Note: Wrote this for a short story competition - I didn't win, but I still wanna send this piece out. If anyone has any thoughts, feel free to let me know :)
“There’s a hole in the sky.”
I sigh. This feels familiar. Almost at once, our room is filled with Noise – the rasp of pencils, whispers, the feverish buzzing of the camera that clings like a glassy limpet to the ceiling above our side of the room.
From where I sit, I see Katie bite her lip. She’s pretending that the old woman, Roslyn, doesn’t exist. Maybe she doesn’t. Roslyn insists that she a figment of Katie’s imagination. But, somehow, the old woman persists.
“Anyone?” Roslyn’s mouth has corkscrewed, as if we had somehow insulted her. She is a thinned out chain smoker, draped with a shawl and cardigan and dress that fit her like a funeral shroud, and yet none of us can see past her. Light from the room’s lonely window struggles around her frame to reach us.
I look to Katie, sitting ensconced in the worn blue wing chair beside me. Her headphones died three days ago, and the doctors refuse to charge them. The book she is reading is one of two in the room, and we have both finished the thing, twice over. There is no reason for her to ignore Roslyn, other than to ignore the inevitable.
I hear suck in her breath, a huff that echoes around the room.
“Katie…” I whisper to her.
“No…” she whispers back. “She doesn’t exist…”
“And yet, she’s your fault.”
Katie’s jaw tightens. I regret saying it at once. But then, I see Ros turn, twist at her midsection like a hooded cobra, and I forget to feel anything at all.
“Anyone?” her voice has dropped to a dangerous octave.
“Daniel? ak maruābu?” Manoj has stopped pacing around the table in the centre of the room, and is looking at me with an earnest, stupid smile. The old man only speaks in dead languages – assumes we do as well – and when he follows my gaze to Ros, he turns the greying half-moon of his face to her instead and says, “ak maru hen?”
Her voice rolls over us: “Can anyone else see the hole in the sky?”
“Yes!” I shout, leaping up from my chair. “I see the fucking hole, Roslyn!”
For a moment, she is silent. The Noise shifts toward me like the barrel of a gun, and from behind me I hear the sound of a door opening, of boot steps on wood, of a thick voice asking if everything’s okay, and a monotone response, and Roslyn’s mouth sets in a line, and from where I stand I can smell the tobacco on her, and I feel Katie stand up behind me, and all at once I realize that I have heard and seen and smelled and felt this all before. I feel my stomach turn.
The echo numbs every other sound. Even the Noise seems to dull. Then, from behind me, I hear a page being turned over.
This voice comes from the other side of the room, beyond the yellow line painted cleanly across the floor. There is a desk, there, and a doctor is sitting behind it with three of her young students – the condescending flanked by the naïve.
“Yes?” The word escapes me, and I hate how timid it sounds.
There is silence, and then:
“Please show me your notebook.”
“Nnn…” the word dies in the space between teeth and tongue. I can say no. I have said no before. I woke up an hour later with a pain in my neck, and they had still read my journal. And, regardless, I am afraid of sharp objects.
Roslyn never stops staring. She follows me, not simply with her eyes or her head, but swivelling her whole body towards me, tracing my journey to the long table, looking straight through Manoj as I reach for the three-dollar notebook lying on the table beside him. And yet, it’s not her eyes I try to avoid.
“Mr Williams…” My name, now gilded with a warning.
I am not sick – I merely dream about the future, and I write it down, so that I can remindmyself that I am not sick. I even made it a motto, noted it, here, on the first page:
‘Temporal lobe seizures be damned’.
It makes me smile. I was never a doctor, mind – I just used to edit the spelling mistakes out of Wikipedia articles. I start flicking through the pages. Old dreams flicker past in stop motion.
‘…say I’ll read it backwards next time…Katie tries raising her voice, but …complaining about the coffee…’
The notes are inevitably hieroglyphic in structure, the handwriting half-gestated in form as it crawls across the page, scrawled by touch with a pencil held between finger and thumb. I can do it without waking up, now.
‘When I wake, my neck…they bring the food in, and a guard sneezes…’
I wish they’d give me back my old notebooks – I wish, at least, that I could have the exercise books that I used to fill when I was a child, the ones I’d carry with me, still trying to catch the dreams in the moment they’d play out. I never did. They’d always catch me by surprise. I was shocked. Delighted. Those dreams were good – dreams of invitations to birthday parties, of taking the train out of the city with my mother, and seeing my grandmother’s garden in the rain.
‘…the milk as it swirls around the cup…’
And other things, when I was older. My first kiss. My first job… my only…
‘I shudder as the old man sips…’
My only job. They can keep the newer notebooks. Those were all-
‘Ros is looking at me, furious. I hear…’
My thumb catches at the page.
“It’s there.” I say. The doctor remains silent until I turn the page toward her, holding the book out and away from my body as I resist the urge to simply throw it. I can almost feel her eyes scanning the page. The buzzing of the camera tells me that others are reading it too.
“I don’t know…” Ignorance has never stopped the doctor from asking, but, amazingly, I’m still ignorant. I wouldn’t be here if I knew myself better.
“Thank you, Mr Williams…” The Noise quiets.
“Thank y-” No. I will stop thanking people for demanding things of me. I turn to go back to my place, to the stool beside the blue chair, only to find that Roslyn perching there, the same mute dislike pasted across her face.
“Magister?”Manoj presses a hand into my forearm. “Operor vos postulo a loco ad perficiendum?”
“I…whatever.” I let him lead me to the window, where he pushes a chair beneath me, and squeezes me on the shoulder.
I shake him off, but the old man doesn’t seem to notice, or mind. He goes back to wandering around the room, and I am left to press my head against the window frame, the book still clenched, face-outwards, in my hand.
“I care, Katie.” Roslyn is trying to get through to the girl again. “I give a shit about what you do, because what you do determines me.”
“Leave her alone, Ros…” I whisper.
“That’s not my name, Mr Williams…” comes the icy reply.
Manoj’s feet pad softly past.
“atra upaviza raksaka…”he says again, as if I’d asked him to repeat himself.
Thunder rolls in the air outside, shaking the windowpane. I set my free hand against the cool glass – I can feel a breeze pushing against the other side. Slowly, I look up, and out.
Beyond our lonely window is a garden, drenched in rain. Not a garden. A flat green plane, kept neat within the borders of an old stone wall that encircles it, unbroken, except for a gate at the far end, opposite our window. In spite of everything, of everyone who keeps us here, they’ve just left an old wooden gate between us, and the garden, and the wide stretch of a field beyond it. They’ve left the Casuarina tree that hangs over the gate, bent double with age.
And in spite of myself, I like this view. The way the tree hangs over the gate like the archway to a tunnel, like a portal to some invisible world. I used to look for places like this, even when I’d grown up – I’d read too many stories about children walking through magic doors into other worlds. I’d hoped to do the same. I’d hoped I’d dream about walking through one myself. I never did. Life carried on…
“Fuck…” I whisper the curse into the wall as a headache grows in the knot between my eyebrows. I dreamed this too.
I look down at my notebook.
‘…I look out on the garden, and think about magic doors…knowing that I’ve dreamed this, I open the…’
It’s not unusual for me to dream about the day, or dream of self-awareness, of my own realisation, though even that moment of clarity comes with as much of a shock as the dream itself.
But all the same, something stops me from closing the book. On this page, the words start to plummet down, as if in sleep I had moved, and my hand had wandered while the pencil still wrote.
‘…I keep reading, following my own…’
‘…Roslyn asks me if I’ve seen it…’
I drop the notebook in shock. I’ve never-
Footsteps. A door opens, and closes. I turn around to see that the doctor and her students have left us alone. But Katie and Roslyn aren’t looking after them.
“Are you-” Katie begins, before Ros interrupts her.
“Finalmente. Él ha logrado ponerse al día!”Manoj has crossed the yellow line, walked past the desk, and there is no Noise, no bootsteps. He tries the handle, knocks on the door. “Y cuando tu chica termine, podemos empezar.”
“Manoj… stop…” Katie’s nose is bleeding. Colour comes to Roslyn’s cheeks.
“Fatto e illusione uniti. Sogni prima della realtà. Il passato è presente. Sarà meraviglioso, per un momento…”
“Shut up!” she shouts at him, hurling her book. It misses him.
My head hurts. I cup my hands to my ears, turn my face to the storm-tinged sunlight, and press my forehead to the cold glass. The Noise has all but stopped. Somehow, the shouting is worse.
“No, Roslyn!” I whirl around, kicking the chair out from beneath me. “I don’t know what you want-”
Roslyn is standing there, alone, with the book in her hand, with her hand raised above her, frozen in the act of throwing it at Manoj. And I know that I have dreamed this.
“…Manoj speaks, and I can understand him…”
“Katie…?” she whispers, more alive in her terror then she had ever been in terrorising me.
“Daniel.” Manoj. “Do you see the hole in the sky?”
“…there’s a hole in the sky. A pinpoint framed by the old tree…”
I look up, and I can’t tell whether the garden has split in two, or if the grey sky above the field has opened…
I used to search for magic doors. I never dreamed of one. My dreams never showed me a fantasy – one day, I grew up, and started dreaming of my office desk, of riding the bus, of oversleeping. I dreamed of every day the same, and never did a door open, and one day I broke, and screamed at the empty promise I’d made to myself until someone took me away, and I dreamed of my place here, instead.
“I tell myself I wanted this.”
