by Alan Ryker
10
I dreamed my dream. Somewhere in the city, the serpent writhed, and I could feel the vibrations of its bulk as it slammed about in its search for me.
I approached the fryer. I flipped the switch off. I did not burn. I lived my life, feeling the drag of reality, pulling against the elasticity of that false moment. Trying to make it farther than the last time. Trying to live just another good day, another hour, another minute. One more moment of the opposite of my real life. But as always, with every step away from the inferno the pull grew stronger as it attempted to correct this small event which caused cascading changes, unacceptable changes. Behind me, the fires burned. But I plodded ahead, second by slow second. I would not go back. I had nothing to go back to. I would fight the universe. I would destroy it all.
The pull grew until I once again faced that pivot point of perfect balance: my greatest exertion versus the universe’s desire to take the correct shape.
Fuck that. I dug my fingers in. I pulled and strained. I took one more step into that impossible future.
And then…it snapped. I slipped the past’s fingers. The flames receded. I flew, tumbling, confused. Free.
BOOK II
1
That’s what I remember. I swear that every bit of that is as solid as any memory I have, as solid as any of the other building blocks that make up who I am out of who I’ve been.
But I’ve been sitting in bed not in my parents’ house for several minutes now, staring at the indistinct form of a woman lying beside me, feeling the warmth coming off of her, human warmth, human contact that I feel starved for though we’ve been lying side by side all night long. I’ve been examining my body as I run through these memories, and I have no scars. What I have are ten fingers, two eyes, and a scalp covered in long, loose curls.
I’m afraid to move, afraid to do anything that might awaken me back into that nightmare world of agony and hopelessness. I remember so many times through all that wishing that I’d just wake up, and now I have. A few minutes ago my alarm went off and I awoke from what seemed like an endless nightmare.
So why am I so scared?
I have other memories. Memories somehow occupying the same spot on the time-line as the ones I just described, just as vivid, just as real.
Everything is one until I lean into the fryer, hurrying to get done with cleaning duties so I can head to the Barrington’s party. But then everything divides. In one set of memories Madison calls and I forget to flip the switch and I burn, and I remember burning. I remember watching the flame approach. I remember feeling the pain, and trying to hurl myself back like you’d reach away from a hot burner but not being able to, the pain following me. I remember the flames going deeper until it felt as if my bone marrow was on fire, and I remember hearing my fat sizzle.
But I also remember not receiving any call. Instead, unharried, I flip the switch off before leaning into the fryer and scraping all the crust from the sides. Instead of lying on the floor covered in flour, praying to die as I continued to cook inside the powdery coating, I go out to my car and get my change of clothes, a suit, and head into the bathroom and emerge looking nice, smelling of cooked food and hoping that no one notices the incongruity but knowing that people will even though they won’t say anything.
Instead of an endless ambulance ride in which I beg over and over to be knocked out, I enjoy a long drive to the country club, singing along to my radio because I don’t feel like committing to a single CD, instead flipping around, using my famous memory to drag up the lyrics to pop, rap, R&B and classic rock songs as something catches my ear.
My famous memory, which possesses several months of two distinct layers.
I feel about for a shared memory of this moment, whole, in bed, a nightmarish memory, one in which my flesh is melted and fused and I’m staggering through my parents’ house without purpose. Memories of a living death. There isn’t one. Things have converged again.
I arrived at the party to find that Madison had just left around the same time I was lying beneath fast food heat lamps, freezing and cooking at the same time as plasma flooded my burnt flesh and my blood turned to pudding and my heart almost stopped beating.
Mr. And Mrs. Barrington greeted me warmly, introducing me as their future son-in-law to whoever they were talking to. They didn’t know where Madison had gotten to, but they were sure she’d be back any moment.
I’m sitting up. I slide back down beneath the covers, reach over and put a hand on a smooth, naked hip, breathe in the musky warmth.
I get out of bed. I need to see something. My feet go from a soft rug to hardwood and then one foot through the bathroom door lands on tile as I flip on the bathroom light, which cascades out, drawing a groan from the bed.
I cross the bedroom, but I can see the truth already. As she turned away from the light, she revealed long, blond hair. I continue, though, kneeling on the bed, crouching over the sleeping woman.
Janet Ericsson, the beautiful, foul-mouthed hostess from Pajino’s. She opens one eye and looks at me. “What?” she mumbles thickly.
Our schedules are dissimilar. She closed Pajino’s last night, while I get up at five to get in a workout before heading in to the Gerhardt Fund.
“Just wanted to look at your beautiful face.”
She smiles sleepily, barely turns her head toward me and puckers her lips, twisting them to the side for a kiss. I kiss her and stroke her silky hair once. Despite her crass, hard-nosed front, she’s wonderful. She helped me so much when Madison disappeared the night of her parents’ party, abandoning me and leaving me at the mercy of the local police.
“Now turn the fucking light off,” she mutters before slipping back into slow-breathing sleep.
I walk back to the bathroom in the master bedroom of the condo I recently bought. Shutting the door behind me so as to not further disturb Janet while she sleeps, I stare at myself in the mirror. I’m me.
Standing straight, I know I’m 6’4”, and quite a few inches taller if you include the pile of sleep-mussed curls atop my head. My shoulders are broad, my arms and torso covered in gym muscle, my body no longer wasted to a twisted skeleton by months of hypermetabolism. My skin is the flawless milky-coffee tone that confuses so many people. I’m young and strong and beautiful. The nightmare is over. I smile. It broadens and broadens until I look like a maniac. The nightmare is fucking over.
Was it a nightmare? It seemed so real. It still seems so real. Nightmares are supposed to fade, to feel real while they’re happening and then to fade. They aren’t supposed to claim space in the real time-line of memories. But all of my memories are doubled from the night of the party until I just awoke.
I shake my head. It will fade. It must have been the dose of Klonopin Janet gave me. I’ve been sleeping badly recently. Work is going so well, providing me with these problems that are more like puzzles that my brain won’t let go of even when I get home so that I’m in a constant manic state. I’ve been sleeping so lightly that I’m not used to vivid dream anymore. That’s all it is.
I rub at my chest. Remember how it had resembled a cow carcass left out in the desert sun, scraps of rawhide stretched haphazardly over blasted ribs.
The nightmare is over.
I brush my teeth and force my thoughts to my coming workout, the routine I’ll go through down in the building’s badass gym, one of the amenities that comes with my hefty homeowners association fees.
I’m me. The nightmare is over.
* * *
It’s back and bicep day, and I warm up with some easy curls. I remember reading that Arnold Schwarzenegger loved lifting weights so much that once he got his pump going and got deep into a set, every rep felt like an orgasm. I’d always thought he was a nutbag, especially imagining him talking about it in that thick Austrian accent, but now I know what he’s talking about.
I grip the bar of the chin / dip stand and begin pulling myself to it, and it feels amazing. I’m so damn strong. After a warm-up set at body weight I cross m
y ankles, settle a twenty-five pound dumbbell between them and start my working sets. For being 6’4”, that’s pretty damn good, but it feels better than pretty damn good. It feels like I’m flying up to the bar, like my 215 pounds plus the dumbbell could be blown about by the wind. Even when I get to the seventh rep and my pace slows and I’m grinding the reps out to get to ten, the point where the ache of my assaulted body usually overwhelms my pleasure in physical exertion, I still feel fantastic, am loving every straining flex. I’m not quite jizzing my gym shorts like Arnie, but my nightmare has lingered, the events real enough to make me appreciate even the pain of a healthy body, so different from the sour, sickly pain of disability.
As I shake the acid out of my biceps, the door beeps and Todd steps in, pocketing his keycard.
“Sup Cody?” Todd says, a big smile crossing his handsome-but-goofy face.
“Sup Todd?” I say, walking over and grabbing his hand in a semi-elaborate way that I know he enjoys, me being the only ethnic friend he’s got.
“What are you hitting today?” he asks.
“Back and biceps. Got some burnout curls left. You?”
“Second chest day. High rep.”
I nod. He does have a massive chest, and his barrel torso and short arms help him move crazy weight. Chest was the only day he’d ever beat me. Competing with him put an extra fifty pounds on my bench, but I started coming in a half-hour earlier because, despite enjoying the friendly competition, I needed that time to myself. Todd was a bit much at 5:30 in the morning. A few of the other residents worked out at 5:00, but none I worked with and felt compelled to pal around with. Todd was the guy who let me know someone in his coveted building was selling.
Then it hits me again, a tidal wave of alternate memories flooding over my brain, drowning my present reality, leaving it bobbing dead beneath the water. I live with my parents again, in my old bedroom, where I do nothing all day but pray for time to pass faster though I’m not looking forward to anything in particular. The memories hit me so hard they knock me dizzy. I close my eyes, stagger back a step.
Todd’s calloused hand grabs my bicep, steadies me. “You okay, man? You must have pushed it too hard.”
“Yeah, I’m okay. I just slept badly.” Which isn’t exactly true. Not true at all. I slept so deeply that I can’t let go of it.
“You didn’t eat, did you?”
“You know I never eat before I work out.”
Todd rolls his eyes and huffs in exasperation. “Dude, you’re cut. You’re beach ready all the time. The only reason to not eat before you workout is if you’re cutting. If you’re lifting, you need sugar and amino acids in your blood or you won’t gain.”
I flex. My blood-filled, vein-roped bicep rises impressively. “I’m gaining just fine, my friend.” He looks like he’s about to speak. After that wave of vertigo and fearing another, I’m done with my workout and definitely done with this conversation I’ve had a hundred times. So before he can get a word out, I say, “In fact, I’ve got to go eat right now.”
He shuts his mouth, recalibrates, nods. “That’s a good idea. I’ll see you at the office.”
We slap palms again and I gather my water and towel and head for the door. Despite the normalcy of that interaction, or maybe even because of it, I’m even more creeped out than when I woke up.
2
I walk to work. Besides amenities like a great gym, a rooftop pool and some of the hippest loft space in the city, my building’s other big draw is that it’s only a few blocks from the building whose sixteenth floor houses the Gerhardt Fund, the biotech venture capital fund I work for as an associate. During nice weather—and the early summer mornings have been beautiful—it’s an easy walk. I’m still enjoying my healthy body, feeling the morning sun on my maskless face, walking briskly to my amazing new job.
After Madison disappeared, the police came looking for me. They had no reason to think I had anything to do with it other than the fact that I was the boyfriend, and that I had no alibi for half an hour that night, the half hour during which I drove from Pajino’s to the country club, the half hour when people noticed she’d left the party.
The time-line wasn’t exactly damning. I had to have been traveling for most of that time. They also had to acknowledge that it would be stupid for a man to kill his rich fiance before marrying her rather than after. But for a while I was their prime suspect. By default, because it also seemed that I was their only suspect.
They never cleared me, but they moved on, only keeping tabs on me from a distance, checking in intermittently. But the damage with the Barrington’s was done. Her father wasn’t hostile, but also was no longer championing me. Her mother seemed sure I did it. I feel bad for her loss. I do. But besides being a desperate mother, I can’t help but feel that—with her priviledged background—she’s extra suspicious of the swarthy fellow from a working-class background.
And it was my loss, too. I feel guilty about getting with Janet so soon after Madison’s disappearance, and I know it looks like I don’t care, but it’s the opposite. I was going crazy. I still can’t believe she’s gone. I still can’t figure out where she went when she drove away from that party.
These new memories feel right, not just in the fact that they seem just as real as any memories I have, but also because in this alternate reality, my life was burned away at the same moment I lost Madison in this reality. It makes sense. These two sets of memories fit together, I just can’t quite fit them. They’re two images placed over top of each other, and I know that if I squint just right, focus my eyes at the right point, the point in between them, they’ll come together.
No, that’s crazy. One set of memories is right, the other was a dream that somehow expanded out of proportion.
I focus on my feet slapping the concrete, heading toward this job which is even better than working for David Barrington at Sanders & Stevens. And it happened on that night, that strange night that has split off into so many different realities, some of them with full sets of false memories.
After Madison disappeared, but before people got worried, Mr. Barrington introduced me to Tyler Norris, one of the top GPs of the Gerhardt Fund. We chatted. He asked if he could steal me away, and he seemed to mean it a bit more than most of Mr. Barrington’s friends. So when it became obvious that I wouldn’t be working at Sanders & Stevens after all, I gave him a call, and he gave me a job as an associate at the Gerhardt Fund.
As I ride a tightly-packed elevator up to the sixteenth floor, I try to clear all this nonsense from my head. What matters is what’s in front of me. What’s in front of me moves too fast to share brain space with anything else. People who can’t focus get lesser jobs and stay average.
I smile at Debra, the very attractive receptionist, and she smiles and waves at me as she says, “Uh huh. Uh huh,” over and over into her headset. Then I step into the Dungeon.
The Dungeon is a windowless room filled by four low-walled cubicles. It is where we associates narrow down the hundred applications for capital to the one package that gets handed to one of the junior GPs. There’s no question that it’s a grind, but for some reason I love the grind.
90% of what comes through our online application system isn’t just wrong for the Gerhardt Fund, but for any venture capital. The other guys get furious. If an application is especially ridiculous and the recipient sees that none of us is on the phone, the swearing goes from breathless mutters to shouts. But I love it.
Amanda and Michael are already at their desks working through applications.
“We’re a biotech fund. How fucking hard is that to understand? We won’t give you money to expand your dog grooming business. Fuck,” Michael says to no one in particular, not looking away from his computer as he deletes and moves on. Amanda smiles at me, rolls her eyes at Michael.
I smile back, shake my head in commiseration. I’m glad my cube isn’t right by his. The guy is incredibly tightly wound.
“How’s it going?” I say.
<
br /> It was a general question, but Michael doesn’t even acknowledge that I spoke.
Amanda says, “It’s going to be a long day, apparently.”
Todd bounds through the door with a smile on his face. He’s a morning person, and is still probably riding his endorphin wave.
“How’d it go?” I ask.
“High-repping with 270,” he says with a smile on his face. He slaps me five on his way to his chair. Amanda rolls her eyes again. She rolls her eyes a lot.
Eventually we settle into our work, and the only sound is Michael’s muttering and the occasional phone call to an applicant entrepreneur.
I’m going through the fresh applications that came in overnight. At this point, I’m just looking for a reason to reject them. This company is a startup and could use an angel investor, not venture capital. Rejection. This one isn’t in biotech. Rejection. This one looks good until I get to the projected financials and see that they’re obviously working backwards from a number they think we want to see rather than forwards realistically. No way their personnel costs will stay that low. Their scalability isn’t even close. Rejection.
The door opens and Tyler steps through. I look at the clock and see that an hour has flown by.
“How’s everyone doing this morning?” Tyler asks. After a bit of small talk that even draws Michael into speaking, Tyler leans on the four-foot wall of my cubicle.
“We liked your report. I can’t wait to try out one those training machines.”
“So you’re going forward with Fortress?”
I sense Michael’s eyes on me, a glare boring into my back.
“Well, they’re not getting our investment yet, but from your report they’re definitely worth another look. We’re taking the jet to DC next week. We’d like you to come with us.”
My heart pounds so hard I have a flashback of the hypermetabolic state I’d been in when I came out of my coma. I’d be lying perfectly still but my heart would be racing, a war-drum rhythm pounding in my chest and reverberating up into my brain.
