I just started working on this story the other day. I thought I'd just give a little sample of what I've been writing. If you see any problems with points-of-view or tenses changing... that's your problem, not mine. It's long enough that you might want to just print the thing.
If you haven't visited my blog in awhile, there are some recent posts below this story that you might want to skip over to, including some pictures from my work.
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Adolescence. Mark receives messages from a box and tube, little flickers telling him what to think, what to say, what to be. Mom’s hooked on junk, gristle in her mouth, caffeine in blood, nicotine in her patch. She’s hooked on men; hooked on diet pills with money back guarantees. Dad’s gone, lives somewhere else, but sits in the corner, rusty wheelchair, drool on his face. But it’s okay. TV. Inculcation. Repetition. Buy this. Buy that. Invisible beams, space satellites, people from unknown lands, raise this adolescence into a unit, a man, a cog.
College. Marriage. The Work Place. Something is wrong. And then, the transmission is interrupted.
Mark sat there in his cookie cutter cubicle thinking cookie cutter things. But his cookie thinking was about to transform and grow into something never seen or thought of in the history of the most disgusting creature: the Homo sapiens sapiens. The change doesn’t happen right now though, not in the presence of his buffoon friends, but far off into oblivion, another universe you might say: that is now my history. But for now, before the making, he sits idle, talking with his cubicle buddies. There are four of them.
The person to the left of myself (or Mark) is Mack. His head is perfectly round like the cantaloupe, symmetrical, not colored consistently around the curves, and dented with pock marks. When Mack goes home, he asks his wife, "How was your day?" She responds like a robot, "It was okay. How was yours?" At this point, Mack, responds like a robot, "It was okay." After this they will eat and watch TV. TV makes their relationship beautiful and healthy and even tender. They turn on the box and turn off the three pounds of meat that lurks behind the eyes. The couple will live vicariously through bad actors, realistic sets, blazing colors, and ridiculous plot lines.
Sitting next to Mack is Bill. The funny thing about Bill is that he resembles a typical Bill. He parts what he says is genuine hair to the side, wears a blue hand-me-down suit that he thinks is new, is in his mid to late 40’s, fat, and looks like he wishes he wasn’t married. In fact, later that night, he won’t be.
The fourth unit is Niles. His creamy flesh, ocean eyes, chiseled contours, and teethy smile make you wish you were him. But you’re not. After work, he will go home to watch men wearing uniforms: Broncos, Bears, Dolphins, Beavers, or some other deranged animal, prance around all sweating, grabbing each other, hugging, holding and sometimes even fondling. This makes him "a man" for reasons even the greatest of philosophers still don’t understand. Niles claims he has slept with a different female every week. His claim is valid with the exception of that onset of latent chickenpox about a year ago.
I would tell you the details of what they are working on but it’s too dull and too blah and so awful that it really doesn’t matter. They look at spreadsheets, run numbers, and wonder to themselves what it’s all about. You see, the Four are just stupid cogs in a stupid machine in a company they don’t understand. All they know is that they work in insurance and are constantly told they are making the world a better place. They all believe this too.
The problem with these four gentlemen in this absolutely true story is that they don’t actually exist. Well, they do, but only in Mark’s head. Because right now, Mark is comatose in the dream-state. And even this might not be true. Or, it could be the other way around.
It’s important to move back into history, a history so far back, it goes beyond the Medieval Age, the Ice Age, the Dinosaur Age, and keeps going back to the beginning, to that single point: the dot, and going further, behind time and out the other side into a parallel universe where things are real. We are no longer dreaming, my friend. This is Reality.
Mark’s eyelids creased open allowing cascading floods of photons to swarm inside and onto the retina. Rods and cones ignite sending impulses rupturing in streams down the bundle of twisted meat of the optic nerve and then into the occipital lobe. Chemicals and networks of beautiful drugs swim, frolic, dance, and even communicate.
Mark is awake. He wipes crusties from his puffy lids.
He finds four men sitting at cubicles. They are Mark, Mack, Bill, and Niles. Bill says something like, "Hey Mark, did you check out Nascent Group?" Mark says nothing because he is trying to understand something he’s not capable of understanding. What I was trying to understand wasn’t about clapping hands or falling trees or any of that nonsense, but about why I felt so normal.
Finally, Mark says, "Yeah. I’m going there today."
Nascent Group makes drugs that effect other drugs inside the skull. I will be their toad for a week as I sign my body over to them for tests. Big Money. They claim their new pill will make dreaming feel totally authentic, meaningful, real, existent. Conscious awareness and memory mimic normal waking life. This is what I am told.
Nascent: just another building, dank as dirt, stained like coffee teeth, piled in city of leaning towers and dirty air. Mark sits beneath the fluorescent lights as the glare green, hues, and other unnatural colors, all of them horrible, descend upon him. The room is square and white-filled and has filthy diseases passed on by other patients, the germs creeping around in invisible worlds. You can smell the rot of overly used antiseptics and pesticides that no longer work. A doctor stands across from him touching Mark’s wiener and then scoops underneath and then fingers inside. "Okay, cough," he says with a smile. Gloves float through air before landing inside the garbage. "Swish," says Doctor Ramchandrin and then continues, still grinning with his Santa’s beard and devil eyes, "I think you’re ready, Mark." He writes on paper. "I need to warn you about the side effects. They can be intense. Sometimes euphoria sometimes paranoia but always powerful." Mark says okay, pulls up his trousers and takes his paper to the lab.
The lab is also square, windowless, and without humanity. Mark is met by a single bed, two doctors wearing white uniforms and a closet bathroom. Mark sees the restraints on the bed while blood pumps thickly through his heart. "Don’t worry, Mark. We’ve never had to use the restraints."
The next thing I know, I’m strapped down to the bed screaming about something. Not really sure what I was saying or if it was even English. A doctor who appears to be 18 feet tall jam-packs me full of a beautiful narcotic. I sleep.
Mark finds himself sitting on a paisley couch of orange and yuck. A television talks to him about war and death and famine and other things he will never appreciate. Two pictures hang above the tube with awful images of mutinous nature and the wood floors sit there waiting to be walked on. He is home. The lady next to him is his wife. She looks indifferent to him. Her soothing skins now looks rough, her makeup cracked, so thick he can smell it on her face.
What happened? He accidentally thought instead of moving his tongue.
"What happened?" he asks.
René’s head twists from the shoulder like a haunted ventriloquist and says in monotone, "Oh, good. You’re doing better." Her head turns back to the TV while her eyes glitter and fill with infotainment. All is glorious inside René’s head.
"How did I get back here?" Edges of insanity and grief and disbelief spilling from Mark. This time her body, flabby cheeks, tall forehead, wiry hairs, all animate as a whole. She is a homely home mother. She wears something like a moo-moo with stubbles of hair stuck in her armpits and flip-flops instead of slippers.
Her face changes from absence to genuine concern and then running on in relief: "Oh good. You’re okay. I mean you kept asking ‘How did I get here?’ And I’d say ‘Get where? You’re home.’ But then you would ask again two minutes later." She pauses. "You look different now. "
"I don’t remember asking about getting here," I say.
"Man, you really had me scared. I talked to the doctors and they kept insisting you would be fine. They want you to go back tomorrow. I said, 'no way, José'. You’re not setting feet in that place again. Comma. Period. Explanation point. I really told them."
"Okay. Fine. But, how did I get back here?"
"Get where? You’re home. What did I tell you?"
And then suddenly everything was back to the norms of life.
The home is small. The ceiling shoots up to 5 feet and 3 inches so Mark has adapted a spine that looks like a question mark. It is a house with two bedrooms, one with trashy furniture, the other with equally trashy furniture, living room built around the Tube, and a kitchen made for a large midget.
Slouched in the kitchen, he sets the table. He tells René, "I love you," while thoughts wander back to when they met. It was in the year 40-pounds-ago. They had biology together, but he had seen her before. He eyed her in Ninth. Mark pulled tricks and jokes all completely immature, some about body noise and some about babies being crushed or strangled. They were all funny. He found that René liked the morbid funnies and so he was attracted to her even more.
René was simple minded, believed anything she was told, kooky, and little deranged in a cookie cutter sort of way. Her father was raw, a beast really, and had even touched her groinal region on numerous occasions. She blamed all of her problems on father: the weight, the depression, the bad acne, and her antisocial disposition, all of it and anything. But it wasn’t her father’s fault. Like many people, she just had defective genes.
She cooked and he ate. Potatoes smashed with a splatters of butter, green sticks of bean stacked like pick-up-sticks, and the white gland juice from a cow’s teat swished around in a translucent mug. All was right.
Green vines on orange, little pink flowers, chaotic, trashy, all of these things were the wallpaper. "You seem okay to me. But can you really tell fact from fantasy? How do you know this isn’t a dream? That you’re not in the experiment right now? " René asked. Her brightly lit moo-moo matched the brightly lit paper behind her. Mark focused his cornea, only seeing René’s lumpy head, while the rest of her was camouflaged in the thickness and tackiness that was behind her. Her head seemed to squeeze from the wall itself. "Come on. Tell me. How do you know this isn’t a dream?" René’s face was now in his face, her eyes like tunnels of blackness burrowing down into infinity, her mouth moved violently, "How do you know? Come on. How do you know? Tell me. Tell me now! Are you dreaming?" She flopped back in her chair proud of herself, happy to dominate him as usual.
René's face, every muscle, everything expression, calmed into a blizzard of serenity. "How do you know this?"
"Because everything feels too real to be a dream."
That’s when I woke up.
The lady next to me has a soft snore like a generator in some far off land. Silk worm hair, skin from the gods, smell of nature’s water, beauty all wrapped up, bundled and cocooned. My René. I had awakened from a godless nightmare. I was back home, my abode, this was real time, real life. But what happened? Why did my dream feel so vivid?
Alarm. Snooze. Brush teeth. Brush hair. Socks. Shoes. Kiss goodbye. Mark in the lobby of some insurance uber-corporation, stands, gawks and feels standard, normal, ununique. People walk by. They look like replicas of himself, like he stands in a hall of mirrors. He desires his dream and even misses its terrible agony and fits of madness and that terrible clausterstranglation.
File. Print. Memo here, memo there. Who cares? Coffee. Eat. Leave. He sits at home with a book of yellow pages before him. Nascent Group. He finds and peels. He remembers the company from somewhere transparent.
It’s morning, the sky sighs, the clouds melt, the morning tingles under the skin with its nippiness. Nascent: a building among members, shines in light, colored by sky, a friend of city. Suite number 201: Reception. "Hello," says a voice behind plastic glass and pressed wood. She smiles, her grin too blissful for morning. Plump like hippo, soft as the fur, she awaits his answer. "Yeah, um, this might sound crazy, but I heard about this place from a dream and I’m just wondering what you do here exactly." Now he waits for her to talk.
A moment passes and then, "I’ll put you down as a walk-in. Have a seat, please."
I sit among the vacant seats. It’s quiet, like god removed my eardrums.
Suddenly, Mark finds himself in a large doctors office with the man from his dream, named Doctor Ramchandrin. Everything is clean, peaceful, and rearranged, at least compared to his dream. Is it the same place? He thinks so, but his thought are lies, so he doesn’t trust them. His heart goes thumpety-thump so brutal and so hasty he thinks maybe the doctor can hear the muscle pumping even through the chest plate.
"So, you were wondering what we do here?" the Indian man said. The Good Doc described neurons and dendrites, and chemicals here and chemical there, all with such detail and precision. But Mark would never fully understand.
"You make dreams feel real? With a drug?" I asked.
"No. Drugs don’t do that. We use a CXV machine. But I’m not sure if I can help you."
Confused, I questioned, "Why not?"
"Well, because you’re already dreaming." A moment of silence. And then Doctor starts laughing, all at Mark, all in his direction. A long arm with long dirty fingers reaches behind Mark’s ear and uncovers a buffalo nickel. "See, you can’t do that in a dream."
"Yes, you can," Mark says matter-of-factly.
"Okay, then. Let’s get you set up."
I’m in a room with two doctors who stand before a Victorian bed. Lining the wall are large windows, framed with elegant purple drapes of majesty that open to display the clearness and beauty of the city below. They say something and I lay on the bed. They are gone and Doctor Ramchandrin connects things to my head and then helmets me. "Are you sure you want this, Mark?"
I say, "Yes."
A movement. And then a tickling starts in my right cheek and then a burning, so much, so painful, that it reminds me of fire. "Wake up, man! You’re dreaming!" And then I realized the Doctor had slapped me like a new born babe. "How do you feel?" he says "How is it to be dreaming, dude?"
"It feels the same."
"Right!" The Doc says waving wilding, displaying the room with his hands. "That’s because you’re already in a dream. I’m not real. I’m you. This room is you. Welcome to you!"
I don’t know what I’m saying but I say it anyway, "How do I get back? How do exit a dream?"
"There’s something wrong with you, don’t you see? This is a psychiatric hospital not some Get High Get Low Let’s Have Fun With Our Dreamy Drugs kind of place. You have to find you and what’s wrong and how to fix this whole thing, that’s the way out. Now go and tell René you’re dreaming or you’re insane or whatever."
"But -"
"Just remember you’re trying to find yourself. Just a hint. Mark is not what he sees because he can observe color and texture. He is not hearing because he can observe sound. He is not the senses because he can observe them. Go to the source. Listen. Our time is up. I have my next appointment," and then Doctor Ramchandrin froze solid not blinking not moving, imitating one of those statues of great antiquity.
Mark returns home to tell his René the disgusting news. The house has many rooms, some with antique furniture, some with furniture minimalized and amplified, all the wallpaper is exquisite and says something like, "I’m classy, which means you’re classy."
The living room ceiling reaches high toward infinity, but stops at 17 feet and 2 inches. Chandelier of ruby and diamonds with a mixture of other Chinese cut glass dangles loosely over husband and wife. Husband tells Wife the story of dreams and axons and dendrites never really understanding the ramifications or that he might loosen her psyche. He knows she shall believe. But she does not.
"You’re flipping crazy," she says, wanting to say something else, but after all, this is not her dream. "You’re not dreaming. I’m not in your head. I have thoughts and feelings and a history. This is not trees falling in the forest, this is flesh," she smacks her skin, "this is real. When you leave I think about things. I watch TV. I eat. I sleep. I even have dreams. How do you think I got this perfect body. By just sitting around. No. I work out! I think about having babies. But no, that’s not for you, is it?"
"But -" And then for a moment I thought about how we met. It was in biology class. She was brilliant in all kinds of ways, not just in class but with everything. Everybody wanted to be by her, to talk to her, to touch her, to just be in her presence. She always dominated our conversation while I, a commoner, sat back, quiet, reserved. Something worked because she pursued me. She asked me out. She dominated me. And then I heard a voice, not in biology, but somewhere else, somewhere that was not in my memory.
"But what?" she says, and then continues her wicked dialogue from before I went to La La Land. "How do you know this isn’t the real thing and your dreams are. How do you know this? Wake up, Mark!"
I drive into the city and see people watching me from other cars, from the sidewalks, from inside the windows of storefronts. I sit with the Four. I am one of them, one of these subtle permutations of reality or whatever that other place is.
Bill peered up, sneaking a peek, looking for character, looking for suspicion while Niles bites and crunches on pieces of fingernail. He spits one onto his desk and then, "So, Mark? So, I’m hearing we’re just all inside of your head."
Mark gawks, composes and then, "What? Where did you hear such a stupid thing?"
"Bill told me."
Affirming his guilt, Bill erupts: "Dog gone it, Niles! I told you not to say anything," turning to me he cowers, "Sorry, man. The word’s getting around. I saw it on TV."
Niles says with his beautiful mouth, "Why did you have to get us involved. I don’t want to be here. I’d rather be someplace else."
Mack, using his cantaloupe, begins to speak of all things rational, non-confrontational. "Listen, we all have a job here. Let’s just get back to work and do our thing."
Niles says, "What thing? We’re in his head stupid. There is no thing." He turns to Mark. "Why couldn’t you dream up something more interesting, something with pizzazz and naked flesh and ..."
"I’m sorry! I’m sorry! It’s not my fault."
Bill, timidly, "Are we any different? I mean from the other place, your waking world?"
"Yeah. I think so. But I can’t really remember that well. Seems like the other place is dreary,"
Bill: "Well there you go, Niles. Things are better here."
"Well, how dreary are we talking about, Mark?" asks Niles.
"It’s pretty bad. Our whole lives are just routines and subroutines."
And then I remembered something. Something an Indian man told me about reality and characters and how everything is just in my head…
And then Niles says, "So, how do you know that you weren’t already in a dream and you’re dreaming inside a dream?"
Mark has no answer.
He returns home. He goes to bed, next to magical eyes and ears and other body parts, all them lean, all of them tender, and wakes up next to a slab of fat and gristle with chalky hair, loose parts and breath that kills rodents. Her name is René and they live in a two bedroom house. She constantly insists that Mark look at all of her flaws. She grabs hunks of fat and says, "See? I just can’t seem to loose it no matter how hard I try." And then she bites into brownies, portion for three, covered in caramel, sprinkled with walnut. She says, "the walnut has the good kind of fat."
When Mark finally responds, he says, "Oh."
At work, I realized I was just in a complicated assembly line and then a name came to me: Eli Whitney. Founder of the Cotton Gin, the assembly line, and white slavery. I sketched some diagrams on paper for a time machine.
I was going back to kill that bastard.
Suddenly, god delivered all the working parts, the bending of space-time, quantum tunneling, all the crazy mechanics, all realized, all given to me. I thrashed away on paper as god’s beauty, all pouring from my soul, came delicately from the end of my pen. I understood what Luke and John and Matthew must have felt. I would change things. I would save the world and humanity would sing with…
"Hey, Mark." And then the god’s gift dissolved, draining from this diseased mind. Once again, I was just a cog.
To Be Continued
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