The Distant Nightmare

I.

The dream began at the edge of something that had not yet ended.

Elias Thornwood sat in his study at half-past three in the morning, the kind of hour that exists only between yesterday and tomorrow, when the walls of a Bloomsbury townhouse grow thin as paper and the voices of other people's dreams bleed through the plaster like watercolour on wet canvas. He was a translator by trade—specialising, as he had once told his grandfather at a dinner table that smelled of rosemary and boiled potatoes, in "the art of making foreign things sound English." It was a neat line, one that had served him well at the university press where he spent his days bending foreign sentences into the clean, polite corridors of standard prose. But tonight, there was a dream on his desk that no amount of translation could make English.

It had arrived wrapped in brown paper and twine, addressed in a hand that belonged to someone who understood the weight of ink—the loops of the c and the sharp cross of the t were like footsteps in wet clay, each one a deliberate mark on the earth. Inside the package: a leather-bound journal, its cover the colour of strong tea left too long in the cup, and a note in the same looping hand that read, in letters so careful they seemed to be apologising for existing: "You will understand when you begin to read. But read carefully, because some things can only be read once."

The journal belonged to someone named Julian Mercer.

Elias knew the name the way one knows the names of people who have died—through other people's conversations, through the particular hush that falls when the name is mentioned at dinner, through the photograph on Julian's desk at the press, a photograph of a man with thinning hair and a mouth that seemed to be halfway between a smile and a question. Julian had been his friend once, three or four years ago, when friendship was something that happened over pints of bitter and walks along the Thames at dusk, when the river looked like a dark road and the bridges looked like the ribs of some enormous, sleeping creature. They had spoken of books and of nothing, of the weather and of everything, of the strange alchemy that turns a stranger into someone you can tell secrets to without meaning to.

Then Julian had stopped coming to the pub.

Then Julian had stopped answering his emails.

Then the photograph on his desk was the only Julian anyone saw anymore.

Elias opened the journal to the first page. The first line was written in the same careful hand: "I have been dreaming in your voice for seven months."

II.

The dreams, Julian had written, had begun on a Tuesday in November, on a day that had felt like any other Tuesday until it did not. Julian was a archivist at the British Museum—a man whose life had been, in his own description, "a series of rooms, each one containing something someone else wanted to keep." He spent his days among manuscripts and maps and things that had been deemed important enough to preserve and important enough to lock away, and his nights in a small flat in Kennington that he described, with a precision that bordered on the clinical, as "adequate for the preservation of the body but not, so far, for the nourishment of anything else."

On that Tuesday in November, Julian had fallen asleep in his armchair, a manuscript on ancient botanical illustrations open on his lap, and woken at three in the morning with Elias's voice in his head.

Not a memory of Elias's voice—the voice itself, live, as though Elias were sitting in the room, speaking in that low, careful baritone that had once read poetry aloud to a room full of people who were pretending not to listen. "The sea does not ask the shore to hold it," the voice had said. "It only asks the shore to be there."

Julian had turned round, expecting to find Elias in the doorway. The doorway had been empty. The room had been dark. The manuscript on his lap had fallen open to a page that showed, in intricate botanical detail, a flower that Julian did not recognise—a flower with petals the colour of faded gold and a centre that looked, impossibly, like a human eye.

He had looked up the flower the next day. It did not exist in any catalogue. It did not exist in any herbarium. It existed, he learned from a botanist friend at Kew who spoke to him in a voice that was careful not to be alarmed, only in the dreams of people who had recently lost someone they loved.

"It's a dream-flower," the botanist had said. "A metaphor, really. People project it onto their sleeping minds because waking life doesn't provide enough space for the grief they haven't admitted they're carrying."

Julian had nodded, because that made sense, because metaphor was the kind of thing that made sense, because anything that could be explained as metaphor could be explained as not-real, and not-real was survivable.

But then the dreams continued, and in each one, Elias was there, speaking in that voice that Julian had not realised he was starving for, and in each one, Elias said something different—something that sounded, to Julian's archivist's ear, like the working-out of a problem, the slow and careful solving of an equation that had begun on that Tuesday in November and would not end until Julian understood what the equation was for.

III.

Elias turned the pages of the journal. The handwriting grew stranger as the entries progressed—less precise, more urgent, as though the hand that wrote them were running out of time or running out of something that felt like time.

"The flower appeared again last night," Julian had written on the fourteenth entry. "This time it was growing in the margins of a sixteenth-century map of the Mediterranean. I did not draw it. I did not imagine it. It was there when I woke, pressed between the pages of a book I had not opened in months, its petals still moist as though the night had not yet finished watering it."

"On the twenty-first night, Elias spoke my name for the first time. He had never done that before. In seven months of dreaming in his voice, he had never spoken my name. When he did, the room did not change. The light did not change. The temperature did not change. But something changed—a small thing, a nearly invisible thing, like the difference between a room that is empty and a room that is waiting."

"On the twenty-eighth night, he told me that he knows I cannot hear him. 'You are reading this, or you will read this, or you have already read this and forgotten,' he wrote. 'But I need you to know that the dreams are not a haunting. They are a conversation. I am talking to you, and you are listening, even if your listening takes the form of sleep and your talking takes the form of ink on paper.'"

Elias stopped reading. He sat in his Bloomsbury study, the London rain pressing against the window like someone who wanted in but understood, politely, that they were not welcome, and he thought of Julian—the careful man, the archivist, the man who had once told Elias over a pint of Guinness that he was afraid of dreaming because he was afraid of what he might dream about, and Elias had laughed and said, "You mean you'll dream about files and catalogues?" and Julian had smiled, a small, private smile, and said, "No. I mean I'll dream about you, and I don't want to dream about you because dreaming about you would mean I miss you when I wake up, and I have found that missing you when I wake up is more than I can bear."

Elias had forgotten that conversation. He was sure of it. It had happened in a pub that no longer existed, on a night that had long since become yesterday, and he had forgotten it the way one forgets things that are too kind to carry.

He turned back to the journal. The final entry was dated three days before Julian died.

"I think I am close to the solution," it read. "Whatever problem Elias is solving in my dreams, I think I am finally understanding what it is. It is not about death. It is not about grief. It is about distance—the kind of distance that exists between two people who love each other but have forgotten how to measure it. Elias is teaching me, through the language of dreams, how to measure it. And when I understand the measurement, he says, I will understand everything."

The last line, written in a hand so shaky it seemed to belong to a different person entirely: "Tomorrow, I will sleep with the journal open on my chest, and I will dream in Elias's voice one last time, and I will finally know what he has been trying to tell me. Tell me, if you are reading this, that you knew. Tell me I was not foolish for dreaming. Tell me the distance between us was never as large as it seemed."

IV.

Elias did not cry. He was not sure why he did not cry—whether it was shock, or numbness, or the particular kind of grief that arrives so late that it has forgotten how to be tears. Instead, he did something he had not done in three years: he walked out of his house, into the London night, and he walked to the place where Julian had last lived.

The flat in Kennington had been let to a young woman who worked in a gallery in Southbank and who, when Elias stood on her doorstep at midnight and asked her, haltingly, if she knew anything about the man who had lived there before her, looked at him with a mixture of pity and suspicion and said, "He was quiet. He kept to himself. He used to read botanical books in the evenings, the ones with all the pictures of flowers. I think he was lonely. But then, so was I, and we didn't even speak to each other."

Elias walked home in the rain. He walked past the Thames, past the bridges that looked like ribs, past the river that looked like a dark road, and he thought about distance—the distance between Julian and himself, the distance between the living and the dreaming, the distance between something that ends and something that has not yet ended.

He went to bed. He did not want to dream. He was afraid, suddenly, of what he might dream about.

But the dream found him anyway.

It began, as all dreams do, at the edge of something that had not yet ended. Elias was standing in a room he did not recognise—a room full of flowers, dream-flowers, the ones with petals the colour of faded gold and centres like human eyes, and the room was vast and empty and Julian was standing at the far end of it, so far away that Elias could not tell if he was real or imagined.

"Elias," Julian said, and his voice was not the voice from the journal, it was his real voice, the one Elias had forgotten, the one he had carried without knowing he was carrying it, and it was the most beautiful thing Elias had ever heard.

"I know," Elias said. "I knew. I just—I forgot. And I am sorry I forgot."

Julian smiled. It was the small, private smile from the pub, the one Elias had seen once and carried for three years without knowing. "You don't have to be sorry," he said. "The distance was never the problem. The problem was thinking it was."

The flowers in the room opened, one by one, like eyes waking, and in their centres, Elias saw not death and not grief and not the end of something, but the beginning of something that had not yet named itself, something that was still reaching across the distance between one consciousness and the next, patient and unending and as natural as breathing.

He woke up. The rain had stopped. The sky over Bloomsbury was the colour of a page that has been read and put down and will be picked up again, eventually, when the time is right.

Elias Thornwood picked up his pen. He began, carefully, to translate.