PDF It had been the same nightmare as yesterday – and the day before yesterday. And now, jolted awake after that grenade had torn his body apart, it was cold sweat bath again for Dave; heart hammering and raspy breathing that took some time to get under control. He was not dead. It had only been a dream. Only …
He glanced around their new bedroom and wondered if all rooms that had been newly refurnished lost a bit of soul in the process – and thereby the instinctive feeling of safety that was always connected with the well-known. He certainly felt like somebody had stolen a part of insides right now and implanted a chunk of ice instead.
Dave pulled the sheets aside with annoyance: It was what he could do to suppress his uneasiness. In a moment, he knew, he would prowl the kitchen for a snack. Then he would consider texting Ken down in Memphis – and then think the better of it as he had done the previous two nights. And then he would feel sorry for himself, and then – Christ – he had to do something else this time. But what?
He shuffled over to the window, which was dark and smeared by cold sleet. The view of the narrow back street outside didn’t do much to relight his sense of calm, especially not an ink black winter’s night such as this. Some kids had even stoned the lamp post down there – the one on the sidewalk at the location exactly beneath their bedroom, two stories down. For a second Dave felt like a shadow, as if that single light’s demise had left a dark spot inside him as well.
Dave sat down on the bed again, on Ken’s side; still struggling with himself – about whether or not to go to the kitchen, to text – heck, maybe even call Ken. But he would just come off as a whiner, wouldn’t he? … He shook his head; and it was in that moment, perhaps to distract himself, that he began rummaging a bit in Ken’s BBB (his Black Book Box), as the latter had dubbed it.
It had always been below Ken’s part of the bed, an old package box that once had contained a long-forgotten Christmas gift and now it had become a repository of curly-paged paperpacks. Dave had never been particularly interested in the BBB. If there was one thing they didn’t have in common it was taste in books. But then he noticed one – the sole hardback: Hidden Reality – by someone guy named Greene.
Dave opened the brick and leafed through it, and after a few pages he felt that chill again, as he had when he had just been torn out of sleep. The Greene guy, smiling without a care in the world from the inner cover, he actually claimed that there could be “parallel universes”- if not scientifically observed yet, then very much validated by theory:
The case in a nutshell seemed to be this: Our universe might be infinitely big. If that was true, so there could be only so many ways matter could arrange itself within that infinite universe. Eventually, matter has to repeat itself and arrange itself in similar ways. So if the universe is infinitely large, it is also home to infinite parallel universes: What we thought was ‘all there is’ – our own universe, could in fact contain many, many versions of ‘all there is’.
Thus, if there could be an infinite number of these parallel universes, so there could be universes which was completely the same as ours – copies, if one liked. But there could also be universes that looked the same, but with slight deviations. Perhaps the sole difference was that you had been born in Spain and not in Louisiana. And then, of course there could be the ones in which not only you had taken a sligthly different turn on your way to work one morning, but universes in which all of history had taken a major turn.
And now he had to stop.
For Dave alternate universes had always been something that was only real in comic books … Surely this was some fringe science?
He leafed a bit more, and then found himself actually reading. The book was lucidly written, surprisingly clearly in fact, and he became engrossed – against all odds. Or perhaps because of the odds: What were they that he, if he went back to sleep, would not have the same nightmare – fourth time in a row:
Being a young soldier in the Third World War, some insane sequel to the second war – in 1946 when Stalin had decided to grab the rest of Europe for himself, and the US had scrambled to build nukes quickly enough to stop him. The context was, of course, ridiculously unclear, just as it always was in dreams. But he knew it well enough, because it was the only book on his own nightstand. Nothing but a good alternate history-yarn, right? Not something you had to think too much about – unless you dreamed it instead …
Dave put the Greene-book on the bedside table; Ken’s midnight pastime, with serious scientists discussing parallel dimensions and alternate universes. But had he – Dave – developed an obsesssion about his own book; and now, was he seeing ‘signs’ everywhere, including in Ken’s book, that his obsession actually referred to something real?
But that was crazy, too! An obsession, at least as far as he knew, was like … not being able to shake a certain line from a song, or worse – some hideous thoughts about committing murder, or maybe being afraid of touching a doorhandle for fear of bacteriae. His sister-in-law had had a small bout of that a few years back, and it had been bad enough. But why those nightmares? Surely they couldn’t be classified as that?
And there were no other links between the alternate history lightweight paperback and Ken’s hardcover brick with that friendly Greene-guy arguing enthusiastically why parallel and alternate dimensions weren’t so far out after all. He had to think about that, for a moment. Then he came to a conclusion of sorts.
Okay, fine, one of the characters in that World War III-anthology was a young gay man, who felt so ashamed of not having the courage to live openly as gay back home that he went to war instead, and that had moved Dave a lot. He could identify. He had the bruises to prove it – very literally. But that was not enough reason to invoke Freud, Jung – let alone some oddball superstitious connection to a fringe science world view.
And, yes, he had always been completely absorbed in those history documentaries on Discovery – about World War II and the Cuban crisis. He could easily identify with that past, too, although it had happened long before he was born. So perhaps it wasn’t so strange that the combination of something relatively personal, and dark imaginations about alternate history wars had affected him. But for it to have become a ‘mental infection’, too … ?
Dave lay down on the bed again. He wondered: Was it enough to be considered mentally unstable if he fell asleep and now dreamt about some World War III fiction which had not happened … at least in this universe … for the fourth time in a row? And if that was a sign of some mental condition … could he do something to stop himself from going insane?
What was it his sis-in-law had always said about her fights with OCD?
‘Maybe you don’t know what causes your obsession but the only cure is to confront it, otherwise it will grow and take control of you. You can’t outrun it. The only cure is to confront your fear until your mind tires of it.’
He had already summed up a lot of good arguments why he should not do this. After all, he had been moved thoroughly by the book about a imaginary World War III, yes, … but to have become literally afraid? He wasn’t afraid of something that was just … fiction. He didn’t have to ‘confront’ it.
Still, he reached out and took the book from his own bedside table: World War III – 1946. He had a few chapters left; might as well get something done about it, now that he had woken up in the middle of the night. And there was another reason: Perhaps he was going insane in some fashion, but he would not go insane without a fight. Even if that fight was imaginary as well.
Because fighting was part of him. Dave had had to fight all his life: First to survive the streets in Southern L.A., later to survive when he came out, and now to survive having to clean that lab in a dead-end job whilst working blood and sweat in the nights on his art submissions. He had almost broken down when he didn’t get that job at DC after all. They had virtually signed the contract and then – “unexpected cutbacks”. Sorry, mate – and what a load of horseshit that was!
But as if it hadn’t been enough, there had also been the ever-more toxic arguments with Ken over the summer, and the growing feeling of emptiness about their relationship, and the fear that his beloved sister-in-law might crack again, and –
… and here was the bookmark.
He began reading, keenly aware of the silent streets outside and the silence in their apartment and inside himself. Like the whole world was bracing for a big thunder storm, or something – just waiting for it to break loose. But what the hell would that all be about? He certainly wasn’t waiting for any storms.
All he wanted was stability: If he could just hold out a little longer, with Ken, with the submissions, with the gnawing feeling of being alone in the world as he sat in his corner of the living room every evening, pouring over the drawing board, hands still stinking of cleaner and industrial soap … then he would eventually make it, turn his life around for the better. ‘Just hold out’ – that’s about the only useful thing his old man had taught him, although old Joe Reese himself had not been able to live up to it much.
But here and now, just thinking about all that crap he had to grit his teeth and endure, made Dave smile; made him actually look forward to loose himself in that silly, but gripping, World War III-yarn for half an hour or so … even though things now looked pretty grim for the young man in the book.
Perhaps, Dave mused, if he went to sleep again and found himself in the Third World War parallel universe for a fourth time, then he would not wake up and be afraid again – not of the nightmare of war itself, nor of worry about his mental health.
After all, hadn’t he already fought a war all by himself in this universe?
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Feedback: I hope you enjoyed the story. All stories are (copy-)edited regularly. I'd like to hear what you thought of it - or - if you have corrections of US English grammar or suggestions for better use of language, particularly as regards my attempts at writing slang or local dialects. (English is not my native language.) You can reach me here: beyourstory AT gmail DOT com - or leave a comment on the Facebook fan-page Thanks! - Chris.
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