R³, page 5
“No.”
“Why don’t you let me try and help you? You’re here, in my office. You don’t have to come back if you don’t want to, but we can at least use this allotted time, so as to not waste your trip.” Ha, trip. “What brought you here, today?”
I can’t help but roll my eyes, while having to admit the man is right. It was my decision to walk into his office. It was my decision to lie on this delicious smelling couch. It was all my decision. So I could either stare at the ceiling for the next hour or at least play ball. My decision. But is it really?
“I had a dream.” I begin. I know of no other place where to begin.
“In your sleep?”
“Yes, in my sleep, when else do people dream?”
“As you know, John, people don’t really dream anymore.”
“Well, this is not about people, this is about me. Me, me, me, me,” I shrill like a Chihuahua, “I’ve been able to dream since I can remember, but only in rare spurts. I used to dream a lot when I was a kid but everything went dark after that. Until a few nights ago. I feel like I’m losing control.”
“Are you afraid of losing control?” he writes down whatever it is shrinks write down during sessions.
“We’ll that’s a stupid question.”
“Nothing you say is stupid—” typical condescending shrink answer.
“I feel like I’m entering a new reality. Yet part of me remains in the old one. I feel—torn.”
“There’s always only one reality, John. A physical object, as you are, can only be in one place at one time. Einstein proved that. Is that what’s troubling you?”
“There’s a syncopation in reality.”
“Even the most extravagant of syncopations are still part of music. They are not an error, but part of the overall flow and rhythm. Tell me about your dream.”
“Pleasant memories, I guess.”
“Your memories?”
“No. They were Nina’s. I think.”
That’s when he stops writing. I can feel his pen touching the yellow notepad. I can feel the friction. But it is static.
After a brief pause, he continues. “You drank R³?” His demeanor has changed. As if a switch inside his brain had suddenly flicked on instantly giving me his full attention.
“Yes. But I didn’t have Nina’s prepackaged dream. I was in it, in her dream. We were sharing it. I looked it up but couldn’t find anything on the subject. As if it had been erased completely. Every record.”
He twiddles with his pen. “How is this dream affecting you?”
“I had this weird feeling—as if I had met her before. No—I know, I’ve met her before.”
“Before the dream?”
“Yes.” I say yes.
“Dreams are fabrications, collages of memories. You may have seen her face somewhere, but in fact, this woman your mind created, does not exist. At least not as you think she does. She’s not real John, only a fabrication of a wild, unnaturally induced dream.”
“No. I met her a long time ago. And I saw her again that same night, before the dream.”
“You saw her? In waking-life?”
“That’s not everything. I was her for a short moment. Almost as if we had switched bodies and I was suddenly seeing the world through her eyes, not mine. Feeling what she was feeling. Her pain.”
“That’s not possible,” his tone changed. He felt… angry.
“Why?”
He didn’t have enough time to reply. He probably didn’t want to either. His cell phone erupted, splicing our conversation in half instantly. I looked down, embarrassed, not sure why. Until I realized I had heard that jingle before. It was the same, broken melody I had heard outside my apartment that morning Isaac bled to death between my feet. Why does he have the same jingle? And why do I feel like I’ve heard it before? Before now. Before Isaac. Before before.
“Is this melody upsetting you?” He’s been staring at me closely, studying my face, my every move. “My apologies, I usually keep it off during sessions.”
A sudden invisible wall seems to grow around me as I fidget again, looking away, avoiding eye contact. I’d like to crawl back into my apartment now.
“It sounds like the beverage had an unexpected chemical reaction with your body and has started acting as a hallucinogen would,” he begins his so-called diagnosis. “Most hallucinogenic states can have self-consistent histories and rules. They can also include time effects making it seem like time goes on indefinitely, or to have been going indefinitely. Which also happens when you sleep. A twenty minute nap can feel like a full-night’s sleep.”
I’ll admit that seems to explain a lot, everything in fact, but it doesn’t fit. It’s too perfect. It’s not right.
“What if this reality is an extended continual dream and death is when you wake up?” I ask.
He stares at me blankly.
“A dream is a reality when you’re in it, right?” I add. “Reality is a dream, and then memories are what’s left when you are out of it.”
“Then John, the solution is quite simple,” he begins. “You need to open your eyes – and wake up.”
Wake up.
That simple.
Chapter 8: Reuse. Redream. Recycle.
Reuse. Redream. Recycle.
The same image of my mother appears before my eyes, as she attempts to feed me R³ by the spoonful, cackling like a hen with her Egyptian queen eye shadow.
“Open wide! Time to dream.”
The TV is clearly on as its white light flickers against the intricate wallpaper, switching from levels of high to low intensity, but due to its current angle, the screen remains unseen. Whatever dialogue or music was playing then was not registered in the imprint of my memory.
“There you go, sweet bug!” she says as she reveals her crooked smile. “Now let’s get some for mommy!”
Following her very carefully orchestrated eight o’clock routine, she pours herself some of the pink liquid before quickly chasing it with a big gulp of red wine, until there’s not but a drop left. The process doesn’t quite end there. She refills her glass laughing joyously, overpowering whatever soundtrack plays on the disregarded TV box.
It’s not until the hyena wail ends that I can clearly hear what plays on the box. It’s the haunting jingle. The same one Dr. Hammond seemed to have selected, out of all the infinite options, for his phone. I instantly bop my tiny body off my favorite couch towards the TV. I come face to face with it, as if preparing for a Spaghetti Western duel.
This is it.
The moment of truth.
What are you?
On that beautifully shaped rectangle, perfectly framed in the center, Nina’s face materializes out of white, leading into the beginning of a commercial. Her skin radiates, comparable only to how one would imagine an angel. Her striking hair immaculately tied back into a perfect bun. Her perfect smile. Her movements enigmatic and minimal, giving her presence a surrealistic quality—she was perfectly robotic.
Her full lips part on cue.
“Reuse. Redream. Recycle. Making all of your dreams come true.”
As her flesh dissolves into whiter than white, the glistening blue bottle takes her place with a caption under it:
R³
Making Your Dreams A Reality
I press my tiny, four-year-old hands against the screen, taken aback by how easily they blend in, dissolving into her magnetic whiteness, mixing in with the electric static, becoming one.
I find it incredibly bizarro how much Dr. Hammond’s home resembles his private office. And this is not a mere matter of sterile taste and lack of a warm color palette, but to the extent of impersonal décor. The single college diploma, framed in what could best be described as expensive, glossy wood, surrounds itself by a collection of thick books, taking over your usual family vacation picture spots on the shelf. No Christmas postcards; nothing. Almost as if no memories had been stored in this environment, or non that wanted to be openly displayed.
How did I get here? Why am I here? Is this a dream?
A medium sized crate holds another mound of books on his round glass table. A few swim around the crate like satellites or moons orbiting a large planet. I grab the one on top: THE GOLDEN BOUGH: A STUDY IN MAGIC AND RELIGION by Sir James George Frazer. Another one reads THE MONADOLOGY by G. W. Leibniz. I flip through it carelessly – chunky text. Until the pages abruptly come to a halt:
Now, as in the Ideas of God there is an infinite number of possible universes, and as only one of them can be actual, there must be a sufficient reason for the choice of God, which leads Him to decide upon one rather than another.
Stuck in the middle of the book, both clumsily hidden and incredibly inconspicuous, sits a small brown manuscript with a large black symbol on the cover.
For no particular reason, I look up and find myself facing a stainless steel-encased oval mirror. Everything seems to be in order, except for the fact that my face is not there. In a similar fashion to my encounter with the officers outside my apartment, my face suddenly lacks eyes, nose, a mouth… leaving nothing behind but a smooth, blank canvas of skin.
Somewhere else…
…In a different dream…
…In the vacuum, where muted sounds resembling crackles erupt at no specific interim…
The beautiful, elongated, metallic object cuts through the colorful, space-like, geometric environment. Getting closer.
And closer.
And closer.
Closer.
Chapter 9: I died, but then I was reborn.
I died, but then I was reborn.
Where am I?
My eyes open halfheartedly, blinking a couple of times as they adjust to the blazing ball of fire. Someone plays with my hair forcing me back to sleep as I try furiously to stay awake. I slowly get a general sense of my bearings as alertness seeps into my brain. I force myself to sit up. I look around. I was sleeping on a bench. A bus stop bench. I had been sleeping on the bus stop bench outside my mother’s house where the loony homeless woman with the shopping cart sits on a daily basis. Why or how did I get here? Your guess is as good as mine. As to why she was playing with my hair, I have a few hypotheses; none of which are worth mentioning.
The top of my head itches. Great, I think, loony gave me lice. Or worse—fleas. Fleas lay eggs on your bed, your pets, your furniture. They spread. Vicious parasites. At least lice stay on your head.
Her toothless trap opens, crapping out some mumbo jumbo: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
I stare into her unblinking eyes, glimmering with intense passion. Could this woman be speaking the truth? Perhaps. But the squawking cackle that followed instantly shattered our newfound connection.
Ma prepares an InstaMeal while I scan through the kitchen cabinets. It’s supposed to be breakfast. At least that’s what the diagram on the box suggests. She places the jell-o-like cube on a bowl.
I catch a glimpse of my reflection. I look like shit. The bags under my eyes are as big as plums, but I can’t tell whether it’s from oversleeping or lack of sleeping.
“Are you sure you don’t want to take a shower? The meal needs a few minutes to cool down.”
I tell her I’m good.
I pocket one of those fancy new LED lighters. Don’t think she saw me, and if she did, she’s doing a great job pretending otherwise.
The great pretender.
“Are you feeling alright?”
Why would she say that?
“You barely ate.”
Oh. I’m sitting at the dinner table. It seems I had gotten glued to my reflection in the bowl. More like the silhouette of my reflection, since you can’t really tell my features apart. I hadn’t eaten anything. She was already done.
This has been a recurring thing—time passing, me not noticing.
“Not hungry,” I tell her.
She pops a snowflake and chases it with a glass of water.
“You shouldn’t take those.”
“They make me feel good. Did you get around seeing that doctor?”
“Did he give you those?”
“He’s good, isn’t he?” she shoots back. It’s like talking to a wall, no one listens.
“You remember R³, don’t you?”
“R³? No—no. What is that?” she asks.
“A drink.”
Her expression: blank.
“You used to give it to me as a kid,” I add.
More blank in the abyss of blankness.
“What drink? I didn’t give you a drink…”
“The dreaming drink, ma!”
She frowns, hard, straining her brain, as if digging deep down into the old chambers of her memory bank.
“Oh, yes! The drink!”
Halle-fucking-lujah!
“How lovely it was to dream, even if it was a prepackaged dream,” she adds, reminiscing.
“The girl, in the dream, did I ever meet her?”
“No, I don’t think so. No.”
“Nina?”
“Sweet bug, I don’t remember. I’m sorry but it’s all very fuzzy.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t been blacked out half of the time it wouldn’t be fuzzy.”
She instantly looks down, forcing a meek half-smile, embarrassed. I regret saying that instantly. I’m an asshole. No need to poke the wound, no matter how much truth infected it. I try my best to change the subject.
“There’s a homeless woman loitering outside. You should call the cops.”
“She’s here??” She instantly rises and rushes to the kitchen fetching an extra bowl. “I haven’t seen her in four days!”
“Do you know her?” but she rushes out of the house, too excited to formulate an answer. “Ma!”
Goddammit.
The second the bowl is handed to her, Ms. Cuckoo digs her hand in, scooping out noodles like a wild animal. I observe, feeling my face go sour, unable to hide my disgust. God, she slurps so loud. Louder than Isaac.
“What are you doing?” I finally ask my mother.
“She used to be here all the time. Until she disappeared one day.”
“How come I hadn’t seen her before?”
“I died,” Ms. Cuckoo butts in, amidst her slurps. “But then I was reborn. After three days.”
My mother smiles, finding her lunacy adorable in every sense of the word. I think her brain may be as warped as this woman’s.
“Ma, she’s obviously a nut.”
“Johnny!” she whacks my arm as if I were ten.
“I was reborn, to deliver a message,” crazy says, slurp, slurp. “I have information that can save lives.”
“A message you say?” my mother feeding coal to the fire.
“Stop encouraging her.”
“A message. For you,” says the slurping monster as she points her boney, noodle-wrapped finger at me like the Greek prophet Cassandra, cursed with visions that would go forever ignored.
A sudden feeling of discomfort takes over my body. I feel sick to my stomach. What could this woman possibly have to say to me? Every word she mutters only adds up to incoherent sentences. What could she possibly have to tell me? What could be so important?
Maybe she knows. Maybe she knows everything. Maybe she knows what’s happening to me, and how my world is starting to unravel. Maybe she can help me and show me the way out.
Maybe.
“And what’s the message?” my mother leans in, naturally curious.
The woman looks up, deer in the headlights. “Message? What message?” Slurp.
I can feel my face turn beat red. I stomp away before I make the completely impulsive decision of smashing that woman’s head into the pavement and beating her senseless with a stick.
How could I believe she could help me? Even if it was for a split-second, how did I let myself be suckered into her broken brain?
I feel so stupid. Deceived by my own brain. I want to go back to that bowl of soup, back to that dark silhouetted reflection, and allow myself to be taken by it, consumed, fed into the whirlpool towards the void.
I’m not going to let it deceive me again.
Chapter 9.5: I must not let my mind deceive me.
I MUST NOT LET MY MIND DECEIVE ME
October 15, 1591
I didn’t drown, but I remember being underwater for hours. That of course, is not possible. The possibility of having hit my head against a rock when falling into the lake still lingers, although I haven’t been able to find wound or bruise. However, that didn’t stop the disorientation from overtaking me. I do remember falling, splashing through the surface, having no sense of alarm or fear as my body weight sank into the infinite depths of the basin.
Once lucidity crept back in, my immediate reaction was to swim towards the surface, sure that I’d soon be running out of air, but I soon faced a new complication. It could’ve been partially due to my disorientation, but I couldn’t differentiate up from down. This shouldn’t have been a long-term issue as down would logically be darker and up would have the sun blazing through, guiding me out. However, this was different. Darkness was around me, but the sun beamed from both above and below. This statement obviously contradicts itself. That is, by all laws abiding physics and reality, in one word, impossible. Time wasn’t a luxury I could sit on as I debated on the unnatural causes of such an anomaly, so I quickly made a choice and pushed up—if that indeed was “up”—towards one of the two beaming suns.
Only a few seconds went by before I knew I had made the right choice. As I kicked towards the surface, I could clearly see the enigmatic bubble materialize on the other end, refracting the sun rays like a diamond.
