May 16 2008
DarkPages - Day Dreamer: Introduction
It’s cloudy this morning, lending a sort of blueish quality to the light coming in through my bathroom window. It’s not quite bright enough for the task at hand, but my electricity’s been cut off again, so it will have to do.
I peer at my own face in the mirror, half-covered in a beard of white foam. I run the safety razor under the water and then lift it up under my chin, holding my breath as it glides against my skin. My stubble is just a little too coarse for this two-bladed piece of crap, and it leaves behind an invisible but irksome residue of bristle, even when I shave against the grain. I could shave my whole face twice and cut my skin to ribbons, or leave behind enough growth to have a 5 o’clock shadow before lunchtime. I read somewhere that you can soften facial hair by using conditioner on it before you shave, but I’ve never tried it.
I’m contemplating all of this when I abruptly fall to my knees. Simultaneously my head dips forward, cracking against the edge of the sink, and I topple half-shaven onto the tiles of the bathroom floor.
Clairvoyant narcolepsy, that’s the simplest way of putting it. I perceive things in my dreams that I have no rational way of knowing, visions of other times and places, of the future and the past. But only the dreams I have when dozing, nodding off from the waking world and peering into another.
In this particular vision I’m someone else, and I’m standing on the ledge of a roof overlooking some squalid neighborhood south of the city center. I can feel a tingling in my fingertips, and I flex my digits, sensing currents of potential in the air, like the moment before a static-electric discharge. If I had a mirror, I could see who I am, and maybe make some sense of this vision when I wake up. But the mirror I’ve got is back in my bathroom.
Back in my bathroom, where I am concussed and quite possibly bleeding. Oh Hell.
I dream of rising up onto the balls of my feet, trusting the rubber tread on my sneakers to grip against the marble of the ledge. Am I going to jump? Apparently yes. Tensing my legs and springing, flinging my form inhumanly far, across the void of the gap between tenements to the ledge of the next building. Whoever I am, I’m not your average guy, but that’s hardly surprising. I don’t have visions of everyday events.
Speaking of which, is this the future or the past? There’s no immediate clues. I have a vague sense that it’s the present, or the immediate future, but by now I know better than to trust the leaps of intuition made by my sleeping brain. You ever know something in a dream, just know it out of nowhere but for dead certain? Even though it doesn’t make sense? Better to second-guess myself than to make faulty assumptions.
My vision swims a moment, bobbing as I walk across the roof and flip down onto a fire escape without using my hands. Something’s off about my hands; I’m nervous about accidentally touching the railing of the fire escape, fingers hovering a foot above the metal. I should be wearing gloves.
In the gap between my outstretched hands I can see down into the alley below. My eyes adjust from near focus to far, and it’s a moment before I make out the figure lying flat on the pavement. A female form in a house dress, on her back in the shadow of a dumpster. Not sprawled, just laid out peacefully. Her hair is splayed like a halo, half in the puddle of water beneath her head.
The muscles in my face twitch. Cognitive dissonance. Whoever’s eyes I’m seeing through, he doesn’t recognize the unconscious woman on the ground. But I do.
Time to wake up.
