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  “And you could see the things behind him that would have been hidden by his face, should he have had one?”

  She ran the sentence twice in her head before she made sense of it. What a nerd! Did he have to phrase things like that all the time? “No, there was a black hole instead of his face. I couldn’t see through it.”

  “How about hair, or ears, did he have those”

  She frowned for a second and whispered: “I don’t know. I can’t remember. I was too scared.”

  He scribbled something on his pad. He was probably the last non-hipster alive using pen and paper to take notes. He’d probably have to spend hours entering them in his computer later. When he was done he raised his gaze back to her. This particularly inexpressive gaze of his. How could he hypnotise anyone with such empty eyes? “Can we now talk about this week’s dreams?” Her heart started pounding.

  “I dreamed something really weird.”

  “I’m listening”

  “I dreamed that I was waking up in another house, ten kilos heavier. When I saw myself in the mirror, I screamed, and my Mom showed up at the door.”

  “What age were you?”

  “Like right now… More or less.”

  He scribbled something for a while. “You saw yourself clearly, in the mirror?”

  “Quite clearly”

  “Could it be that the person you saw was someone else entirely?”

  “No, no. It was me all right. Just fatter.”

  He fell silent for a while. Silent and bland, like if he were on ‘pause’. She almost said something but he resumed by himself. “Anything else about this dream?”

  “Well, to begin with, the room was a mess. Dirty and smelly.”

  “You could actually smell? In the dream?” he interrupted. He had never interrupted her before.

  “Why, yes. Cold tobacco mainly. Is there something wrong about that?”

  He frowned. Something else he had never done before. Maybe a slight tension in his brow as he was taking notes or thinking hard, but now he was obviously pissed about something.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Anything else you can tell me about this dream?”

  He hadn’t lost his frown. She added hesitantly: “Huh… When I saw my mom, I saw her face really well. Normally, I don’t really look at her. But in this one, she was really clear. I even saw the wrinkles around her eyes.

  He pursed his lips. Something was definitely wrong. He was way too expressive.

  “Miss Roivas…” he started, with this concerned look in his eyes, “from the very beginning, I have expressed doubts that our work together would result in a fruitful conclusion.” He stared down at his notes. “In the light of your recent description, I am left with no other choice than to terminate our collaboration.”

  “What!”

  “You see, it is a recognised fact of my profession that the sense of smell can occur, in dream, only in a specific set of circumstances, which you do not satisfy.”

  “What!” She sort of understood what he said, but she couldn’t quite believe it.

  “I can do nothing other than conclude that you are inventing this dream from the ground up.”

  “I’m not!”

  “I should commend you for having fooled me for so long. I’m afraid that we will not meet again after this session,” he checked his watch, “which ends in a few minutes anyway.”

  “But… But…”

  “I will, of course, report your behaviour to your GP, and she surely will suggest a course of action that will address your mythomania before anything can be done about other problems you might have.”

  “I’m not lying! It’s true!”

  “I will request that you leave my office now.”

  “Fuck!”

  And she was out.

  * * *

  The last thing she needed. Tears were rolling down her cheeks as she cut through the cold, damp wind. She walked all the way home, teeth clenched with frustration. This was so not fair. Why did she even mention the smell? This asshole obviously didn’t know squat about his own job. But her GP would never give her a recommendation for another psychiatrist after the email the doctor was going to write her. She was fucked. She’d have to deal with her dreams herself, and she knew she couldn’t. Only the hope of going through hypnotherapy soon had kept her together. Now that that was gone for good, her next dream was going to kill her.

  She arrived home super late. Grandma was all alarmed. “Why didn’t you call back?” She had turned her phone off before the session. She was so upset she had forgotten to turn it back on. “Sorry Grandma. Please don’t be mad. I’m not feeling good.”

  “How is it going with the doctor?”

  “I’m not feeling good, OK? I’m going up to my room, OK?”

  “Aren’t you gonna eat something?”

  She closed the door before answering anything. She didn’t know what to answer. She threw herself on her bed and started crying again. Her life was hell. She couldn’t take it anymore. She wished for a dream to take her away, for good, to never come back, to die in her sleep. She fell asleep thinking that.

  And, boy, did her wish get granted. Mom and her were hiding behind the couch. The killer was in the house and he was looking for them. They didn’t dare look but they heard his footsteps when he was near, sometimes saw his shadow sweep the room. Every time a little closer. He was getting impatient, started throwing things around, and they both cowered and shivered at each noise. Eeva turned to Mom and saw that she was scared out of her wits. She knew that if someone was going to save them, it had to be her. She heard the killer go in the kitchen. She dashed to the flat’s entrance, pulling Mom along. But Mom resisted. Eeva turned back, “Come on Mom!” she whispered, “We need to go!” When she turned back, the killer was at the kitchen door. He’d heard them. She pulled hard on Mom’s hand. The killer moved out of the kitchen and into the living room in three great impossible strides. Eeva tugged as hard as she could but Mom was so heavy! She wasn’t looking at the killer, she couldn’t. She got kicked in the chest almost all the way back behind the couch.

  She fell down, her head ringing. Gasping for air. Mom! Mom was standing there, dazed and confused. The killer raised the gun to her head. “Mom! No!” Eeva jumped to her feet and dived into Mom’s midriff as she heard the gunshot. They both tumbled over and fell into the kitchen. Not the kitchen! She led Mom under the kitchen table. What a stupid move. The killer was still in the living room. Maybe he knew they were cornered. She turned to Mom and gasped in horror. A bit of her head was missing. Blood was pouring down her shirt. Mom faced her, her eyes empty but the hole in her head almost staring. Eeva was petrified. Only when the table was lifted up in the air and thrown to the side did she snap out and look away. The killer was there, his gun pointed at them. Eeva screamed. He shot Mom in the head again. Eeva felt the blood sprinkle her face. Mom fell back on her behind, still looking up. The killer fired again, and again, and again, each time Mom’s body jerking, each time a pink mist spraying over Eeva. When he stopped firing, she was crying and screaming and covered in blood. The gun pointed to her, she could see all the way down the barrel. Shoot me! He obliged. She was still screaming when she woke up.

  Grandma was by her side, holding her hand. “You’ve been yelling for ten minutes. I couldn’t wake you up.” Eeva burst into tears. Why didn’t the dreams just kill her? Why did she have to live through them over and over again? An inescapable torture. People thought of Hell that way. For her it was everyday life. Why couldn’t she be like any other kid in school? It was still pitch black outside, but she wouldn’t go back to sleep. Not after one like that.

  She took control of her sobs. “Go to bed Grandma, I’ll be all right.” Grandma was too old for that shit.

  “Don’t be stupid. You’re not all right at all. And I don’t sleep much anyway.”

  Eeva lost it. She put her head on Grandma’s shoulder and cried and cried a
nd cried.

  * * *

  And she dreamed and dreamed again that week. The old dreams, some new ones. She woke up a little more exhausted every day. School was like a haze. She was going to fail this year so bad! And she couldn’t care less. The immediate survival of her sanity was all she could focus on. She grew overly anxious in the evenings. She tried to put off sleeping as much as possible. Coffee helped a little. But she’d been a caffeine junkie for so long that it had little effect on her. She was up to ten cups a day. And strong ones too. If depression didn’t kill her, an ulcer was next in line.

  She had another dream like the one where she saw her mother’s face clearly. She was in the same dirty, and definitely smelly, room. There was an ashtray on the nightstand, overflowing with ashes and cigarette butts. That was weird because she only smoked a little bit, and never at home. Just borrowed cigarettes over coffee with the two other misfits in school. There was the same broken mirror on the wall that returned her the same fat version of herself. If I scream, Mom will come. Her heart started beating dubstep. “Mom?”, she called. She listened intently. After a few seconds, she heard a voice: “Did you call me?” She closed her eyes. It was Mom’s voice. After all those years, it was the sound of home. The sound of all things good. “Can you come up?” This room wasn’t feeling like home at all, on the other hand. It was nothing like the flat where Mom had been killed. Her dreams of Mom always happened at her old home. Why would she dream of this place?

  “You come down!” Mom yelled.

  Her dreams of Mom always had a killer too. If she left the room, she’d go down to the kitchen, and it would be her old kitchen, and the killer would come and shoot her. The simple fact that she just thought of that was bound to make it happen in the dream, wasn’t it?. Oh! This one was a lucid dream! She was aware she was dreaming! “Please Mom!”

  She heard a muffled grumble. “All right then!” Footsteps got nearer and nearer until she saw the door handle turn. Eeva held her breath. The door swung, and there she was. Looking so short and vulnerable. And behind her, there was no faceless man with a gun. It was just her. “You better have a good reason. My show is on.” Eeva threw her arms around her. “Mom!” She started crying, she held her tight. “Hey! Stop it! You’re choking me!” Mom managed to push her away. “What are you on? Crack?” Eeva felt so confused that she woke up.

  * * *

  The days and nights started blending in a grey blur. She only fell asleep at the end of a desperate coffee-fueled battle to stay awake. She’d usually last until sunrise. She stopped going to school. Grandma tried to get her out of bed but she wouldn’t budge. When she was in a nightmare, she was unwakeable. She’d open her eyes at last, sweating and panting, already freaking out in the expectation of the next row.

  Every other day, nested between nightmares, she’d get the killer-free dream. The dream of Mom. It always started the same. She woke up in the dirty room, looking like she’d been on a McDonald’s diet for a year. She started paying attention to things beyond the fact that Mom was downstairs. For starters, she realised there were parallel scars on her arms and forearms, some still red. Like she’d been cutting herself. She went on to find stuff that would have been at home in a government-sponsored anti-drug infomercial. A square of aluminium foil dirty with brown powder she assumed was heroin, a pressured gas lighter and a charred spoon. She was relieved to find no syringes at all and went and almost stepped into a used one on the floor. What the fuck was this dream about? She’d worked up the courage to leave the room and found that, even though the rest of the house was even more rundown than her room, there was no crouching killer about to pounce on her. Once she got used to that oddity, she started experimenting with the dream.

  The dream was always lucid. While in-dream, she’d always remember the previous runs. But the dream never remembered her. So she could try something different every time. Once she ran out of her room, straight out of the house, into the street, and down the block. There were only few people outside but she got the clear impression they were avoiding her. Most of them looked the other way, one changed sidewalks, one gestured something at her that she caught out of the corner of her eye. At first she thought that the guy had waved to her. But when she looked at him and he turned away, she figured that it wasn’t that at all. He must have flipped her off. What?

  She had to navigate a couple of streets to get to a place she recognised. Gosh, they were in the worst fucking neighbourhood in town. She’d been there only twice, because of some jerk she’d called "boyfriend" for a week before she agreed to have sex with him and subsequently got dumped. Was her first time too. Why on Earth would she dream of living there? But it did fit with the dump-of-a-house she and Mom called “home” and with the general hostility of the people in the street.

  The Mom-dream was always very short. She’d look forward to it if it weren’t always nestled between two particularly gruesome nightmares. She’d only have time to do one or two things before waking up. And she couldn’t follow through the next time because the dream always reset. She tried some silly things just to test the dream. She stopped short of walking into the living room and kicking the TV over, Mom watching. The TV was the only expensive-looking thing in the house, so that was sure to raise hell. But why the fuck not? Everything would be forgotten in the next dream.

  If she wanted to try something on Mom, she’d first need to get her off the couch first, which was no easy task. Mom really liked that show. It wasted precious dream-time. She tried a couple of lines before settling on “Mom, we need to talk” as the quickest way to get her attention. At first she wanted to ask her about the years she’d missed. She wanted hugs and kisses. But she couldn’t find a non-awkward way of doing it. She was fifteen after all, and gathering from Mom’s responses, they didn’t have the cuddliest relationship.

  Actually, it looked more like they were on the war path. Mom was snappy, dismissive and quick to resume watching TV. Like they had just had a big fight. That didn’t help. The dream assumed a pretty definite recent history that she had no idea of. Through a couple of trial-and-error, she managed to gather that she’d been working at a local fast food joint and got fired recently for being late for work. Her Mom was obviously pissed at her for that and expected her to know it, which she didn’t in the beginning and it made communication very difficult. Once she figured that out, she tried apologising for it. “I’m so sorry I lost the job, Mom. I’m going to get busy finding something else soon.” Mom glared at her defiantly. “Don’t bullshit me, I know you’re not.” So her in-dream self was not the apologising type. She made a mental note for later.

  It wasn’t just the people in the street that had a pretty low opinion of her. Her mom seemed to despise her. Getting something out of her required much persuasion. That one time when she tried to find out why she wasn’t sending her to school ended in a lot of yelling and no answer at all. And she had to run out to avoid having the remote thrown at her when she suggested cleaning the house. She didn’t know how to bring up the subject of her dad without escalating the discussion to nuclear levels.

  Her Dad. Mom had taken that secret to her grave. She toyed with the idea for a while. It probably wouldn’t work at all. But the dreamscape was such a realistic projection, she had to try. If Dream-Mom told her a name, she’d find him in reality and maybe… The more she thought of it, the more she liked the idea. This dream was so weird. Maybe it had been sent for her to find him. And when she would, the nightmares would stop. She hung on to that line of thought for dear sanity.

  But it was a dud. There wasn’t enough time. When she first tried, her mom went nuts: “What! Fuck him! And fuck you too! Don’t you ever talk about this!” And she got slapped in the face so hard it woke her up.

  Another time, she tried begging. Literally on her knees. Mom reacted with contempt. “Pick yourself up, you look ridiculous.” And she walked out to the kitchen, leaving the TV on.

  She would go for something more subtle,
but the dream was too short. She had to find a way to yank it out of her quickly. If she had more time…

  She stopped trying after a few more failed attempts. This dream was only coming every few nights anyway. The other nightmares kept her on the verge of exhaustion. She had entered a routine of fighting sleep, surrendering, getting battered, and standing up again, bruised and scared, waiting for it to happen over again. Reality itself started looking more and more like a hallucination. So she wasn’t even surprised to find Doctor Astikainen waiting on her porch when she went out for groceries one morning. Or was it an afternoon?

  “Good afternoon, Miss Roivas.”

  Ah there it was. “’Sup.” She walked past him and stepped out in the fog. Or was it rain?

  The doctor started after her, spreading a big black umbrella over his head. Rain.

  “Wait, Miss Roivas, I would like to have a quick conversation with you.”

  “Have it your way.” she mumbled, not even turning around. No way he heard it. But her body language must have spoken for her.

  “Doctor Juvonen had me worried when she said that you missed two appointments and weren’t returning her calls.”

  Doctor who? Oh… Her GP. She’d been calling? She hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t checked her voice-mail in ages either.

  “I was concerned that my quite abruptly ending our collaboration might have caused you to stop seeking medical assistance.”

  “It did.” she mumbled again, picking up her pace, wanting him to go away, not wanting him to leave, wanting him to pull out a gun and make reality end like dreams always did.

  “Then I must…” He broke into a jog that allowed him to overtake Eeva, spun to face her and said, “Then I must deeply apologise to you.”

  She was stopped in her tracks like she hit a brick wall. She looked up in his eyes and they were not inexpressive at all. The dude really was sorry.

  “I would like to take you to see Doctor Juvonen and ask her for an independent diagnosis. In any case, I’ll do whatever is necessary to take you back to a specialist.”

  “Not you.” She didn’t know if she meant it as a question or a condition. His reply didn’t help her figure it out.