This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan Read Free Book Online Page A

head. She could not write a real journal because she did not want anyone else to read it.
    She was lying in her hospital bed, one ear on a pillow. She pulled another pillow over her head to block out the television sounds. She went over and over them again, each time from the beginning, to set them in her mind.
    She continued.
I was born five years after the end of the War, and its shadow lingered. I knew it had been a terrible War and an exciting War and that its end released the world in a burst of great light. I gathered that we were now living in a wonderful time, The Future, where an image of superimposed ellipses illustrated the font of all being, The Atom, and that all would be good, henceforth and evermore, because the War had been fought, the War had been won, and the War was over.
But the War was still there.
The War was in the chairs, rounded and tucked in the lines of the thirties, the years when War was accreting like leaves in a headlong stream, lodged against implacable economic and political rocks. The War was in the black-and-white photographs of my father in uniform on my parents’ dresser. It was on the bookshelves and in the acrid pages of old newspaper clippings I found in trunks, in the books I found and read at my paternal grandparents’ house—books like Boots and her Buddies , or Nina and Skeezix , illustrated by pictures of German and Japanese spies with narrow, ominous mustaches, wearing spectacles that blanked out their eyes, war propaganda for kids. It was in movies, where black-and-white spies played out their games on mysterious trains and in narrow dark streets that seemed the epitome of Europe, where the ominous two-toned siren of the Gestapo signaled deportation and death.
Walter Cronkite narrated The Twentieth Century on television. Tiny puffs of smoke emerged from rolling valleys; troops marched; the Prudential Company’s impressive logo, the Rock of Gibraltar, announced its sponsorship, and my father watched, always leaning against a doorway, never sitting down, gleaning information about what he had been through. Winston Churchill’s great tomes proclaimed themselves boldly on the Danish Modern bookshelf he built in his basement workshop: The Gathering Storm , Their Finest Hour , The Hinge of Fate . By day, Danny and I writhed like movie soldiers beneath hibiscus bushes and hid behind sandboxes in our backyards, carrying machine guns and avoiding Germans. At night, when a tiny bedside light illuminated the fine, old well-polished bedstead with carefully turned down, smooth sheets at the house of my maternal grandparents, the War was in the shadows, sharp and deep, and on the lace-covered dresser where a picture of the two sons who had died in the war, Keith and Jerry, forever smiled, boys in overalls, holding between them a string of striped bass.
    She went over it again and again, etching it into her mind, so she would not forget. They wanted to sweep everything from her with these drugs, but that was wrong. She had to remember.
    She had to remember everything .
    No one else did. But that was her fault too. No one else could.
    Things were better now, she supposed, than they would have been otherwise, as if histories were shifting toward the more positive end of an unseen spectrum. The Palestinians had not been moved wholesale from their land, and had been paid well for the huge tracts where European Jews could settle in what was now Palestine-Israel. But she could also remember a war in 1967, when Israel took great swaths of land with weapons the U.S. had given them. Now, in this timestream, there were still disagreements, but the Middle East was not a festering powder keg.
    The African Union, formed in 1964, elected and sent delegates to a Pan-African Congress, which seemed forever mired in bickering. This was not surprising, because the African population contained many more cultures and languages than Europe, but much progress had been made, progress being defined as decreasing