Lately all my nightmares are about time travel.
I dream that I wake up and I’m nine years old again. Before the bullet, accidentally fired from a gun my father should have never treated like a toy. Before the worst of my parents’ fighting started, back when sometimes Mom would still dance in the kitchen.
Even in my dreams that’s not early enough to save everyone. Even in a dream that starts as a good dream, it’s a matter of triage. I can’t save Mom, already becoming a monster (maybe a monster already, and little me was too innocent to tell). I don’t even try to save Dad, who was already the man who’d grow furious if my mother talked about cutting her hair, the man who would go on and on about how he fell in love with her because she wore knee socks and looked like his idea of a Japanese schoolgirl.
In the dream, when my sister goes in for her latest stint at the ER, I ask the doctor if he knows what Marfan syndrome is.
In the dream, I manipulate my parents in every way I can. I tell my mother, God came to me in a vision and told me where she needs to invest. I pepper the narrative with enough information about the coming months that eventually she believes me. There’s eventually enough money for the doctors, there’s enough money to keep the heat on all winter. Enough money for the dentist, and for therapists. But she trusts me not at all, and is as cold as ever she was, pinching my narrow belly. She calls another brown girl a dog, and I snap at her; in my dream I argue with my mother from the day I wake up as a nine-year-old, and she hits me. Dad doesn’t beat me less in the dream than he ddid in real life, because for all that I have the knowledge of a woman in her thirties, I have the hormones of a child, and he was after all always a small-hearted, insecure man. But in my dream I’m not afraid because I know he’d never kill me, so I can do what I have to do even if it means I limp.
In my dream, sometimes when I turn fifteen or so, I buy a phone card and I use it to dial Johnny’s phone number just so I can hear him pick up and say hello. He’ll be with Theresa then, probably, and I wouldn’t ever try to change his path, even in this dream where I was changing everything else. I practice kata late at night, in the yard where no one can see, so that when I turn eighteen and escape to college I can find my Sensei again. I’ll tell him I practiced a little as a child, I’ll dodge the subject. In the dream, kendo keeps me sane, just like it has done in waking life.
In my dream I never go to England, I don’t have the time. And so my ex is never my ex, and never comes here, never marries an American, never has that baby, and I feel guilt at the excision of that life from the universe. But how could I go be with him, child that he was then, when I’m by then nearly fifty years old in a nineteen-year-old’s body?
In my dream all I know about the world falls like dominoes, and I stop being able to predict what’s going to happen. I make a payphone call to Oklahoma City early one morning, and then in September of the year I graduate high school I make one to New York; that’s all I can do. I do everything I can, and it’s not enough, and I am exhausted, and there’s Johnny’s voice, quiet and crackling on the Nineties phone line after dinner every six months or so when I allow myself the weakness, saying “Hello? Is anyone there?”
And I can’t say yes. I can’t say In a few years, in a few years I will be because I don’t even know if that’s true anymore. I don’t know who I’ll be. I just listen to him breathing on the line for one beat, two beats, and then I hang up.
And then I wake up. And I look at the flower lights hanging from branches on my bedroom ceiling, and I listen to the cat murring on one side of me and Johnny breathing quiet on the other. And I ache so comprehensively that it’s hard to tell how much of it is hurting for the life in the dream, and how much of it is hurting for the life I’ve lived. And I turn over, and I try to go back to sleep.
