In the pause between breaths, are you dying?
The other Gradie woke up to the sound of his alarm. In his dreams, he had eaten at a Laotian restaurant with a woman with long purple hair, red at the roots. Afterwards, they had gone to a thrift store in a strip mall that had once been a grocery store. The land behind it dropped away into dense woods, and they had driven around back to look at it, wondering if there were any trails down in the brush.
Most of the dream fell away with the sheets, washed off in the shower, got broken apart and diluted by the flow of moments pouring into the new day, but strands remained, like dust on the eye. He saw the woman as he drove to work, tried to gather the shuffling buzz of her face into a definite set of features, and failed. At work, near lunch, he started to see the fried somethings they had eaten, the small dots of red heat floating in the soup, the shafts of lemongrass. He tried again to see the woman, but by then there was only the memory of his attempts to remember her.
The rain from last night steamed off into clear skies through the day until the last bits lingered in little clouds and shimmered in the cracks of concrete. Evening orange spread like something melting over the parking lot and darker rain clouds gathered at the edges far out past the low bows of highway ramps. He stood there next to his car, nestled in the first moment of real peace in nine hours, listening to the wind blow in the rumors of more rain. Then a silent car ride. The eight hours of work fell out like a hard mass of oxygen-starved flesh, un remembered, leaving no mark on any part of him, only evidenced by the hole it had left between the two periods of being alone. An utter and complete waste of time.
The stillness of his apartment had turned stale during the day. He beat life into two alcoves in the dead air; the cleared space of carpet in the living room where he pounded out weighted push-ups and ab wheels, and the cone of light around the computer where another short story cracked into a few thousand words, but was then dropped into a folder and left there to cool, though the other rough globs of prose waiting there whispered that the hammer and file would never come.
Near midnight, he lay down with music playing too loud in his headphones. As he drifted off, he tried one last time to bring back the face of the woman with the purple hair, but only saw a collage of coworkers, porn stars, exes, and a few fuck buddies, one of who smiled long enough for his brain to remind him she had OD’d last summer, before she dropped away to some unseen darkness, or maybe flew off to some other guy’s dreams.
The dreamless sleep was never broken, but somehow, from some other plane, a contact was made. The connection lasted no time, and thus measuring zero in duration, could be said to not exist in the world with the sleeping Gradie, but the world on the other side knew how to use moments that had no measurable size. It could be said to be made of them.
The alarm tone came in through his earbuds. For a moment, the Self rose up and a great wordless, groan racked his head; a lament against missed work and capital murder charges, a squirm against a life thrown away. It lasted until Gradie traced the shape of a soy sauce container on the table, and walked his Spirit through other memories, of Sam and their conversation, until it rolled over the Self and dropped it back down into that still silence.
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“I’m up,” he said to the empty living room. The alarm stopped. A soft morning light tried to wiggle into all the corners and gaps between things. As he lay there, the Gradie in the Real faded to less than memory, an echo buried beneath the Self
His hands were greasy from sleeping with the repel gloves on and he pulled them off. In the bathroom past his feet, the shower was going and he stared at the golden light leaking out of the edges of the door while picturing Sam inside, soapy and glistening.
The vision made his heart race and seeing her in fantasy made his memories of her blend into it. What had been real? Their talk last night he could remember clearly, and the meeting felt as solid as a dream could be, but the Otherworld was a dream now days old, the meeting in Lucy’s astralarium already curling at the ends like a drying thing that only held its image when wet and new.
As for the Real, it was less than a dream, less than a memory. There was an idea of a him far away, living another life, but the pieces didn’t connect. He could see the office and an apartment, but the fragments blended in with other places from this other self.
That other him had been falling away ever since his first day in the Otherworld, and now, he thought about him as little as the Gradie in the Real thought about the sun rising every morning. It was just something that happened.
The office of that distant Gradie meshed with the brokerage he had worked in years ago, the other apartment blended with Sam’s, as if his mind was trying to rebuild the life of that other him out of pieces of this one. The ceiling flickered in faint shadows. The shower sounded like it might have been running since the beginning of time and showed no signs of coming to any resolution. In the disconectedness of it all, he couldn’t find himself. Couldn’t be sure what he remembered and imagined.
“Alan.”
Michael’s voice rang in his ears, and instantly, everything rolled into place. While his own past shifted like a dream in his memory, and even the rest of the team felt different in the Hardworlds than they did in the Otherworld, Michael was the same no matter what reality he was in. Still, after all these months growing into his Spirit, Michael was his anchor, his constant.
It was as humbling as it was frustrating, and Michael's overly concerned tone didn’t do Gradie’s ego any favors.
“Yep,” Gradie said.
“Do you remember why we’re here?”
“Yeah, trying to get a coin off this guy.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re dimension hopping astral projecting people from the Otherworld, and going into a Hardworld is what we do. That good enough? I’m fine.”
“Don’t get defensive. It’s normal to feel untethered here. The longer you do what we do, the more distant the Real starts to feel. Hardworlding is, by its nature, depersonalizing”
Gradie had opened his mouth to say he was fine again halfway through the little speech, but it had started to scare him. Being cut off from the other him, from himself, felt like it might be a kind of dying. He remembered all the other things Michael had told him about going into a hardworld and it took on a new danger, like looking back and seeing hidden blades on a path already taken. Dropping out, getting lost in a Hardworld, thinking this Self was who he was. Not being able to remember the real, maybe not even reach the Otherworld. Forever?
But he remembered the desire, though brief, he had felt the night before, to be rid of his Real self for good. Would it be so bad?
“Alan?”
“Yea. I’m fine. I got it.”
There was a pause and Gradie realized the water had stopped. He wanted to think about Sam in there dripping and nothing else. Michael sighed softly.
“All right then. See you out there.”