Spazmantha.

Not even original, that. She’d first heard Spazmantha when she was eleven.

It shouldn’t bother her. She knows that. Her mother has told her that. Her shrink has told her that. Actually, the shrink said, “You have bigger issues than that to concern yourself with.”

How do I know this? How am I seeing this? This dream is a very strange movie in which I watch Samantha and watch her thoughts at the same time.

The shrink’s bigger issue was obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD for short. Everyone threw that term around like it was nothing, like it was cute, OCD. “Yeah, I’m a little OCD? Hah hah.” It wasn’t cute, and Samantha did not have a little of it.

Samantha goes to the bathroom and washes her hands. She uses Cetaphil soap because it’s mild, but she uses a brush as well, a wooden-handled bristle brush. First, the hot water. Then the Cetaphil, taking care that every single square inch of her hands—and for purposes of her compulsion, her hands end at the first crease in her wrist—is covered. Then the brush. She brushes hard. Then she rinses.

And that’s one.

I watch as Samantha begins the process all over again. The Messenger stands behind her. Samantha sees neither of us. This isn’t happening, this has already happened. The Samantha movie is in a flashback.

“Can she hear us?” I ask, but the answer is obvious: Samantha can neither see nor hear us. She is washing her hands, has already washed her hands, done all this already. I’m seeing it, here, in my present, but it’s in the past.

I can smell the soap. I feel the steam rising from the too-hot water. When I step to one side, I can see myself and Messenger in the mirror.

He’s taller than I am. He’s white, I’m Asian. He’s . . . beautiful? I’m . . . pretty? Maybe that, maybe pretty, but not beautiful. I’m not sure many girls could call themselves beautiful while sharing a mirror with Messenger.

There’s something about him that seems unnatural. He’s a marble statue brought to life, unreal. Isn’t he? He can’t be real, not really real, if for no other reason than no one dresses that way. And yet there is a weight to him, like a distortion of gravity, a bending of light, as if he was made of the stuff of collapsed stars.

I force my gaze from him and back to a more distressing vision: Samantha Early begins a third round of washing. Her hands are obviously spotless—she could perform open heart surgery without wearing gloves—yet, caught in the compulsion, she washes her hands a fourth time. The backs of her hands are bright pink now, like sliced ham, with fingertips so raw that the cuticles are tearing away in tiny shreds. She wields the brush with a ferocity that is necessary to her, energy that she must expend, pain that she must endure.

On the fifth washing little drops of blood ooze from the cuticle of her ring finger.

“Can’t she stop?” I ask.

“If she fails to wash her hands seven times, her family will die,” Messenger says.

“What?” I snap. “That’s crazy.”

“Compulsion is very like insanity,” Messenger says.

He is not indifferent, that’s the thing. His too-near voice that seems always to be whispering in my ear is held to a standard of cool detachment, but his eyes and his mouth and his forehead and the way he swallows all speak of reflected pain.

He understands. He feels. I’m convinced of that at least. There’s a humanity to him. He’s not entirely cold and beautiful and strange—there’s something flesh and blood there as well. That reassures me. He may be only a figment of a dream I’ll forget upon waking, but still I am relieved.

It is still a dream. What else could it be? I wake in a field with a mist covering me, and then, all of this?

Wait, had I fallen asleep? I try to recall, I strain to dredge some memory out of my foggy brain. But again it is as if all I can see of my waking life is a sort of clip art version, a stock photo version with generic people acting generically, none of it possessing the detail and grain of reality.

Samantha begins her sixth round.

“Is this why—”

“Many things are why,” Messenger says. “But this is for our deeper understanding.”

Why do we need to understand? I want to ask him that, I want to demand an answer to that, because there has to be some very good reason why my subconscious mind would lay these sad images before me like a fortune-teller laying out her tarot cards. But all of Messenger’s answers were vague, and after all, was there a point in asking why within a dream? Eventually I would wake up, and then I could consider the meaning of it all. Calmly, coolly, with the sick sadness of it all pushed aside and relabeled as nothing more than random imagery conjured from an overtired mind.

We were no longer in Samantha’s bathroom. We were at a school. But not my high school; of that I was sure. Almost.

A banner on the wall of the corridor read carlsbad high school—go spartans. The colors were maroon and gold. The colors at my school were . . .

What were they? I was sure I was in high school, and sure that this was not it. Why couldn’t I remember my school colors?

Dreamland was a strange world where cause and effect could be reversed, where one could move effortlessly from place to place. Where gaunt, beautiful boys with intimate voices and eerily blue eyes could wear skulls for buttons. Yes to all of that, but if this was a dream, shouldn’t I be able to recall my school colors? Or my name?

Mara? Mara what? I felt the knife’s edge of panic again. If I stopped believing this was a very lucid dream, if I started for even a moment to believe this was real, I would have to be afraid, and I feared that moment when I might be forced to cross the line into a more personal terror.