A DREAM, 12 AM, L.A., BUT IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER

Fiction by Ev Datsyk & Lise Morland

BED, 6:41 AM, A STICKY SUMMER MORNING

There is a woman in his bed and a woman in his head. He wakes with both but only wants one, heedless of whether either wants him.

The woman in his bed is too young and an artist. He’s always waiting for her to leave him. She gives no indication she will, but he expects it anyway, a person who has lost sight of the difference between waiting and wanting.

A man of greater conscience would end things, but, every time he entertains that in earnest, he finds more to let from her blood. Some vital essence he’s been pillaging from her slowly, stealthily, for months: her joie de vivre.

The woman in his dream had a joie de mort. An inner darkness that stared back at his, void to void, starless and hungry. L’appel du vide.

And now he’s a man who walks two worlds: the present and a dream. One foot in the real world—solid concrete, cold stone—and the other in the ether of sleep—slippery gossamer, too fragile to bear his full weight.

BED, 6:41 AM, IN THE FRIGID AIR-CONDITIONING OF AN L.A. SUMMER

She wakes up to the phantom smell of unfamiliar cologne. It’s dark and clean and sharp, like if a shark’s triangular tooth had been transmogrified into a scent.

The man in her bed will be her husband in six months and five days. They’ve been together a long time. Too long, maybe. So long she has to do math in her head to come up with the exact number. Subtract fifteen from her age; that was how old they’d been when they met. Sweethearts. School lockers and football field bleachers flush with nostalgia. She knows his cologne, every note of it. She knows the black bottle, the brand, and the drawer it sits in.

He’s in the shower getting ready for work. A doctor. Plastic surgeon. It’s impressive at parties and insidious when he runs his thumb under her eyes and says, You look tired but means, I could fix that.

This new scent fades the harder she tries to hold onto it and the harder she tries to conjure the man it belongs to. She’s never seen him before, she’s sure of it. But he’ll visit her throughout the rest of the day in traces of déjà vu, misassembled dream-montages, a flash of a dimpled smile or ocean blue eyes she imagines herself drowning in.

THE KITCHEN, 10:35 AM, A LIST OF GOOGLE SEARCHES 

people you see in dreams

what does it mean to meet someone in a dream?

are the people you see in your dreams real?

is it possible to dream about someone you’ve never seen?

is it true if you dream of someone they’re also dreaming of you?

dream telepathy

is dream telepathy real?

can someone manifest you in their dreams?

drugs for sleeping

valium side effects

how do you find someone online when you don’t know their name?

SITTING ROOM, 8:17 PM, A FALL DAY, GOLD LEAFED

“Are you having trouble sleeping?” she asked, and he said no.

“Then why are you taking the pills?”

Her questions were fair. His reaction was not.

Now there are artist-shaped spaces around his home. He wonders how he should fill them. Before the artist, these were shelves for another lover’s artifacts, and, before that, a lover before him. He’s never had interest in claiming them for himself. He imagines a world where they’re lined with dreamstuffs.

The woman, he thinks, would like knickknacks of a certain quality. Antiques with ghosts tangled in their machinery. Snowglobes with haunted scenes and dust glittering like stars.

“I’m going crazy,” he says. The penthouse is empty; no one hears it. Still, it’s a relief to say it aloud. I’m going crazy. A delicious admission, and how better to put the experience of falling in love?

BRUNCH, 11:05 AM, FALL BUT IT’S STILL HOT AND DRY IN L.A., SO

“I’m just worried about you, that’s all.” Her friend reaches across the table and lays a hand over her wrist.

She reassures her, “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“You’ve been so far away lately.”

“I’m sorry. I know.” She smiles abjectly, as though this apology will make up for her being a shitty friend. It won’t. She doesn’t care. She’s thinking about what she’ll do when this obligatory brunch ritual is over. Go home. Take a pill. Burrow into her pillow. I missed you.

“Is it about that dream again?”

She feels heat rising in her cheeks. She knows they’re probably turning pink and splotchy. She hates the way her friend says it, That Dream, like it’s something wriggling or repulsive, like she’d just thrown up onto the table next to a plate of half-eaten French toast.

She regrets ever mentioning it.

A MEMORY

When he was seven or eight, he woke every night with a figure sitting on the end of his bed. It was constructed of velvety rich blackness that absorbed all light. Without a single defining feature, he knew it was a woman, and a cruel one. Not his mother, cruel in her own ways, but an immortal and awful one, whose cruelty was not of petty jabs and disappointments, but fatal, and would drag him down hellward like an anchor.

He stared into her, paralyzed. In those terrifying seconds, he yearned for her to swallow him up like moonlight.

But then, something in him woke up. He screamed, and there was the thump thump thump of footsteps on the stairs.

His parents read up. They explained this was hypnopompic hallucination. Your body woke up before your mind, and dreams are slipping through the fissures between worlds.

It’s not real.

But it was. It is.

He’s again in the lapse between worlds, having to choose one.

The darkness is different, but the promise is the same.

Her face is inches from his, her nose a freckled pinpoint in the centre of his view. With some difficulty, he lifts his hands, reaching for her pale cheeks, her dream-flush.

Are you a ghost? Are you a wish? When will you take me under?

A MEMORY

Her teens and twenties were long insomniac years. She never slept. Days would run into nights would run into days again, distinguishable only by the sun sometimes and the moon others.

Nighttime had always been her favorite. Blissful quiet hours. The stars. It was the only time she felt truly awake, or maybe truly alive.

She walked through every other time like a zombie, falling asleep halfway through movies or on the open face of a book or with her chin in her hand in the middle of class, daydreaming.

She survived on double-shot lattes and cool breezes and midnight skies, a tiredness so profound it felt more like invincibility.

THE DRUNKEN BOAR, 6:55 PM, MIDWINTER, EVERYONE IN SCARVES 

“It’s just awful,” his coworkers say.

“I can’t get it out of my head. What they did to those people. The precedent—!”

This is a table of lawyers, so they actually laugh then, pedantically, at the lack of precedent the case set when it was settled rather than tried. He doesn’t.

My father … got put to sleep for 2 months … 20-some hours a day, only awake to use the toilet.

He thinks, So much sleep. Perchance to dream.

“Hey, you with us? Earth to Jaws.”

It’s a silly nickname. Because you are the man who appears from the deep, unseen and unknowable, who rises and chomps and descends with a mouth full of blood.

He is floating, but not in the sea. Or maybe he is. Isn’t it just like that, how the horizon is the singular mirror between the deep and the stars?

SITTING ROOM, 7:16 PM, THREE DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING

She should be asleep. What is she missing in that other distant world? Is he waiting for her? Looking for her? Wondering where she is?

The words spill out before she can think too hard and bite them back. “I can’t marry you. I can’t do it. I can’t.” Her voice is too high-pitched. It comes out with the force of something bottled up for too long.

He’s usually so understanding. So patient. Tonight, he’s hurt and livid. “Where the hell is this coming from?”

What can she say? That she’s never felt this way before? That ever since she’d dreamt that dream—and the countless dreams since—of a mysterious man whose existence is questionable, whose reality is improbable, she could barely think of anything but him?

How is she supposed to say, I think I’m in love with someone else? Someone I’ve never seen, or met—someone who might not even be real?

But all she says is, “I’m so sorry,” as she hugs herself around the middle.

THE PARK, 5:07 PM, WINTER, WHICH LOOKS LIKE FALL, WHICH LOOKS LIKE SUMMER

“Have you seen this man?”

She is the prince in Cinderella. She is holding a printout of a sketch she’d commissioned an artist on Instagram for. They’d exchanged over a dozen emails with her requested changes. She paid extra to get it just right. Thicker eyebrows. Squarer chin. This is her shoe. Does it fit? Is it yours?

She is a forlorn dog-mom looking for her lost puppy. Call this number if you find it. Don’t chase. Will run.

This is how she spends her time now—when she isn’t sleeping. When she isn’t dreaming. She thinks, I’m losing my mind. She thinks, I have to try.

She’s visited every occult store in Santa Monica and Burbank. Bought every book with Dream in the title and a few crystals and some incense for good measure.

She hands a printout to the next person passing, “Have you seen him?”

THAT OVERPRICED ORGANIC STORE, 10:21 PM, WINTER, BUT HE’S CAUGHT A TAN

What do you call a standalone dream? A shooting star. A lone bullet. An outcast. A haunting.

He lost a case at work. They said, you’re not yourself, Jaws. You’re better than this. His bed is lonely. His dreams are empty. He’s starting to miss the artist—anyone, really, who wants to put up with his shit more than they want to be alone.

“I’m going crazy,” he says as he’s said before, waiting for the gravity-rush of madness, the slip-and-fall of love to sweep his legs from under him. It doesn’t. He has so many sleeping pills on him. They’re in his pockets, weighing him down like stones. He crushes one between his molars, then wades into the grocery store like he’s planning to drown in it.

The woman in his head lay her hands on ivory piano keys.

The woman in the vegetable aisle holds an orange.

Is it a daydream or a vision?

He thinks, You look like the woman who ruined my life.

THAT OVERPRICED ORGANIC STORE, 10:21 PM, WINTER, CHILLY ENOUGH FOR A COAT

She still needs to eat. She forgets. It’s easy to forget. It’s easy to sleep and to dream and exist in an immaterial world where she does not need nutrients or vitamins or three meals a day.

The grocery store’s fluorescent lights are so bright overhead they gleam off speckled tiles. The floor is so glossy it looks like a beige lake. She feels less real, less substantial, less herself here than she does in her dreams. It is too much at once.

She picks up an orange and turns it over in her hands and examines it for bruises and squishes it softly to test its firmness. This is more absurd than anything she’s dreamt. I’m losing my mind, she thinks, wanting to laugh.

There aren’t many people here. It’s too late. Or too early. So when she sees a person-shape in her periphery, she looks up.

Her breath catches. She thinks, It’s you.

She knows the bite of his cologne before he even passes her in the aisle.

She thinks, Are you real?

She thinks, Am I?  

Ev Datsyk dreams too much about her 9-to-5 and not nearly enough about falling in love and other joys, like cake. Her publication history can be found here: https://www.evdatsyk.com/

Lise Morland wanted to be a mermaid when she grew up. She's now a writer whose best work can be found on her laptop’s internal storage.