by Rob Horner
The air around him was perfect, not too hot or cold. There was no merciless sun beating down on his head. Instead, where ground ended and sky began was a stark line, brown below, a light blue above. It looked more like a room of infinite dimensions than a true landscape.
He experienced no hunger or thirst. He thought of checking his attire but couldn’t seem to make his head perform the proper motions. He might be standing naked but couldn’t make himself care.
In a place of such complete plainness, with nothing to distract the eye, all his attention focused inward, which might be the purpose of this place. His life was as plain and empty as the land around him, but it hadn’t always been that way. Casting back through memory, before his current worries, he found fuzzy and indistinct images of his early years with the Navy.
Discovering quickly, in this place without distraction, that those memories would not resolve into concrete images, he strove to remember further back. There was a sensation of passing through a barrier…soft and yielding at first but only giving way with a great effort, like a stretchy but resilient membrane. Then his memories before joining opened in his mind, sharp and crisp, full of sound and light and emotion.
There was his family, loving and supportive. He witnessed beloved scenes from his childhood—his dark-haired father teaching him to play baseball, his fair-haired, fair-skinned mother enrolling him in his first Tae Kwon Do class. He remembered words of praise for report cards with good grades. He excelled in school because of their guidance and encouragement.
Flash forward in time.
He remembered the argument, quiet but emotional—they never shouted in his home—when he announced his decision to join the Navy, rather than proceeding immediately to college. In that era of Obama, his parents, though solidly middle class, couldn’t afford to pay his way through school. His grades, though excellent, weren’t enough to warrant a scholarship. The military seemed a perfect solution. He could serve four years and then use the G.I. Bill to help fund his college education. There was also a need to serve, a desire to give back to the country which offered so much, just as his father had.
As his thoughts returned to the time of his recruitment, he felt again a sensation of passing through a barrier. Perhaps because he was focusing on his parents, he noticed a strange warping. Not only did the images in his mind begin to lose their clarity, turning fuzzy at the edges, but the images themselves changed. His father’s tall frame shrunk, his flat stomach distending into a belly swollen from years of bad food and beer. His mother’s hair and skin darkened as she lost height. She became rotund, with features more akin to cruel ignorance than intelligence and compassionate beauty. Despite these changes, Travis sensed no loss of emotion for them. They were his parents, and he loved them no matter what they looked like.
Moving through his memories and witnessing their alterations also altered the landscape.
The desert disappeared while he focused on the past, and he now stood in a plain room. White walls extended upward ten or twelve feet to a white ceiling, lined by two inset banks of bright fluorescent lights. The plainness of the room made it difficult to assess its dimensions, but it wasn’t large. In the far wall was a rectangular cutout, like a door, barely distinguishable because of the uniformity of color. Awareness of his body returned as well. He was dressed in linen elastic-waist pants and a linen, pull-over, short-sleeved shirt. He was barefoot, and the white tiles felt cool under his feet.
Since there was nothing else in the room to attract his attention, Travis walked to the door.
There was no visible handle, and no hinges marred the side. The door would have to open out. To the right of the door, almost invisible against the white wall, was a smaller square of white, perhaps ten inches along each side. Not knowing what else to try, Travis placed his right hand in the center of the square.
The door slid up into the wall, opening onto a scene of madness.
Sherry
Sherry found herself floating in a deep, black void, a place so devoid of light that if it weren’t for the uncomfortable sensation of her pupils dilating to their fullest, she’d have thought she’d been stricken blind. Disjointed pictures floated through her mind, a slideshow arranged out of order by a capricious spirit, images appearing for an instant, then disappearing.
She saw her childhood in Virginia Beach, pictures that brought memories filled with love, of feeling like her dearest wishes would be granted, despite that her parents never had much money.
She remembered holidays spent in quiet celebration of family and loyalty. She ached anew over the cancer that claimed her father just after her twelfth birthday, and rejoiced for the marriage of her older sister, and the new life that made her an aunt before she turned eighteen. She grew closer to her mother following the death of her father. For just a moment, floating in the void, she was filled with a sense of peace so profound she could have wept.
Then the peace was shattered with the memory of a tragic accident, a frantic hour in a chaotic emergency room, people rushing around but, strangely, without sound. Shouldn’t there have been sound? Her mother had been killed shortly after Sherry joined the Navy, her life snuffed out by a drunk driver. So unexpected, so unfair.
With her sister living her own life and her parents both deceased, Sherry had nothing else to distract her. She threw herself into her studies, graduating from Boot Camp at the top of her company and earning herself one of the most demanding rates in the Navy. She remembered marching in the Pass and Review, remembered the graduation ceremony, the choir singing Anchors Aweigh and God Bless the U.S.A.
And then…
Then she found herself in a stark, white room. The sudden light from the bright fluorescents in the ceiling sent daggers of pain into her dark-adjusted eyes, forcing her to squint as tears blurred her vision. Blinking them away, Sherry had a moment to wonder at the strange white outfit she wore, a top and a bottom, like a set of nursing scrubs. On one wall of the room there was an outline as of a door, with a smaller square set into the wall beside it. She experienced a moment of trepidation as she approached the portal. What was on the other side?
With nothing else in the room to examine, however, she had nothing to lose by finding out.
She stretched out a hand to the door and pressed, but it wouldn’t budge. Its margins were flush with the wall, almost more like the thought of a door than an actual portal. Turning her attention to the square outline on the wall to the right, Sherry thought of a biometric access panel, which appeared in so many modern movies. If iPhones could read fingerprints, why not doors? Lifting a hand, she pressed it flat against the panel. The door obligingly slid up into the wall. Beyond it lay a vision of madness and chaos, so startling that Sherry forgot to scream.
Together
Whirling in a chaotic maelstrom of images, Travis and Sherry lose their senses of self, giving control of their conscious minds to the madness surrounding them. Thoughts intermingle, becoming inseparable, as memories become fantasies become dreams, some as real as Memorex, some as faded as old watercolor. Some have sound and are brimming with life, while others are sterile as a laboratory clean room, picture without sound, life without color.
Twisting like an Oklahoma tornado, these winds of imagination carry brief flashes of reality—or perhaps they are winds of reality interspersed with flashes of imagination—glimpses of family and friends, people not seen for years, not thought of since…well…since whenever the last time they were thought of. There are also images that make no sense whatsoever and can only be understood by straining the mind to include things seen on television documentaries—like constellations of stars familiar and imagined, planets both beautiful and desolate, streaking as though moving at great speed.
There are brief snatches of hospital rooms, complete with electronic monitoring devices, probes, tubes, and needles, like something out of a medieval torture chamber brought into the medical future. Doctors in hospital greens wearing respirators as though afraid of some ai
rborne disease move back and forth across an undefined field of vision. There are brief, terrifying glimpses of needles that look long enough to be injected in the groin in order to extract fluids from the brain. Strangely colored liquids pump through long vacuum tubes as the hiss of ventilators and the beeping of heart monitors fill the air.
Flashes with sound…true memories.
Pain flares in every joint. Cramps contract every muscle, like a vice squeezing at head and feet. Two bodies struggle in vain to curl into the fetal position. Restraining bands at head, upper arms, wrists, thighs, and ankles prevent any such movement. Fluids pump from bottles, through narrow tubing, and into their bodies via intravenous lines attached at scalp, both antecubital fossae, and into the femoral vessels at the groin.
Travis’s father and mother appear, unaltered, tall and strong, fair and blond. Then they change like a fairy tale in reverse. They become shorter and darker. The image rewinds. Tall and strong, eyes clear and bright. His mother is fair and loving. There is a light surrounding them, a nimbus like the sun gracing their forms. Then shift, different, darker, smaller. Back to the beginning. So handsome, so beautiful, features sharp and clear; then swarthy and fat, shorter and cruel, images fuzzy at the edges, less vivid, less…real. Faster and faster, until the images change by the second, then twice per second, presenting a stark contrast.
A much-loved girlfriend appears, high-school sweetheart, prom date, dark of hair with Polynesian coloring, who wants to stay together. Then she’s gone. What happened? What was her name? Why had he forgotten her? Hair like silk down to her waist, always smelling of strawberries—he could remember that much. Replaced now by Angela’s face, yet oddly distorted. The features are right but not quite in proportion, a close approximation, like he is seeing her through bubbled glass. Why can’t he see her clearly?
For Sherry there is a loving mother tragically removed from her life. The meaninglessness of her death presents an odd pattern of images. The flashes of an emergency room reappear, an image of a doctor sitting across from her, her own form shrinking, bowing, shaking with emotion. But it’s seen as if by an outsider, like a close shot in a movie, the camera looking over her shoulder. There’s something wrong with the focus. The doctor’s face is blurred, the lapels of his white lab coat fuzzy with distortion. The name on his identification badge looks like it’s written in Russian. The moving picture is silent, almost sterile. Sherry realizes she feels sorrow in understanding the meaning of the image, like the loss is new, but does not sense any sorrow or grief in the image itself. Odd memories of her husband flood her thoughts, crystal clear shots of Stan as she knows him, unattractive, inattentive, morose and withdrawn. These are interspersed with fuzzy recollections of him standing tall and attractive, romantic and engaging. The differences between the two are subtle, a slight shifting of a feature here, a softening of a line there, but those inconsistencies make all the difference when viewed in totality. Back and forth the images go, what she knows is clear, what she remembers is not. Which is real? Are either? What she knows for certain is there was no Stan before the Navy, and somehow that’s important.
Through all the whirling of images there is also a sickening feeling of motion, a spinning, as though the images do not move but Travis and Sherry do, following a wide path at first, but picking up speed. Faster and faster they spin, like they began at the top of a cataclysmic tornado and are somehow traveling its circumference, defying all physical laws as they proceed downward in tighter spirals, coming closer to the ground rather than being pulled up and away.
Around and around, the images come faster and faster: a hospital room, a doctor, needles, sensations like shocks across their skin, memories appearing out of nowhere, faces flickering, blending, Angela, Stan, mother, parents, sister, death, betrayal, Boot Camp, graduation, Travis, Sherry. Their field of vision constricts as they near the base of the tornado, spinning in place now as through a narrow tunnel, sensation of wind rushing past their ears at great speed, pulling them towards a vague place of light, blessedly devoid of images, pulling them into the light, too bright to make out what lies beyond.
Now through the light, a strange feeling of…connection.
Sherry
The brilliance receded, revealing a hospital room. She was an observer watching as a horde of doctors, nurses, and ancillary staff performed a variety of tests on a sheet-covered form lying still on a hospital bed. The medical staff, identical in their gowns and face masks, inserted needles, took blood samples, and recorded numbers displayed in green, red, and blue numbers on a dozen different machines.
Then the figure stirred, and the doctors jumped back, falling over themselves in a rush to get away from the bed-bound form. The body fell still, its breathing not enough to stir the sheet that covered its face. The cardiac monitor to the left of the bed showed a steady eighty beats per minute. The bed was fastened to the floor rather than being on wheels. There were wide leather straps running over the patient, securing him or her to the bed, tight over the arms, chest, and legs. The figure stirred again, hands fisting at the sides, struggling against its bonds.
Unable to resist her curiosity, Sherry eased closer, secure in the knowledge the figure wouldn’t be able to break free. The doctors took no notice of her as she drifted like a ghost toward the bed. Numerous electrical lines snaked from the monitors, running up under the sheet. With its initial stirring, the figure had dislodged the covering enough for Sherry to see a swath of light-brown hair poking from the top.
The figure’s arms wrenched upward, snapping the wrist restraints, and Sherry stopped, stricken by a sudden fear. Levering its arms against the mattress, the body lunged against the chest restraint, pushed and strained, then relaxed back, only to lunge against the strap again. The chest strap stretched taut with each burst of motion and fine white lines began to show along its length, cracks forming in the leather.
The hospital room had emptied around her. Or perhaps it had always been empty, in the manner of dreams. The room was solid white, floor to ceiling, with two rows of fluorescent lighting centered over her head. There was only her, the bed with its bindings, and the figure covered by a sheet. She knew that if she looked to the left side of the room, she would see a door that blended in with the wall, and beside it a square panel.
As the figure rose up again against the bindings, Sherry felt an urge to flee, afraid of what might happen if she were to look upon the face still covered by the sheet.
Yet she didn’t run; she couldn’t move. No sound escaped her as she watched the struggle. Idly she noticed that one of the arm bands had disappeared completely, while the other seemed to be crawling up the side of the bed, as if to trap the left arm again. Then the figure lunged one last time and the chest strap snapped, disappearing as if it had never been, the sheet falling to pool in the individual’s lap.
Sherry saw a well-defined chest, topped by broad shoulders and a neck that was not muscularly thick, but which wasn’t thin and scrawny. Raising her gaze, she noted the brown leather chest strap reforming over the chest, trying to anchor the body back to the bed. If she waited a few more moments, the body would be secure again, the face covered with a sheet, and she could wake up safely.
Instead she looked at the face of the man in the bed, met eyes so haunted by the torture he’d endured that she screamed in defiance and empathy, which brought her crashing out of the dream.
Shooting to a sitting position in her bed, Sherry knew she could never forget that haunted visage. Neither could she ignore what the dream implied.
Somehow, some way, she had to help the man on the bed.
She had to find him, help free him from his captivity, and help him stay free.
Somehow, she had to help Travis Wilkins.
Travis
Travis shuddered in his sleep as the dream neared its conclusion. Though he never remembered the dream while awake, his dream self was aware that all this was the same, that he’d seen this hospital room so many times it should have no
power to frighten him. After all, the figure under the sheet, who struggled so mightily against its leather bonds, would turn out to be a blank, featureless form completely devoid of any characteristics of gender or mentality. In short, it was a unisex mannequin.
Travis watched as the scene played out. The figure stirred, the doctors backed away, then disappeared. He was back in the starting room, just him and the bed and the white thing upon it. He noticed, as he always did, the signs of the weakening of the chest strap, the minute creak of leather stretched almost to its breaking point.
As had happened every night before, he found himself drifting forward. But something was different this time.
On the past three occasions, as the sheet began to slip, he’d seen a white head shaved completely bald, not even a trace of shadow gracing the scalp. This time, however, he took note of thick hair, reddish, flaring across the head of the bed.
The chest strap broke, and the figure sat up, arms stretched out to him, begging for help.
Travis noticed small breasts riding high on a sensuously molded torso. A slender neck curved down into small shoulders and rose up into a delicate face with anguished features.
She had large blue eyes filled with fear, a delicate nose, and a full, passionate mouth. Add that to the ginger hair brushing her shoulders, and Travis knew who was trapped in the bed before him.
“Sherry,” he said softly.
The simple vocalization dispelled the dream, bringing him to wakefulness even as the figure in the bed uttered its scream of pain and fear.
Sitting up in his barracks room, Travis clapped his hands over his ears, unable to think through the rapid thudding of his heart.
