Chapter 2

Jan 13, 2014, 4:49:19 PM

Under normal circumstances, I’d be inclined to explore the premise and implications of actual, discrete realities, but when the embodiment of your imagination drags your unconscious ass off the street to discuss your failure to write her story, well, we’re obviously not talking about a normal circumstance. She’d already admitted she did not have an explanation for how she got here, so I considered the next question.

The story. Her story. If anyone should know it, it was her. If anything should be impossible, it would be me knowing her story the way I did. At least, that would normally be the case with the life story of someone you met on the street. Again, normal did not quite apply to this situation. Without a single attempt to establish the details of her story, we’d already referred to it the way two old acquaintances addressed a shared experience.

On the other hand, there was one thing the story could not account for.

“So, how is it that you know me?” I asked, finally scratching at the itch that started bothering me from the moment she first spoke to me. “I always intended to publish under a pseudonym–a pen name.”

“Oh, you did,” she admitted, giving me an irritated look. “Fortunately, the books I found about me were just a subset of the collection of books written about you.” Her irritation evolved into amused satisfaction at my shock. Before I recovered, she went on, “But the truth is, I was dreaming about you for a long time before I got access to that library.”

I blinked. A smug voice in the back of my head told me I should have known, but had chosen not to. Rather than pursue that thought, I focused on her. “You dreamed about me?”

“Um,” she looked off to the side and cleared her throat. “It was more like, I had nightmares about you.” Her eyes turned back to me. “Nightmares about being you.”

My mouth went dry and my throat suddenly tried to close up. I dragged my feet off the coffee table and planted them on the floor, leaning forward to brace my elbows on my knees. I knew the story. I knew she had always been plagued by nightmares, but… “I thought your nightmares were about the massacre–the night your… mother died.”

She looked away again, and closed her eyes; concealing the stab of an old wound. Her reply was a bit tight, “That’s where they often start–and end. In the middle, they go down stranger, darker paths that seem to go on forever and I get so lost… I can barely remember who I am.”

My gut clenched. “And that’s when you dream of being me?”

She hesitated before nodding.

I pushed up and stalked away in a sudden fury of conflicting emotion. There was nowhere to go. No way I wanted to walk away from her. I didn’t even really see anything but her, and yet I felt like I was riding a rocket out of the atmosphere. I didn’t get more than a few steps before I stopped, and let the thunder roll through me.

This is what mountains feel like in that terrifying moment they remember they are volcanos. In the brief passion of exploding; shattering and dissolving into choking clouds of ash. When they turn inside out, revealing their hollow shells and molten cores.

“It’s not the same,” I breathed, hands clenching into fists as if I could keep from flying away if I just held on to myself tight enough. “I dream about you, sometimes. Sometimes, for an instant, I’m someone like you. I’ve never really dreamed of being you,” I declared in a hollow, aching voice.

“Not when you’re asleep,” she corrected softly. Her hand grasped me by the shoulder and with firm but gentle strength she turned me to face her. Met me eye to eye. “But you dream about me almost every moment you’re awake. I am always on your mind, and that’s why it’s such a nightmare to be you.”

The emotion that thrust me to my feet was spent, and for one endless instant the whole universe stood silent and still. Then I was in free fall. Her hands slid down my arms, gently closing about my fists. With that same firm, feather-light touch, she brought our hands up into our line of sight.

I already knew this metaphor. I used it to describe what I call the point paradox. When you hold on to nothing, you grasp yourself. It’s the fundamental existential paradox. “A story isn’t the words on a page. Words are just the ashes of a fire that burns only in the mind. My story, burning in your mind; you, consciously unleashing your imagination; you dream of being me when you’re wide awake,” she asserted passionately.

What could I say. A person could define the creative process in other terms, but her description was weirdly accurate and essentially true. The tricky part, as always in the case of a truth, was knowing what it actually meant. I pulled my hands free and ran my palms over my face, covering my eyes. The mask I wear is one I cannot take off, but she managed to strip it away almost effortlessly, shattering the lie that lets me function as a human being.

“I guess that’s the problem,” I confessed after a moment, from behind the shelter of my hands. “I had a dream instead of a life. It was a good dream; too good, really. For all the pain and horror, and all the paradoxes, too good to be true. A great story, but…” I took a deep breath and sighed, dropping my hands. “I was looking for a way to survive, and it was too strange and complicated a story to find a marketable audience.”

She regarded me thoughtfully for a moment. “I think I understand,” she finally said, drifting toward an end table and turning on a lamp. As the light spilled into the room, she gestured at the lamp’s twin on the matching table at the other end of the couch. She continued speaking as I lit the other light. “I’ve passed through your life like a leaf in a hurricane. I saw more than was in the books, but I have to guess at the proper sequence.”

I crossed my arms and looked down. “If I’d had any balance in my life, I might have been able to finish writing and publish. I don’t know if I’d have gotten the story right, though. I know what you mean by ’leaf in a hurricane’; I’ve always been able to glimpse the pieces, and I have a good grasp of the overall picture, but I was never able to figure out how it all fits together,” I admitted.

I looked around, part of my mind trying to place myself in an unfamiliar environment, wondering whose home we were in. Where was the guy she’d been speaking to when I woke up? What compelled a stranger to take a strange couple into his home? It was a blank that would have needed an answer if I was writing this scenario. Actually, it was a blank I’d need to fill in somehow, now that I’d fallen into the story I was supposed to write.

Oh, nice stumbling block there. “How the hell am I going to write the story now?” I found myself complaining aloud.

That made her laugh, and hearing it made me want to cry. I know, that’s odd, but it’s a symptom of my life. My own laughter never felt or sounded right to me. I never laughed the same way twice. Something pegs my humor meter, and some weird, random sound came out of me. Sometimes it was outright creepy.

When she laughed, it sounded right–even laced with painful understanding of my complaint. She ended with a deep breath and a sigh, saying, “I don’t know much about writing, but I assume you just write. Put the ideas down as they come to you; when you run out of ideas, take what you’ve got and try to put them in order. I’m guessing you’ve tried that, though.”

I gave her an exasperated look. “We are talking about your life here, right?”

She opened her mouth, thought about it for a second, then nodded with another sigh. “You’re right. It couldn’t possibly be that easy. If I hadn’t lived it–if I’d tried to imagine it back when my life was reasonably normal–I wouldn’t think it was possible to even dream it,” she confessed.

Under my breath, I muttered, “I didn’t think it was possible to even read it.”

She looked at me and frowned. Oops. Guess she heard that–as she quickly confirmed, “I read it. Apart from the fact that I quickly figured out it was impossibly like my life–not so great for my sanity right then–it was a pretty gripping story.”

My brows furrowed. “‘Like’ your life? I thought you said it was accurate?” I challenged.

The look she returned was mockingly skeptical. “Do you have any idea how weird it is to see your world through the lens of an alien language and culture?” she retorted, arms crossed and hip cocked for emphasis.

I rolled my eyes and sighed, half exasperated, half relieved. “I know how hard it is to capture–and by that I mean, fake–the language and culture of a world I was pretty sure existed only in my imagination. At least now I know I don’t have to go to all that extra work.”

She shook her head in mild disbelief and shrugged. “From my side, it seemed like someone had gone to a lot of extra work to disguise my biography. I’ve met a few gods who would have gone to the trouble just to mess with my head.” She looked at me, scanned the room around us, and returned her eyes to mine. “That could apply even to this,” she amended, in clear reference to our situation.

“Anyway,” she returned to the point, “the events and situations, the essence of my thoughts and feelings all came through. Not my story the way I might write it, but the way someone with their own perspective, looking through me, would write it. It was that, more than the books about me or you, that convinced me you were out here.”

I tucked my head down. I couldn’t help it, really. I got an odd feeling, thinking about that conundrum. As a writer, the sky is the limit. It’s fun to play with the notion of gods; people who personified power, shaping reality the way a writer shapes a story. It was amusing to think you could find the lives of ordinary people on the shelves of their libraries.

To confront it as a possible reality, with only one degree of separation, ought to seem frightening–at the very least, deeply disturbing. To me, right then, it just seemed preposterous. My life didn’t make a good story. It hardly qualified as a life. She had it characterized much better as a nightmare. It was tainted by one mundane and ugly paradox. Painful, but tame and boring compared to a life like hers.

I’m not even sure how the idea came to me, originally. I think I’d been sketching an outline of her life, and it sort of came up after her death–which troubled me, but given where her adventures had taken her, dying wasn’t enough to end her adventures. I could see her coming back to life somewhere down the road, but I knew the trip to the library would send her down another path first.

I never felt comfortable about exploring that path. It hurt to imagine a scene like this, writing it out but not living it. That was the reality I expect to face; not this. In a way, I guess I believed, deep down, that the story had it’s own reality, and I wanted to preserve that faith. How could I knowingly write myself into the story without at least that part glaring back at me as pure fiction?

I’d lied to myself enough up to that point. I didn’t have the stomach to do it again, even if that was what the story called for. I guess that was when I started to lose the thread of the story, trying to change it to suit a broader audience. When my demons began to work their way into the fabric of the story. With a deep sigh, I confessed, “That’s where I fell prey to doubt.”

She just nodded, as if she was expecting me to say that. Well, if I was her nightmare, I suppose she would. Then she said something that proved how well she knew me. “That’s also pretty much where you stopped lying to yourself. Isn’t it?”

I crossed my arms, head still bowed–almost masking my slow, timid nod–as I confirmed, “Yeah. That’s where my life really started to fall apart. And, where the story started to take on a different meaning for me.” I forced myself to look up, and say what I had to say to her face, “I began to see my inspiration in a different way, and question all the things that brought you to mind and unlocked your story.

“It didn’t kill the story for me, but it expanded the paradox,” I explained, holding myself tightly. “I started to get a better understanding of how a time paradox works, and of course, I kept getting lost trying to follow the path, searching for the way in and out–knowing how it ends while growing less and less certain about the beginning.”

By refusing to consider direct involvement in the story on my part, I realized that I might have imposed myself on the story in a far more disruptive way. I was still debating how to bring that concern up when she broke the silence.

“The beginning…” she murmured softly, thoughtfully. “We never remember the beginning,” she continued, pursuing a notion my words kicked loose in her skull. “We pretend not to know why–but then that is one of our favorite tricks, isn’t it?” she glanced up at me, smiling at my confused silence.

With her arms crossed she began to drift about the room, examining objects while continuing this strange interlocution. “We pretend not to know many things. We can even pretend not to know the truth. The horrible truth. But the beginning?” she paused and met my eye in the mirror across the room from the couch. “Well there is an explanation for that one. We never remember the beginning because there never was a beginning. That’s one of those horrible parts of the truth we choose to miss.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Her choice of words–the horrible truth–bothered me inexplicably. My own musing forgotten for the moment, I wanted to argue with her; as a writer, I wanted to point out the fact that there are many beginnings and how easy it is to remember most of them.

The urge to argue was so strong that I felt suspicious of it. It might have been an appropriate impulse for one of the philosophic, speculative debates I used to get into with my old friends at the pub, but the honest part of me knew I was trying to keep from asking “What horrible truth?” aloud.

She turned to face me, and the look she gave me made me feel like I asked the wrong question. I thought she was waiting for me to rephrase my query, but, before I could think of the right question to ask, she reprimanded, “You know what I mean.”

For a moment I didn’t know if she was answering the question I asked or the question I kept to myself. Or were they the same thing?

“We never remember the beginning,” she went on, not even sparing me a second look, “until the very end; because there is no end either. How can there be when at either moment you’re right in the middle of it? None of which makes sense, of course, until you risk looking at the truth. I wish I could tell you that truth. Honestly.”

“Why couldn’t you?” I prompted, hoping for something to define where this conversation was heading.

She smiled to herself. A rather frightening smile. “And pour water into a full glass?” She laughed. It was still a mesmerizing sound. “The truth is already there. You already understand it on some level. It just doesn’t fit into your perspective; you don’t know how to explain it to your self. It’s like being in a conversation and thinking about what you want to say when you should just be listening.”

She wasn’t looking at me. I doubt she was looking at anything in particular. It struck me suddenly that she was holding herself posed to listen. On sheer reflex, I tuned into the background as well, and she spoke again, “So, telling you the truth… the trick is just getting you to listen.”

“What?” I blurted, startled by the fact that she had basically done just that; tricking me into listening.

“We never remember the beginning,” she said quietly, precisely as she had before. I looked at her with a frown, but she carried on without regarding it. “We pretend not to know why–but then that is one of our favorite tricks, isn’t it? We pretend not to know many things. We can even pretend not to know the truth. The horrible truth.

“But the truth?” she held that in the air a moment, and looked at me pointedly. She held up her hands for emphasis.

Realizing that the question was not rhetorical, I nodded.

“The truth is a constant. It doesn’t need to repeat itself,” she declared. As she went on, she measured out her words, “I can remember the beginning.”

Before I could ask the beginning of what she cut me off with a gesture, and resumed the pose of listening. This caused my agitation to grow. I have never considered myself an insensitive person. Indeed, there were times I felt proud of my sensitivity to the subtlest of cues.

As a child I was so sensitive that there were moments when I seemed to get caught up in the thoughts and feelings of the people around me. I don’t know where that notion could have come from, but my best guess has been that I could read the state of a person’s mind so well from their body language that I would experience sympathetic thoughts and feelings.

What am I driving at? Well, at that moment, her gesture struck me so suddenly she might have just as well screamed “Listen!” at the top of her lungs.

That shock subsided quickly, but I could not shake the feeling that she was communicating–deliberately–on many levels, verbal and non-verbal. I brought my mind into focus and met her eye.

Without words, her body resonating with the charge of an epiphany, she managed to express her awareness of my realization. My eyes widened and she nodded with the faintest smile. The clearest thought chimed in my head, Ears hear, but the mind listens… the mind listens with every sense and it becomes a sense.

Can you read my mind?

I was nodding my head before I even thought to question the origin of the thought. My mind fell still, the silence ringing with heightened awareness. I didn’t have to question what beginning she was talking about, because suddenly it was obvious what beginning people were oblivious to. The moment we become self-aware.

She smiled broadly at me and nodded assertively. Without further distractions she resumed speaking.