The Dreamers Who Touched Tomorrow

FOUR JOURNALS AND A LIE

She does not go back.

This is the decision she makes standing on the pavement outside The Still Point with her coffee going cold in her hand and her journal open to a page that has one word on it and no explanation. She makes the decision the way she makes most important decisions, quietly and completely, without ceremony. She will not go back. She will return to her usual coffee shop tomorrow regardless of the line. She will erase the half block detour from her morning routine and in three weeks it will be as if Tuesday never happened.

She is very good at erasing things.

She walks to work. The twenty minutes does not feel like twenty minutes. She is aware of her feet on the pavement and the cold air and the ordinary Tuesday morning proceeding around her with complete indifference to the fact that something has just happened that she does not have a category for. People pass her. A bus releases a sigh of hydraulic pressure at the corner. Somewhere above the fog the sun is doing its best.

She does not open the journal again.

Meridian Press occupies the top two floors of a Victorian building on Calloway Street that smells permanently of old paper and the particular ambition of people who chose books over money and have mostly made peace with that choice. The elevator is unreliable. The stairs are steep and covered in a carpet whose original color is now a matter of speculation. Elara takes the stairs every morning and has never once found this inconvenient because the stairs are twenty-two steps of transition between the city and the work and she needs that transition more than she needs a functioning elevator.

She is at her desk by 8:15. She has a manuscript open on her screen by 8:17. By 8:20 she has read the same paragraph four times without retaining a single sentence and she closes the document, folds her hands on the desk, and looks at the middle distance for a moment that is longer than she intends.

Her colleague Priya appears in the doorway with the expression of someone who has noticed something and is deciding whether to mention it.

"You look like you saw a ghost," Priya says.

"I look like someone who needs better coffee," Elara says.

Priya accepts this, which is one of the things Elara appreciates most about her. She does not pull on threads. She takes the surface answer and moves on, which in their two years of working together has made her one of approximately four people Elara considers genuinely restful to be around.

"Editorial meeting at ten," Priya says. "Harmon wants everyone to have read the Delacroix proposal."

"I read it last week."

"Of course you did." Priya disappears. Her footsteps recede down the hallway.

Elara opens the manuscript again.

This time she reads the paragraph and retains it and makes three margin notes in red and moves on to the next page. The work helps. It always helps. There is something about the act of close reading that requires exactly enough of her attention to crowd out everything else. The manuscript is not very good but it has potential in the way that uncut things have potential: the shape is there, it just needs someone willing to do the patient work of revealing it.

She does the patient work until 9:58, then closes her laptop and goes to the editorial meeting, where she sits in her usual chair and drinks the office coffee which is terrible and says exactly four things, all of them useful, and does not think about grey eyes or the stillness of a man behind a counter or the way her journal has one new word in it that she has not yet decided what to do with.

She does not think about these things with considerable effort.

The prediction happens at 2:17 p.m.

She knows the exact time because she checks her watch the moment she hears Harmon's voice in the hallway, which is the moment she knows what is coming, which is the moment the familiar cold feeling settles into her sternum like a stone dropped into still water.

In the dream two nights ago, before the road and the fog and the crack that she has now logged as appearing for the eighth time, there was a fragment she noted but did not fully examine. Harmon in the hallway. The particular cadence of his voice saying something to the intern whose name Elara has not retained. Eleven words, which she had written down phonetically because she did not fully understand them in the dream context.

She had written: something about the Vellum contract, the words not yet and a number.

Through the open door of her office she now hears Harmon say to the intern: "Tell Sasha the Vellum contract is not yet finalized. They want forty-two percent and we are not there."

Forty-two. The number she had written without knowing it was a number.

She looks at her desk. She looks at her hands on the desk. She picks up the red pen and opens the journal to the prediction log in the back, the section she color-codes separately, and writes: Harmon. Vellum. Not yet. 42%. Time: 2:17 p.m. Accuracy: exact.

Then she closes the journal and goes back to the manuscript.

This is the part people would not understand if she told them, which she has never done. The predictions are not dramatic. They are not revelations. They are small, precise, ordinary moments that would mean nothing to anyone who had not dreamed them first. A conversation in a hallway. A stranger's exact words on a train. A cat in a specific location two streets from her building. The dreams are not showing her the architecture of the world. They are showing her proof. Small, repeatable, undeniable proof that what she sees at night is not her own mind processing the noise of daily life into narrative. It is something else. It has always been something else.

She has four journals full of proof that she has shown no one.

She has never fully decided if this is prudence or cowardice and tonight, for some reason, the ambiguity bothers her more than it usually does.

She takes a different route home.

Not consciously, or not consciously at first. She tells herself she is walking through the market district because she needs to pick up something for dinner and the market is a reasonable detour. This is true. She does need something for dinner. The market is a reasonable detour.

The market is also four blocks in the opposite direction from The Still Point, which means she is not avoiding it. She is simply going somewhere else for entirely practical reasons that have nothing to do with avoiding anything.

She buys tomatoes and bread and a bunch of herbs she always buys with the intention of using and mostly does not use, and she walks home through the long way, and at no point does she take any street that would bring her within two blocks of a coffee shop on the corner of Hadley and Fifth.

At home she makes dinner and eats it standing at her kitchen counter reading a novel she has already read twice because sometimes a book you already know the ending of is the only kind of company that feels manageable.

She does not open the journal.

She does not let herself think about the word she wrote this morning.

She goes to bed at 10:30 with the deliberate intention of sleeping without dreaming, which is not something a person can actually intend their way into but which she attempts anyway because the attempt itself feels like a form of control and right now she needs every form of control she can manufacture.

At 3:09 a.m. she wakes up.

Not from a dream. From the absence of one, which is somehow worse. She has been so accustomed to the dreams arriving on their own schedule that their failure to appear feels pointed, like a silence in a conversation that means more than the words around it.

She lies in the dark. The water stain shaped like Chile is invisible at this hour but she knows exactly where it is.

She thinks about the grey of his eyes and the unsteadiness of his hands and the fact that he recognized her, which is the part she has been not thinking about all day with the most disciplined effort. Because the dreams have been showing her a man for three years but they have always shown her his back, his posture, the shape of him at a distance. They have never shown her his face with any clarity. They have never given her a name. They have certainly never given her the experience of being recognized in return.

She had assumed, in the way you assume things you have never examined, that the connection was one-directional. That she was the dreamer and he was the dreamed and the dreaming moved from her toward him without any reciprocal current.

The way his hands shook when he handed her the change suggests she was wrong about that.

She sits up. She reaches for the journal. She finds the page with the single word and underneath it, in the small precise handwriting she uses for things she is not sure about yet, she writes a question.

If he is dreaming too, what has he seen?

She stares at it for a long time.

Then she writes the thing underneath it that she has been refusing to write all day, the thing that has been sitting at the bottom of her chest since 7:45 this morning like a stone that is too heavy to ignore and too frightening to pick up.

He already knows me. That means the dreams showed him the futures too.

That means he knows what I know.

That means he went into that coffee shop this morning knowing I might walk through the door.

She closes the journal.

She does not sleep again until almost 5 a.m. and when she finally does the dream that arrives is not the road and the fog and the crack in the pavement.

It is a room she has never seen, lit by winter light, and he is sitting across from her and they are both very still and he is looking at her the way she now knows he looks in real life, which is like someone who has been waiting for a long time and cannot quite believe the waiting is over.

In the dream she does not run.

She is not sure what to do with that.