Steven James
Placebo
To Pam Johnson,
For all of your help, all of your smiles, all of your insights
Epigraph
Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Who knows but that we all live out our lives in the maze of a dream?
Part I
ENTANGLED
The Shore
You are there when they recover the bodies.
The day is gray with thick, somber clouds hanging heavily in the sky. Mist lurks above the bay, circling in a breeze that comes in damp and cold off the water.
You stand onshore watching the divers position their boat at the place where the witnesses say they saw the minivan go in. As you wait for them to reappear, your heart squirms like a thick, wet animal trapped inside your chest.
It was your wife’s minivan.
And she had your two sons with her.
The silence is stark and chilled, disturbed only by the wet slap of waves against the shore.
For some reason, even though the van disappeared into the bay more than two hours ago, you still hold out hope that somehow Rachel and the twins have survived, that some inscrutable miracle has drifted down from heaven and stopped the water from pouring into the van.
You try to convince yourself that the vehicle has become a safe haven filled with air, a metal bubble of life — proof that a loving God exists and cares enough to step into time and save lives; you tell yourself that someday you’ll all look back at this and stand in awe of the unimaginable possibilities of divine intervention.
You tell yourself that.
But then a pair of divers surface, tugging something with them.
And you see that it is one of your sons.
The body doesn’t look real, more like a mannequin or a CPR dummy — frighteningly motionless, its skin pasty gray, its eyes open and staring unblinkingly at the blank, indifferent clouds.
It’s only because of his clothes that you recognize which of your two boys it is — Andrew, the oldest by three minutes. You recall seeing him in that outfit earlier in the day, before you headed to the rehearsal for the show. Yes, it’s Andrew.
Five years old and now he’s dead.
As they lift him into the rowboat, his head lolls your way and water dribbles from his loose, gaping mouth. His eyes still refuse to blink.
For a moment you think it’s some kind of mistake, a cruel joke the universe is playing on you.
No, no, that’s not really him, that thing in the boat. Andrew is alive, of course he is. Any second now he’s going to come running up the shore and yell, missing his r’s like always, “Daddy! I’m okay! Don’t wuwy, Daddy! I’m wight hewe!”
You catch yourself gazing along the shoreline. A few emergency medical personnel and police officers stand near the pier staring quietly at the divers, but that’s all. No media. The cops have kept them professionally cordoned off on the road beyond the boat landing’s parking lot. Besides the paramedics and police, the shoreline is empty: just a long line of lonely sand and jagged rocks curling toward the far shore now lost in the fog that wanders restlessly across the water.
Of course Andrew doesn’t appear running up the shoreline. The body is real. Your oldest son lies dead on the rowboat, and now the divers are going back down to retrieve the rest of your family.
The pulsing beast in your chest writhes again and you find it getting harder to breathe. You want to leave, to turn away, to run and run and run forever until your heart is finally in a safe, emotionally dead and distant place and you get a phone call outside of time from the police explaining everything in objective, detached detail, but you know you have to see for yourself what happened to Anthony and Rachel.
You have to.
And so you stay.
And stare at the water rippling beside the boat, afraid to even blink. You wonder if this comes from what you do, the knowledge that so many things can be faked, that there are so many ways to make people’s minds play tricks on them in that fraction of a second of misdirection, either through the gentle deception of sleight of hand or the almighty power of stage lights or camera angles. If you blink you miss everything. The old line, the clichéd standby: Now you see it, now you don’t!
But nothing is faked here today.
It isn’t long before the divers bring up Anthony. It takes longer with Rachel.
You hear some whispered words through a radio that one of the officers has and realize that it was her hair. It got tangled in some branches as they were removing her from the van. Then he turns down the volume, and the rest of the words squibble away and drop out into an uneven static.
For some reason as you watch the men bring the three corpses to shore in the boat, you don’t cry. You know enough about how people react to tragedy to realize that this is shock, you’re in shock. But naming the condition doesn’t help; in fact, it almost seems disrespectful to label the numbness, like a subtle move toward objectivity, which is the last thing you want right now.
“Mr. Banks?” A voice, scratchy and soft beside you. You turn and see that it’s one of the police officers, a sturdy woman, maybe forty, with dark eyes and a tight bun of sandy brown hair. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No.”
“We’ll have someone drive you to—”
“No. I want to see the bodies up close.”
She takes a small breath as if she’s about to dispute that and you brace yourself for an argument, but she replies simply, “I’ll go with you.”
You realize that letting you spend time with the bodies now, rather than at the morgue, might not be protocol, and you respect that this officer seems to care more about you than about policies and procedures. You hold back from telling her that you want to be alone with your family, and silently accept her offer.
The boat arrives at the pier and the two of you walk toward it.
None of the officers are joking around or using gallows humor like cops do on TV: “Looks like today’s special is three for the price of one!” Maybe screenwriters stick those lines in the shows because treating death honestly would be too hard on viewers and ratings. Better to lighten the mood, tidy up reality, let us escape — at least for a few hours during prime time — into a more sterile kind of pain.
You arrive and look into the boat, then climb aboard and kneel beside the three corpses that used to be your family — the boys you ate breakfast with this morning, the woman you kissed goodbye just before you walked out the door.
You reach for her cheek and hesitantly touch its wet, claylike surface. You slide the snarled, wet hair from her eyes, and though you try to hold back your tears, you fail, and the rising squall of wind brushes wisps of fog across your face as if its ghostly, curling fingers are trying to wipe the tears away. Or maybe the mist is just trying to taste the pain and carry it farther ashore.
She did it on purpose. Rachel did.