I woke up in a dark room. My left eye would not open fully, and I felt the weight that sat atop my eyelid, suggesting some sort of assault, but I had no recollection of it. I examined the room and immediately knew I was in my childhood home. It was my family room. I looked over to where the television used to be, and then over to where the sky blue cotton couches used to sit, constantly beaten on by me and my three other brothers.
The floor was dusty and the room smelled of neglect. The wooden shelves remained, if only barely. The dust revealed the outlines of picture frames that had once sat on the walls, illustrating the love that no longer resided in the moderate suburban home.
Struggling to my feet, I felt the sharp pain fold my stomach into halves. I reached under my shirt and felt the wound. It was deeper than I could have anticipated, and when I took my hand out from under the shirt, the blood was a dark crimson.
I stumbled out the front door and saw the tree house sitting on the great oak. The tree house seemed in great condition. Suddenly I tripped on a rogue nail coming up from the porch. I hit the wood, and then nothing. Nothing but pure white and the feeling you get during the first drop of a roller coaster.
And then the only thing was the roller coaster, that dark blue metallic snake that I was too afraid to ride when I was ten. The twins made fun of me so much that day, I remember, and I did everything not to cry. They were older than me, but Mitch was the oldest by a good three years. He said he’d sit next to me and that everything would be fine. I threw up my five-dollar hot dog after getting off and never felt so good in my life.
The earliest memories I have of Mitch were in our living room, sunk into our cotton couch after everyone else was asleep. He told me that he was afraid of Aunt Ashley, but couldn’t say why. Whenever she stayed with us, he offered the idea to the twins and me that we have a slumber party. I never understood why Mitch hated Christmas so much when it was clear from all the presents that he was Aunt Ashley’s favorite. Sometime I wish I was older. Maybe then I could’ve helped.
The light was painfully bright as it crushed down on my left eye, which wouldn’t open or close. I felt my body leaving me. I felt the warm memory of my living room, which now was a hollow dust farm. Mitch told me that 90 percent of dust is skin flakes. He wrote that specifically to me in his suicide note, and nothing else.
Appearing over me suddenly was the silhouette of a person, disturbing the brightness and ruining the memory. All I could feel was pain in my stomach. There was a loud pop and then I felt my ears again. I could hear people whispering, “Do you think he’ll make it out of this?” and, “I doubt he’ll leave the hospital.”
I should have felt safe, even saved, but I didn’t. The voices were strange, and somehow didn’t belong near me. I was naked and uncovered and suddenly felt the urge to struggle. My body tensed and a squeaky moan escaped my lungs, followed only by an exhalation of stale air.
“Relax, Mr. Boureguarde,” a woman said. “You’re doing very well. You won’t be able to respond to me, but I assure you that nothing is wrong. You did, after all, agree to all of this.”
I didn’t remember anything. I wondered why I had been at my condemned childhood home, why I had been stabbed, and why all of this made me think about my best friend who’d been fascinated by death until he finally offed himself at 17.
“Sleep, Mr. Boureguarde. You’ll feel like new tomorrow.”
I was powerless; the little motion I had made drained me completely. There was commotion around me, the sound of plastic and glass, and then warmth spread through my body. The pain melted from my gut and I slept.
“You know what I read about people who get their heads cut off?”
“No, Mitch. What?”
“The heads can still hear and feel and think for a while.”
“How long?”
“Like, ten seconds.”
“That’s cool.”
“Yeah, I wonder what they think about right before their brains die.”
“What would you think about?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find out some day, I guess.”
Some day, maybe. Some day was a day that no longer existed for me, and I saw the long stretch of time moving on ahead without me, like an army following a dead leader to battle. A horse with no rider, only a saddle and a sword swinging by the side and the ghost of a man following along behind, wondering how he had gotten there and why. That was to be my fate.
My eyes contracted unexpectedly and then sprung open, admitting a flood of white light into my brain. I heard beeps and electronic chirps and felt the bustle of feet moving rapidly along a tiled floor, but saw nothing except whiteness. Panic. I tried to move my arms and realized that they, along with my legs, were strapped to the bed by large, plastic restraints, and my mouth was covered by a cloth. Then I saw eyes, a pair of blood red pupils boring into mine, surrounded by the same blankness I had seen before. They grew to encompass my entire field of vision, if vision was truly what it was, and my heartbeat increased until I felt my chest thumping on the bed.
My body lifted itself, prevented only by the plastic restraints from tumbling off of the bed, and then fell back down with a crash, and a searing pain screamed along my spine. Hundreds of hands seemed to spring out of the mattress under me, prodding and poking at every open piece of skin on my body, and I could feel myself lifting and falling in succession, the pain increasing each time as the eyes carved through my flesh. Then blackness and calm enveloped me.
Visions. Aunt Ashley’s thin figure, covered in a stained nightgown. My shock at seeing her.
“Aunt Ashley!” Wide open eyes. What was she doing here?
Her silent embrace had been so weak, arms enclosing me like feathers. A sinking feeling in my chest. I remembered suddenly Mitch’s face, how he laughed when he saw roadkill. Who was this woman, who had her son been? The light from the window made the dust shimmer like tiny fireflies doing figure eights in the still air, colliding into one another frantically.
“The son I lost,” she whispered. “There is the son I lost and then there’s you, the son my sister kept. This is how it has always been.” She spoke with her eyes closed.
“No more will she be happy. No more.” And then her embrace turned into a grip, my body numb as she plunged what felt like an ice pick into the warmth of my flesh. Sucking in air before I collapsed, I glanced at her crazed smile and then at the blood dripping thick, like paint, onto the wooden floor.
“It’s time.” A man spoke but I couldn’t see him. “Prepare the other one’s body.” The pain left my body—every sense of feeling dissipated from me. I was weak and confused. Where was I? What was going on? I tried to voice these questions but nothing came out. All around me I could hear voices but I could see no one. I mustered up enough energy to turn my head to the side. Mitch was lying strapped to a bed beside me. His brown hair was neatly combed and parted to the side. His pale naked body soaked in the lights radiating from above him.
“Mitch!” I screamed, but it was silence as air came out of my opened mouth.
“He’s waking up, give him another 500 milliliters.” It was the same man as before, calmly giving directions. I remember as I faded back into unconsciousness staring at Mitch as he stared back at me and smiled.
I dreamed the dream I dreamed again. I wish, I wish, the dream would end.
Mitch sits on my bed humming the words. He catches my eye, and the images and voices I’ve seen and heard since I’ve woken into this hell come rushing back.
The red pupils. My friend who killed himself at age 17 in middle school. “Relax, Mr. Boureguarde.” “You know what I read about people who get their heads cut off?” Mitch told me that 90 percent of dust is skin flakes. The pain in my stomach.
“You really never see it coming, do you?”
“See what, Mitch?” He moves close to me and crouches to eye-level.
“Red-eye Flight 17, middle row, out of Boureguarde, Michigan. The only thing you remember during the crash is my head being taken off and 90 percent of your aunt’s skin on fire before that pole went through your stomach.” His voice is a whisper. Panic. “But the doctors…the doctors won’t let me wake up.”
He begins to look annoyed, as if I’m some dumb child or animal. “Nooo. It’s you. The real doctors have fixed you long ago. You won’t let yourself wake up.”
He looked wildly around him. “This…reality is naught but a phantom, a fiction your mind created to try to cope with what happened to you. You’re trapped in a nightmare, Mitch, ensnared in a dream: a prison of your mind’s own making.”
He just called me Mitch. It’s too much. “No, no, your name is—” He shouted at me, interrupting: “You can’t remember my real name, or your aunt’s, so every time we go through, I become you!” He pauses, and calms down.
“Your name is Mitchell Ashley. We’ve gone through this a million times and we’ll do a million more, until your mind is finally ready to handle what’s happened.” He checked a watch that wasn’t there. “Do you know how we restart the dream?” Before I could even answer, he stood up and punched me hard in the left eye. Without a word or sound, I started to fall asleep. I wanted to wake up. I want to wake up.
Darkness surrounded me. My left eye would not open fully, and I felt the weight that sat atop my eyelid, suggesting some sort of assault, but I had no recollection of it.
