Dreaming of Dreaming

Dreaming of Dreaming 

or

The Legitimate Dangers of Sifting Through the Madness of Poetics and Happenstance  

a short story by

 Palmer Hennessey Cole

     Propped against the back of my shower I look like the abortion of some stain’s kiddie-porn fueled, meth addled, post-masturbatory, shame-induced suicide. Battered and bleak, the black where my eyes used to be, don’t even blink when my bloodied and delirious effigy stares calmly back at me through hysteria. I drop the pill bottle to the ground and turn on the water, setting it to hot.  I slump to the floor and let the slick-wet wrap my body in a deliciously sensuous blanket of water. This time reveling in the warm all-embracing womb of unconsciousness, I think of the day this began, I can almost feel my hand on the steering wheel and that cool breeze. It feels good. I close my eyes and let myself slip.

     It’s a seemingly perfect fall day, the kind where the leaves are just beginning to turn and the suffocation of summer loosens its grip, letting the brisk breeze of change breathe cool life into the world. The night before, I pulled an all-nighter and I’m running on four hours of sleep and have been conscious for forty-eight. I roll the windows down and accelerate past the ‘Slow Deaf Child’ sign. My neighborhood is small and rarely has more than one car, let alone those people milling about on sidewalks, whom our government seems to think will either inexplicably leap into oncoming traffic or sit idly by while a death-dealing half-ton SUV careens from the pavement and pummels their lethargic flesh. My skin flirts with the cool breeze that lifts the hair from my scalp. It feels good and I close my eyes for just a moment to give the wind the attention it deserves.

     My eyes snap open a few seconds later to the sharp crack of something meeting my vehicle, then deciding to bow down underneath it.  The panic of being startled awake after dozing off is multiplied by the soccer ball I see in my rearview mirror. I mash my brakes with such alacrity that my head puts a small fracture in the windshield. Now at a stop, I turn my car off and hesitate to look behind me. I know what I will see, but my baffled brain seems to think that not looking will leave this from existence. Trembling, I tweak my neck far enough to see small legs and a red sweatshirt splayed across the pavement. It’s strange how the boy appears to be napping, how the calm silence of the street frames the chaos that just occurred like a picture of a picture. Almost as if this didn’t happen for real, I’m only watching this happen on some antiquated tube television.

     I quietly get out of my car and begin to walk over to where the boy lay. The bottom of this reality drops out, taking me with it as I realize the boy’s sweatshirt was actually gray and that its fabric held the former contents of his head like a morbid dye. My head begins to pound as my heart attempts to beat its way from my chest and find a new host who hasn’t just killed a child. It only succeeds in causing a roar in my ears and making my forehead throb with such significance that my vision goes blurry. On my quick trip to the pavement I don’t notice the boy’s cochlear implant, or the mother shrieking from her yard, or even the throbbing anymore. I just feel the chilling breeze begging me to the dark.

     This is the first time that I fight to stay conscious. My legs have folded up underneath me and I am now kneeling at the boy’s body in some sort of hazy fatigued mourning. Soon dish-soap smooth hands gingerly grasp the boy and lift him from my view. Blood-warm tears begin to run down my smooth stoic face. I look to the mother who’s demanding of me, the street, and God why. If my brain were able to work and if my jaw able to unclench, I still wouldn’t be able to answer her. I only offer her my tears.    After a while the mother becomes quiet and cries with me. Our morbid sobbing death-powwow is interrupted by flashing red and blue lights. Unable to comprehend what has just happened I can only think of the unfairness of emergency vehicles not using the siren when the victim’s already dead. In time I feel hands lifting me up and placing mine behind me. I barely notice the cold handcuffs being clasped around my wrists. Someone walks me to the backseat of a police cruiser and from there I watch the boy being taken from his mother and laid on a stretcher. The ambulance pulls away and I think of how I did not even see the boy’s face.

     A police officer gets in the car without saying a word and drives me to the station. Soon I am taken to an interrogation room and some detective assigned to the case begins to ask me questions. From my almost out of body state, I hear someone with my voice answer his questions. My consciousness, in some foggy half-here half-there place, notices the detective bring up the warning sign and how assholes like me don’t even notice them. I had noticed it; I just arrogantly ignored it. My disembodied jaw begins to move as my absentee voice answers.

      “I did see it.”

     “Then why were you speeding?”

      “I wasn’t. I dozed off… Just for a second.” I feel that my body should shiver as I come to the realization, but it doesn’t.
     
     “So, you decided to take a nap while driving and now this boy died because of it? You pathetic, selfish prick!” The detective is getting agitated. I can see the spit forming at the corner of his lips.

      “I’m sorry…” My mouth barely gets it out. 

     The guilty admittance comes as plain as my expressionless face. The detective took my inability to deal with this as arrogant apathy. He begins to scream incomprehensible obscenities. Shaking with rage the detective yanks me from my chair and begins to beat me. Boots, knuckles, and knees pound my body. The pain brings me back to my senses. Every nerve in my body is on fire with impulse. I don’t fight back. I don’t defend myself. I don’t even try to cover my face, as he does his best to rearrange it. Saying the pain feels good would be incorrect, but my body welcomes it as some sort of admonishment for my sin.
     After the detective frees his fury on my body he exits the room. Lying on the floor in my blood, I fight to stay conscious. I need this, I can’t block it out. In a minute other officers come in the room and politely place me back in my seat. They tell me that a speeding driver killed the detective’s own child a year ago as she was crossing the street. They apologize for him and begin to speak in ambiguities and vague notions about the department being held accountable for assigning him to this case and that suing the department for my situation would be fruitless. As someone bandages my wounds they tell me that after reviewing the notes and without any witness testimony to prove otherwise, my actions will be considered non-negligent and that I’m to be let go. I accept this with nonchalance that shocks even me.
     Back at my house I sit and stare at my blank television. I try to push the incident out of my head with whiskey. I try to remember the boy’s face as I pour the booze into my mouth. The whiskey enters and exits the glass so fast that the ice doesn’t have time to chill it. Drinking straight from the bottle now I take the last sip. I feel numb enough to go to sleep. In all of my life I have never dreamed. I close my eyes; then I open them and it’s morning. I read somewhere that this is an indicator of psychosis. Tonight though, is different. For the first time I dream.

     The dream is quick. I’m drinking a soda and feel something in the back of my mouth. I stick my fingers in and touch my teeth. They feel loose, almost brittle. I begin to push and pull them; then without pain, I pull one out. I look into my palm and see a tooth. Its color is far from ivory, more green and rotten brown. I reach in my mouth again and effortlessly pull out two more. Staring at my hand, blood that is thick and oil-black begins to ooze from my gums and slide out of my mouth like some slick seething serpent coiling in my hand. I am not alarmed. I am not even disgusted. I just watch.

     My eyes open and I’m laying in my bed. The afternoon sun has long since crept into my room and is now making my face sweat. During the night I had kicked my sheets, blanket, and pillows off onto the floor. Just me and mattress, now; the sweat and bare bed disorient me. I look over to my clock and realize that I’m late for work. Jumping from the mattress, I hurriedly go to take a shower. My body is killing me; pounding headache, sore ribs, all of it just hurts. I vaguely remember a bottle of booze and attribute my current state to a hangover. I pop two painkillers left over from some previous procedure before getting in the shower. The steam, water, and meds ease my hangover. I get out, towel off and begin to brush my teeth. As I’m brushing my dream comes back to me. It alarms me. Never having had a dream before I drop the brush, which would perfectly suit my purpose, and instead plunge my fingers into my mouth. I breathe a sigh of relief after making sure all my teeth are accounted for. Looking in the mirror I notice a black eye and a scab on my forehead. This puzzles me, but I remember that I’m late for work and push the strange malaise, even stranger dream, and the occurrence of dreaming, itself strangest of all, from my mind.
     After finishing up in the bathroom I dress and leave my house. Outside, standing in the spot where my car should be, yesterday’s events flood into my mind. Beginning to panic, that same calm detachment takes over. The calm part of my brain tells me that everything is fine and to not worry. The lucid part, though still calm, presents to me what happened matter-of-factly. You dozed off while driving. You hit and killed a deaf boy. You got off due to a technicality involving a cliché loose-cannon-cop and the department’s corrupt risk-aversion practices. You should be happy about this. The different parts of my mind battle between the relief of avoiding prison and the crippling remorse of taking a life. They settle somewhere around melancholy.
     Though pushed back, my guilt hangs over me like death over the infirm. Purposely forgetting work, I go back inside and am overtaken by the urge to clean my house. Cleaning a one-bedroom house should not take this long, but the vacuuming, dusting, rearranging and organizing turn to compulsion. After hours of scrubbing baseboards, washing out insides of light fixtures, dusting under the fridge, and other increasingly superfluous tasks I feel satisfied with the common areas and move on to my room. Fresh sheets, clean carpets, and hollow hampers later I stop dead in my tracks. While emptying my bathroom’s wastebasket I notice three little white rectangles made from tissue about the size of a dental floss container. My hand begins to tremble once I unbound the thin paper and find three green-brown teeth individually wrapped in Kleenex-caskets. I take them back to my bathroom, set them on the counter, and stare at my reflection in the now pristinely clean mirror. I check my teeth, find they’re all there, and begin to talk to myself like a madman.

     Louis, you have all of your teeth.

     Yes, but I also have three other teeth that, inexplicably, appear to be mine.

     Well, they can’t be yours, since there aren’t any gaps in your gums. They must be someone else’s teeth.

     I live alone, you fuck.

     No need to get angry, just relax and stay calm. Flush the teeth and forget about it.

     I’m sorry. I will.
     After flushing the teeth I watch them swirl round and round like sailors being swallowed by some septic-sea. Then with a gurgle and a hiss of the toilet refilling I’m back to myself. Realizing the inherent absurdity of talking to myself and the utter outrageousness of offending then apologizing to myself, I try hard to act like it didn’t happen. I tell myself that it was an hallucination, some sort of fever dream from all the cleaning chemicals and the trauma of yesterday. I close the door to the bathroom and let myself believe what I will.
     The next few weeks went by with little incident, considering. I got rid of my car and bought a new one. My work decided to give me a promotion-of-sorts that let me work from home, my pay, however remains the same. I haven’t had another dream. I still find my self unable to deal with what happened. A few reporters called to get my story. I neglected to comment.  I read in the newspaper that the police department issued a statement proclaiming the incident a “tragic accident”. For finality the department fast tracked the construction of a speed-hump in front of the boy’s house. I am disgusted at the government’s lack of tact, how horrible it must be for her to look out her window everyday and see an asphalt reminder of what happened to her child. Yet, to the world at large that’s all this was. Just a speed-hump. The cars keep driving. The channel changes. And something else replaces this tragedy.
     I live in the former-ghetto-now-made-nice-by-gentrification part of town that houses young, up, and coming professionals—whatever that means—partially uprooting those not ‘up’ or going anywhere, fighting the loss of culture, forcefully taken by wasp-wallets and proper white sedans. The mother and her son where of those few flirting with the poverty line; the Cuban descendants of other Cuban descendants, whose nicotine-soaked cigar-making hands birthed and nurtured this city in a plume of proud tobacco-cloud labor. Our neighborhood is on the edge of the formerly grand, now raspy smoker’s cough of Ybor. Taking a longer than necessary route to circumnavigate that harrowing speed-hump, I heel the sidewalk to the boy’s house. Their house is pragmatically small, quaint in its rustic old-world construction, and has what was once white paint, now painfully chipped, flaked, and unkempt from neglect. Before, I always winced at the sight of the house. Now, it’s piteously obvious that something like a cochlear implant costs more than they could afford. However they got the money, paying for paint seemed simply out of the question. I now wince for an entirely different reason as I approach the home.
     Stepping up to the front door of the house, the bone-white knuckles of my stuttering hand pause above the door. Feeling the anxiety and adrenaline rise in my stomach, I close my eyes and take a deep breath. A chilling breeze blows across my jacketless back and bare neck, as my panic is replaced again by the same cool calmness. Two steady raps later the door is answered by a shell of the same shrieking woman from the street. Her thick brown hair is disheveled and seems even thicker with grease. Her domestic-abuse-dark tea-bag eyes look me up and down and then with a knowing nod beckon me into her home. She gestures for me to sit in a worn cornflower blue corduroy chair across from a dark plaid couch. Between them, a crayon stained coffee table covered with the marks of the unmistakable exaggerated excitement of a child. As she goes into the kitchen, my calm faintly falters. This should be overwhelming. I should be uneasy. I should be seeping out some sobbing sinewy mess of flesh-faced yearning and too truthful confession, some squawk, some squeal, some unstoppable utterance-song begging for release. But I don’t, not yet.
     She returns from the kitchen with unsolicited mugs of coffee. She takes a seat on the couch and hands me the mug. Sitting in contemplative silence, I scan the room and notice emptiness; empty book shelves, empty rectangles written in dust and lighter-shade paint on the walls, and the distinct absence of youthful joy and laughter. Packed away into cardboard boxes that line the room are every last remnant of a child ever existing within these walls, save for the coffee table. On it are zigzagging lines and pictures of stick figures playing soccer. I take a sip of the black coffee and wince as it burns my tongue. The jolt of the burn cracks my calm like an axe in ice. For once I feel the dread that has laid coiled in my gut and I splinter the silence.

     “I don’t know what words can convey the regret and remorse that have consumed me since what happened.” I take another sip of the scalding coffee and wince with the welcomed burn.

     “Oh, is the coffee too hot? Some cream will cool it down. I forgot to get you cream. I’m always forgetting things.” Through a plastic smile, I notice her begin to gesture with her hands, slightly flinch, and then with somber restraint place her hands in her lap, forcefully silencing her skin. Every last shred in those boxes.

     I stop her before she can get up. “No, no the coffee is fine. I am having trouble dealing with what happened…what I did. Is there anything that I can do to help you, anything at all?” I fumble over my words as they fall from my mouth.

     “No sweetie. You don’t do a thing. I bet you want some sugar for that coffee. Let me get you some.” I’m taken back by her sincerity. How could she possibly want to help me?

     “The coffee is fine. Please. Please do something to me, yell at me, hit me if you want, anything!” I chug the coffee between breaths. The caffeine and pain slowly peel back the calm and let me feel. “I need you to hate me.”

     She is no longer looking at me, instead her eyes are fixed to the scribbled table. “I don’t hate you.” She says meekly before adding “Are you sure you don’t want me to get you some cream and sugar?” 

     Fetid spittle forms in the corner of my mouth. “I’m fine! Well no, not really. Not at all. You have to do something! You can’t just not deal with this! Something despicable and horrible happened! Really happened. I..I killed your son.” I feel sick to my stomach, but I can’t waste this fervor. “I killed your son.” 

     She looks at me with what can only be described as knowing pity. “It wasn’t you. I forgot to put batteries in his implant…I forgot…Oh yes the cream and sugar?”

     Baffled, defeated, and deflated, I slump in the chair and watch her get up and go to the kitchen. In her absence I dig through one of the boxes labeled ‘pictures’ and find a photo of the boy. He’s an average looking young kid; short hair, dark skin, about eight with a toothy grin. I think of what it must be like staring at a silent world with all its frenetic movement rendered mute. How he must have finally found a method or manner of path to make sense of it all. How just when he has it figured out someone in a lab coat gives him sound. How the utter insanity of our idiotic cacophony must have been the most amazing and fantastical of hells.

     Down the hall and through the wall I hear her opening and closing cupboards. She announces that she forgot that she’d already packed the condiments and returns with gloves, a sponge, and cleaning solution. Dropping to her knees she begins to scrub the crayon-epitaph from existence. Seeing her prostrated, unable to even remember sugar, I feel frustrated and leave her to her own hell.

     Later that night I pace the freshly vacuumed, meticulously clean hall of my house, bouncing between fits of tweaker-rage and perverse tranquility. One second the self-loathing is so strong that I contemplate suicide, then with the snap of a synapse I think darkly of how lucky I am to not have hit another car when I dozed off. Without thinking I take a bottle of brown liquor from under the sink and begin to vacate my thoughts with the spirit. Four drinks later I find myself beginning to yield to the persistent pull of the warm and comfortable calm of detached apathy. With the last of whatever will that’s my own, I crawl into bed and think to myself: Everything is okay, people die, life goes on, the world keeps spinning, the cars keep driving, the channel changes, and something else replaces this tragedy.

     There are a pair of pliers in my hand. A glass on a table, filled almost to the top with teeth, leers at me, gnashing, with an impossible grin. Wrenching sacrificial enamel to add to the ever-growing mound of molars, bicuspids, and canines. Each time, as I yank twist and snap a tooth free I hear a slow hysterical growl rise, grow, and rupture into desperate, obscene, insatiable, intoxicated jubilee. Circling me are prickly-peared whimpering-straw hollow men; hand in hand with the grey-gone suicide-kid who never tries and always does; rubbing elbows with saintly-sodomizing howling-motorcyclists contemplating jazz; following tan-faced children, popping pistols and packing sharp-edged axes, all wholly and holy in unison laughing just outside my comprehension.

     My eyes open to the gray-green sheen of tile floors. Molten lead matriculates through every pore, muscle, and bone in my body. Lighting up my nervous system, my body is alive with the most primitive of feelings. Pain. Taking in my surroundings I realize that I’m on the bathroom floor. Fighting the convulsing twitching agony I notice two things at once, the presence of blood and the distinct shine of a metal hand tool. With this my stomach betrays me and I crawl over to the toilet. Gripping the cool porcelain fixture I feel the calm try and fail to cloud this out when, to my horror, I catch sight of three teeth sitting at the bottom of the commode just before expelling yesterday’s bounty. I flush the toilet and go to wipe the spittle from my mouth when I feel the unique texture of scab covering my cheek. Not needing a mirror to piece together what had happened, I rip one of the drawers from its rails spilling its contents to my, now red, tile floor. Finding the prescription bottle I cram enough painkillers down my throat to silence my inner storm. With every last iota of controllable energy I slither into my shower and prop myself up against the back wall, look past the open door, and finally face the mirror. I don’t blink when I see my bleak visage.