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He folded the paper into pristine perfect lines, opening and closing and writing on the folds with a black ink pen, symbols he had invented lest it mean something to unallowed eyes. He fell into a rhythm, open shut open, folding up the paper out of ceremony to see what it read. He frowned. That wasn’t the result he wanted. He crumpled the paper device into the trash.
Daniel 4:5: I saw a dream that made me afraid. As I lay in bed the fancies and the visions of my head alarmed me.
A memory that could only be described as stolen, two times removed and diluted through the exchanging of hands. It was his only by virtue of possessing it. Summer air of salt and sickly sweet and the latest hit on a boombox. The kind of heat that sat on the skin.
That wasn’t the Bluff City he saw in his ever growing dreams. There was the lapping of waves on the shore, how he stood barefoot in the cold sand of autumn, a place so familiar he knew it wasn’t quite right. The blueink of night wasn’t as colourful as he remembered (?), the lights of the boardwalk not reaching as far. And as such he felt elsewhere, far, like abandoned contingency. Hector picked at his cuticles.
Ecclesiastes 5:7: For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words.
Holy fool he was, he could not see the business as anything but messy, speaking in revelations with weighted chest against the pop filter. It was there and everywhere and he could see it when others refused. There were, of course, exceptions; he wouldn’t be talking to the night if there weren’t. The folks who lived while others slept, the unspoken unseen solidarity that came from the whispers of other lonely nocturnal souls. The liminality of never seeing the sun fully in the sky, gas station lights and fluorescent dim apartment stairwells. Maybe it wasn’t that they heard him and believed. Maybe it came down to needing a voice to sleep.
Psalm 25:16: Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.
There was something missing. Or, more accurately, he was never here to begin with. It wasn’t that he didn’t exist. He had his hands and dreams to prove it. Still, that inexplicable missing, more and more as he grew ever convinced that it was the other way around. That it was he who was missing and lonely.
Hector, are you there? It’s me--”
A voice he knew casually, one of the many acquaintances he had, soaked with urgency and distance. It spoke too intimately, the urgency too soft and close, like it used an old childhood nickname. The message wasn’t for him. A fear elsewhere made Hector hope the voice would come. The cyst under his cheek was getting worrisome.
He hoped the voice would come even if it wasn’t for him. It made him think of how, once, he dreamt of endless fingers writhing in the sky, snowfall and brassen Silent Night in the streets. Those apathetic and malevolent digits stretching uncountable, reaching with wanting curiosity. There was a new excitement in the crowd, a switch flipped to open the heavy floodgates to see what type of water poured.
And it was back on the beach. Events so far away from each other it lopped back, folding in and around itself.
There was a drainage tunnel in a future suburb somewhere, damp and cold no matter the weather. The concrete within formed its own rusted stalactites from decades of dripping water, red-orange fingers clawing downward like the ones in the sky. Overhead he could hear cars drive over sewer grates, metal slam magnified into a hollow roar around him, and deeper, deeper, deeper, twelve minutes far.
It would’ve been unnaturally cold for autumn before everything happened, a chill more befitting of late November, thick sweaters unpacked prematurely in the year’s life cycle. 3AM on her narrow balcony. It was the most comfortable time of night for people like her, where Chris swore she felt the world merging into something blurred, the far off sound of passing transports a sustained brass note, like the night played its own music.
Chris wouldn’t sleep even if she could. This time was too sacred to leave behind, that tired stirring in her head that was exceptionally distant and real, a great and painful longing. It never felt more true than when the world was conspicuously quieter. It made clearer the noise that was always there. The neverending decibel. It was better to be tired from vigilance than awake and ignorant. Besides; she had been overtired for a long, long time.
She flipped her burner phone open and closed, taking small joy in the slight resistance of the spring mechanism. She would not call tonight. Tonight she felt like listening to the enigmatic voice on the radio in silence, his words peaceful to the many others who called in, awake like her in the dead of night. But she didn’t have enough fingers for what she couldn’t put a finger on. Everything felt--
She supposed even he would run out of things to say. The thought sliced the smallest incision in her stomach. If she got bored of this, then what? Who was she outside of it?
Cigarette smoke swirled around her chest and into the black sky. Her instincts told her she would find an unexpected answer.
It would play on copied buildings in every district, the clashing dissonance of opening eyes a song that refused to be ignored. It would be a beautiful glace into something better, that it was possible to dream beyond this. A magnum opus. The final stroke of the brush.
Another late night in the office for Maggie Darcy. It wasn’t uncommon for her to stay late; she couldn’t sleep much anyways nowadays, a sharp anxiety continuously prodding her chest when she laid wide awake in bed.
A manila folder was spread across her desk. Maggie didn’t read it so much as stare at it, the numbers and letters blurring slightly as her head wandered elsewhere. She was so close to blowing this thing wide open. It thrilled her when she felt the satisfying click of pieces falling into place, worth the second coffee of the night. She frowned at the folder in disdain.
No; it wasn’t thrilling, actually. It didn’t feel good anymore. And she knew it wouldn’t matter what she discovered, that she could construct a paper mâché mountain out of receipts and printed statements that didn’t add up, and still it would not matter. It felt so distinctly unfair that after all the schooling, the promotions, the late nights forsaking sleep, that she had only just caught on to the disappointing reality of it all. Enough money and the law did not apply. So what if she caught some rich asshole evading taxes? Cheating people out of their wages? It’d be a drop in the ocean if the ocean would ripple at all.
Turned out it was all bullshit. Her job, her routine. In darker nights she wondered if her entirety wasn’t just bullshit too. It did not help matters that things were only getting worse in Bluff City. Immediate and slow all at once, a blink and a sudden realization of how it all changed, like a plate shifted and she felt the aftershocks too late. The snow was heavier. The nights, she was certain, were darker. That she wasn’t the only one in the office on late nights anymore. How it felt like a sideways game of social chicken if she packed it up and went home. And Maggie hated losing. So here she was; in an office that should’ve been empty with her small radio dialed to a late night talk show.
The blathering of the radioman used to be comedic to her, chuckling to herself at the shit he was saying. Decoy presidents, decoy-decoy presidents, infinite love and how there was nothing greater. And maybe it was his sincerity or the way he said things aloud and unafraid. But soon, like Bluff City itself, she felt herself shifting. That odd notion that things had changed.
Maggie only cared about facts to the degree it made her cold. So she was told. What she heard on the radio? It was beginning to become as sure as the math in her manila folder.
Fucking bullshit.
She unlocked her phone and dialed. It had been two decades since her last confession.
He wondered how he was doing. Last he heard he’d become some esoteric DJ personality, started digging where he shouldn’t have. Dangerous. Yet the thought made him proud, even if pride was slippery territory. It was good to know that the desire for truth and justice was inherent in him no matter what the permutation. No matter the body.
He lifted a flap of his paper craft and smiled.
Every moment was the confusion of waking up from a dream she couldn’t remember, an echo she could feel on the tip of her tongue.
Florence was never one to feel her age. Lately, though, she felt it bone deep and consuming, her wrists and hips locking in the cold mornings in October. Those pains could be soothed by diligence, three eight second stretches. But they’d always come back. It was that sort of age.
Another pain was hidden in her drawer. Letters tucked away out of fear and confusion, as if the contents would shake her out of the sleep that always felt upon her. The letters were, in every sense, impossible. Hector was dead. He died and the whole city felt it, Bluff City a storm of snow. Helicopters overhead roaring of discontent finally voiced. Whoever was writing those letters did a bad job of impersonating him. It sounded nothing like the poetic scripture on the radio, how he spoke in biblical metaphor meant to be dissected. Yet it was that echo again. Different, maybe, but more familiar than what she knew to be true. It could not be anyone else but him.
There was something waiting without lungs with bated breath that was waiting to snatch him, carry him away as ephemera to be stored in a humid room. There was concern for the person she always never knew, and things, whatever things were anymore, had converged enough that the time was imminent.
Florence had forgotten something. She just had to remember it. Hector would help her remember.
She picked up the heavy black receiver of a payphone. She was positive she'd done this before.
We're coming for you, I promise.