The Collapse and the Dreams
By J. F. Gleeson
Part I
Torture Train London to Somewhere
I arrived flung out into the station’s great atrium, and I was late, which had been probable, for I had left the house late amid sensations of a stomach bloated to planetary mass and the attempted addressing of this, though there is always mad hope, closer to assumption, that some allowance of spacetime will bring you to the where you need to be at the when you need to be at it.
The cyclical attrition between gut and mind tears the gold out from the daylight, replaces it around in a floodlight show for the frightened, on this day so that I could see: Handholders, Partnerwaiters, Phonelaughers, the Gorgeous and the Wanted and the Impossible. And I brought myself through them, to the bleachy smelling place where a man sat in a semicircular windowed booth, and where I banged the door to a cubicle closed and sat looking at the inside of the door and listening to the station announcer reveal that my train was going, ten minutes, going, five minutes, boarding, departing, gone, southwest, somewhere.
I bought myself onto the next train and sat on the flakes of a platform chair and could put my mind to nothing more upward looking than tiredness as a rejection of knowing, degeneration inevitable, the minutes passing as certainly as I was certain that there was no living I could do above frantic dissatisfaction and alarm, in some way abandoned, people past me on the platform, people, people, a pocket device brought repetitively out from my pocket for the checking of the time and seconds, chaotically obsessional as though I must confirm that time is still passing to reassure myself that I might still be terrified.
Part II
The Collapse
The fresh air through the open window doors made a sound and sensation level some with the peaceful fright and thrill of the dreams, though when you awake from nightly travels you remember the things that cut that all away.
In the house I had brought myself slowly in and put down my bags by the dining table; and I had not needed to throw the glass doors open to the beetle buzz and the green swash of outside, for they had been left this way, the hillside cleft from house to sea so that the sun past noon chuted down the valley and spilled right onto the ocean, glinting back in concentrated trinket archipelagos, light itself wrangled like matter for human pleasure, which it would be impossible not to experience in some primeval way, bathing in strong sun that nearly forces basking akin to dogs and lions, our relations as all things are.
It was very hot with a dry and airing heat. During the journey I had been drinking from a bottle of dehydrating stuff that had made me feel a little ill and more responsive to the arid light.
Though it was, in a strange way evasive of computation, nice, to be so dried out, so finished and completely drained, very dry with the wind so that I could lie down on the floor, not for sated nap, no not like the Impossible and the Wanted do, just for that rest of thinned parchment rocking in the summer.
Only completely wasted collapse.
Perhaps to blow away.
Quite nice.
Part III
Slugs in the Sun
I awoke in the bed in the house. Having fallen asleep on the floor in another room, I know.
There was a door right by the bed, in actuality, or what constituted it, opening nearly onto the bed; and in any event this door was where there is not a door. And things were concerning, for not only was it the middle of the night, but this new door or not-door was not properly locked. Nor was it fully closed.
Lying in the room with which I was very close, for some while frightened, I dared myself eventually to look out of the door at the fields and trees at the top of the valley, from this door looking a sort-of-place. I was very close with this surrounding too, but would be pressed at years’ remove to describe it well, or tell well what I saw.
At evening there comes a blue of dusk. This night was delved into far deeper than dusk, though such blue had managed to stick and stay and spread out into the latest hour, rendering all unblack and mostly fairy-shadowed.
Down across the field in the trough, that scaled down amphitheatrical dip in the earth and the steps down to it, people I did not know but knew not to interfere with were burning some stake without visible effigy, mumbling silently around it and flinging themselves silently around it; one turned silently and saw me I was sure, so that I softly closed and latched the new door above the bed, did the same with the old door that had new steps before it, got into the bed and tried to make as little noise and light as I could. I was sure that both doors would be visited.
I do not know why I was hidden away in their attic, but I was fully geared in armour stippled with bits bashed out of it, like a science-fiction bounty hunter, attending to my attic setup, hidden behind ramshackle objects and piled unused rafters, working by the light of my few humming little monitors but also by quite a lot of light shafting up straight in screens from the lit rooms below me where the attic floor was panelled straight, and coming up in a crosshatch of spotlights where the attic floor was less safely put together, which it was where I was working and farther on into the mess and gloom. When I had to hop around the room to check on things, it was gingerly that I did it.
I consulted with the others when they briefly visited, and I took the craft out down into the rooms. I was careful, sticking to the halls and staircases, keeping to the lamps and ceiling roses, staying out of the rooms where the families were, when their Mother rounded a stairway and almost caught sight of me, my craft being smaller than one of her hands and easily swattable, and so I quickly retreated and rose up and saw her below me, looking up at the ceiling and cracks. I leaned back against the wall.
Working again I was cognisant of some classical power building, my voice becoming lower and more synthetic though I spoke to no one.
Before I came to the pinnacle of my power I came out of the train station in the city, out under the station awning which was sat stolid out like that of a cinema, the station name (illegible) even stuck to the front of it in haphazardly degreed black letters on a white glowing background.
THE SUBWAY!
IN STATIONS NOW!
That is not what it said, of course.
For what it said was not legible.
Opposite the station was of course the black-railed park, displaced from some elsewhere, some park more meaningful and which I had not been into moved into the space normally occupied by the other park that I have been into, which has in it a lot of ratholes and abandoned marginally-empty beer cans which in the summer are tipped and despite lack of sugar frequented by wasps.
Out of the station, then: the show began!
I had been told by nobody to come for the show, and they had also told me that I would not be hosting it but would be acting as a chaperone of sorts for the contestant.
The contestant was a very nice young man dressed up for the occasion who had been having difficulties in the area of Romance. The little side-street we stood upon quite highlighted Romance as the subject of our show, what with all of the bins along the pavement saturated with newspapers, coffee cups and takeaway wrapping, these whipping into little orbits around the bins and spinning out down the street like debris ejected out of no-vacancy black holes and joining a general piecemeal stream of more trash blowing down the street tarmac from, as I stood under the station awning, left to right, presumably all going somewhere, smashing down in a great trashfall as far as I knew at a cutoff city cliff, for I never unfortunately followed the street in that direction; because I was not there for trash, I was there for Romance and the show!
I chaperoned the contestant about this little area of the city, in which we followed an itinerary of women he was due to meet with.
The gentleman’s Romantic difficulties being quite immediately plain, the first of these Dates was not interested in our contestant in a Romantic sense at all, though played up a bit for the show and bore a quite genuine kindness towards him, lit as it was or not by pity for him. So we moved on, chatting a bit and I finding out that the young man was naïve if not ignorant in the area of perceiving Romantic interest in others towards him.
So we were on to the second Date, taking place as the first on that same strip outside the subway station, it being afternoon and also sunny.
Our second Date it seemed shared similar problems with the contestant, convenient and helpful for the pair of them as it gave them a little common ground on which to speak, standing outside the black rails of the park with the afternoon litter blowing down it and the people milling up and milling down it.
Success, and I was pleased!
Until we continued on our jaunt through the city, slightly higher up the street (left of the station as you came out of it), almost making it into the main streets of the city which were like concrete canyons, and saw the woman we had just met, very passionately, and unmistakably Romantically, embracing a man whose face we never saw! She turned and told us that she was still enamoured of our contestant!
And our young man was quite pleased!
She thinks she can have it all!, I told him.
She’s taking you for a ride!, I said to him.
I was met only with a passive blunt look that seemed to show no understanding.
The city commotion broke out and I ran through the streets, scuffing over curve-topped walls identical to those that capped the playground of my very faraway youth, into the vogue outer parts of the city centre which were much less city, architecture relaxed into shops and cafés and residences, all unmarked and closed and anonymous for they were not meant to be patronised, and like craters the squares had the sun of lowering afternoon pour and bowl down into them, spotlighting the little parks for these were where narrative would occur.
The parks were little by one aspect but large by others. Changing space had the distance between two trees vaunting or shortening and the number of people sat in the park changing with it.
Into one of these park squares I dropped, having pulled myself over the fence railings, the park ‘small’ and with some few chunky trees, likely oaks for the sake of normalcy, not many of them, but sufficiently into vivid summer stages that they brushed cover over most of the grass from the sun. People were sitting in cross-legged circles with cider cans and crisps. Beyond the street surrounding the square was a square border of houses and a couple of shops, three storeys about so that their uppermost windows looked nicely right into the tops of the trees and down onto the park.
To my dismay and surprise, I was going at such tilt still that by accident I ran right into one of the circular signposted areas around the tree bases, nearly tripping over the ankle-high placard and falling right over the half-logs delineating the area. I did not have time to hear the keeper shouting wait, don’t! because I had already done what I should not have done, and I had set the little theropods loose and caused a chaos in the park. They scattered instantly, scattering the picnickers with almost greater speed, who in fleeing screamed and lifted dresses and dropped wallets everywhere. I hauled myself up onto the wall to get away, finding myself next to the keeper who had tried to warn me, a friendly young man.
‘I thought I’d been to a park with dinosaurs when I was about five!’ I said to him. ‘So I’m not crazy.’
‘Yes, this has always been here!’ he said.
‘Did you used to have a t-rex?’
‘Yes we did!’
I asked him, could he help a friend of mine, who has a qualification in animal care, get a job working with animals?
The keeper said he’d be happy to ask around. ‘What kind of animals does he want to work with?’
‘Probably zoo animals or domestic pets. I think he’s done farm animals.’
Trying to shower, it was in that curtained-off corner of the grey room, and it was very stressful, bordering on nightmarish, so that I relocated to the stone room with the stone cubicles and the completely transparent shower curtains, though it was worse in there in the dark, massive space like a hollowed out brick and all the floor wet, and a lot of manic jittering and jeering outside from the other people going into or out of their showers. A leering eye manifested through the curtain repeatedly, vanishing when I chased it away only to return, a leering smiling eye in the gradually quietened and calmed space beyond the curtain. I called out for anyone to help get that eye away but no one else was there, all gone, or no one else was listening.
I got into the van to try to shower in there, which led only to a multitude of new pressures, the van being driven and not carefully, a semi-transparent bit of limp curtain all that obscured me from passers-by for the back doors were unlatched and flying open and half shut as the vehicle spun into oncoming lanes and rounded corners widely and unsafely. There was more energy then on my part being put into trying to cover myself than I could concentrate on the act of showering. The woman driving the van took a loop of route, down past some houses and the library, a calming sky soaring and very beautiful over these places I knew; I do not know if I had ever seen it with such painterly weight over that road: that great bold cast of pinky orangey blue, particular minutes of sunset that are their own and unworried with night and dark to come. They worry neither the denizens beneath, even those being flung unclothed against the walls of open-backed vans, water spraying out and everywhere, bombing down roads they have known for far too long, able in mad disarray to consider the scope and shades of skies they wished to know.
I lost my body sometime then and existed only as a feeling. It is not difficult to do, but it is difficult to withstand. The woods were different and grey, built from some I had seen but bearing no comparative specificity.
The White Haired Woman sat on a thin fallen tree by a choked brook guttering across the wooded floor, the woods sloping up at her back. She was talking to the Man in a Tie, who stood by the brook on compacted earth that did not muddy his shoes or trouser legs.
I felt quite sick. The compounded feeling I existed as was made of:
jealousy
hopelessness
sick sureness of bad things
The woods themselves felt sick. I was open to that feeling as I would not have bodily been. The jealousy was selfish; the White Haired Woman would never wish to speak to me as she did the Man in a Tie. The hopelessness was a thing of existence. Nobody had told me what might happen, but I knew it very well.
Anyway they were talking to each other, in the woods, thick with grey weather and grey trees, and grey mud and grey mood and a grey brook running as well through a plastic bag stamped into the mud as it did through its lumped grey banks. A grey haired Man in a Tie, exhibiting grey feeling, thought, future, intention.
Walking the path through the woods I was backwards and forwards in time. Somewhere forward, nobody told me that the White Haired Woman was missing. Sick sureness of bad things resolved into truth and matter. Somewhere backward I walked with regained body down to the woods with many others, early sunset, another lot of many others coming back up from the woods.
When I saw the Man in a Tie amongst them walking back up from the woods, I was compressed back again out of my body into sick feeling, become terror, all things gone but that terror and a sick feeling babbling out of streams and plastic bags.
I awoke on the unvarnished wood floor with the sunlight gone thicker and far colder, I lying warmed somewhat in the direct light but knowing I would have been shivering outside of its bounds. I lay in the squared off beam in the unbeetled and flyless wind, shaped as though jammed sideways into a wrongly measured grave. A casket for lowering into many places. But I did not wish to leave it.
Sun behind the house, the sky over the ocean was not unworried by the night.
On the edge of a barber’s loyalty card that lay next to me on the floor, I had written in blue pen no thing more than:
Dream of 12th July:
J. F. Gleeson lives in England. His work has appeared, or is soon to appear, in Ligeia, Overheard, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Weird Horror, Maudlin House, Goat’s Milk, Dream Journal, Bear Creek Gazette, Rejection Letters, The Daily Drunk and Mandrake. He has in the past used the pen name John Banning. He has a website: deadlostbeaches.blog