LONELY PLANET
I
Ryan can’t remember his dreams. It’s been this way for two and a half years. He used to have so many beautiful, exciting nights – charging with elephants across marshmallow fields, fucking childhood friends in the stands of enormous monster-truck rallies, even dipping into libido-charging bouts of lucidity, wherein he could suddenly fly, melt time, be happy. Now, though, there’s nothing – not even the faintest, most ephemeral glimmer. But Ryan’s done his reading on nighttime emissions. He knows perfectly well that if you sleep, you dream; knows that he is no exception. And thus he figures these curious memory gaps can mean only one thing: that some seriously malevolent shit must be running amok in his subconscious.
Ryan guesses that if he could remember his dreams, he would call them nightmares. He feels he has good reason: despite the gaping dissolves in his memory, each morning is marked by a sense of dread so acute that he whimpers. He whimpers before he opens his eyes, before he is aware of himself as a being, distinct from his sticky mattress, the rattle of his ceiling fan. Whimpers as the sensation of waking life, consciousness, Ryanness, materializes in the slow, plodding minutes of awareness.
After two and a half years, Ryan’s sense of dread has reached a rather excruciating pitch. So much so that the word nightmare no longer seems sufficient, summoning images and associations that have little to do with his everyday (i.e., California, fluffers, money shots, regret). Ryan reasons his dreams must trump nightmares – that his dreams must be visions of some definitive personal hell (a place without west-coast sunshine, perhaps – a place without gratification of a manic, eternal itch). So he’s considered getting help, professional and otherwise – seeking out a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, a psychiatrist. He’s pondered reading Jack Altman’s 1,001 Dreams, Graham Masterson’s 1,001 Erotic Dreams Interpreted, paying for a professional Tarot reading and repeatedly changing his diet, eliminating salts and sugars and empty carbohydrates. He’s considered raw-food diets, protein diets, regular hydrotherapy and weekly enemas. He’s even toyed with wearing runes and power stones, having his apartment smudged by a metaphysician wielding a pungent, metaphysical joint.
And yet Ryan’s not entirely sure he wants to remember. All these potential aids in recollection have yet to leave the planning stage – a spiritual healer’s cell number scribbled beside his dusty desktop, a chat with a New Agey webcam girl about the various pros and cons of home enema kits. Directly confronting his dreaming unconscious is for now – as it has been for what seems like eons – simply too harrowing an endeavour.
This summer afternoon, Ryan lies prone on a bare, queen-sized mattress, kitty-corner to the open door of his bedroom. Black cotton sheets lie tangled in a mass on the floor, musty with the dry residue of sweat, semen and spilled beer. His eyes open and shut, fluttering rapidly, as he realizes that he is again whimpering, high-pitched and puppy-like, as if in response to something impossibly obscene. So he stops. After a few blind and grasping minutes, he sits up.
He rubs his temples, raking his fingers through a blond crewcut and massaging his shoulders, kneading the sore, suntanned muscles of his chest and back. He sends his hands over his stomach, protruding ponderously over the elastic of his boxer briefs (another sore point for Ryan, who sometimes feels as if this whole lack-of-dreams issue is somehow related to his weight, the weakening of once-turgid muscles, the flabbiness of his thighs). He reaches between his legs and squeezes his penis, finding it tremendously and painfully erect.
Hot summer sunlight – filtered through L.A. smog, but still honeyed, golden – streaks through thin gaps in his blinds, casting rivets of white glare on a thirty-inch television set against the opposite wall. Ryan catches sight of his upper body and face reflected in the screen. Though he is foggy with the residue of sleep, he feels there is something odd in his reflection, some dreamy quality, a trick of the light. Something he can’t place.
His Nokia ring tone – an obnoxious, chirping arpeggio – sounds from across the room. He pushes himself off the bed and stumbles over a sea of belt buckles and balled socks, T-shirts, seashell necklaces, mesh-backed baseball hats and wraparound sunglasses. The phone rings five times before he can fish it from the pocket of a crumpled pair of jeans. He flips it open and presses the plastic to his ear.
‘I’m not going to tell you it’s half-past.’ Don Debris’s voice is sore and metallic, a busted bedspring. ‘I’m not going to tell you, but, you know. Now you know.’
Ryan slumps back down on the mattress.
‘Just to let you know why I’m calling. And – I’m not sure why you deserve this telephone call. Just letting you know I’m no longer your personal wake-up service. Night before a shoot, stay at a Holiday Inn or a Super 8. Buy a new alarm clock.’
Ryan swallows, staring at his milky reflection in the television screen.
‘Buy a rooster.’
Ryan’s reflected skin is white and smooth, imperfections and blemishes and chestnut-tanned skin softened to a bleached consistency. His nose is a smear of shadow, his eyes black concavities. In the television, his neck appears perilously stick-thin, insubstantial. And there’s something else, too – a weird shade or a smudge, hovering a few feet to his right.
‘This is your life, Ry-Ry,’ Don says, with something like a sigh.
‘This is straight-up threesome, right? Two chicks, I’m assuming,’ Ryan says, squinting.
‘Two chicks.’
A tremor ripples throughout the room: a car stereo blasting Caribbean music somewhere near Ryan’s block, the bass despairingly loud.;
He puts down the phone. Stares hard at his reflection.
Thinks, there’s somebody here beside me.
He holds his breath, his muscles tense, and turns to look, his heart thumping with the passing bass. Certain he’s going to find a ghost, a spectre. Something white, and transparent, and dead.
‘Hello?’ Don’s voice is tinny and small in his lap. ‘You there?’
II
‘So you may have heard this already,’ says Michael Seidenberg, sound operator, short and over-tanned. ‘Stop me if you have. I’m serious. So, this is like two weeks ago. We were shooting a scene with two brunette chicks, one meathead-looking guy with long blond hair. Calls himself Shawn Helmsley, you know this guy?’
Ryan leans against a divider and nods. He glances at a heap of garbage bags piled against the west wall of the warehouse: eight green bags bursting with crumbly muffin stubs, coleslaw, oily paraffin paper and teeth-marked ends of lunch meat. He tries to read the slogan written on the side of the bags but can only make out half the phrase: Dust to Dust, written in a cartoon-like, jubilant cursive.
Ryan and Michael stand in a makeshift dressing room beside a complimentary snack table offering a platter of tuna, egg salad and pale ham sandwiches, a stack of plastic plates and cups and utensils, and two-litre bottles of Snapple Lemon Iced Tea. Walls are composed of mismatched cubicle dividers and office panels, mixing taupe with slate grey, tan with cerulean. The floor is concrete and dusty, marked with dark shoe scuffs and mounds of ancient gum.
Ryan rubs his eyes, still feeling the disorienting buzz from the bowl of pot he smoked thirty minutes back. Once the THC kicked in, he found it easier to cope with entering the warehouse, thought less worriedly about sucking in his gut or throwing back his shoulders, stopped dwelling on whatever it was in his bedroom reflection that made him uneasy, made goose flesh rise in salute along his upper arms and back.
‘So Helmsley’s standing in this bathtub,’ Michael continues, his black, six-inch goatee wiggling with each syllable. ‘The shower’s on and he’s getting head from the two chicks. They’re choking on this thing – really, stop me if you’ve heard this already, it’s making the rounds.’
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