Category:

1

Every morning felt like Henry's first. Perhaps it came from working with code so much, the detailed sequence of inconsequential numbers that resulted in something coming to life, something that had never existed before. Perhaps it was because his aversion to leaving the house had grown so severe that he'd long given up trying, so he was left with only one wonder within his reach. Lily. The woman sitting in the chair next to his bed, smiling in the lovely, vaguely haunted way he sometimes sees as a side effect of overwhelming love, and other times as merely pity.

"That was a bad one," she says.

"Was I snoring?"

"You were nightmaring. You woke up like I fired a gun next to your ear."

"Did you?"

Her glasses are round and too large for her face in a way Henry finds heartbreaking. She pushes them up hard against her brow. "What was the dream about?"

"It was the same one," he says. "More or less."

"Tell me."

"Why? Dreams are stupid. Don't we have other things—"

"Dreams tell us who we are," his wife says, and pulls the chair an inch closer, taps at her chin with doctorly interest. "Don't you think we could all use some help with that?"

He hears the "all" as meaning himself. He could use some help with knowing who he is. It's a very Lily thing to say: superficially supportive, curious, passively superior. His desire for her to stay here with him is so great he forgives her for making him feel like an anecdote, something she might later share with friends for their amusement. Or worse, their sympathy.

"It's our house. This house," Henry says. "I'm moving through the halls like I'm not in control of my limbs. Just drifting, you know?"

"Sure."

"And I'm going up the stairs to the second floor. That's when I start to get scared."

"Are you scared of—"

"Not it. Not exactly."

"So it's—"

"A sense. Like I know something bad is coming but I can't prevent it."

"And you can't wake up."

"I can't do anything except go where I have to go."

"The attic."

"The stairs to the attic, yeah. That's where I stop. Looking up at the door. Except it's different from the real door. This one is covered in chains and padlocks, top to bottom. Like whoever put them there didn't think there was enough of them so kept adding more and more."

There's no way to predict what will catch Lily's interest, and what will cause her to wander off and leave him to what she calls his "pet projects." Henry often feels like there's an undiscovered vein of conversation that might keep her with him longer, maybe even bring her back for good, if he could only stumble on the right topic or theme. He's made the mistake in the past of thinking she wants him to be more entertaining. But after trying to mimic the charm of the leading men in the movies she likes, he saw how she found him the least engaging when he was working the hardest at it. It makes him want to ask what she found most attractive about him before they were married—whatever quality he still possesses that he could try to magnify—but he worries she'll say she's forgotten.

"Then what?" she says.

"I hear a voice behind the door."

"Its voice."

"Yeah."

"But you couldn't hear what it was saying."

"When I've had the dream before I couldn't. But this time I could."