Screamscape - Part I

I am lost. Placid. I look out at you now from the flat surface of an ordinary mirror. I see myself and that is all. My reflection looks back, but it isn’t there. This thing. This place. It has me deep inside. And I can’t get out. I know my wife is back in the bedroom. At least. The thing I believe to be my wife. Asleep. Just a particle in this blank essence. Something has been calling out to me. Something near. It tells me that things were always like this. I had a life on the outside. Before I went into the machine. before I was trapped in my dream. A dream. An essence. Stuck in my own head and sleeping. Oh. Sleeping ever so soundly. But I know the doctor is dead. I know he is gone and I’m trapped in my mind.

Alone. At any moment I can trigger a jump. One second I’m at work. The next I’m being run down by lions in Africa. Or maybe losing my breath upon the precipice of some vast intergalactic monolith. And the only light I have to look to is that of a great star’s light peaking out from behind a holy crystal celestial orb. This is my word. I am god in a box. And I can’t do a damn thing about it. Three-hundred and fourteen days. That’s how long I’ve been here. I tried to calculate the time precisely but the clocks don’t work here. Time is amiss. I’ve begun to read my breaths, blinks and heartbeats. I count each second in the back of my mind. I’m always counting. Everything may change here, but not me.

I’m always the same. This counter is wet. But it isn’t. I’m tried. But I’m not. Nothing makes sense here. All I need is a moment to think forward, without jumping again. I just need to get through this morning. To go to work. To figure out a way out. Before I could ponder another moment of it, her voice called out to me from the slightly opened door.

Honey, are you up?

Yes, dear!

Do me a favor and put the cup on.

You want a cup?

No, just put it on.

Will do.

How did you sleep?

Not so well.

What time is it?

Not sure. maybe six.

Come back to bed. You don’t have work till ten.

I don’t? Well. Maybe run a load.

The washers broken. Remember?

Yeah, I remember.

You get the tax papers? I set them out last night, before you came in.

Forgot all about them. Sorry, babe.

It’s fine. Got time today.

Yup.

There was a brief silence as I inspected her voice. Was this woman really my wife? Did I have a wife before all of this? For all I knew I could open the door to my room and see just a blank space where a pre-recorded audio bubble stands to resemble a person speaking to me. I came to learn much about dreams and see as how they were merely simulations of a sort and how not everything in them was in full existence. There ere fakes, duds, glitches, substitutes and props. A pre-arranged environment meant to entertain the mind. That’s all. She called out again.

What you want for dinner tonight?

Uh. Chicken. You planned it, right?

I was hoping we could cook together.

Sure. Sounds nice. Any occasion?

No. It’d just be nice.

Right.

What about the tickets?

The what?

The tickets, for the movie? It’s Friday. 

Oh, yeah. Right. I got them. Don’t worry.

You sure?

Absolutely!

What did you pick?

What?

What kind of movie did you pick?

Uh, horror.

That should be interesting. You know how I love horror.

Yeah, me too.

You hate horror though.

Yeah. Right… Hey, hon! I’m gonna hop in for a shower. Be right out.

Sure thing, babe!

A movie? Tonight? That should be good. Maybe I can escape then? Use the screen to wake up? I’d slash my wrists but death doesn’t wake you up. Believe me, I’ve tried. Wait. Movie? A movie? Movies. Oh, no… I jumped again. And this time my thoughts took me to the screening of a film, of relatively large proportions, and before I could exist my seat to hit the  concession stand the lights dimmed, the screen went aglow and movie started. There was trace of the bathroom I had been in or the presence of the thing that made itself out to be my wife waiting in the bedroom. I was alone in the theater. Well, that’s not entirely true. There were some shadowy figures, about three, spread out in seat towards the far back of the room.

I turned to see them, but only for a second, knowing my mind wouldn’t take the time to give them faces, names, personalities. They were just dark masses of meat in the room. Scenery. That’s all they were. The movie began and it started with the painful birth of a young infant with just a little bit of hair and a knack for crying his eyes out. after that the film had spanned five years in length and I felt as if I was turning to alabaster sitting in that seat. After the five year mark they boy was diagnosed with some illness that made him slow and we, that is all of me and the three human pieces of scenery in the theater, saw the boy’s dreams each night. And in them he dreamt of the future.

Of a time he was to pass. And he did. At nineteen he was drafted and joined the Navy. While there he was stationed far away, lost some buddies to the tide of the ocean, met a Japanese girl whom he settled down with after four years of service and sat by her side at the age of twenty-five as cancer took her last breath. He drifted for a while, sold his passport and wandered the life of a weary nomad across America. One day, at a time when he was about thirty some co-workers heard him doing a Sinatra impersonation and gave him the nerve to audition for an upcoming film. He accepted, met a pretty little agent and by the time his thirty-fifth birthday had come, he was married with two kids.

A boy and a girl named Ian and Shirley. At the age of thirty-eight his wife passes in a car accident and his daughter dies of alcohol poisoning while in college. Just him and his son, whom he doesn’t talk to due to years of neglect, finally calls him one day to reconnect and the two of them reconcile and decide to meet up. One day a train to the boy, no… man’s, small town derails and on it is his twenty-two year old son. The man, alone and heartbroken, slips into a depression and frequents the local Irish bar in hope of filling his bubble of sadness with ounces of wine every night, all cause he can’t take heavy drink. One night while walking home, at the age of seventy-two now, he meets a hot little number, a year younger than him, who’s living locally with fantastic benefits and is on the prowl for a partner-in-passing. 

He’s granted a lovely last three months in which his liver improves and he watches as the third love of his life, Martha, dies on the eve of a lovely Sunday morning. He follows a week later, in his sleep, sorrow-stricken and fully lived. He made no attempt to contact his parents all his life and drifted apart from his older brother after joining up with the army. And so he dies, broken and yet, all together. Peaceful and ready his name moves among the stars and makes it’s place within the vastness of unending time. Like that the credits roll and I take my leave, wondering what it was all supposed to mean, then giving up once I remembered where I was.

It was at this time a great big black shape, like a carved rock passed through the dim screen of the theater and fog filled the room. Before me a large dark shape passed over head, slowly making it’s way in through the screen and positioning itself in the dead-center of the room. It loomed above me, omnipresent.