7ilZZua.jpg [https://i.imgur.com/7ilZZua.jpg]

Chapter 36 - Galaxy Brane Kenzie

I was just glad we were so close to the weekend. My dad’s Friday class load would be a little heavier, so it meant not getting home till after mom. But this day was a different story. Once he was done with all his teacherly stuff, he promised we could go out to eat somewhere nice.

So, I stretched my back as he went through all sorts of daily paperwork I didn’t understand. It was followed by waiting, turning and returning of keys, and passing through hidden places marked for “staff only”.

They were boring compared to what I imagined. No secret rooms, darkened windows, or mysteries. Just enough filing cabinets to crush an army.

When I was younger, I literally tugged on my dad’s arm to get him to hurry through them so we could get to somewhere more interesting. By that age, I tolerated the quiet spaces. Better if I had a book nearby.

My dad lingered in the break room as he shuffled through his sparse mail. He had a chat with someone else from the math department. He was lankier than my dad with frazzled hair but a bare face. He told the same sorts of jokes, scientific or otherwise, and they both laughed a little too much over things I didn’t find that funny.

It took till the waning sun slipped through the old oaks on campus that we finally made our way to dad’s car. Gladis went home on her own.

We discussed places we could go before settling on the steakhouse down the block. It was a bit pricy, but nice for a treat. My reward for getting through the week, even though I still had one day left.

Steakhouses were interesting. They always had two sets of doors. I could never understand that. No matter if it was a local place or a major chain, they were arranged with a front door, which everyone slammed opened as far as it would go. Then there was a small room with some decorations. Sometimes there was a lone second door or there were a pair, for those entering and leaving.

Back then, the way to the bar was open from the front. Of course, also back then, the restaurant was still in business. Fat TVs lined the walls. Above the bench in front of us hung a bright photo collage taken on a highway far out in the desert. The ceiling was high with a slow, spinning fan to circulate the air. The lady at the front recognized us. She worked a couple different jobs around town, but my dad knew her best from a local pharmacy.

We took a long, nearly full-circle booth towards the back so I could sit far enough away from dad. The dining hall was quiet for this late in the week.  

The main room was covered in mirrors. A set on our side faced one another with a darkening, watery infinity of reflections. I always wanted to see into the full depths, but you couldn’t glimpse past yourself.

“What are you thinking about?”

My dad casually posed the question as he flipped through his menu. I didn’t answer him, as we received an iced tea for him and a Diet Pepsi for me.

The answer I eventually gave was, “Just how I might try the breaded trout.” It was a fish and chips combo. I'd never had that before.

At the same time, I was so used to the other choices and the way to have it done right for me, that it felt weird to shake things up. Our server, who recognized us, congratulated me on kicking my wheat allergy and made some recommendations. Ultimately, I went with my usual, petite steak.

“So, you didn’t have any problems with your classes? None of the problems we talked about?”

I would be able to offer him a few, hopefully satisfying breadcrumbs.

“The teachers all treated me fine. They knew about things and…uh. For some classes, I had to go somewhere else for a little bit and…I was like a TA at uhh…a chair by myself but mostly I was in groups and stuff. Mrs. Horwitz did a good job of making me feel a part of class. And Summer and Natasha and a bunch of my other friends were cool and it was okay.”

He nodded with each bit, slipping on a frown at my vagueness about being out of class. But he relaxed at the mention of a TA. He often used them himself. And I often talked up Mrs. Horwitz because my dad had a favorable opinion of her from the Back-to-School nights he’d attended.

The names of my friends were only met with hints of recognition despite the fact I’d told him their names on numerous occasions. He sipped his tea and offered, “Well, you don’t ever let them bowl you over or anything. You have a right to be there. I can call or talk to them if they’re fooling around or trying to mess with your education. I know… with how all the people are in this area…”

Finger-raising time. Snippets of political talk about Brookville. How ridiculous the local newspapers were in the way they slanted the news. I wore a calm smile and nodded through his waves of words. Take out recent events and it could’ve been any one of his speeches/rants. It made me feel comfortable to think of it that way, divorced from all the uncertainties in my life.

I was glad to have him with me. I always am, even in the roughest patches (and there are many). My father. My dad.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Not to be overly sentimental but too many moments whisper away, sublimating like dry ice. Where once you thought they were solid and permanent, they vanish in the air with only the tickles of thoughts left behind. New moments fill spaces that seem just as substantial but, before you know it, you just have an aroma in the air and the memory of what once was.

And now it’s too depressing.

Around that time, we probably received a small, dark rye loaf with a side of butter. My first time trying their bread instead of leaving it all for someone else. It was surprisingly addictive with the butter. Just enough that we finished it up quickly between the two of us. My dad appeared noticeably disappointed when it was gone but didn’t say anything.

Rubbing a rough patch on my hand, I wished I had some moisturizer. I looked around the main area. It was small for a steakhouse. The other one I knew had hidden booths, blind corners, and multiple levels to it. This one was simple, but their prices had always been more reasonable than that one. Might’ve been part of why they eventually went out of business.

Setting his broad, lightly-spotted hands at his sides, my dad’s rant hit a lull between finishing the bread, not wanting to exhaust his drink, and our salads not arriving yet. Leaning forward slightly, he asked, “Is there anything else? What’s on your mind?”

When it came to the subject of my mind, it was hard to isolate any one thing. There were a multitude of things but they tended to flash by like clicking through television stations, each fleeting instant, clear and crisp, but never quite solid enough to retain all the details.

Often there were memories and fragments, worries and visuals along with sounds and conversations. The little figurative crew in my head did its best not to concentrate on the stuff that was better left on the cutting room floor. The best things, the sweetest things were the little flashes that seemed to come out of nowhere.

A snow-swept mountain peak. Some shifting, purple puppet with a top hat and the busy, precise details of a soundstage. A cobbled street following to a waterfront with clean, high buildings touching one another. And those were just the ones that made sense and could be articulated before they escaped.

The rest were fantastical non-sequiturs at their clearest in the minutes right after waking up in the morning, like the random backwash of a history that never existed. Although, at that moment (but not really) my dad asked me what in particular I was thinking about, I had a thought that branched off of that reflection.

It was one I’d toyed with in passing, pawing at like a cat investigates a suspicious object (not that I knew cats much then beyond ruthless claws, some parasitic/symbiotic relationship with old ladies, and irritating dander).

I’d once half-read a blurb in Discover magazine about a holographic composition to human memory. Not to sound too much like Wes, but I conflated this with my rudimentary understanding of quantum physics from shows and other magazine articles to ponder how the human brain has mysterious, holographic aspects.

What if the brain doesn’t exist in a single, normal dimension? Rather, the brain…our brains...are like those branes in physics where you only see the physical dimension while there are higher dimensions enclosed but invisible.

So, everything you dream is actually a perception that seeps through from other universes or other layers of the universe of which your brain interacts.

Random, drifting thoughts that come out of nowhere? That came out of you perceiving something beyond your limited physical senses.

Other places. Other selves. Other aspects to our world. They can only be tangentially intuited.

Dreams serve as an easier means of access because of your altered state. But they’re so difficult to remember that you would need to work really hard or be in tune with your own brain to get at them vividly.

But all the imaginings. All the little stuff we as humans thought we just made up. It’s all perception and misperception of real things.

Some story we think we created is just catching fuzzy fragments. Maybe we fill in the gaps. Déjà vu is an easy explanation. Another universe where everything happens the same as here, just not quite matched up in time. You sense it but think it has already happened. It has, but over there.

Humanity exists as it does because we tap, even just a little bit, into the full nature of reality with all its chaotic dimensions and slivers of being we don’t understand. Strange things, unseen fears, monsters, ghosts, whatever…are all glimpses of something real slipping past what normally are our limits of perception.

I was a confused, teenaged girl who perpetuated girlness just being close enough to someone else…I figured I was allowed to let myself think off the deep end of the pool. It wasn’t any weirder than the past week.

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Art by Alexis Rillera/Anirhapsodist