“What will this do?” I asked the woman in the white lab coat. She was using her applicator to spread a cool gel on the back of my calf; a shiver went up my leg from the tingling sensation of the fluid.
From the edge of the table, just out of my sight, she answered, “The nanomachines are in solution in this gel. After I finish applying it they will swim between the cells on your skin and into the tissue of your leg, where they will begin to repair the damaged nerves.”
I spend a moment there laying on my side taking this in, picturing these tiny mites waving their legs of carbon atoms, crawling across cell membranes like spiders skittering across pond water, coming at last to the fine strands of nerve fiber, whereupon they would scavenge what they needed and begin to weave new tissue, trailing the gossamer strands of new neurons behind them as they wrote new sensation into my leg. I turned to look at her over my shoulder. “And so…it’ll just work? They’ll just…fix me?”
She smiled. “Yes, it will just work,” she said, and yet didn’t say at all. As before I found that I didn’t really seem to be hearing her words so much as I knew what she was saying. Certainly her lips never moved.
I turned away from her, thinking about this. Wondering what it would be like when they were done. I could sense the doctor starting to walk out of the room, and suddenly it hit me: she’d put the salve on the wrong leg. “Wait-” I said, turning over –
–and fell some indeterminate distance, falling solidly upon my bed, face down, eyes opening with a start to focus groggily on my pillow. Oh, no.
There’s a trick I learned some years ago, one that I can’t teach, can’t explain how it works, where I can push myself back into a dream if I do so immediately after waking.
pleasepleasepleaseplease
I close my eyes again, and slide back into the peculiar floating warmth of the dream. My bed gives way to the operating table. Blankets disappear, and I’m in the hospital gown again.
you have to come back, it’s the other leg, you need to do the other one
I open my eyes again, see the doctor in her white lab coat walking from the room. “Wait!” I call out to her, in the same speechless method she used to talk to me. She stops, turns towards me. I start to tell her about how it’s the other leg that needs to be treated…
...for all the good that will do me, I realize. I already know this to be false, these walls only mist, the doctor only a shadow. The magic is gone, the sudden reappearance of the hospital room no longer a miracle now that it is revealed to only have been the result of a cleverly placed mirror this whole time. For years I’ve tried to pull things back with me into the waking world, coming out of dreams with fingers locked firmly around newspapers from my hometown, fine china teacups, hot breakfasts, bicycle wheels. I’ve yet to return to my body anything but empty handed. Surely this superscience cure of molecule-sized robots will be no different. “Nothing,” I tell her. “It doesn’t matter.”
The doctor smiles at me again, and walks out of the room, no doubt dissolving back into sand as soon as she leaves my sight.
I close my eyes, open them again. Roll over on my back. Stare up at the ceiling of my bedroom.
I wonder about my dream counterpart, if he ever gets tired of driving up and down highways along the coast, walking through ever-changing yet hauntingly familiar cities, jumping off building tops to float lazily to the ground, if he ever gets weary of never being cold or having swollen joints. Maybe he’d like to change places for a while, go sit in my chair in the office, stare blankly at a computer screen all day while I ride a tiger through the park. Maybe.
Probably not, though.
Dreams, why must you vex me so?
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