She typed furiously. It was so good to let the ideas out when everything was blocked.
Lesley had been a cool dynamo at school. Her gifts, a blossoming attraction to her professors, made her a certain Special. She was huskily discussed in the institutional lounges of SoT in a mix of jealousy and respect. Lesley was sort-of loved; but in her view the teachers were fading now and lay ruined in the wings, and her parents seemed to value little of anything except those Abalay coupons. She fashioned her lifestyle into something less stylish, more clinical. The love was really not penetrating. It fell away like debris from lottery scratches. No one noticed her underlying personality until she got the look from Miss Y. That had been, well, a day to remember. Those coupons -- she knew that they were just something her mom and dad clung to, to feel togetherness after total failure. Love was gone and Les heard a lot about coupons.
She was unconscious.
But memories seemed like life! Amazing.
It continued, and the derisive laughter drove her out of school like she remembered; but it wasn't sadness she felt when she saw herself crying about it. It had been a tragedy of sorts, her upbringing, she understood from a new and bizarre vantage (she must be dreaming), but she was now frantic, running, and the shadows seemed outrun and exhausted behind her. She blearily opened her eyes again, and tried to turn the pillow to its cool side. There was no pillow.
Again in the deep dark behind her eyelids: Byron, always around in her hot states. This entrance replayed and was mythologized but still was true to her, and it was a dream. The hot states were the best. My leg is actually on fire.
Lesley then went about her duties as ascribed. She was a little better off than her beautiful little Rebecca, and she revisited a place she would have given anything to have frequented. Huh? Wait just let me rest. And the helplessness of being away from Rebecca during her formative years made Lesley a killer. I lost touch and now I will go. She often thought about the definitions of love that she had lapped up as a child - the blanketing and unresolvable feelings thrust onto her plate. I love you! I have no idea what I love. She hesitated again, getting taken to the place where everything was a reverberation, a construction, a dream. It all was now. I am a GREAT agent. So proud really, but no help from her friends. She was always acting, to everyone, but she had wanted more, before dying. So she was dying. That seemed unlikely right now. This was a great story! So tired at the same time.
Really! Her supposed lie, her careerist asset and apex, that which was at the root of what was going wrong with how Rebecca was being raised - was self generated transference of her own self-hate. Whoa, intense. Am I commenting on myself somehow? But then her baby sister Rebecca was a vision of beauty. The other situation was lusterless. Nothing else could matter because look at Becks! Now Les wasn't sure what was frustrating - her own latent fury - hey Rebecca wasn't even a child, she is just 2 years younger than I! Such a non-sequitur leap, no connecting logic, this was all so frenetic, and it was all suspicious. A strange mystery in my head and I know the signs of hallucination, and she knew it intellectually while she dissolved again. In that ocean, that resort and the problem with the food. Bobbing up again, she MUST be dreaming. So lovely and surreal though and I want to get back to that. And she was, and the eye would be sliced soon, but that was only a movie, not like those red fireworks like from the bridge, and the sound of ripping open the letter from West Syn and the laughing in the ice cream store and the zippered bag and she was outside in winter witnessing herself lone laughing, and then too close-up, and my teeth need attention because they are too clenched because my father is repeating the last thing he ever said, and this was then Nightmare terrifying actually, end end end end now end. On the floor her body shifted and she groaned pathetically.
I am thirsty, turn.
Byron, on the hill that old afternoon, was a glass of iced lemonade.
He said with outright authority that the power was shifting, and that seemed like the most adult idea. Her maskedball of opinions seemed to be naked suddenly. And the unexpected kiss made both of them almost die of embarrassment. She was utterly in control one moment, rationally calibrated to respond to any kind of input. The next, she was basically giving herself to him, and he was in reciprocal happy dismay. Initially. And then there was nothing but us.
He really sucks, she thought as the dream whirled in its naive trajectory in backburn. Les was a pragmatist and perhaps fancied herself a imaginary journalist, with her eyes closed and lips open to him. What a story!
She reflexively gave it a rational once over, and then decided to write a hate-piece on reflexes, and then she was thinking --
She stopped short, withdrew, glared at him, stood up in a stoneful mechanical rejection and then -
Byron said something. Did he? Wait that needs a bit of process --
Lesley was cut off at the knees and midway through the head, but managed to straggle away, righteously, from the gorgeous-smelling cut grass and in fact the whole sensational childhood memory. She thought she had made this sparkle a part of her collected childhood, like bottling, labeling and cataloguing a volume in her personal ephemeral library. That she was a normal girl. Her parents would revel in the story once uncapped in their presence -- an intense but shortlived kiss drove them in disparate directions in the dark park that night. And By and Les were facing a lot of jokes, she knew. There seemed to be a lot of disconnects in her train of thought actually. Where am I? I need to ash this smoke, it is going to fall. Leaves fell. She knew that while more fate was about to arrive like a massive clot, she was in total frozen despair, no ammo, no reason, and paralysed with delusion while it all was sucked away into a lost and unseen rest. She dreaded this something and it was the end and so scary and black but there was again hot on her face, and not as final-seeming as that other hideous coagulation. It was blotting her history away and coaxing her to intervene. Then it would be uniformly reset, my life, my life.
No - these silly consequences aside, in electric lively love, his face lit up again, and Byron (had once) made an observation that really stung. It was happening again in fact. And the sting was seriously burning. He had been correct, and now it was time and the cloister bell rang and the chickadees were fleeing and she turned the pillow and totally failed due to a predictable lack of pillow... and she smiled out in a real, sharp, and agonizing way.
This whole show, she thought, was being taken by black, something totally black with no face and no way away. She felt its hunger which was for her suddenly her death and she was waiting like prey, close by and deadly enthralled to see if she might flinch or if she would go home, and now no control. Death can't be really eating my dreams. I will not die.
Les was immediately on the ground on an unforgiving different plane, was strangely shocked that the floor was so hard and sticky?, and there was no pillow, for SURE. She was then passed out again and wondered if she would lose consciousness and that was a feedback loop endlessly when
The old screen door hissed open with a touch, and the minority of insect life carried in on the breeze with her were destoyed immediately. The meeting of Movers was about to start and she had the astounding evidence in her left hand, with which she suddenly tried desperately to turn her pillow, and she wasn't able to even know where her arms were. And her leg was broken? and watched Byron approach in a weird dream superimposition. There was no pillow and her neck was definitely sore. There was this terrifying stickiness on her face ... but she was okay with Byron, because she remembered and eager to relive every second they had shared.
What a hot bother. She couldn't believe how easily love had made itself felt. Legendary!, she thought in a headline writing mode.
And then in the morning, it was years later. The incident (was happening and I am about to wake up) had temporarily shorted out their love story, she thought as though she might write it down. She typed furiously. Where was the pillow. OH
I was dreaming. I knew that. Ouch what the fuck --
By is right there. I am on the floor. That noise. It is getting closer.
She was dazed and bloody and she remembered what had just happened as her dreams dispersed and she began to get her bearings through what she now perceived as true waking life. And her leg was certainly broken. It was under her opposite leg at an obscene angle, bleeding and she caught a glimpse of bone? Her face was hot and there was no pain that she could recognize, but a shrill alarm was unbearably screaming in her mind.
The situation seemed very bad. She summoned her desperation and tried to make a noise. It faltered somewhere in her chest, and emerged funnily weak. Her concussed brain was still promulgating ironic death-skits, tempting her to return to its easy dreams; and she was totally disconcerted by what she had dreamt, until By's voice exploded, real, physically next to her, and she instantly swung her right arm behind her blindly to find purchase. She hit something, and leveraged that inertia into an agonizing uprightness for a better view
of what exactly was going on here
She barely had the time to execute one desperate instinct.
Then the impenetrable glass smashed, and it entered the Observation Deck.
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