Chapter Ten
The nightmares were getting worse. Wasps continued to crawl up the wall of a locked room, but there were other, more subtle things now too that left me reeling. Dreams are insidious like that. What unfolds when we close our eyes is an approximation, a facsimile of real life. Yet how I feel is how I would feel if it were really happening. The links and chains to my past, forged innumerable years ago, are rattled in the same way by imagined events. The stress and anxiety they induced were beginning to take a physical toll on me. I couldn’t explain this to Jackie, so I kept it to myself.
“Apparently the King of France kept the Mona Lisa in his bathroom”, I said as we lay in bed the next morning. I stared up at the ceiling overhead, at the small brush stroke imperfections we made
