What Lies Beyond the Stars

by Micael Goorjian

“The word was parachute or salamander. It was tricky, wasn’t it, Maddy?” Jane set Adam’s pills next to his murky, green protein shake. The Sheppards had reached the sixth stage of Adam’s Thursday-morning routine. Across the breakfast table, Madison and Chandler were providing Adam with quality time, while Jane recounted Madison’s triumphant spelling-bee win.

  “What was the word, baby?” Jane prompted.

  “Porcupine,” Madison said without looking up from the phone she held just under the table. Next to her, Chandler ate cereal while simultaneously flicking angry birds at militant pigs on his phone.

  “Right, porcupine!” Jane tossed bags of baby carrots into the kids’ lunch bags. “Madison got it right, and the snotty girl from Diablo was eliminated.”

  As Jane continued narrating juicy details, Adam did his best to appear interested. However, an acute awareness that something was different about the breakfast nook had been nagging him all morning. It was nicer somehow, more pleasant, and he couldn’t figure out why. Had Jane repainted the room back when he was away recovering and he was only now noticing it? Or had she changed the drapes? No, everything was exactly the same, yet Adam still sensed a change, something . . . missing.

  “And then that boy with too much hair product totally blanked on . . . oh God, what was that word . . . ?” Jane searched for it. “A total softball, something like—” She shouted over to Madison. “What was the word, Maddy? Some breed of dog, right?”

  “Malamute,” Madison said flatly, eyes on the text she was composing.

  “Malamute, right! And so, Mr. ’NSync just froze up, which allowed Madison to move on to the final round.”

  The neighbor’s dog, Adam realized. That was what was different. There was no more whining and yelping coming from next door. In fact, Adam couldn’t even recall the last time he had heard the dog out there.

  Maybe they got rid of it while I was away, he thought.

  Without appearing to have lost interest in Jane’s retelling of Madison’s spelling-bee exploits, Adam casually glanced out the window toward the fence separating their property from the neighbor’s. To his surprise, the dog was still there—still confined to the same long, narrow space between the neighbor’s house and the fence. The same crazed dog Adam used to watch running tirelessly back and forth along the side of their house every morning, whining and crying. That same pain-in-the-ass dog was still out there. But it had changed.

  The dog that Adam saw now was lying on the ground near the front gate with its nose pressed firmly into the cyclone fencing. Quiet, motionless, yet alert, it sniffed at the air on the other side, at the occasional fragments of life passing by. Adam felt a knot the size of a monkey’s fist forming in his throat. Recognizing the hazard in the situation, he quickly drew a hand over his eyes to cover the inappropriate tears welling up.

  “Did you show Dad the trophy, Maddy? Go get it from your room. It’s a huge trophy.”

  Adam tried focusing on his breathing. He needed to think of something other than that dog out there. Despite himself, Adam looked out the window again. The neighbor’s dog let out a long huff and then lowered its head onto the cold cement between its front paws.

  That night Adam lowered his own head down onto the cool comfort of his pillow. Throughout the day he had remained in control of his emotions with the aid of additional medication, regulated breathing, and routine distractions—the same tools that had allowed him to survive thus far. But the wound delivered by the neighbor’s dog refused to scab over and was now threatening to bleed into the unprotected underworld of his dreams.

  Sensing the approach of a nocturnal storm, Adam tried a delay tactic: reading before bed. Plato’s Republic was one of the few books sanctioned by Dr. M. to have in the house.

  Behold! human beings living in a underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads . . .

  After 20 minutes of staring at the same paragraph, Adam gave up and turned off his bedside light. Click.

  Eyes shut, Adam spent the next hour watching the grainy dance of capillaries pulsating behind his eyelids. At last he began to slip into the darkness. Down, down, down toward the first subconscious musical strains to catch his untethered attention. They appeared in the form of old song lyrics, repeated over and over, like a stuck CD.

  Now that I’ve lost everything to you . . .

  Now that I’ve lost everything to you . . .

  Now that I’ve lost everything to you . . .

  Now that I’ve lost everything to you . . .

  The first visual impressions joined the song, rippling toward Adam in gentle waves. Lines on the ground, cracked and yellow, marking boundaries. Weathered gray cement leading to crumbling, rubbery black mats, there to cushion his fall.

  Down, down, down . . .

  You say you want to start something new . . .

  You say you want to start something new . . .

  You say you want to start something new . . .

  You say you want to start something new . . .

  He was back in front of the country schoolhouse, just as he had been in so many dreams before. He was moving quickly toward the playground out back where it was waiting. As he approached the corner, the turning point that would reveal what he needed to see, the old feeling began to creep in, the dread of having left something essential behind.

  Adam turned the corner. This time the yard was no longer cloaked in its usual dreamy vagueness. This time he saw everything as if he was wide awake. Down to his left was the water fountain, with its neon-green mold, the engraved button on the head of the spout that read PUSH, the U and S worn beyond recognition. The metal basin, painted white, chipped in places to reveal the black cast iron beneath. Below the fountain the eternal puddle was shaped like the continent of Australia. Every detail was as clear and crisp as a Mendocino morning.

  On the opposite side of the yard, the merry-go-round spun slowly. Lying on it was the body of a young boy. Motionless. Alone. Seeing himself as a six-year-old boy made Adam’s heart pound faster (he could actually feel it racing in the dream). And he knew what was about to take place.

  First he heard it, the high metallic sound of the approaching diesel engine—grug-grug-grug. Then the car door slamming, followed by the crunch-crunch of footsteps on cement coming around the schoolhouse. Gloria, his stepmother, appeared and walked past him in the dream. She stopped when she saw the boy on the merry-go-round and called out to him.

  The boy sat up, face confused and then alarmed as he looked around for someone other than his stepmother, someone he expected would be there. Gloria was now demanding that the boy come with her, just as Adam had recalled before, but it was slightly different this time. Something about her voice.

  “I know you can understand me,” she said. Her words were a little too punchy. A little too well pronounced. “It is time to go, Adam.” There was something unnerving about it, as if there were a second voice coming from her, an incomprehensible language hissing between the words. Adam wished he could see her face, but from where he stood in the dream, he couldn’t. She was all ponytail, tight and serious.

  She was now moving toward the frightened boy. When she reached the edge of the merry-go-round, she stood there for a moment, and then without warning latched on to the boy’s legs. The boy began to scream hysterically, “No, no, no!” as she pulled him toward her. Like a trapped animal, he fought back, kicking and screaming, holding on to the metal bars, his life depending on it. She continued to reel him in closer with her arms. Or was something else happening down there? From where Adam was witnessing the scene, he couldn’t quite see over his stepmother’s shoulder. He needed to move closer.

  Adam willed himself forward to where his stepmother was grappling with the young boy’s legs. Then what he saw sent a thunderbolt of terror in
to his dreaming body. Reaching out from his stepmother were not arms but tentacles of milky-gray mist, slithering over the screaming boy’s body, winding their way around his legs, and moving up his torso like snakes. At the end of one of these dark tendrils, a barbed hook was working its way through the boy’s clothes, into his skin, and burrowing down into his body.

  With a sudden jolt, the boy was torn off the merry-go-round. Screaming in terror he stood face to face with something that was not his stepmother. Shrouded in gray mist was a festering, parasitic void, a black hole sucking in everything within its event horizon, feeding off the never-ending cycles of pain and suffering that had crept into the hearts of men and women since time began. Then it screamed out the incantation that would enslave its new host.

  “YOU WILL BEHAVE YOURSELF!”

  A tendril became a hand that reached out and struck the boy’s face. SMACK! And then it was over. No more tentacles, no hooks, no terrifying, endless void. Just a little boy and a frustrated woman who had momentarily lost her temper.

  Adam’s stepmother reached down and took the young boy by the hand. Obediently he followed her.

  As she led him away, something barely perceptible took place. Like a cell undergoing mitosis, Adam watched as his younger self split in two—one boy following his stepmother toward the waiting car out front, while the other boy turned away and defiantly climbed back onto the merry-go-round.

  Adam sensed the dream beginning to slip away. As he felt himself slowly rise up into the air above the playground, he tried to resist but was unable to stop his ascent. Floating above the schoolhouse, he saw one younger self being driven off toward a future life he was not meant to lead, while the other remained in the school yard, locked in a dream state on the slowly spinning merry-go-round.

  Again the dream was shifting. Adam could still see the boy spinning on the merry-go-round below him, but the sight no longer had a visceral element. He was now watching it like a scene in a movie shot from above. He began to sense that he was elsewhere. He felt something beneath him, his own weight pressing down on a chair. Where am I? All he could see was the boy in the school yard, slowly spinning round and round on the rusty, metal pinwheel, but now the scene appeared flat and two-dimensional.

  He was looking at a screen. A computer monitor. But where the hell was he? When he tried to turn and look around, to his horror he found that his body was paralyzed. Even his eyes were unable to shift away from the screen in front of him.

  Adam’s panic increased as an even more terrifying realization struck him. Although he was lucid enough to know he was dreaming, he was starting to sense that he might not be able to wake up. Then came the even more dreadful thought. Perhaps this dark place was where he really was, where he had been all along. Perhaps what he thought of as his life was just a series of images on the screen before him.

  As if provoked by his panic, the screen began to twitch like a video presentation run amok. Violent flashes of light—BART tunnel lightsabers—pulsed over the boy on the wheel. Moving faster and faster, until it erupted into a maddening stream of endless content, an explosion of scenes from Adam’s memory files. Scenes from his life mixed with lines of computer code and video-game landscapes. Jane, Blake, zombies, a whining malamute, redwood trees with pixilated blood splattering through their trunks, pills the size of oranges, men in Einstein wigs striking Tibetan chimes. Adam struggled to get free of the rush of images, but he could not look away.

  In flashes rapid as machine-gun fire, Adam saw his stepmother slapping him in the school yard over and over again, followed by images of unspeakable horror, as if the entire history of human violence were spilling out in a horrific mosaic of war, murder, rape, torture, and piles of festering bodies—a pornographic orgy of sex and death that played out in an endless cycle.

  Helpless, paralyzed, and unable to look away, there was no way for Adam to escape the utter madness pouring out of the screen, forcing him to consume it.

  Then he realized that there was something he could do. There was one small yet vital aspect of himself that he could still control. His attention. Although he could not avert his gaze from the screen, he could focus on the screen itself, on its flat, two-dimensional form. Instead of getting lost in what was going on inside of it, he could hold on to an awareness of this place he was in.

  As he did, he began to see more of it. The screen had edges. And now something else—a slight reflection. In the screen a reflection of the space behind him, and the more he concentrated on it, the clearer it became. He could start to make out things around him. Now he could even see where he was!

  He was inside the Cave.

  He was in the Virtual Skies Tower, at his desk in his cubicle, and he was not alone; behind him he could just barely make out other people, all staring blankly into their own glowing screens. The Cave was much bigger than he ever realized, extending as far as he could see in all directions. A cold, dead universe filled with countless glowing faces—small, pale moons glowing in the reflected light of their screens.

  Adam was not sure what was worse, the assault of images on his screen or what he saw now. Either way, it felt like he was seeing too much, witnessing a dark truth about humanity that was never meant to be seen. All he wanted was to wake up, or go back to sleep, or whatever would take him away from this utterly hopeless place.

  “What lies beyond the stars?” It was only a whisper, coming from another dimension altogether.

  “What lies beyond the stars, Adam Sheppard?”

  He felt the voice echoing in his chest now. And then, from the infinite ocean of tiny dead moons, he saw a soft, warm glow moving toward him. He was unable to turn and look directly at it—his eyes were still locked on the screen—but he could see it in the screen’s reflection, approaching him from behind. He could just make out the figure of a woman, naked, floating in infinite space, the flames of her red hair a sun among moons.

  Adam began to weep. Not since Mendocino had he allowed himself to even consider her. He had banished every thought, every image from his mind, erased file after file, wiping his internal hard drive clear of all references to her. Yet despite his efforts, he knew that, like an addict, he could never truly recover. She was in his cellular material, and if he allowed himself to believe in her again, there would be no turning back. He had chosen instead to accept that she was a fantasy, the first game he had ever created as a child. He had accepted that, in the real world, a hope like Beatrice was not allowed to exist.

  “Do you exist?” asked the voice within Adam’s chest.

  “I’m a dead fact,” his mind responded. “Just one more pale moon.”

  Being in her presence, in the mere reflection of it, was too much to bear. He almost wished for the lesser pain of nonexistence. With all of his will, Adam focused on trying to turn around, to actually see her, to make her real.

  On the screen in front of him there was now only a single image, the original overhead shot of a boy on the merry-go-round, spinning round and round, sleeping as if for all eternity.

  “AHHHH!” Adam felt his insides tearing apart as he struggled to free himself and turn. Blood began to pour from his eyes and ears. On the screen before him, the boy began to toss and turn, eyelids fluttering, struggling to wake up.

  “AHHHH!” Like a lightning bolt, a single crack appeared across the screen.

  Adam opened his eyes.

  His pillow was soaked with perspiration. It was still dark in the room. Adam’s vision was too blurry to read the clock on the bedside table. Holding his breath, he slowly turned his head toward Jane. She lay turned away from him, snoring softly.

  CHAPTER 28

  THE DOORWAY REVEALED

  Wrapping paper in his lap, Adam examined the book in his hands. More Tweets from the Soul: An Inspiring Collection of Life-Affirming Tweets, Volume III.

  “Oh,” Jane sang out, peeking over Adam’s shoulder. “This is just so funny. What do you think, Adam?”

  Adam could feel himself nodding a
nd smiling. He no longer needed Jane’s cues for moments like this. The practiced grooves of appropriate social behavior were carrying him along safely this evening. He had ridden through the day on these auto-response rails without a single person, including Jane, noticing anything was amiss.

  “We have the first two volumes. This must have just come out,” Jane said as she flipped through the book. “We don’t have this one yet, do we, sweetie?”

  “Nope. Not yet.” Adam’s performance tonight had been supported by several key factors. First was the familiar environment of the Silver Oak Grill—safe and reliable, with its festive decor and eager-to-please waitstaff, its dependably large portions, and its clean, cinnamon-scented bathrooms.

  Also keeping Adam on an even keel tonight was the dependable cast of characters around the birthday table. There was Jane’s mother, Cassandra, hidden behind her designer sunglasses, checking out other women’s outfits. Howie with his new caregiver, Don, a large African-American man. Chandler and Madison were also present, along with their electronic devices. And there was the extra setting for Blake, just in case he showed up.

  One small variation tonight was the new set of neighbors, Zach and Brittany Lynch, who were now living across the cul-desac in the faux Italian villa that Stefan and Annie Thompson had lost to foreclosure. From Adam’s perspective their new neighbors were not discernibly different from the old ones.

  “This book is so right on for Adam.” Jane smiled. “It’s like you’re psychic or something.”

  “No, no, we’re not psychic—” Zach shrugged as Brittany finished his sentence.

  “We just thought since Adam likes philosophy and he’s a tech guy, this would be perfect.” She smiled enthusiastically.

  “Ha. Right,” Adam said while experiencing an almost imperceptible twinge of panic. Hasn’t this moment happened before? Adam thought. Maybe Zach and Brittany actually are Stefan and Annie, just hiding under different skin. They finish each other’s sentences, just like Stefan and Annie . . . But, no. Stefan and Annie were from Southern California and automatically agree with whatever you say, whereas Zach and Brittany are from New York and automatically disagree with whatever you say.