text: When I was nine years old, my mom took me to a stash house, and I don’t remember why. My parents weren’t junkies; they were alcoholics, sure - I had known that much from a much younger age than I should have - but they weren’t Dream users. I fight to remember anything else about that day, but I can’t. The only thing I have to explain it is an old notebook, something my dad gave me. The first line stands out, a line and a half high, spelled out in a child’s frantic scribble. It’s the only line in the notebook that I have never rewritten; I guess that makes it the most true. Reading it still burns me, even after all this time. My sister swallowed her name when she was six. Our mom had been in the other room, infatuated with the latest season of The Bachelor, and our dad was passed out drunk. I was only nine, but I guess had been given the task of watching her. And so I watched, legs pulled up to my chest and back sunk deep into the plush sofa, as she sat on the floor and rolled her name back on forth like a marble. Her name caught the light as it rolled, sending off sprays of rainbow color that shimmered in its wake. She and I were transfixed, like it was our own private mirage. She picked the thing up from time to time, feeling its smooth facets under her still-tiny fingers. When she popped it into her mouth, I spit out an involuntary giggle. I imagine that was something she did a lot, slipping her name behind her lips and swishing it back and forth like a hard candy. She bulged out her cheeks like a chipmunk and I dispensed another automatic giggle. Knowing mom and dad, one of them would probably have slapped the name out of her mouth, and slapped her again for good measure, but I just watched and giggled. I brought my hand up - partially to the taut skin of my throat and partially to my own name, which hung securely there - when my sister started to hiccup. The first one was a spasm followed by a giggle of her own. The second came with the same spasm, followed by a half-and-half cough and sputter. The skin of her throat bulged with the rough shape of her name and I watched as her eyes started to water. I pulled my legs tighter against my chest as my sister dropped onto her back. She rolled back and forth, small fountains of spittle spraying with her frantic blurts and gurgles. Her shoes shook on her feet as she rolled; they were too big, hand-me-downs from me to her. I was on my knees when mom shouted at us to keep the noise down. I cradled my sister’s body in my arms and went through all the motions that a child imagines might save a life. I balled my hand into a fist and punched her in the back; her sticklike frame shook and her eyes bulged every time I hit her. The pearlescent glow of her name bobbed beneath the skin of her throat. “I told you both to keep it down!” Mom’s voice was shrill and thin. “Don’t make me come in there. If you want to sound like a bunch of monkeys, I will gladly sell you to the zoo.” I guess I might have been screaming, but all I remember is the sound of the Bachelor in the background. In a last effort, I opened my hand and slammed into her back with all the force I could muster. Her shoulder blades were sharp against my palm. I watched the light of her name bob one more time before sliding down her throat and disappearing. Her body was wracked with a gutteral inhale; strings of saliva dangled from her lips and tears streamed from her red eyes. “I thought I told you two-” Mom’s slurred outrage broke off as she stood in the doorway, plastic cup of wine sloshing in her hand. Her bleary eyes focused on me, fixing on the name that hung around my neck, before shifting to my sister, her name nowhere to be seen. She opened her mouth slowly, her tongue wetting her lips. She closed her mouth for a moment, then opened it again and tipped back the rest of her wine. A thin stream dribbled down from the corner of her lips and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. Her name, a jade-colored thing embedded in a ring too small to take off of her finger, glittered in the room’s shafted light. Later, after we started speaking again, she told me that she was going to ask what had happened, but either she didn’t trust her eight year-old to tell the truth or she figured that the truth didn’t really matter that much anyhow. I don’t blame her for thinking either of those things. The next day, mom grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to the back of our family car. As she drove, she took periodic swigs from a thermos of something that she had taken from home. Whenever she took a drink, the smell of something strong and sickening filled the car, and the smell lingered long after she closed the thermos up. That day’s first stop was a pawn shop, its neon sign only half illuminated and its front window caked in dirt and cigarette soot. She left me in the car when she went inside, carrying a handful of her mother’s gold jewelry. I watched through a clean patch in the front window as she haggled with the man behind the counter, alternating between the strategies of screaming at him and of tenderly stroking his hand. She hadn’t bothered to crack any of the car windows and as I watched, the midmorning heat and the smell of the thermos contents washed over me in waves. A little while later, mom stepped out of the pawnshop door. One of her strategies had worked out, since she was leaving with stacks of cash in hand. She climbed back into the car, started it, and drove off without so much as a glance in my direction. We drove for several more hours, or at least it felt like we did. It was mostly through areas of town that I didn’t recognize and haven’t been able to find since. I remember feeling worse and worse as we went. My stomach churned every time mom tipped back her thermos. For some comfort I tried to imagine my sister, home in bed where we left her, but I couldn’t get the details to stick in my mind. I could picture her in pieces, like I was putting together a puzzle but every time I got two pieces to fit together another two fell apart. I could see her hair, but not her face. Her nose, but not her hands. It just made me feel sicker. We drove past a burnt-out tenement building, the kind we had lived in before we moved into my grandma’s house. Mom parked the car a distance away and walked the block or so back to the building we had passed. I stood at her side, body feeling rigid and ready to snap, as she knocked on the building’s big metal door; it made a reverberating sound that I could feel rattling in my bones. High up on the door, too high for my younger self to see in, a slot opened up and mom flashed the cash she had brought. The slot slammed shut and the door shrieked open on rusted tracks. A large man - the largest I have ever seen - ushered us inside. The room, a lobby of sorts, was lit by a series of bare lightbulbs, all swinging on frayed wiring in a phantom breeze. We followed the giant down the center aisle, past several side doors. The sides of the room were lined with pillows and people stacked high against one another; the air smelled like ash and sweat. The giant pushed us to the side of the aisle as another man bustled through the far curtained door, carrying a tray stacked high medical syringes and vials full of impossible color. I didn’t know what they were then, but I do now. Dreams, individually pickled and preserved in little jars; each one offered a slice of escape, if you could pay the right price. The man with the tray stopped for a moment, watching us with rat’s eyes as we hurried through the curtain and into the next room. I remember a thin man sitting behind a big desk. A dark brown trench coat enveloped his skeletal form, its flaps fluttering in the same unnoticeable draft that stirred the lights above. I held my sides and shivered. The thin man motioned my mom forward and then rested his elbows on the desk. As he leaned in to speak with her, the sleeves of his coat fell down his arms and pooled on the desk. His hands were as small as a child’s. The giant man seemed uncomfortable as he eyed me, like he had never seen a child in his place of business. I shifted uncomfortably and looked at the ground. I was feeling worse than ever and the smell of the place wasn’t helping. The giant squinted in the dim room and then motioned me to a chair in the corner. I was grateful to sit down; I watched my mom talk to the thin man in hushed tones, the conversation punctuated by an occasional sigh or a laugh from the man. His laugh was as thin as he was, sounding more like the wheeze of slow wind through a weathervane. It was a joyless sound. Eventually, he stood and paced over to one of the filing cabinets that lined the room’s back wall. He unlocked one and rolled the drawer open. He stood there for a moment, rifling down inside and drawing out a handful of shapes. He laid them out on the desk and I could tell by the shine of color that they were names - young names, at that. The man said something to my mom and she pointed back at me. The man beckoned me forward with a languid gesture. “Which one of these looks most like your sister’s?” the thin man asked me. I stared at the names and struggled to remember what hers had looked like, before it had disappeared in her mouth. My hand wavered above the desk, hesitant to commit. “Take your time,” the man said, “the choice is important.” He smiled. I remember his teeth, long and perfectly straight. I picked the one that most reminded me of my sister, or the one that I most hoped did. It shone pink and gold, like an autumn sunset. Mom hissed at me through her teeth when I pointed it out, but didn’t object. The thin man nodded and waved me away. I stepped back and tried to remember what my sister looked like. In the car, it had been like a puzzle, and now, it was like the pieces were disappearing one by one. I could see the shape of her in bed, and I could feel the weight of her cradled in my young arms. I had the rough outline of a girl, but nothing else. I wish I had even that much now. “Give it a few days,” the thin man said to my mom as he counted out the money she gave him. “I can’t give you a guarantee, these things aren’t an exact science.” Mom nodded and pocketed the secondhand name. “I am sorry if it doesn’t work. But don’t come back here again.” Mom took me by the hand, her grip just a little too tight, and pulled me out of the room. The man with the tray watched us leave, a syringe poised in his hand. In the glass tube I could see the silty dregs of a dream - swirls of joy and of innocence, the color of childhood. Later, I imagined that that dream had been mine, harvested and sold off by a thin man with long, straight teeth. I imagined him laughing that wheezing laugh as the rat-eyed man sucked the dream from my head and handed it out to junkies, to the ones who could pay; ones whose own dreams had been stolen from them too. I imagined all of this to be true, but only later. That day, all I did was throw up on the sidewalk outside of the building. It didn’t make me feel any better. When mom and I got home, dad had sobered up enough to greet us at the door. His mouth hung in a slanted gape, his tongue paddling half-formed words. Mom waved him off and pushed me inside. She deposited me on the couch and then shuffled off to my sister’s room, her back stiff and determined. Once she left the room, my dad slumped down next to me and we both sat in silence. He was the one who gave me the notebook, later on that night. He came into my room while mom was watching over my sister and talked everything over with me. He convinced me to write down everything that I could remember; I didn’t understand why at the time. He slung himself over me, hanging off my slight shoulders and coaching me through the words that I didn’t quite know yet. I’ve rewritten that first entry a couple of times now. I’ve revised the details that didn’t feel right, cleaned up the aspects of the story that chaffed when I read them. I don’t know where the whole thing sits, on the continuum between truth and fiction. I also don’t know if it really matters. Rereading those paper memories of my sister always triggers a kind of itching feeling inside my head, some sort of half-kindled deja vu that spreads beneath my skin like a rash. I have to force myself to acknowledge what I read and write as reality; sometimes my suspension of disbelief doesn’t go quite far enough. Out of all my invented endings, my favorite version is the simplest one: it goes more or less like this. When I woke up that next morning, my dad was sprawled out asleep on the floor and mom stood in the doorway, watching us both with a weary eye. I asked her how my sister was doing. She drew her eyebrows together, forehead muscles knotting as her head bobbed furtively from side to side. She had this look on her face - a confusion, like she knew she should answer me but couldn’t decide on what the correct answer was. She settled on no answer at all, only huffing through her nose and then backing out of the room. When I clambered out of bed, I couldn’t remember which room was my sister’s. I went from room to room, circling the house, until I saw something that I recognized. In the room next to mine, the room with pink and beige walls and the disconnected fan that hung uselessly from the ceiling, I found an unfamiliar girl sitting up in bed. She was fully dressed and her tiny hand was clasped around the name that hung from her neck. I asked her who she was and why she was in our house. She answered both questions, but I forgot both answers as soon as she stopped speaking. I had trouble looking directly at the girl; my eyes slid off of her, and they dried up and forced me into a blinking fit if I tried to focus on her for too long. I asked her the same questions again and she started crying. Frozen stiff, I called for mom and dad. Mom came up and she stood behind me, opaque drinking glass in hand, and we both stared at the strange crying girl. The previous day’s nausea was rising in me again, and looking at the girl only made me feel worse. I looked up at mom and she nodded to me; I took that as tacit permission to leave. I hurried back to my room, stepping over my dad’s snoring body, and wrote down everything as best I could. The entry from that day is made up of fragments, spelled out in a child’s uncertainties It was some time before I went back into that room next to mine - probably a year or more, if I were forced to gauge it. I’ve written the memory down along with the rest of the story.; it’s different from the rest, though, since I remember the whole thing clearly. In my head, the room was just a spare used for storage. When I wandered in, I was surprised to find a child’s bedroom, the walls painted pink and beige, with a small bed pushed into the corner. Everything was covered in a thin layer of drifting dust. At the foot of the bed, I could see a pair of my old shoes, unlaced and ready. Seeing the shoes there, I felt sadness drop like a stone down my throat and ripple through the rest of my body. I was jolted out of the feeling by a yank on the collar of my shirt. I stumbled over my shoes, falling back and slamming into the floor. My mom was standing over me, her hand still hanging mid-grab. Her eyes were welled with tears that she kept trying to shake away. She looked dazed. From that point onward, she kept the spare room locked. I think I have lost other people. There are dog-eared entries after my sister, other stories that I don’t remember forgetting: a college friend whose name burned in a motorcycle accident; a girlfriend, her name stolen by a spiteful ex. Each is a gap in my own story, a puzzle piece vacuumed up and thrown out with the rest of the dust and debris. I remember some things that I read; the events, mostly, the set dressing, but the people are gone - just blank spaces. When I’m not focused on them, I forget that the spaces are even there. There’s a fairy tale that my wife likes to tell, something that her mom told her when she was a girl. It says that somewhere out there, beyond everything we can see, there is a place where all the nameless people live. A place where they grow old and content - even happy, if they let themselves be. It’s a place where the nameless are safe. When she tells the story, I think about that empty room next to mine, about the too-big shoes at the end of the bed. I think about the room and I hope that whoever used live there is safe. I hope that she lets herself be happy. Sometimes, when everyone else is asleep, I sit at the kitchen table and read through my notebook entries. I sit and read and I imagine that my wife’s fairy tale is true, that the place in the story is real. I think about going there - about taking my name off, leaving it on the bus, throwing it into the river - just leaving everything behind and letting everyone forget me too. I think about seeing my sister again. I imagine what she looks like, older now than when I would have known her, and I imagine the life we could live together. It could be a happy life, us living together in that nameless place. That’s what I think about at night, while I’m sucking on some strong drink and letting it carry my mind away. I drift aimlessly through the notebook’s scrawled-over pages. When I finish my drink, I close the book. I clear my mind - and I go to bed.