The Doctor's Dreams

By JJ Brown

On New Year's Eve, Doctor Marsha Arzt has mysteriously gone missing somewhere between Manhattan and Brooklyn, in the first novella of The Doctor's Dreams. Looking for clues, her brother discovers Marsha kept a secret dream diary. It unnerves him, but he can't stop reading. Her nightmares seem to predict a future he isn't willing or able to face, certainly not alone in the wee hours of the morning. In the second novella, Eve Wissen feels like a decapitated, single head of household after a surprise layoff at work. A workaholic scientist adrift in New York City, she adds up the unemployment facts. Numbers are no longer her friends. Her sudden freedom thrusts her into a void where she scrambles to reinvent meaning for her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JJ Brown
• Release date: Aug 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9780989385312

JJ Brown

J.J.Brown is a published author of 10 books including mysteries, speculative fiction and noir fiction infused with a passion for nature, science and family. Her books are published in print, ebook and audiobook editions.The author spent her childhood in the Catskill Mountain region of New York. She continued writing fiction during her career as a Molecular Biologist and Public Health Advocate in Philadelphia and New York City. Her fiction subjects often address current medical and mental health issues, and environmental concerns.J.J.Brown has a PhD in Genetics from earlier research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock. Brown’s genetics, medical education and public health works have been published in leading scientific and professional journals.When not writing, J.J.Brown enjoys reading, Tai Chi, and time with her companion rabbit, Belinda, and parakeets Sweety and Penelope. She has two daughters and lives in New York City.

Book preview

The Doctor’s Dreams

Two Novellas

By J.J.Brown

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 J.J.Brown

All rights reserved.

eBook Edition ISBN-13: 978-0-9893853-1-2

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

The Doctor’s Dreams is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to people, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editor of the short story collection Cassandra’s Roadhouse, from SYEO Publishing, in which a section of The Doctor’s Dreams first appeared in another form as a short story entitled The Desire of Cerberus. Thanks go to Lillian Rodriguez, Glenn Morrison, Janet Kim, and Mike Macartney for comments on the manuscript before publication.

Cover design credit goes to Reymond Mendez and cover photo credit to Eren Gulfidan for her photograph of actor Lillian Rodriguez in New York.

Table of Contents

The Doctor’s Dreams

After the Layoff

About the Author

Also by J.J.Brown

The Doctor’s Dreams

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe

1

On New Year’s Eve, the Brooklyn apartment where Frank waited for his sister was silent as a cemetery. Sitting alone, Frank listened to the above-ground trains pass at longer and longer intervals. Each time another train shook the walls, the sound grated along the nerves in his body and Marsha’s absence disturbed him all over again. He wanted to report her as a missing person but it hadn’t been 24 hours since he last saw her—and so he thought he couldn’t.

He asked himself, who would believe that an adult coming home late from work, tonight of all nights, was something to worry about? Surely no one but him. He would have to be patient. Frank felt vaguely frustrated. Patience was not one of his virtues.

Marsha’s old Pomeranian, Sasha, slept near the doorway—dead to the world. When Marsha got back from work late from the hospital other nights, Frank forced himself to walk the little dog around the block. Sasha would rush along the narrow city sidewalks with him, pulling hard on the leash because she much preferred her walks to be with Marsha. Tonight he’d already walked Sasha twice. She was worn out. He watched her long black fur rise and fall with her quiet breathing. Her paws twitched. She seemed happy, he thought. He wondered what dogs thought they ran to or from in their dreams. What desires of Sasha’s had not yet been fulfilled? Did she have conflicts she needed to work out in dreams? What fears surfaced during sleep?

The little dog’s paws stilled. Her mouth curled back framing a low growl. A nightmare, Frank thought.

Who really knows what another dreams? The dream world is the last wilderness, vast and unknowable.

Frank had expected his sister to get back from work by about six. By seven-thirty he started to worry in earnest. He ate. He cleaned the kitchen to pass the time, wiping a sponge along the sink and over the electric stove top. He ate again. He moved the special things he’d bought for the evening around in the refrigerator; the sparkling wine, the raspberries, and the cheese. He would have to wait.

Imagining the terrible things that might happen to a woman on the subway from the F to the M line, from Manhattan to Brooklyn on a drinking holiday like New Year’s Eve, Frank checked the news online repeatedly. No concerning events were reported in his area; no train accidents or delays, no murders. Marsha didn’t look like a potential victim. Nothing external distinguished her. She didn’t dress any differently than anyone else there, mostly in gray or black like any ordinary person. She had no conspicuous habits. But still. Bad things can happen to any kind of person; ordinary or extraordinary, rich or poor, good or bad. Crime, like disease and death, does not really discriminate. The unpredictable things like these were the ones Frank was most afraid of, with a deep and irrational fear.

He stalked through the library room of the small apartment removing and replacing favorite books, killing time as the last moments of the year ticked by. Not in the mood for making ambitious personal resolutions, he flipped through the bizarre short stories of Franz Kafka. He took out a classic collection of old German poetry. On edge, Frank was unable to settle on anything. He didn’t know what he felt like reading. Nothing at all, really. And as New Year’s Eve wore on, instead of anticipating midnight with an appropriate emotion, like light-hearted happiness, he became more and more darkly agitated.

He asked himself what would explain Marsha’s absence. What was she doing?

She’d been forgetful lately, he reminded himself. At times she seemed lost. Yes, some nights she missed her usual subway stop. Frank thought her memory lapses were from stress. She certainly overworked herself. He couldn’t change that about her, no matter how many times he brought up her grueling schedule. One night she’d stayed on longer to cover new patient arrivals for another doctor who was missing, Frank couldn’t remember why the doctor was out. Sick, probably. The longer hours happened infrequently, but they were unavoidable, she said. The hospital was chronically understaffed. Another night she’d called to say she was helping with one last emergency, a patient badly injured from gunshots. She’s seen the patient before, for knife wounds, and felt she couldn’t leave. The case drug on for too long and in the end, the patient couldn’t be saved. Many a doctor’s nights were tragic like that, Frank had learned over the years.

Yet tonight was different. Marsha didn’t call. She didn’t answer her phone when Frank called her either—and he called many times.

Hoots, yells and fireworks exploded throughout the neighborhood at midnight. The New Year! Poor Sasha panicked, racing from one end of the apartment to the other, barking herself hoarse. Cars drove by and honked. Party revelers blew toy horns. Frank looked out the window and followed the rainbow colored fireworks trailing over the edges of the apartment buildings across the street. He could hear the neighbors upstairs, next door, and down the street too, all cheering. The simultaneous, wild release of pent-up energy was a brilliant moment. The New Year was anticipated and celebrated by everyone but him, it seemed. This was not a happy time for Frank. No, he would have to celebrate later when Marsha finally came home, if she did. She had to, of course. It was only a matter of time.

The clock on the mantle chimed twelve times over the din outside. With the last bell, Frank understood that he must do something other than wait for his sister.

2

Frank called the hospital at a quarter past midnight. He didn’t get through. He tried five minutes later. Finally, at half-past, he reached a clinic nurse.

Dr. Marsha Arzt? Oh, she signed off at seven. Happy New Year! the nurse exclaimed, all cheery.

Was it possible Marsha had something social planned but she neglected to mention it? No, that was unlikely. He felt a brief, nauseating wave of jealousy.

Frank sifted through the papers on his sister’s messy desk hoping she’d written down her schedule. He didn’t think she’d mind him looking, if she knew. They had no secrets, not that he was aware of. But then, if he had known, they wouldn’t be secrets at all. So maybe she did have secrets. Frank pushed aside mail, old Metro Cards, medical journals, printed copies of research articles, private notes about her patients and their diseases. He found nothing about her plans that night.

His eyes went back to the patient notes. He wasn’t indifferent to his sister’s work as a doctor. He had feelings, after all. The fact was that her work truly disgusted him—the raw physicality of it, the naked pain of witnessing other people’s suffering. Medical images bothered him the most, imagining that her patients’ insides looked like that. And there were so many patients. Her work horrified him when he looked closely. Frank asked himself, how did she do it, day after day? He was sure he’d never understand her dedication.

To make himself useful while waiting, he thought of organizing Marsha’s desk. He sorted through her things. While creating neat stacks, he discovered a plain manila folder labeled Dreams. It was under a pile of mail. This intrigued him. Inside he found handwritten pages. A dream diary! He hadn’t realized Marsha wrote anything but medical notes. But there, in Marsha’s pretty, even script, was a set of records. Each began with the words, I dreamt. And she’d dated every page in the upper left-hand corner.

How many times had Marsha described her wild dreams and nightmares to him, mornings, over coffee? Countless times. Vivid dreaming was one of her idiosyncrasies. He found the dream-telling ritual disturbing. But her confessions, as he’d come to think of them, helped her in some way he didn’t fully understand. That was what mattered after all, to be helpful. And so, no matter, he didn’t need to understand the dreams.