The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories by Bruce McAllister Read Free Book Online Page A

getting stronger, he said, though I couldn’t control it yet. I didn’t need the “focal stimulus,” he said, “the physical correlative.” I didn’t need to meet people to have the dreams. 
    “When are we going to do it?” I finally said. 
    He knew what I meant. He said we didn’t want to rush into it, how acting prematurely was worse than not understanding it, how the “fixity of the future” was something no one yet understood, and we didn’t want to take a chance on stopping the dreams by trying to tamper with the future. 
     
    “It won’t stop the dreams,” I said. “Even if we kept a death from happening, it wouldn’t stop the dreams.” He never listened. He wanted them to die. He wanted to take notes on how they died and how my dreams matched their dying, and he wasn’t going to call anyone back until he was ready to. 
    “This isn’t war, Mary,” he told me one day. “This is a kind of science and it has its own rules. You’ll have to trust me, Mary.” 
    He pushed the hair out of my eyes, because I was crying. He wanted to touch me. I know that now. 
     
    I tried to get messages out. I tried to figure out who I’d dreamed about. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and try to talk to anybody I could and figure it out. I’d say, “Do you know a guy who’s got red hair and is from Alabama?” I’d say, “Do you know an RTO who’s short and can’t listen to anything except Jefferson Airplane?” Sometimes it would take too long. Sometimes I’d never find out who it was, but if I did, I’d try to get a message out to him. Sometimes he’d already gone out and I’d still try to get someone to send him a message—but that just wasn’t done. 
    I found out later Bucannon got them all. People said yeah, sure, they’d see that the message got to the guy, but Bucannon always got them. He told people to say yes when I asked. He knew. He always knew. 
    I didn’t have a dream about Steve and that was the important thing. 
     
    When I finally dreamed that Steve died, that it took more guys in uniforms than you’d think possible—with more weapons than you’d think they’d ever need—in a river valley awfully far away, I didn’t tell Bucannon about it. I didn’t tell him how Steve was twitching on the red earth up North, his body doing its best to dodge the rounds even though there were just too many of them, twitching and twitching, even after his body wasn’t alive anymore. 
    I cried for a while and then stopped. I wanted to feel something but I couldn’t. 
    I didn’t ask for pills or booze and I didn’t stay awake the next two nights scared about dreaming it again. There was something I needed to do. 
    I didn’t know how long I had. I didn’t know whether Steve’s team—the one in the dream—had already gone out or not. I didn’t know a thing, but I kept thinking about what Bucannon had said, the “fixity,” how maybe the future couldn’t be changed, how even if Bucannon hadn’t intercepted those messages something else would have kept the future the way it was and those guys would have died anyway. 
    I found the Green Beanie medic who’d taken me to my hooch that first day. I sat down with him in the mess. One of Bucannon’s types was watching us but I sat down anyway. I said, “Has Steve Balsam been sent out yet?” And he said, “I’m not supposed to say, Lieutenant. You know that.” 
    “Yes, Captain, I do know that. I also know that because you took me to my little bunker that day I will probably dream about your death before it happens, if it happens here. I also know that if I tell the people running this project about it, they won’t do a thing, even though they know how accurate my dreams are, just like they know how accurate Steve Balsam is, and Blakely, and Corigiollo, and the others, but they won’t do a thing about it.” I waited. He didn’t blink. He was listening. 
    “I’m in a position, Captain, to let someone know when I