Our dreams are unpleasant.
I know this because the first night I knew him, I lay awake, unable to sleep, my bones humming with the thought that there was another man like me, someone else like me. The brother I never knew.
I watched him sleep for a while, the lines of his face lit by the dim crescent moon that crouched in the night sky. Like most people I've known well enough to share a bedroom with, he seemed almost child-like as he slept, his face made innocent and beautiful because there was no one looking out from it.
He was only drowsing then, on the blurry, smeared line between wakeful thought and full sleep. I know because since we've met, we've discovered that we really do act like stereotypical twins. I may be a little less than nine months older than him… but still, we're like twins. Almost everything about us is the same. So I knew that at that point, about ten or fifteen minutes after we'd turned off the lights, he was not quite asleep yet.
Time slipped by us, the way that fine silk or satin will slip through your fingers if you forget that you're holding it.
He was dreaming now; I could see that in the pulsing motion of the eyes beneath his eyelids. It was a nightmare, I was sure; puffs of whimpering sound emerged from his mouth with steady regularity. Whatever his nightmare was about, he was screaming… in that silent, helpless way that dreamers scream, of course.
He rolled onto his side and he quieted. His dream was no longer so terrible, I could tell. His breathing steadied.
For a while, time drifted. I think I actually fell asleep for a time, but I did not dream. I know this with a certainty that terrifies me: I did not dream because, that night, he did all the dreaming for both of us.
He wandered back to that smeary line between dream and reality, and I saw his eyes twitching. I saw a sliver of his right eye beneath its lid for a moment – and then he shrieked.
Don't say that I meant that he screamed. Screaming is common enough, and I've heard plenty of it, in some of the unpleasant circumstances I've wandered into.
Shrieking is a different thing, a different thing in every way.
The bells in Poe's poem shrieked, and it is to them that my mind always flashes when I remember that first night we spent together. I wish I could say that those lines of poetry came into my mind when I heard him shriek, but they didn't. To be melodramatic about it, all words were struck from my thoughts. I was dumbstruck.
Yes, dumbstruck is the word for what I was as I listened to him shrieking into the cool air of a motel room as the moon lit up the room and made a mere nightmare a Lovecraftian horror for the both of us.
He drew in breath to shriek again – I heard it hiss past his lips – and was silent. His hand and forearm fell from the bed, dangling between bed and floor. You know how motels are – the beds so close that kids play bridges on them.
I reached out and took his hand in both of mine, intending only to comfort him – after all, my own mother had comforted me this way so many times when I was a child. I knew it would work for him.
With that touch, a seeming river of horror flowed from his hand to mine.
I stood in a wasteland – or perhaps it was a city. The buildings shot up to touch the sky, intersecting the ground at perfect seventy-degree angles, their straight sides covered in strange designs of triangles with seven sides and circles with nine hundred sides. Impossible vehicles sped through the street, flatly four-dimensional. Gibbering creatures surrounded me, too organic for my eye to grasp, conversing in some loathsome tongue which, like their form, hovered just beyond the edge of my comprehension, as if they spoke in a language I had spoken in childhood, but no longer spoke any more.
And I was one of them!
I couldn't help it – I stumbled back and shrieked – shrieked like a firebell, like a train-whistle.
I awoke in a panic of terror when my hand slipped from his. I stilled my breathing as best as I could. Oh no. Oh no.
I waited with my pulse thrumming madly away in my abdomen for him to wake up or do something… and at last, he did. He rolled on the bed, turning his back to me, and I relaxed. All right. He was alive and still asleep – thank God.
I felt drowsy, myself. I wanted to curl up in the dark and sleep, followed by waking up at a good time of the morning – preferably noon or so, as I had a good little case of jet-lag going by then.
I never expected that I'd be able to do it, but I closed my eyes and I went to sleep.
No bad dreams.
Not that night.