The shark I’m swimming next to loses the power of speech so I know the stuff’s wearing off soon. I take him back to a safe depth because, real or not, he’s an interesting guy and I don’t want him flattened by the pressure. The shark’s name is Shark. He says sharks don’t have individual names, they all just answer to “Shark,” the ones that can speak. I get out of the ocean and on to dry land; even though there’s no consequence I hate when you stop breathing the water and jolt awake like it’s in your lungs (but I still prefer it to when you’re flying and that goes away). Shark was good company, I gave him a skull and bones tattoo so I might recognize him if I see him again down there. Sometimes from dream to dream I forget, or someone I’ve met shows up on a different planet or as something else, so I came up with the tattoo idea. I tried a tag with info once, name, species, where I’d met them, but the text was hard to read and kept changing; symbols work better.
I land on an island of volcanic rock and grind a plot of sand big enough to lie down in. I make the sand cool and white and it gives beneath me like a mattress, almost exactly like my mattress. I let myself sink down into the sand slowly until the island swallows me up and I start traveling into the belly of the planet. The sand warms as I swim down into it, and its scratchy texture changes by imperceptible degrees into the softness of my bed sheets. I breathe it and swallow it and it fills my bloodstream with tiny granular prickles. My blood mixes with it, it heats up with me as I near the planet’s center. Sliding down through the rock, becoming the rock and the rock sliding through me until I reach the center where I burn and fuse and harden into the heart of the planet, the heart of the dream. When I am a diamond there is a pure clear light and my eyes open to darkness.
It should be light out. It takes me a minute to realize my pillow is on my face. I peel it off and breathe in deep. I feel rested, but there’s a slight ache of pressure at the base of my skull. I take the multivitamin with the orange juice I keep bedside, I’d better have more protein before the next time I dive; they say brain activity can be up to 30% of the energy you burn, probably why I’m not a fat bastard with as much time as I spend swimming.
I pull out my notebook and put in “Shark” with the skull and bones symbol. You usually can’t remember those things dream to dream, but sometimes you do and it gets better with practice. The best example of that is your own identity; it takes months to get to the point where you can bring that across with you. I remember, until I got that far I was just “Hero Man” and couldn’t remember what I wanted to do when I got there in the first place; like when you leave your keys upstairs and go back for them: upstairs you have no idea why you’re there, downstairs you remember the keys, upstairs again and not a clue.
When I first started swimming I had some fun, flew around, had some great sex, but I could never think what I was there for. They tell you to come up with a real specific goal you think about when going under, just something stupid like “create the Eiffel Tower,” and then work up to more things. Now and then I’d run into people from the World but I couldn’t quite recognize them until after I came out. People mostly spoke in dream-code, it’s like a talking cryptogram where anything they say could be something associatively connected to what they were trying to say. So instead of the thing itself it could be a step removed: you see someone and they greet you with “Hi,” but “Hi” sounds like “High” so instead they say “Roof” or “Cloud” and you have no idea what they’re talking about; I don’t know if it’s in what they’re saying or how you’re hearing it. This is close to the way people drift-dream where your mother could appear as your High School nurse because you called her “Mom” once. The more time you spend Lucid, the less hiccups there are, like language immersion in a foreign country. When you’re at two degrees or more of association nothing makes any sense at all: a book could be a pencil because Henry David Thoreau wrote “Walden” and also perfected the pencil, in this case it would be very difficult to determine that pencil is actually a book; not to mention the impossibility of reading a book in LD. The problem with the sex is that you’re really the only person present. So nothing really goes too far in that aspect. Some seem to have an unlimited appetite for it, I think because they only really want to have sex with themselves; though people never get tired of those sex robots, so who knows?
I’ve always wondered if there is any crossover with other dreamers. But nothing’s ever been proven, and with the associative mix-ups we probably wouldn’t recognize one another anyway. It’s like ghosts and aliens, if I saw just one tiny shred of something I could mistake for evidence I’d at least entertain the notion.
I only dive every other day; you don’t dream on the nights you dive and if you don’t alternate you could stop dreaming altogether, if you do that you’ll go insane and sleep won’t do anything for you anymore. It makes sense, you’re hijacking your natural process away from what it really wants to do: cognitively render the events of the World into retained perceptions. I don’t get hung up on what I lose by the change, the whole system is pretty inefficient anyway; for example: most of my day is redundant, but every day my dreams go through the process of rendering it as new information, which creates a lot of useless crap to sort through when you’re looking for a specific memory. Thankfully you can often use the “Chutes & Ladders” shortcut of memory association. Don’t even get me started on movies, books and TV, our subconscious is so stupid it doesn’t even realize those things never happened to us. It sounds funny but it really isn’t; before I got the hang of LD I’d have these nightmares that were so much worse than any half-remembered dream because I was IN the dark hallway with whatever movie serial killer after me, my stupid brain didn’t know the difference; it’s like “remember that time Freddy Krueger tried to kill you?” The ones that die in LD, I think they have heart attacks from how real that stuff is, but if they can’t handle it they shouldn’t dive; it’s like when that one stupid kid chokes on the toy so the company takes them all back. Who am I kidding? Pot is still illegal, anything that gives you an outside view of the World is banned, while caffeine and alcohol that bind you to it are on every shelf. Those people are just floating through their dreams and their dreams are as capricious as their lives. They float and we swim.
I split my time four ways: there’s the World, LD, sleep and the Web. To anyone outside I might look lazy but without the balance of these I wouldn’t be able to keep up. The World is where I get the resources to do the other three; the Web is where I actually interact with people, locality is a hassle; LD is where I do my most important work; and sleep is a necessity, housekeeping. I tried to combine the World and the Web and make my money there, cut out the unnecessary, but you can’t rely on that income, it isn’t steady, so I work 24 hours a week screening copy for this company called “Central.” They’re the only one I could find that actually invests a little in quality control. Last place I worked for just dropped me and closed down the department, their stuff went out with errors but nobody cared, and probably nobody on the end-user side noticed. It isn’t the sort of job that gets an “ooh” in a bar, but it pays well per hour and keeps me in LD caps.
As far as a job you don’t care about at all goes, they don’t get any better; it’s well paid, 20 minutes away, and I haven’t even seen my boss in a month. They gave me access whenever I want, so long as I keep the inbox low I can work at 2am or whenever. It’s one of those jobs you can do or can’t, you try to put just anybody on it and mistakes will slip through the cracks like sand through your fist. You’re just looking at pages and pages of 99.9% identical copy and finding the divergence, which of these is not the same? I try not to be there during regular business hours because what I do offends some of the people there; the people whose mistakes I catch, of course, but more importantly some of the higher-ups. It almost seems to morally offend them to pay someone to ensure quality, as if having me there causes the mistakes to happen and without me they’d just wink out of existence. It’s like the Joker exists because of Batman, if I left the bugs would go with me.
I have to keep a schedule of when I’ve been places, especially work, because sometimes I trip and wind up there during LD by accident or regular dreaming and forget I’ve got to put in the real time in the World. Which, as you can imagine, really sucks. They don’t clock me in or out but I’m honest about my time. That’s what they’re buying with my salary anyway: time, not work, and the potential of anything I could accomplish or do or be during that time. For everyone, time away from their family, time they could be learning or experiencing, time they could be buying themselves more time. But I’m honest; I do my own thing on my own time.
Time in LD is fleeting, you can’t split a second into halves and live in it forever; time passes. You can do things in slow motion or speed them up but in the end you’re still under the governance of Father Time, rolling you into the future at one second per second. Every cap puts you out for about eight hours and when you resurface you can come back faster if you take B and C vitamins, but the main component of LD is just magnesium. People have loaded up on magnesium to intensify their dreams for a long time, add in some natural psychotropics and you trick your brain into wakesleep. I don’t know which ones, it’s the eleven secret herbs and spices, but it’s out of your system in a week, doesn’t stay in your hair like weed and won’t make your spinal fluid look like grey water like those party drugs.
I swim back to second grade; I’m looking for this girl I met on a plane coming back from summer camp. I had poison ivy, put some lotion on it, then had a reaction to the lotion, so I was on this plane looking like a zombie but I remember the girl that sat across from me. I remember when school started I still had hives and I was thinking, “Is this normal now? Will I have to deal with this shit forever, as standard?” You don’t appreciate your health when you have it; you can’t remember what it’s like to be sick when you’re not either, how eternal it feels.
I find the plane ride but her face and actions are fuzzy. That’s how it is when you go back to memory, anything you didn’t notice at the time is either fuzzy, conjecture, or you’ve made up a lie. You can see yourself forgetting sometimes, once sharp exchanges fray and faces cloud over, they fade like turning down a dimmer; recent events fade the fastest. I go looking for things and try to clean them up, throw in conjecture and see if it rings any bells or strip it away and see the architecture, build it up with a construct around it. My great-grandmother couldn’t tell you what city she was in, but she could tell you about Brooklyn 90 years ago.
You can’t just go there in a snap like when you’re awake, as if it’s some kind of instant time machine. You have two options, really. First is that you pick a general heading, like “PRE-SECOND GRADE SUMMER” and page through, but if you want to save time what you can do is you can build a construct of anywhere, fill it in automatically with details and hope you attract the right setup, like fishing. You reel your way to the target by associative hooks, the more specific the better. So for this one I can go page by page at the chapter starting with second grade like I’m trying to find a quotation in a huge book by remembering what part of the page it’s printed on, or I can use a hook, like some other time I had poison ivy or mosquito bites, or another plane ride, or another memory from the camp I was coming back from and reel it in that way.
It’s related to identity, you don’t really know who you are in LD so even when you remember a task you’ve set for yourself you feel more like a private eye, a dream representative on the job, a leased avatar. Maybe the avatar is only rented and goes back to doing something else when you’re not inhabiting it, but maybe things say different things when you’re not looking at them (they do in LD), I don’t know. Maybe that’s why there’s something vaguely not right about having sex in LD, or in a regular dream, it feels like you’re naked in a room without curtains and might be seen. It could be you know somewhere your real body is doing embarrassing things that could be witnessed, but it feels different than that. I know, because I talk in my sleep in some language nobody understands and now and then I have to tell whoever I’m sleeping with or near to wake me up if I do that; I don’t want to start saying secret shit people could hear, it’s not fair. This is different, when you feel things and you’re diving it’s phantom feeling; you touch your arm and it takes a second to feel it because you have to remember and fake what it feels like or if it should be felt at all; sometimes you turn off feeling, you can fly into the sun and burn yourself to cinders just for fun, or take your legs off and put them back on. You don’t have to feel anything at all and when you do the feeling doesn’t quite belong to you. Emotion is different. The emotion down there is all yours. But when you do things there, things that are wrong or even just embarrassing there’s a paranoia…I guess there’s one in the World, too, though most credit it to religion.
When you get to your destination it’s always the opposite of a construct. The memory is always more worn down than you thought. Walls you didn’t notice are missing from the room, if you didn’t mark what someone was wearing it’s a blur; it makes it harder to solidify the things you do remember, not easier. And then there are the memories that have gone away completely and the only way you even know they’re missing is if something tells you that, if there’s a defined missing space or a reference to something absent from the database. If nothing tells you, you’ll never know; there’s no limit to what you might be missing; you can’t remember what you forgot, not even that you forgot it. Or, you’ve recorded a spot, wrote it down somewhere in the World, and you go back to that spot and it isn’t what you put down; your construct is faulty. Imagine you pop in a home movie and someone’s in it who you thought died two years before it was made; then things don’t agree with each other and you’ve got cognitive dissonance.
I remembered this plane ride because it was the first one by myself. It was a tiny plane, I don’t even remember if it was one of those where there was no wall between the cabin and the cockpit and you could look right out the front window. I was seriously sick from medication (I was allergic to the anti-allergy medication they were pumping into me) and I had a genuine pus-oozing sore on my neck, I can’t imagine what I must have looked like, and I was eight years old, but somehow my first time out of supervision, looking like a zombie plague-victim, I actually flirted with this girl across the aisle from me. It’s just idle curiosity, but I wanted to do a little detective work and see if I made the whole thing up; there’s more than a little Piaget in me, but only the half-assed parts.
Jean Piaget was this guy who defined false memories early on, the kind that result in people “recovering repressed memories” accusing their relatives of sexual abuse that often never happened. His story was that his first memory was of his nurse taking him to a park in a carriage at the age of two where she was set upon by a brigand and robbed. First he insists that he remembers the entire event, then the nurse writes a letter to his parents admitting she faked the attack to steal some money she’d been entrusted with, then he changes his tune and says he remembers that part too, but then he formulates the idea of false memory.
Piaget, probably with the help of hypnosis putting him into a state much like LD, went back to that little park and when he got there it was a construct created from the nurse’s story and his own conjecture: times he’d been to the park in question since then plus generic details like foot traffic and birds singing, or snow and bare branches if it happened in winter, or if you don’t remember there’s no weather at all like when you’re on a soundstage. In his construct world the birds sang and a gentle breeze stirred the leaves (you don’t bring a baby to the park in winter), said Ruffian steps out from behind an oak tree, he is shabbily dressed and unshaven, maybe he has an eyepatch like a modern soap opera villain, he thrashes the Nurse and absconds with her purse, containing the funds with which Piaget’s wealthy parents entrusted her.
The only thing he knows for sure is what the park looks like, the construct Nurse probably looks the way she did the last time he saw her, years later. The real memory isn’t there at all; maybe he slept through the whole thing or was too young to remember anyway. Most likely the original memory was there but the construct borne of the story superseded it completely. This is the most common occurrence, and you can peel back the construct and sometimes find the bare bones of the actual memory, provided it hasn’t been completely forgotten, overwritten or thrown away for its inferior pleasantness. Once you strip away the constructs and the buffers your memory goes from a lushly populated jungle wonderland made out of molasses and papier-mache to the spare architecture of your actual past. It’s colder after the defoliation, with no bullshit to keep you warm, but it’s real.
I’m up in the plane and it’s third person, which is a construct, of course, but a useful mode to work in. I start with the plane and it blurs halfway between an American Eagle puddle-jumper or one of the TWA’s without the cockpit dividing wall (never get away with that today). It flickers back and forth, but it’s a start. I try to remember if they gave us a whole Coke like Piedmont did back then, or just a cup with ice like American, cheap bastards. Blur. Was she blonde? Blur. How much older than me was she, twelve? She was older but I convinced her I was twelve, too. Was she with her family? No, I’d have been cowed. It’s a lame example, but it gives a picture of the process, why it takes so long, step by step, like defragmenting a hard drive. In the long run it will compress unnecessary noise and space but in the immediate it takes all your attention and processing power. By the time I’m done with the plane ride there’s not much left besides a lasting impression; one I probably just imagined, anyway, like most of them.
Last night I fell into REM from the middle of LD, things got a little out of hand. I was in a hole with two guys I’ve never seen before and we were digging. I went straight there and “came to” there; it takes a bit to come to yourself and get your bearings, until then everything is usually hazy and half-remembered. Wherever I am when I come to I usually clear everything away so I can start blank, but this time I let it go because we were digging and in dreams sometimes whatever physical action you’re performing can be the more simpleminded direct metaphor: you’re digging so you’re digging into your past or your subconscious, you’re up in the sky so it has something to do with God. Doesn’t matter how stupid it sounds, when you get down to automatics we are usually that stupid. This is why I’m good at fixing bugs and programs even though I know nothing about them, I understand how stupid they are: they never go around a wall they can walk into.
The three of us at the bottom of the hole are talking, but it’s only an impression: a sense of blue-collar camaraderie and that I’m exactly the same as them. It’s a nice day in the hole, but there’s that soundstage stillness in the air. The clouds aren’t moving and, though it’s midday bright, there’s no apparent sun, only bright ambient. We’re excavating what looks like the future foundation of a building. I can’t tell if we dug the whole foundation, or if we were called in for some reason just for this part, like they have reason to believe there’s something important where we’re digging.
The conversation is easy, without underlying tension or expectation, but that’s no indicator, maybe we’re used to serious shit. The excavation is like three concentric squares cut down the middle, three levels underground, and has a dirt staircase cut into the middle of the right-hand wall. We’re at the deepest point and digging. I’m sitting back and observing, curious to see what we find, but I’m first person and I twirl the shovel around a little just to verify I can take control.
All of sudden there’s a jump-cut and we’re trying to get the hell out of the trench. I’m still in first person but I can’t take control. Companion #1 makes it up the dirt staircase to the second level up and stops to help us if we need it. Companion #2 is halfway between levels 1 and 2 when the staircase crumbles inwards and he jumps off it to the first level. He digs his hands into the wall, which has become strangely moist and claylike and climbs up to the next level, and then #1 helps him jump the staircase to where he is.
They both turn to me. The sky is turbulent and the dirt is humidifying under my feet but there’s no rain yet. I dig my hands into the wall and start climbing. I make it to the first level and am on the flat when the ground starts moving under my feet. The clay breaks apart and I’m standing on a moving conveyor belt that’s trying to roll me back into the pit, which has by now turned into a bubbling swamp-mud quagmire. There are three conveyor belts on my level, all going different ways and they’re all branded with Tyvek, that company that makes housewrap for ongoing construction. Third person shoots back and it looks like I’m in a video game, from behind, but I’m still feeling everything in first person and I still don’t have any control. I leap between the belts, over the bare patches of decaying mud and get to the wall; metal rungs pop out of it. On the next level the ground breaks down again and I’m leaping from Tyvek platform to platform. I make it to the sidewall, my companions have reached ground level and they reach down to pull me up. You know the scene: right as they reach, the dirt under me and the conveyor belts and all tumble down into a bottomless pit and they get me in the nick of time. They’re pulling me up, and from when my head breaks ground level I’m waking up; by the time I’m standing my eyes are opening and it crossfades with the World.
The whole thing only took one hour according to my internal clock, but no time has gone by. I look at the alarm clock. Look away. Look back. It stays the same.
I get to the job and the work is all done. This isn’t a friendly corporation I work for. Nobody pitched in to help out. I sure can’t sidle up to some security guard and ask to look at the tapes. I certain as fuck can’t ask anybody if I did it. I look at the files and I can’t…track them. The errors keep moving. I have a “Good work!” email from my boss but the project she’s referring to has bugs all over it. Or does it. They’re there. They’re gone. At least it’s the middle of the night so I don’t have to explain why I’m here to anybody, because I don’t know. Something is wrong.
I’m tired like I haven’t slept. I’m sitting at my empty cubicle on the empty floor in the empty building, in the forest of cubicles. I’m fading out. Halfway down I hear chatter coming from around me, ghost chatter, it’s warmer, I feel daylight blasting through the window offices, filtering into our thicket. Chatter, aimless pleasantries buzz by, the people speaking phase almost into sight. Then cold again, the only sound is the almost subliminal hum of the few lights I have on, and a nearby mini-fridge. I shake my head. For a second I’m off. It feels like during that time I have an entire dream, lasting nine hours, but it’s not even a second. The composite desk reaches up and grabs for my cheek and I’m out.
And I’m in LD. I think. In the dream I’m squashing bugs. It’s irritatingly literal. Playing whack-a-mole with these little scurriers. There is a wall, an apartment wall, it’s hollow and there are holes in it, pin holes in the dry wall where things were tacked up and other holes where things have eaten their way through. I’m looking at this blank cream-colored wall and the little bugs start running from hole to hole. They look like they’re running in and out of craters on the moon. They’re tiny, ¼-inch long and a millimeter across, but they have ten little wriggly legs and they’re squirming across and inside my walls. At the same time I can see it from their little eyes, though I don’t know if they even have them, the massive bumps they’re running across, vaguely aware of the sideward pull of gravity, of the enormous expanse of room around them, the time difference at that small size, their internal clock going slower, like a sloth’s, or faster, like a hummingbird’s? It feels faster, moving as quickly as possible across the lunar surface but there is just so far to go and a feeling of impending menace. And I see an enormous slow shape coming from above, it presses the bug ahead of me into the wall and it squashes, its insides explode on the surface like gray pulp. The object pulls back from the wall and I know I’m next. I keep my back legs churning but soon I feel something bearing down on me from above; a shadow covers me. The wall presses down on me and I feel myself mashed into the pulp then smeared across the surface, my legs torn away in all directions and pulverized, my innards a paste on the surface. At the same time I’m outside grinding the bug into the wall and putting down the tissue stained with a blotch. But the bugs keep coming and I can’t keep up.
Then there’s this one bug; it’s the size of a golf ball cut in half with its little legs sticking out from the sides like compass points. It’s scurrying along the floor and leaving a trail of toxic dust behind it. I keep tracking it, and throwing a white hand towel on it and jumping on it to crush it, but its carapace is too hard, it won’t squash. It runs out from under the towel and I trap it again but each time it leaves more of the dust. The dust is like…I was in the rainforest and our guide picked up this black caterpillar. He had a leaf in each hand and kept letting it travel from one to the other. He was pretending to do it absently but you could tell he was taking real care. We were only seeing the black fuzz on its outer side, then he turned it over and the underside looked like something from a horror movie, like a skinned body, raw flesh writhing. He told us how if you so much as touched this little creature you’d have a fever and be next to dying for two weeks. That’s what the trail of this scurrier is like, like if you even just cross it it’ll infect you. I’m the bug too and I see the floor and the bathroom in the distance and as I run it draws near and behind the sink I know I’ll find my hole, my entranceway to the wall where the other bugs live. I’m nearing the hole, about to dive down into its absolute darkness. I’m going back into the wall where the bugs teem and crawl over one another and tear one another.
It’s too much, with a burst of willpower I wrest control and I wipe the area clean.
Everything goes white, but I can’t tell if I’m making it happen or if it’s the illusion of control. I’ve heard of these people who have Presque Vu. They think they’ve seen everything before; halfway through playing a tennis match they lose interest because they say they’ve seen the outcome already. Of course, they can never tell you what it was and prove it, or bring their magic to the OTB booths on Derby Day. What’s happening is just their brain is seeing what’s happened a nanosecond before their brain sees it. Sometimes you can pretend to predict what someone is saying by taking the beginning sounds of their words coupled with what you might imagine they would say (and, people not often trying to be so surprising, you’d probably be right). Sometimes you pretend you are controlling (or at least complicit in) what happens because you have no choice and the illusion of power is important. So I don’t know when I clear the area and everything goes white if it’s me or if that’s what happens next in the dream.
I wait for what’s next but nothing happens, nothing is next, just white.
I wait. Time passes, presumably, on the white plane. I get tired of waiting.
I create a table at a restaurant. Or I think I do. Immediately something feels wrong. The table has a “real” aspect, even though I’ve never seen it before, as of something I didn’t create myself but imported. Your inventory of imports is limited to items you have stored in your memory, or you can create new items out of the ether, or you can commingle the two and create a hybrid. Oftentimes, mistaken memories create the hybrids on their own and when you strip things down these inaccuracies hopefully go out with the garbage.
This table is real, I can feel it, and I know it isn’t in my inventory. I sketch in a little more, placesettings and chairs, other tables in the restaurant, stone-tile floor beneath a wall of exposed brick. There’s a purse next to one of the chairs, it’s from my inventory and I place it as my boss’s purse. The brick wall has one of those Campari posters you can find in any college grad’s first apartment. A smell creeps in around me, maybe a wood-burning stove. There are five glasses of red wine on the table, and yellow sunlight, tinted as if filtered through an awning, begins washing across the scene. A window looking out on a city street at midday confirms the yellow awning. Footsteps of patrons and waiters, heels clicking on the stone, the breeze as the door to a patio opens and closes, glasses tinging each other and ice cubes tinging inside the glasses. A counter of orange and yellow tile. The smell of the stove is familiar; I think I know where I am. There is a Tuscan restaurant down the street from my office; I’ve never been there but I’ve walked by it often enough. I look out the window and the view crystallizes; I see a street sign and know that’s it. It’s still filling in slowly like a grave rubbing. The sign says “Rustico,” It’s another of those small chains that mix twenty influences in a pot and pretend they all came from the same point of origin. The ceiling is a powdery orange dreamsicle color and spotlights glare off the focused table’s blonde-wood surface. One of my seldom seen colleagues from work is at the table, and then two more. My boss is drinking her wine and the waiter, in black pants and vest with a white shirt, is refilling her water, he has a napkin over his forearm. There are two seats left and at one of them appears a pretty girl I’ve never seen before. Everyone is drinking to her and it occurs to me that she has joined Central and they’re celebrating. The final chair has its back to me. The back seems enormous, I can’t see around the sides of it to tell who’s in it, but it’s obvious it’s me. I feel my weight shift as my avatar reaches for the wine; I feel the dry bite as it goes down.
“The only way we were going to get Pryce down here,” my boss is saying, “in the daytime, to meet you, was to bait him with a free lunch.”
“The Phantom of the Corporation,” says Denning, picking at a Roma tomato.
“Light burns,” I offer, the new girl laughs.
“Mariza will be my second,” my boss explains. “She will take care of tech support and I’ll take care of development projects.”
“Does that mean anything to you, Pryce?” asks Denning. He turns to the new girl. “Pryce can’t code, he can barely use a machine.”
“Pryce can spell,” says my boss. The other two haven’t looked up from their feeding, making the most of an infrequent windwall.
“A-S-T-R-O-P-H-Y-S-I-C-I-S-T,” I spell. Mariza and my boss clap appreciatively.
“At Central,” says Denning, “we have the luxury of non-essential personnel.”
“You make me essential, Denning,” I say. “If they ever get rid of you they won’t need me anymore. Keep the bugs coming, you’re paying my rent.”
“Now boys,” says my boss, “I’m sure Miss Mariza is very impressed with your IT machismo.”
“Nerdzilla versus Megalodork,” manages Fischmann, between intakes of pasta.
“Don’t cast stones, Fischmann,” says my boss, “no one else brought their manual on Flash to lunch with them,” too late, he’s submerged already.
O looks up from his plate long enough to give the new girl a once over that would land him in sensitivity training for a week were we within office walls.
“I think I can appreciate what both of you do,” Mariza says. “For you,” to Dunning, “each line is like a beam in a house you’re building, and slowly you create the framework, then the walls and the furnishings until you have a livable house. And you,” me, “are like the building inspector. You fix the flaws in the house. He resents you because you aren’t building the houses yourself but without you they’d come crashing down.”
“Or at least look stupid,” I say. “And where is your place in the conceit?”
“I’m there for when there’s an earthquake and the ground opens up and eats your house. For when things go terribly wrong.” There is a stillness hovering over the table, and I feel somehow like she’s talking to me. Not the me in the chair, but the one hanging back still with one foot in LD.
My boss expenses the lunch and they all file outside. I follow after my avatar (or am I the avatar?) and once I get out the door there’s only white. I can look back into the restaurant like into a movie set, but now it’s empty and abandoned.
I knew a girl that could remember the pattern of the wallpaper in every room she visited in her dreams. That isn’t healthy. They’re supposed to disappear, be assimilated and sink back down in. Trying to ascribe a meaning to what is very little more than random association isn’t interpretation, it’s madness waiting to happen; we aren’t talking about ones and zeroes here, it’s more like when Garfield eats pizza before bedtime. Your body and mind can think you’re upset for the wrong reasons, or they can send you peaceful places that mean nothing, or your dream could be Hamlet as performed by two rocks and a shrub.
I was staying awake, or so I thought, when I began to think about why it was that I was pulling so hard at the strings of my past. What I was looking for, or hoping to accomplish. I could only do this by dreaming up someone that was just like me and asking why he is that way:
Several years had passed and, rather than creating new memories, Elliot Broder continued to dwell on the forsaken connections of his early life. Never becoming a true part of those other lives, he thought mainly about whether this had been his true path or simply a mistake, a giant error in navigation brought about one degree at a time. And what connections was he looking to form now, something with his disinterested co-workers? Or a new beginning with a possible hallucination? Or find some way to go back and right some wrong long ago, some moment of opportunity that may never have existed?
Was the lost connection still there, he wondered, some friendship or romance meant to endure but squelched in its infancy; some great love that stayed a friendship, some great friendship that stayed an acquaintance. If so, he had to admit, the reason why he was the one pining, searching, for things that never happened was, in all likelihood, because he was not the one who was missed. Ever the passive partner, ever required to be the motive force, how many of these paths were unexplored because he never took the first step down them himself? It would be easy to think that the others in the equations lost as much, so they should have sought him out but…had that been the case certainly there would be some evidence that his status or even whereabouts were of interest to anybody at all. This, alas, was not the case, and he was easy to locate.
Again, in all likelihood, this was because he was not the one who was missed. He was the one who felt the ache of the absence, mourning for loves that never happened, that perhaps never could have happened, like mourning for an unborn child; and the never-conceived issues of these never-kindled loves seemed to watch him, disapproving of the choices that lead him to this spot where the body and mind had been healthy but the heart was so dulled and muted he began trying to stimulate it artificially.
The memory of infatuation; of love; of concrete realizable lust; the fear, even, of that love’s betrayal and expunction were as faded as Broder’s recollections of real adrenaline, real thrill, real joy. When had all sensation gone? In the same past he continued to return to, brooding over ancient wrongs, resentments and embarrassments, attempting to recreate as fully as possible all memories of every particular that surrounded him at the times marked in his mental catalogue of love, of joy, of peace.
This “past” he repeatedly returned to was like a play or a film where the production has ceased and the players have left behind their old personas to move on to new roles, new scenarios. They would no wish for a character of uncertain regard from a very old, vaguely remembered, perhaps actively repressed show to suddenly appear asking about the old half-remembered routines. What place for Broder could there be now when his position at the time was nebulous at best and perhaps could not even be recalled with any clarity except to note that it may be this ill-definition that was its defining characteristic. As with the lost pieces of his memory he would most likely be defined in the memories he was supposed to inhabit by his absence.
I’ve been clean for a month.
Every now and then I get tingles of association, mainly when I’m actually sleeping I’ll come across stripped down areas of my psyche; defragmented regions that look deforested. I’ll remember later almost recognizing the scene but I shake it off, I am trying to let my dreams take me where they want.
I am working during the day and sleeping at night. I am typing to people on the web with whom I might actually make a personal contact. I am trying to let my waking life take me where it wants.
Every now and again there are twinges of feeling. Phantom pain. Sometimes I cry at movie trailers when they use that sweeping manipulative music. Sometimes it feels like there is some other part of me that has been asleep waking up, trying to arise, but it just doesn’t know how to go about it and I’m not much help.
I was in a cab the other day and it skidded out, oncoming traffic was bearing down on us, we barely made it back on the road before we were killed, I actually felt scared…I guess that means it mattered to me if I was here.
One other thing. And I can’t be sure. But the other day I was in the Central Square and through the millions doddering here and there I could swear for one second through the crowd I thought I saw the girl from the restaurant, Mariza. Take from that what you will.