“Sagacious.”
“I know that word, I think. I can’t define it, but I associate it with like, a deer. I don’t know why, but I have an association with that word.”
She realized her dream was no longer visually interesting. It was just a dark void filled with voices. As if on cue, the figure before her was now an austere, noble looking white elk, adorned with gleaming antlers that looked like smooth Amazonian vines that had calcified and hardened into sheer bone.
“Nostomania. An intense homesickness.”
“Hmm, Nos-tuh-mania. Interesting. I like that word. I don’t think I know that one. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it. I’m impressed. Just so you know, yes, I am looking that word up immediately when I wake up.
“So do you have, like, all the information in the universe? Are you a God? Are you God?”
“Frigorific. Producing cold.”
“That’s a cool one. Frig. Frig-o-riffic. It sounds like a fake word, like a fake curse. Cold, hmm. Homesickness. Cold. Is there a pattern I’m detecting here?” Her palms were sweating. She didn’t like that it was complying with her request; whether because it was going to prove itself correct or because she felt she now owed it something, she wasn’t sure.
“You know, just because you tell me SAT words doesn’t mean I’m going to believe you, you know that, right? If you are so wise, you should know that. I do appreciate them though. I must have read them somewhere and be remembering them now, though, thanks for telling me about them.”
Her sweat accumulated, pooled in her armpits. She was marinating in it; it passed through her insides and poured out forcefully between her legs. She felt its unwelcome presence by her ankles, even in her dream feeling inconvenienced, knowing somewhere she was going to wake up to something unpleasant.
An inkling of a passing suggestion that the elk was transforming into something else that only reinforced the wetness beneath her.
She woke up with a start. Right on time, her bladder was close to bursting.
She made her way, bow-legged, to the bathroom, making sure to close the door so as not to wake up anyone with the light. It was sad, she thought through fatigued reverie, that the dream was over. There was a hidden world inside her, words and experiences and an imagination that she always coveted but never felt she possessed. But it was there, down below, waiting to be unleashed.
A world inside.
Assuming, for the sake of argument that her guest had been real and not just a dream, then its plan had backfired. She was more excited about all the potential that life had to offer than she’d ever been. She liked the interesting presence she’d conjured up and looked forward to meeting it again.
Still, she wasn’t particularly eager to fall asleep again. She blamed it on the heat in the room, but made no attempt to toggle the temperature. And of course, she looked up those two words — “nostomania” and “frigorific.” They were real and had been defined correctly.
She was impressed. That was one feeling she could identify.
She’d rather not investigate the other feelings.
>< >< ><
Julia breezed through school the next day. Her classwork was simultaneously more interesting and less interesting; more interesting, in the context of how this was part of the wider world beyond her experience, and what lay beyond was so interesting; and less so, in that this classwork was, well, classwork, busywork, inconsequential, removed in its way from reality. Questions about, say, trigonometry were symbols of the deeper world, fascinating in helping her to contemplate an entire universe of theories and connectedness she knew almost nothing about.
But this school wasn’t the wider world. School was just a holding pen, teenage daycare.
She made no mention of her dreams to her friends at lunch time, except by allusion.
Lynn and Julia were both in Ms. Shaw’s Composition Class, and Lynn was complaining about the essay Ms. Shaw sprung on the class, which she required the class to complete over the upcoming weekend.
“Frigorific!” Julia replied.
“Frig!” Lynn parroted. She liked the hard consonant sound and thought it was a cute word Julia had made up on the spot. It felt appropriate.
“Frigorific, I say. It’s frigorific, I say,” Julia continued.
“Hmm, okay there. No more coffee for you. You’ve had enough,” said Lynn, in her understated way. “Or your crack. No more crack for you. Sleeping pills, maybe. Cough drops, sure, why not? What harm could they do?” She shrugged off her irreverent goofing.
Later, when the whole group was together: “So, anyone have any interesting dreams last night?”
Venice, Claire, Lynn: they all drew a blank in their own patented way; shrugs, noncommittal faces. “We failed, the whole lot of us,” said Lynn.
“Thanks for thinking I could even have interesting dreams, though. I have something to aspire to,” added Clare. The downbeat way she said it either made her joke more effective, or more harrowing.
“Ven, save us?” pleaded Lynn.
Venice shrugged. “We used Venn diagrams today in class, and one time I dreamed people were calling out my name, and then I was somehow stuck in a Venn diagram, like I’d become one, because you know, Venice —”
“Got it,” Lynn assured her. “Failure all around.”
“So yeah, who knows, maybe I’ll have an interesting dream tonight? But other than that, nah, got nothing,” Venice concluded.
Julia didn’t know what to expect, or if she’d tell her friends anything about her dreams, unless one of them had shared something eerily analogous or equally hyper-specific. The underlying subject of the dreams would be of casual interest, perhaps most so to Lynn, but she didn’t feel like entertaining arguments or even discussions about it.
This was her thing.
>< >< ><
She sat on the floor of the dream cave, Indian-style, looking up in rapt attention. She knew it was a dream cave because, why else would she be in a cave, and why else would the floor appear as nothing more than an inorganic shade of monochromatic light blue, and why else would she be in a cave that had none of the trappings of a cave? No dust, no grime, no darkness, even; she could see fine, everything bathed in soft lambent light. There was no indication, even, that anything would be descending from the ceiling, yet here she sat, prone and waiting.
A brobdingnagian arachnoid shape descended from the unseen ceiling and appeared before her like an ever-stretching monument in a gilded city. Marked by tremendous size, she thought somewhere. It descended patiently but inevitably, like the New Year’s Ball.
She was naturally afraid of spiders but felt no fear.
In dream-sleep, she’d learned, the perception of size meant nothing, but even with that knowledge in mind, this was perception-altering. Its carapace and abdomen alone were both leagues taller and wider than her.
Each of its eight legs was longer than she, even though there was no reliable form of comparison, for each leg was not actually a leg, but an ethereal projection of a loved friend or family member. Her mother; Venice; Lynn; Clare; a boy named Max she had affection for; her aunt, who she didn’t like that much but who was inexplicably present, yet again; her first-grade teacher Mrs. Sullivan, forever her favorite teacher; and her dead grandmother Bernice, all extending outward from the spider’s body and wafting like rooted underwater plants.
She didn’t have the mental bandwidth to recognize and appreciate all eight projections at once, and she suspected they disappeared, reappeared and changed their order as she exerted herself in making sense of them. Her grandmother in particular was unusual, in that Julia had no working memory of what she looked like when she was alive; she’d died when Julia was only five.
While the other legs were fluid and dynamic — like ghostly projections — her grandmother’s was rigid and flat, a brown wall projected behind it. She recognized the ima
ge: it was a picture of her grandmother that her mother kept on her night stand. As she looked at the projection, she felt herself inhabit that old space, the musty smell of mothballs and unsavory hard candies, the brown wall cut with three shelves of knick-knacks. She could tell the shelves were occupied, but had no idea with what.
The spider lowered to her level. Its carapace was beautiful and sleek, metallic, appropriate for the antiseptic crystal space. She didn’t fear it. She gasped as it flexed its legs, saw the projections of her loved ones adjust, as if they were images changing their aspect ratio.
“I’ve been dreaming about you,” she said, a line that was funny and ridiculous even to herself.
“I’m afraid of spiders. But your appearance is different. If this is my mind trying to make me afraid of you, it backfired.” The spider lacked the mandibles, the grubby, crawly sense of alien otherness that made people itch and slap at themselves in disgust. This was more like a crystalline spider ornament, an aesthetic monument to their ability to captivate.
It had not yet spoken to her.
“I’m glad you returned,” she offered.
“Yes. I am glad you do not fear me. Your subconscious mind recognizes what I represent, on some level, so it will always inspire you to fear me.”
“I want you to show me. I don’t....I don’t know how to say it. If there is a proper way to say it. I want to follow you wherever you are willing to lead me. I want you to show me.”
The enormous crystal spider shape hung motionless. Its eight projected legs continued shimmering. She noted in a micro-second passing that the legs lost focus and blurred whenever she focused to express herself.
“I am happy to hear that. But I must tell you. I must make you understand. I am not here to show you anything. You will not be seeing anything. This is not an adventure I am taking you on. Your brain repels me and makes you fear me, because it wants to survive to reproduce itself and its genetics, despite the personal cost to you.
“But part of the nature of your brain — your very being — is influenced by what you’ve experienced. Your culture prioritizes adventures, journeys of discovery. You think this is what is expected of you, on some level. This is not a journey of discovery or self-knowledge. This is not a journey where you will learn about yourself. This is the end of your existence.
“I am offering you only the escape from the inevitable experience that awaits you, the most excruciating agony that awaits you. That is all.”
“I understand,” she said.
“I don’t believe that to be true, but I can only work with what is. In this dream, this image you have created, you are staring up at me, in awe. The size differential is influencing your decision-making, making you genuflect before me.
“I do not want you to be unduly influenced. Your type submits and becomes obedient to differences in height and perceived dominion, and I do not want that coloring your decision. But perhaps it is inevitable.”
“I understand. Thank you. I have made up my mind. I want to follow you. I want to go with you. I trust you. I’m excited, and I’m curious.”
There was no way to calculate time in dream-sleep, she knew. A narrative sequence spanning years in dream-sleep can occur in the objective length of a second. Yet still, even knowing that, she felt time passing and passing without a response from the great figure before her.
Finally, after what felt like hours, it spoke.
“I am certain that you are making the correct decision, although perhaps not for the right reason. I am certain that, if you could live out your entire uninterrupted life, experience the agony of natural death, and then situate yourself in this position again, you would understand why this choice was the correct one.
“My hesitation, which you may suspect, is because I want to make sure you are making an informed decision. Even if it is a correct decision, it is my obligation to ensure you are making an informed decision.
“If you agree to this, this is the end of your existence.
“I want you to understand that this is the end of your existence, if you allow me.”
She nodded slowly. There was a rumbling excitement within her, an eruption of elation, of grand virgin vistas. Her nerves flared up in panic, but she suppressed it, pushed through it, and smothered it.
There was again a long delay.
“I am confident you are making the right decision.”
She closed her eyes — inside the dream, she thought, as her eyes were already closed in ‘the real world’ — and allowed her guardian to lead her, into the dark of her mind and into the dark of the void. If this were real, it would be amazing. If it were just a dream, she’d wake up and have more fantastic dreams to dream.
>< >< ><
Clare sat in English class. This was a senior class, late in the period and late in the school year. In essence, this class would have no bearing whatsoever on her or her colleagues’ academic futures, and they acted accordingly. The class, separated into five distinct groups of about four or five students each, spent a couple of conspicuous seconds of conversation on the assignment at hand and then shifted to talk about practically anything else.
“I just —” Clare trailed off and forgot what she was talking about. Henry, a casual friend and classmate, kept his head arched, ready to nod and be understanding. Henry was a nice, calm Chinese-American student who planned on attending the University of Binghamton, as did she (and as did a fair portion of her graduating class). Since they would both soon be attending the same college, she figured it’d be helpful to get to know him better, since she may be seeing him around on campus next year.
“I just … I totally blanked on what I was saying.”
“You were —” he paused, hoping that maybe she’d remember on her own accord, “you were, talking about Julia’s —”
“Funeral, right. Julia’s funeral. Oh my god, I can’t believe I forgot that. That’s so weird.” Clare had tracked every day since Julia’s passing and since her funeral service, and did not want to contemplate a time when she didn’t keep up those efforts.
There was a high-pitched female laughter beside them — the “oh my gawwd” kind— that jolted her like a next-door gun shot. “Anyway, umm, any big plans this summer? Are you going to Corey’s party by the lake this weekend?” The end of senior year was a democratizing season, with a built-in reference point for different cliques and groups to hang out.
She wrote Wuthering Heights — Reasons on her note book, in big bold letters, in case Ms. Harrison walked around checking on them. She crossed out Reasons and didn’t know why she wrote it down to begin with.
She breathed heavily and looked back up at Henry. He was gone. His chair was moved back a space, as if he’d made room to get up and leave. She looked around to see where he went and didn’t see him, or see the tail end of the classroom door closing or see anything to suggest he’d left the room or had even ever been in the room.
She looked over in Venice’s direction to make sympathetic eye-contact — a general get-me-out-of-here face — and wondered, why not just walk over there, it’s already pandemonium in here, no one is paying attention.
She never got Venice’s attention.
“Beyond lies the Wub puts the Wub in Wuthering Heights, it’s about a pig,” said Susanne, a classmate in her study group. “Did anyone else find it so creepy when the pig’s head is on, like, a platter and is still talking to the main character? That freaked me out. That picture freaked me out.”
That didn’t make any sense, but okay.
Clare was nodding slowly and empathizing. “I remember I read this story once when I was in like, in junior high, in a collection, called Beyond Lies the Wub. I thought it had something to do with Wuthering Heights for some reason, or maybe was the same thing, I didn’t know. All the stories were illustrated, and all I remember about that story was that there was, like, a detailed p
icture of a hog’s, like, decapitated head. It scared the shit out of me. It’s so funny you mention that.”
She turned to Susanne, who was wearing Henry’s face stitched atop her own. It didn’t fit over her face properly. Had anyone told her that? The incongruity of Susanne’s lush blonde waves over Henry’s inscrutable, dried-out, graham-cracker-textured face was too much for her. She almost laughed but contained herself. How did Susanne speak so clearly while wearing Henry’s face like that? Crinkly holes were carved for her eyes, but not the mouth, which retained Henry’s usual blasé expression.
Susanne raised her hand, didn’t receive any response, and walked up and left the class, bringing what remained of Henry along with her.
She imagined Susanne in the bathroom, employing lotions in vain to get that crinkly skin-mask looking smoothed out.
Julia was sitting in front of her, in Susanne’s seat … Julia! Was here! Adrenaline surged inside her; sending everything around her into a whirling paroxysm, like a violently-tossed fish bowl.
Julia was still there when her vision stabilized.
Julia! This couldn’t be. This was a dream. The surge of emotion made her perspire, and the whole class room heated up uncomfortably. She felt herself with her hand and felt a down black puff jacket. That’s why it was so hot. She thought to take it off but didn’t.
“Julia, what are you doing here?”
Julia looked like she always had, she sensed. A dim outline of her mottled brown hair, rounded, moonish pale face, the brown dots of freckles and the red clusters of stubborn zits. Clare identified that pimple — it was a nasty one she’d noticed on Julia the last day she’d ever seen her alive. “A lot of juice is coming out it,” Julia had complained. “But at least it’s apple juice,” she’d joked. The memory of that quip reverberated on the school’s loud speaker so everyone could hear it and smile and laugh.
The pimple expanded into its own world, lifting Clare out into the galaxy when it ruptured, and she slid down the expulsion of pus like a toddler on a toboggan.
With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer Page 3