For years, he had been haunted by terrible dreams of water rushing up to swallow him.
Night after night, no matter if he had drunk himself into a stupor, exercised to the point of collapse, or worked himself to exhaustion, there came the water—always the same.
His other recurring dreams would alter, like poems half remembered haltingly recited. There was the hallway from his childhood covered completely with scorpions, there it was again but now teeming with snakes granted the adhesion of spiders. There was the river where he and Edith had run off to as children to play and, later, to kiss. Now it was beautiful under the sun, now lit with a vast yellow moon. And of course his mundane dreams ran along the ruts of his everyday—his desk floating up to the ceiling, the car driving through water, his lines not coming to him for his performance in the Shakespeare Club.
Not the water. Every night, it rose, dark and cold as slate through a white hallway of girders. He slid towards it, forced down to it by the irrefusable force of gravity, as the floor slanted beneath him. In that water was death. When his nerves allowed him the fortitude to stay with the dream after he had slammed into the water, he saw bodies in it, broken and pale, dying the water almost imperceptibly darker with their blood.
Haunted by the dream, he had found himself describing it in his journal over and over and, when he became a writer, the force of the dream was such that it demanded to be put down on paper. And when he set himself to write the story of the days and weeks leading up to that death black tide, it flowed out of him more easily than he could have imagined. Every detail was under his fingers without hesitation or searching. The only difficulty was picking the exact words he wanted to describe a scene which was crystal clear in his head.
The book had sold well, so well they had shipped him over to England to promote it. And he had loved England, that other Eden. Nowhere else on earth had hills as soft and green as England.
But now duty, after ten long years abroad, called him back to America. His mother had died, he had just been informed, and he was wanted back as immediately as possible.
His mother. He loved her, paid for her care. Enjoyed her letters. But somehow she was always connected with that black water. It was always her calling that had woken him from his sleep—as if her voice and the rush of the water in his ears were one and the same.
Time to go home to settle the whole thing. His siblings wouldn’t. They resented his life abroad and detested his books.
He had purchased the cruise liner tickets without a second thought—but now as he was standing in the queue to board, he had a terrible pit in his stomach. Who names a ship after the Greek divinities who were killed by their children, he asked himself, eying the red and black hull looming above.
But he tried to be rational, tried to recognize that his fear was based on a dream, which were not real.
He was the last passenger to board, thanks to the terrible traffic in Southampton, so when he passed through the steel door, the sailor slammed it shut behind him.
As soon as he saw the hall into which he had stepped, however, he tried to wrestle the sailor from the door.
He screamed to be let off the boat. Let off the boat! Multiple seamen rushed to restrain him.
He raced through the terrifying halls, almost inviting himself to have a heart attack rather than face that black, black water, cold without mercy or escape. He could hear his mother’s voice as he had heard it all those times she had called him to her side to nurse through the night her hypochondria and hates and self-loathing. He could hear that voice demanding he keep her company now, come and be with her in the black water at the bottom of these white steel walls.
Through sheer animal desperation, he managed to escape to the deck, with a cadre of annoyed sailors behind him. One called out, “Jesus, fine, if you want to get off that badly, jump.”
He did. The deck was 60 feet above the water, the brown, oily water of the estuary brightly lit in the sun of a beautiful spring day, and even if it killed him, at least it wasn’t the cold hell of his dreams.
When he was dragged, legs shattered and pelvis cracked, onto the warm deck of a smaller vessel, he laughed. And he continued to laugh all through his recovery, and he laughed when word came of the sinking of the great ship. And he laughed every morning when he woke up from gloriously dreamless sleep.
It was not until he could walk again—forever, now, with a cane—that he dreamed, only once more, of the water.
Except that time, as he started deep in the cold water, the livid, decomposing face of his mother rose out of the darkness to float beside him. With a petulant frown, she said, “Was this really so much to ask?”
He awoke laughing.