Skillful Death by Ike Hamill Read Free Book Online

wrecked my car on the guardrail of the overpass. It was right near the house I grew up in. I mean, it was like that overpass, but it wasn’t.”
    “And then?” I ask.
    “Then... I knew I should call the police because it looked like it was more than fifteen-hundred dollars of damage, but I wanted to call my grandmother first. I couldn’t call her though because the phone was going off. Yes, the phone was going off with the dream signal. I thought it was weird because I had just been thinking that it would be strange if I was having a dream because we were just talking about it.”
    I watch his eyes.  
    “What color was your first car?” I ask him.
    I’m trying to keep him off-balance and get a read for what his eyes do when he’s accessing a visual memory. When I wake up from a dream, I have the whole thing in my brain. Ted looks like he’s trying to reconstruct a drunken evening; either that, or he’s making the whole thing up.
    “My car?” he asks.
    “Yes, what color?”
    “Yellow. Yellow and gray. It had a couple of spots of primer.” His eyes dart up and to his left, the same as when he was describing his dream. It could be a match. “But that’s not the car I was driving in the dream. The car in the dream was black. It was a hatchback. I’ve never owned a hatchback. What was that car they used to make? The really terrible one?”
    “Is that it? You wrecked a car?”
    “No, wait. I heard the signal from my phone and at first I thought it was a bug in the app. But then I realized it was a dream and I called off the cops.”
    “What do you mean? You called them off?” I ask.
    He shrugs. “I took control of the dream. I didn’t need the police anymore. Then I got a laptop from the back seat because I remembered I needed to email you. I sent the email. Did you get it?”
    “What did you send?” I ask.
    “The thing from the book you made me memorize. I sent that in an email,” he says.
    “What specifically did you write?” I ask.
    “I wrote the thing,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut. “Paul’s stage name is Mungo Fetch.” His eyes pop open and he smiles at me. “Right? Did you get it?”
    I wave for Ted to follow me out to my desk where my computer sits. I point to the open laptop and offer that he should look for himself.
    Ted stares at the screen for a second and then looks over his shoulder at me.
    I hear the sound play that indicates a new message.
    “There!” Ted says, pointing to the screen.
    When I look past Ted to the inbox, it’s my turn to believe that I’m in a dream. The latest message is from Ted and the preview says “Paul’s stage name is Mungo Fetch.”
    “That wasn’t there a second ago,” I say.
    “It can take a second for email to be delivered. It was probably just routing.”
    “We were in there for ten minutes while you stammered through that recollection of your dream. How does it take ten minutes for an email to make it from that room to my machine?” I ask.
    “We don’t know how the email was routed,” he says. “And what if your inbox is only updated every ten minutes?”
    I roll my eyes. I’m stumped as to how he pulled off this email trick, but I know one thing: it’s definitely a trick.
    “Go back in there and dream up emails about the other fact I told you to send,” I say, pointing to the room.
    “It’s just going to happen again.” Ted shuffles off and closes the thick door behind him.
    I sit down at my desk and read the emails—the one about Paul’s stage name, and the earlier one about Mary Dempster. Every email comes with a header, which is a digital fingerprint of where the email came from and how it got to its destination. I’m no expert, but I pull up the headers side by side just to compare. These two emails look like they came from the same place. Aside from that, I can’t tell much.
    It’s weird that Ted mentioned the second email—the one I hadn’t gotten yet—but he didn’t say a word about the Mary Dempster email.