Dreamland by Robert L. Anderson Page A

at the Railroad Diner in DeWitt.
    Instead she lay in the dark, clutching Connor’s iPhone, imagining it was a line that tethered her to him. She must have lain there in the darkness for at least an hour before she felt it—a softening of the boundaries of her body, and an opening, as though her bed had become a hole and she was dropping, or she was the hole and the world was dropping toward her. For a moment that could have been seconds or minutes or longer, she felt nothing but swinging, as if she wasn’t a person any longer but just sensation and vertigo. This was the in-between space,an awful space, untouched by thought, where nothing could exist. From the time she had started walking she had been terrified that one day she would get stuck here.
    Then there was a parting, as of a curtain, and Dea felt a soft sucking pressure on her skin and suddenly she had skin again, and ribs and lungs expanding inside of them. She came out of the dark like surfacing after being underwater and she was in. She’d made it.
    She was in Connor’s dream.
    She was standing in an empty apartment. She recognized it right away as a hastily constructed overstructure, not an element of the dream, exactly, but Connor’s instinctive response to her intrusion. The details weren’t filled in. The furniture was missing, and there were soft petals of plaster drifting from the ceiling, as though the whole place were in danger of collapse. The windows were missing, too, although as she approached, panes grew up out of the empty sills; the glass knitted itself together elegantly, like ice forming over a pond. He was trying to keep her out.
    She estimated she was on the third or fourth floor: across the way, she could see four- and five-story apartment buildings, wedged together, and lights in several windows. Christmas music was piping from somewhere, a tinny sound, like the music that gets played in Hallmark card stores. Chicago. She knew it right away. She could feel it, could feel it in the cold air that made the glass chatter ever so slightly and see it in the wind, which spiraled a plastic bag down the block and made the street signs sway.
    Below her, a Lotto sign was blinking in a deli window.Colored Christmas lights dangled limply from its blue awning. It was dusk—there was a faint red smear on the horizon, like a small cut in the fleshy clouds knitted across the sky—and the light had a strange charcoal quality, like a drawing that had gotten smudged. Then she realized it was snowing. But the flakes were dirty, gray looking, almost like ash.
    She wondered where Connor was. She assumed he would appear soon on the street, blowing into his hands, maybe, or trying to catch a snowflake on his tongue when he thought no one was looking, and was surprised when instead he appeared in the window of the apartment directly across from her. She ducked quickly. She counted to thirty before she risked peeking over the windowsill again. He was gone. Instead, she could see a brown-haired woman—his mom? Not his stepmom, definitely—hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree. The room was warm looking, practically glowing, and Dea had a momentary suspicion that she was supposed to be serving as witness to this: to the perfection of it, the completeness. That Connor knew she was there, somehow, and wanted her to see. But she dismissed the idea just as quickly.
    Before she could second-guess what she had come to do, and decide it was a really fucking stupid idea to break the rules, she found the stairs leading down to the street level. Her footsteps were very loud, as they often were in dreams: Connor’s mind was too focused. He was zeroing in on the room, on his mom, on the ornaments. There weren’t neighbors to shout or cars to honk or babies to cry.
    Outside, it was a dream kind of cold: it didn’t hurt, didn’t knock Dea’s breath from her chest or make her hands swell andstiffen. This, too, was because of