Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
When the Center Falls Away, Part 1 of 2
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
This is a two-part piece; the conclusion will be posted tomorrow. Please feel encouraged to comment if you have feelings about this kind of thing one way or another.
Chico didn’t really understand how people were inserted into dreams; it was all a bunch of neurochemistry and electroneurology and interface science and software entity engineering, and those weren’t where his skills lay. But he didn’t have to understand it. All he had to understand was that a rich guy was having nightmares.
No nightmares so far, though. He just sat in the dim grayness of the subject’s mind, watching images spring up from the blackness, flicker, flatten, and fade.
Then he felt the gravitational pull of the dreamer’s mind as the dream began: a loose and imprecisely-defined ego coalesced out of a swamp of memories and habits among dark semi-human shapes. Dream interventionists were always pulled to the dreamer’s ego, because everything existed in related to it. Chico felt himself dragged down the thought vortex toward the dreamer: a generic shape, flickering with shadows, mostly in the form of a boy. Across from the boy sat a hugely fat, glowering woman with bull’s horns. The boy turned and ran, but his dream dragged the woman along after him effortlessly: she was too important to whatever he was worrying about to slip away. Chico could feel the fear in the air. The setting suddenly flickered into sharp relief, a school somewhere, all linoleum hallways and painted cinder block walls with grade school art projects taped up on them. The horned woman stepped out of a classroom door ahead. Then the hallway crackled and snapped and turned into a cafeteria crowded with shouting, oblivious students. The boy stopped running, knowing (Chico could share the thought) that he couldn’t leave the cafeteria during lunch without a pass. This was the time for Chico to step in: he would help the dreamer face the horned woman …
The huge woman lurched forward suddenly, scattering children who folded back into her wake. Then she reached out and and grabbed the boy’s head with one meaty hand. He screamed as she jerked on his head, snapping his neck. Chico cursed. Now the dreamer would wake up and he would have to start all over.
The dreamer collapsed to the floor and began to break apart into ash. Chico felt a sudden rush of panic as he realized the dream was not ending.
The horned woman looked up at Chico and shrieked wordlessly.
He Had a Void in His Chest
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
He had a void in his chest. It wasn’t a hole, like the kind of thing a shotgun would make. It was very dark, and it only barely had edges, and it seemed to make you bend toward it, and it made a low sound like water running over something electrical, and frightened me nearly to death.
He, the homeless man, sat stiff against a tree, his legs crabbed back and his arms splayed out and his throat exposed and quivering with wiry black hairs. A boy–he can’t have been more than five or six–threw a pine cone at a passing rollerblader on the bike path, but near the path the pine cone veered as though it were being swung on a string … veered toward the man with the void, slowed down, rolled across the ground, sped up, skittered over the dry, sandy earth, leapt into the hole, and was gone. The noise, the water running over something electrical noise, went up in pitch just a tiny bit.
I turned, and there were people wandering toward us through the park, a pair of lovers whose held hands were losing their grip, a man in an expensive suit who had forgotten his laptop case on a park bench, a pair of girls dangling Barbie dolls … all staring at the void.
My shoes started scraping against the dirt. I was sliding toward it.
“Go away,” said the man with the void. “Far as you can get.”
I shuffled backward, my treacherous feet nearly sliding out from under me, moving toward the void.
“What is it? What’s in there?” I said. But he shook his head, and shuddered, and suddenly he folded in on himself and the void was much larger, a gap in the ground that was beginning to swallow the tree. I ran, pushed through the people, out into the traffic that all seemed to be veering now toward the park. I ran for the river, where there were oceangoing ships. I imagined the ocean roaring in, pouring into the relentless gap, the earth collapsing in on itself like the man had done.
But I didn’t understand, because when I turned to look, fearing I would see the void already engulfing the park, instead there was a light in that direction, a brilliant light that shone like a new star.