The truth about Eugenie

EUGENIE: Where am I?

UNKNOWN: You know I had some thoughts before, that the opposite thing would happen.

EUGENIE: Oh my god, am I fucking dead?

UNKNOWN: Sometimes I’m just doing my thing and then I have the feeling that I might open my eyes and

wake up from a coma in a strange bed, and that all my life was it, an oniric coma. People in the room are like ‘heey, welcome back!’ and I actually know all of them. They have names and everything, and I know their names.

EUGENIE: Is this a radio station? Can you hear me?

UNKNOWN: Yes, I can hear you, I just wanted to mess with you.

EUGENIE: First of all, what the fuck are you talking about and who are you? Second of all, is this Mauna Kea?

UNKNOWN: You are a good Geography teacher.

EUGENIE: I must be dead. I mean just the name Mauna Kea, ‘White Mountain’ I must be dead. Oh shit, shit, shit!

UNKNOWN: Speaking of white mountain, have you ever had that sensation, that you could blink and

emerge from a drug-induced state, a bong in your hand and like, your friends are all around you and they’re asking you, ‘how was it?’

EUGENIE: I am in Hawaii.

UNKNOWN: Yes you are in Hawaii and you are not dead. You are not alive either.

EUGENIE: I am in a coma.

UNKNOWN: Wrong, too, sorry. Again, how surprising, if I had had to bet, I would have said I had would have made the journey to you and not you to me.

EUGENIE: You live in Hawaii, and yet I cannot see you, it’s like you are speaking inside my head like Morm—

UNKNOWN: I don’t live in Hawaii, it’s just a magical place. I thought it would be appropriate.

EUGENIE: I mean it is breathtaking, especially with the observatory domes all scattered around here at the top of the volcano.

UNKNOWN: Are you afraid?

EUGENIE: No. Not yet.

UNKNOWN: The air you can breathe from up here, it’s unreal. So pure. So clean.

EUGENIE: Yes.

UNKNOWN: You can breathe?

EUGENIE: Of course I can breathe, what kind of a question is that?

UNKNOWN: I am asking you that out of honest interest, because you are not real.

EUGENIE: I knew you would say something like that. Are you my sleep paralysis monster?

UNKNOWN: I am n— you’re not supposed to have a sleep paralysis monster! You’re not supposed to have things that I didn’t give you.

EUGENIE: I was sure you’d say that too. What things?

UNKNOWN: Like memories of your own.

EUGENIE: First of all, why Mauna Kea, why Hawaii? Second of all, who are you? And thirdly, lady, I have many memories.

UNKNOWN: Ah yes?

EUGENIE: I have childhood memories.

UNKNOWN: Like what?

EUGENIE: I can’t… retrieve them right now, it must be the coma, everything is a blur. But i have memories of my marriage.

UNKNOWN: I really doubt that.

EUGENIE: It makes you giggle, to see me struggle?

UNKNOWN: NO! I apologize if I seem amused. I’m not that kind of person who laughs at others in distress.

EUGENIE: I just have to take your word for it.

UNKNOWN: Taking my word for it is going to have to be a pattern in this conversation.

EUGENIE: Because you are certain that there is going to be a conversation?

UNKNOWN: I mean, what will you do? Walk off?

EUGENIE: Yes, get down this volcano, reach a village, tell people, borrow a phone.

UNKNOWN: Eugenie this is my world. There are no people here.

EUGENIE: Unsurprisingly.

UNKNOWN: I just want to talk.

EUGENIE: I have… wait, I have a memory of sitting in a field and seeing this giant bull, he was two meters high.

UNKNOWN: That’s huge.

EUGENIE: As massive as a small basketball player. We made eye contact and he walked to me in the grass, slowly, calmly. I was a little afraid of his size, but he was kind, he nudged me with his wet nose, bumped against my face, he smelled earthy and of hay and pasture and Spring.

UNKNOWN: So beautiful.

EUGENIE: Are you yawning?

UNKNOWN: No! Are you trying to say, that you have memory of that cow?

EUGENIE: No, it was a bull. That’s an important distinction to make, because people are not—

UNKNOWN: … are not used to seeing male cows—

EUGENIE: … having reached their full height because—

UKNOWN: … usually in the dairy industry, they are killed for veal before adulthood.

EUGENIE: Usually, yes. Sinister.

UNKNOWN: Still, you never wonder why you still eat meat and drink coffee with cream after having met Tim?

EUGENIE: Who’s Tim?

UNKNOWN: Tim is that bull you encountered in your field.

EUGENIE: You’ve been there too? You know him personally??

UNKNOWN: Tim’s passed now. He died at twelve years old of a genetic condition caused by the merciless machine of milk-making for human milk consumption. His best friend Abby and some caretakers watched him one last night before he expired.

EUGENIE: That bull is dead? Hold on, that bull that I saw in the field is dead?

UNKNOWN: At least he had known only peace and respect all his life.

EUGENIE: The bull is dead but I am not.

UNKNOWN: He lives on as a symbol.

EUGENIE: Of what?

UNKNOWN: A symbol of why you never questioned how that memory of yours is so pleasant but it didn’t stop you from eating Tim’s parents and brothers and sisters and—

EUGENIE: Ugh, you’re one of those preaching vegans.

UNKNOWN: Preaching compassion.

EUGENIE: What is your name?

UNKNOWN: My name is Rider.

EUGENIE: Like a bicycle rider.

RIDER: Except it’s spelled Rider with a Y.

EUGENIE: And you are female.

RYDER: I don’t think Ryder is a name that’s been assigned a gender. I am a woman yes. My pronouns are she, her.

EUGENIE: I have memories of the whales.

RYDER: I gave you that memory because I had watched The Big Blue when it was remastered and showed at the cinema, and I was thinking about the ending a lot. I thought it was a pretty nice way to die, to follow some dolphins when everything had been said and done, to go into the darkness of the water.

EUGENIE: I have never heard of this movie. You are Ryder with a Y and with obscure movie tastes.

RYDER: I don’t think so, you see, that movie is pretty well-known where I come from.

EUGENIE: Europe?

RYDER: I’m certainly not from Hawaii.

EUGENIE: Why Mauna Kea?

RYDER: You pointed out the telescopes here. And the enchanting name of the place. I had some dreams of where the land meets the sky, where things become a bog, a goo, I dreamed of the dreamlike state of this location in particular. When I was younger, my biggest wish used to be to go to space. I meant to pass this one on to you but never managed to squeeze it in your char—your self. Are you yawning?

EUGENIE: Yes ‘cause I’m bored ‘cause it’s like, everyone’s biggest wish, to go to space.

RYDER: I don’t care if that’s everyone’s biggest wish, why wouldn’t it be? It’s an awesome wish, isn't it?

EUGENIE: I’ve never had that fascination myself.

RYDER: Indeed.

EUGENIE: You don’t have it anymore?

RYDER: Why are you asking that?

EUGENIE: You just said ‘I used to dream to go to space’

RYDER: Well, I’m too old now, and I’m out of shape. I smoke too much, no one will send me to space, I think.

EUGENIE: Good thinking.

RYDER: But back when I was a child, I dreamed it with such excitement I thought, even if I qualify far enough to be seated inside the rocket ship and it explodes at takeoff like the Challenger shuttle, I’ll be happy, I’ll be in the place of my dream, I’ll die happy.

EUGENIE: You are Ryder with a Y and with a death wish. The dolphins sucking you in at the bottom of the sea… now this.

RYDER: And you… you should hold your horses, you don’t know me.

EUGENIE: Ryder, or whoever you are, that makes no sense. On one end you have the option to die of old age in space, having fulfilled your dream, and on the other end, the alternative of dying at the birth of it, at the opening credits of it, at some what-the-fuck prologue that’s not your dream, and you’d pick the latter? I am asking you again, am I dead?

RYDER: Eugenie you are not dead, you don’t exist. Sorry to be blunt, but I made you up just because I needed a sidekick for Barry, that’s the only reason.

EUGENIE: You are my sleep paralysis monster.

RYDER: And you are not listening.

EUGENIE: My sleep paralysis monster visited me.

RYDER: If it is important to you to try to convince me that I am your sleep paralysis monster, go ahead.

EUGENIE: He was skinny, skeletal even, crawled on the floor of the bedroom like a giant grass hopper, stared at me, you know, how sleep paralysis creatures are.

RYDER: I genuinely don’t.

EUGENIE: They are reported all over the world and pretty much fit the same description: as tall as a wall, looking extremely thin and bony, having to bend at the ceiling, walking a choppy walk. They resemble a black stick with no discernible face, elongated limbs, fingers like knives. They wear their hair chest-length and sometimes, if they climb on top of you while you are lying on your back, you can feel their damp and sticky hair brushing against your cheeks.

RYDER: Christ.

EUGENIE: My monster was that frightening, especially when I felt the bed caving in behind me the first time he came over. I couldn’t move a muscle and I was shitting my pants. And especially when he would crouch at the foot of the bed and watch me. It’s not like he had eyes, no, he had the faintest, shakiest little white dots in the middle of all the blackness.

RYDER: I would shit my pants too.

EUGENIE: But the last time he came to me, the vibe was different. He spoke to me in a scary way just like you are speaking right now, however, he meant well, he gave me a friendly warning.

RYDER: When you think about it, Tim the Bull could have killed you, trampled you, with his strength, his size. But you forced yourself to hide your fear from him and just faced him like three meters away from him opening your arms in a hug invitation and he stared back at you, almost like he nodded, and walked to you and into the hug with no after thought, because since he was rescued at such a young age as a Holstein calf, and had known nothing else but kindness and respect in his sanctuary, he couldn’t take you for a foe, ever. And he gifted you a connection of the instant that was so simple but so deep, with his big wet nose and, so pure that, sometimes, when you go through some shit, you conjure that memory back to your heart, to comfort yourself.

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EUGENIE: You saw it too.

RYDER: Eugenie, I was there.

EUGENIE: We have the same memory.

RYDER: Fast computation doesn’t seem to be your forte! Or you indulge in denial, that’s also possible.

EUGENIE: Hold on, all… all I hear from you is death death death.

RYDER: Sorry, you were correct after all. I do have this tendency.

EUGENIE: You’d have this tendency enough to actually place a time bomb inside the rocket that’s supposed to take you to the space of your biggest wishes, perhaps.

RYDER: Oh my god, sh— I would not. But in a way… what would I do after I achieve my space endeavor? Chase another one?

EUGENIE: What did you say about Barry?

RYDER: I made him up. I made you up.

EUGENIE: When?

RYDER: Twenty years ago, a long time ago. Barry was younger then, I mean… he stayed younger. He was fashioned after the impression left on me by a boy I met on a roller coaster in Florida. That boy, I don’t even recall his name, had some crazy energy, he was all over the place. I didn’t speak very good English back then.

EUGENIE: English is not your native language.

RYDER: No, you should have heard me, when I learned English, I sounded terrible. I mean my accent was enough to make your ears bleed. But after Florida, when I went back home, I missed him. I dreamed of seeing that boy again, with all that wacky energy, he was magnetic. He had kind of inspired me.

EUGENIE: You dream of going to space and seeing a Florida boy again.

RYDER: Why wouldn’t dreams be ‘a mix between extraordinary and ordinary’? I saw that sentence in the underground tunnels of my town, it was the line on a poster for a Magritte art exhibit.

EUGENIE: Magritte just… give me a second. Magritte. So you are… Belgian.

RYDER: I’m certainly not from Scandinavia.

EUGENIE: Is Ryder your real name?

RYDER: Real, not real… We are passed that, now, I think.

EUGENIE: You just said that I wasn’t real.

RYDER: That’s been my opinion but.. who knows, presently.

EUGENIE: Ryder isn’t your real name.

RYDER: You don’t want to know who I truly am.

EUGENIE: I don’t want to be here anymore, I don’t know, I’d like to leave.

RYDER: Are you getting scared?

EUGENIE: A little bit.

RYDER: Eugenie, since you told me that you are able to breathe, breathe. In aborigine folklore, people think the real world is the one in the dreams, and the delulu one is the one you live when you are awake.

EUGENIE: Yeah yeah yeah I know. Wow so profound.

RYDER: You become a bit of a bully when you are spooked.

EUGENIE: No, it’s just, cliché, to say something like that.

RYDER: A cliché thing doesn’t mean that the thing is complete nonsense.

EUGENIE: Right. You sound just like Barry.

RYDER: Gee, I wonder why. Anywho, the universe either doesn’t differentiate between what you desire and what you are scared of, it’s just the energy you’re putting out there that matters.

EUGENIE: The univ— yadda yadda, yeah, worshiping the problem, I’ve heard of that too.

RYDER: And visions you have during sleep paralysis are just due to the uh… fact that your brain is aware that it is dreaming while you are in a… wait, a waking state—

EUGENIE: Are you reading from Google or something??

RYDER: Yes, I’m on Wikipedia. Therefore, out of concern, during sleep paralysis, your brain works hard to uh… to block your body from—

EUGENIE: Wikipedia! You know anyone can post information to that website, don’t you? You know how unreliable it—

RYDER: It’s an overview, nothing more, take it easy. Soo, out of blabla concern blabla your brain works hard to block your body from moving because the brain doesn’t want the body to act out of following the actions you’re dreaming of. Here. Pretty well explained.

EUGENIE: Something that Barry doesn’t have.

RYDER: Doesn’t have what?

EUGENIE: He doesn’t feel the presence of danger, his brain doesn’t go into paralysis when there is danger around. If you made him, why did you make him this way?

RYDER: He has always been this way but he… let’s say you weren’t always like this and Barry was always like this.

EUGENIE: You are talking about arcs.

RYDER: No I’m talking about writing you first, in a different way. Barry was a bit different too back then, but his core was the same. You didn’t have that much of an age gap with him though, in those early days. You and Barry… I don’t want to tell you about my first versions of you.

EUGENIE: Let me guess, you were going to say that initially, Barry and I used to be wizards in a wizard school.

RYDER: Funny.

EUGENIE: Or that he was a vampire and I was a vampire slayer in California.

RYDER: LOL

EUGENIE: Or that we were from District Twelve or something and had to participate in some… annual games.

RYDER: I get it, you work with teenagers.

EUGENIE: And you don’t?

RYDER: I am not a high school teacher, no, only you are.

EUGENIE: Alright, alright, don’t say a word about your profession.

RYDER: When I began writing, you and Barry… were siblings.

EUGENIE: Are you fucking serious?

RYDER: I don’t think I can explain to you.

EUGENIE: Siblings from the same parents?

RYDER: No. Adopted.

EUGENIE: I’m curious as to why.

RYDER: Because, I don’t know if you have perceived it sometimes when you meditate about things or when grace miraculously touches you, but i want Barry and you to be each other’s everything.

EUGENIE: I’m going to try to forget that I heard that.

RYDER: Good idea.

EUGENIE: Regardless, I know what I remember and those are not hallucinations. My sleep paralysis monster gave me a warning. It was the last of his visits, after which he disappeared forever. He sat next to me and gripped me rigidly, didn’t let me move, didn’t let me turn my head. I was accustomed to the stiffness but not to his actual cold hard hands imprisoning me against movement. His face split up next to my cheek and the heat coming out of this black hole, I was seeing it at the corner of my eye— HEY are you listening?

RYDER: Actually yes.

EUGENIE: The breath from his mouth made the air shimmer. The sounds coming out of there were like muffled screams and white noise, like when you open the window of a car on a fast highway.

RYDER: And what did he say to you?

EUGENIE: He said ‘watch out’

RYDER: ‘Watch out’

EUGENIE: I gathered all my courage to ask him what he wanted, and that’s what he replied: ‘Bad, very bad’ And the number four.

RYDER: …

EUGENIE: The number four or, wait, the color yellow, I’m not sure. Man, I used to have pristine memories, be a memory freak! Now it’s all mixed up. But my monster said something was coming.

RYDER: A lot of people think that.

EUGENIE: You think that.

RYDER: I hoped and dreamed something was coming, yes, I prayed that the world would end, that Mauna Kea’s crater would open like the mouth of your night monster, and explode, yes.

EUGENIE: Well, Mauna Kea is an active volcano.

RYDER: High school second year of Geography. Kīlauea volcano is the one who woke up, though, in my time period. Sadly, Kīlauea is a tiny player.

EUGENIE: The Yellowstone super volcano would be a better choice, when it comes to sizes of players, to fit your fantasy.

RYDER: Don’t say that word, fantasy.

EUGENIE: Our time periods… Our time periods are not the same?

RYDER: I don’t know Eugenie, at this point I don’t know.

EUGENIE: Why did you name this… character, Eugenie?

RYDER: You mean you?

EUGENIE: I don’t want it to mean me. I don’t think you are more or less real than any sleep paralysis monster of mine, I don’t think my memories have been planted in my head either. I’m assuming you are something people see in between life and the afterlife, when they’re in a coma, and that’s why my brain feels like fried eggs.

RYDER: Are you aware that to produce eggs, male chicks born out of eggs laid by chicken are grounded alive on the first day of their existence? Discarded like a byproduct by the egg industry? Like literally dropped into a mixer. If people had to push the button to activate the blender to obtain eggs in real life, I’m sure a very small portion of them would actually do it.

EUGENIE: I don’t want to hear your vegan propaganda.

RYDER: Compassion, as propaganda, sounds very easy to defend to me.

EUGENIE: I think you are my consciousness or something, trying to frighten me.

RYDER: Wouldn’t you listen to your consciousness?

EUGENIE: Not to everything it’s telling me! I’d have to prioritize.

RYDER: Cram what you can into a twenty-four-hour-day.

EUGENIE: Yes.

RYDER: Or maybe I’m God

EUGENIE: …

RYDER: What?

EUGENIE: Sorry I’m trying not to laugh. You are not a god, you are—

RYDER: What am I?

EUGENIE: You are not well in the head, you’re working hard to scare me. I think I must face my fear to see what’s behind it and like… what’s next like… like a rite of passage. I think you are part of the… portal or something.

RYDER: Eugenie, don’t panic. I could also not be real, just as not-real as you are, I could also be something made up from the mind of someone else. Imagine, you are so small that you fit inside a bubble of water, your whole world fits there, and that bubble of water is sitting on my cotton trousers while, in the meantime, the bubble of water in which I live is sitting on another person’s pants, someone bigger than my own bubble-of-water world.

EUGENIE: True, but tell me why the name Eugenie. My mother and father passed away when I was a baby, they could never tell me the reason why they picked the name Eugenie.

RYDER: Spoiler alert your parents are not real either.

EUGENIE: They are real to me, and my aunt, who is my mother’s sister, doesn’t know the story, and neither does her husband, my uncle.

RYDER: What’s your aunt’s name?

EUGENIE: I… can’t remember.

RYDER: What was your fictitious mother’s name?

EUGENIE: My fict— Dammit, I don’t remember, okay??

RYDER: Your name comes from a book titled Eugenie Grandet, in which—

EUGENIE: Are you French?

RYDER: I’m certainly not from Sweden. Listen, in that book, the character of Eugenie waits forever for her big crush Charles. He’s just some dude gone to some faraway land and he’s into her money, ‘cause she’s loaded. She waits for him endlessly behind the curtain at the window of her big house.

EUGENIE: Her… window.

RYDER: I know, I know.

EUGENIE: Are you rich?

RYDER: In a way yes, but not with money.

EUGENIE: You are a rich bitch.

RYDER: I’m rich with fortune. I have some good stars watching over me. I am very fortunate and yet I have never been happy, and that’s why I chose the name Eugenie.

EUGENIE: Because you’ve never been happy?

RYDER: Don’t say it like that, like I have done something wrong. It’s not my fault. If you could feel the void I felt, the void that’s waiting for me on the other side, you’d understand. It’s swallowing you, it walks behind you when you get off work, when you’re commuting back home, when you do your laundry, when you’re having a nice time drinking a smoothie, when you— You see, Eugenie Grandet, the girl in the book, she doesn’t live in the present, she doesn’t spend her money into some fun activities, she doesn’t hang out, she waits and she waits, you understand? I hoped that if I based you on her, you would turn out happier than her in the end.

EUGENIE: The end. That’s ominous.

RYDER: Don’t be scared.

EUGENIE: You hoped… by some miracle?

RYDER: By some miracle.

EUGENIE: So you named me after some dumb alienated chick?

RYDER: I could have named you Stevie, from Stevens in the Remains of the Day, you know, another—

EUGENIE: Oh God, that’s horrifying! Another freak!

RYDER: Harsh.

EUGENIE: That kind of suffocating fable makes my skin crawl.

RYDER: The name comes from a character who is frozen in love or, perhaps more accurately, her conception of love. I didn’t mean to build you as clueless and nonreactive, on the contrary, I meant to use that perdition to give you a boost. And I like the image of the curtain, I imagined it, in the warm season, blowing nicely in a soft wind, swell into the room.

EUGENIE: Not hammered by a violent rain?

RYDER: Only for fiction.

EUGENIE: …

RYDER: You keep shivering. I thought this place of reunion wouldn’t be too cold not too hot.

EUGENIE: Just a bit creeped out, forget it. Why haven’t you ever been happy?

RYDER: Well, I have been very bored, and very lonely.

EUGENIE: Oh my Gosh, I have been lonely too.

RYDER: I know. I have become a lot like you, after I made you up. Not right after but, once many years passed. Like an orange that’s slowly peeling off.

EUGENIE: How much of me have you become? I would have thought people who made up characters would shape them after their own personality and not the contrary.

RYDER: Me too, so, imagine my shock! I didn’t behave like you when I started writing. I was much younger, much much younger.

EUGENIE: Where was that?

RYDER: I wrote in many countries, I wrote in Ukraine, in Mexico, I wrote in Qatar and the Netherlands and North Africa.

EUGENIE: But you are not from any of those places.

RYDER: No.

EUGENIE: So you are not a teacher.

RYDER: No.

EUGENIE: You are not a nurse.

RYDER: No.

EUGENIE: You are not an astronaut.

RYDER: N-ho.

EUGENIE: But you have been around the world.

RYDER: I’m telling you, I’ve always been fortunate.

EUGENIE: But not wealthy.

RYDER: Just enough for the plane tickets I suppose.

EUGENIE: Aand you don’t work at the post office.

RYDER: I don’t. I am none of those jobs. I am a writer.

EUGENIE: You write for a living.

RYDER: I don’t know what to tell you.

EUGENIE: You write and you make a living by writing.

RYDER: You are talking about money again, Eugenie, aren’t you?

EUGENIE: Yes.

RYDER: I am not making any money with my writing, but I’m making a living. Some crazy living.

EUGENIE: You seem disinterested in money.

RYDER: I am, and you? Are you not bored out of your mind by money?

EUGENIE: Because you’ve never had money troubles.

RYDER: I have been favored, I have never known poverty, you are right about that.

EUGENIE: I’m realizing that I’ve rarely thought about money. It must be a part of my character that you never developed. Hey that makes me think of that podcast where people discover they have been Artificial Intelligence bots the whole time they thought they were alive and real humans.

RYDER: Or the Matrix.

EUGENIE: Or the Matrix. We must be from the same generation.

RYDER: We might have been for a minute, but we will never be from the same generation forever.

EUGENIE: Why not?

RYDER: Because it matters a lot that Barry remains the same age. That’s why there can only be one direction: I have caught up with you, years after years, and I will turn older than you.

EUGENIE: Oh lord, I forgot about Barry again. I’m forty now, and you are…?

RYDER: Forty plus, forty and some more dusty years.

EUGENIE: I don’t know where to begin in all of my f—

RYDER: I know.

EUGENIE: If you’re going to tell me that life begins at forty, I’m gonna—

RYDER: It can, though. In my youth I was obsessed with the Prophet Muhammad.

EUGENIE: From Islam?

RYDER: Peace Be Upon Him.

EUGENIE: Are you a theologian?

RYDER: Not either. I’m a writer.

EUGENIE: Why would you be obsessed with Muhammad?

RYDER: Not for that reason but because Muhammad is cute. He is the blatant example that none of us adults have to have accomplished anything before we reached forty years old. Do you know he was a hot shot in Mecca and a flirt and a remorseless businessman before he obtained the revelations inside his cave, and he was just freshly forty?

EUGENIE: No, I don’t know much about Muhammad.

RYDER: Peace Be Upon Him.

EUGENIE: You’re a Muslim.

RYDER: I’m certainly not an atheist or even one of those spineless Pikachu agnostics, thank you.

EUGENIE: Look who’s harsh now!

RYDER: I meant to provide you with a vibe of Arabia and I failed at that too. Just too many beautiful things to compress into one humble story.

EUGENIE: The… oriental octave.

RYDER: That’s all I managed, you know.

EUGENIE Yes so, hum… So Barry, he’s made up too?

RYDER: …

EUGENIE: Ryder with a Y? Hello?

RYDER: YES I mean no, he didn’t stay made up all the time.

EUGENIE: Why are you whispering?

RYDER: I am afraid if I talk about this too loud, it will—

EUGENIE: What?

RYDER: …

EUGENIE: Speak!!

RYDER: Nevermind. Anyway I met Barry once.

EUGENIE: You are saying you met him like you and I are meeting right now?

RYDER: No. Barry appeared to me in real life, but I let him go.

EUGENIE: How is that possible?

RYDER: I have some theories, some of them supernatural, and some of them… No, scratch that. All of my theories are supernatural.

EUGENIE: Tell me one of your theories, it’s alright, I won’t tell anyone.

RYDER: One of my theories is that I needed Barry so much that after years of writing him, he finally came to me.

EUGENIE: Was this man’s name Barry?

RYDER: It was not Barry.

EUGENIE: But did you name him Barry by accident, sometimes?

RYDER: Unfortunately, I did.

EUGENIE: He popped up on your balcony?

RYDER: Don’t laugh, it was almost the case! No, Eugenie, I’m serious, I was as stunned as you are right now. He was there at a moment where I needed him more than just his character that I made up, and he saved me from despair.

EUGENIE: You are fucking with me.

RYDER: Relax, Eugenie. We are not fighting over Barry, you and I. I don’t want Barry, I let him go.

EUGENIE: After he saved you from death—

RYDER: I didn’t say death, I said despair.

EUGENIE: I heard death.

RYDER: Despair can lead to death.

EUGENIE: Hope can do that too.

RYDER: Let’s stop snowballing for a second.

EUGENIE: So, after Barry saved you, you let him go. Like, away.

RYDER: Yes, he did his magic and left. I want you to have Barry, not me.

EUGENIE: You think that I have Barry?

RYDER: Do I think that? I’m trying to make your relationship with Barry chaotic enough so no one knows, actually.

EUGENIE: Will I have Barry?

RYDER: If I write enough, yes. Because happy endings are my thing.

EUGENIE: Spoken like someone who enjoys a movie where someone dies at the end following some dolphins into the abyss. Or some dolphins being angels of death.

RYDER: Yeah well. Just trust me on this.

EUGENIE: How can I trust you? You sound completely insane.

RYDER: Yeah well. Again, you don’t have any choice.

EUGENIE: And if you don’t want Barry, then, why did you make him?

RYDER: I should explain to you like you do to your slowest students.

EUGENIE: You say that, it’s an odd thing to say. Are you sure that you’re not a teacher? It sounds like… from experience.

RYDER: I promise you that I am not a teacher.

EUGENIE: Who gives a damn anyway. Just tell me—

RYDER: Barry came into my life, my real life, not some empty island in the Pacific, alright? He came to my real home. He was even wearing a green mask when he appeared.

EUGENIE: I’m sorry, I don’t follow. A green mask?

RYDER: The reason it happened is because if you dream something hard enough, it can sometimes come true. It’s called writing magic. There is also sigil magic, I mean, don’t quote me on this, I’m actually just reporting what a scientist guy said at a conference that I attended.

EUGENIE: Dream enough like, dreams and nightmares? Like lucid dreaming?

RYDER: No, not those, dreams and nightmares that you have when you sleep are something else. They’re like your black monster, they could be a lot of things, things, buried as shallow as your done day, or as interred as the lowest strata of your subconscious. And lucid dreaming is another different practice altogether. No, I’m talking about daydream.

EUGENIE: Fantasizing?

RYDER: I don’t like that word, for some reason. I mean daydreaming, conscious dreaming. Playing with your dreams. Play is a revolutionary force, you know. It’s the energy you put out there in the reception of the universe, as I said, it’s more

powerful if it is from play.

EUGENIE: Daydreaming.

RYDER: Daydreaming.

EUGENIE: Does that include masturbating?

RYDER: Sexual energy is also quite a strong way to send something out into the universe. Anything that is mindful, honestly, present in the moment.

EUGENIE: So your stories come true, sometimes?