Unseaming Read Online Free PDF Page B

him step in and write a feature story. Once he turned in his profile of the professor, he begged his managing editor for permission to chase a freelance article. Permission granted, Bryan signed up for the tests.
His face a wide brown square above his white lab coat, Patel approached life and subjects like the coolest of poker players. The professor’s perpetually half-lidded eyes rarely hinted at anger or amusement. The rumble of his voice stayed perpetually even-toned. He was by far the most unflappable man Bryan had ever met, though he wasn’t without a sense of humor.
As soon as Bryan described his lucid dreaming skills, the professor wished to observe for himself. They performed a simple verification: Patel asked Bryan to move his eyes right to left and back again twice every 10 seconds while “awake” within his dreams. Bryan found this easy. The EEG graphs recorded during Bryan’s REM sleep displayed sharp spikes for the paired eye movements, over and over, making his brain waves appear regular as heartbeats.
When he woke, he heard Patel’s rumble. “For what reason would you hone such a skill?” The professor tapped Bryan’s forehead with a cold finger. “Do you keep a harem organized in your head, perhaps, like the crazy man in that Fellini film?”
Bryan kept his voice as flat as the professor’s. “Wouldn’t it be obvious if I did?”
Silence hung between them. Then Patel’s scowl fell away, and Bryan had the pleasure of actually hearing the professor laugh, like a mirthful bellow from a bear.
As often happens with writer and source, the two pledged to keep in touch after the article’s publication, but didn’t—until the Blessings began, and Bryan discovered he could no longer remember dreams.
Nor could anyone else.
It wasn’t as if dreams were simply gone, driving a sleep-deprived populace toward madness, but as if something else had supplanted them, an enigma that let people maintain their sanity even as it washed the world in blood.
* * *
     
When Bryan returned from his jog, predawn light cast the cookie-cutter houses of his neighborhood in dark silhouette. The derelict had left the stairwell.
Regina was up—he could hear the shower running when he opened his door. She’d already stripped the bloodied sheets from the bed and replaced them with clean ones. He called Sukhraj’s cell and left a voice mail.
His eyes flicked to the bureau by the side of the bed Regina had claimed. Her new pendant dangled there from one of the drawer knobs, an object escaped from a bad dream, a red diadem inscribed with a gothic “G.” Regina had a knack for involving herself in loopy things—she believed wholeheartedly in ghosts and nature spirits, paid to take classes in energy manipulation and chakra healing—a trait that Bryan at times found exotic, endearing, but now found alarming. Yet he’d kept his mouth shut, held back, when they met for dinner last night and he noticed the red G glittering in her cleavage.
The casual text she’d sent that started it— how r u doin? , then, I want 2 c u —caused a pang of longing in his chest that was amplified tenfold by his first glimpse of her beneath the dimmed lights at Pazzari’s. She’d cut her silky brown hair short, added red highlights. The blue half-jacket adorning her shoulders was the same she’d worn on many lunch dates before the Blessings. Even with the lights turned down low, her green eyes shone.
They hugged and forced the hostess to wait before escorting them to their table. As Regina took her chair, Bryan’s eyes eagerly followed her neckline down only to discover the diadem. The discovery stabbed as if he’d stepped on a nail.
The Gaians held that the blood of the so-called Blessings washed the human race each morning as a warning from the Earth spirit—or, as a sarcastic radio personality once phrased it, “Mother Earth’s PMS”—in response to the many ways Modern Man had damaged the world: pollution, strip-mining, clear-cutting,