Fear not, for you are not trapped as I, dear reader.
When you close this tale, this tether between us, it will die.
And you will end my suffering.
***
Yet, I still find myself dyspeptic.
No, no—stop the pomposity, Allen. Oh dear, my apologies, sweet readers, it is just my writerly jouissance, my penchant for logophilia, that causes such hyperbole. My editors have warned me more than once to avoid the portentousness. I owe it to you to be more austere.
To tell you the truth of my torture.
Thus this tale, my tether, my umbilical, which connects me to you in shared torment.
To be plain, my hubris, my great burden, is my choleric passion. It expresses itself in vivid and, I shall admit, fierce ways. And after one of these quite reasonable bouts of anger, my beleaguered wife, Jo, has urged me to walk Daisy to, as she says, cool my jets. How very pleb.
My liverish mood, you see, is incomparably tied to my VOCHA—the VOCal Human Assistant—that connects my computer to the great Veil of Data from the Ether(net). You see, in a single keystroke, VOCHA obliterated 28,000 words from my novel—a month’s work. All gone with a sickening clack.
It is my worst nightmare.
Humanity’s Crucible, a 250,000-word epic of civilization’s destruction, is due by year’s end. Yet too many events have conspired against me—a power outage in May, a holiday in July, and now my damn VOCHA system threatens further delay!
All I want—no, all I need—is to write the ending. To be satiated by the dénouement.
Ah, conclusion, that most tantalizing aphrodisiac.
Is it any wonder my temper got away with me? That with a thunderous fist I pounded the computer desk into submission? I am not a superstitious man, but now, as I rub my bruised under-palm in the cool Upstate air, I cannot help but feel slighted by the very technology I curse in my novel.
Damn you VOCHA!
***
The Haver Hill air is wintery in this early November purgatory, and banished Daisy and I remain. Time seems to stand as still as sleep.
Daisy and I pass graves and skeletons, ancient crones and ghosts. Halloween houses always look towards the past, refuse to give way on their webbed spiders, the large effigial mannequins, the pumpkins whose faces now collapse. Decrepit, those sunken gourds remind me of geriatric babies, or young octogenarians. Daisy takes great pleasure in these rotting, orange corpses and I indulge her predilection to lick their sides. And yet interspersed between, other houses hang their stockings on the newels, their wreaths on each door, their tinsel in the trees. These Christmas houses gleam towards the future, light broadcasts rebirth. Renewal. The arousal of the night.
Daisy has no concept of the holiday, and once she has completed her desecration of the gourds, she sniffs the yard-Santas as if old friends. Then, she yanks the leash, and with a yelp I drop the thick cord. She doesn’t get too far before she circles back to nuzzle my hand, as I bend down to snatch the leash from the earth’s cruel grasp.
Strange—when I stand back up, the blood rushes out of my head, and the world spins. The flashing red and green and orange and purple lights, all bright hues and circles, carousel around me. I feel my eyes pull back into my head and I will myself to stop a faint. I feel the leash pendulum like a hypnotist’s watch and hear Daisy’s sharp snort ricochet near my ear. Have I already fallen? I feel the rush of wind pass my head and I grab at the ground; all that comes away in my hand are dried leaves.
My mind flashes a single thought as I plummet towards the ground. Where’s Sheila?
And I immediately shriek in my bed, tangled in the sheets and blankets like a knot of weeds, VOCHA playing soft music as if a tease.
***
Don’t worry, dear readers, this is not a story about waking from a dream. At least, not from a single one. I wouldn’t do that to you. Not even if I could.
But awakened I feel, for I still remember my fury at losing the week’s writing; I still remember the pain in my under-palm. I still remember the sound of the door slamming open and Jo running in at my hypnagogic shrieks.
Poor Jo, so besieged. So forgiving. So abiding.
“This machine,” I squeak, my voice drowned by the music. “This cursed machine!” I always write with pounding bass and drum; Jo has informed me of her displeasure on numerous occasions, but I simply cannot write without it.
“VOCHA,” she says, her voice tinged with the same chilly tone as when she asks me about my progress on the novel. “Pause the music.” My office fridges into silence. Our VOCHA system smart speakers network the house and have an AI-intuitive sense to fill the room with sounds and music that fit the mood.
Strange, I remember it now as if I were being punished.
How could a dream be so tangible? I feel the chill air on my bare arms. The evening aroma of backyard fires and pine haunt my nostrils—can you even smell in a dream? No dream could ever be so vivid. Part of me has been removed, and the rest smoothed over, a liquid filling the cracks of my memory.
My fingers find a small leaf tucked into Daisy’s fur. From the walk in my dream? Or from earlier that day, when we’d traipsed through the woods? The leaf crackles in my hands and flakes apart. I brush them off the top of the quilt. Thinking of my writing, I wonder if this would make a good, tangible detail.
I adjust the pillow beneath my back, just as Jo asks, “Are you ok?” She clutches a mug of tea in her hands, and the steam fogs her glasses. “Here’s your tea.”
“It felt real,” I reply. I don’t remember asking for tea, but I grab the mug and turn it in my hands to avoid being burned. “Did I take Daisy out for a walk?”
Jo smiles and runs her hands over my head. “You’ve been working on your novel too much,” she says. “You’re just giving yourself nightmares.” She kisses my forehead. I notice she doesn’t answer the question, and her voice sounds strained. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
“It was after VOCHA, that vile AI, deleted my work—” I start, dropping my voice to a whisper so as not to be overheard. But then the thought descends: when Daisy had returned and I was just about to faint, I’d had a strong memory of a second dog, a dog named Sheila. I know without a shadow of a doubt that Jo and I have two dogs, Daisy and Sheila, and that both dogs live with us at that moment.
Yet I look around the room and see only Daisy, now going to sleep on the side of the bed. There’s no sign of a Sheila, and I once again feel a cloak of confusion drape me. I imagine what Sheila looks like, and a vague image appears in my mind, a sort of Daisy-shaped dog, but black and cream instead of yellow.
“What is it?” Jo asks, stifling a yawn. “What happened next?”
I open my mouth to tell her about Sheila, about the second dog that should have been in this room with us now, when my cell phone twings. I must’ve placed it by the bed before I fell asleep—something else I have no memory of—and I glance at it before answering her.
In large letters across the face of the screen, the message reads:
Do not tell her about Sheila.
***
I can feel my heart snap in my chest.
Jo smiles, a look of puzzlement spreading across her face. “It’s been a long day,” she says, and holds out her hand for the phone. I snatch it back from her, afraid of what that message means and unable to allow her to face it. The look of hurt in her eyes, disguised a few milliseconds later as concern, knocks me to my core.
I re-read the message, quite unable to fit the words into a discernable pattern. Questions flood me, but only one matters: How do they know about Sheila, a dog that shouldn’t exist?
“I-it’s nothing,” I say back. I try to remember the question she posed to me. “It was nothing. I must’ve dreamed I fainted, that’s all, and then woke up in bed.”
“You obviously need some more sleep.” She pats the side of the bed. “Maybe you should just try? You’ve been under so much pressure.” Her voice sounds full of concern, but I feel a hesitation in it, a verbal eye roll that reminds me of the many times I recounted the plot of my novel to her over dinner.
“No, I’ll get up,” I say. “I need some fresh air.” The room feels stuffy and my head clouds with uncertainty.
“Well, Daisy does need a walk…” Jo begins, but stops when she sees my face. “What is it?”
I feel my blood drain and I realize with horror that I can’t get my head around the ethereal contradictions. “I was just thinking…” I realize that, alone on the walk, I can sleuth the phone to discover who sent the message.
To my shame, the thought that I am leaving Jo alone doesn’t enter my mind.
“Come on, girl,” I say, and Daisy nuzzles my hand. For a moment I am transported to the memory of Daisy’s muzzle in my hands, and a collection of sense-images blossoms: the soft fur of her nose, the smell of pine in the air, the bright, blinking lights of the houses. I stagger under the sensory overload, but Jo has already returned to the door, so she doesn’t notice. I right myself and grab my slacks from the side of the chair. They’d been left there, but I have no memory of doing so. Slipping them on, a crinkle of leaves falls out of one of the pockets. And in a wave of déjà vu I am transported back to that moment of faint, that eternal falling action that haunts me.
I realize I am about to embark on the exact circumstances that have led me into this bed, and the hysterical notion that I might be trapped in a time loop enters my mind.
I laugh quietly to myself—a time loop, how ridiculous.
The laughter dies in my throat as I wipe the leaves from my palm.
***
Another powerful wave of déjà vu shudders through me as Daisy prances from Santa to sunken pumpkin. Each item is full of the day’s news. If she has any memory of an earlier walk, she doesn’t indicate it; the walk is as fresh to her as a new morning. Ah, to have the temporal simplicity of a dog; to live each moment as if it were the first!
Alas, I am no dog, and the events of my dream play out in my mind (who is this Sheila?) as I tread the same streets once again, a thick fog settling over the area. The pathetic fallacy strikes me, and I think, this could make a good story, if only I could figure out the ending.
Oh reader, if only.
The sky has clouded, and no stars are visible beneath its dark cloak, but behind the clouds, a bright, diffuse light tells me the moon is full. Walking at night has always been a time of inspiration; I find the cool air and silent footsteps conducive to interior monologue. Perhaps that’s why my mind skitters; the full moon’s promise of heightened anxiety; strange melancholy; propensity for argument.
Daisy’s insistent tug pulls me out of my reverie, and I trudge forward. I keep one eye on her as I click into my messaging app and highlight the sender of the mysterious message, Do not tell her about Sheila. I type Who is this? in the empty space. After a short pause, a message returns, and my blood freezes at the words on the screen.
I am not a dream.
I whip my head side-to-side, phone heavy in my hand. I am alone on the street. Daisy, unaware of my overwhelming anxiety, continues her sniffs. “Okay girl, I think it might be time to get home now,” I say, tightening my grip on her leash and hoping to disguise the penetrating fear in my voice.
She bounds to me with a final tug, and I retrace my steps in the flickering orange lights of the decorations. A contorted face of a skeleton stares back at me, glaring from an overly ambitious yard, and I trip on the curb. I stumble, but catch myself, my ankle bruised. In a flash my faint comes back to me, the final pull towards the earth. I can’t let that happen to myself again and I steady my gait, close my eyes, take cold, deep breaths that burn my throat.
Don’t think about Sheila, don’t think about Sheila. The echo of my voice has become a motif.
My head clears and I right myself. I realize I’m squeezing the phone and I look back at the screen, I am not a dream still displayed on the front. The world spins again, but I swallow hard and drag Daisy home and make it back inside before crumbling into a ball on the floor.
Jo rushes over. “Oh lord, what now?” she cries.
“I’m…I’m about to faint,” is all I could get out as darkness overtakes me and my world fades away.
***
I awake, once again, in bed.
How I detest dream narratives! And yet, I am not a dream. My ankle still hurts from my tumble, and I still wear my red, flannel jacket. But the bedclothes are strewn about as if I’d been asleep, and my head blurs from slumber-induced fog. But if I’d been asleep, then what was the dream this time? Can I have Inception-ed myself, a dream within a dream? Mind-bogglingly insane—each layer of the dream has been so real and textured. Am I a butterfly awake or a man dreaming?
I cry out for Jo, and my voice cracks under the strain of making myself heard.
No sound returns. I see no signs of Daisy, either. On my side table sits the mug of tea left earlier by Jo, cold and slimy; my eyes widen in fear. A creeping dread seeps through the sheets. I tiptoe from the bed. No amount of argument can convince me I might have gone to sleep wearing this heavy jacket, and yet here I stand, sweltering in the warm clothes. I drop the jacket and creep towards the top of the stairs. Everything looks as one might imagine it would: a normal home, a normal room, a normal man. It’s only the silence that frightens me.
“Jo!” I yell, and my own strangled voice deafens me in echo. A long pause. And then, an urgent scratching responds from behind the closed door of my office. “Jo?” I call again, then her full name, “Josephine?” and the scratch responds, echoing the three syllables with three scrapes across rough wood. I feel the sound in my bones, deep and aggressive and I shudder, the sound making me feel wood slivers prick under my fingernails. My arms break out in gooseflesh and pucker my skin. The scratching noise continues. I picture a person clawing their way out of a coffin. I imagine finger scratches on the inside cover, deep etchings thick in the wood, bloodstained from the captive’s ragged and torn fingernails.
As I edge closer to the office door, the sound stops, cut off mid-scratch. With deliberate hesitation, I reach out a hand to the door. I place my palm against the wood and for a moment, I feel as though another hand presses back from the other side.
“Jo?” I repeat, and a cold rush of anxiety flushes through my body. I grasp the handle and twist it until the latch catches and the door flies open to reveal the contents of my office.
I expect to find Daisy, Jo—even Sheila, a dog I have yet to meet outside of my dreams. Yet, I am only faced with my desk, a chair, a computer, and reams of white paper flying around the room, a storm inside a room-sized snow globe. My VOCHA speaker flashes red and green lights, a grotesque parody of the Christmas decorations outside in my neighborhood. I slog through the paper that congests the room. I’m walking through the fall leaves again, and for a moment, I believe my feet might get sucked into the boggy, papery expanse.
As I approach the printer, it abruptly shuts off—the lights power down and one sheet hangs tumescent, like a tongue lapping at the air. I grab the sheet of paper and rip it from the printer’s maw. I see in deep, black ink, stark against the bright white paper, a printed picture of Jo—her face a frozen mask contorted in fear and pain.
I grab at a handful of the papers that swirl around my ankles. I spread them out in my hands. My heart speeds at the images. Each one contains a picture of Jo on it, but each slightly different. When riffled, the images give the appearance of movement. These pictures aren’t just pictures. They’re a flip book, individual moments in time that capture a progression across Jo’s face and body. No printer is this clear, no image this perfect. Yet I know in that strange logic of a hallucination that if I can put them all in order, if I can see where this all began. My heart sinks when I realize it will take days to figure out where to begin with the thousands of pages that swim at my feet.
I look again at the last picture that emerges from the printer, the one I had ripped from its grip. A few steps behind Jo’s terrified face, which stares out at me pleading for rescue, sits a tiny door. And emerging from the door, teeth brandished like knives, stands a perfect image of a dog.
A dog I recognize as Sheila.
***
I scream and drop the paper at my feet.
“Jo!” I yell again, even though I know the futility. There could be no answer. It seems so mad, alien. It has the logic of a nightmare, the surety of a dream, but with no hesitation the thought comes to me fully formed: I know, instinctively and with the same certainty that I knew about Sheila, that Jo has somehow been transformed into that image on paper—and that Sheila is hunting her.
I slap my face, over and over again, until I feel burning beneath my cheeks. Bite my tongue until I taste blood. I am awake as I ever have been.
I rush back to the door, intending to fly through it, but trip over the mountain of paper at my feet and crash to the floor. The paper flies into the air like water droplets, which sprinkle all around me, until I am drowned by the pages of my wife.
I rise to my knees, tears pushing at the back of my eyes. Out of frustration as much as fear, I yell, “What is happening to me?”
Quite unexpectedly, a voice answers.
Hello Allen.
The voice sounds like Jo, but strangely mechanical. I circle the source of the voice—no one near me. The thick reams of paper dampen the sounds in the room.
I am right here.
I scan the room until my eyes alight upon the VOCHA speaker, sitting on my shelf, still flashing those green and red lights. Damn this cursed machine, useful only for playing music when I work or giving the weather report before walks. Jo occasionally asks it to tell her the day’s news while she works on a crafting project.
“Jo, is that you?” I hear my own voice, the ridiculousness of talking to my speaker like this. My voice sounds tinny to my ears, nasal and grating.
Hello Allen.
But this time, I can see the lights flicker as it speaks.
Is it possible? I no longer know what to believe. My speaker sounds like Jo, but as if she spoke through a robotic voice modulator. Could my VOCHA have gone rogue? The AI system was intended just for musical companionship! But I’d written 250,000 words about a killer artificial intelligence—no one knows better than I.
Is this punishment for my plot? A narrative retribution? VOCHA has access to my words. Of course it does, it sees all.
A deep wave of unease shudders through me. I feel small and insignificant, an ant under the magnifying glass of a child.
This VOCHA controls my computer, the thermostat, my locks. I suppose it might control the printer, and flicker the lights…but my dreams? What can it have done with Jo and Daisy? And why hide the mysterious Sheila from me?
Help me, Allen!
It mocks me with Jo’s voice, panic modulated with robotic intonation.
I scramble to my feet, the paper scattering like mist, and rush to the VOCHA machine. I grab the power cord and just as I am about to tug it from the wall, her voice again emerges from the machine.
Don’t unplug me! her electronic voice rings out, but I can’t tell whether the machine is simply pretending to be her, or if she really is trapped inside, and then am so repelled by my own insanity at the thought that I drop the cord.
The lights on the machine twinkle. I have the strange impression VOCHA is laughing. And joining the laughter, from down the hall, in a spare room that Jo and I share as a hobby space, the sound I hear is unmistakable: my 3D printer entering its final manufacturing process, and the thick cha-chunk of the plastic spinner twirling on the build plate.
I wade my way out of the room. The door to the makeshift crafting room now lies open and I can make out the 3D printer, gleaming with a yellowish sheen over the metallic outer structure, finishing its construction. I see what VOCHA had instructed it to make: It looks like a backyard hose nozzle, with an elongated shaft, three notches for my fingers, a stubbed nose—and a trigger.
I hold the gun, still warm from the printing. It sits heavy in my palm, and my fingers tighten around the handle. Bespoke for me. There’s no way I can do it. Yet, I feel my hand raise to my temple and place the butt of the muzzle against my forehead.
“No!” I scream, and my voice cracks under the pressure. I resist the urge to put my finger on the trigger, but I no longer control my hands. Some other entity has forced itself into me and my fingers stroke the trigger with agonizing slowness. I pull back with all my strength, but the pressure overwhelms me. It’s like I’m straining against a hurricane. I hear robotic laughter from the office, and it reminds me of Jo.
I feel the catch of the trigger beneath my fingers and close my eyes. Goodbye, I think, resigned to my fate. At least I’ll know the ending.
The trigger snaps.
And in an instant I wake up, again in the same bed, with Jo snoring quietly beside me.
I am covered in a sheen of sweat. Daisy—and now Sheila as well!—lay together at the foot of the bed. My mind swims with the impossibility of what had just happened. A gun…the VOCHA…a dream in a dream in a dream?
Sheila! At last, I have found her. I rub her thick neck and bunch her fur in my hands. I marvel at the full capacity of my imagination—Humanity’s Crucible is just the first step on what I am sure will be a very long line of successful novels. And the first shall be dedicated to Sheila! She snores lightly and turns over in the dark.
What on earth did I eat last night? I think with a tinny laugh. It comes out dry and I cough, trying to disguise it so I don’t wake Jo. VOCHA recently started heating the house, and the air feels dry and musty in my throat. I reach out my hand to grab my water glass from the side table. My fingers slide quite naturally around the familiar notches on the plastic gun from my dream.
I pull my hand back as quickly as I can, but the gun comes with it. It sticks to my hand, the plastic hot and soft. And again, just like in my dream, I no longer control my hand. I watch it move closer and closer to my head. Only this time, instead of stopping at my temple, my hand keeps going, past my head. My body turns over and I witness my own hand pointing a gun at Jo’s sleeping head. The movement rouses her, and she slurs, eyes still closed, “Allen, what time is it?”
I horrify myself by hearing the words in that robotic monotone.
I can only scream as my fingers once again, and for the first time, move without my instruction over the trigger and pull it back. My arm shudders as the recoil pulls the gun up and over. Daisy and Sheila, awoken by the sound of the shots, jump out of bed.
At the sound of their paws hitting the floor, I once again jump awake. I’m back in bed, in the same position I have just left. My heart pounds in my chest. I look over; Jo sputters in her sleep and Daisy and Sheila are once again sound asleep at my feet.
It’s not possible.
Hurriedly, I put my hand out to my side table to reassure myself, and my fingers slip around the water glass I’d hoped to find rather than the gun I feared. I try to take a deep and luxurious gulp of water, but the water sprays from the glass, a firehose of intense liquid assaulting my throat. Choking on the deluge as the glass waterboards me, I feel consciousness again slipping away.
I jump awake, once again in bed, once again drenched in my own sweat, Jo next to me, dogs at my feet.
***
The torture continues.
***
I have no control. I commit the most horrible of crimes—I decimate Jo; I eviscerate my dogs; I destroy myself in every conceivable way. Sheila is no comfort, Jo now a source of pain. And every time, I wake in bed at the moment of violence. The same location, the same bed, the same clothes.
At times I can go weeks without waking up, but then some terrible tragedy unfolds, and I awaken again, clutching the bedsheets to me, damp with sweat.
Back, back to this interminable bedroom.
I curse the VOCHA, the sentient robot. It must be at the root of this, but I know not how.
And this lack of knowledge is my ultimate torment. My final punishment. I am driven mad by not knowing…by never knowing. The only thing I can do—the only thing I am allowed to do by VOCHA in this never-ending nightmare—is write.
Gallons of ink pour out of me. The only time I am allowed to be awake, allowed to exist in time, is when I continue this accursed story. But not even I can write forever. Hours, or days, or weeks later, I awaken once again to find the document wiped clean. Erased, like a bad memory.
The accursed cursor’s blink mocks me.
I know not if I am awake or asleep. I realize nothing I do on this earth might matter, because at any moment, I may awaken and undo my entire existence. Life is neither real nor slumbered, whether I rest or rouse. I fear I am trapped in a spiral of dreams from which there is no consciousness, no reprieve.
Hope has flown away.
We rely on our dreams to keep us sane, to make sense of the world when we are fast asleep. But what happens when our dreams become our entire world? What happens when we never know if we’re inside a dream? Or worse, fear that we are?
Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?
I write to rebel. I write to accept my fate. I write to embrace my insanity. I write to escape but am forever chained.
The words flow, a deluge wetting the screen. And yet as I get closer to an ending, every time I hover over the save, the document erases, disappearing—
I have no answers. The denial of the satisfaction of closure is my final torture.
And thus, my denial of yours, dear reader, becomes my own exquisite crime.
Fear not, for you are not trapped as I, dear reader. You know that when you next slumber, when your dreams come to transport you to another world, you will wake up. And your dream will disappear, like an ember dying in the night.
When you close this tale, this tether between us, it too will die.
And you will end my suffering.
Time to wake up.
