by Matt Cardin
“Oh, but I like it. I mean, he likes it.” He could tell she didn’t believe him, so he tapped his manicured nails on the tile tabletop in syncopation with his words to emphasize his sincerity. “No, really! All that housey-spousey stuff is actually kind of fun in Brian-world.”
Cornelia tapped her chin with a long maroon-lacquered fingernail. “So, do they ever do it? Or is life all just chores and church socials?”
“Oh sure, they have sex. But I never get to see”—He twirled his forefingers in the direction of his crotch—“the works in action. It’s like watching a soft-core porn channel in a hotel room. No close-ups allowed, in case a kid enters the room. The camera moves toward them, then it veers off toward a fireplace or an open window with a pretty sky outside.”
Cornelia’s smile dipped down into a smirk. “How dreary. Must be terribly boring for you.”
“Nooo. . . .” Lafcadio thought for a moment. “In a way, it’s rather sweet. And the lack of visuals isn’t a total loss. I mean, I do still feel every sensation that Brian is feeling.” He looked into Cornelia’s eyes. “I think sometimes Susan is supposed to be you.”
Her eyes hardened into a stare that clearly said, Don’t go there. “You will recall,” she said, “that we only slept together once. Before I’d figured myself out. I’m Susan? That hardly seems likely.”
“Is it likely that I should be Brian?” he countered. To lighten the mood, he cocked his head and widened his eyes in a mock posture of exaggerated artsy-fartsy pretension, and she laughed. Her teeth were whiter than the foam on his Macchiato, whiter than arctic ice, and they transfixed him in a momentary flash of near-revelation.
“It’s so like you,” she said, “to have such complicated relationship issues even in your dreams.” She was still laughing when she glanced at the clock on the wall. “Whoops, I’d better get going. I’ve got a class coming up. Keep me posted on all the exciting developments in Brian-land.” She leaned over and pecked him on the cheek, then gathered her purse (more like a suitcase, he thought) and headed for the door.
He watched as her long, lanky strides carried her away from him. The rippled muscles of the arctic waste were still taking shape in his imagination, and for the millionth time in his high-strung life he silently thanked the gods—any gods, whatever gods there might be, he didn’t care who they were—for gifting him with a dreary dream life of almost archetypal normality, since it freed him from the fetters of psyche-bound inspiration and allowed him to take in, as if by osmosis, every subtle sensation of the world around him. Without anything of equal vibrancy buzzing in his subconscious to compete with the splendor of the outside world, he could work in complete inner freedom, allowing the obscure mechanism of his own creative faculty to transform scattered sense perceptions into magnificent paintings that made him the awe of the arthouse community.
The gods bless you, Brian, he said to his alter ego. Through the plate glass storefront, he could see Cornelia standing on the sidewalk, squinting up at the sun. After a moment she pulled out her flaming-orange sunglasses and slipped them on. As she loped down the sidewalk and out of sight, he found that he still couldn’t decide whether or not he loved her.
But then he reasoned, if he couldn’t decide, that probably meant he didn’t.
The dream, as always, was in black-and-white, except for the part with the startling new addition of blood, which fountained and sprayed in gouts like bright red finger-paint. The color shocked him, but not into full consciousness. He soon discovered another fact about this remarkable dream: it could get amazingly tactile, almost more so than real life. Brian’s world had always been pinch-yourself-and-wake-up solid, but never like this. The blood was warm and sticky as maple syrup, and the pain was a white-hot pocket of concentrated agony searing into the socket of his right eye.
What had happened was that Susan had asked Brian to unload a pickup bed full of potted flowers. He had backed the vehicle up to the front porch like the dutiful dream-husband he was, and had lowered the tailgate and climbed into the bed to unstack the dull plastic pots with their colorless floral occupants.
(Lafcadio, watching from a nonlocalized point some distance away while simultaneously identifying with his dream-self, had thought the grayish blooms most distasteful.)
It happened on the first jump. Brian realized it would be much easier to hop down than to squat and climb, so he steadied the pot in his hands and stepped off the edge of the tailgate, intending to drop lightly onto the balls of his feet. Susan’s scream burst out with an impossible loudness and hung in the air with a ringing reverberation that could only happen in a dream. He hadn’t noticed the hook projecting from the porch ceiling, right near the edge under which he had opened the tailgate. It was meant for hanging a plant on, obviously. Susan must have mounted it there without telling him. The gray-silver point extended an absurd length past the overhang, maybe three inches or more, and was located precisely at eye-level from his standing position in the pickup bed.
The curved end was vicious-looking, almost medieval. It caught him in the top rim of his right eye socket, and his weight did the rest. He fell forward, the point gouged into the bone of his skull, his legs left the tailgate, and then he was lodged there, hooked like a great flailing fish. The plastic pot hit the lawn without breaking, although potting soil sprayed everywhere, and the colorless bloom was crushed. His body went out of control then, legs kicking and spasming as if he were trying to pedal up Mount Everest, hands and fingers slapping and clawing at the smooth vinyl siding of the eave in a vain attempt to lift himself up. While all this went on, his throat opened up and spouted a veritably Pentecostal string of gibberish that seemed to have something to do with screaming for help.
Then Susan was grabbing his legs. She was grunting and lifting him up, heaving, thrusting, while her impossibly loud and long scream still hung in the air. At last she succeeded. The hook ripped free, dragging a few bone splinters with it, and he dropped to the truck, slammed into the open tailgate with the small of his back, and hit the lawn still writhing.
That was when the blood began to spurt from his eye in candy-red finger-paint gouts. The pain was a knot of acid searing its way inward from his eye to his brain. Susan was pawing at him in panic, weeping, asking him what to do. And in the midst of it all, rather absurdly, he vomited.
“He puked? So what happened then? Did he die? Tell me everything!” Cornelia’s eyes shone with eager interest. Lafcadio drew in a sharp, tobacco-laden breath and let it out slowly, trying to buy time to fathom the reason for her eagerness. This time they had met at their favorite bar, the Twilight Lounge. The decor was an edgy mix of Goth and camp imagery: ABBA posters and black candles arranged into arcane geometric patterns, G.I. Joe dolls tangled in faux spiderwebs. Cornelia was dressed for the occasion in a black velvet catsuit with a denim jacket.
“No, he didn’t die.” Lafcadio floated the words out on the tail-end of a smoky exhalation. Cornelia interrupted him before he could say more.
“What?” She blinked and leaned closer, bringing with her a mingled scent of sweet perfume and sour gin. “Did you say ‘Oh, he sits and cries’? Lafcadio, my darling, you’re incomprehensible when you mumble, especially amidst all the lovely musical accompaniment.” A bassy club beat throbbed in the atmosphere around them, overlaid with a glassy texture of synthesized strings.
“I said he didn’t die.” He repeated the words with a hint of annoyance. “People usually don’t die in their own dreams, right? And after all, he is me.” He held up his cigarette before him in an attitude of detachment and regarded the cherry-red ember glowing on the tip. “Things seemed like they were getting better before I woke up. Susan took care of him. She dialed 911, and an ambulance came and rushed him off to the hospital. I opened my eyes just as they started to wheel him into the ER.”
“Interesting. . . .” Cornelia took a sip from her gin and tonic. “So Susan saved his life. But then, she’s the one who installed the hook in the first place. And you say
it hurt his eye?” She mused for a moment while the smoky air continued to throb around them like the interior of an artery, and while Lafcadio remained deliberately absorbed in his cigarette meditation. In his mind, a fiery orange sinkhole had opened up in the abdominal arctic waste. Volcanic flames were beginning to lick out from the edges and melt the snow to slush. The water first dripped, then drizzled into the hole, and its touch only seemed to fuel the flames.
“Hey.” Cornelia’s ruminations seemed to reach a point of sudden synthesis. “Do you think that’s symbolic—‘eye’ equals capital ‘I’? Maybe the hook in your eye represents a buried feeling of hostility toward your deathly-dull dream life.” She smiled with an almost childish glee, and he thought she seemed just a little too pleased with herself.
“It’s a fundamental tenet of my belief system,” he said in a far frostier voice than he had intended, “that there is ultimately no such thing as a fixed center of identity.” He saw her eyes roll in a familiar expression of boredom, but he went on. “These chairs underneath our asses right now are just as much a part of who we are as anything rattling around inside these juicy little heads.” He raised his right hand, the one holding the cigarette, and tapped his index finger against a veiny temple. A tendril of smoke found its way from the tip of the cigarette to the corner of his eye, where it brushed a stinging tail against the tender pink tissues. He waved it away and tried to ignore Cornelia’s look of amusement.
“The injured eye once again,” she said. “Do you think someone is trying to tell you something?”
He refused to acknowledge her comment. “I have no reason to be hostile toward Brian or his life,” he continued, “because he may as well be me, and his life mine. My life may as well be his. Just as yours may as well be mine, and mine yours. Our souls are both located in this cigarette I’m smoking here. They’re also in that gin and tonic you’re sucking down.” She was in the midst of downing the rest of her drink, and she made a face at him, holding the liquid in her cheeks for a moment before swallowing it.
“Really, darling,” she said with a sigh, “sometimes your attempts at Zen-like wisdom are too much. What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m saying there’s no boundary between identities, so what’s to be afraid of?”
She shrugged. “Who said anything about being afraid?”
“It’s the same thing with my art,” he went on, ignoring her question. “I deliberately make the perspective undiscoverable. The viewer might be looking at any one point from any other. Have you heard of Indra’s net?”
She shook her head, clearly having lost interest in his monologue. But that did not prevent him from continuing.
“It’s a metaphor in Hinduism for the infinity of perspectives in the universe. Indra’s net is an endless web that has a jewel located at the intersection of every strand. Each jewel reflects all the others, so you have infinity contained in every finite point on the net. A long time ago I decided to use this idea as the philosophical basis for my paintings. When you view any one of my pieces, you don’t know where you’re supposed to be seeing it from. What’s more, this means the frame itself isn’t the boundary of the scene. My landscapes fold in on themselves and create a self-contained infinity. In this way, my work mirrors the reality of subjective personal existence, just like the metaphor of Indra’s net. Because ultimately, there’s nothing outside the frame for any of us. There’s just an endless hall of mirrors with no boundary.” He started to say more, but then he abruptly shut his mouth and sucked on his cigarette as he realized that the words he had never spoken, and never wanted to speak, were rising to his lips. These words expressed a fear that had dawned on him one day in a quiet moment when he was reiterating his credo to himself for the thousandth time: No boundary means no escape.
“Is there anything else?” Cornelia asked. She was watching him with her ruby red lips screwed up into a wry grin.
“Just the fact that your eye/I theory doesn’t hold water,” he said. “The injury wasn’t a threat at all. In fact, it might turn out to have been a liberation. Brian and Susan’s marital relationship has been at kind of a low ebb lately. Then he ran into trouble and she saved him. Maybe this will revitalize things between them.”
“Yes,” Cornelia said, “but Susan put up the hook, remember?” She smiled at him with eyes that were as pretty and hard as the rest of her. “If I remember correctly, you also told me that I’m Susan. Is that how you see me—a disturbing mix of destroyer and savior?”
Lafcadio barked out a small, sharp laugh. “Hardly, my sweet. Listen, we could spend all night on this. This autopsy of my dreams. But do you know what? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a rose is a rose is a rose, and diamonds are forever. Let’s just say it’s all really interesting, and leave it at that. Will you indulge me?”
“Oh, darling!” she cried. “This is too much, coming from the enlightened Zen-master of the avant garde art world!” She laughed and laughed until he feared she would hurt herself. When she had recovered, she said, “Certainly, my sweet. But one question first: Doesn’t it bother you to know that Brian-world is now a painful place to be? You’ve talked so much about how realistic it is. Well, I’m not so sure the marriage or anything else will be better now. Brian may be disfigured, and he’ll definitely be blind in one eye. He’ll probably suffer brain damage. I’m surprised you haven’t acted more concerned about this. What will your dreams be like now, my wise Lafcadio?” She looked deeply into his eyes, and even in the midst of his consternation, he wondered again whether he loved her.
“Don’t know.” The artist slumped back in his seat, his meditative mood broken. The arctic landscape remained unaltered in his mind’s eye, although the drizzle of water pouring through the hole in the ice had grown to become a steadily flowing waterfall. The flames were hidden now, but they were still there, still burning below the frozen crust, as evidenced by the flickering orange sheen they imparted to the ice around the hole. He had a momentary flash of something new: a human figure curled into a fetal position, located deep within that fiery pit. Its eyes and mouth were open wide. He couldn’t tell whether it was laughing, crying, or screaming. Perhaps it was doing all three.
He frowned at Cornelia as he ground out his cigarette in the glossy black ashtray on the table. “You’re just a sweet little ray of sunshine, aren’t you?”
Of course the dream was monochrome. How could it be otherwise? And yet Brian sensed that something was different. Something was missing from the room around him, some indefinable aspect of solidity whose absence made everything seem vaguely flat and unreal, like cardboard stage props and scenery.
(Lafcadio, hovering in extra-dimensional space somewhere near the ceiling, shared his alter ego’s confusion.)
Brian was parked in a wheelchair in the center of his black-and-white living room, slumped in front of a black-and-white television set, watching a black-and-white program unfold on the screen. He couldn’t budge an inch. The insipid TV world was inescapable, and he was positioned to face it for a full frontal assault. Susan had engaged the wheel locks on the chair to prevent the incessant squeaking of the spokes he had been causing by rocking back and forth, back and forth. She was in the kitchen behind him right now, making his lunch, from the sound of it. She must be chopping celery—crunch crunch crunch, crunch crunch crunch. To his right and left, adorning coffee tables, walls, and windowsills, a tangled profusion of potted flowers bristled with muddy gray blooms that emitted an incongruously sweet perfume. It saturated the atmosphere of the room like a syrupy fog. He almost thought he could see it shifting and shimmering in the cold light of the television.
Drool was gathered in a heavy glistening lobe on his lower lip, but he lacked the energy to care about it. He felt nauseous and dizzy, and had no idea what was happening on the program before him. Something about a perky family stranded on some planet with a prissy bad guy and a robot with floppy arms. A black rotary telephone perched atop the set with a ridiculously long cord d
angling down in front of the screen. It slithered across the concave surface, unevenly dividing the flickering image, and ended up as a bunched pile of gleaming black coils on the gray-carpeted floor.
His injured right eye was smothered in bandages, as were most of his cheek and forehead. His exposed left eye kept blinking, rolling, and refocusing as he tried to fathom what the characters on the television screen were so concerned about. The prissy bad-guy was bitching at the robot while the robot waved its accordion-pleated tube-arms.
His poor wounded head pulsed with an odd liquid surging sound. In his grogginess and sickness, he imagined that he must be hearing the primal sound of the ocean deeps, where colorless fluorescent fish glided with rippling fan-fins through an eternal night, and where the currents murmured of secrets too ancient to be spoken aloud. Such thoughts were new and strange, and they scared him. He longed for his accounting forms and the familiar taupe walls of his office. But the ocean sound seemed to be a permanent addition, and he feared he would never see the comforting interior of his office again. Now, one week after the accident, he still rocked to the sound of the tidal rhythm, but the wheel locks kept him from creating the soothing back-and-forth motion that had been the only comfort he could find in this new half-conscious existence.
