by Matt Cardin
Susan entered the room holding a plate with a sandwich on it. She was smiling and talking to him, but her words sounded like gibberish. When he tried to raise his hands to accept the plate, his arms felt as if someone had tied them down with lead weights. Her voice came to him as if through water, all muffled and murky, and the words sounded like blah, blah, blah, spoken in relentlessly perky tones, so upbeat they rang utterly false.
She held the sandwich to his mouth, and his nostrils were suddenly filled with the clean yet musty smell of whole-wheat bread. With the cloying perfume of the flowers now mercifully muted, he found that his nausea had concealed a fierce hunger. He was positively ravenous. His lips parted of their own accord, and the spongy bread sopped up the bead of spit on his lower lip as Susan fed him the sandwich bite by bite. While he ate, he couldn’t help noticing that she wore low-riding pants with a high-cut shirt, and that her navel stared at him from the smooth white expanse of her stomach like an unblinking eye that mirrored and mocked his own newly monocular face. It fascinated him for some reason. He felt he should be reminded of something.
He still had four bites left when the phone rang. Susan set the plate on his lap and took two steps over to the television while he stared down at the unfinished sandwich with a mute cry of frustration sealed off in his throat. His hands clenched and unclenched, but his wrists were pinned to the arms of the wheelchair by invisible straps.
“Blah, blah, blah?” Susan chimed into the black mouthpiece. She listened a moment, then “Blah, blah, blah!” she replied. A look of pleasure crossed her face as she brushed past him to the coffee table, where she consulted a phone book for the caller. Her smile faded as her finger stopped on the page before a name and number.
“Oh, blah, blah, blah,” she continued in a more serious tone, moving behind him toward the kitchen on some errand, dragging the long black cord in her wake so that it pulled up against his arm. He flinched at its stiff spiral touch and continued to look with longing at his sandwich.
After a moment, she returned on some other errand. “Blah, blah, blah!” she enthused, racing in front of him toward the phone book again, still chatting away to that all-important caller, still pulling that super-long springy cord so that it worked its way up and encircled his neck. The coils were as smooth and cool as snakeskin against his throat.
From some point buried deep inside his brain, out of some black well of selfhood where the ocean currents murmured in soothing tones, a thought emerged. The whispering voices coalesced into an intelligible sentence, and the sentence began to flow toward his throat. He opened his mouth and grunted, but the cord was slowly strangling him. He coughed as if he were trying to expel some bit of sandwich lodged in his windpipe. The words were almost there, they would almost form. His mouth worked and his lips gathered more spit, but his voice would not come, it could not break free of the constriction around his throat. In desperation he mouthed the words silently with his crumb-covered lips, wondering as he did so what the thought might mean, and where it might have come from: No boundary means no escape.
(Lafcadio, who had been watching these events unfold with growing agitation, felt his disembodied heart skip a beat.)
Susan was now out of sight in the dining room, or perhaps even beyond that, and the cord was growing tighter and tighter. The television world continued to blather with incomprehensible characters and concerns while the cold spiral coils dug deeper and deeper into his Adam’s apple like a garrote. Straining, trembling, he jerked his arms against the invisible straps, but try as he might, he was immobilized.
As the dull throb of medicated pain in his bandaged eye blossomed into a bright burning agony, and as the robot continued to wave its arms and the prissy bad guy went on with his outrageous accusations, Brian finally realized the nature of what was wrong with the room: There was no difference between the world around him and the world on the television. The gibberish spouting from the mouths of the TV characters was no more comprehensible than the gibberish his wife was still spouting in the other room—or, come to think of it, from the gibberish he had spouted himself when he was hanging by his eye socket from the porch ceiling. None of it made sense. All of it was insipid and pointless. There was a tangible lack of realness to his surroundings, an absence of something that would have given everything more weight and caused it all to make sense again. But what exactly was this indefinable quality whose absence made life nothing more than a TV show where people spoke nonsense, and where there could be no escape?
It wasn’t until rivulets of shocking-bright red began to seep out from beneath his bandages and spatter onto the colorless sleeves of his pajamas that he found his answer.
No boundary means no escape.
When the change came, it came quickly. The room receded suddenly and sharply, as if he were backing down a tunnel at incredible speed. The pain in his face and constriction in his throat faded like someone had turned down the volume on the television. For a time, he knew only an insensate bliss.
When he opened his eyes—his eyes, both of them intact and functional—he found himself lying in a bed that was not his own, located in a room he had never seen, where the walls displayed a dazzling array of surreal painted landscapes, and where he somehow knew that nobody had ever slept beside him more than once, not even Susan.
His throat finally opened and released an impressive array of shrieks when he realized that his name was supposed to be Lafcadio, and that he had awakened into the wrong life.
“So is he dead?’ Cornelia asked. “You haven’t talked about him for—what is it, two weeks now? I can only assume that he died from his injuries. What’s Susan doing with the life insurance money? Installing a greenhouse?” She smiled and laughed, but he refused to look at her.
This time they were sharing a pizza in their favorite trendy restaurant, Mad for Pie, which served every sort of pizza one could imagine—except the traditional sausage, cheese and tomato sauce kind. The entrée steaming on the table before them now was the specialty of the house, an exotic mélange called The Swordfish, Artichoke, and White Sauce (with Just a Touch of Cilantro) Dream Pie. Lafcadio’s stomach was out of sorts. He sat back in his tall wicker-backed chair and tried to avoid the overpowering scent of seafood and cilantro that rose to his nostrils in heady waves.
“To be honest,” he said in his best nonchalant voice, “I’m not sure what’s going on with Brian right now.”
“What do you mean?” She shoveled another lump of swordfish-laden crust into her mouth, and he watched the motion of her jaw with sickened fascination: its determined scissoring and champing as it ground the fishy flesh to a pulp, then the spasm in her throat as she swallowed the pungent lump and it began to stretch its way downward through her esophagus toward her waiting stomach. His own stomach lurched ominously, and he looked down at his cigarette.
“I, uh—how do I say this?” He picked up a heavy burgundy-colored napkin and mopped his sweating brow. “I haven’t dreamed about Brian for sixteen days now.”
She stopped her chewing and regarded him from across the pie with an expression of disbelief.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m serious.”
“Lafcadio,” she said. The swordfish suddenly stuck in her throat, and she groped for her glass of water. When she had taken a drink, she licked her lips and continued to look at him. “What’s happened? Hasn’t Brian been with you for years now?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Aren’t you concerned about this?”
“Yes.”
“So why haven’t you said anything?” Her wounded pout dismayed him, and for a moment he considered telling her the tale he had been concealing for over two weeks: of how he had awakened in his silk-sheeted bed thinking that he was Brian; of the profound panic that had gripped him for hours as he struggled to remember how he had awakened into someone else’s life; of how the delusion had hung on until mid-morning, when for no apparent reason his own name had seemed to attach to him with a new assertiveness
, and the dream-identity had evaporated from his consciousness like a moist fog; of how he had found himself standing in his kitchen, holding a cup of Jamaica Blue Mountain and wondering where somebody had hidden the Folgers.
For the rest of that horrible day he had been unable to stop the trembling in his chest. He had canceled a dinner date with Cornelia (she had gracefully declined to ask the reason) and spent the night in his studio looking at his easel and allowing the arctic vision to gain further clarity and intensity in his mind’s eye. He had known the time would soon arrive for him to begin committing the vision to canvas, but on that night some inner impulse had told him to wait, and he had heeded its restraint. Later, when he slept, he had found that his classic TV dreams were gone for the first time in over a decade.
Instead of watching Brian’s soothingly banal ramblings, he had found himself floating high over an arctic tundra, watching a volcanic sinkhole widen into a veritable crater amidst the icy furrows, wondering whether the abdominal ripples stretching away toward the horizon might ever meet with the rest of the torso, with breasts and a neck, and with a face. It was the first time he had ever dreamt himself into one of his own artistic visions, and he hadn’t known how to feel about it the following morning. The next night the dream had been the same. And the next, and the next.
He considered telling Cornelia this. But how could he, when he knew that it was her face he half feared to see past the icy horizon?
“I just needed time to adjust,” he finally said with a weak smile. “You know you’re my most beloved confidante, Cornelia. Please don’t be upset with me.”
“I’m not upset, dearest. I’m just surprised.” She shoved away her plate and began looking around for a server to take away the remains of the pie. Once their table was cleared and wiped down and they were alone again, she leaned forward with her forearms resting on the glossy brown surface and looked into his eyes.
“Do you know I talked to my therapist last week about you and Brian?”
For a moment he thought she was joking. He kept expecting her serious expression to break into a smile, but her mouth was a determined line, and her eyes were as hard as sapphires.
“You told Dr. Breckenridge about this? About my dreams?”
Her severity broke easily in the face of his indignation. Immediately she was pouting again, but now in a rather hard way. “I was missing you, Lafcadio. I really wanted to hear about the latest episodes of the Brian and Susan Show. I always look forward to our conversations. I just called Dr. Breckenridge to change my appointment, but we ended up talking about you. How could I not mention you, when you were the main thing on my mind?”
Lafcadio could not sit still. He twisted in his seat and tried unsuccessfully to find a comfortable position. He picked up his drink, but his hand shook so badly that he had to set it back down. He looked around at the waiters and waitresses servicing tables, at the upscale married couples and college students, all of them wearing trendy clothes and devouring various nonstandard delights. The sight only angered him. As a last resort, he turned to examine his cigarette, but its usual soothing influence was nowhere to be found. Then he gave up and looked at Cornelia’s face.
“So what did you tell him?”
“I only told him what you’ve told me. I described your dream life, all black-and-white and cozy. He found it quite fascinating. I could tell he wanted to ask me to introduce you to him, but he was too afraid of crossing a professional line.”
Lafcadio considered this for a moment and then began to nod, slowly at first, then with increasing vigor. “Of course.” He recalled the sensation of a curling phone cord pressed cold against Brian’s throat, and he snickered a little, then laughed. “Of course.” Once again he gazed into Cornelia’s eyes, considered her toned and taut physique, now tastefully attired in a green sparkling jacket with black satin shirt and pants. He drank in the sight of her masculine femininity, and found in it an impression of dawning realization. The full knowledge waited just beyond the horizon, like an arctic mountain range chiseled by the elements into the shape of a familiar face.
She was speaking to him. Her words came to him all murky and muffled, as if through water. “After all, Lafcadio, you were the one who said . . . what was it? Sometimes a dream is just a cigar? Something like that. You were quoting somebody. But the more I think about it, the more I believe you had the right idea. Don’t take any of this seriously. Dr. Breckenridge didn’t know what he was saying when he told me your dreams are unlike anything in the history of psychology.” She shut her mouth when she realized she had said too much, but he found it funny. It was all funny now. She was a million miles away, and her confusion and misery were of no consequence.
It also just so happened that her face and clothing were losing their color. He blinked rapidly as the color drained away from her like dye being leached from a canvas. Her blue eyes became a stony gray. Her ruddy expression became a murky white. Her sparkling green jacket became a sickly weak shade of gray, like library paste flecked with glitter. In just a few seconds she was flushed of all color. He was so startled that it was a moment before he realized the same effect had overtaken the restaurant around him. Mad for Pie had taken on the appearance of Father Knows Best. The pies and pizzas were gray cardboard, and the patrons and scenery were colorless stage props and cutouts.
(Somewhere close by, in some nonlocalized portion of extra-dimensional space, another center of identity began to make itself known: a buzzing unit of self-consciousness that felt somehow like a vane protruding from the back of his head; an unknown self whose reality ran much deeper and held more solidity than the Magnificent Artist identity he had cultivated for most of his life. This new self was sharing his vision and consciousness, watching his life unfold like a fiction. And it was judging everything about him and his life, considering it all impassively, and finding it all to be quaint and comforting in a banal, white-bread sort of way.)
He felt his hand rise to his mouth to suck in a lungful of nicotine smoke. His lips curled into a smile, and for a moment he almost felt like his old self. “Cornelia, my sweet, don’t worry about it.” His voice carried through the stale air with a vibrancy that was almost visible, as if its very timbre might bring back a hint of color to the room. He felt a strange power surging in his breast, a kind of exhilaration beyond anything he had ever known. The landscape in his mind’s eye pulsed with an intensity that almost obscured the sight of the restaurant. For once, his inner vision was stronger than the world around him, and in this fact he found his release.
If life was unbounded, he thought, just like his landscapes, and if no boundary meant no escape, then the only way out, the only way to achieve the ultimate transcendence, was to turn inward toward the source and center of consciousness itself, and find his longed-for infinity inside the world. Just like the self-contained infinity of Indra’s net, which he had never truly understood until now.
(The newly awakened higher self nodded behind him in approval of his insight. He could sense its benevolent attention upon him.)
Cornelia’s face loomed in front of him, and also beyond the icy horizon in his mind’s eye. In the restaurant she appeared gray and flat. In the arctic waste her features were chiseled from crackling blue ice, and the light of a slivered moon overhead glinted in silver sparkles on her face like flashes on the facets of a diamond.
“You’re not mad?” the Cornelia of the outer world was asking. “Are you sure, Lafcadio? Because I don’t think I could bear it.”
“No,” he heard himself say. “Far from it. In fact, I think you may have liberated me. I’m thinking that maybe Brian is gone now because he woke up. I’m thinking that maybe he and I have finally come together.”
She looked at him somewhat suspiciously. “Should I congratulate you?”
“Perhaps. What say we find out for sure?” He rapped on the table with the knuckles of his free hand and sat forward abruptly in his chair. He felt positively giddy with good will. “Will you come
over to my place tonight, my dear? I have something prepared to show you. I haven’t told you anything about my latest project, you know I always keep them private until they’re finished, but it’s about time you saw it, even if it is only a work in progress. Because you’re directly involved in it.”
Her smile returned then, and he saw that her teeth were still icy white, a flashing beacon in the grayness surrounding her. “Lafcadio! Do you mean that I’m featured in it somehow?”
“Oh, yes!” He laughed and allowed her to grab his hand. “Yes, you are! I think you’ll be positively amazed at the role you’ve played.”
After that, he found he could simply allow himself to act the part of Lafcadio for the remainder of their time together at Mad for Pie. He chatted and laughed, and she laughed and chatted back, and they made plans for her to arrive at his flat at eight o’clock, at which time he promised to reveal to her a facet of herself that she had never suspected. He even managed to keep up the old appearance of the Magnificent Artist when her chattering words lost all meaning and began to sound like “Blah, blah, blah.”
When they parted, each was riding on a wave of giddiness, although he knew that hers did not match his. She thought she was going to be immortalized in one of his paintings. He, on the other hand, knew they were both going to be immortalized in a scheme much bigger than any she could ever imagine.
He labored all afternoon in his studio. The painting seemed to shape itself.
He had to take extra care to blend the colors for the fiery crater, since his colorblindness precluded his assessing it with a simple glance, but he felt his hand being guided by a higher power, and he knew, even without being able to judge the quality of the work with his eyes, that it was the best thing he had ever painted. And after all, he would soon awaken to the actual scene of the vision, and the pathetic oil-based facsimile would no longer have a significance.
As he continued to work toward completion, he began to feel as if a key had been fitted into a lock. The door that opened allowed a flood of insights to spill through his brain. Brian’s world had been less real than Lafcadio’s, and its unreality had been reflected in its monochromity. That much Lafcadio had always known. But he had never suspected that perhaps his own reality was being watched from a still wider perspective by another layer of himself, a layer that was even more awake, more vibrant, more real. The thought of the sensuous delights, the manifold impressions, that might be available to that wider identity, sent him into paroxysms of aesthetic delight.
