Dreamology(32)

“Why paint someone’s portrait if you are just going to cover their face with a piece of fruit?” I say out loud.

“They’re surrealist,” Max says from up ahead.

“I knew that,” I shoot back. Sort of.

“Why the fascination with surrealism, Dr. Petermann?” Max calls out.

At this, Petermann turns on his heels to face us, arms outstretched. “Because in our dreams, we are all surrealist painters, creating narratives and pictures that are often as beautiful as they are nonsensical.”

Petermann motions us inside a room, where we find Nanao looking bored, holding a clipboard. To her left is a machine that looks like a giant glossy white donut, with a center the size of a manhole.

All I can think is, Nope.

“Will I be expected to get in there?” I ask, my body suddenly frozen where it’s standing.

“I know it’s hardly a hammock on a tropical shoreline, but I need to get a standard read of your brain activity before we begin putting you to sleep and seeing how it changes when you dream,” Petermann explains.

In response I just start nodding quickly, over and over again, unable to form any words.

“Alice is a little claustrophobic,” I hear Max clarify, and when I glance his way, I find him smiling at me. It’s infuriating.

“Is my anxiety humorous to you?” I ask, and feel my face growing hot.

“No,” Max says, in a tone that sounds like he’s giving up. “But you have a small piece of cactus in your hair.”

Horrified, my hand shoots up to my waves, where I find a stowaway from Terrarium Club. I am always getting things stuck in this rat’s nest. “Then maybe you should stop looking at me,” I mumble, and attempt to stealthily pull the leaf out. Max is still sort of smiling, though it looks like he’s fighting it.

“Did you get it?” he asks.

“Shut up,” I say.

“I’ll go first,” Max announces to everyone.

As we watch Max’s long frame retreat into the depths of the evil donut monster from behind a glass partition, Petermann explains to us—over a speaker, so Max can hear, too—exactly what the machine does. A functional MRI maps the blood flow to the brain to show what parts are the most active. In dream mapping they use an fMRI in combination with an EEG. The EEG monitors the electrical activity in the brain, which determines when the subject is in early REM cycle and likely to have the most image-filled dreams. The fMRI then maps what parts light up in the brain, to help us understand how the brain dreams. Then the person is awakened to describe what they saw.

When Max is finished, I pull my phone out of my pocket in a dramatic fashion. “Oh, would you look at that,” I say loudly. “Six p.m.? We should probably wrap it up soon, right, Dr. Petermann? It’s okay, I can come back another time.”

“You are going to be fine, Alice.” Petermann puts a hand on my shoulder. We’ll be here the whole time, just behind the glass. And you just tell us when you need to come out.”

“Okay,” I say quietly, looking at the machine from five feet away. “I’m ready to come out.”

Petermann gives me a look. “First you have to go in.”

I told myself it would be better once I was lying in the machine, that it would be over and done with before I know it, but it doesn’t feel any better at all. I understand I’m not enclosed, that there’s a hole where my feet are, that I could, theoretically, scootch my butt out of this death trap if the power went off or everyone in the room was suddenly rendered unconscious by a freak accident or alien invasion. But staring up at the roof of the fMRI just makes it feel like it’s closing in on me . . . which it sort of is.

“Just lie perfectly still, Alice.” Petermann’s voice comes on over the intercom.

“I am,” I say.

“Your left foot is jiggling like there’s a mouse up your pant leg,” I hear Max observe.

“Can you make him leave, please, Dr. Petermann?” I ask.

“This isn’t going to work,” I hear Petermann whisper. “She’s too frightened.”

Despite my suspicion that all the blood had drained from my face long ago, my cheeks still manage to burn. I feel so embarrassed. This test is part of the research I insisted we do, and I can’t even go through with it. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting to get the hell out of this thing anyway. My breath is starting to come too quickly and my lungs feel like they are the size of sandwich bags. Am I feeling light-headed, or is that just my imagination?

“Alice?” Max’s voice is like the eye of the storm. The one calm place right in the center of the hurricane, breaking through all the noise of my mind. “Are you still with us?”

“Yeah,” I manage. My voice comes out so quiet it scares me even more.

“What’s the one place in the world you would like to go but have never been, in a dream or otherwise?” Max asks.

I take a shallow breath and focus. Easy question. I can do this. “Pig Beach,” I say.

I hear a chuckle from Petermann. “Did I hear that correctly?”

Max explains, “Pig Beach is an island in the Bahamas, filled with clear blue ocean and palm trees, but inhabited entirely by giant, fuzzy, friendly . . . pigs. It’s Alice’s favorite place in the world, but she’s never been. She talks about it all the time.”