Justin Lo
The
hallway wound about wildly, churning and flickering as its long beams rippled
and crinkled in the wind. But John
still felt that rush of elation.
“Are
you sure this will work?” he asked his partner in anticipation, a large
mouse scurrying parallel on an enormous cage-wheel made of smaller mice tied
together tail-to-paw.
“Of
course it will work,” squeaked the mouse, vanishing from sight. The dim green lights reached out at
John, who quickly shielded his face with his arms.
Marianna
was a quiet, shy girl who had gorgeous silken hair but not the face to
match. She always sat in the back,
her face ducked in such a way so that her hair would be the main focus of
anyone who chanced to look at her.
She
seemed to be just a bit out of it at times, and this intrigued some of the more
curious students in the classroom.
“Marianna,”
asked one boy who approached her at the beginning of lunch one day, the girl
still hunched over at that desk, immobile, well past the sound of the school
bell.
“Yes?”
she replied without looking up.
“What
are you doing?”
“Sketching,”
she said, pointing at her small leather-bound notebook with the ballpoint pen
she was holding in her left hand.
“What’s
it of?” the boy asked.
He
worried if he was being too nosy, but Marianna didn’t mind at all. She was not shy out of introversion;
she simply did not have the motivation to initiate a conversation. And so she willingly laid the notebook
out for the boy to see, and he took a seat nearby to avoid towering over the
diminutive girl in such an inadvertently intimidating way.
The
page was filled with nonsensical abstractions, with scratchy marks vaguely
suggesting objects, but even then, objects of utter inconsistency.
“Abstract
art?” offered the boy.
“I
guess you could call it that,” said Marianna. “But I don’t really think so. Just look around you.
What do you see?”
The
boy complied and answered: “Chairs, students, posters, the ground, the sky, and
a whole lot of other stuff.”
“Yeah. But do you notice how everything seems
to just … make sense?” she asked, looking at the boy directly for the
first time. Her hair fell out of
the way, and her slightly crooked nose and asymmetrical eyes greeted the
sunlight. The boy was mildly
surprised, but felt more of a strange attraction than repulsion.
“Well
yes, it makes sense.”
“Yeah,
so look at that poster of there – the one of the tree.”
“O-okay,”
said the boy, unsure of where this would be heading.
“Now
look at me.”
The
boy turned his gaze back to Marianna.
“Where
is the poster now?”
“It’s
still there on the wall …,” said the boy.
“Yes,
even though you’re not looking at it right now, you know that it is
still there, don’t you?”
“Of
course. Only a fool would think
that just because he doesn’t see something, it doesn’t exist.”
“Good,
good. And what about you? Every day that you wake up – has there
ever been one when you woke up and you were not who you expected to be?”
“No,
I’ve always had this body,” said the boy.
“And it has changed gradually, but never with any surprises.”
“Have
you ever thought about why this world makes so much sense? Why chemicals react the same way if you
mix them the same way, why no human has twenty eyes, why a cat always meows but
never barks?”
“I
suppose that’s because like objects tend to act in like ways,” said the boy.
“Yes,
and things out of the extraordinary are not only amazing … they also are almost
always made up. No person can fly,
do you agree?”
“Yeah,”
said the boy.
“But
why would it be so great to fly?”
“I
suppose it’d be fun to see the world from another perspective.”
Marianna
shook her head. “No, it’s so great
to fly because we can’t. Because
we’re bounded, because we’re limited.
Because this world has rules and regulations, consistency and
persistence.”
“Just
hang in there,” said the now-invisible mouse.
The
walls sank and then coursed into liquid, carrying John along a narrow canal as
mountains and stars whizzed by. He
watched as passed through a few creatures on the same canal, he watched as the
canal vanished and was replaced by an endless field of lavender and blue.
Out
of the ground flew a few twigs that spun around and then multiplied into a
small hut. This would be his final
destination.
“What
are you getting at?” inquired the boy.
“This,”
Marianna said, pointing at her picture.
“These are objects no more extraordinary than the ones we see every
day. Here is a cow. This is a desk. This is a boy. This is a girl.” She began pointing out each object with
her index finger, and the boy saw that he could not recognize them before not
because of inaccuracies, but because they had been contorted or represented at
bizarre perspectives or magnifications.
“Haven’t
you ever seen anything like this before?” asked the girl.
“Umm,
not around, not recently,” admitted the boy.
“I
think you have,” said Marianna.
“Once in awhile, when you fall asleep, right?”
“I
guess … some dreams have been this weird.
Like that time when a very sexy woman grew out from my light
switch. That was certainly odd.”
Marianna
smiled. “I think I know the
answer.”
“The
answer to what?”
“Why
this world is so ordinary, so regular.”
“And
why is that?” asked the boy.
“Because
we made it this way. You see, I
think I finally understand. A long
time ago – I don’t know exactly how long, because the ordinary passing of time
here might be very misleading compared to real time – but a long time
ago, I think our ancestors, in the real world somewhere, were fed up with a
world of inconsistency and of senselessness. And so one by one, they let themselves drift off to
sleep. Not any ordinary sleep, but
a coma almost. A coma in that
world that would allow them to enter a collective consciousness in a virtual
realm.
“It
was a virtual realm governed by all the rules that they wished would exist so
that they would not have to constantly live in worry or cope with sudden
changes or lose everything they once had.”
Marianna
paused for a moment.
“So
when they fall into a coma, they appear here?”
“Not
just appear,” said Marianna. “They
are born. Not really born,
of course. The real birth still
happens there.”
“But
if they spend all their time here, how do they have time to make new children
there?”
“For
everything like that – sustenance, childbirth – they have to go back. And they do. We do. We just
don’t remember it, usually.”
“The
dreams we forget?” asked the boy.
“And
the ones we remember, too,” said Marianna. “All of them.
But as well as we can, we try to purge all memories of our times in the
real world, to live in comfort here.”
The
boy nodded and abruptly announced, “I should be moving on to lunch now, but
thanks. It’s definitely an
interesting idea you’ve got there.”
Marianna
smiled. She knew that he didn’t
believe her, but it didn’t matter to her one bit. No one had to believe her. Because she was probably the only one in the whole world
who, due to pure accident, could truly remember.
John
stepped into the house.
“Anyone
home?”
“Just
come right over here,” said a voice.
John
followed the voice that repeated itself periodically, always saying the same
thing, followed it down a long, damp corridor until he arrived at a small
bed. Out of his pocket he pulled
out his lucky leather-bound notebook.
And
he lay down, clutching the notebook, closing his eyes as he had been told at
the very beginning of his journey.
Off he went, mind wandering, world growing hazy, and then he opened his
eyes. To Earth, the land of
dreams.