Everyone! In the Dream! Is You!

The first thing I remember is falling through stars. Tumbling down the barrel of a kaleidoscope. Multi-colored constellations screaming color, twinkling like shattered glass in my ears and I’m falling, falling or maybe flying, up or down, I’m not sure I can feel the difference anymore. I am carbonated, effervescent, shaken up and bursting. I try everything I can to keep from throwing up. I’m hurtling toward something, I know I am, and I know that it might break me, but I don’t care. I want to be broken. I want to be destroyed. Dashed like a ship on the rocks, my hull burst open, spilling plundered treasure to the depths of the sea, until I’m nothing but a shimmering cascade of stolen gold, and all that I’ve ever been, ever thought I could be has been emptied out into the deep void of nothing at the bottom of the world, and I’m free, and there’s nothing left but me, just me, just me, me, me, me, me.

     But then I hit the ground; at least I think I do, because I’ve landed on something cold and hard and it knocks the wind from my lungs. When I find my feet, I see I’m standing in the hallway at school, but I’m not wearing pants, so it must be a dream. I can hear the late bell ringing inside my head. Everyone’s bumping into me as they rush past, but they all have something wrong, like their ears are too long or they’re all talking backwards or they’re happy and smiling and laughing. There’s a loud bang like a locker door slamming and I feel my stomach drop. I’m going to throw up. Maybe I do throw up. I squeeze my eyes shut and wait for it to be over, squeezing and squeezing, until I feel a hand on my shoulder, and hear Lindsey whisper in my ear. He says he’s taking me outside.

     I open my eyes and suddenly we’re there, sitting under a tree. He’s eating an invisible sandwich, taking slow, luxurious bites, and it’s filling up his mouth like water. Across the quad, I see an incredible boy with rippling muscles throwing a football. His skin is like gelatin, shaking when he moves. He is the most beautiful boy I have ever seen, and so I wish him gone. But instead of disappearing, he multiplies, and each time he throws the football, there’s another one of him there to catch it, until all of his gelatin selves have formed a full, wiggling team, ducking and diving and hailing Mary all over the place. 

     You’re not wearing pants, Lindsey says between his chomping, and I tell him he has no right to judge because he has no eyes. That’s not true, he says, I have eyes, they’re just stuck in backwards. I ask him to prove it, but he says he can’t, not without killing himself, which he definitely, definitely doesn’t want to do. I don’t believe him, but that doesn’t seem like a nice thing to say, so I let him pretend. Everyone here is me, after all.

     It’s a widely accepted fact here, that everyone is me. At least it is to me, so I assume by the transitive property, it is to everyone else as well. I haven’t asked anyone, though. That would be like asking your parents if they are in fact your parents, because of course they are, who else would they be goddammit, and where do you get off asking me a question like that, it’s like you don’t even want to be a part of this family. At least, that’s what Jung said—that everyone is me—chewing on his pipe like a rat tail and slurring in his unabashed, pre-war German. Everyone in the dream is you! Every time he said it, he’d start in the center of the room, then, like the bouncy ball in a sing-along video, he’d pop from word to word until he was standing at the window, watching a rain of firebombs hail down from the sky. Then, he’d blink out of existence and the whole thing would repeat again. Everyone in the dream is you! Pop. Everyone! In the dream! Is you!

     Lindsey asks me what I’m doing this weekend and I tell him I’m going on a date. With who? he asks, and I tell him I don’t know yet. How about him? He points to the field where the beautiful boys have formed a pyramid, complete but its tippy top, which the last two are each attempting to finish by bouncing one off the other’s stomach like a trampoline. Which one? I ask, and he says Take your pick. He tries to whistle them over, but his mouth is still full of sandwich and it trickles down his face, so he just claps his hands a bunch until they notice, rolling over one another and bouncing into line in front of me. 

     I poke one in the belly and he giggles. The next one does too. I move down the line, one by one, poking each one until I get to the last and when I poke him, he doesn’t giggle or even smile. But when I remove my finger his belly starts to leak fluid, or at least I think it does, until I look up and he’s crying. 

     This one, I say to Lindsey. I want this one.

At some point, all my teeth fall out. This happens enough, in the dream, but it’s annoying every time. I’m still taking my pills, you see, even in the dream, and sometimes, if it happens while I’m standing at my bathroom mirror like it does today, sometimes I’ll take a handful of my teeth instead and shoot them back down my throat without tasting them, just like the grown-ups showed me. The pills start dissolving the second they hit my stomach, shedding their little coats and setting down their packages of enzymatic inhibitors. But the teeth don’t dissolve. Instead, they attach themselves to the lining of my stomach in a ring and start eating my food instead of me. So, I go hungry for a while. But today I make sure to dump all the teeth into the garbage can before slinging back the others, because I have a date tonight, and we’re going to a restaurant, and I want to be able to at least pretend to enjoy my meal.

     My mommy is pacing around downstairs, which I can tell even from the bathroom because I hear her voice on the boombox coming and going like an ambulance siren. I go out to watch her from the landing. She’s got a new floral-printed bedsheet, and she’s wearing it draped over her whole body with the eyes cut out. She has the boombox perched on her shoulder like an 80’s b-boy, and the mouths of the speakers are flapping open with every recorded word. 

     THAT’S ALRIGHT it says at volume eleven OH HONEY CONGRATULATIONS, and then she turns back around and starts walking the other way and I hear it bouncing off the wall IT’LL GET BETTER, I PROMISE, then back again YOU’RE GONNA MAKE YOUR MOTHER CRY. I bop down to the kitchen and start making a sandwich.

     I’ve got a date tonight, I tell her, and the boombox replies I’M SO PROUD OF YOU. I’ll probably be home late, I say, and the boombox asks DID YOU FINISH YOUR HOMEWORK? Of course I didn’t, I say, this is a dream, the homework’s made of fish scales, and the boombox says THAT’S ALRIGHT. Are we out of mayonnaise? I say, rifling through the fridge. OH HONEY CONGRATULATIONS replies the boombox, and it sounds like she’s turned around again. I think we’re out, I say, and put my sandwich down half sandwiched. IT’LL GET BETTER, I PROMISE. I grab my jacket from the hook by the door and tell her I’m headed to the store. YOU’RE GONNA MAKE YOUR MOTHER CRY the boombox says as I shut the door behind me.

     A few blocks from the house I remember I have no teeth, so a sandwich is out of the question. When I reach the corner and turn onto Only Way, there’s Jung waiting for me with his stupid little mustache, only now he’s a cat. I keep walking and he follows beside me. 

     What happened to your teeth? He asks me. I tell him he’s one to judge, seeing as he’s now a cat, but it turns out he’s just asking, so I tell him I threw them away. Not a good sign, he says, In a dream, anyway. Losing all your teeth is a symbol of losing your grip, he says. Grip on what? I ask him, but he spots a mouse in the hedge by the sidewalk and jumps away to chase it. He comes back covered in blood. But this isn’t a dream, he says, licking his lips. You should probably go see a doctor. I don’t have the heart to tell him, so I say I will.

     At the store I try to purchase the mayonnaise but the cashier is dead on the floor, so instead I drop a five-dollar bill on the counter and hop up to sit beside it. Jung joins me, and watches me pop the top off the jar and scoop out the egg fat with my hand. After a few spoonfuls, I hold my fingers out to him, and he licks them clean, sanding the skin off my hand with his tongue. Together we look down at the bloodied face of the cashier. 

     He looks familiar, I say, and Jung says, Of course he does. Our brains can’t make new faces, so everyone we see in our dreams is a face we’ve seen before, even if we don’t know it. The guy on the billboard or the woman who serves us coffee. I thought this wasn’t a dream, I said, and he says it isn’t, but he doesn’t sound so sure. I see the wind pick up outside and the front door blows open, then sucks shut again with a loud bang. I feel my stomach drop again. I struggle not to vomit up my mayonnaise. 

     How would we know? I ask Jung. Well, he replies, I guess we wouldn’t. Maybe we’d be able to tell when it was over, because then things would be different, but until then, there was just no way to know. I tell him he doesn’t sound very confident, and he tells me he’s not the right cat for this kind of talk. And we laugh and laugh.

     On the way home, I take a wrong turn and we end up standing on the edge of the world. Below us, I can see Hell. Jung tries to spit off the edge to see how far down it goes, but he’s a cat, so he can’t. Instead, I pick him up and throw him off. He falls for three and a half minutes, maybe more, but he disappears from sight before I see him hit the bottom. I don’t feel bad. Cats always land on their feet. Except if this is a dream, which would mean that he’s me, which would mean that he doesn’t.