Anthology Complex

by M. B. Julien

  As the number of points gradually increase in the same direction as time, or due to decisions and actions, the number of possible occurrences increases, and therefore the chances of each point becoming a reality decreases. Getting from point 1a to point 10gv is not likely, and getting from point 10gv to point 100nkd is even more unlikely. Consequences may instead land on 100rfd or the other many possibilities.

  Some people say the universe has been in existence for billions of years. Can you imagine how close you came to never being born? How close you and I came to never having this one sided discourse.

  We've gotten to a time where the number-letter sequence is so high and so diverse that every thing that happens now, in comparison to the time of the beginning of the universe, is unlikely to happen, and because of this, some occurrences are credited to fate; this idea that this specific event was destined to occur.

  Chapter 17:

  PAGE 1 OF 8, "THE EIGHT DREAMS"

  Third year, January 5th, I had this dream. I had died a long time ago, but it wasn't the type of death where afterwards people would attend your funeral or your wake; it was a spiritual death. I lost all of my hopes but also lost all of my fears. Your beliefs, dreams, goals, they don't matter to you anymore because you realize there is a possibility that your existence may serve no purpose.

  What killed me was a note I had received, telling me that at some point in my life I would have to question my existence. Question my purpose, my function. That I would have to accept the answer, the truth that I find, because fooling myself would be pointless. This note stayed in the back of my mind, growing silently like a plant. This note that someone left in place of my wallet.

  Sometime later in the dream I am on the subway, and this man tells me that he gave me that note. That he picked my pocket. He bumps into me, takes my wallet, leaves the note there in its place, and now he is trying to give me back my wallet.

  A normal person might be angry, but by this time that seed that this man planted in the back of mind has grown fully and is flourishing, and instead I ask him why he did it.

  He tells me that besides needing money for food, he did it because he wanted me to think about my life even if it was only for a second. He asks me how I think someone would feel if one day they are leaving their house, and in their mailbox they find a mysterious note like the one I found in my coat pocket. How would someone react to that? Then I ask him if he has been doing this to other people, and he says yes, he says he's been doing it for a long time.

  He tells me that people get notes every day, it's just that some are more obvious than others. When you're about to go to sleep laying down on that bed thinking about things, when you're driving down that long stretch of road thinking about things, when you're walking through that bad neighborhood thinking about things, all these moments are opportunities to better yourself.

  Regardless of how good of a person you may be now, or how bad, there is always room for improvement. Then he tells me that the improvement he's talking about isn't necessarily what you get from giving to the poor or becoming a better parent, the improvement he's talking about is the one you get from suffering, from misery and struggle. From finding light in the darkest corner.

  Now my stop comes up, but I want to hear more of what this man has to say, so I stay. I ask this man if he believes in God, and he says he believes in a higher being but not a personal God. He tells me that he doesn't believe in a God that intervenes with our daily lives and happenings.

  He tells me he believes that someone made all that we can comprehend, that someone must have put it all in motion because you can't make something from nothing, and then this being either moved on to other things or decided not to incorporate itself into its creation.

  Then he asks me if I believe there is a meaning to life. A purpose to our existence. I tell him that I had been thinking about it ever since I got his note, and that I came to the conclusion that in order for something to have a purpose, it has to have a reason for conception, or a beginning, and a goal, or an ending. Sort of like how most people go to college to receive some kind of document so they can have the chance to work in a specific field or have a certain job.

  Your beginning is applying for the college with the intent of receiving some form of education, and your ending is graduating knowing and understanding most of the knowledge you needed, and now your goal or the purpose for that idea being conceived has been fulfilled. I tell this man that if the universe has a beginning, then it must have an end, and therefore there is a good chance that there is a reason why we are here.

  Then I tell him that if the universe however does not have a beginning, then it has no end, and every thing that we do is meaningless. There is no goal. He looks at me and he says that our lives have a beginning and an end. I suppose we shouldn't be looking for the answers to why this universe is here as a whole as opposed to why we are all here individually.

  There is a brief pause, and then this man tells me his name is Roach. The last thing he tells me before I wake up is that we either die accomplishing every thing or we die accomplishing nothing.

  Today, those words make my think of Mary, about how she is trying to accomplish so much and give meaning and purpose to her busy life, but in the end when her time has come, if she doesn't feel that she led a fulfilled life, then just that one second of regret can make her feel as if she she didn't accomplish anything. If however in her final days she feels that she did the best she could, perhaps she will be at ease with herself and find solace. For that brief moment in time, she will feel as if she has accomplished everything.

  There was a time when I tried to tell Maria about this dream, but she didn't believe me because I was so descriptive as if my memory was at some kind of inhuman level. The truth is my memory isn't really at an advanced level. When I was with her I was consumed with the dreams I had, so I spent days and nights thinking about them, studying them, and eventually it became so important to me that my mind wanted to start remembering every piece of the dream so that I could later dissect it.

  After she left, when I started to take them more seriously, that's when my memory really got an upgrade. Teachers always tell you that you are more likely to remember something if you write it down and say it out loud. After writing and thinking about my dreams so much, I became more aware of how they worked. Their patterns and what they were about. There are people around the world who have this condition where they remember every single second of their life for as long as they live, or something to that extent.

  Sometimes I wonder if that applies to their dreams as well, and sometimes I wonder how close I am to getting to that level. It has also been said that every person subconsciously remembers every single thing that happens in their lives, but the problem is sometimes we just can't access that memory.

  That's probably why every once in a while a dream seems like a faded memory when I try to think about it, that's probably why I can't remember certain elements of the dream.

  A little girl is walking down a school hallway and next to a locker she sees a book on the ground titled "Hypnosis." According to the idea previously mentioned, this memory will stay with her for the rest of her life, somewhere inside her brain I guess, but she won't necessarily remember it.

  With my dreams, I've gone through so much memory therapy that I've learned how to remember these experiences that I have.

  When I was younger I started to recognize that the dreams I had were sometimes connected with another dream I would have, so I asked a doctor if such a thing was normal. Do people usually have dreams that seem as if they are trying to tell a story? He tells me that he doesn't know, that it's not his field of expertise, but he also says that he wouldn't doubt that it could happen. Then he goes on to ask me what my name is and if I feel depressed.

  Chapter 18:

  OEDIPUS ELECTRA

  I'm walking home from the grocery store and down Chase street I see a crowd. Naturally my mind begins to wonder what may have happened
, and as the average human thinker would behave, I assume something bad happened.

  As I get closer and closer, the yellow police tape becomes more visible, and then finally someone tells me that someone was murdered. Shot down. This city gets more than its fair share of homicides, but I'm starting to believe that death will never get old. No matter how many times you see a lifeless body, it makes you think.

  I'm standing there looking at the man's face, at least they didn't mess with that. Then I start to think of Joe, how even though Joe isn't dead like this man, they both look the same. Their faces are so still. Expressionless, emotionless. Sometimes as a child when my mother would make my father sleep in the living room, I would walk by and watch him as he slept, and it always scared me because he looked so dead. In some dark twisted way, how he looked when he slept was exactly how he looked at his funeral to me.

  There was a time in my late teenage years where all I could do was think about death, but I think we all go through that phase some point in our lives and it hits us hard because it's such a hard thing to understand. What is death? The obsession with death ate away at my mind, and it wasn't because I didn't know what happened after it, it was because I knew it would have to happen someday, and I didn't know when.

  I can't say that I've accepted death, but I am not terrified of it anymore because as we all know there isn't really anything we can do to prevent it. In ways birth is the same as death, but because our mind is in a fixed position on life, I don't think we can ever perceive that as what it really means. This damn fisheye view. It probably takes someone until their late teenage years to question life and death, but I'm sure it takes everyone a lifetime to accept death itself.

  I get to the front of my apartment building and I look at the flowers Lynne is planting, and they are starting to die. Today I am surrounded by death it seems. They are turning brown and look shriveled up. Now that I think about it, I hadn't seen Lynne since that night she came to my apartment.

  As I'm about to open the front door I notice Claire's car in my parking spot. I guess she's over for dinner. As I'm walking to my apartment door I hear talking and knocking, and eventually I see Claire and some man standing in front of Lynne's door. It kind of looks like that man who was here before, the man who was banging on Lynne's door and disturbing everyone in the building. Her ex-husband. But I can't be entirely sure. I nod at Claire and she nods back, and then asks me if I've seen Lynne.

  I tell her I haven't seen her in days, and I ask if Lynne is missing? Misused question mark. As I'm asking this question frames of that dream pass through my thoughts. Billboard, have you seen Maria?

  Claire tells me that Lynne is fine, she tells me that she was suppose to meet Lynne today to talk but she hasn't been answering her phone all morning and she doesn't appear to be home. As her and the man are walking by to leave the building the man tells me to let them know if I see Lynne, and then he gives me a dirty look as if he is trying to turn that favor into a demand.

  After they leave I open my door and I go fill the fridge with my groceries. The damn garbage can is full, so I go outside to throw it out. As I'm walking I notice Claire's car is gone, and in the corner of my eye I see Lynne's window curtains move, as if someone was checking to see if they had left. Someone is home.

  I'm walking back to my apartment door and as I'm about to open it, I instead decide to go see if Lynne is actually home, to see if anything is wrong. I knock, and then I say it's me, I say my name, and she opens the door. I jokingly ask her why she's been avoiding me and she begins to laugh, and those bruises on the side of her face seem as if they were gone. I would kill to see that laugh.

  I ask her if that was her husband, and she says it was her ex-husband. She goes on to tell me that she thinks her sister is seeing her ex-husband and about how much she hates them both. This damn hate gene.

  I ask her why she didn't just open the door and talk with them about it, and she says because Claire would never realize that Silvio was using Claire to get back at Lynne for taking the kids away from Silvio. She calls Silvio an Hispanic bastard.

  These adults now sound like they are going through typical high school bullshit. She also adds that she doesn't trust Silvio's temper.

  Then Lynne tells me that she knows that Silvio found her last time because Claire told her where Lynne was staying, and that this was the reason why she hated and suspected her sister. Lynne's face is so red that I decide I have to change the subject, and I tell her that her plants are dying. She looks at me confused, then the redness goes away. She walks into the other room and then a few seconds later she walks back out and hands me something. A packet of seeds.

  She tells me that she made the mistake of trying to plant zinnias where there isn't much sunlight. That zinnias can't survive in a shade garden. Since there was no other place to plant anything she was instead going to plant Peace Lilies. She tells me that Peace Lilies flourish in the shade. She's finally smiling again. This happy gene.

  Not too long after I hear a knock on my door, and I go see who it is. I'm hoping it's not the return of Claire and Silvio. I look down the hallway and I see a police officer and I inform him that I'm the one who lives at that door.

  The officer asks both Lynne and I if we saw or heard anything strange last night or this morning, and we both say no. Lynne asks why and the officer tells her that there had been a murder not too far from here. The murder that I walked past.

  The officer tells us that before the man was murdered, several tenants from other apartment buildings said he knocked on their door and asked strange questions and looked as if he were confused. As if he didn't know what was going on and he had no real connection to the world outside of his mind. As if he were unaware of his actions.

  The officer asks if either of us received a visit from a man like that and we both said no, and then went on to ask others in the building and then he left.

  Two nights ago I had a dream where I was digging a grave. At first I'm standing in front of my mother and my father's tombstones, and then I'm standing in the grave digging deeper and deeper not realizing I won't be able to get out. I'm looking for my mother and father but no matter how deep I dig I can't find them. It's funny how I say "them" instead of "the bodies." When a boy is alive and well, you'll call him Jason, but when he's dead and his body is lifeless, most people refer to him as "the body." Where's the body? Bring me the body.

  Not where's Jason, not bring me Jason. I think most of the times the people who knew Jason would keep calling him Jason because they don't want to realize his life is gone and all that's left is his body. The human psyche at work.

  I keep digging and digging but all I can see in my mind is Abraham Lincoln's face and what I think is his voice. "We can never fool all of the people all of the time." I look up to see if Lincoln is above me, speaking down to me, but he isn't there. Just a voice in my head.

  When I look back down to start digging again, I see that woman, and she is laying face down. That damn woman that haunts my dreams. That damn woman who won't tell me who she is. I start to turn her body, and before me I see a woman who resembles my mother.

  After I wake up I try to figure out what it means but all I can really come up with is that the dream when I'm in the utopia and this dream mean something, that they're connected at least in my mind. If the woman laying in that bed in the utopia that I am leaving is my mother as well, then maybe what I'm hoping for subconsciously is that my mother is in a better place now. In a peaceful place. Or maybe that I'm willing to switch places with her if she isn't.

  Before my father died my mother committed suicide. I believe she killed herself because she felt as if she was born in the wrong time period or the wrong parallel universe. She didn't say it but I know she hated most of the people she met. She hated them because she hated people in general, she hated human tendencies and their lifestyles. Misanthropy.

  She hated the imbalance in the world, and she hated the people who didn't care about it even more. Her h
ate grew so much that it eventually consumed her and took away her life, literally and metaphorically.

  The one thing I could never understand was how she loved my father. How can you hate so many people and find room in your heart for this one person. Now my father wasn't a bad man, but he wasn't that great either. He didn't beat my mother, not with his fists at least, but in a way he did hit her. He ignored her, and he didn't care how obvious it was that his work was more important to him than his wife and his family. Somehow she found the strength to stay with him until she died.

  After she died, my father realized how much he ignored her. How worthless he made her feel. His guilt turned into physical body complications and then he eventually died. In a way they kind of killed each other, but only in kind of a way.

  I remember when Maria thought I needed help, that I needed to go see a psychiatrist or a therapist or something like that. I saw her point, my mind was out there, so I decided to humor her and go see one.

  The problem with that was that the medication they were giving me was messing with my memory, and in turn, I couldn't remember my dreams no matter how hard I tried. For two months, it was as if I had no dreams. I couldn't live like that. I wouldn't live like that.