Decisions and revisions which a minute shall reverse.
The cracked road crunched beneath the tires and dry oaks bursting out of the storm drain flew past the windows. Something in the clouds and the sunlight and the motion of it all whispered to him, like he had dreamed this moment and it had ended in an explosion. He was going sixty when it came out from behind the trees.
The mall. It rotated as the road curved and he watched it dance. He remembered going to it as a kid, a smear of shopping trips and Christmas décor, scrapped from the years and pressed together behind his eyes. Where the memories ended, something else moved. A memory without definite qualities, a forgotten sensation, reforming in his mind. He was sure of the mall in a way that he hadn't been sure of anything since waking up, and it made him feel alive. It kept spinning as he came around it, and he wondered if it was going to drop out of the world and leave a gaping tear in reality.
Without thinking, he turned in at the first entrance and it came towards him like a faded beige horizon. He passed over the storm drain creek and turned onto the road that circled the mall. Faded black lines of the words JC Penny floated ghostlike over the empty lot and vanished.
He watched the mall dance until it rotated completely and he found himself back where he started. The memories, if that’s what they were, never came to him. It never gave up its secrets, never fell through the earth or told him why he loved it. It just spun at the center of a churning pavement sea, hinting at something he couldn’t even approach. He circled it again without revelation and parked under a leaning light post.
“Fuck.” He leaned back and stretched his legs above the pedals. After staring at the torn sagging fabric over his head for a while, he came to the realization that he was having a mental breakdown.
“It's gotta be stress. This job is killing me,” he said it to the visor. His voice flattened on the interior, giving the statement a connection to reality that helped him believe it. He sighed and his stomach growled so deep it shook his chest.
“All right. I’m losing it. I need to eat. Then check myself in, get tested, put on medication, get on disability…”
He went halfway around the mall without looking at it until he got to the strip of retail space with the cafe stuck in the middle and pulled into a spot right up front.
Inside, he pointed the hostess to a table near the window and ordered a coffee over condensed milk and a breakfast Bánh mì. As he waited in the morning silence, the mall stared at him across the shimmering lot.
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He tried to ignore it. Staring at the glass topped faux wood table, his mind gorged itself on the passing seconds and spat up fears of unemployment and mental health evaluations. The last shreds of dreams slipped away, beaten back by the rushing current of waking thoughts. A sharp bite of longing, cold claws in his chest, struck him as the dreams dissolved, and in a reflex learned from a lifetime of grasping at fantasies for comfort, he wrapped his mind around them. For an instant, they darkened as dreams, and lit up as memories.
The mall caught his eye again. Some cloud shadow flashing over it. A breeze through the oaks. He suddenly felt that he had dropped into the same strange plane of existence it occupied and they were vibrating together.
The waitress set his plate down with all the niceties and he nodded without hearing anything she said. When she had gone, he stared out at the clouds and thought of dreamcrafts and impossible towers, of sapphire eyes and whiskey drinking dreamguides, of Hardworlders and a war of light and demons.
“I don’t give a fuck if it's not real. They can lock me up for the rest of my life on a Thorazine drip if I can believe in it for just one second.”
The food was incredible. He focused on every flavor and sensation, and in between bites, while drinking deep gulps of the alkali ice water, he searched outside and traced every surface, now lit up with morning sun, trying to find the gaps in all of it, looking for pieces of that otherworld peeking through. Instead, he found nothing but unyielding reality.
“All right then. I'm crazy.”
The restaurant's phone rang and Gradie remembered the card from the dream. His phone said eight fifty-seven. He opened up the dial pad and tried to remember the number.
It came to him instantly. It was so clear he was sure he had seen it somewhere beore and it had slipped into the dream from memory. Weren't numbers impossible to read in a dream? He thought about the card, held in the gentle light of a thoughtcrafted hotel room, and remembered the numbers shifting.
Despite this, the number was now right in front of him, typed onto the screen, and he was sure, somehow, that it was right.
It was eight fifty-nine.
He put his thumb over the dial button, and stopped.
“If I call this, and get some random business, I’ll lose it. If I don’t call, I can still believe, just for a while.”
He looked back at the phone. Nine o clock. He hit dial.
The line rang like funeral bells and the silence between was the stillness of death. A few more seconds, and his life would be over. He felt the dreams fall away into dull dead memory as the ringing in his ear blended with the realness of everything else.
The line clicked and he gagged on his breath.
“Hello?”
It was Michael. But maybe it wasn’t. It sounded like the man in his dream, but it was probably just—
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Gradie.” He choked on the word.
“Why are you calling this number, Gradie?”
He almost threw the phone across the restaurant, but tightened his grip and took a breath.
“Because you told me to.”
“Oh yeah? What else did I tell you?” The voice was mocking, but familiar. The dead dreams flared up like coals in wind.
Do something drastic…
“You told me to do something drastic.”
“Oh, wow. Sounds serious. And have you done something drastic?”
“I called in.”
There was a pause on the other end, and Gradie felt the breath fall out of his chest.
“Oh, ok. Well, enjoy your day off. Careful with those strong coffees.”
The line clicked off.