Dear Indy

The following is an excerpt from my short story, “Dear Indy.”

***

We had been married for about six months when we received a belated wedding gift from Mitch’s aunt, Lydia. He’d told me dozens of stories about Aunt Lydia – a kooky, nomadic anthropologist who was always halfway across the world engaged in the sort of ridiculous hijinks that sounded, to me, like tall tales. Mitch was dying to see what she’d sent.

It was an amulet. An ancient Egyptian amulet, to be precise. It was palm-sized and made of what appeared to be turquoise. There were hieroglyphics engraved upon it, including the fairly ubiquitous scarab beetle and Eye of Horus you may have seen in Indiana Jones movies or your 100-level Egyptology course. It clashed garishly with the rest of our bedroom and looked, honestly, like something Aunt Lydia had picked up at the Cairo airport, but we thought it was cute, if a little kitschy, and we gleefully strung it above our bed, as instructed. In her letter, Aunt Lydia wrote that it would summon good dreams and bring couples closer while they slept.

At first, it had no effect to speak of. For a few months, when either of us had a good dream, we would gleefully remark that it was due to the amulet. But other than that, it faded from our minds like any other tchotchke would.

It was a few months later that we had our first real, big fight. It was about nothing, like most terrible fights are. But – I had been feeling sad, or unfulfilled, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. This alien feeling of discontent came out during our fight about nothing. Mitch had noticed, of course. He was irritated because he didn’t know how to manage my sadness. He didn’t have to manage it, but he felt like he did. I thought maybe it was my fault that he felt that way. It’s infuriating to look back on it now – the solution is so obvious. We didn’t understand yet how to be open with one another.

That night we went to sleep, the same as always, me on the right side and he on the left. We had cooled down slightly from our argument, but it was apparent to both of us that it was the kind of fight you’d need to have another conversation about the next day. So we were still tense, and sleeping farther apart than usual. He fell asleep instantly, as he always does, and I felt a pang of irritation that he had this privilege while I lay with my eyes wide open, wringing meaning out of every word we had exchanged that day.

I finally drifted off around four a.m. to one of the most peculiar dreams I’d ever had. I was a giantess, maybe eighty feet tall. I roamed an idyllic, abandoned countryside, having isolated myself from general society due to my size, and to reduce risk of accidental injury to others. I spent my days quietly exploring the scenery, clearing great expanses of land with each giant step, picking apples from trees and popping them in my mouth like Tic-Tacs.

At last, I came to a rocky, gray cove dotted with pine trees – lugubrious, saline, and salient. It looked like a scene manifested out of the pervasive melancholy mood that had seemingly settled into my bones.

I sat on the pebbly sand for a while, tasting the brisk, salty air, letting the icy waves lap harmlessly at my giant feet. From around the stone cliff face that bordered the inlet, a minuscule man rowed a minuscule canoe into my field of vision. To me, in my present form, any regular human would have looked small, but this man was tiny. Maybe two feet tall. He maneuvered his canoe through the surf with heroic effort, and great difficulty. I decided to help him by plucking him out of the water between my thumb and forefinger. When I held him up to see him better, I thought he had the most familiar face, but I couldn’t place where I knew it from.

He thanked me effusively, in his tiny, squeaking voice, for saving him. He asked if he could help me in return, but I told him no, there was nothing he could do for me. I was an eighty-foot woman bound by nature to nomadic hermitude, and he agreed there was nothing that could be done about that. For a moment, I felt a sudden urge to flick him from my finger like an ant and watch him disappear into the sea. I let the moment pass, and, almost arbitrarily, my affection for the tiny man returned. I placed him back inside his little canoe and set him a ways up the coast, closer to his destination.

I was pleased with myself, the way I often am after completing an act of kindness, but still acutely aware of the blueness, or longing, or lack, that I so dearly wished I could shake.

The cobwebby strings of the dream still clung to my thoughts the next morning. Mitch woke before me, and it wasn’t until I looked over and saw his empty space in the bed that I realized: the unplaceable face of the minuscule man had been his.

I drifted downstairs in a daze and found him making French toast at the kitchen island. He hummed while he worked, something he did only when he was in a good mood. I, myself, had nearly forgotten about our fight, and stood at the bottom of the stairs for a moment while I tried to think of something to say. I hugged my robe closer to my body and watched him slowly dredge slice after slice through the egg mixture. I thought of his tiny arms working the oars in his tiny canoe. He looked up before I could say anything.

“You were in my dream last night,” he said.

“I was?”

“Yes. It was weird. Not like any dream I’ve had before.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it.”

“Hm,” I said.

I’d forgotten how little I usually cared about other people’s dreams. Everything is so resonant to the dreamer, but to anyone else it’s a random collection of really pat symbolism held together by zero logic. I don’t like to hear people describe their LSD experiences for the same reason. I decided not to tell Mitch about my dream, after all.

“The gist of it was that I was looking for you,” he said. “But I was small – like, miniature – so it took years.”

I froze. He had my attention again.

“Did you find me?” I asked.

“Yes.” He expertly flipped a piece of toast on the griddle. “But I kept looking.”

“Where?”

“Sorry?”

“Where did you find me?”

“Oh. On a beach. A winter beach. It looked like, maybe Nova Scotia or something.”

I walked up to him and leaned my head on his shoulder.

“You were a giant,” he said.

We spent the day poring over every detail that we could remember from our dream. The condition of the water, the height of the pine trees, the color of the rocks – every image he recalled matched my memory perfectly. There was no question, we decided, that we had not just freakishly dreamed the same thing, but actually dreamed the same dream. It was really him, rowing along in that little canoe, not whatever feeble version of him my subconscious mind could conjure up. And it was really I who rescued him from the choppy surf and the sharp rocks. I decided not to share with him that I had briefly contemplated flicking him away and watching him drown like a bug in the sink. Because I thought it might put a damper on what otherwise was shaping into the beginnings of something remarkable. Even if it never happened again, I loved that strange, vivid dream dearly, and I loved Mitch, and I loved that ugly amulet for all that it had sparked.

A year or so went by. We both made progress in our careers, Mitch receiving a coveted promotion and me moving to a higher-paying position at a nearby university. I briefly saw a therapist in an attempt to assuage that strange sadness, but eventually I just got used to it and went on with my life. I felt happier when I was with Mitch, anyway, and we wondered if I wasn’t just lonely – my research position was somewhat isolating, after all, and Mitch had been working longer hours. We considered adopting a cat, and amused ourselves with names from literature and film – would we call him Holden Caulfield or Dirk Diggler?

Our relationship was better than ever. We operated autonomously during work hours and then shared the highlights of our days over dinner in the torchlit, stone veranda that we built with our new paychecks. In his particular Mitch way, he made it all feel so easy – for him, making the most of each day was simply a matter of waking up with the right attitude in mind, usually employing the use of an idiomatic mantra such as “carpe diem” or “the early bird gets the worm,” and getting to work, manifesting destiny. Our partnership gave me the odd taste of that mentality, and from time to time I felt that maybe it really was all so easy.

Only occasionally – when he was stuck at work late into the night, or when I traveled out of town – did my brain present me with the harrowing what-if scenarios, did I explore the dark corners of secrets that he likely was not keeping from me. But I was always able to dismiss these intrusive thoughts. He had never given me any reason to be suspicious, or to doubt. But it’s only natural, when things look and feel so bright, to find yourself searching idly for the storm clouds. What we had was beautiful, and intricate, and I feared losing it – feared the idea that something might have the power to disturb it. I told myself that this was nothing more than my self-destructive id poking at itself, hoping to elicit something fresh to feed upon.

There was one evening, a few weeks after our second wedding anniversary, that I nearly gave into my impulses. I was alone, tidying the avalanche of papers that had accrued in our home office. I opened Mitch’s desk drawer and found his journal – an old, leatherbound thing he’d been filling up and adding extra pages to for years. I was surprised to see it there – he usually carried it with him. I picked it up, appreciating its heft, and ran my thumb along one of its worn edges with a nervous thrill. I considered the secrets that might be within – I didn’t suspect it contained anything scandalous, but it surely held insights. Without a doubt, there were thoughts and opinions within these pages that Mitch had neglected to share with me, innocent though they may be. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to glimpse this unprotected version of him, open and raw and unfettered by subconscious attempts at impression management?

I shoved the journal roughly back into the drawer and slammed it shut. I left the papers, half-sorted, where they were, and went to the kitchen to make myself a gin and tonic. I’d never been tempted to pry like this before, and I was unsettled by my own intense curiosity. I remembered the time I’d read my sister’s diary, when we were in middle school, and the sour taste of guilt that hung over me in the weeks that followed. As I stood there in the kitchen, mixing my second drink, I had that same sour taste in my mouth, and I felt like a child.

I fell asleep early, but woke around midnight to the sound of Mitch getting home. He got into bed quietly – respectful as always – and before long I drifted off again. It was then that Aunt Lydia’s amulet fired up for the second time.

The living room was one I had been in before. The brick fireplace cast dancing light onto the wine-colored walls, lending a quietly Gothic feel to the otherwise shabby but comfortable-looking space. The TV was old, and played black-and-white, shhhh-ing static. The orangish sofa was fraying in spots, and the coffee table, though it looked to be of fine quality, was covered with half-empty glasses and mugs, and the watery rings of those cups that had come before. The carpet was deep and plush, and upon looking down I was glad to discover that I was not wearing shoes, but my favorite striped socks. After being in the room for a moment I realized that it was not a living room at all, but a den. It was the den of my childhood friend Leah MacReady’s house, where her parents used to correct me when I erroneously referred to it as a living room. Always telling me that it was actually called the den.

I left the den in hopes of finding Leah in her bedroom or making a peanut butter sandwich in the kitchen. Instead, I found each door to be locked, glued shut, or too heavy to open. There were only the two staircases – one that led down to the drafty basement, where we used to dare one another to spend ten seconds alone in the dark, and one that ascended to the forbidden upper floor, which I understood to contain her parents’ bedroom.

As a child, I loved Leah’s basement and our adrenaline-fueled excursions into it. It was unfinished, with cement floors, teetering towers of boxed holiday decorations, and a single lightbulb hanging from a string, its feeble glow laughably far from reaching the spider-filled corners. The open-riser staircase, with long gaps between each step, called to mind an ankle-grabbing monster likely lying in wait below. And most importantly, the heavy metal door at the top of the stairs, which shut with a satisfying whunk, rendered the basement essentially soundproof, allowing us to shriek freely without fear of disturbing her parents.

Late at night, during sleepovers, we would creep downstairs one at a time, often after trading whispered ghost stories or sneak-watching old creature features on cable, to test our courage. Sometimes, if we felt especially brave, we would turn three times and eke out a barely audible “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.” But usually, when it was my turn, I would simply wait, frozen by fear and exhilaration, in utter darkness, until enough time had passed for me to sprint, screaming, back up the stairs to safety.

Now, as I stood in front of that heavy door, I could not fathom mustering the courage to open it and face the horrors below. I sensed a dark and disturbing presence languishing down there, something rotting for eons in the sickness of its own twisted power. The second I turned the doorknob, surely, it would wrap me up in its slimy tentacles and slurp down the essence of my very being. I felt, more than heard, a low, reverberating call, which beckoned as much as it repulsed me.

Instead, I made my way to the other staircase, the one that went up. Never, in all my years of friendship with Leah, had I visited the top floor of her house. I had only seen her dart up there once or twice, to retrieve her mother if we needed a Band-aid or wanted her to come down and make us mac and cheese. It still felt glaringly out-of-bounds, even now, and I took the first step gingerly, half-expecting it to break apart beneath my weight and fall away into ether. When I felt sure my footing would hold, I looked up and found that I couldn’t make out the top of the staircase. Instead, it curled ever upward, disappearing eventually into a swirl of hazy clouds high, high above. Considering the alternative, well – I went up.

It was an arduous journey, this staircase, seeming to grow steeper and steeper the longer I marched up it. My legs ached and my mouth tasted dry. But when I thought of turning back, I remembered the fearsome entity that dwelled below, and I was compelled upward.

Eternities later, and having grown much older, I reached the landing at the top of the stairs. An impossibly long hallway stretched before me, with a door on either end of it. One was ajar, and so I went through it.

In typical dream fashion, it was my bedroom and it was also not my bedroom. The bed had my sheets on it, the bookshelves were lined with some of my favorite titles, and the walls were the same shade of periwinkle that Mitch and I had painted our room at home. But it was mostly empty, absent of the cluttered life I crammed into any space I inhabited. And curiously, the window overlooked a huge oak tree with a swing hanging from it, and beyond that a small vegetable garden – the view I’d had from my childhood bedroom.

Finding it almost overwhelmingly lonely there, I hurried down the hallway and through the opposing door. It was another bedroom. This one, too, was half-empty.

Standing in there, to my surprise, was Leah’s father.

“What are you doing in here?” he said.

I was confused. Mr. MacReady had always been kind to Leah and I, when he wasn’t preoccupied with work. Now he looked massively irritated to see me standing there in the doorway, unsure of myself. I started to apologize, remembering that I wasn’t allowed upstairs.

But as soon as my mouth began to shape itself around the sorrys and the it won’t happen agains, the words floated away and disintegrated, ever just out of reach.

Instead, I found it easier to turn his words back on him: “What are you doing in here?” My tone matched his in acidity.

“Damn it,” he said. “What does it look like?”

To be fair, it was obvious what he was doing. He was packing a suitcase.

“Why?” I asked, reaching for something else to say and not finding it.

“I have nothing left,” he said.

Along with suits and ties, socks and shoes, I noticed that Mr. MacReady was packing Mitch’s old high school soccer trophies, the ones he keeps in our home office.

“Put those back,” I said. I could feel ire prickling at the back of my own neck now.

“These are mine.”

The ice in his glare was foreign to me. I took a staggering step backwards, swaying over the threshold like a drunken fool. Frostiness radiated outward from his twisted sneer, creeping up my spine and my limbs until I felt as cold and hard as him.

I couldn’t find words that were sharp enough for what I wanted to convey. I wanted my hatred to affix itself to him, unshakable, like sticky burs. I wanted him to feel the venom of my bite every time he moved a muscle.

Trembling, I crossed the room and swept the suitcase from the bed. With more strength than I knew I possessed, I cradled it to my chest like a baby, or a football, and crashed down the staircase with it. Mr. MacReady was hot on my tail as I descended, shouting profanities, his breathing loud and ragged just behind me. I dodged and parried his grabs at the suitcase, at the trophies – those trophies, they weren’t his, they were Mitch’s – they were mine.

Finally, I reached the landing and sprinted to the heavy metal basement door. I swung it open, angrier at Mr. MacReady than afraid of the primordial beast I had sensed down there. I lobbed the suitcase forward, watched it tumble away, open, spilling cheap, golden plastic into the inky black. Distantly, I heard Mr. MacReady scream, a blood-curdling scream of agony and grief. With the door still open, I could feel the whooshing energy of the thing, the spirit, the entity. I felt it surging toward me – though I could see nothing but darkness, I understood that it was the black maw of the monster, yawning wide before it swallowed me whole. I closed my eyes in anticipation.