Chapter 3

So she was untroubled by the clutter she lived in. No one ever came to call, and her rich interior life made her real environs irrelevant.

The only window in her apartment offered a panoramic view of a vacant lot. The city beyond was only lovely at night when the old whore painted her face with neon and dimmed the lights.

By day, Alice hid herself in a cubicle where she was just one more worker in the vast hive. No one noticed her as she scuttled in and seated herself behind her screen. She was a trucker on the information super highway, moving her freight with nimble fingers. The people she dealt with had no faces, and often, no names. Her paycheck was logged directly into her account. She had never spoken to her boss.

Her only friend was Rick. She had never seen him. “Rick” was only a username on the Film Noir Chatline, a pseudonym, of course. She suspected that he had taken the name because he had seen “Casablanca” forty seven times. Such excess seemed obsessive. She had watched the film no more than a dozen times—at most.

Nevertheless, Alice spent most of her lunch hours trading messages with him. She knew that he was lonely too and probably as unlovable as she was. It didn’t matter whether he was really a gangly teenager or a paraplegic; in her mind, he was always slouched over his keyboard, wearing a sweat stained fedora and chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes, wincing occasionally at the twinge of old wounds, remembering Paris.

That was her life, until the dreams began.

Alice grunted with effort as she sat up on the bed and reached for the clock. “I’m too young to feel so old,” she thought. Outside, winter refused to die. The vacant lot next door was still grey with rotting snow, and trash lay half interred under the skeletal remains of last year’s weeds.

She remembered her dream. Odd that it stayed so clear, but it had been unnaturally vivid. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair. She was surprised to find it damp.

“I must have been sweating in my sleep,” she explained to the empty room. It could hardly have been the rain in her dream, after all.

She had no appetite for any breakfast that morning, strange for a woman who was usually a hearty eater, and left for work with nothing but coffee to sustain her. She arrived early and went directly to her station.

Consulting her calendar there, she saw that she was scheduled to see the company psychiatrist at ten. It was a routine visit. Company policy required all employees to see the shrink twice a year. She never knew if the purpose of the policy was to boost morale or ferret out potentially unstable employees. The visits were always an ordeal for her. The shrink was an old pipe smoker who welcomed her to his confessional couch where she spoke of her loneliness and self-hatred. He listened without sympathy then told her in his detached and professional manner to get a life. She hated him.

She couldn’t face this day without talking to Rick.

“Good morning, Rick,” she typed.

He was there. He was always there. “Good morning, Alice.”

“I dreamed about you last night.”

“Sounds like a real nightmare LOL! Funny, though, I dreamed about you too. We were at a party. You’re a babe!”

She stared at the message for a long moment, reminding herself that it was only a simple coincidence. “Hardly,” she replied. She felt a flush rising to her cheeks. It had never occurred to her that she might be the object of his fantasies too. She quickly dismissed her next thought, the eerie possibility that she and Rick had communicated through telepathy while asleep, that they had both appeared as idealized versions of themselves in a shared dream.

“Speaking of dreams,” wrote Rick. “I have a bootleg program for you—a real mind blower. Way better than just gaming. (And you didn’t get it from me!)”

She was unimpressed. Rick was always discovering the next greatest thing, but she downloaded it and saved it on disk.

“Dr. Deluse will see you now.”

Alice was surprised when the receptionist (an anorexic walking stick and Alice resented her for it) spoke the unfamiliar name. Change always made Alice wary, and she was put off that her usual doctor had deserted her, taking her secrets with him.

“What happened to Dr. Prober?” asked Alice. The office door opened, and a tall, large boned woman in a grey suit stood in the doorway smiling at Alice.

“He has retired,” she said. “You must be Alice Underland. Call me Jane.” The therapist’s office had been redecorated. Behind the desk, a reproduction of a painting by Fuseli had been hung.

The picture showed a demon crouched on the chest of a sleeping woman. Alice could not imagine why such a disturbing picture had been placed there. The ugly but comfortable old sofa that Alice usually occupied during her sessions had been replaced by a leather divan. Alice lay stiffly upon it, arranging her skirt for maximum modesty, disliking the feel of the leather against her fingers and legs. It was like reclining in the palm of a giant hand. Alice looked over at Dr. Deluse. The woman had seated herself on the edge of her desk, deliberately informal. Dr. Prober had always made a fortress of his desk, not even rising to see Alice out. The familiarity made her uneasy.

Jane Deluse had disturbing eyes that seemed to phase from brown, to grey, to green as she studied her subject. She sat with her legs extended and crossed at the ankle. Her shoulders were back, and she had one fist braced against her hip while she twirled a pencil with the other. There was an unsettling restless energy in the woman.