By Rebecca Morn
"What do you want?" Carl
Streumer demanded of the paper-boy standing before him on the other side of
the tattered screen door.
The boy looked
terrified. Although Carl was only average in height, his tangled shock of
slightly graying hair, the haggard anger in his face, and the crooked creases of clothes long worn made him
seem much more imposing than he really was. More than he usually was, more
accurately to say.
The boy held up a
battered set of collection cards on a ring, stammering, "S-sir, I'm
collecting for the Herald." Offering his explanation, the boy tried
to force himself to meet Carl’s gaze, but clearly, but even in the dimness
of the porch, the hard stare of gray eyes, red-rimmed with lack of sleep,
frightened him. He looked down and away almost immediately.
The paper-boy, however,
appeared to have noticed the silver locket, the one dangling from the slim
chain wrapped around Carl’s fist, as his gaze slipped back towards it.
Carl tried to order his
thoughts, think of what to do. He clenched the locket tighter
and said in short, clipped tones, enunciating each word, "I have no use for
newspapers. Cancel it. Just leave me alone!"
With that, he turned
away, slamming the door behind him. He could hear the paper-boy's quick
footsteps as he hurried away.
Inside, Carl slumped
against the door as if he were using the weight of his weariness to keep it
shut. "I didn't have to scare the shit out of that kid," he breathed to
himself. "Why the hell am I doing this? Displaced aggression?"
The hand that clutched
the locket he pressed against his chest. Finally, with a sigh that
shuddered a little, he levered himself up off the door and lurched back into
the mess that was once a living-room.
Partly because of his
exhaustion and the rest due to the heavy curtains shutting out the light,
Carl stumbled on one of the many piles of books and notes that lay strewn
all over the floor. He caught himself just in time on the edge of the
coffee table, but sent two of the books flying and scattered at least a ream
of used papers.
Still leaning on the
table, he pulled his legs free and sat on the overstuffed sofa that, except
for the two walls of bookshelves in front and to the left of him, dominated
the room. Many of these shelves were in fact empty, leaving dust to collect
on the polished oak.
These shelves had once
held the books now in piles on the dirty, green carpet, old psychology and
philosophy texts from his college days in pursuit of a degree now useless,
in addition to at least a dozen overdue library books. The only books left
on the disused shelves were those Carl had bought when he turned to
freelance writing for a living. This latter group had remained untouched
for about as long as the others had been on the floor.
Carl sat unthinking for
a short time while his hand, almost of its own volition, moved up into his
field of vision until his tired eyes came to rest upon the locket, as they
had countless times before. He gazed at the delicate seven-point star
worked into its tiny cover, barely larger than his thumbnail. Swaying on
the silver-link chain, it gleamed—the only bright thing in the room—as if it
soaked up all the light and then released it in short bursts, refusing to be
dull. When his mind came back to him, Carl opened the clasp and looked upon
the even finer detail of the face inscribed in bas-relief within.
As he remembered the
woman who matched that fair, smooth face and the long flowing hair the
artisan of the locket had captured with such precision, Carl's chest grew
tight, and his breath quickened. But by slow degrees his face began to
harden, his brow lowering, and the corners of his mouth twisted in an expression of gall.
A groan forced its way
between his teeth and with closed eyes, he snapped the locket shut and
jammed it into his pocket.
Cursing silently, Carl
reached for the last book he'd been reading before the paper-boy's
interruption, a dusty tome called Philosophy and Humanity, written by an
obscure professor from some backwoods college he'd never heard of.
With a legal note pad in
hand, he took up where he'd left off.
"The nature of reality,"
it read in pompous tones of absolute authority, "has never been adequately
explained and, due to its subjective and sometimes solipsistic qualities, is
especially difficult to explore. No single man can claim to have
experienced reality and still convey that special understanding to anyone
else. This particular section deals with dreams and the problems they pose
to the philosophical questions of what reality is. Dreams tend to be
amongst the most intriguing of these studies because nowhere else are we
confronted with situations which are clearly outside the domain of
conventional reality and yet have aspects which can cause serious doubt,
lack of control being one such aspect and the experience of temporal
distortions (several hours or even days seeming to take place during a
single dream session, for example), in addition to—"
Carl closed his eyes and
let the book drop from his hand. Then, reopening them reluctantly, he
lunged at a pile of papers and pulled them into his lap. Leafing through
the crumpled, yellow sheets, he soon found what he didn't want to find and
groaned. The scrawled notes were quite familiar: Dreams, lack of control,
temporal distortions, they all appeared as black squiggles on the wrinkled
paper. Soon, he let these papers rustle to the carpet and leaned his head
back until it rested on the dingy curtain against the window behind him.
And before long, with the dimness and stifling warmth of the sealed room and
exhaustion, Carl drifted to sleep.
*
* *
"But if this is all a
dream," he was saying, "then I'll wake up eventually and lose everything
I've found here."
Carl gestured around
himself, from the grass covered hill he reclined on, to the old stone
fortress about a mile off to his left, to the woman who lay beside him. Her
face matched the one in the locket, which she wore on her neck, shrouding
all with her long brown tresses. She sat up, pulled her legs under the full
skirts of her simple white gown, and said, "Why then, my love, would you
cheat yourself out of what might be, just because you may be dreaming?
Dreams are magic; why question a gift such as this?"
"You don't understand,
Faer," Carl said, propping himself up on his elbows. "Where I come from,
people don't believe in dreams. Those who do anyway are usually put away.
Before I started writing articles for a living, I studied a special
discipline called psychology. Dreams are supposed to be unconscious
processes, releasing pressure so to speak. Everything I dream is in my own
head, even if I can't control what happens to me."
Carl knew that she
probably didn't understand half of what he'd said, but Faer just smiled and
put one cool finger to Carl's forehead, saying in a voice full of care, "Do
not frown so, beloved. I, too, could not bear to lose you."
Carl then pulled his
wife closer and looked thoughtfully over the countryside. He frowned
anyway. It
was the quiet, introspective moments like this that bothered him the most.
His memory and reasoning told him he'd gone to sleep only a few hours ago at
most and was now having a vivid dream, probably due to the huge amount of
rum he'd drunk that evening.
His memories of that day
were hazy, almost as if it, and not this, were the dream. But he did recall
all too clearly that his former life hadn't been very pleasant, utter
loneliness comprising the majority of it. Back in college, he'd taken up
psychology solely because he had wanted to be with people, and help them,
and yet had to give up his dream of a practice for the imposed seclusion of
a writer's life.
Freelance writing was
only marginally better than unemployment, but by spending nearly all his
time churning out articles for psychology magazines, Carl was able to
support himself and his rented house. Barely.
Everyday life had
consisted of dragging himself out of bed early in the morning, writing for a
few hours, and around noon going out to check the mail for replies to his
query letters. Sometimes there'd be a check and sometimes Carl would mail
off a couple more articles. Then he'd read the dry psychology magazines
that came (when they did), write some more and then go to bed. He ate
whenever he remembered to do so.
Carl hated the tedium,
but when he had sat down and thought about it that one particular night, he
honestly didn't know what else to do. He still couldn't start a practice,
but he couldn't go on writing and existing without people around to talk to,
to have friends. Even children feared him anymore; he had noted the
frightened stares as he made his infrequent trips to the market or to the
post-office for stamps. Even the children—it was more than he could bear.
So as his thoughts
chased themselves, fleeting wisps of reason, he'd remained there in the
darkened living-room, drinking straight rum out of a tumbler that tasted
vaguely like the orange juice it had held that morning, and wishing all the
time he was somewhere else. At first, he tortured himself with apathy and
despair and self-pity, but after a while he couldn't even feel those anymore
and so he'd drifted away from himself.
Faer shifted in his
arms, murmuring a quiet sigh in the warm sunshine. Carl remembered more
about his initial disbelief when he came to in what had to be an impossible
world. It had struck him at first as being from a medieval time, what with
knights jousting, kings ruling their subjects (mostly peasants), and stone
fortresses and castles. And Faer was right, dreams were magic here, but so
were many other things, and people besides. Carl's arrival about two
hundred yards south of the large castle off to his left, the one topped with
six tall spires, had been later explained as the failed attempt of the
sorcerer's apprentice to summon a demon.
Yet this dream was far
more than just a fantasy; beauty lived and breathed here. It was exactly
what he had needed. It was Different.
It was also the product
of a sick mind. Carl had studied such delusions back in college. Sometimes
he chided himself, Come on. A medieval fantasy? The idea wasn't even
original.
He wondered if he'd lost
his sanity. He also didn’t buy the notion that if you questioned your
sanity, you were sane. He’d known plenty of crazy people who were
one-hundred percent aware they were several marbles short of a full bag.
Much had happened since
he'd awakened here, enough to fill entire volumes, over a year of
happiness. But to Carl it was sufficient to say only that after his initial
confusion and disbelief, he soon came to love this clean, unspoiled world,
and especially its clean, unspoiled people. Even if at times, it seemed
like a tale out of La Morte d'Arthur or some fantasy novel, or worse still a
product of his sick mind, he felt a pang anytime he even considered the
possibility of giving up his new life. And that pang would turn sour and
hard in his stomach when he imagined his future without Faer.
Psychologists even, he
glowered, are not immune to falling in love.
When Carl looked up
again, he was shocked to discover that his field of vision had foreshortened
and taken on a slight blurriness at its outer edges. With that realization,
he knew deep down that he was merely re-experiencing his final moments in
that former dream once again. Dreaming the dream, he thought dismayed. It
had happened so many times before over the past month. And still it went
on. Again.
He heard himself saying,
almost as if in the distance, "What bothers me the most is that once I do
wake up—"
"Are you so certain you
will?" interrupted Faer with sad, pitying tones.
"I know it. Sometimes I
can feel it. It's like a tugging at my soul, or maybe it's my liver. Hell,
I don't know." He laughed bitterly. "Once I do wake up, I'll begin to
doubt this ever happened. That's the way dreams are, never any proof and
then all I've ever had here will just fade away."
A slight frown creased
her forehead while Faer thought, but a moment later her face brightened as
she exclaimed, "I have it!"
She bent her head so
that its long waves of hair brushed Carl's leg as she fumbled with the catch
to her locket. Again, Carl felt the stab of memory. This has happened
before.
No, don't give it to me!
he wanted to shout but was helpless to do so.
Eventually, she worked
the catch and the chain came free. As she held it up in the sun, it
sparkled, each flash catching Carl squarely across the eyes, blinding him
for an instant each time. In between, he could see Faer's visage softening
and hear her voice saying, "Silver is magic, too. And besides, this has been
Enchanted. It will stay with you."
She paused and caught
her breath; Carl lost his. Faer's eyes hardened and in a hollow voice, she
said, "Our love will be the bond to keep you here with me..."
Carl's hand went out by
itself but all he could see was Faer smiling brightly as she dropped the
locket into his open palm. It took forever to fall. The silver
caught the sunlight, flashing white into his eyes, blinding him completely
with white.
The white overwhelmed
him.
*
* *
Carl snapped his eyes
open in horror, confused by the sudden darkness. All he could see was
black. He flailed his arms about until finally they touched the fabric of
his couch. Calming himself, he fumbled a little more near the end-table and
turned the 3-way light on to its lowest setting. The light dazzled him,
and, as he surveyed the room through purple spots, he was greeted with a
sharp wrench in the back of his neck.
Carl winced, and
massaging his neck slowly, he climbed to his feet and once again avoided the
piles of books and papers, making his way to the kitchen.
The pain subsided
somewhat as he splashed cold water on his face over the dirty sink filled
with dishes. Drying himself with a dishtowel he glanced over at the digital
clock on the stove. Three-zero-seven, it said. Carl's stomach grumbled,
but he didn't listen to it.
Soon, his mind came back
to him and he could think again. He turned away from the sink, and with a
weary, shuffling gait, returned to the living-room littered with its piles
of knowledge, his hands jammed in his pockets. The fingers of the right
found the locket by themselves.
The smooth texture of
the chain caught at his attention, bringing unwanted awareness. Stopping
abruptly, Carl pulled it free and dangled the shining star in front of him
as he stood motionless among the books. He gazed at it, wondering what to
do.
"No," he said aloud,
rather hoarsely. "I can't take this anymore."
Carl crossed the room
and dropped to the sofa once more. He sighed and said to the room, "Fine.
Look at it rationally. Last month I had a dream. A vivid dream. It left
me depressed and confused. A few days later, I just happened to find an
object, a silver locket to be exact, laying in the grass on the edge of the
sidewalk, not two blocks from the supermarket. It matched the one in the
dream precisely, down to the last detail. And as was stated in the dream,
that locket was to 'stay with me'. Just a coincidence?"
The room didn't answer.
Carl thought into the gloom for a time. Then he said, "Or is it possible
I've confused the order of the events? Maybe the locket preceded the dream
and I've hidden that fact. I can't deny I have been having these recurrent
nightmares, and they were all afterwards. Maybe I built up the dream beyond
what it was, altered it to fit my conception of the facts. Or even just
fabricated the original dream entirely."
Carl stood and crossed
the room to look out the single window on the left wall, just beside the
bookshelves. He leaned upon the edge. The moon outside lit his yard,
giving it an eldritch glow.
He spoke again, "I don't
see how I could come up with these arguments if I'm not still capable of
rational thinking. I shouldn't even be able to conceive of memory
distortions if that's what I'm doing. And I can remember unrelated events
too, and how I felt and what I did between the original dream and when I
found the locket."
Suddenly, he yanked
himself away from the window. "Now wait a minute! I thought I was trying
to be objective. Look at the facts: A delusion about a medieval fantasy and
a silver locket. Hell, that's not even original!"
Carl stamped back to the
couch, kicking up papers on the way. He sat again. "A magic locket?" he
snorted in derision. "That's practically a cliché. Did I alter my wife—I
mean, the woman in the dream to fit the engraving. Or dream about the woman
in the locket and convince myself that the dream came first?"
Again, the room offered
no answers. Carl lifted the chain before him, just then noticing that he'd
been clenching it all this time. He stared at the silvery locket and with a
motion of his thumb opened it. Faer's eyes gazed at something beyond him.
"Is it you?" he
breathed. Before long, he couldn't stand it anymore and snapped the cover
shut.
He shoved it into his
pocket. In a voice that despite a strangle-hold of self-control still
betrayed hurt, he asked, "How can it be so exact? What is the rational
explanation?"
Since no one else could
answer, Carl took a few deep breaths and sat up straighter. He said, "Due
to a depressed and frustrated state of mind, the subject was highly
susceptible to suggestion. Upon finding a small and rather obvious object,
the subject evolved an elaborate delusion in which he convinced himself that
he had dreamed the situation before finding the object. The subject has
followed well-established patterns and tendencies, including certain
neurotic and possibly border-line schizophrenic behavior."
Carl laughed, but it was
a tight and forced sound. He rubbed his temples with one hand. "And
obsessive-compulsive behavior, too." He gestured grandly at the piles of
books.
"Is that it then?" he
asked. "I've convinced myself that I had an adventure like 'A Connecticut
Yankee' and all this time I've been trying to justify it? For all that
matters, I could've pulled the case straight out of a textbook. It almost
makes sense..."
Carl stared ahead, not
seeing anything. His eyes unfocused as he thought about what he'd said.
Suddenly, they flared up and his lips curled back from his teeth. "But
that's not what I remember!" he shouted, startling himself.
Carl rocked forward
until his head was between his knees, with his arms tight against his
chest. He stared at the convolutions of the carpet. He whispered, "Okay.
My dream was just like a fantasy story. What do fantasy heroes do in
situations like this?"
Find a miraculous way
back and reclaim his lost love, Carl's thoughts mocked him.
"I can't do
that," he croaked. "I'm no hero and my life isn't a fantasy story."
Carl lunged to his feet
and roared, "Dammit!"
He kicked at the books,
sending them flying. He lashed out at the papers on the coffee-table.
Reaching down he grabbed a huge pile of notes and flung it at the
bookshelves. The papers rebounded and drifted to the floor.
Carl looked for more,
eager for violence. "Motherfucker!" he bellowed. "I have to go back! It
never happened!"
His eyes, edged in
white, raced around the room. He had to destroy…something. Anything. He
wanted desperately to hear the splintering crash of a coffee-table against
the bookshelves, feel the shock of it shoot up his arms. He longed to shred
the books, tear each one into tiny pieces, and then watch flames consume
them all. Burn out the disease, cauterize it. As he stood in the center of
the living-room, motionless, another wave of frenzied rage began to build,
threatening to overwhelm him. Carl clenched himself as it grew, feeding
upon itself. The wave of hatred and self-loathing rose high within and
crashed.
But instead of giving
release to his fury, letting go, he pulled it inside himself, greeted it
like a lover. It burned, searing him. He stood among the mayhem he'd
created, like an icon, breathing hard and deep, in and out. His hands
repeatedly tightened into fists at his sides.
But gradually, an
outward veneer of calm eased over his tortured features; his eyes lost their
edge of fire. Before long, all volition deserted him and he swayed,
uncertain.
Suddenly, Carl dropped
to the floor on the piles of papers and books. He began to rock back and
forth, and held his face in his hands. His shoulders shook a little.
After a long while, the
motions slowed and eventually stopped. Carl let his hands fall to his lap,
where they laid still as if they were never really his. He blinked several
times and licked his lips. Then he said decisively, "Irrationality must be
the key."
He stared ahead,
unseeing. Carl spoke again. "Rational thinking says I'm not rational
anymore. So I'll have to be irrational and irrational people are called
crazy. What would a crazy person do?"
He blinked again.
"Well, I have to pick something."
Carl thought about it
for a while, sorting through possibilities. There were so many psychoses to
choose from. Then he had it; he made his choice. At least being a
psychologist has been useful for something, he thought.
Carl sighed deeply and
pulled himself up off the floor. After making his way back to the kitchen,
he returned with a turkey sandwich on stale bread and a glass of milk that
just bordered on going sour. He devoured these quickly, heedless of the
crumbs dropped on the papers and books and carpet, looking about the room,
fixing it firmly in his memory.
When he finished and had
replaced the glass in the kitchen, Carl went to his knees among the piles.
He gathered all the papers together, ignoring the scrawls upon each. He
crawled all around the room, and even scrabbled under the couch for a few
stray sheets. The dust he raised made him sneeze a couple of times.
Then, with a huge double
arm-full of yellowed and crumpled papers, he walked to the back door and
dumped it into the open garbage can to his right. He debated whether or not
to toss in a match, but decided against it. The garbage can was
sufficient. No need to create a fire hazard which might spread to the
neighbors’ houses.
Carl brushed his hands
together once and went back to the living-room. He looked down at the books
that remained on the floor and soon set to gathering them up and replacing
them on his shelves. The borrowed books he placed on the end-table nearest
the front door. As he did so, Carl unfolded and straightened the pages as
best he could, smoothing each on carefully. Those he had torn, he repaired
with cellophane tape.
When he was done with
the books, Carl began to reorder the furniture, heaving the sofa closer to
the window. He placed the coffee-table back in front of the couch. He
wondered then whether he should dust the bookshelves, but decided against
this also. It might be a very long time before they anybody saw them
anyway.
Next, he returned to the
kitchen and washed the dishes in the sink, replacing each in the cupboard as
he finished them.
Then Carl went over to
the refrigerator, and upon opening it proceeded to throw everything into a
grocery bag. Everything went: The last of the sour milk, a dry lump of
unidentified cheese, all the frozen dinners, a few pieces of vague fruit or
vegetable. Even the bottled items were included, the ketchup, the
strawberry jam, and some salad dressing. The glass hit the floor with a
loud thump.
When he'd finally
emptied it, Carl turned the fridge off and propped the door open. The full
grocery bag, he took out back and unceremoniously dumped it on top of the
papers in the can. Let the stray animals have what they wanted, if they
cared for food that really was no longer fit for consumption anyway.
He went back inside and,
after closing and locking the back door behind him, walked back to the
living-room once again. He looked all about him, turning a complete circle,
to make sure everything was in place. Carl continued his careful scrutiny
as he moved toward the end-table by the front-door. He locked the
deadbolt. Wouldn't want kids to get in first, he reasoned.
Finally satisfied, Carl
reached over to turn out the light, but hesitated at the last second. He
thought for a moment and then pulled open the drawer in the table removing a
pencil and a piece of paper from inside. After writing "To be returned to
the library" and placing the note on top of the stack of borrowed books
where someone would find it easily, Carl took one last look at the room to
make sure all was in order. He glanced at the bookshelves, packed full of
absolute knowledge, and whispered, "I don't need you anymore."
Eventually, he turned
out the light, the higher settings on the 3-way dazzling him. Soon though,
he was able to see again, and sighing he went upstairs.
He stopped briefly in
the bathroom to take care of a minor detail.
He left the empty
prescription bottles on the sink so they'd find that also, whenever they
came to see what had happened to him. Sleeping pills and pain killers were
a cliché too, but that really didn't matter.
Then Carl went to bed.
(Copyright 2004, all rights reserved. Duplication, retransmission, or
alteration without permission is prohibited.)
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