Flashback

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Nick floated in green weightlessness.

Nick floated in no-space, no-time. He was coming up from the smell of canvas walls and grass floor of the tent in Texas, away from his son and father-in-law, up into the real world of no-world.

Nick’s eyelids were sutured, but not quite shut. His eardrums were punctured, but not quite without hearing.

Nick floated with his lungs full of oxygen-rich liquid. They had drowned him into this death-life. They had not removed his eyes. They had not removed his optic nerves. It was punishment.

White-coated shapes, distorted in shape and size, moved in the nonliquid spaces outside his tank. Occasionally a greentinted and lens-distorted semihuman face would peer in at him in the intervals when he was up and out of his dreams.

NCAR.

NCAR.

The basement of the floating dead in NCAR.

Nakamura Center for Advanced Research.

And Nick Bottom’s punishment was to have his eyes, to have his shattered eardrums, to be brought up from the Flashback-two dreams from time to time.

Dara was dead. Val was dead, murdered on that Saturday in September. Leonard was dead. Nick wanted to be dead but they would not let him die. This was Nakamura’s punishment, Sato’s punishment, for opposing their Shogunate will.

Nick’s world was dead.

Except for this dream-fantasy happy-ending world into which they submerged and resubmerged him like a kitten being drowned again and again.

Nick floated like a white, bloated dead thing. But he dreamt on. And between the dreams… this…

He felt the feeding tubes and catheters boring into his body like barb-burrowing eels. He felt his muscles gone flaccid and rotting away like white mushrooms in the thick fluid. He stared out through sutures at a green world.

He had dreamt he was a man. The dream, Bottom’s dream, had brought them together briefly. But she was gone. And he was not allowed to follow.

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, or his heart to report, what my dream was… I shall sing it at her death.

Nick Bottom floated in the NCAR green tank of thick liquid and the drug entered his body and carried him back to his dream.