03-29-2019, 07:38 PM
One of the problems surrounding this “have you ever had a nightmare that felt so real” business (if he was going to do more than scoff) was that he never remembered his dreams. Not really. Not like sitting down wide-eyed and pointing, “you were there, and you were there, and you.” Not like Shay rolling over in bed and jostling him awake to tell him I just dreamed you strangled me to death in the Subway bathroom and Near just shaking his head because other people’s dream narratives always struck him as tedious or grating, but that was, at least in part, thanks to the inability to reciprocate making him feel that he had been cheated out of an experience he was due simply by dint of his being human, like eating or sex.
He never really remembered his dreams. But he assumed he had them from the shadows they cast. He woke, often enough, with impressions. Heavy. Negative, usually. Emotions that, in spite of disconnection from their antecedent, would bleed into everything he thought and said and did until time and the concerns of the day washed them out. Maybe one night Dream Shay strangled Dream Near to death in the Subway bathroom -- come morning, what Real Near had left was an inexplicable wariness toward Real Shay that he might have shaken more easily if he could trace it back to its source.
Now he woke up all awkward angles in a chair not made for sleeping, neck sore and fingers still wrapped around the bottle of cognac, which he lowered to the ground and released before standing up to crack his back and knuckles and probe the outlines of the sense of dread that had permeated through him since he closed his eyes. He couldn’t tell where it came from -- if it was the same as before but amplified, or if it was new and separate from The Kid and his exhibition. What he knew was that his eyes wanted light and his ears wanted sound almost as much as his throat wanted water, so he flipped every wall switch he could find over the course of a bleary stumble into the kitchen.
As he leaned under the gooseneck faucet, slurping water out of cupped palms, he became aware that the cellar door was cracked open. The locked cellar door. The locked cellar door that he had every intention of leaving closed and locked forever because the thought of opening it was a tarantula crawling up his shoulderblade. But he had told Jude to do whatever he wanted … Two steps toward it, wanting to close it again but not wanting to entomb the kid, he shouted out, hoarse, “You down there?”
He never really remembered his dreams. But he assumed he had them from the shadows they cast. He woke, often enough, with impressions. Heavy. Negative, usually. Emotions that, in spite of disconnection from their antecedent, would bleed into everything he thought and said and did until time and the concerns of the day washed them out. Maybe one night Dream Shay strangled Dream Near to death in the Subway bathroom -- come morning, what Real Near had left was an inexplicable wariness toward Real Shay that he might have shaken more easily if he could trace it back to its source.
Now he woke up all awkward angles in a chair not made for sleeping, neck sore and fingers still wrapped around the bottle of cognac, which he lowered to the ground and released before standing up to crack his back and knuckles and probe the outlines of the sense of dread that had permeated through him since he closed his eyes. He couldn’t tell where it came from -- if it was the same as before but amplified, or if it was new and separate from The Kid and his exhibition. What he knew was that his eyes wanted light and his ears wanted sound almost as much as his throat wanted water, so he flipped every wall switch he could find over the course of a bleary stumble into the kitchen.
As he leaned under the gooseneck faucet, slurping water out of cupped palms, he became aware that the cellar door was cracked open. The locked cellar door. The locked cellar door that he had every intention of leaving closed and locked forever because the thought of opening it was a tarantula crawling up his shoulderblade. But he had told Jude to do whatever he wanted … Two steps toward it, wanting to close it again but not wanting to entomb the kid, he shouted out, hoarse, “You down there?”