Usually whenever I stayed up late, I didn't dream, yet on that night I did. I dreamed I was running across a gray stone floor, with Bethany's hand in mine. On either side of us rose ten-foot-high stone walls cracked from age. The ceiling—if you could call it that—was a massive dome that spat out no light. I swore there was a translucent fog hovering above the arena, but I can't remember to this day if it was fog or an ominous atmosphere.
You know how when you dream, you just know things? You can know what's going on, who that person is, what their business is, their age, their date of birth, and whether they squeeze their toothpaste from the middle or from the bottom, and all without a single spoken word. Well, I just knew that this maze was huge, and that's putting it lightly. City sized? Country sized? Continent sized? All putting it lightly. Learn a bit about how grand—just how huge—the universe really is, and you'll start to get the idea.
We turned left.
“In other news,” reported the walls, repeating the news story that ruined my business. “The man who recently contracted trichinosis believes he obtained the parasite after eating pork that wasn't fully cooked from Dennis's Diner.”
We turned right.
“Have you heard that Dennis's Diner doesn't fully cook their meat?” gossiped some pedestrians I had passed on the street one day.
We turned left again.
“This place needs to be shut down!” shouted an irate protestor. “ You don't care about your customers, you only care about how fat your wallet is!”
We turned right again.
“If you don't shut down your store,” threatened another protestor, “we'll show that pretty little girlfriend of yours a real good time!”
The walls echoed the stomping of our shoes when they didn't echo those horrible words. I didn't check behind myself to make sure Bethany was still there or that whom I was dragging around was Bethany. I just ran and ran and ran. I knew that I was searching for freedom for the both of us. Yet somehow, without a map or some source of information, I navigated the maze without running into a dead end or chasing my own tail. At least, that's how I remember the dream. The fleeing I remember, but the spans of time in between the reminiscing walls were a blur, like my brain had fast-forwarded past the filler.
We came to the first dead end in the maze. It might have been the periphery, I'm not sure. But beyond that wall was our freedom. I turned to the person I had been tugging around, saw for my own eyes that they were Bethany, and told her to stay a minute. She said nothing and did nothing. She was so lifeless, like she was an android obeying the whim of its master.
If I had conscious control over my actions in that dream, my first attempt to scale the wall would have been to get a running start, then run up the wall far as I could before throwing my fingers at the crown of the wall. For whatever reason, I omitted the part with the running start and jumped like a madman for the crown. I must have been bending my knees less and less before each leap, because I achieved less height each time, to the point where my knees must have stiffened and refused to bend. I felt crushed more and more with each failed jump, as if the ceiling of the black dome was crashing down on me. The more it crushed me, the more I saw that scaling that wall was hopeless, that I'd be trapped in that maze forevermore.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
You know how when you think back to your dreams, they have this surreal atmosphere to them? My dream lost that atmosphere the second I heard a voice recite the famous quote frequently misattributed to Albert Einstein. I traced the voice to its source and found it to be one of the most peculiar characters my mind could ever cook up.
He sat with his legs crossed and looked as though he had been ripped straight from a Greek legend. Yet his skin complexion held ties to men and women in the middle east. A few wrinkles clawed into his forehead and along his cheeks, and his head of hair and mustache were dyed the first gray hairs of age.
“Just out of curiosity,” he asked with no accent, “how long were you planning on jumping there? If you want to call those last few attempts 'jumps,' that is.”
“Who are you?” I asked him. “This is a dream, isn't it?” I had several thousand more questions on my mind at the time, but I didn't want to overload the man.
The man jumped to the ground. “Hemen,” he said as he fixed his chiton. He stretched a hand toward me. “And, yes, this is a dream.”
I reluctantly took his hand and gave someone—if you want to define Hemen as a “someone”—my first dead fish handshake. I might have applied some pressure had I not been distracted by the fact that I couldn't feel my hand gripped in his. I had almost panicked, but then I remembered I was in a dream. “D—”
“I know who you are, Dennis.”
My hand fell from his, and I stupidly asked, “How do you know—”
“It's a dream, remember? You're not the only one who just knows things in here.”
“Then...” I said as I considered which one of my thousands of questions to ask next. “Why am I conscious of what's going on? I'm not lucid dreaming, am I?” I hadn't considered lucid dreaming as an answer of what was going on, since I hadn't tried it before—didn't know how to achieve it—and therefore didn't know if dreams lost their surreal atmosphere when one became aware of their dream-state.
“Lucid dreaming? No. It'll take too long to explain what's going on, and I'm not a patient person, so I'm going to skip to the meat and potatoes,” Hemen said. “What you're doing to Bethany isn't right.”
“What?” I said, flabbergasted and downright offended. “How could you say such a thing?”
“Easy there, pal,” Hemen said, holding his palms up in a defensive manner. “Before you get defensive, let me explain.” He cleared his throat, opened his mouth to start, then made various thinking poses as he seemed to reconsider his explanation. “Actually,” he said, stroking his bare chin. “Let me ask you this question: Did you ever once, when you had decided on this whole moving plan, put yourself in Bethany's shoes?”
My jaw hung open, and I found myself for a moment speechless by Hemen's audacity. “Just who the hell do you think you are to say such a thing?” I hissed. “You think I didn't put myself in Bethany's shoes? You say I didn't think of how she'd feel staying in town where she received the most horrible threats?!”
“No need to yell now,” Hemen said.
“I thought of nothing but her when I came up with my plan. You really think I did this for myself?”
“Stop right there,” he said, facing his palm toward me. “We both already know that you'd jump off a bridge if it could bring her eternal happiness, but that's not what I'm getting at. Think back to when you had proposed your moving plan. How did she react? What did she say?”
Steam was still puffing from my nostrils, and I wanted to say so much more to the man—possibly more with my fists. But I did my best to resolve conflicts peacefully, and I wasn't going to betray that method because of one oddball of a character. I replayed mine and Bethany's conversations—fights might have been a more accurate word—when we “talked” about what to do. “She suggested something,” I started, calm as I could be at the moment. “Extra locks on the doors, I think. Buying tasers. You know, for our own safety.” I looked to Hemen for approval.
“Go on,” he said.
“She also suggested some other things. Starting a new business. Hiring body guards. Um,” I said, trying to remember more of the suggestions.
“But do you remember what else she said to you?”
I spent a few more seconds recalling the remainder of her list. “Using aliases. Starting an online business.”
“No, no, no,” Hemen said, shaking his head. “Do you remember the thing she said after throwing out random ideas?”
Another minute passed as I filtered out the things she said that weren't suggestions or her scolding me for being too rash and stubborn about my plan. After another minute, I found what Hemen was referring to. Replaying her words drained me of my anger but filled me with sadness for her and disgust for myself. “She said to me, 'We'll get through this together. Just remember this one thing: I'm here for you.'”
Hemen nodded slowly.
My gaze wandered about as it hit me like a freight train, what Hemen had been trying to communicate to me. My eyes found the android-Bethany, who stood toying with her fingers, resembling a shell of the Bethany I had first met.
“I get it,” Hemen said. “You're trying to protect Bethany. You're the man in the situation, the man should protect his woman, and so on and so forth,” he said while spinning his hand like a waterwheel. “But have you forgotten that she wants to protect you, too? In a different way, sure, but she cares about your well being the same as you do hers.”
I looked away from the android-Bethany, too ashamed to meet her eyes.
Hemen placed his hand on my shoulder and spun me around to face the dead end. “No matter the obstacle, just remember Bethany's words.” He rotated my head around to meet the android-Bethany. She stood with the toes of her left foot tapping the ground and her hands held behind her back. She looked like the Bethany the night of our first date. “You're called a couple for reason,” Hemen said to me, and then gently pushed me toward the android-Bethany.
Staring at her, seeing the same stance I had moments before our first kiss, my heart pounded as crazily as it had when I kept glancing at her lips. I took slow steps toward her, and neither of us said a thing. I didn't meet her gaze much, and when our eyes did meet, it was for a brief second. But the closer I got, the more my confidence built, like it did when I approached her about a second date. Then a third.
Her hands rested at her sides now, and she was an imitation of the Bethany I had been dating for several months. Five months? Seven, maybe? I couldn't say, because she had changed so much and so fast.
I took her hands in mine and caressed them with my thumbs. Though I couldn't feel them in my dream, I could remember how the real things felt. My lips parted to speak, but the android-Bethany glued them back together with her forefinger. With the smile of the Bethany I had first said, “I love you” to, she shook her head slightly. I smiled, too, then chuckled quietly like I had after fearing her reaction. Then my lips settled to the small but joyful smile I gave her when she said back to me, “The feeling's mutual, then,” and I gestured my head toward the dead end.
My hand in hers, I led her to the wall, each of us at the other's side. When I checked over my shoulder for Hemen, he was missing from the ground and instead perched atop the wall. He waved to me, and I returned the gesture.
When we stopped at the wall, it glared down at us, and I swallowed the lump in my throat. I had an idea of how to make it to the crown, but while I was confident in my strength, I wish I could have said the same about android-Bethany's. In that dream, she could have had muscular strength greater than my own, but if her muscle mass was equal to that of my Bethany's—of the Bethany who could lift only the lightest boxes when we moved into our apartment—then I was fearful that we would remain stuck at the bottom of that wall.
She plastered her back to the wall and bent forward, hand over hand with her palms facing up. The confidence in her eyes and smile was the same as the Bethany I had been dating for the last three years. It seemed like it had been so long since I had seen my Bethany with that expression that water gathered in my eyes. I turned away, acting like a fleck of dust found its way into my eye, but I doubted that Bethany was fooled.
I readied a running stance a good twenty feet or so away, gave myself some motivational pep talk, and ran up to the android-Bethany in my first attempt at a move I had only seen in action flicks. I didn't think it would work on the first attempt, and, pain real or not, I was afraid either of us might get hurt.
When I was a step away from her, I planted my foot on her hand and used it as a vault. I aimed my other foot above her shoulder, and then threw my hand at the edge like a grappling hook. Yes. Yes! I shouted in my head when I saw that my hand had cleared the edge, and my heart fluttered when it caught. I hooked my other hand and then pulled myself up. I flung my leg over and then rolled onto my back when I saw that the crown was a solid four or so feet in diameter. I lay there for a little bit, amazed that I had pulled that maneuver off.
An orb of white light shone where I knew freedom awaited. It stole my attention, and I watched as this light rose like a star born from the horizon. The maze seemed to just vanish wherever its rays reached, as did the dome, and watching it was, I think, like watching the very birth of our universe. I could have kept watching as that light rose—brighter than the sun yet harmless to observe—but then I thought, I'd love to watch this with Bethany.
I peered over the edge at the android-Bethany, who shared with me a peculiar Smile that I wasn't familiar with. It baffled me as I attempted to recall where I had seen it before—if I had seen it before—but I had no recollection of my Bethany ever sharing such a Smile with me. I lowered my hands, and she jumped once, twice, thrice. On the fourth attempt, she brushed my fingertips.
“Come on,” I encouraged her. “I know you can do it!”
For her fifth attempt, she gave herself a short running start, planted her foot on the wall, and caught one of my hands. I caught her other hand and pulled her up. Though I couldn't feel our contact, I could feel that that Bethany was as light as my Bethany.
When she was safely on top of the wall, I hugged her. It was the strangest hug I had ever had, like hugging air that pushed back. But because I was overwhelmed with emotions that stirred water in my eyes again, I couldn't care less that I couldn't feel the hug or that the person I was hugging wasn't real.
“I'm so sorry,” I told the android-Bethany. “I'm so sorry.”515Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡcR07QLbuHO
I couldn't feel her hands against me, but I knew she had returned the hug and smiled that Smile.
When I cracked open my eyes, I saw Hemen looking at us, smiling and waving. He looked past us, as if distracted by something, then stood up and started away toward the darkness of the maze.
The light born earlier distracted me again as it shone brighter and brighter upon both of us, swallowing up everything and filling my vision with white.
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