Skylar's Reawakening, Memory 3: Ms. Stacey Creed
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“Look who finally decided to wake—”
Skylar chucked the first thing he could find at her, which ended up being the Book of Mormon he had used to try and stay awake.
“Ow! Hey!” The woman shielded her face, deflecting the missile with her own book. It fell to the floor with a dead thud.
“Sorry,” Skylar muttered. “Just needed to make sure you were real.”
She lowered her arms, revealing her game face. Unwilling to desecrate her own book, she reached for the nearest object, Skylar’s backpack, and threw it at him, scattering the pages hidden underneath it.
“Real enough for you?” she countered, but the feather-light pack bounced off Skylar’s chest with nary a sound and fell softly into his lap.
Still aching and sweating, Skylar sighed and threw his legs over the edge of the bed, sitting with his head in his hands. His guest could wait. The air-conditioning unit chugged in syncopation with his slow breaths coming down from the nightmare.
“What’s this?” the woman asked, and Skylar heard the rustling of paper.
A blank fear shot to the forefront of his mind. He lifted his head and saw her picking up one of the pages of his suicide note, now strewn about the desk and floor.
“Don’t look at that!” he stood up too fast, his balance wavering.
“Why not?” Her eyes brushed against the first word before he stole her attention. “What is it?”
“It’s... a…” Skylar trailed off to think, buying time by storming across the room and collecting all the other pages. “…a poem. It’s a poem that I’m working on.”
“I love poetry,” she lit up and faced her book out so he could see the title: The Collected Works of William Blake.
Jesus Christ, Skylar rolled his eyes.
She wrinkled her brow, seeing his thoughts on his face, but didn’t say anything.
“Then you understand, then,” Skylar spoke before she could, “that a poem in progress, it’s a sensitive thing. It’s not ready, and you wouldn’t force a poet to share his work before it’s ready, right? If you love poetry, that is?”
He stood over her with his hand out for the last page. Her blazing green eyes didn’t flinch from his stare boring down on her.
“Sometimes they need a push,” she shrugged.
Skylar’s face paled in naked fear. He could always take it from her if her eyes lowered from his so much as an inch. Numbers shifted on the digital alarm clock like the timer of a game in overtime.
“But,” she handed him the page. “I can see you’re not ready.”
Skylar snatched it a little too eagerly. He took the bundle of pages over to the bed like a furtive zoo animal and stuffed them in wadded handfuls into his backpack, checking and double checking that he had them all. Some fell aside as he crammed them in, and he hastily scooped them back up. The woman watched him with one finger bent along her jawline.
“Not even close,” she added.
Daylight shined around the perimeter of the closed curtains. The muffled sound of distant morning traffic bled through the motel walls. Skylar buttoned his backpack shut and set it securely at the head of the sweat-stained bed, checking over his shoulder at the woman as he did so. She watched him all the while, waiting until he was done, sitting as naturally as if this was her space and not his that she had invaded. Patience and calm built her firm yet relaxed posture, and her face shone warm and pleasant—all traits that annoyed Skylar. After about a minute of standing around dodging her eyes with his hands in his pockets, he moved to the window and slid open the thick curtains. Sunlight stabbed into the motel room. He grimaced and rubbed his eyes.
“How did you get in here, Sally?” A low timbre from just waking up coated his voice.
“It’s Stacey,” she corrected. “The door was unlocked.”
“It was?” Skylar straightened. He marched over to the door and observed the open deadbolt in disbelief. He scoffed at himself. After going through all that trouble to find a place for privacy to go through a night of hell, and he forgot to lock the door.
Stacey set her book on the desk and bent to pick up the one Skylar threw at her. A sly humor flashed across her features as she read the title.
“It’s nice to see you exploring your spirituality,” she teased, “but the Book of Mormon? Really?”
“What? You got a problem with that?”
“Not necessarily,” she held out the word, trying and failing to keep a straight face. “But Jesus in North America? Come on. An elementary schooler could pick up on the America-centric revisionism going on there. Same way different cultures across time have modified their origin myth to justify the power structure of the week. The Christian Nationalists are probably salty they didn’t think of it first.”
“Sure, it’s ridiculous,” Skylar crossed his arms and leaned against the door. “If you look at it literally. But we’re dream travelers. Zoom out and think symbolically. It’s possible John Joseph Jingleheimer Schmidt or whatever the hell the guy’s name was who wrote it was interpreting spiritual structures through the cultural framework he was born and raised in, meaning ‘Jesus’ in this case just represents some spiritual archetype within the universal undercurrent of all religious experience. ‘I-took-a-form-you-would-be-familiar-with-slash-be-able-to-understand,’ that whole cliché.” He shrugged, “Not saying I believe it, but there’s more than one angle here.”
Stacey stared at him, her face unreadable.
“Comparative religion’s a hell of a drug,” Skylar added to kill the silence.
“You’re full of surprises,” Stacey’s laugh sounded like bells. “You hadn’t struck me as a religious apologist.”
“More like a devil’s advocate. I just wanted to win the argument.”
“We were arguing?”
“You so far strike me exactly as I figured,” Skylar launched himself off the door and paced past her. “Your type is always going on and on and on about different cultures, and how we should always be considering other viewpoints and perspectives—”
“My type?”
“—which is a bit infantilizing because duh, we all learned to see things through others’ eyes in like kindergarten, or at least I did. But you all carry this banner at the college level like its the deepest insight ever without any awareness at all of your own massive blind spot: you don’t treat the mainstream culture or any close-orbiting subcultures with the same level of detachment, respect, and curiosity you do for any culture outside of it, despite the fact that it’s a culture, same as any other culture.”
“That’s me? That’s my type?” Stacey raised an eyebrow, somewhere between amusement and minor offense. “And where are you going with this?”
“The irony continues as you wall up more and more in your ivory towers, holier than thou, creating your own tribe-minded in-group with its own exclusive identity and rituals and self-aggrandizing circle jerks, and turn your noses up at any culture that smacks of anything Western. Thus, your condescending attitude and writing off of the backwards-ass polygamist Utah weirdos.”
“You’re painting quite the picture based off one little joke.”
“I can put two and two together, since you’re a group-minded person. All groups require the upfront cost of a piece of your soul, and all groups inevitably devolve into groupthink. Forgive me if I want no part of that.”
Stacey stood up in front of him, disrupting his pacing, her face inches from his.
“I don’t know who you think I am, Skylar, but make no mistake: no one speaks for Ms. Stacey Creed except Ms. Stacey Creed.”
They stood close, face to face, and a small charge flickered in the air between them. One look into each other’s eyes told them that convincing the other of anything other than what they already believed was impossible, and yet they stayed locked on to each other, partly out of hope, partly out of defiance. Stacey’s perfume hovered in the fringe of Skylar’s awareness, but he wouldn’t let himself give it anything more than a passing acknowledgment, despite how pleasing it was. And despite that they were roughly at eye level, Skylar, coat clinging around his broad shoulders, still appeared to tower over Stacey in a way that made her think distantly of comfort, but she paid more attention to her mission. The motel room’s small appliances creaked and chirped in the silence.
They broke apart simultaneously, and stood so their backs faced each other, several feet apart. They stared at opposite ends of the dingy room.
“And just what are you doing here, Ms. Stacey Creed?” Skylar crossed his arms. “It can’t be for the same reason—”
“—The same reason since Albuquerque,” Stacey answered over him, and they looked at each other again.
At the mention of the city where they first met, they both recalled the memory of how chance, a wish, and some music brought them hurtling into each other’s lives.
Late winter snow drifted between the peaks of the Sandia Mountains, light blue and hazy up in the cloudless atmosphere. A dry chill filtered down into the dirt and asphalt streets of Albuquerque, where a neighborhood street fair enlivened an otherwise quiet January Sunday. Tall, terracotta colored skyscrapers shaded an intersection of stucco-sided one-story buildings displaying a blend of Spanish colonial and modern influences. Vendors manned kiosks, booths, and tents visited by a varied cast of locals and tourists. BBQ scents wafted out of food trucks offering pulled pork and chile verde, and music from multiple stages and street corners—brass cover bands, Pueblo folk, acoustic singer songwriters—overlapped in a lively blend.
Skylar ducked under some commercialized Kokopelli figures hanging from a kiosk, passing through nearly unseen in the rivering crowd, though his long coat instantly placed him as an out-of-towner. The warm road felt good under his bare heels as he passed booths selling handcrafted Acoma pottery, Zuni kachinas, and American kitchenware descended from the “live laugh love” school of design. He surveyed the trash cans for the reason he came, and soon found a score: a nicely preserved paper tray of street corn, with only one bite taken out of it. He scooped it up unselfconsciously and kept walking, eating as he did so.
The crowd thickened at a corner up ahead, all gathered around a street busker doing an energetic one-man rendition of “More Than a Feeling.” Seated on a cajón, the performer’s body rocked with the rhythm as he downstrummed his capoed guitar plugged into a small Fender amp through an aftermarket pickup clipped onto the sound hole. Dew drops of sweat fell from his hair and fogged up the round Lennon-esque glasses sliding down his nose. His voice, even without a microphone, projected and captured the street corner. Skylar joined the crowd while he ate, listening to the singer lament letting Marianne slip away, her ghost rendered eternally youthful through song and memory.
After a verse, Skylar sensed a presence beside him. Always one to check his surroundings, he stole a glance. A tall woman had walked up next to him, a little too deliberately, wearing an athletic black tank top, green khaki short shorts, and white sneakers. She watched the busker with shining green eyes, bobbing to the beat like she couldn’t help it. Bright blonde hair framed the symmetrical features of her soft brow, pixie nose, lush cheeks, and small, finely contoured jaw, and she smelled of roses and apples.
She caught Skylar looking and offered a friendly smile.
“I’ve always loved this song.”
“Brad Delp killed himself,” Skylar swallowed a large chunk of corn.
“I’m sorry?”
“Brad Delp, the singer of the band that originally wrote this. Boston or whatever the hell they called themselves.” He took another bite and spoke through a mouthful, “‘I am a lonely soul’ is all his note said.”
“That’s such a shame. What a voice he had.”
Skylar shrugged, and the conversation fizzled out. They watched the busker play and sing. Nearby, a mother held her baby, barely old enough to walk, up by his hands, swaying him gently and teaching him to dance and feel the music.
“Are you like one of those connoisseurs of obscure rock and roll trivia?” the woman tried again. “I have an uncle who’s like that.”
Skylar didn’t acknowledge her, paying more attention to his street corn, the first thing he had to eat in over twenty-four hours. Phospher bronze chords rung out and swirled around them, two people in a crowd. The effect of music played tricks with time, slowing down the moment. A rare pulse flickered somewhere in Skylar’s gut, and he had a feeling it wasn’t the street food. He turned his attention to the woman. While her gaze was transfixed on the singer, he studied her face, his mind wrenched by the odd sensation of recognition, though he was positive they had never met before.
“This guy’s doing a good job with it,” she said. Her tone shifted, mysterious and leading, “This song really is so otherworldly. Kind of like... something... out of a dream…” She managed to hold a straight face for a few seconds before cracking up. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Stacey,” she introduced herself and held out her hand.
Skylar looked at it, and then back up at her.
“You’re the dream traveler that responded to my wish,” Stacey said.
Skylar said nothing.
“That was you, in my dream.”
Skylar kept his face neutral.
“Wasn’t it?”
Skylar walked away.
The crowd applauded as the busker finished his song.
Stacey blinked in disbelief. She shook it off and pushed through the crowd after Skylar. “Hey! Don’t pull this! I never forget a face. I know it was you, and—” she grabbed his shoulder and turned him around, “—I know that you’re a dream traveler.”
“What of it?” Skylar shrugged her hand off and stepped into her space, repelling her back a stride.
They stood in front of a booth selling quilts, mats, and tapestries. A hanging Navajo blanket, with its pixelated diamond patterns repeating within bands and bands of smaller and smaller rectangles, formed the backdrop of their conversation.
“You answered my wish,” Stacey said.
“No, I don’t believe I did.”
“You were there. In my dream, where I was waiting for someone to answer.”
“Did I approach you? Speak to you?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Then I didn’t answer you,” Skylar pivoted to walk away again.
“Then what were you—where are your shoes?”
Her curve ball question stopped him in his tracks, and he looked down at his feet like he also wondered where his shoes went. His odd apparel and unkempt demeanor somehow slipped through the filter of Stacey’s first impression. It occurred to her, suddenly, that he looked like a bum.
“Never mind,” she continued. “Sorry. That’s not important. What were you doing then? Why visit my dream?”
“I was...” he searched for the right word and found it with a sigh, “scouting.”
“Scouting?”
A syllable caught in Skylar’s throat. “You weren’t supposed to see me,” he fought against himself to say.
“What? Why not just show yourself?”
“Dream travelers don’t usually organize. Hell, there are hardly enough of us to organize. Naturally I was skeptical of your Cooperative or whatever you’re calling it—”
“The Confraternity.”
“—of your Confraternity. Skeptical, if curious. If someone’s putting a wish out there to recruit dream travelers and it just happens to roll my way, why not scout it out? Keep tabs on who’s out there, you know?”
The crowd meandered around them, their conversation one of hundreds buried in the festival hubbub. A passerby ducked between them under the hanging blanket to enter the booth. None of the surrounding activity interrupted Stacey’s searching stare into Skylar’s bored brown eyes. She found herself having difficulty getting a read on him, and sensed that he wasn’t bothering to read her at all.
“You could have been five hundred miles away,” Stacey said.
Skylar shrugged.
“I thought this was your way following up with me. You’re telling me that after making contact in my dream with no intention of further communication we just randomly bump into each other on the street?”
“I see where you’re going with this, but listen, I’m just here for the street corn.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences, Mr…?” she prompted for a name.
Skylar didn’t answer. Stacey frowned. His detached countenance, initially jarring, began to irritate more than confound.
“Alright, fine, be that way. You said it yourself how few dream travelers there are out there. You won’t blame me then if, since I have you here, I lay out the Confraternity’s cause?”
“Do your worst,” Skylar finished the last bite of his street corn and started walking.
“The worst is yet to come, if we don’t stop it,” Stacey dashed to his side.
They walked up the street. A gang of kids chasing a dog raced by, and a man in an open Hawaiian shirt tried to sell them flowers. Lost balloons drifted overhead into the pale sky. The various sources of live music transitioned with their travels, mixing unevenly into the low dissonance of clashing keys.
“As I’m sure you’re aware,” Stacey said, “the wealth divide is greater than it’s ever been in history, and it’s by no accident. We’re all living at the mercy of a psychotic transnational criminal oligarchy hellbent on hoarding wealth and power and using any means necessary to beat down and strip away the rights of the common individual in the working class. Anything to eliminate a perceived threat, though the irony that we wouldn’t be a threat if they didn’t treat us so poorly is lost on them.”
She paused and let her words hang in the air for a moment.
“I’m aware,” Skylar prompted her to go on.
“Okay. Just checking. There’s still a lot of people who aren’t. So you’re familiar then with their usual tactics corrupting society—dark money, mafia-style leadership, fear-mongering, defunding education, exploitation, extortion, control of the press and media, et cetera, et cetera. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, a new theater in this war has recently opened up.” Stacey paused and looked around, scanning the faces of all the strangers in the crowded streets. She walked a little closer to Skylar, and continued in a hushed voice, “Reports have been circulating amongst dream travelers about a rogue group that are working in service to the wealth class to carry out their ambitions. They’re targeting political and academic ‘enemies’ and controlling narratives through the use of their powers, which is a violation of everything it means to be a dream traveler. The Midwest Confraternity of Dream Travelers was formed in response to this, to investigate and contain the threat of rogue dream travelers colluding with oligarchs and threatening the freedom of everyday people in the Waking World.”
They walked in silence as her case and plea sunk in. Tall buildings eclipsed the sun, casting long shadows over the swathes of happy people enjoying the festival atmosphere.
“So?” Skylar said.
“So?!” Stacey stammered.
“Bad dream travelers are out there. It happens,” he leaned as he walked to peer into passing trash cans. “Isn’t cleaning up the riffraff the Knights’ job?”
“Please. They’re too tangled up in their own competing codes and philosophies about how to get things done to ever get anything done.”
Skylar made a face in agreement.
“And besides,” Stacey said, “their main focus is on the Obliviators. I don’t think they’re even privy to this new brand of rogue dream traveler.”
“Isn’t a rogue dream traveler just an Obliviator?”
“Technically one can be rogue without being an Obliviator, so long as they don’t, well, obliviate anyone’s mind.”
“And fly under the Knights’ radar by not doing so,” Skylar pieced together.
“Which is why we can’t count on them. And this isn’t just one or two Obliviators acting out independently. These people are operating at scale, organized and backed by corporations and centuries worth of political machinery. It’s been said that good’s only problem is that it isn’t as organized as evil is, and I’m finding that rings true here.”
“So, what, your little Confraternity fights the bad guys? You’re going to save the world from all the evil out there?”
“Yes. I was sent out west on a recruiting mission, to send out wishes to find any dream travelers who would be willing to help our cause.”
“‘Willing’ being the operative word, here,” Skylar said distantly, steering towards a trash can outside of a food truck.
“With awareness comes willingness, wouldn’t you say?” Stacey said. “If you have a conscious, that is, which I still believe most people do. If you have the power to do something, why wouldn’t you? What an honor, right? Sure, it requires a little self-sacrifice, but it is a matter of priorities. You can’t really enjoy freedom without first dealing with the threats to—” As she spoke, she watched Skylar zero in on a trash can, reach in, and pull out a half-eaten cheeseburger. He did it so nonchalantly it took her a second to realize what she was seeing. “What are you doing? That’s trash!”
“No, it’s waste,” Skylar corrected.
“What’s the difference?”
“Waste is still good. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a waste,” he lifted the burger to his mouth.
“Don’t eat it!” Stacey impulsively swatted his hands down.
He shot her a look, and she shrank apologetically.
“Excuse me, but I’m hungry,” Skylar tried for another bite.
“Oh my God, I’ll buy you a corn dog! Just don’t...” Stacey grabbed his arm and pulled him along, checking over her shoulder to make sure they weren’t making a scene. “There’s like a million food trucks here. What’s your situation? Can I ask you that? You seem…”
“You haven’t figured it out by now?” Skylar couldn’t help a grin at her reactions.
They stopped outside a parking lot occupied by a caravan of food trucks circling some umbrella covered picnic tables. Stacey observed again Skylar’s greasy hair, dirty coat and clothes, and bare feet.
“...homeless?” she ventured.
“I wish I had the luxury to worry about politics and grand schemes,” Skylar said. “I really do, but I can’t afford to. My main concern is just getting through the day. I’m living meal to meal here, just trying to survive.”
“That’s what I was saying about priorities,” Stacey said. “This war is bigger than you or me. It’s about everyone’s survival. We can take care of the little things right now. If you need food and lodging we can provide that at the Confraternity.”
“Thanks, but I don’t need the help.”
“Are you sure?” Stacey almost laughed, but caught herself. “I thought dream travelers had a code about helping each other out, since there’s only so many of you. Isn’t that what the whole ‘solidarity’ thing is all about?”
“Normally, yeah,” Skylar said. He looked away, thinking of Aisling. “I left that all behind a long time ago.”
“What’s stopping you from picking up where you left off?”
“Look, you don’t know what I’ve been through, Shelly—,”
“Stacey.”
“—but this isn’t my fight. You know what they say, right: pick your battles?”
“This is everybody’s fight. Sometimes your battles pick you, and you have to rise to the occasion. Look, it’s bad enough these tyrants and psychopaths are now aware of the Dream Realm, but to have access to it too? You know how it is with these types. They want control over everything they see, and if they can’t have it, or even if they just don’t understand it, they will destroy it. They see something like the pure and unrestricted freedom dream travelers have as a threat to their control. That’s what’s at stake here. The freedom to travel at all between realms of thought. To think differently from what you’re told and shown. To think differently from others. To think at all! Now do you want a corn dog?”
She stood at the end of a semi-formless queue leading up to a food truck window, and pulled a money clip out of her pocket, offering.
“I’m quite alright with my burger, thank you,” Skylar dusted off the burger he was still carrying and took a long awaited bite. “This is free,” he chewed, getting a kick out of Stacey trying to hold back her disgust. “I don’t think these people can destroy the Dream Realm. Not without destroying humanity itself. Dreams come from dreaming beings, after all.”
“And humanity’s proven quite the rational primate when it comes making decisions not to destroy themselves and the planet.”
“Alright, I walked into that one,” Skylar swallowed. “But what do you want me to do? What can I even do? I’m just one broken man in a broken world doing his damnedest just to keep it together every day.”
“You’re thinking too small, which is ironic for a dream traveler,” Stacey said. She took a deep breath, preparing to draw out all her persuasive rhetoric and energy. “Stop thinking about just yourself and start thinking about your position in the wider social fabric we’re all woven into. This isn’t something you can just sit around and wait for someone else to fix. There is no someone else; there’s only all of us. It’s not something one person can fix, either. I know we all grew up with some form of the hero myth, simplified in our movies and shows, and while I’m not going to say it’s entirely untrue, there is absolutely no such thing as the one-hundred-percent independent one man army who saves the day all by his rugged lonesome self. No, in those stories the heroes are only as good as the people around them—that’s the force, the force that unlocks the hidden reservoirs of strength within that allows them to overcome the villains. It’s what differentiates them from the villains. Isn’t that better, though, than the solo hero myth? What a relief that you don’t have to do everything yourself!
“So you’re asking what you can do? Bring yourself. That’s it. Join. Unify. And help. Because you are so much more than just yourself, and human power and potential really only activates when it’s combined. Because when we work together we’re reassembling the shattered whole of humanity’s broken heart. We’re acting in accordance with the greater laws of harmony when we have a unity of purpose towards the common good. Isn’t that what we were all raised to believe? Isn’t that what we were taught was the ultimate function of society? So what if the reality fell short and growing up taught us some harsh lessons about how far we are from that vision of heaven? That’s where the individual comes in. It’s an ongoing project across generations, across millennia, and once you realize that, the path to your place in the pantheon lights up—where’d he go?”
Caught up in her passion, Stacey hadn’t realized that half of her monologue had been more of a soliloquy. Skylar was nowhere to be seen, though she had accrued a small arc of spectators. A teenage girl clapped sarcastically, and a passing man in a suit tossed some change at her feet. Stacey scanned the crowd for the dream traveler a few more times before admitting to herself that she lost him. She grit her teeth, game face on.
“Oh, I am going to get him for this…”
The startup of a diesel engine rumbled and resonated throughout the decrepit walls of the motel. Air brakes hissed, and a behemoth eighteen-wheeler navigated a parking lot too small for it, the driver’s struggle on full display through the window behind Skylar and Stacey standing in Room 33. Its starting and stopping sounds scored the otherwise silent room, and the sun’s heat, magnified by the window, baked the air. Stacey stood closer to the light coming through, her posture firm, while Skylar hunched in the shadows across from her. He sighed and rubbed a creeping tension in his neck, staring at the woman who had followed him over seven-hundred and fifty miles across the country.
I knew I should’ve made a left turn at Albuquerque, he thought.
“Who’s Aisling?” Stacey broke the silence.
“How do you know that name?” Skylar blurted out in one quick breath. “I mean, none of your business... how do you know that name?”
“You were saying it out loud in your sleep. Thought I’d ask. Maybe if I get to know you more as a person I can be of better help—”
“Nuh-uh. No. There is no ‘getting to know me.’ What part of my demeanor has suggested in any way that I’d like for you to get to know me?”
Stacey furrowed her brow, genuinely thinking it over, which Skylar found ridiculous. Uncomfortable in the silence, he turned for the sink in the bathroom and washed his face, if not just for something to do. The cold water stung, though not nearly enough, and he dragged his hands across his red eyes and down his stubble. Stacey’s reflection in the mirror watched him as he raised his head.
“Did I say anything else?” he asked over the running water.
“Other than her a name a few times, you were sleeping like a baby.”
“Really?” he grimaced in disbelief, though relieved. He turned off the sink and walked back out, wiping his hands on his coat. “And can we talk about that? You breaking in here and watching me sleep? I’m not crazy; that’s weird, right?”
“I thought it would be weirder if I woke you up,” Stacey said. “And I wasn’t watching you. I had my book, so I thought I’d sit and wait.”
“You couldn’t have waited outside?”
“And risk you giving me the slip again like you did in Amarillo? OKC? Not a chance. I still don’t know how you pulled that last one. Are you like one of those bum lords that has a network of homeless people acting as your eyes and ears or something?”
“Ha ha. I’m homeless. Funny.”
“Sorry,” Stacey reevaluated him. “You didn’t seem particularly sensitive about it before.”
She leaned against the bureau, one leg crossed over the other. Skylar sat down at the edge of the bed, keeping his back straight for once and crossing his arms. He faced away from her, staring out the window’s theater showing the sunny parking lot. The quiet grated on his skin, and his mind raced with anxieties, fuel for tonight’s batch of nightmares. He breathed through it, waiting to see what would happen, what Stacey would say or do, if anything. He could feel her behind him, feel her eyes on him with that look he didn’t understand. Unbeknownst to him, she opened her mouth several times to speak, but words never came together, and silence reigned.
“What’s with you?” Skylar sighed. “Why have you followed me halfway across the country when I thought I made myself clear? Why are you trying so hard to recruit me? Me, of all people?”
Stacey walked over to front of the room and joined him in viewing the world out the window.
“Maybe I see something in you,” she said. “Perhaps against my better judgment, but maybe you’re not as far gone as you think.”
“No, that can’t be it,” Skylar assumed a thinking pose. “Must be something else… must be…” He uncurled slowly as it dawned on him. “Oh ho ho. I’m the only dream traveler you found, aren’t I? No one else responded to any of your wishes, did they?”
Stacey conceded with a slight, one-shouldered shrug.
“Without me, you’d be going back to your little Confraternity empty handed. Mission failed. A type-A do-gooder like yourself couldn’t stand that, could you?” He stood up. “Which means, how interesting, I suddenly have all the leverage here.”
“No you don’t, Skylar. I’m perfectly fine cutting my losses and going back without you. We’re not that desperate.”
“Not that there’s anything I could get with that leverage, since all I want is for you to go away.”
“You’ve yet to give me a good reason not to at least visit the Confraternity,” Stacey said. “Even if you don’t stay, I feel like some community would do you good.”
“Community? Wouldn’t that be nice,” Skylar scoffed, and his tone reddened. “Only, I’ve tried community, and when I’m not outright rejected at the door it’s only a matter of time before I’m sidelined or crushed underfoot for some runaway belief that dominates and erases any individual expression and soul. It’s only a matter of time before they make a decision in your name you don’t agree with that reflects negatively back on you, and if you try to argue against the majority, surprise, you’re no longer a part of the group. I’ve tried. I’ve tried and tried and it’s the same pseudo-compromise every time, and I’m tired of it.”
He crossed his arms again, planted his feet, and his back expanded with a heavy breath. He exhaled slowly in the rising heat from the window’s greenhouse effect.
“Okay,” Stacey said carefully. “I can tell you’ve had some bad experiences with some maybe not all that great examples of community. But not all are like that. You can’t treat all of them, or any future interactions with different ones, based off one or two bad instances. I understand the response to do so, but at the end of the day it isn’t rational.”
“Don’t try to convince me that I’m the one being irrational!” Skylar said. “People are irrational. Just take a look around. At every turn they’ve traded in community and control for convenience and let corporations and technology dictate how their lives should be run. They’ll complain, but keep their heads in the sand, never daring to speak anything that will disrupt their access to the addictions that society lords over them. Take your pick, we’ve got them all: alcohol, drugs, gambling. Take something good, like entertainment, extract the art from it and turn it into a soulless commodity, nothing more than an empty distraction to put on in the background. Take something like sex, strip all warmth and humanity out of it and warp it into meaningless and vacuous pornography, again with no higher function than that of oblivion for its users and profit for its proliferaters. And everyone is so easily misdirected through the most basic psychological hacks to think, speak, act, and vote against their own interests, being led around in circles in endless ‘debate’ instead of taking action, all because it appeals to their vanity. You see, it hasn’t just been ‘one or two bad instances.’ It’s everywhere. Tell me, where the hell is the community for the rational man in a society like this?”
“I can’t disagree that people are… difficult,” Stacey said. “But this sounds like a simple case of looking at the glass half-empty. There are amazing people out there with good hearts doing good things, even in times like these. You have to have faith that they’re out there, regardless if you see or hear about it or not. This, as it happens, is how the oligarchs and wealth hoarders operate: they warp your perception through the manipulation of culture and media to create the illusion of a frightening and disheartening landscape with the goal of alienation and isolation. Everything you brought up is caused by the hoarders and is what the Confraternity is fighting against. The media, so to speak, has it right where it wants you.”
“You don’t think I’m aware of that? I’m not even plugged in to the media anymore. And I know how to parse through information. I’m not dumb enough to fall for their propaganda.”
“Prove it and act otherwise. Be a man and stand apart from all the negativity.”
“Nice try, but that’s not going to work on me. You want to talk about the media having people right where it wants them, why don’t you look at all the negative connotation its loaded onto having a penis in this day and age.”
Stacey clicked her tongue and placed her hands on her hips. She cycled through various possible responses she could have countered with, but made the choice to stay focused on her mission.
“Do you honestly believe what you’re saying?” she asked. “What, do the people just deserve their fate then? Even if that fate was set in motion by people, decisions, and systems put in place long before they were born? How is that fair? Can nothing change? Is there just no hope according to you?”
“Yes! In a way,” Skylar shrugged. “The people voted for this. Who are we to trample on their freedom, if this is what they want? Why should I be responsible for everyone else, especially when they don’t seem to care all that much?”
“Who cares if they don’t care? Why are you letting them lead you around? Be the first to care. Be the first to love,” Stacey searched his face, looking for some sign of life. “Let me ask you this: what are you doing? Not about broader issues or anything. Just in general, with your life. Because I’ve followed you through four states now, and it looks to me like you’re just wandering.”
Words caught in Skylar’s throat. All at once he became aware of the black hole in his soul he was talking around. He couldn’t tell her about his suicidal ideations, no matter how kind and receptive she appeared. They weren’t close enough by his social standards, and there wasn’t enough time to build that trust. The course their conversation and his future would take if he suddenly starting talking about suicide, if he exposed himself, was unimaginable, a line that mustn’t be crossed at all costs. The problem curled in on itself; he couldn’t tell her that there was something he couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t suggest a thing that would hint at anything wrong, so he said nothing.
“You’re not just anybody,” Stacey reached her arm out. “You’re a dream traveler. You have a power most people can only fantasize about.”
Skylar flinched back from her touch.
“They would only fantasize about it because they don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “I’ve been in and out of people’s heads my entire life, and there’s alarmingly less variation than you’d expect. It all boils down to essentially the same few wishes, over and over again. What’s more, most people are only wishing for things they think will make them happy. After doing this long enough, you start to see that if there’s one consistent through-line throughout all of humanity it’s that they will always choose illusion over reality.” He pursed his lips and shook his head, “Not me. Look at me how you will. Alone. Homeless. I’m what is real.”
The debate crested. Following an unspoken natural rhythm, they both paused, to breath, and to allow time to process each other’s words. Skylar wandered deeper into the room, fidgeting with drawer handles and the angle of the TV. He saw his warped reflection in the old black screen and turned away. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets, finding his velveteen backpack, with his suicide note inside, the only safe place to rest his gaze.
“Whatever you’ve been through, let us help,” Stacey said reassuringly. “We can help each other. Come on. The world needs dreams travelers now more than ever.”
“The world chews up and spits out dream travelers,” Skylar shot back. “They wouldn’t know a good thing if it answered every last wish they had.”
“Again, be the first to—”
“They actively punish anyone who tries to help them. Just ask Socrates and Jesus.”
“You don’t always see the results of a good action right away. You have to give it time—”
“We don’t have time! Might I remind you that climate change is looming over our heads and environmental catastrophes beyond our comprehension are going to wipe out half the population?”
“Okay, I’m starting to catch on to your strategy of hiding behind global issues to avoid the real discussion here.”
“And that would be?”
“You,” Stacey said. “You’ve just given up. You’re a quitter. You’re like the dog in those learned helplessness experiments that just stopped trying to escape the electric shocks hurting it.”
“That dog was smart!” Skylar stepped forward, not realizing he was raising his voice. “It was playing the metagame. It’s not a bad thing to quit a rigged system. Look, I played the game like everyone else and got nothing for it except a wasted life and my best years all behind me. I know how everything is going to go if I were to rejoin the herd. All I want is to be off this carousal.”
“I see. You’re an evolved quitter. You’re refusing to play at all now, which is worse.”
“Sometimes the only way to win is not to play.”
“That doesn’t apply here. You can’t just turn your back on society—”
“I didn’t turn my back on society! Society turned its back on me!”
Echoes of Skylar’s roaring voice ricocheted off the motel walls. The horrified look in Stacey’s eyes told him too late that he overdid it, and he turned away in shame. Heat coursed beneath his face and his body stiffened as his mind fought to douse wildfire emotions. As desperately as he wanted to explain himself, the dreaded and familiar experience of his words coming out all wrong, no matter how he tried to arrange them, tied his tormented tongue down. Their conversation had hidden the onset of a panic attack, and he suddenly found himself drowning several stages deep. He placed a hand on the wall to steady himself, though it helped little. He needed space. To be alone, and to collect himself. He needed to find a way to communicate that—if he could just have enough quiet to think.
“You have a gift,” Stacey’s voice quivered from behind him, on the verge of tears. “Use it. Imagine the world if Brad Delp never sang at all.”
“Oh shut up,” Skylar spat. “Like you even cared or knew his name before I said anything.”
A long silenced followed.
Skylar stood hunched up by the wall. He stared through his clenching hand at the blurry floor, grinding his teeth to channel the tension in his jaw. He heard himself exhale in long heaving breaths and he let them flow. His mind wasn’t blank, though thoughts, scenarios, and fears raced by so fast the effect was the same. Time melted, and there was only the narrow confines of a moment he wanted out from, a twisted present where his focus closed completely, severing him from the true present. The lights buzzed and the air-conditioner hummed in the dim motel ambiance.
Gradually, the sensation of the wall beneath his hand reached his brain. Skylar felt his weight against it, and felt his body again. His breathing settled, and some mental faculties switched back on. The look on Stacey’s face when he snapped at her flashed in his mind. He knew what he had to do to at least try and make it right, turning around with a sigh and an apology.
“Look, what I meant was—”
The door stood open, letting in a blast of blue sky and sunlight. Skylar squinted to see he was alone in the motel room. It sunk in after a delay, and, once realized, he bolted for the door.
“Stacey?” He caught the frame and called her name out into the vacant parking lot. It echoed across the asphalt, bouncing away with some articles of trash carried in the wind. He called again for her and stepped out onto the cracked sidewalk, looking left and right, near and far. Power lines and trees bordered the back lot, void of people or vehicles. Skylar stood in disbelief for a second before dashing around the side of the building. He checked the front lot and scanned up and down the street, each call for her diminishing in urgency as he was forced to acknowledge she was gone. The indifferent traffic drove by, and life carried on in the city like nothing happened.
“You got her to leave,” he muttered to himself. “You got your space. Good job, you idiot. Making women cry. That’s all I seem to be good for.”
He sighed and kicked around at nothing on the floor.
“‘At least I’m real,’” he mocked himself. “God, why do I say such stupid shit? Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
He pounded a fist into his forehead, wincing before each collision and consciously trying to let go and hit as hard as he could. No matter how hard he hit, he couldn’t knock out the thought that she was the one who left this time. Before, he was the one who always walked out on her. Something about that one difference told him she wasn’t just gone, but gone for good. It hurt him more than he expected. In a way, Stacey had been his last human contact. His last lifeline. He was sure he wanted nothing to do with her Confraternity, but there was a certain comfort in their cat-and-mouse interactions. She made his wanderings a little less lonely, even if the accumulated total time they spent face to face over the last four months couldn’t have added up to more than an hour or two. But if he didn’t want to go, it couldn’t have lasted, and he should have known that.
Skylar dragged his hands down his face and let out a grunt of frustration. He braced for the onslaught of over-analysis and overthinking that always followed social interactions the minute he was alone. The usual regret and self-loathing wracked and stabbed his soul, and an armor of numbness absorbed most of it. The thought that punched through the most was her last words, before he made a monster of himself and scared her off.
Why did she bring up the Brad Delp thing? he thought. Does she know? She couldn’t have.
A slip of white paper on the floor, sticking out from the hanging covers, put an abrupt end to the mental storm behind Skylar’s eyes. He knelt and picked it up: a piece of his suicide note he had missed. He wondered if it was possible, though he knew it wasn’t, for Stacey to have read it at some point when he wasn’t looking, which branched off into a thousand more irrational paranoia. He watched himself think and think and think it over, exhausting his soul, when it struck him, now that the seal on the idea had been broken, that he didn’t have to worry anymore if he didn’t want to.
It was time to put it all to rest.
He curled his fist around the page.
“Today’s the day.”
Next Memory: The Fruits of Starvation
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