Reasons Only Time Allows

by Micah Thomas

  “I plum forgot,” Henry said, drunk off his ass..

  “Are you sure?” Cassie asked. “I did have a really nice night, all things considered.” Her eyes were tired, and Thelon knew it was time to go.

  You let those freak distant memories trigger inside you like they did Henry. You’ll come around. Thelon said, “Yeah. I’m tired, but dead-ass sober. We can swing by for breakfast, yeah?”

  “Got a phone number?” Cassie asked. “Something I can text?”

  “Actually, neither of us have a phone,” Henry said with an exaggerated wink.

  Cassie either didn’t notice or was too buzzed to care. “Okay, that’s weird. Fuck. I just realized I left my car at the restaurant. Whatever. Okay, you two weirdos, it’s been real. Um, how about you come by tomorrow—not too early—and we get breakfast and decide shit over coffee and orange juice?”

  “Peace!” Henry shouted. Then, as if on second thought, he chased after Cassie as she headed up the steps to her apartment.

  “Whoa, easy there,” Cassie said, a little startled.

  Henry let her turn into his arms and gave her a big, non-gropey hug. He smiled like a goofball and bounced back down the stairs to Thelon. Cassie smiled, chuckled, and went on her way.

  Young love. I bet…I bet if I could connect to myself, I’d feel that for Annie. A hug sounds damned fine.

  Henry and Thelon waited until Cassie shut the door behind her. No wave from the window.

  Thelon ran his hands over his hair, pulled his fingers through his beard. “So, that’s that. Ready to go?”

  Henry climbed into the passenger seat and reclined it as far back as it went. “I want tacos.”

  “That’s great. Pops would say people in hell want ice water. I want to sleep.”

  “Tacos!” Henry shouted.

  “Oh my God. Are you going to keep doing that until I feed you?”

  “Tacos,” Henry said agreeably.

  Thelon drove out of the apartment maze and followed the GPS directions to their hotel. The highway moved too fast and blurry with painfully bright headlights. Cars with pulsing LED underbellies sped around as if it was a video game. Thelon drove like an old woman, muttering, “Jesus Christ,” as he observed near misses every single lane merger.

  Unlike Cassie’s sleepy suburb, Scottsdale was very much awake. Thelon regretted picking a hotel so close to nightlife, but it had just sort of happened. He wanted sleep and no drama. Please, for the love of God, no more drama.

  “Look, there’s an Hermanos next door to the hotel,” Thelon pointed out “Will that satisfy?”

  “Tacos,” Henry mumbled. “Rolled tacos.”

  Thelon parked in front of the dingy taco shop and said, “You wait here. I don’t need a public intoxication charge tonight.”

  “Tacos,” Henry said and nodded.

  “Stay here. Stay, boy. Stay.” The last thing I need is Henry roaming out in the streets.

  Thelon went inside and despite the people walking by and the general activity, the place was dead with only a few employees shuffling beneath yellow lights.

  A dude stood at the register, high as a kite, eyes red as a fox’s ass.

  Thelon stared at the enormous menu with photos of greasy meals, and it all looked like dog shit to him. “Um, could I get a rolled taco meal, and, uh…like, three street tacos?”

  “Sure thing,” said the employee. “Eight dollars.”

  Thelon paid with a ten and wanted to leave a tip, but there wasn’t a jar. Do you not tip fast food workers? He couldn’t remember. The food came fast as if everything was already under heat lamps and ready to go—and it was. He saw motion outside before he even opened the door. Henry! What are you doing?

  He came outside to the sight of Henry beneath the streetlight, either making the weirdest shadow puppets or trying to wipe some invisible gunk off his hands.

  “Yo! I got your tacos,” Thelon said and leaned against the rental, watching Henry continue his strange dance a few feet away. “What are you doing, man?”

  “You see it? What is it?”

  Thelon blinked and did see it, but also, he didn’t. A giant moth was there—and not there. A body long as Henry’s arms, gray and mottled brown, it had legs like sticks and branches, holding Henry’s hand as they danced in circles beneath the light. Its wings softly fluttered, dusting Henry with showers of golden sparks that liquified and gelled on his hands and face. Henry let go of the insectoid branch-limb and wiped his face and hands of the powdery and liquid light. He laughed and laughed as it sloughed off him and dissipated like fairy sparkles before hitting the ground.

  Thelon clutched the bag of tacos. The grease leaking from the sack hit on his leg, but he couldn’t look away. This was monstrous and beautiful, and he was vaguely aware of an audience—young hipsters watching—but they couldn’t see the beauty. He knew that. Thelon’s body suffused with a joy. His nostrils opened wide to suck in air and his arms and core tingled with a cheerful energy. How had I been tired just a moment ago? How, when there are such wonders in the world?

  He watched as the moth pulled away from Henry, his arms open wide up to the sky like some stereotypical painting of a native man giving thanks to the Creator, and the moth ascended up to the streetlight. There, where it shrank down, smaller and smaller, joining the ordinary moth brethren at the apex of the bulb. Henry stopped moving and lowered his arms. His face was a tranquil mask, eyes half closed as if about to dream. The onlooking hipsters walked on, unsure of what they had witnessed, but feeling good about it.

  Thelon relaxed and his perception of time rejoined its normal flow.

  Henry, too, resumed and walked the few steps over to Thelon to take the bag of tacos from him. “Why are you so nervous all the time?” he asked as if nothing had happened.

  Still in process of grounding, Thelon answered with an honesty that took himself by surprise, but he couldn’t help it. He was caught in a moment between places and said, “Something is happening to me, Henry. I feel a rabbit in my heart getting threatened by these changes. The fast beating heart, small and scared, hammers too much and I fear its heart— my heart—will explode.”

  Henry laughed and pressed his hand against Thelon’s chest, over his heart. “You’re something of a poet, man. We’re cool. You’re cool. Nothing bad is happening. That’s something they made me say in therapy; I know where I’m coming from. I know where I’m going. I know where I am. Say it with me now.”

  Thelon repeated, “I know where I’m coming from.” But do I? “I know where I’m going to.” Black Star. Fuck yeah. “I know where I am. I’m at,” he looked up at the restaurant sign, “ Amados?” Wasn’t that Hermanos when we got here?

  Stomach cramps hit him hard. A weight so heavy struck the top of his head, it was like a brick falling from the sky. The weight continued smacking down layers of his body, cracking his neck with an awful sound, then descended upon his bowels like a slinky down a steep stairwell.

  The next thing Thelon saw was Henry fucking with the hotel keycard, which he observed up close and personal because he sat on the ground slumped against their room door, his beard smelling of salsa. “What happened?”

  Henry got the door to click open and looked down. “Dude, you got…um, you’re a mess.” He helped Thelon up and into the bathroom.

  Thelon let Henry brush out his beard with his fingers. “What is this?”

  “I, uh…I force fed you tacos? You kept saying you were hungry, but you were acting drunk.”

  Henry pushed Thelon over on the bed where he promptly passed out in his clothes. Henry sighed and took Thelon’s shoes off and then went to sleep as well.

  ~

  THE HIGHWAY SOUNDED like the roar of a jet engine that never got closer or farther away. An orchestra of noise. Low rumblings, helicopter chop, chop, chop. These things filtered into the hotel room and Thelon became aware.

  Melodies formed in Thelon’s mind as they always did with repetitive sounds. He was suddenly sad that T had not pursued m
usic. Dad didn’t want him squandering his potential, but creative work was part of it. Why couldn’t Pops ever see that? He should have been anything but a businessman. Where did T go so wrong?

  These thoughts filtered through his mind until he closed his eyes again and resumed sleep. Yet, he still heard Henry as he snored. Thelon found he didn’t mind that one bit. Tomorrow is a big day. Better get your sleep, son. Scratchy sheets. Flat pillows. Running water in another room.

  I am sleeping. Thelon knew he was in a resting state, but he couldn’t shut off his awareness. A strange bodily confusion dwelt within him. Sleep was supposed to be either dreams or nothing, not lying in bed with your eyes closed but your mind awake. Still, he did not move, save for the rise and fall of his chest. How long he stayed like this, he didn’t know, but the absence of thought, the darkness of actual sleep, did arrive.

  No sooner had he fallen into that perfect rest that he heard a loud bang as if someone slammed a door near his head. Heart racing and tightness in his chest, he sat up with a start. Whatever had made the noise was gone, or wasn’t real in the first place, and he saw only the shadowed hotel room and the outline of Henry still sleeping. Thelon slid quietly out of bed and went to the bathroom to get a drink of water.

  The moment he turned on the faucet, he heard a bang right next to his head again. The noise made him blink and he tumbled in a strange physical disorientation. When he opened his eyes again, he was once more in bed. Oh shit. The fake waking dreams. Thelon pinched his own arm but didn’t wake up. Despite a heaviness in his limbs, he felt very much awake.

  Someone knocked. It was a rapping so gentle it could have been a draft of air moving the door in its hinge, but Thelon knew it wasn’t. He knew it was T was knocking. Thelon panicked, afraid of waking Henry—of Henry seeing two of him—so he opened the door as silently as he could manage and whispered to T, “What are you doing here? I thought you could only appear in my dreams.”

  “You are dreaming.”

  The damned and dreaded cellphone buzzed on the nightstand. Too loud. Henry will wake up!

  “Don’t answer it,” T said.

  “Look, T, I appreciate what you’re doing and yes, I desperately need a spirit guide or whatever you are, but…”

  Henry moaned in his sleep, thrashing against the blankets and drawing Thelon’s attention. He received a strong mental impression that Henry was in danger. That this dream within a dream was growing less pleasant and represented terrible trouble.

  “Ignore him. Ignore them both,” T implored.

  Henry screamed in his sleep and Thelon jumped at the sound. He rushed to Henry’s side, pulled as if by magnetic force. Something black and leathery crawled across Henry’s skin. A centipede!

  Thelon only saw it for a moment along Henry’s neck, then back it darted beneath his shirt. It was like the moth-thing outside. Thelon received the jolt of knowledge and knew. These monsters are drawn to Henry. He is vulnerable.

  Thelon knew he needed to intercede, but how? He’s dreaming. I’m dreaming. He took a deep breath and as he released it, his throat made a Darth Vader hushing noise. The sound waves came out as visual distortions, rolling like organized smoke descending down on Henry in wavering lines. The centipede reacted by screeching and poking its ugly head between two buttons of Henry’s shirt. Thelon lost track of anything else in the room—no more T, no more phone; just Henry, the bug, and his voice. He took another deep breath and let out that growling huffing breath again, this time with more effort.

  The waves of heavy breathing struck the insect and caused it to come out entirely, writhing on Henry’s chest. His eyes popped open in fright.

  Henry gasped for air and reflexively flung the bug against the wall, where it splatted apart like wet cake. “Bro!”

  They were no longer in the hotel room. They were somewhere familiar to Thelon, but not Henry—not as he was in this world. Still positioned with Henry sitting on a bed and Thelon kneeling beside him, they were now in a prison cell on the Moon. It was a white on white world of futuristic design which once upon a time housed Thelon as an inmate. The alarming terror that preceded this moment vanished. In a moment of strange tranquility, Thelon smiled at him.

  “Where are we?” Henry asked. “Am I dreaming?” He looked at the bug splatter on the wall. “What was that?”

  “Dude. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  Henry got up and looked around. “I think we’re in jail.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. This is where they locked me up. I think we might be in my memories.”

  “That’s weird. I feel like I’m wide awake. Am I a figment of your imagination? Cause you never told me about this place.”

  “No. It’s real—and, you know, not real. Somebody once told me not to fixate on the weirdness of things and I didn’t get it until now.”

  Henry rubbed his hands together and gazed at his palms. “I was having bad dream. Something was trying to eat me. It was gonna eat me.”

  Thelon nodded. Yeah, look at your hands. I’ll look at my hands. “Hey, this happens to be exactly where you and I met the first time.”

  “No shit?”

  “None. I was sleeping in this shitty bed. Every day, they’d take me out, pump me full of something like acid or DMT, and I’d go tripping in a sensory deprivation tank. One day, I was crying in here. Missing my mom. Feeling like a fuck up. And Henry—the other Henry—showed up in my mind. You were kind of an asshole.”

  Henry smirked. “No way.”

  “Fine. You had to, like, front with me until I got with the program. You knew more about this shit than I did. Do you still?” Do you remember?

  Henry’s eyes unfocused and his mouth gaped open like he was about to speak, then he sneezed.

  “God bless you,” Thelon said automatically.

  “Thelon, let me put it this way. I feel high right now so nothing I say while we are in this dream can be held against me.”

  “Okay?”

  “I don’t fucking remember any of what you are talking about.”

  “Fuck.” Thelon felt high too, but also crestfallen.

  “I wasn’t finished.” Henry held his head with both hands. “I don’t remember up here. I keep laughing at myself because from day one, none of this makes sense.” He moved both hands over his heart. “But something here remembers. At first, I thought it was wishful thinking—digging the vibe of someone believing in me, thinking I’m important and I’d take your money and the ride—but I can’t lie. Fuck. Cheesy. My body remembers something.”

  Thelon smiled. I knew it! “Let’s see if we can get out of here. It’s not exactly a happy memory.”

  “Well, the door isn’t locked,” Henry said, swinging it open. “Let’s see what there is to see.”

  They walked side by side through the empty prison and found no doors locked. No impediments to their wandering appeared, but nothing particularly interesting did either.

  “Down there, if we followed that hall for like a mile, there was a room full of the sensory deprivation tanks. They’d put me in, and I’d trip out in the universe.”

  “Sounds like my idea of a killer time,” Henry said, laughing.

  “It was a fucking nightmare. There was, like…there was this thing out in space—a horrible collection of bad shit that had ripped its way into our world. You and I would go out and confront it. We’d try to burn it up. It’d try to eat us. We couldn’t do shit.”

  Henry burst into laughter. “We’re not really doing much better this time.”

  “If we can get to the door where you and I escaped when shit went wild—like, truly wild—I think maybe there will be something else on the other side.”

  “Go into the light, Carol Anne!”

  “Something like that. I don’t know. Call it a hunch.” Thelon enjoyed the lightheadedness of the conversation, but he did feel like they were here for a reason—not that he knew what it was. Abandoning both T and Nestor was good; the right thing to do. Still, it would be good
to have a guide. What had they wanted to tell me? Both at the same time. They had something to tell me. Or, damn. They don’t want me bonding with Henry?

  They walked past empty cells, cafeterias, and workspaces. At an enormous airlock, Henry pulled at the comically large gears holding the door secure, but it did not open. “So, this is it? What’s out there?”

  “There was space, man. Like the void and vacuum of space.” Thelon scratched at his beard. “How did you open it? Shit. Um…”

  “Did I blast it?” Henry made dramatic superhero arm movements ineffectually towards the door.

  “I don’t remember exactly. You were inside me and so was your fire thingy. It was alive, too. Between the two of you and all my extracurricular tripping on acid or whatever, we changed. Like, we shifted into energy and it wasn’t like a superhero movie. It was real and…strange.”

  “Well, inside you? We can make out if that’s what you need to do, but like, just as friends, you know?”

  “Fuck you.” Thelon laughed, as well. The air in this place lent itself to an easy-breezy silliness which Thelon needed even though he’d never said as much. This is as happy as I’ve been since I woke up at my parents’ house.

  “Okay, if that’s off the menu, let’s do the Captain Planet thing and our powers combined, open this fucking door.”

  “Wait, before we do that, you have to tell me: how are you not freaking out? Like…” Thelon leaned his hand against the door, feeling the smooth textures of the metal, knocking on it to hear the tinny sound. “We are awake. And this isn’t real.”

  “I don’t know. Fuck off with that questioning shit. All of this since meeting you is nutsy cuckoo. I’m not gonna lie: we are off the map in terms of crazy shit in my lifetime of crazy shit. You know what, though?”

  “What?”

  “I feel cool. I feel really fucking cool. I’m not running anything. I’m not in trouble with anybody. Nobody needs anything from me except you, and you’re cool as hell to hang with, so let’s race the trip. Let’s ride out into this alien unknowable universe! It’s a blast. I see you feeling bad—yeah, you’ve got heavy shit on your mind. There’s some big-ass plot driving our fates into danger and you are responsible, but really, dude, you’re not. You’re just a pawn like me, and if I can chill then you can chill.”