by Jesse Jordan
They stared.
“I just need some time,” James said.
Ezra only shook his head, though James didn’t see it as he turned away and began the short walk home. But from over his shoulder he heard Ezra speak. Five words, low, almost to himself.
“It’s time to grow up.”
James called Dorian. She hadn’t answered the first time, and James didn’t leave a voice mail so he’d have an excuse to call back. Again, this time, no answer. “Hi. This is Dorian . . .”
“Hey, Dorian. Could you gimme a call when you get this?”
He’d texted earlier too. More of the same. He still hadn’t planned what he’d say if she did call him back.
James collapsed onto his bed as Ezra’s words boomed and reverberated, an accusation and an appeal. Across the room he could see the first panel of the first issue of Fearless: the cabin on the cliff—the ink outline half colored in orange-and-red pencil—and there was Eliza—truly her—staring back at him. You should go work on it. You should call her again—and with that internal disagreement, the last of his drive dripped out.
He’d slept so little lately, barely a few forced hours a night, and now it felt as if that debt was being called in. He didn’t even kick off his shoes. Instead, James simply lay there, the noon sun an orange pulse against his closed eyes as he pondered the endless forking paths before him. One anxious thought burned supreme: that his future both was preordained and had myriad trajectories he could choose—though in each one he saw Ezra and the Pit and death, death, Death.
James lurched from his bed with a silent scream on his lips—eyes wide, searching the darkness—before he realized he’d been dreaming and choked it down. For a moment the room was alien and he was sure he was somewhere else, but then the desk and the table and the alarm clock came into focus. He was home. The clock read 9:53 p.m.
The faces swam back into his vision, and James swung his legs off the bed and turned on the light as quick as he could. As soon as the illumination filled the room, though, James’s whole body caught—there was Dink, only inches away, crouched and staring at him.
“You okay?” Dink said.
James could only swallow and nod.
“You were having a dream that scared you?”
Again, James’s only response was a nod. He saw the revulsion in Dorian’s eyes, saw that child’s eviscerated face, and shuddered.
“What’s it like?”
“What?”
“Your dreams?” Dink said, crossing the bedside table and sitting on the corner closest to James, his feet dangling off the side. “It’s a thing I’m always curious about.”
“Why?”
“Just because your dreams are so different from anything we experience.”
“How do you know that if you don’t know what ours are like?”
“I’ve spent enough time here that I have an idea. I just always like to hear about them.”
“Oh.” James kicked the tangled sheet off his leg and rubbed his eyes. “What’s it like for you?”
“Us? Well, we don’t need to sleep. That’s simply not a feature we were designed with. We do sometimes, for enjoyment, though you have to go to a special place. And it’s dangerous.”
“It’s dangerous?”
“If we just lay down and tried to sleep in Taloon, nothing would happen. We’d just . . . be. But if we go to the Great Field of Dreaming and lie down and stay very still and calm, then eventually we’ll slip into what is our closest version of your sleep. We . . . we stop experiencing Taloon. Instead we see this world. It’s a magical place, but it’s . . . treacherous. You fall asleep there and the show is so much better than the junk and labor of your life, so you just stay. Forever.”
“Really?”
“And every inhabitant of Taloon completely gets it. Everyone wants to succumb, because it’s bliss. It’s like your consciousness has been shipped to this world and set on the wind and it’s just . . . flitting from place to place. Sometimes you’ll see whole cities or deserts, and sometimes you’ll zoom up real close and watch two humans mate or the impact of lightning, or you’ll relive the same meeting over and over again, or you’ll follow an antelope around for its entire life in just a few moments or watch generations of ants building their civilizations. You have . . . no control.”
“I guess that’s pretty much what it’s like when we dream.”
“But there’s a very important difference. I’ve spoken with enough humans to know that, yeah, sometimes your dreams take you to Taloon, just like ours take us here, but you also get a lot of other dreams, ones that take you to other places, places that aren’t Taloon.”
“So lots of people go to Taloon in their dreams? It’s not just me?”
“Everyone does. In fact, I’m sure you did long ago, before all this started; you just didn’t realize it. How could you? Everyone assumes dreams are just dreams. Everyone assumes they’re real personal and internal. What’s really interesting is how transparent it all is to an outsider. When you see an artist bring something from their dreams, something from Taloon, and use it in their work, and then see all the other humans respond so strongly to it, it’s clear why. ’Cause it’s familiar to everyone ’cause everyone has visited Taloon. But, because you’re inside of it and unaware of the interaction between our worlds, you can’t see it.
“Last time I was here—I think it was 1987 in your American time. Or 1997? I can’t remember. But I saw this television program about honeybees. The image struck me. A wall of bees, and when one fluttered, this subconscious signal was transmitted to the other bees, who then fluttered, so that one bee created a perfectly harmonious wave. The humans who were monitoring this were explaining how it worked, and I started laughing, because the things they can see in other species they’re blind to in themselves. If you could ask one of those honeybees why they just fluttered, I’m sure they’d say, ‘I don’t know. I just felt the urge.’ Same thing. Humans can’t spot reactions to connections if they don’t know the connections are there.”
James was up and at his desk, sliding papers aside until he came up with the right one. “Here,” he said. “Look. I did that.”
James laid out the paper and Dink walked onto it, looking down as James pointed at the tear-shaped alien artifact he’d drawn.
Dink turned his gaze up to James, who could feel the little man’s tension like heat. “What is that?” Dink said.
“That’s . . . in the Pit. Behind the walls, there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of them. They . . . they shake and, and scream.”
James stopped. Dink looked as if someone had just run a ragged edge through his guts. His little dark eyes left James and settled on the drawing. One knee went down, then both, and his tiny hands reached out and touched James’s version of the golden lamps. Dink ran his fingers along the edges. Each finger was only slightly thicker than the lines of ink they traced.
Dink continued to stare. James felt that he should leave Dink alone or get rid of the drawing or apologize or just say something, anything, but only one thing came forward.
“Everyone was looking at me,” James said, and Dink turned to him. “In the dream. They uh, they all hated me. Everyone. Millions and millions of people—or were people. They were dead. They were crying and they were asking me why and screaming at me and I . . . uh. . . .” Eyes hot and full at the memory: the hate-filled pleading in his ears, Dorian’s face, Mom’s. “I’m sorry, Dink.”
Dink padded across the table and leapt down. He crossed the floor, climbed the dresser, and ripped out three pieces of tissue from their pastel box. The sheets were bigger than him, and he folded them repeatedly before sticking them under his arm and using his other arm to do a sort of controlled fall down the dresser, catching himself for an instant at every handle. Then it was back across the floor and climbing up the bedside table, again with only his one arm.
The sheer oddness of the homunculus’s Herculean task chased away some of the total te
rror recall of the dream. James wiped his eyes and cheeks and blew his nose and wiped again and blew again.
“Sorry,” James said, but Dink just waved a hand at it. “Those are your friends in those things, aren’t they? It’s the ones who listened to Morning Star?”
The little shoulders rose and fell once, and Dink sat and folded his tiny legs. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you put them there?”
“No.”
“Then don’t apologize.”
“Sorry. I mean, y’know . . . you know.”
“Yes.”
It was quiet then, and James watched the little man and wondered where his mind was. James’s own had finally excavated a truth he’d sensed the mass of for a while. “I don’t wanna do it.”
There. He’d said it. What he’d never quite been able to say to Ezra. Thanks but no thanks. I don’t want it.
“Then don’t.”
It took longer than it should have for those two words to be translated from sound into words and meaning. Then don’t? Then don’t. No, that’s not right. “I can’t just . . .”
“Just what?” Dink said. “You can’t just say no? Of course you can. You have free will. It can’t be taken away, only gifted. You can say no. Understand, I’m not saying it would be easy, or even that you’d survive, but you could say no.”
“But what would . . . ?”
“What would happen? I have no idea.”
“What do you want?”
“What do I want? I want Morning Star and all the others to be free. I want the death or freedom of the War. But I swore myself to you, and I won’t lie. You can always say no. To anything. It’s the simplest act and one of the first freedoms forgotten.”
The thought detonated in his psyche, crumbling walls built and reinforced many times over, and for a manic, powerful instant he saw Taloon and Earth as if he were a god looking down, the two worlds nothing but different-colored gasses floating through each other; and to those within it seems so tangible and definite, but above it’s absurd that they can’t see each other, that they believe so hard in their own oneness. It was disorienting, and James reached out to steady himself.
The house shrank around him. The ceiling pressed into his head; the walls wrapped around him like a blanket.
“I have to get out of here for a while,” he said as he stood. You could say no. They would never allow it. Ezra—Mikhael—they would come for you—come for you, come for you; the Catholics in the Escalades, the men in suits are coming, coming; what would you do about them?
Dink leapt from the table onto the side of James’s shorts. But as he began to make his way into the pocket, James stopped him. “I think I need to be alone.”
“I understand. But I’m your protector and we don’t know who’s out there. Plus, I’m very good at alone. Many people have been alone with me and never even known it.” And with that he was gone.
James opened his door and looked out—every light off, every door closed. As James went by his parents’ room, he heard the unmistakable sounds of sleep: two breathers, just below snoring, out of rhythm. A movie played through in super-duper fast-forward: cliché college B-roll, they meet, they love, they make love, pregnant and scared, married and excited, scrambling for jobs and money, getting by, panic attacks . . . random people, biological miracles, no magical properties are infused with the names Mom and Dad. For a moment he considered sneaking in, this urge, to kiss them both on the head, to be close and smell them sleeping like they were his babies. It came and hit and passed, and a minute later he gently pressed the front door closed so that it wouldn’t make a sound.
Thirty minutes later James found himself back at Haley Pond. The Moon was big and close and full, and the pond bounced the image right back at the sky, only distorted some—a child making a silly face to a grown-up. James sat, his ass farther up the incline, his now-shoeless-and-sockless feet digging into the wet grass, feeling the pleasant rumple of the dirt below. Wet leaves glimmered like ornaments as the wind tripped by in quintuple time. James sat and sat. Dink was gone, run off somewhere but, James was sure, within sight. The traffic slowed and spread and disappeared. Night turned into overnight; lights went dark; quiet filled the air. James’s butt numbed, and he rolled over on his belly and watched ants navigate monster blades of grass.
The wind died, and James watched the surface of the pond lose its ripples—still and silent, the water laid in its earthen bowl like a pause. James remembered the night when he’d been here before, sitting on the other side of the pond, the urge to dive in, the fear that someone might see; and like that he was on his feet, almost laughing he felt so full. To be alive is to be free and unpredictable. To be alive is to be a god. The thought that he’d once been afraid someone might see seemed like a memory of a child’s nighttime fears. He peeled off his jeans and boxers, toppled over and extricated both feet as he writhed on the grass, ecstatic at the sensation of the naked grass on his naked flesh. The back now, the chest, as he pulled off his shirt, scrambling up to his knees and then feet, running, stumbling, down to the pond, last step, the right foot pressed down and out! Arms out, chest out, back bowed, a laugh of disbelief crowed just as he burst through the surface.
Cold! He laughed underwater and drank an accidental mouthful before coming up and shaking his head free like a dog. He dove under again, swimming toward the other side, now corkscrewing, now limp and floating. All nerves activated. He felt the water press his chest, felt it run over his bare ass and between his cheeks, and felt its cold buoyancy against his crotch. It was an alien sensation, one that screamed of freedom and power, and once again he spun through the water, feeling it touch and brush all of him.
Then there was purchase below—ground, mud, the other side—he knew he should probably get out, the fear of getting caught just inching back now, but the greed of pleasure drowned it out as he turned and buried both feet in the mud, pushing back off the other way. He swam hard, ripping through water and kicking for distance, the muscles in his arms and chest stretching and contracting, stretching and contracting, and when he reached the other side he swam up the inclined edge, his feet switching from kicking to running, and shot himself up onto the grass once more. It was only a moment, though, that he lay there breathing. Repose was death; action was the only truth now. James scrambled up with both hands and feet, and he ran. He ran as fast as his legs would stretch out before him, as fast as he could with his wet feet on this wet grass. Along the edge of the pond, the swimming and running starting to set fire to the air in his lungs, he pushed harder—harder!—arms like uneven pistons, leaning out so far he could fall on any step, catching himself. James raced around the pond, and the air rushed the water off his uncovered form, and when he reached the place where his clothes lay in a pile, he dove headfirst and slid across the grass, rolling at the end, coming to a stop on his back. He heaved, and it felt like he was breathing in the whole sky and blowing out the night clouds.
Within a minute, his breathing slowed. Within another minute, the feeling had passed and existed only as a memory. The following minute, he pulled his jeans back on, just in case. That was when the idea struck. James put his shirt and shoes on and jammed his socks in his back pocket, and then he headed off toward the ChocoMalt factory.
James found the door that he and Ezra had used now boarded up with fresh wood. He walked along the building, running his hand along the fifty-year-old brick as the disregarded grass pushed its way under his jeans and brushed his ankles. He didn’t want to take his hand away; he could feel the energy of the place in his fingertips, like it was covered in a film of static electricity. There was a hum too, low and steady, though it was something James heard not with his ears but with his insides, with the cavity that held his heart. Maybe it wasn’t life or energy or any other word we have, but James was sure whatever animating magic powered him and Mom and Dorian and stray dogs and old evergreen trees and everything else pulsing with life also resided in this
building.
James turned the corner and came upon the broken window he’d looked through the first time he visited this place. Now, though, everything was different. He was different, the place was different, and perhaps most importantly, the light of the full Moon poured through the broken windows like a crashing wave. The massive open space was a carnival of unnatural color. The soft-blue glow of the Moon painted the burnt-orange rust everywhere like underwater Day-Glo, and the remaining exoskeletons and machines and stairs threw deep-black shadows in angled patterns across the floor. It was as if the room contained small black holes.
Using a found chunk of brick, he broke away the remaining glass from the frame and then carefully climbed in. There was a scratch as he swung his left leg inside, and when he looked down, he saw a snag and a small spot of blood.
He remembered the shape he thought he’d seen, and for a second that animating fear was back, directing him—Out! Now! He felt a few muscles pull against bones and joints in subconscious allegiance, but James did not move.
He took a breath way, way down into his belly, and as he released that breath, it was as if the fear rode the exhale out. And as it left him he took a step forward, walking to the center of the room, toward the metal exoskeletons which had once supported multi-ton machines and vats, to the wide-open floor where the otherworldly blue glow was brightest, where the tingling in his gut felt strongest. He stopped and stood and breathed, and with each exhale it felt as if this place was breathing in, and when he inhaled it felt as if he was drawing in the factory’s exhalations.