Anthology Complex (7 page)

She's sitting on my couch telling me about her ex-husband, but not once
does she mention how she got the bruises. I assume it's just a part of her life
that she will not talk about. Everyone has those. Then she starts to talk about
how she feels so alone at times.

I start to tell her about Maria, how even when I was with her I still
felt alone at times. I think to myself, sometimes we are alone and in pain for
so long that after a while we can't feel the loneliness or the pain anymore. I
tell Lynne that even if you find someone, there is still a chance you will feel
alone.

As I'm talking, the phone begins to ring. That damn ringing sound. I
tell her that I'll be back, and I answer the phone. It's the hospital, some
lady telling me that they are going to move Joe to another room. A room where
they put other coma patients who have been in a coma for a long period of time.
I go back to the living room, and I find that Lynne has fallen asleep on my couch.
I was gone no more than five minutes.

I start to say her name out loud, but she's not waking up. I rub her
shoulder, but she still doesn't wake up. Deep asleep. I think to myself, what
should I do. Just let her rest here until she wakes up? I say her name out loud
one more time, this time even louder, but she still doesn't wake up. At this
point I'm thinking of getting a large bucket of cold water, but instead I go to
her apartment door and I see if her door is open, and it is.

I decide that I will just carry her to her bed. It would probably be
very weird to her if she woke up on my couch in the morning. So I open her
apartment door wide open and then I go back to my apartment, I go back to her.
I say her name louder one last time. And then I rub her shoulder harder one
last time. She still will not wake up. I pick her up, this tiny woman, and I
carry her to her bedroom and I place her in her bed. I look down at her for a
little while. I wonder what she is dreaming about, hoping that she is in some kind
of peaceful place. Her utopia.

I look down at her legs but I can't see her fake leg because she's
wearing jeans again, but I can however see her feet. She didn't wear shoes when
she was coming over to apologize. I'm looking at this plastic foot, and then I
reach out and touch it. I slide my hand across it. That cold plastic. This one
part of her body that doesn't have to deal with pain anymore.

I pull the blanket over her and as I'm walking away I hear her say
something, but I can't understand it. I turn around, and I realize she's
talking in her sleep. She talks in her sleep.

I laugh and then I go across the hall, to the kids room. I put my hand
on the doorknob, and I think for a little while, and then I open it and I see
David and Sarah sleeping. In the corner I see the television on that high
cabinet. David and Sarah should be arguing about what cartoons to watch, but
instead they have watch their mother take a beating in the places that are
still prone to pain.

Chapter 14:

“SLEEP WHEN YOU'RE DEAD”

I'm leaving my apartment building and I notice the flowers. They are
growing but they look funny now, as if they are missing something. I wonder if
Lynne planted them right. Now I'm at the hospital, asking someone if they could
find out where they moved Joe, he's still in that damn coma. They take me to
the room, and I see a few other people who are also in comas. I pull up a chair
next to Joe and I sit and think.

According to some scale, if you are in a state of confusion, you are in
the mildest coma. A coma is a state of unconsciousness. You are considered
unconscious when you don't react to the environment around you. So imagine a
person walking around confused and technically unconscious. What happens if
that person comes face to face with danger and doesn't even realize it?

Some people will tell you that coma patients can sometimes hear you if
you try speaking to them, but I don't know if it's fact or fiction, but I had a
weird dream last night and it had something to do with Joe. I decided to tell
him the dream regardless of if he could hear me or not. I tell him that in the
dream I'm sitting in this small room, at a desk.

On the desk in front of me there is an emergency contact form that I
have to fill out. On the wall that I'm facing, there are two paintings. On the
left there is a painting of the Chicago Cubs logo, a baseball team, and on the
right there is a painting of Anna Briol Walkhill, a celebrity. I don't pay as
much attention to the paintings as I do the form, simply because I'm having
such a hard time filling it out. If something happens to me who should know
first? Who should know last?

I still often wonder why Joe would put me on his list, but I think I'm
starting to understand. I'm starting to understand that maybe Joe is as alone
as I am. Maybe one man can never know another man, but if we can begin to
understand and comprehend these things that this man does because we also do
these things, we can come closer to understand who he is through who we are. He
probably had just as hard of a time filling out the form as I did.

After a while I think about the other people that I know in my life, are
they as alone as I am? There are thousands of people around us but we still
manage to drown in loneliness either because we don't know these people around
us or we just don't want to know them at all.

At some point during the night I guess my dream completely shifted focus
because I also had a dream where I was in a helicopter with someone. He was the
pilot and I was the co-pilot. I looked down at this city, this civilization,
and I realized just how little I really knew about a world where there was so
much to know. So many people walking, working. So many rocks, roads.

In the human body the heart pumps blood throughout the entire system to
get nutrients around to parts of the body, parts such as the brain and the
muscles we use to walk. The way of travel is through veins and arteries.

While I'm looking down at this place with so many roads, its structure
begins to remind me of human veins. People driving to work along this road,
blood cells traveling to the calf along this vein. They do this all for the
sake of the bigger picture, for the efficient operation of a large system. The
similarities of how our body functions and how a city functions are uncanny.
Every one has to work. Every blood cell has to supply. Every one has to do
their job to keep the system in motion.

The pilot moves the helicopter a bit closer to the ground and as he's
doing this there is a big automobile crash on a road below. A small problem in
a large system. Now the pilot is bringing the helicopter even lower so we can
check it out, and then I wake up. I remember in another dream I had when we
finally land, we see a lifeless body on a sidewalk near where the crash took
place. I can't help but think about Joe's crash. I picture Joe's lifeless body
lying on that pavement the same way he is lying here on this hospital bed. Who
is this man who lays here sleeping? Who is the man who lays there dead in my
dream? Who is that woman that lays in my bed in my dreams and never shows me
her face?

Chapter 15:

THIS FISHEYE VIEW

I pick a random composition notebook and take it down from off the
shelf. This one is dated from two years ago. Now I flip to a random page, to a
random dream, but what exactly is random? If you stuck an invisible magnet on
one side of a die and then rolled the die on a floor that would attract the
magnet, you can get the die to always land on four, or any specific number that
you want, every time. We have applied a specific circumstance or force, the
magnet, to the event, rolling the die, which will give us the same output every
time.

Now we remove the magnet and then roll the die five times, we will
usually get different outputs. While this may seem random, there are still
circumstances and forces at work, such as strength and gravity, but if we can
manipulate these circumstances and forces we can get the output we want every
time. So considering these elements, true random may be the absence of any
circumstances and forces whatsoever. No influences at all.

The dream that I end up reading is a dream about judgment. In the dream
I am standing before God, and he asks me why he should let me into Heaven.
There was a day when I was younger and my mother came to pick me up from
school, and in the car I ask my mother what Hell is. She looks at me for a
moment, as if she is trying to determine whether I will understand or not, and
then she tells me that when we die, we are either sent to Heaven or to Hell.

I ask her what these two places are, and she tells me that Heaven is a
happy place where the good people go, and Hell is a sad place where the bad
people go. She tells me that the only one who can decide where we go, the only
one who can judge us, is God, because God is good.

She tells me never to judge another person because no matter how good we
may think we are, there is still that chance that we can become that bad person
we are judging later in life. This bad politician who benefits financially from
the murder of thousands of people, he could just have easily have been the good
general who saves these thousands of lives, if only the circumstances and the
forces in his life were different. But we must also consider that in the change
of these circumstances and forces, this general could become the politician.

I tell God that I lived my life the best way I knew how, and I tried to
be a decent person. I told him he could accept me for who I am, but that I
wasn't going to beg him to let me into Heaven. He looks at me for at least a
minute, judging me, and then he tells me to start walking. I begin to walk and
as I'm walking there is a light that gets brighter and brighter, brighter and
brighter and then pitch black, and then I wake up.

My philosophy on the search for the truth is that I can be convinced.
Religion, science, the exploration of the universe, if someone's teachings are
convincing then I can believe it. There are people who suffer from a massive
amount of pride in their ideas and beliefs and there is no convincing them of
another truth. They just won't accept it.

These people have this fisheye view where they think they have the
answers, they think they can see it all, but they are looking through only one
perspective.

They can hear all these things, but they can't see them because they are
only looking in one direction. There was a man who said that you should be like
water, taking the form of any cup you should be poured in. An open mind is
sometimes the difference between salvation and turmoil. Satisfaction and
dissatisfaction.

Chapter 16:

THINGS CREDITED TO FATE

Sometimes our dreams take place in a certain location more than once.
For some of us it's a lot more than once, some of us may even have dreams in
that certain location every month or every year. The location might be an old
house, a place you used to play as a child, the place where you met your best
friend or your one true love. This place just keeps coming back to you in your
dreams almost as if it were trying to tell you something.

While the location remains the same, we don't usually dream about the
same thing. Details, plots, people, these properties of the dreams often
change. I'd like to say the location never changes because we think it will
always look the way it looks in our minds when we think about it.

Even after years have passed and we've moved on from that place, when we
think about it and try to remember it, when we try to think of what it may look
like now, all we can remember is the way it looked when we left it.

There is this dream I have often where I'm in the military and I am
traveling along with a few other soldiers in this deserted area. There are
small rundown buildings and a dirt path for vehicle travel. In one variation of
the dream we are all riding in a vehicle. I'm in the passenger's seat, there is
a man in the driver's seat, and then there is a big open space in the back for
the other soldiers to sit in.

I look down at my dog tags, and they are blank. I look at the driver's
dog tags, it reads "Max Harper." Behind me, to the left, there is a
metal window slider, I pull it up and I can see the other soldiers in the back,
playing cards.