Kissing Through a Pane of Glass by Peter Michael Rosenberg Page A

in bed staring at the ceiling, allowing random thoughts to jostle around in my head, watching them settle to their own levels. After some five minutes of this, Rachel stirred, gave a little sniff, then snuggled up to me. She murmured a barely coherent, “Good morning,” and kissed me on the chest.
     
    ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked, stroking her hair.
     
    ‘Mmm, fine,’ she mumbled. ‘Strange dream.’
     
    ‘What happened?’
     
    ‘Not sure.’
     
    ‘Tell me.’
     
    She was still pretty dozy, so it was difficult to follow the stream-of-consciousness retelling of her dream, but the gist of it was as follows.
     
    She was asleep in her bed, not in this flat, but in the house she had lived in as a child. She knew it was her old bedroom because of the blue and white wallpaper and the moth-eaten teddy bear that lay beside her on the pillow. Her parents had been entertaining friends and family to dinner. She had had to go to bed at eight o’clock but was not tired, and could hear them all laughing and talking in the dining room. At some point - she wasn’t sure when - she heard her bedroom door open, and then heard footsteps. She saw the silhouette of her favourite uncle - her father’s older brother - come towards her. He knelt down next to her and kissed her on the forehead. His breath smelt terrible; a smoky, beery smell. He whispered something in her ear but she didn’t understand, and then she felt his hand under the covers. He tried to kiss her again, only this time on the lips, which she didn’t like, and just as she turned her head away she felt a sharp pain in her abdomen. The pain had woken her.
     
    It does not, I think, take either a dream specialist or an analyst to draw the obvious conclusion.
     
    After telling me about the dream, Rachel dozed off again for an hour. When later that morning I asked her about the dream, she looked at me blankly and claimed she could remember nothing. I did not repeat what she had told me, something I still regret to this day.
     

Chapter 20
     
    My first thought was that someone had broken my neck. I opened my eyes to a world that I did not, initially, recognise, although it was not long before I realised that this was a problem of perspective rather than perception. I was jammed up against one end of the bed, my body twisted and contorted in a manner that I could not have devised deliberately. I could not move my head as it was crammed into the corner of the room at an angle which, I was sure, defied all natural laws.
     
    Of more immediate concern was the fact that I could not feel my left arm; it was completely numb from fingertips to elbow and, for the best part of half a minute, I succumbed to a terrible panic; I had severed a nerve, I had cut off the blood supply to my hand, I would never have the use of my arm again. What the fuck had happened to me?
     
    There was, in addition, a distinct lack of sensation in my legs, and a heavy pain in my lower back, as if I had been kicked repeatedly by an angry mule wearing jackboots. The relentless throbbing in my temples, a persistent dull thud of monotonous regularity, was offset by an unpleasant, nauseating, high-pitched whine in my left ear, which suggested that, whatever it was I had done to myself, the damage was almost certainly irreparable.
     
    As if all this were not bad enough, every time I drew breath my body was wracked by sharp pains in my chest and a hot, acidic rasping in the throat. My mouth was so dry that my tongue had become virtually immobile. Hangovers were not new to me, but this one had a personality all of its own. As all these terrible afflictions clocked on, one by one, I became more and more despondent; this was no way to start the day, any day.
     
    Liana was fast asleep beside me, snoring heavily. She looked peaceful enough, and had managed to remain unknotted for her night’s journey into dreams; I was just the slightest bit envious, and noted, even in my reduced state, a desire to