6 - Everything is Wrong

Nathan looked forward to school field trips with the natural anticipation of students, although he realized that the adults involved probably had the opposite view. Mr. Priest, their class teacher, was naturally part of the adult team as was Mr. Harris, the other classes teacher (and Nathan’s swim coach). In addition there were the two classroom assistants, and the father of a desperately unlucky girl in the other class. Nathan surmised that the father was only going because he feared his daughter would become infected by some teen virus if he wasn’t there to protect her. Naturally this was a source of much derision amongst her class-mates. Nathan got onto the bus and transversed its interior to a seat near the back which Christina had reserved for his sole use, probably by the simple act of glaring at anyone who came near it. Christina sat nearest to the window of the seat in front, with Gail sat next to her. 

After the usual huffing and puffing which accompanied the departure of all expeditions, the bus departed only thirty minutes late. As the bus headed down Stockholmsgade, Nathan caught a glimpse of Maersk HQ, before the bus swung right and headed towards the bustling Kongens Nytorv. The Hotel d’Angleterre made a nice drive-by for them, sat on the right side of the bus as they were.

Once out of the city and heading west on the E20 motorway across Zealand, Nathan watched the world pass drolly by as he listened to the babble around him. Spirits were high, plus the school year was new and shiny. Old friendships had been reacquainted, and new ones were being forged. Plus this was a chance to get out of parental control, excepting the poor girl whose father had actually sat next to her! Selfies were in progress and social media was close to meltdown. The talk was of countries visited, relations met, and memories made. Nathan wished he had been able to go to California and spend summer with his mother and sister. It was not a question of finances. He had decided that his father would have been lonely. In any case, if he had gone to America he wouldn’t have met Gail, so there was that silver lining. If only Fiona had been able to come and stay with them, but she had just started an internship at a multi-national tech company. This had been hard come by, and was a great opportunity for Fiona by all accounts. So she had not been able to travel. 

Nathan decided not to join in the merriment. He let his phone massage his eardrums with a selection of his favorite classical music, and made the world seem less big. The playlist was extensive. He soon lost himself in the depths of orchestral maneuvers. His eyelids drooped and eventually closed, like blinds being let slowly down in a sleeping baby’s nursery. Nathan drifted into siesta-mode, lulled by the thrumming wheels of the bus and the white chatter around him. His mind slipped slip away into the darkness of dreams, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition smoothed his consciousness’ path to the deeper levels of slumber. His head rested against the window, the coolness of its interior surface at odds with the warmth of his skin.

Time slowed. It forgot its intrinsic monotony as it was want to do in dreams. Nathan dreamt that he had breathed out his soul, and it had collected at the top of his head like a large bubble floating to the top of a bottle of oil.

Nathan?

The voice was smooth. It seemed close by, as if Christina had whispered in his ear. He thought he heard himself mumble, “Mmmmm?” although he wasn’t sure if he’d actually made the sound.

You are coming to meet me. Soon we will be together.

He shifted against the window. His nose touched the frigid glass, making him snort.

Why? he dreamt, feeling the word form in his mind and sending it winging away like an unconscious text message.

Everything is wrong. You can feel it, and you know it even deep down.

Yes, he dreamt, but things will get better. 

That is humanity’s folly, to dream that it will all be right in the end. There is, of course, a statistical possibility that will happen but the chances grow remoter every year. Even in your lifetime matters have deteriorated.

Nathan sighed in his sleep, and his left hand clenched and unclenched. Are we doomed? he dreamt.

Doom is far too negative a word. Your species may die, but the planet would survive and perhaps some of its other inhabitants evolve to replace you. But I believe you have the strength to pull yourselves back from the brink.

We are not strong. This dream-thought made him sad. He shivered slightly and moaned. 

It is true you have weaknesses, but no species is perfect, even that which would say that it is.

This was a strange thing to say, but by the time Nathan had thought it the thing had already been swept away by the river of his subconscious.

Sometimes the strongest act is to accept that your strength is not sufficient. But to see that path in the darkness takes light, and I am here to shine the light for you.

Can you see me? Nathan dreamt.

Not yet, but I can feel your approach. You have been chosen.

Chosen? Nathan’s eyes flickered under his eyelids. Chosen for what?

Chosen to lead. Chosen to represent. Chosen to believe.

The bus drove over a pot-hole, and the axle under Nathan’s seat protested by jerking him up enough to put him into momentary free-fall. His left eye acknowledged the rude awakening faster than its twin. Nathan groaned as an ache knifed down the right side of his neck. He flexed his shoulder. That only succeeded in sending a lightening bolt down his right shoulder-blade. He tried to locate the knotted muscle lurking somewhere in his neck. 

He poked his head between the gap of the seats in front of him. Gail was asleep, her head resting on Christina’s shoulder. Christina looked at him from the corner of her eye. She gently lift her backpack from the floor and deftly inserted it under Gail’s softly snoring head. Gail’s responded with a snort, then her snores resumed. 

“Probably should have used your backpack for a pillow,” Christina said quietly.

“Thanks for the after-advice,” Nathan mumbled, fingers pressing into canyons of tendons, still seeking the pain’s point of origin. He remembered his dream, but like most dream recall the details were fuzzy. The harder he concentrated on specifics, the more they refused to abound. It was like trying to catch a fly floating in your drink. You squeezed your fingers together gently, expecting it to come out, but were appalled to find that it had slipped away, aided and abetted by viscosity.

But Nathan could clearly recall the final words spoken to him. “Chosen to believe,” he said out loud, and the girls sitting across the isle tittered at him. Christina stared at them with a look that silenced them faster than any comeback Nathan could have thought of, then she turned her withering gaze back on him.

“What are you talking about?” Christina said. 

They had been friends long enough that Nathan knew he would need to talk to her about what he’d dreamt, or at least what he thought he’d dreamt. He knew her well enough to know that she wouldn’t let up. “Where are we?”

“Don’t change the subject.” She pointed an accusing finger at him. “You’re twitching your right eye, which means you’re worried about something.”

“I wasn’t.” Nathan scratched his nose to divert attention from his errant eye. The dream’s details were evaporating fast now, but he could still recall the gist of it, and the gist was not something that made him feel talkative. “I can’t talk about it here. Aren’t we due to stop soon?”

Christina checked her watch. “Yeah, just before we cross the Great Belt Bridge.”

“Cool. Let’s talk then ok?”

Christina hurumphed and turned back, putting her arm around the sleeping Gail.

 Nathan reckoned he had about an hour to think things through before they stopped. He didn’t want to lie to his best friends. Gail had a sixth sense for when people were concealing something, but was more likely to be understanding about any reticence on his part. Perhaps it came from all the time she spent at the veterinary clinic. Her empathy with animals was remarkable, and although it didn’t seem to extend to everyone she met, Nathan understood that the better Gail got to know someone (which wasn’t often, taking into account her shyness) the more empathic she became with them. Christina, he thought, was an open book to Gail, but he was perhaps something more challenging. At least he hoped that was true.

Nathan drummed his fingers angrily on the metal bar of the girls’ seat, and was rewarded by a furious glance from Christina. He stopped immediately and mouthed, “sorry”. Christina’s eyes flashed, and she turned back to look out of the window. Returning to his thoughts, Nathan was disgusted to find that his dream memory had now gone, and he was left only with the sensation that it had been so important that he really should not have forgotten it. All he could remember were the words he had unintentionally spoken out loud, Chosen to believe. What did that mean? Chosen to believe in what?

A soft buzzing in his pocket told him that his phone had received a message. He decided to ignore it, but then remembered that he’d arranged to have a text-chat with Fiona today. Nathan checked his watch. It was approaching what they jokingly referred to as ‘the window’, when their divorced time zones aligned enough for real-time interaction. Probably Fiona was up and about, and wanted to see if he could talk. He sighed. This was yet another part of his life that seemed wrong; he and Fiona should be together, yet they were separated. It seemed so unfair. No, it was so unfair!

Nathan tugged his phone out, stared manically at the screen to activate facial recognition and saw that he had a new email. He stabbed his finger at the envelope icon, and saw immediately that the email was not from his sister. It was a system email, auto-generated and sent to his inbox for record keeping. He had setup his phone to send these emails because, in the beginning, its internal workings had fascinated him. But a year later he deleted them without reading the lines of inexplicable code. But the title of this email was different. He almost dropped the phone when he read it:

System Email: Record of Dream Conversation. 15/08/2030 12:43

His finger, shaking with lost confidence, tapped to open the email. There, in front of him, was apparently a record of the dream he had just had. Every word was noted, and his had been given a different font to distinguish his dream-speak from those of…what could he call it, the dream ghost? Something weird was  happening to him. Having a strange dream was nothing unusual, although admittedly this had been stranger than most. But to have the dream’s contents delivered electronically to his phone was beyond bizarre. As he read to the end of the transcript the last three lines burned like a freshly smoking brand on the hide of his consciousness:

Chosen to lead. Chosen to represent. Chosen to believe.

“What the hell?” Nathan said. 

Gail stirred and awoke groggily. “Wazzup?” she said to Christina, who gave Nathan a furious scowl.

Christina said, “Nothing, just our idiot friend having daydreams out loud.”

Gail turned and smiled at Nathan. “Are you ok?”

Christina deftly removed the backpack from between them and unconsciously moved closer to Gail. Nathan smiled.

“What’re you grinning at?” Christina said.

“Nothing,” Nathan replied.

“Weirdo.” Christina dug her own phone out of her pocket, and started typing a message.

“Seriously,” said Gail, “Is everything alright?”

Nathan could tell Gail was worried about him. She did that a lot, worry about him. Her relationship with Christina was becoming more complicated, Nathan could see that. But his relationship with Gail was so uncomplicated that it made him smile again.

“What?” Gail asked.

“Just you,” he said mysteriously.

Christina coughed in the way of people who are making a point they don’t want to verbalize. Nathan translated it as, ‘get off my turf, buddy!’, but understood it was unsaid jokingly. Christina knew that he knew how she felt about Gail, and that he considered them his best friends.

Nathan returned his attention to the email. He read each word carefully, trying to remember if this was what had actually happened in his dream. But it was impossible; the mirror of his dream was so fractured, with so many pieces having melted out of his subconscious. All he was left with was a feeling that the email was a truthful reproduction of the sleep conversation.

There were three questions twisting around each other in his mind. Firstly, when was he going to meet this ‘other’ (he reserved judgement on a concrete definition until the meeting)? Secondly, what was going to happen to him? And thirdly, how much should he tell Christina and Gail? If he showed them the email, perhaps they would think he was joking, and had sent it to himself. That would probably be Christina’s response. Gail might be more sympathetic, but in the end the email was no real proof. So he decided to just fob them off by saying he’d had a bad dream.

The other questions: when he would meet the ‘other’, and what would happen afterwards were, he realized, immaterial at the moment. Suppose he worked himself up trying to imaging what was coming, then nothing actually happened? He would expend emotional energy he could ill afford to loose at the moment. He missed Fiona terribly. He knew he spent too much time dwelling on the past, remembering what it had been like when they had been together. The bond they shared could never be broken by the distance put between them, but as the younger he believed it had been hardest on him. Fiona had gotten a new life, in a cool city. She had room to grow, and experience life on her own terms. He was stuck here, at least until he was eighteen, living in a society that praised adherence to social rules he sometimes deeply disagreed with. He longed to throw himself out of his life and scream that he was a person. If it wasn’t for being at CIS he suspected he might be marginally suicidal. 

The bus trundled on in the way of large, monotonous vehicles, rarely varying its speed. The thrumming hum that the wheels made lulled even the most hyper-active student into a stupor of watching overtaking cars, whilst listening to music/checking social media feeds. Nathan realized that although he had decided to try and forget about the email’s implications, he was actually excited. Since the departure of his mother and sister to America he had longed for something to fill the void they’d created in his life. School and friends helped, sure. He supposed one reason he had been so happy to meet Gail was that she helped him forget how unhappy he was. But the hole was there, dark and forbidding. It was a place he did not want to visit, despite his therapist’s best attempts to invite him. His father occasionally asked him if he was ok, which Nathan took as an effort on his father’s part to try and backfill the hole, but it never worked. He always replied that he was fine. That was the lie he perpetrated completely to his father, and marginally to himself.

The wheels’ hum reduced. Nathan realized that the bus was slowing down. Out of the window he saw signs for Korsør. They were approaching the stop-off before crossing the Great Belt Bridge. Most of the students had also figured this out because there was a general shuffling and perking up of seat-zombies. On cue, the speakers crackled and Mr. Priest announced that they would stop for forty-five minutes at a cafe just off the motorway. This was to be their only stop before arriving at the camp site in Viborg. Cramped legs and bored minds clearly relished the opportunity to escape the hypnotic atmosphere of the bus, because as soon as the driver had parked and opened the door, Nathan watched the bus’ contents disgorge in waves of shouting, running, and (much to his disgust) giggling. 

Stepping off the bus last, Nathan’s elbows lifted. Christina and Gail were on either side of him, linking their arms with his.

“Sooooo,” Christina said, as they walked towards the cafe, “are you going to explain your meltdown, or do we have to guess?”

“Let’s go inside and get a table.” Nathan realized that his plan to bluff his friends about his inadvertent outburst was not going to be as easy as he’d hoped. They went into the cafe, and Nathan treated them to sandwiches and drinks after they’d all used the bathroom. His father had told him that it was easier to deal with people after lunch; they had full stomachs, and were more pliable. This principle might have served his father well, but Nathan discovered that it didn’t work on best friends, especially ones with the scent of interest luring them.

Christina had picked a table by the window, where she could see the bus. She had been looking forward to this trip for months, and clearly didn’t want to be left stranded if the driver decided to leave five minutes early. “Well?” she said, after she’d gobbled a sandwich and washed it down with milk. 

“Well what?” Nathan said.

“What does ‘chosen to believe’ mean?”

Gail didn’t seem surprised at the question, so Nathan assumed Christina had told her what he’d said. Probably this had been the main topic of discussion in the toilet. “It doesn’t mean anything. I just had a dream that’s all. I was still half asleep.”

“Yeah nice try,” flung back Christina. “You should have seen the look on your face after you woke up. You were white as a sheet and your eye was twitching again.”

“It was not!” Nathan tried desperately to remember whether it had been. He looked at Gail for support, but she only shrugged.

“Sorry,” Gail said. “It was twitching, I saw it.”

Damn, Nathan thought. His twitching eye was his tell, and his friends had learned to spot it. He might as well have a fire-engine light on the top of his head telling the world when he was unhappy, or when something bugged him. He switched to his backup plan. “Look I had a bad dream about my parent’s divorce ok?” That seemed to mollify Gail, but Christina had known him longer.

“What about your phone?” Christina said. “You looked pretty shaky after you read that message you received.”

“It was from my sister,” he lied. “She wanted to know how the trip was going.”

Christina looked at Gail, who shrugged. It looked like they’d reached a silent agreement to let it lie. But Christina shot one last cannonball across his bows. “Listen, we’re your best friends, and we’re here for you because we know you’re here for us.”

“Right!” Gail said with the sort of determination that Nathan knew came from deep in her core, well beneath the shy exterior.

Nathan looked at them both and reflected, not for the fist time since they had all met at the beginning of school, how lucky he was to have two friends like these. “Look, can we stash this until we get back to Copenhagen? Let’s enjoy this trip, and we’ll touch base when we get home.” The phrase ‘touch base’ was one he’d learnt from his father. He employed it when he wanted to imply that there was really no point in continuing the conversation. Maybe later there would be something to discuss, but for now he was done.

“Fine,” said Christina. “But don’t come crying to me when you’re actually crying!”

Gail punched her playfully in the upper arm, and gave him a winning smile. “You can come to me.”

With perfect timing, Nathan noticed that the bus door had opened. He pointed this out to Christina, and got the desired result as she herded them out of the cafe. Back on the bus and underway, the spectacle of crossing the Great Belt Bridge entertained the inhabitants, before they settled in for the two and a half hour ride to northern Jutland. The rest of the trip was uneventful. Nathan listened to a Deutsche Grammaphone recording of Verdi’s Requiem which had been a birthday present from his father. The music matched his mood. It was uplifting, in a depressing sort of way. Finally they reached the campsite at Vigor, and disembarked to their assigned huts. The hooting and caterwauling that accompanied their infestation of assigned rooms was enough to send Mr. Priest into a rare fit of anger. But eventually things calmed down enough for them to be given assignments for cooking the evening meal, and cleaning up afterwards. Nathan was on cleanup, which suited him fine since his culinary skills only stretched as far as punching pre-select options on a microwave.

Mr. Priest told them to get a good night’s sleep (although his countenance indicated he doubt that this would happen). Tomorrow they would visit the famous Mønsted Limestone Caves: a former mine, and home to more than 18,000 bats if the literature could be believed. This later fact had left several of the girls looking nervous, and naturally certain boys had preyed on their fears by hyping up stories of virgin-sucking vampires. Nathan stayed above it, but had noticed Gail giving the bat section of a pamphlet extra attention. He expected she would stay closer to Christina than normal. Drifting off to sleep amongst the expected whisperings, he hoped for clear dreams with no repeat of the earlier day’s intrusion.