(live: 1s)[(t8n:"dissolve")[<center><h2>somnotourism</h2></center>
<center>a story by DJ Williams</center>
<center>[[begin.->page0]]
</center>](stop:)]In your dream, you are floating above the city. Not the weightless floating of the zero-gravity of your imagination, but floating as though you’re standing on an invisible platform, all of Boston splayed out below you like a city a child built from Legos. It's daytime, and cars swarm the grey canals below like ants and people swarm around them like specks of dust. The clouds are swimming past you, cold and wet when they brush up against your bare legs. You are dressed for work, in a skirt that ends at your knees. You should be cold, you think, all the way up here, but you aren’t.
[[--> ->page2]]
Slowly, ponderously, you begin to descend. The sun moves with you, a spot of warmth at your back, as the blue of the sky bleeds into a pale violet and then into baby-pink and rich orange and finally settles into a tapestry of navy blue dotted with globes of light. Your hand brushes against one as you descend. It sends a quiet pulse of staticky warmth up your arm, which settles in your shoulder. The tingly feeling stays with you. Your bare feet touch down on the sidewalk. It takes a patient minute for the world to resolve into focus, for the ants to become cars zipping through the street behind you and the dust to become people with blank-swimming-shifting faces politely weaving their way around you--you wish you could recognize them better, but you have the sense that they aren’t important right now.
[[--> ->page3]]
The brownstone in front of you builds itself up, cohering in front of you until it becomes the building where you work. Of course you’re here. You were worried you would be late for work. You wish that there weren’t quite so many stairs--the building towers over its neighbors, receding behind them to make room for the stories of steps leading up to the front door. You slide your still-tingling hand over the railing as you begin to make your way up. It’s starting to hurt, in a way that nothing else does right now. The stone of the stairs is rough against your toes. The porch light above the door to the firm draws you like a moth to a beacon in the dim quilted darkness (//why are you going to work at night?//), and when you reach the top it blinks with light and the door swings open without a touch.
[[-->->page4]]
David is here. He’s holding [a folder labeled "Wilkes Case Brief"]<hook| out to you. (click: ?hook)[(replace: ?hook)[[a bouquet of white flowers]<flowers|]](click: ?flowers)[(replace: ?flowers)[[a glass of orange juice]<juice|]](click: ?juice)[(replace: ?juice)[[a stapler]<stapler|]](click: ?stapler)[(replace: ?stapler)[an iPhone with a shattered screen]]
You [[reach out for it->page5]].
The sound of windchimes tears through the scene, reducing the world around you to a swirling blur of color, then to darkness.
You [[open your eyes->page6]].
The popcorn ceiling of your bedroom is looking silently down at you. Your phone alarm is tinkling insistently on the nightstand. You roll over, untangling yourself from the blankets, and swipe blindly at the screen until it stops making noise. It’s Wednesday. It’s seven in the morning.
It’s time to [[get up->page7]].You sit up in bed in an effort to prevent yourself from falling asleep again, and lean back against the headboard.
Thump.
You leaned a little too fast.
[[--> -> page8]]Next to you, Amanda stirs, rolling over to face you. There are racoon smudges around her eyes from where she forgot to wash off her makeup last night. “Frrghnmmph,” she says.
“Good morning,” you reply.
She pushes herself up on her hands into a sitting position and rubs some of the bleariness out of her eyes. This leaves black smudges on the backs of her hands. “Uggnn. My arm is asleep.”
You feel an odd pang in your chest. A fragment of a dream nudges at the outskirts of your consciousness. “You must have slept on it.”
“Yeah. Must’ve.” She shakes it out, then swings her legs over the side of the bed and stands up, stretching. She’s wearing the underwear with the pineapple print that you bought her last time you were at Target. “I feel like I remember my arm hurting in my dream last night. Not much else though. I think I was downtown, at work, for part of it…”
[[... -> page9]]It all comes back at once. It wasn’t your dream--it was Amanda’s. It happened again.
Goddamn.
[["You okay?" -> page10]]You look over at Amanda. She has, in the undefined period of time you spent recalling her dream, stepped into a skirt. She’s undoing her braid. Her head is tilted the way it does when she’s concerned.
What are you supposed to say? Oh, no, was just mentally going over the night I spent inside your head? No big deal?
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just had a cramp.”
You've been doing a lot of white-lying lately.
[[--> -> page11]]She tuts in sympathy, and pulls her hair back into a ponytail with the scrunchie around her wrist before going over to dig through the bureau. As soon as her back is turned, you slump a little bit and drag a hand across your face. You remember now, standing in the sky above the city, brushing your hand against a star, landing on the pavement in front of the law firm, climbing the too-tall staircase, whatshisface--David--handing you the brief just before the alarm went off and you woke up. Everything bleeding into everything else around it, just a little bit at the edges, in the way dreams do. Or at least, the way they do when you’re a hitchhiker. Amanda’s dreams have always, the few times you’ve caught a ride, had a vague but satisfying sense of poetry to them.
Amanda finishes tucking in her blouse, then lets herself out of the room. Probably to get breakfast or something. It seems relatively unimportant right now.
[[--> -> page12]]This is the fourth--maybe the fifth--time you’ve woken up from one of your wife’s dreams. You stopped thinking it was a coincidence or an artifact of your imagination after the third time. You don’t think you’ve ever been in anyone else’s, but it’s hard to be sure--your dreams are a blooming, buzzing confusion more often than not, but you imagine you’d have a harder time picking up on the “not my dream” cues if they were coming from someone you don’t spend half your waking hours with. You always feel vaguely dirty waking up from one of these, even though you’ve never seen anything especially untoward. There’s something undeniably voyeuristic about peeking into someone else’s head, even if you couldn’t possibly be doing it on purpose.
You shake your head, and pick up your phone from the nightstand to check the night’s emails. As far as you’ve been able to tell, this only happens once every few months at most. With any luck, you won’t have to think about this again for a while.
[[--> -> page14]]You’re dressed and combing your hair when Amanda comes back into the bedroom. She has a half-eaten bagel in her hand. “I’m headed out a little early today,” she announces as she toes into her shoes. “We had a big case come our way yesterday and David wants to make sure we have enough time to go over all the major documents today--I’d rather sleep in, but apparently everyone else would rather get in early than stay late. Lucky me.”
Something pings in your memory of last night.
You're not sure whether to [[bring it up->page15]] or [[let it go->page15.5]].
“The Wilkes case?” you ask. Like you don’t already know for sure.
“Yeah,” Amanda replies, an edge of surprise in her voice. “I didn’t think you’d remember that.”
You pop a shrug. "Hey. I'm capable of paying attention." And the diversion: "You gonna have a long week, then?"
She snorts. “More like a long month. It’s exciting, though. This is the first really meaty case we’ve gotten since I started here, and I already feel so much more involved than I ever did at Harlowe. They always treated me like a para; I never got to do shit. Like I didn’t also get my JD, you know? I know UMass isn’t Harvard Law, but I know what I’m doing. ‘snice to be trusted.” She takes a bite of her bagel then keeps talking with the bagel in her mouth. “Mm. I’m rambling. And I’m gonna be late if I don’t leave so I should probably go.” She grabs her briefcase from where it’s leaning against the bed on the floor and leans over to peck you on the cheek. Her nose bumps into your cheekbone in a way that’s probably painful. “Love you!”
[[And she’s gone.->page16]]
You decide to keep it to yourself, though. You don't want to start a precedent of blurting out things you only remember from dreams. "You gonna have a long week, then?"
She snorts. “More like a long month. It’s exciting, though. This is the first really meaty case we’ve gotten since I started here, and I already feel so much more involved than I ever did at Harlowe. They always treated me like a para; I never got to do shit. Like I didn’t also get my JD, you know? I know UMass isn’t Harvard Law, but I know what I’m doing. ‘snice to be trusted.” She takes a bite of her bagel then keeps talking with the bagel in her mouth. “Mm. I’m rambling. And I’m gonna be late if I don’t leave so I should probably go.” She grabs her briefcase from where it’s leaning against the bed on the floor and leans over to peck you on the cheek. Her nose bumps into your cheekbone in a way that’s probably painful. “Love you!”
[[And she’s gone.->page16]]You should be getting ready to go yourself. You’ve wasted too much time //thinking//.
[[--> -> page17]][[WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 2
2:15 PM ->page18]][[TUESDAY NOVEMBER 1
6:18 AM->page1]]You sit the way that helps you think the best--cross-legged on the tarp, canvas balanced on an easel low to the ground. Your overalls have already gained a new streak of paint, and more has dried onto your palms, mostly a deep navy blue. You haven’t been able to get the image out of your head of the Boston skyline as you descended from the sky, the stars as globes of soft light hovering around you, but the perspective has been hard to get a hold on. You’ve produced an embarrassment of sketches over the course of the morning, and you have them taped and pinned to the wall in front of you. You’ve been working on imprinting a gradient onto your canvas, bleeding from a rich violet to a blue that’s almost black, but the sky is so far absent of stars. Everything you’ve tried so far has felt dissatisfyingly static; you haven’t been able to communicate the sensation of drifting down through the lights quite the way you would like.
No matter how uneasy your nighttime ventures make you feel (and how little you want to think about their source), you can’t say they aren’t good inspiration.
[[--> -> page19]]The door clicks open behind you. You glance behind over your shoulder--as you expected, it’s Nisha; she keeps odder hours than you but half of the studio is hers. As you did not expect, there’s a shock of purple coming out of her head. Her hair. Her hair is purple.
“Your hair is purple,” you say.
“Hello to you too,” she replies, shutting the studio door behind her and shrugging out of her coat. “And yeah, I got it done last night. I was feeling something new.” She hangs her coat on the hook beside the door, pulls her newly-purple hair up into a bun. “And speaking of new, it looks like you’re working on something new.”
You look appraisingly back at your own canvas. “Oh, this? Yeah. I have to be working on something. It’s sorta based on--” A dream my wife had that I accidentally spied on? “A dream I had. Last night.”
“Haha, ok. I’m gonna pretend there wasn’t a super weird pause there because that’s none of my business.”
Nisha doesn’t ask you what the dream was about. She’s cool like that.
[[--> -> page20]]
Nisha starts setting up her workspace, pulling bundles of wire out of the cabinet and setting them on the floor around her work-in-progress.. It feels irrational, but you’ve always held an envied fascination for the ways sculptors work with three-dimensional space. Even the flat plane of the canvas eludes you often enough that you can’t imagine having to toy with depth as well.
You work for some time in silence, mixing paints and frowning in concentration at your canvas.
[[--> -> page21]]
Nisha is pacing around her sculpture, humming softly along with the music in her earbuds, adding a piece here and adjusting a piece there. You tend not to talk when you’re both working in the space--it feels less like an unspoken rule, per se, and more like you’re an incurable introvert and Nisha is an extremely chill person. But today the quiet feels more oppressive than calming, and you have a sudden urge to start a conversation. The events of the morning (or more accurately, the events of last night) have put you on edge.
“Do you ever remember your dreams?” you find yourself [[asking->page22]].
“Hm?” Nisha pulls one of her earbuds out.
“Uh, do you ever remember your dreams. Like in the morning. When you wake up.”
Nisha raises a hint of an eyebrow at you, like you just asked a weird question. Which you did. “Um, not usually. My dreams are usually total nonsense, I feel like, so it’s kinda hard to hold onto them when I’m back on real world logic. I tried dream journaling once in high school because I heard it was supposed to help you remember better, but I would always forget to do it in the morning so I eventually just gave up. Doesn’t really bother me anymore. Uh, you?”
This last part is an appellation, like she only remembered the rules of polite conversation at the last second.
You wish this was an easier question to [[answer->page23]].“Sometimes. Not usually. I guess if I remembered them more often they wouldn’t have such an impact on me.” You gesture at your canvas. “They’ve always kind of freaked me out though, like your brain is just giving you one massive hallucination every night while you’re asleep.”
“More than one.”
“Right. Yeah. You know what I mean.” You forgot Nisha was a psychology major and definitely knows way more about this shit than you. You like, barely went to college.
“I know what you mean. It’s weird, but I feel like it’s not any weirder than nothing at all happening while you’re asleep. Like, what, you just close your eyes and open them and the whole night’s over.” She shrugs, then starts carefully bending another wire into shape. “I dunno how relevant any of this is to anything, though. What’s got you so chatty all of a sudden?”
[["Good question."->page24]]This whole short conversation has felt vulnerable, like peeling yourself open, despite the fact that it is fundamentally premised on a pretty glaring omission. “Oh, I don’t know.” And a lie. “Why does anyone do anything?”
“Like I said. Super weird.”
And then you both lapse back into near-silence. This is how you’ll remain for the next few hours, quietly working, until the students for Intermediate Sketching come in at five and you have to go into teacher mode. Then you’ll go home, you’ll heat something up for dinner, you’ll watch an episode of Succession with Amanda, you’ll go to bed, and everything will go back to normal. Like it always does.
[[... -> page25]]Impulsively, you leave a swipe of vibrant purple across the canvas.
[[It looks like a shooting star.->page26]][[THURSDAY NOVEMBER 24
4:31 AM ->page27]]You’re sitting in one of those combination desk-chairs toward the back of the lecture hall. There’s gum on the underside. The rows of seats stretching down in front of you in a funnel seem almost impossibly long. They are populated by the backs of heads, unnervingly static and still. The front of the room is so far away it’s started to blur in the distance, but the professor’s voice is wafting down towards you from the speakers mounted at the top of the wall. It’s Pachernik. This is intro biology. Which you thought you finished your second semester. Goddamn.
[[--> -> page28]]Pachernik is drawing diagrams on the board--chromosomes mingling DNA. Meiosis. You remember. On either side of you, a student is frozen in the facsimile of taking notes, fingers poised hovering above laptop keys, their faces illuminated by the glow of their screens. You look down. You have a notebook open on the desk in front of you, but the writing on the page is a series of incomprehensible squiggles. The more intently you stare at them, the more they appear to swim on the page, writhing trails of ink curling their way around blue-ruled lines.
[[//You should be able to read. Why can't you read?// ->page29]]Pachernik’s Czech-accented voice slides its way into a smooth stream of gibberish. You have the suggestion of a headache, pressure without pain, a fuzziness like cotton has been stuffed behind your eyes.
[[//You haven’t been in college for years. Did Pachernik even teach intro bio? Isn't he dead now?// -> page30]]Beside you, in unison, the blue glow of laptop screens winks into darkness. The voice on the speakers trails off into static. Quiet.
[[You’re dreaming. -> page31]]
The realization does not hit you with any specific weight. You’ve never been aware of your own dreams before, not while you’re deep in them--you would have expected the revelation to jolt you into consciousness. It doesn’t. You’re still sitting in the desk-chair-thing, Pachernik silently drawing great looping diagrams on the board in the front of the room, your neighbors sitting frozen in their chairs. You look at the notebook again.
Still gibberish. You’re not sure what you were expecting.
[[--> -> page32]]
With some minor difficulty, considering you aren’t quite as small as you were when you actually took this class, you slide your way out without disturbing the note. The room has no doors in the back, like you’re pretty sure it did when you were actually here--the only exit, marked by a glowing red sign above, is down at the front of the hall besides where Pachernik is delivering his mute lecture.
The door seems impossibly far away. You know intuitively that if you tried walking, you would never make it. [There’s nowhere you can go.]<nowhere|
(click-replace: ?nowhere)[
As if in response to your desire to escape, the distance across the lecture hall shrinks in on itself, rows of chairs and stationary students suddenly swallowed up by the oscillation in dreamspace, the entirety of the scene rippling before you like fingers were dragged through water, before everything settles and the room is the length it should be. You feel a rumble of nausea like you’ve never felt before in a dream.
[[Did you do that? Did you change that?->page33]]] You take a first, somewhat tentative step down the wide shallow stairs that lead to the front of the room, but experience the deeply unsettling sensation of your foot simply not landing where your eyes tell you it should. Instead of hitting the step below, you step through it like it’s less substantial than water, and the rest of you goes tumbling along with it as you lose your balance. The lecture hall disappears as you fall through the stairs into absolutely nothing, the whole of your vision shimmering and crackling like TV static as you plummet through something you cannot see...
[[... -> page34]]
...until suddenly the world snaps back into place and resolves itself into a wide rolling plain of grass and you are no longer falling because you are standing on your two feet, without even having landed.
The lecture hall was familiar. This place isn’t. The sky overhead is achingly blue, and there’s no sound but the quiet whistling of the breeze through the grass. You’ve always been a city slicker, or at the very least a resident of suburbia--this pastoral scene is unfamiliar, and not something you usually dream about. You think? You don’t often remember your own dreams.
[[You are still perfectly lucid. -> page35]]
In the distance, if you turn to the right, you can see [[a red barn->page36]], exactly the way it would look in a picture book. In every other direction, nothing but grass. The land here is so flat, though, you feel like you should be able to see for miles--[[there has to be a town somewhere near here->page36.5]].(set: $path to 0)You walk toward the barn. It takes ages, but eventually the structure looms over you, a red giant. The geometry of it isn’t quite right--it seems, in a way you have difficulty quantifying, to have too many angles. One half of the door is ajar, the light of day creeping into the barn’s unlit interior. Up close, you can see that the red paint is peeling. You notice, suddenly, that your feet are bare. They look otherwise normal. The grass is damp with morning dew.
[[You slip your way into the barn.->page37]]
(set: $path to 1)Just as though your thoughts have jumped from your head onto the landscape, the air shimmers on the horizon to your left and begins to change, the expanse of sky collapsing in on itself to become a cluster of wood-brown buildings, and something begins to snake its way inward through the grass from that far distance--a dirt trail carving its mark on the ground, the grass simply wicking its way out of existence in a way that makes your head swim. Perhaps this lucidity has its downsides: watching space fold in on itself makes you a little bit queasy.
[[You follow the path set before you.->page37.5]]
There is enough daylight bleeding through the slats of the walls and the rafters and the crack of the door to see comfortably by. It looks like a barn, by your personal approximation of what the interior of a barn would look like. There are bales of hay stacked up in the loft, a rickety-looking ladder leaning its way up to them. The stray straws on the barn floor worm their way between your toes. There are stables, their doors swinging empty, and a small tractor (or maybe just a normal-sized one) parked in the open space. It’s painted a nearly radioactive green. The logo, painted black on the side, resembles a smudge of ink left by the brush of a careless hand, the letters below swimming against each other in a languid dance. An ache pulses briefly in your temple. You rub your forehead with the heel of your palm.
There’s nothing else in here. [[You exit.->page38]]
You feel a prickling at the back of your head, like the sensation in your sinuses just before a sneeze. It’s nagging, and when you shift your attention to it, everything around you blurs and swims like it’s been censored. The scene around you begins to dissolve, each section of your visual field fizzing into static snow and winking out into a red darkness, until there’s nothing left around you but a warmly-tinged nothing.
[[You open your eyes.->page39]]
The town is as unfamiliar as the rest of the scene, too country in character to be anything from your memories. It looks almost like a setpiece from one of those shitty old Westerns your dad used to watch. It looks deserted. Ghost town. You expect a tumbleweed to come rustling down the corridor, lined by buildings on either side--and one does, coming round the bend and blowing past you, rolling end over end.
There’s nothing for you here.
[[--> ->page38]]What the fuck was that?
You are awake and in your bedroom. You reach a heavy arm over to the nightstand to swat at your phone--the screen turns on, revealing the time. Morning. Hours before you’d usually bother to wake up.
Amanda isn’t here. She’s out of town visiting a friend from college, and you’re alone in the bed, your legs tangled in the sheets and your head aching faintly. What was that? That wasn’t your dream--well, the second part wasn’t. The first part had to have been. But so much of what happened is new: the stark lucidity, the transition from one dream to another like falling through space, the way the landscape of the new dream twisted and reformed to suit you. The walls of the bedroom, at least, are blessedly still and solid.
[[--> -> page40]]That wasn’t your dream. It wasn’t Amanda’s dream either, as far as you know--there aren’t too many rolling fields or barns or fucking abandoned ghost towns in Lower Manhattan or Syracuse or anywhere else you know she’s lived. You’ve always assumed, every time this has happened, that whatever is happening to you, the dreams you enter have something to do with proximity, that you’ve been stepping into Amanda’s head because she’s right there next to you, pressing up against you in your sleep, and your minds must be roughly as close as your bodies.
But Amanda isn’t here.
You sit up, rubbing the heels of your palms into your eyes until your vision fuzzes with crackles of white light.
[[--> -> page41]]
It’s been three weeks since the last incident. Before that, it was two months. Before that, it was three. Before that--you don’t remember. As long. Longer. It’s happening more and more and getting clearer and stranger each time and you have no idea what’s happening to you. Why do you even have this clarity, now, that last night’s dream must have belonged to someone else? You know, intellectually, that your subconscious might have generated those scenes from movies or TV or whatever, that you don’t have to have been somewhere to see it in your sleep, but it felt real in some unquantifiable way, like a just-to-the-left version of somewhere you’ve been before but you know you haven’t.
You consider, not for nearly the first time, that you might be going crazy.
[[--> -> page42]]You briefly float the idea of going back to sleep, but you’re not psychologically prepared for another bedtime dreamsurfing mindfuck. You resolve instead to get up and make some coffee and try to think about [[literally anything else -> page43]].[[FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23
7:13 PM ->page44]]“Hello? You there?”
Amanda’s voice sounds tinny and faraway. It’s kind of crazy that cell phones have changed so much since you got your first one but the actual experience of a phone call has barely improved a bit. You’d honestly prefer to text, but Amanda says she likes to hear the sound of your voice. It’s sweet.
“Yeah. I’m here. You were breaking up a little bit. How’s Northampton?”
“Oh, it’s good! Sleeping on the air mattress has definitely fucked up my back a little bit, but you know, Aisling’s pregnant so I had to let her take the futon because I didn’t want to look like an asshole.” She laughs. “So being a paragon of goodwill clearly doesn’t get you anything good.”
“Obviously not.”
You were going for endearingly sarcastic, but it comes out sounding a little snappy. There's a moment of silence.
[[--> -> page45]]Amanda picks it back up. “But yeah, it’s nice out here. A lot greener than Boston for sure. And I can cross the street without feeling like I’m gonna get run down, which is also nice. We’ve sorta been hanging around Smith campus because Marta lives in the area, and it feels like being in college again. Except with fewer snivelly rich pre-law jerks. And fewer men. Wouldn’t have minded that.” She pauses. “And I’m rambling. What about you? How have you been?”
“I’ve been okay.” Mostly true. Not entirely false. “I have that gallery spot in a month and a half now and I’m trying to make sure I have enough pieces ready for it. The well of inspiration’s kinda been running dry--maybe I should take a vacation next.” Cool. Casual. Exactly how you’d like to sound.
“Well, just wait for one of your friends out of town to plan herself a weeklong bachelorette party. Though I don’t know how much artistic inspiration you’d be getting out of this. Unless you wanna plan a series on, uh, the sociopolitical implications of dick glitter and the ethics of drunk women yelling at bartenders. Or something.”
[[God, you miss her.->page46]]
“I miss you.”
“Hm? I miss you too, baby.” A brief lapse into silence. “Ok, I have to go. Jess wants me to run to the store with her before tonight.”
“See you in a couple days?”
“See you in a couple days.”
[[The line goes dead.->page47]]
This is the worst possible time to be stuck in the apartment alone. You’ve been letting mess pile up, clothes stacked up around the dresser and dishes stacked up in the sink--you’re going to have to take care of all that before Amanda gets back. She hates dishes. You had another lucid dream last night, one you’re pretty sure was your own, where you had to stop the building from melting. You’re still stressed out. You feel like if you have to deal with another excursion on top of that you’re going to go into full on freakout panic mode and you really do not feel like going to your therapist to get your anxiety meds refilled so you do not want to deal with that right now.
[[--> -> page48]]You’re sitting at the kitchen table. You had Chinese takeout for dinner. The empty plastic containers are still sitting on the table. A little bit of soy sauce has dripped onto the tablecloth.
And God, it’s stuffy in here. There may be things that need doing, but you feel a sudden and undeniable urge to get out. You can do the dishes later. [[You need to take a walk.->page49]]
It’s a crisp evening tonight--not yet winter, but might as well be--and you leave the apartment wrapped in a coat with your hands shoved deep into your pockets. The sky is inky-dark by now, a sheet dotted with pinpricks of light (//you remember brushing your hand against the body of a star//), but the streetlights are plenty to see by. The foot traffic has slowed considerably from the heavy volume of the day, but there are still people passing by, heads down and strides long, not paying you any mind.
That’s perfect. You are not in the mood to talk right now.
[[--> -> page50]]
The door to the building clicks shut behind you as you step out onto the sidewalk. Your breath makes a faint mist in the air in front of you, and you zip the collar of your coat up a little further. You have no destination in mind, but you know this corner of the city like the back of your hand by now, so you walk.
[[Your mind, as it is wont to do, wanders.->page51]]
You think about standing, barefoot, in front of Amanda’s law office. You think of climbing an unending flight of stairs. You think about the green grass, (if: $path is 0)[the quiet emptiness of the barn, solemn stillness washing itself over the light and sound of the city](if: $path is 1)[the winding dirt path laid out befort you, superimposing itself on the weathered asphalt, day settling itself over night].
You think--
You’re at the Creative Arts Center.
You didn’t intend to end up here. You don’t even usually walk to work, you take the train. How long have you been out here? Your nose feels cold and numb. The building looms over you.
[[“What are you doing here?”->page52]]
A shadowed figure against the wall, dotted with red at the mouth, resolves itself. Nisha. Smoking a joint. “My class starts in like, fifteen minutes, so I know you aren’t using the studio.”
She’s asked an excellent question, and you didn’t exactly come equipped with an answer. “Uh, I was just taking a walk. I guess I kinda spaced out. My feet just...took me here.”
Nisha takes a puff. The smoke trails out of her mouth and up towards the sky, briefly obscuring her features in the dark. “Kinda out of the way, isn’t it? Aren’t you cold?”
“Oh, no,” you lie. “I run hot. It’s fine. Was probably gonna take the T back anyway.”
[["Alright."->page53]]
Nisha regards you with a distinctly dissatisfied look, but doesn’t push any further. “Well, I have beginner sculpture tonight, so I should probably make sure everything’s actually set up in there. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Yeah. I’ll be there in the morning.”
She nods, stubs the embers out on the wall, and tucks the joint behind her ear. Her hair, less vibrant a color in the dim light coming through the glass doors, falls to cover it. And then she’s gone. And you’re alone outside the building. You’re fucking cold.
[[You look up. -> page54]]
The stars are there, arranged in constellations you never learned to see. It’s a cloudy night tonight, with a soft wind, and the breeze sends the clouds ambling across the sky.
The way they drift past each other, shifting in form, makes your stomach flip.
[[You put your head down and make for the nearest T station.->page55]]
[[Time passes.->page56]]You have dreams of looking down at the landscape from an airplane, of getting lost in a building with serpentine hallways that superficially resembles the Creative Arts Center, of trying to arrange a stack of stuffed animals in your closet, of a trip through a shitty haunted house you had when you were a teenager, of trying to fix the dishwasher and not being able to find any tools. Not all pleasant, but normal. All yours. Each of them, after a certain point, fully lucid. It is jarring to snap back to awareness suddenly, not unlike the feeling of being shaken awake.
Your actual dishwasher remains broken. You still have to do them by hand.
[[--> ->page57]]On Friday, you go to the library. One of the smaller branch ones, just to minimize the chances of running into someone you know--not that you know very many people. Small circles. You have to get yourself a card--you haven’t been to one of these in years. Not wanting to voice your request to an actual human being, and finding your spar with the digital catalog unsuccessful, you end up wandering the stacks for 25 minutes (continually reassuring yourself that you are, in fact, awake) until you find the books on dream interpretation.
Thankfully, there’s no one else in this part of the library to witness your transformation into a new ager.
[[--> -> page58]]
They all have bullshit titles. //Unlocking the Secrets of the Unconscious Mind. The Hidden Power in Dreams. The New Oneirology.// Stuff you wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a few months ago. This sense is dampened by your knowledge that what’s been happening to you--what you’re convinced has been happening to you, at least--is likely weirder than anything in any of these books.
You scoop four of them off the shelf and [[go to find an alcove to hole up in->page59]].
(set: $dreamtext to " ")
You end up in a dim corner, your coat and bag draped over the back of an armchair, the small stack of books settled on a little wooden side table. Open in your lap is //A Symbolic Dictionary of Dreams//.
You're not sure what to look up:
* [Your dream about the rolling field and the barn.]<barn|
* [Your dream about floating in the air above Boston.]<float|
* [Your dream about wandering the hallways of the Creative Arts Center.]<hallway|
* [Your dream about putting the stuffed animals in the closet.]<stuffed|
* [Your dream about trying to fix the dishwasher.]<dishwasher|
* [Your dream about flying in an airplane over the city.]<airplane|
(click: ?barn)[{(set: $dreamtext to "//`To see a barn in your dream signifies the feelings that are kept in your subconscious. There is a possibility that you may be holding back your instinctual action or natural urges.
`//")(replace: ?dreamtext)[$dreamtext]}](click: ?float)[{(set: $dreamtext to "//`To dream that you are floating on air indicates satisfaction, contentment and acceptance of some situation. You are letting go of your problems and rising above obstacles. You are experiencing new-found freedom and gaining a new perspective on things. Nothing seems overwhelming or too difficult to handle. Alternatively, floating in your dream suggests that you are wandering through life aimlessly with no goals. You are just going with the flow.
`//")(replace: ?dreamtext)[$dreamtext]}](click: ?hallway)[{(set: $dreamtext to "//`To see a hallway in your dream symbolizes self exploration. It is the beginning of the path that you are taking in life. You are going through a transitional phase and journeying into the unknown. It also signals spiritual enlightenment, emotional growth physical prowess, new opportunities and mental passages in your life.
`//")(replace: ?dreamtext)[$dreamtext]}](click: ?stuffed)[{(set: $dreamtext to "//`To see a stuffed animal in your dream represents an immature attitude. You are trying to escape from your daily responsibilities and problems. Alternatively, a stuffed animal indicates your need to relax and be less serious. You need to let your mind and body to rejuvenate. A stuffed animal may also mean security, love, comfort, support and unconditional or unquestioned love.
`//")(replace: ?dreamtext)[$dreamtext]}](click: ?dishwasher)[{(set: $dreamtext to "//`To see or use a dishwasher in your dream suggests that you need to resolve past issues and old problems in order to make a clean start for yourself. Alternatively, the dream means that you are moving ahead and looking toward the future.
`//")(replace: ?dreamtext)[$dreamtext]}](click: ?airplane)[{(set: $dreamtext to "//`To see or dream that you are on an airplane indicates that you will overcome your obstacles and rise to a new level of prominence and status. You may experience a higher consciousness, new-found freedom and greater awareness. Perhaps you need to gain a better perspective or wider view on something. If the airplane is taking off, then it suggests that an idea or plan is about to take off and be put into action. It may also represent your need to get away and escape from your daily life. Dreaming that the airplane sits on the runway and never takes off refers to a real life project or idea that has failed to get off the ground. You are having difficulties getting started on a project.
`//")(replace: ?dreamtext)[$dreamtext]}]
[$dreamtext]<dreamtext|
[[You have the feeling none of this means anything at all. ->page60]]Several hours later, defeated and deflated, you leave the library. The internet has told you nothing, the library has told you nothing, and you’re not sure where else you can go without having to spill your guts to someone who’ll think you’re nuts.
You’ve been entertaining the idea of calling your therapist up again--it’s been, what, a year? But this isn’t run-of-the-mill, anxiety, panic attack type stuff. Going back on Prozac isn’t going to fix this. You don’t want to go back on Prozac in the first place. She’ll think you’re having some sort of psychotic break, and you’re worried in that scenario that she might be right--can psychotic people tell when they’re psychotic? You don’t feel crazy, but what if that’s all part of it? If crazy people knew they were crazy, would they even be crazy?
You’re freaking yourself out. You should go home. Amanda’s gonna be back from work soon, and you don’t want to have to explain where you’ve been.
[[--> -> page61]]You can’t sleep. You’ve been trying for an hour with no dice--you just can’t seem to keep your eyes shut for long enough.
On the other side of the bed, Amanda is fully knocked out, her soft snoring muffled by the blanket that’s pulled halfway over her face.
You can hear the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the faint sloshing of water in the pipes.
You wish you still had your old white noise machine.
[[--> -> page62]]It’s been getting worse little by little every night. You’ve never had especially insomniac tendencies, but lately the thought of slipping into someone else’s dream, becoming a voyeur for the night, or even just experiencing the discomfiting lucidity of feeling awake in your sleep, having to confront the jumbled wrongness of a dream without the haze of sleep--well. It’s been making you antsy.
You’ve been making your coffee extra strong in the mornings.
You’ve considered the idea that this recent rash of dream-walking is a phase--something that will flow and then ebb and then pass. It’s been getting stronger, more and more frequent, but that’s not a pattern that has to persist. Maybe it’ll stop of its own accord. That’s been your most recent tactic for lulling yourself to sleep: maybe today will be the day it stops. It doesn’t happen every night (not yet at least), so maybe tonight will be one of the nights you get to sleep soundly, and maybe the next day will be the same, and so on and so on and so on.
[[--> -> page63]]The constant stress can’t be good for your heart. Or whatever. That’s something your therapist would have said, and being a doctor probably tends to make you right about that sort of thing.
[[You press your face into your hands and groan.->page64]]
Beside you, Amanda stirs and then rolls over, the blankets twisting around her. Her ponytail has come half undone, framing her face with wisps of strawberry blond. “Mmbabe? You awake?”
“Yeah. Just thinking.”
“Bout what?” She props herself up on one arm, looking at you curiously with sleepy eyes.
“...not much?”
“What’s that mean?”
Oh boy do you not want to get into this right now. “Nothing. Just...it’s complicated. Had a lot on my mind lately.” Hedge hedge hedge. “With the exhibition coming up and all. And the extra classes I’ve been teaching this season since Hannah quit. You know. Just boring stuff.”
[[A pause.->page65]]“You’ve seemed kinda...somewhere else lately. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t wanna, but. It feels like there’s more wrong than that.” She cocks a half smile. “I do know you, you know. We’re married. Have been for a little while.”
You look away and focus on the painting hung on the far wall instead of on her face. An inoffensive beach landscape. One of your mutual friends painted it. How long do you think you can hide this from her? You live together. You sleep in the same bed. You feel like if someone was crawling into your head at night you would want to know, and if Amanda was dealing with something this absolutely fucking crazy you would want to know--so you have no excuse to not tell her if you’re being real with yourself.
Except for that you, A, don’t want your wife to think you’re going insane, and B, don’t want to put something this heavy on her shoulders. You know how to deal with things alone.
“I just...I don’t know if this is something I should talk about.”
“Mm.”
[[Should you tell her? ->page66]]Should you tell her?
Should you tell her?
[[Yes?]<yes| [No?]<no|]<options|
(click: ?yes)[(replace: ?options)[God of course you should tell her! What is your problem? How long do you think you can carry this alone?
“I...yeah, ok. This is going to sound kind of crazy.”
But she’s fast asleep again, her eyes closed, face half pressed into the pillow. Of course she is. And by the time the morning comes and you’re both awake again, she’ll have forgotten even having this conversation, and you’ll have lost your nerve, and things will keep going exactly the way they have been.
[[--> ->page67]]]](click: ?no)[(replace: ?options)[No you’re not going to tell her. Of course you’re not going to tell her. How could you even think of telling her? How is someone even supposed to react to something like this?
You look back over at Amanda. She’s fast asleep again already, her eyes closed, face half pressed into the pillow. By the time the morning comes and you’re both awake again, she’ll have forgotten even having this conversation. Things will keep going exactly the way they have been. It wouldn’t have even mattered.
[[--> ->page67]]]]
It’s an especially hot summer day, and the air in this house is nearly unbearable. You’re reclined dramatically on a mat on the floor, strands of hair stuck with sweat on your face. There’s a mostly-empty glass of mango juice on the table next to you, the ice long-melted.
It smells distinctively of your grandmother’s house, of cinnamon and cloves and cardamom and that extra unidentifiable something that ties it all together. Your brother is curled up on the chair next to you, napping like a cat in the daytime heat, his face sticky with tamarind sauce. You close your own eyes as well, but you don’t fall asleep.
[[--> ->page68]]Your mother and your uncle are having tea on the other side of the room, gossiping about their cousins and their neighbors and the people they’ve seen around town. It’s your mother’s favorite pastime, and since you haven’t been around your grandmother’s in near a month there’s quite a bit to catch up on. The current topic of discussion, as far as you can make out, is your new neighbor, but you couldn’t possibly figure out the topic of discussion. Maybe when you’re older.
Outside, you can hear the chirping of crickets.
[[--> -> page69]]In the chair, your brother stirs sleepily, and asks you a question you can’t quite make out. It’s not the kind that needs an answer, so you don’t ask him to repeat himself.
A welcome breeze slips in through one of the windows. You sit up, eyes still closed, to let it blow across your sweat-beaded forehead, but instead of petering off, it fills the room, the temperature dropping precipitously until you’re shivering instead of sweating.
[[You open your eyes.->page70]]
You’re standing by the coat rack, and the walls have been especially drafty this year--Mom keeps saying something about having someone come by about the insulation, but it continues not to happen. You’re shrugging your way into a coat, already bundled up in gloves and the bulky scarf-and-hat your Auntie knitted for you last year, your feet shoved into half-size-too-small boots. Your Mom is busy in the kitchen and sending you off to the general store to get some butter, a few dollar bills tucked into your pocket. As you zip yourself up, she bustles out of the kitchen to smooth down your coat, tucking your hair more neatly into your hat.
[[--> -> page71]]“Hurry back,” she says, but not exactly quite that. “Don’t want to leave dinner waiting too long.
[[And you wake up.->page72]]
The dream--not lucid, thankfully, but too vivid to be a construction of your imagination--simmers for a moment before it’s gone. It sits in your mind freeze-frame as it dissolves, the face of your not-mother, nigglingly familiar, at its center.
[[... -> page73]][[TUESDAY DECEMBER 4
5:45 PM ->page74]]The students are busy painting their landscapes. It’s a neatly diverse class this season: a couple of local college students, a couple of retirees, a couple of professionals coming straight from work, smocks strapped on over their business clothes. Cynical as you are sometimes, it’s nice to see so broad a swathe of people showing an interest in art. You try to be encouraging. That’s your job.
The bad thing about a class like this--lately, anyway--is that it’s so easy for your mind to wander when you have the down time. Much of the two-hour block, after you’ve done your instruction, is spent with the students painting in silence, only broken when they have a question about which color they should use or where they can find a specific brush or where the bathroom is again. You keep yourself busy these days, strolling between the easels, noting the color gradient in a sunset scene and the silhouetting in a cityscape. There’s one you particularly like, though you have enough decorum not to say so out loud--one of the older students is hard at work on a beach scene at night, painting from photographs she took herself, and you like the way the moonlight reflects off the dark water.
[[Peaceful.->page75]]
Your phone buzzes. You check it. Amanda telling you she’s going to be staying late from work, and asking if you can pick something up from the Thai place around the corner on your way home. You send her a thumbs up and slip your phone back into your pocket.
[[“Uh, excuse me?”->page76]]
One of the college students, a short girl with her hair pulled back in a braid, is gesturing at her canvas. “I’m, uh, not sure this is working. I’m trying to do a sort of mountains-in-the-fall scene but I feel like my colors are blending together too much and I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.”
You look at her canvas. It’s swarming with reds and yellows and oranges, a snapshot of New England autumn, but the trees press together a little more than they should so the colors seep into each other, red swirling into orange swirling into yellow like the colors of a low flame, dancing in front of the flat expanse of a cloudless blue sky, infinite where the trees are finite, seeming to grow in your vision until all you see is that blue.
[[... -> page77]]The student is still looking at you expectantly. You shake your head. You’re slipping. “Uh, I like the colors. But if you use the back of your brush like this, you can scrape some of the paint off and fill it in so there’s a little more of a separation…”
[[And so it goes.->page77.5]]“Have you ever had something happen to you that you just like, couldn’t tell anyone else about?”
“Hm?”
“Like, something happens to you that makes you feel crazy, right? And you don’t want to talk to anyone about it because you don’t want them to think less of you, but then not talking about it just makes it feel even crazier. Like, keeping it to yourself just makes it feel even worse.”
“I don’t--”
“I’ve just been having the weirdest dreams lately. And I feel like everything is falling apart around me, and I can’t talk to my wife about it, and I don’t even have any friends because I never go out anymore, and every moment just feels like banging my head against the wall, and it’s like...how do you even talk about that? Like, what do you say? I keep feeling like, ok, maybe I should go back to therapy, but I’m scared to do even that because if your therapist tells you you’re crazy then you’re actually crazy. And where do you go from there?”
“I just, um--” The cashier looks visibly flustered. “Could you please put your card in the reader?”
[[You are at the grocery store.->page79]]
Jesus Christ.
“Oh my God, I am so sorry.” You scrabble in your pocket for your credit card and push it into the reader. It beeps in acknowledgement. “I’m sorry, I just, I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. I forgot where I was.”
“I-it’s okay.”
There are groceries you don’t remember buying piled into a paper bag. Veggie burgers, grapes, peanut butter Oreos. Looks normal. At least you’ll have something to show for the trip.
“Would you like your--”
“No, no receipt. I’m fine. Thank you.” You grab your bag of groceries with both arms, hefting it onto your hip. “And uh, I’m sorry. Again.”
Head down, you make for the door and for your car, taking it as a positive that there was nobody you know here to see you.
[[--> ->page80]][[MONDAY, DECEMBER 10
9:01 AM ->page81]][[SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6
11:14 AM ->page78]]There’s a vaguely Eastern-inspired tapestry hanging on the far wall. To either side of it are shelves cluttered with small, expensive-looking tchotchkes. A white noise machine hums in the corner.
“So how have you been feeling lately?’
“Uh, bad.” You shift in your seat. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”
“Of course.” Dr. Milton steeples her hands in her lap. “Your situation sounded pretty dire from your call. I want to hear about what’s been going on with you lately, what led to you calling my office.”
[[You’re back in therapy. Good for you.->page82]]
“I’ve been having kind of a crazy couple weeks. Months.”
“Crazy in what way?”
“Crazy in a...I’m worried I might be hallucinating, or delusional, or something, way. But I don’t feel like I am. But I know that doesn’t actually mean that I’m not.”
Dr. Milton arches a concerned eyebrow. “Can you describe the content of these delusions for me?”
“Lately I’ve been…” You trail off. You’re not actually sure that you can say this outloud. It’s a point-of-no-return kind of thing. “Um.”
[[--> -> page83]]“Take your time if you need to,” says your therapist. “I know this sort of thing can be difficult, especially if you haven’t experienced it before.” She clears her throat. “Regardless of the content of these thoughts, do they make you feel like you’re a danger to yourself or others?”
“No!” You shake your head emphatically. “No, I’m not...violent, or anything. If I’m a danger to myself it’s only because I haven’t been getting enough sleep lately.” You rub your eyes. “That’s part of the problem, though. I’ve been losing time, zoning out, forgetting things...the thoughts I have are about...dreams. And I’ve been lucid dreaming too, and I feel like even when I can fall asleep I just never get enough rest and I’m so fucking tired all the time now. It feels unsustainable.”
“I see. And what kind of dreams have you been having? Why do you find it so difficult to fall and stay asleep?”
[[Hrrrrrgh.->page84]]
“I feel like I’ve been having other people’s dreams.”
A moment of polite silence.
“Other people’s dreams? What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, like...I see stuff vividly in my dreams that I’ve never seen before. Or I have a really specific dream, and then I wake up, and my wife mentions that she was dreaming about the exact same thing. And this sounds even worse now that I actually say it out loud.”
“I see.” The clock ticks on the wall. “And have you considered that these perceptions could be a symptom of stress? It seems to me as though these instances can be explained by coincidence, and the fact that you’re aware of the impossibility of these claims is a promising sign that you aren’t delusional. Have you had more than usual on your plate lately?”
“Sort of. I’ve been, uh, working on some stuff for a gallery exhibition, and I don’t have chances to get my work out there very often. And I’ve been working extra this season, teaching classes at the Arts Center, because one of the other teachers quit on short notice and I was the only one who had the time to fill in.”
[["Hmm."->page85]]Dr. Milton is very good at hmming sympathetically. “So it does seem like you have a lot going on with your life. Coupled with the lack of sleep, sometimes stress can cause paranoia, confusion... especially in someone who struggles with anxiety.” She looks at you meaningfully. “I know you haven’t renewed your fluoxetine prescription in a while. Do you feel like your anxiety is being managed without it?”
“I...I thought so. I guess. It helped, but...I didn’t like the side effects. It made me feel like a zombie, I was tired all the time, it was ruining my sex life…”
“You know you could have talked to me about adjusting dosage, or even switching medications to see if we could find one that works with fewer side effects.” She cocks her head. “Maybe we could discuss some options today? I know bupropion didn’t work for you, but we can try a smaller dose of your last prescription, or if this has been really dire, we could consider a benzodiazepine like alprazolam for short-term use while you work through this acute stress.”
Well. You’re struggling is a significant step up from the you’re crazy you were worried about. Even if you don’t want to take the Prozac again, it couldn’t hurt to talk about it--and even the idea that there’s an explanation for all this is making you feel a little better already.
[[“Yeah. Ok.”->page86]]
[[THURSDAY DECEMBER 13
11:33 PM ->page87]]You have nasty dark circles under your eyes.
You lean in to the bathroom mirror--the vanity lights have blown out, so it’s hard to see--and pull down on the skin at your cheekbone, examining the bruise-like purple ring, the tired droop of your eyelid. God. Even though you’ve been sleeping a little bit better these past few nights (who would have thought therapy helps), you haven’t paid back your debt quite yet, and you still feel exhausted, and people on the T and at work keep asking you if you’re ok, and you feel like a liar when you tell them you are.
Amanda has been working more and more late nights lately. You’ve been going to bed alone a lot of the time.
[[You tie your hair back, turn off the light, and head to bed.->page88]]
You’re sitting on the couch in the living room--a living room. Not the one at home. There’s a half-drunk glass of wine on the table. The TV is droning quietly. Food Network. Old episode of Chopped. It’s dark outside the window, the porch lights off.
You’re barefoot, still in the dress and blazer you wore to work. You had a braid in earlier, but it’s undone now, your hair falling over your shoulders.
The TV flickers to static, then an old I Love Lucy rerun, then some reality show you don’t recognize, then goes dark, crackling briefly before lapsing into silence. The wine is gone. It doesn’t matter.
[You’re wearing one of his t-shirts. Your hair is pulled back into a bun.]<hook1|
(click-replace: ?hook1)[[You’re wearing workout clothes, like you just slipped out for a run.]<hook2|]
(click-replace: ?hook2)[[You're wearing nothing.]<hook3|]
(click-replace: ?hook3)[You’re barefoot, still in the dress and blazer you wore to work. You had a braid in earlier, but it’s undone now, your hair falling over your shoulders.
David smiles and hands you a glass of wine. You take it, your fingers brushing against each other. He cups your cheek in his free hand.
[[Outside the window, in the unlit darkness, a racoon rummages through the trash bins.->page89]]
]
You wake up with a start, with a feeling in the pit of your stomach like you’re falling. Amanda is asleep next to you. She must have come back after you fell asleep.
Amanda.
You see David’s smile and feel the phantom brush of his hand on your face.
[[You scramble out of bed and run to the bathroom to vomit.->page90]]
[[SATURDAY DECEMBER 15
7:10 PM
AND 20 DAYS UNTIL THE EXHIBITION ->page91]]You decided to pick up the Xanax prescription Dr. Milton wrote for you. It’s helped a little. Unrelatedly--you think--you haven’t dreamed for a week. It’s been nice.
In the studio, Nisha is putting the finishing touches on her wire sculpture. It’s really taken shape this last week, the metal curling into the form of a woman on her tiptoes reaching for the sky, her hair and her dress whipping around her from an invisible wind, a pose frozen in time.
Nisha has bandages wrapped around her hands from all the times she’s poked and scratched herself on her own materials.
[[--> ->page92]]“You’ve been going a lot more abstract than usual with this series.” Nisha nods her head toward the canvases you have mounted on the wall, evidence of the work you’ve been putting in toward this exhibition.
You have. Lately, images from have dreams have been spontaneously coming back to you, superimposing themselves over reality like acid flashbacks, your vision warping and twisting, stars suddenly hovering around the room where they weren’t before. You painted a piece in a fervor after that last hallucination, a rough sketch of the studio with the walls bending in convex, globes of light hovering around the room like you could touch them.
“Yeah. Guess I felt like switching it up this time around.”
[[--> -> page93]]“Is your wife coming to the exhibition?” Nisha asks.
Ouch. That feels like having ice poured down your back. “Um. I don’t know, maybe. We’ve kind of been having some issues lately. And I don’t know where we’re going to be in three weeks.”
“Ooohhh. Yikes. Sorry. Do you, uh…..want to talk about it?”
“No. I don’t know. I guess?” You run at a smear of paint that’s dried on your palm. “Um. She’s cheating on me. I think. So that sucks. And I haven’t talked to her about it yet because I don’t really want to deal with it now and she doesn’t know that I know.”
“Jeez. How did you find out?”
A dream! I saw it in a dream! “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
[[“Right. Sorry.”->page94]]Nisha steps back to her side of the room, straightens her tools in the cabinet and shuts the door. “You know I don’t usually pry. You’ve just seemed like you’re going through it lately, and I see you every day, so I’d feel like an asshole if I didn’t at least ask.”
“No, yeah, I appreciate that.” God. You don’t just want to go home right now. “Look, do you want to go get a drink or something? It’s ok if you don’t want to, I could just...use some company.”
And Nisha smiles. “Hey, I just assumed you didn’t especially like my company. Sure. I know a good place near here.”
[[--> -> page95]]You are at the bar with Nisha. After hastily and surreptitiously googling can i have alcohol if i took a xanax this morning and coming up with inconclusive results, you settle on a beer and decide to take it slow. Nisha is drinking a vodka cranberry. It’s dimly lit in here, cable news and music videos playing on TVs mounted over the bar, a couple with sleeve tattoos playing pool at the table in the corner and something vaguely punk playing over the speakers behind the din of conversation. If you were pressed, it’s the kind of place you would have expected Nisha to frequent.
“I do like your company.”
“Huh?” Nisha cranes closer to hear you. She’s wearing some sort of citrusy body spray.
“You said you didn’t think I liked your company. I do, I’m just a dumbass who doesn’t know how to talk to people and too anxious to make friends.” You laugh. “And I’m not even drunk! Must be the atmosphere.”
[[--> -> page96]]Nisha laughs too. Her eyeliner is smudged. It suits her. “It’s cool. I wasn’t like, offended. You aren’t obligated to like me just because we work in the same room. You’re a private person. I respect that.”
“Haha, honestly?”
“Honestly?”
“I always thought you were too cool to actually want to hang out.”
She snorts. “What, me? Like, because I have a fuckin’ nose ring? Are we in high school?”
“No, it’s like...an aura you give off. You just seem like an artist.”
“You’re also an artist.”
“I know! Duh. Obviously. But you seem like an artist. Like, you have an aura. A vibe.”
“Ok, you seem like an artist too.”
“I do not!”
“You do! You always look like you’re thinking about a billion different things at once, like there are ideas, like, fucking exploding out of you, or your off on a different world--and you don’t get to tell me what your vibes are.”
You hold up your free hand in a pacifying gesture and take the last swig of your beer. You feel more lightheaded than usual. Maybe you should stick to soda for the rest of the night. [[“Ok. I concede.”->page97]]
It’s easy, like this, to forget about everyone else in the bar. You don’t know if it’s the meds making you brave, or the ordeal making you desperate for company, but this is really, really nice.
[[--> -> page98]]Nisha lives a block away from the bar. You live a 10 minute ride away on the T. You’re not drunk, but you feel like you might be.
You’re crashing at her place. It just makes sense.
Standing on the doorstep, you fish your phone out of your pocket. You have one missed call from Amanda. For a moment, your thumb hovers over her name--you could call her, easy, tell her you got drinks after work and you’re spending the night--but you just don’t want to right now. You don’t want to talk to her and pretend that everything’s fine.
You turn your phone off and put it back in your pocket.
[[Nisha opens the door and lets you in.->page99]]
Her apartment is small, but decorated--of course--with an artist’s eye. There are photos lining the mantle you can’t make out in the dark, paintings arranged on the wall, little sculptures on the table, brightly colored rugs on the floor and pillows piled on the couch.
“You have a nice place,” you say as you follow her in.
“Thanks.”
And Nisha stops at the door to her room, hovering, looking at you. Like, looking at you. And you’re about to ask her where to get a blanket to make up the couch for the night when you realize how she’s looking at you.
She puts a hand on your arm.
[[Oh.->page100]]Ohh.
Jesus.
And frankly, this would be easy if you hadn’t been having issues with Amanda (but if you weren’t having issues with Amanda you wouldn’t be here in the first place) and it would be easy if you were single because Nisha is hot and way out of your league. But you’re married. But your wife is cheating on you. But you’re here.
Are you gonna [[follow her->page101]] or [[not->page101.5]]?(set: $nisha to 1)You kiss her. For a moment, you forget about Amanda, and about the dreams, and about all the shit that’s been happening to you for the past six weeks.
[[The door closes behind you.->intermission2]]
(set: $nisha to 0)“Is there somewhere I can grab a blanket? To make up the couch?”
Nisha pauses for a moment, her hand dropping off your arm, but she quickly lets it roll off her. Taking it with grace. Exactly what you would have expected.
“Uh, yeah. There’s a closet over here.”
[[Nisha closes the door.->intermission2.5]]You wake up in Nisha’s bed, sunlight streaming in through the windows. No dreams last night. The other side of the bed is empty. It looks like Nisha’s already gone for the day.
A flush creeps over your face as the events of last night play back in your head. You slide out of bed, slip back into the clothes that have been scattered across the bedroom floor, and [[exit into the living room->page103]].
You wake up on the couch, sunlight streaming in through the windows. No dreams last night. Several of the pillows have fallen off in the night, scattered on the colored rings of the rug.
You roll over and sit up. The door to Nisha’s bedroom is open, and you can see her bed, empty and made. The light is off. It looks like she’s already gone for the day.
[[--> ->page103]]
In the daylight, you can see the room a lot better. Most of the little sculptures sitting around are of animals--an elephant here, a cat there. You wonder whether she made them herself--maybe older work. The rugs look hand-woven.
You look at the pictures lining the mantle.
[What looks like a young Nisha, her arms around the neck of a black dog.]<hook1|(click-replace: ?hook1)[[A man in glasses with ruffled hair posing in the doorway of the house.]<hook2|](click-replace: ?hook2)[[A grainy family photo of adults in traditional Indian dress, the sun behind them obscuring their faces.]<hook3|](click-replace:?hook3)[Mother.
The woman from your dream.
The baby in her arms has Nisha's eyes.
[[Huh.->blah]]]
[[SUNDAY DECEMBER 11
8:10 AM->page102]][[SUNDAY DECEMBER 11
8:10 AM->page102.5]]“Where have you been?”
Amanda is sitting at the kitchen table. She looks tired, like she hasn’t slept.
“I’ve been calling you all fucking night, I was so worried--where were you?”
“I--” What are you going to say? There’s no point in lying, but there’s no point in telling the truth either. Especially considering the core of it is that you didn’t want to come home and see your wife. “It doesn’t matter where I was.”
Amanda freezes.
[[--> ->page105]]
“It--it doesn’t matter where you were? What the fuck do you mean it doesn’t matter where you were? I was worried sick about you! I--I thought maybe you had been kidnapped or killed or something, what was I supposed to think? You didn’t come home, you didn’t answer my calls--”
“I mean it doesn’t matter where I was! It doesn’t matter. It’s not like you’ve been coming home lately. Out in Northampton, late at work, visiting your sister. Was any of that true? Have you just been like, straight up lying to me, to my face, for months?”
“What are you talking about? What does this have to do with me?”
“It has everything to do with you! Ok, Amanda? Jesus!”
[[--> ->page106]]You’re pacing now. You’re aware that you look like a crazy person. “I didn’t come home because I didn’t want to see you, I didn’t want to talk to you. Ok? I know about David. I know you’ve been cheating for me for--for however long, you’ve been going to his house and telling me you were at work or whatever, and I didn’t want to deal with that.” You can feel tears rolling down your cheeks. “I didn’t want to deal with that. So it’s none of your business where I was. It doesn’t matter.”
Amanda stares at you, speechless, pushing her hair back from her face with both hands. For a moment, you think she’s going to confess it, spill it out, put it in the open--and then maybe you can fix this, maybe you can put it back together and put it behind you.
“You think I’ve been cheating on you? Wha--where the hell did you get that idea? What is going on?”
“I just…” You can’t tell her what you saw. You can’t tell her where you saw it. “I just know, Amanda, ok? You can’t just stand here and lie to me.”
[[Amanda is wide-eyed and silent.->page107]]
“I shouldn’t have even fucking...come back here. God. I--I have to go.”
You leave the same way you came in, over Amanda’s burst of protestation. You’re still wearing the clothes you were in last night.
(if: $nisha is 0)[[[--> ->page109]]](if: $nisha is 1)[[[--> ->page108]]][A few blocks out--you’ve just been walking aimlessly, with no destination in mind--you turn your phone back on. Your screen fills with texts and missed calls from Amanda. You swipe them away.
A few more blocks out, your phone rings.
It’s Nisha. When did Nisha even get your number? You don’t remember giving Nisha your number.
You answer.
“Nisha?”
“Yeah. Hi. Can we talk?”
Never good. “Uh, yeah, we can talk. We’re talking right now.”
[“You know what I mean.”]<hook1|]<convo1|
(click: ?hook1)[(replace: ?convo1)[[“Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean.” You lean against the nearest wall. “What’s up?”
“About last night.”
“Yeah.”
“I, uh, enjoyed myself. And I think you enjoyed yourself. But I just wanted to make sure I didn’t like, mislead you. Um, I don’t really want this to be a thing.”
You nod slowly. “A thing. Can we, uh, define what you mean by a thing, here?”
“I mean…” A pregnant pause. “Like, I don’t want a thing right now. A relationship, or like any sort of regular thing. We had fun, and I like hanging out with you and it would be cool if you wanted to be friends, but I think we shouldn’t do that again.”
[“Right.”]<right|
]<hook2|]]
(click:?right)[(replace: ?hook2)[“I know you’re cool. You understand.”
“Right.”
“I’ll see you at work.”
The line goes dead.
[[You drop your phone on the ground and keep walking.->page109]]
]]
The city sprawls out before you and you feel like you can see for miles. The sidewalk ripples and flows like water. You pass people with their heads down, their faces fuzzy and indistinct. Not important.
You see a barn in the distance, red like a fire against the gray of the city.
You see David, holding out a file to you.
You see mother, tucking your hair behind your ear.
Are you awake? Are you dreaming?
[[Does it matter?->page110]]
The buildings reach up into the sky like trees, going on for ages.
You feel your feet leave the ground.
You float up, up, rising above the city. Nobody around you looks your way, blank-swimming-shifting faces set dead ahead. It’s like you’re not even there. You’re fine with that.
The sidewalk, the street, the buildings, all shrink below you, thin lines of color carving their way across the ground below you, people and cars becoming nothing but specks below the further up you rise. All of it a dull asphalt-gray. Around, the sky unfolds itself like a grand tapestry, going from the dirty gray-black of the city at night, fraught with light pollution, to a black like velvet, dotted all around with stars like little balls of light.
[Further up.]<further1|
(click: ?further1)[The sky goes from black to a deep blue. Up here, there is no wind. You should be cold, you think, but you aren’t. You stretch your arms out to the sides, feeling the sky between your fingers.
[Further up.]<further2|]
(click: ?further2)[You can see the whole city of Boston below, and the suburbs sprawling out beyond.
[Further up.]<further3|]
(click: ?further3)[Your face is wet. You’ve been crying. You’re not sure why.
[Further up.]<further4|]
(click: ?further4)[Your shoes slip from your feet and fall to the city below. Will they burn up in the atmosphere? Will you ever find out?
[Further up.]<further5|]
(click: ?further5)[Is any of this real?
Has any of this been real?
[[Further up.->page111]]]
It doesn't matter at all.
[[end.->title]][[Time passes. ->page104]]On your way home, you forget to stop at the Thai place, and you have to go back. Amanda is late, like she said she would be, so you eat your noodles in silence in front of the TV.
You wake up, an hour later, from a dream of a tangle of limbs, none of which are your own.
[[You drag yourself to bed. ->intermission]]