Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

  That first day had always been a blur when he looked ba it, but Dr. X’s extractor peeled it out of him in vivid detail, each sed -linking to the . Despite his loathing of the extractor, it was always amazing, what he thought he had fotten, what was lurking hidden in his mind. The Spirit sees everything, it’s us who are blind, she had said to him once.

  He had been ying there for what felt like days, waiting to wake up, but he had knowe his fusion and the ck of sense in anything else around him, that dreams don’t st days.

  Maybe he was in a a. Or a car wreck. Maybe an overdose. The Adderall mixing wrong with something else. The fact that he had two perfectly believable expnations for his premature demise must have said something about his life, but he was too distracted to refle it. A ship, or pne or boat or whatever it was, shaped like a giant pe, its shell peeling and revealing a work of ant-farm-like tunnels and rooms with gss faces carved into the seed, was floating by overhead, and he was trying to guess why his brain had spit that out at him.

  “Whatcha doin?”

  Her voice had two qualities to it, sweet sugar sing-song on top, and fug tractor beam underh. In the brilliant hindsight of extracted memory, these revetions came easy, but at the time, he had barely noticed anything but the warm electric all-over body tihat always came with meeting your crush in a dream.

  And just like a dream, it was better when you had never seen the girl before in your life.

  Wide open bright greeared out of a heart-shaped face. Her skin ale and smooth, blushing and freckled. High cheeks, perfect little pointed nose, lips that he could feel just looking at them, jagged flying pixie-cut hair, rainbow iridesce dang on ptinum blonde, and that swoopy eyelihing girls used to do that always drove him wild.

  The the rest of her, leaning over him with her hands on her knees. Shortstack, great tits, swelling thighs peeking out the sides of a mini skirt she ressing down against the wind, which he realized now hadn’t blown once before she got there.

  To his surprise, he ignored her. He just y there, staring at the sky, saying nothing. It was such a shock to the one Luke to see the other had once been able to ignore her. Even now, he saw her in crowds, hunted her in the Allclub.

  But that other Luke, though already burning for her, his throat and chest sm and his spirying to jump out of his neck, his breath tingling like the air around her was ionized from a fresh lightning strike, just stared at the sky, ted the windows on a psychedelic submarine. He khen that this was a dream, and if he stopped to talk to every dream girl, no matter how cute, he might never wake up.

  Unfazed, relentlessly smiling, she squatted dowo him. Her weird metallic clothes, like a rave girl who had actually been to spad partied with aliens, ruffled and tinkled like tinsel.

  She cocked her head and spoke to him again, and this time, it was double in a different way. One voice spoke in the smooth lulling way he remembered, vibrating his memory, and another voice was just a series of sounds. The extractor was w in dual feed, one aionally hued and tainted record, the other distilling raw sensory data.

  Then the process became too subtle to detect, the extractor faded into the fabric of time ay, and he glided across the memories like a raindrop on a windshield… no. He was the windshield, and the water. He passed through the memories like a wave, like energy transferred.

  The Luke iractor was beyond time now, so the Luke in memory became supreme.

  She spoke.

  “You know, I read your mind.”

  He focused on his bed, on his arm, told himself—

  “You think I’m a dream girl. Like in your head, right?”

  That got to him.

  “Nope. I know you are. You are the part of me that’s afraid of going back to the real world.”

  He thought it would banish her. He had read somewhere that dream people hate when you tell them they aren’t real. It didn’t.

  “Exaundo!” she pointed one slender fi his fad grinned.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Don’t you want to hear what I have to say? It’s not every day a guy gets to talk to his dream girl.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Soon as I wake up, I’m gono work killing you.”

  “How do you figure yonna do that?

  “Scorched earth.

  “Ha ha, what?”

  “Kill enough brain cells, you’re bound to be in one of them.”

  “Oh, that’s a good idea, but I have a better one.”

  “Fuck—”

  “Why don’t you just apply the alcohol directly? I knoce right below us where we get—”

  “I’m not moving and I’m not going along with your bullshit. Since you’re my subscious, I finally tell you this to your face. I’m not fug ied in self-discovery, healing old scars, or any of that shit. I’m ied in waking up aing paid. Life is shitty, I might as well stay shitty too while I have to deal with it.”

  Something fshed across her face like longing, like need, like pain, but in her practiced perfected guise, it maed only as stillness, as the absence of expression, a temporary freezing of the mask, for only an instant. Of course, the Luke on the rooftop didn’t notice.

  Thearted ba again.

  “So, you’re trying to wake up, right?”

  He didn’t respond. Even if he hadn’t just fug said that, she was in his head anyway.

  She leaned in and smirked like she had caught him in something.

  “Or should I say, you’re trying to wake up, again.”

  He stopped notig anything in the sky or hearing any sound but the soft jingle of her skirt. He noticed, annoyingly and with a jolt of primal anticipation, that she smelled like citrus and alcohol and a fresh sweat.

  “But you ’t quite do it, because you’re afraid that it’ll be just like the st time you woke up, right?”

  He had never known his peripheral vision was capable of such definition until she had taken up residehin it. She leaned in closer.

  “You’re afraid you won't remember any of this when you wake up, but you’ll e right back here anyway, so it’ll feel like you never woke up at all, right?”

  He let his ser focus forse, and his mind, fresh off the leash, charged backward into memory, until it smmed into that dry mass of time when the world hadn’t been ing with flying things arified with emotion like even the roof could talk to him. There he was, at the ter of a normal day, pletely fug oblivious to this other him stu this rooftop. Abandoned. Helpless. It had ended as quickly as it had e, and he had fotten it as he watched the insanity float past overhead.

  He let the fragile belief that all of this art of him slip out of his grasp, momentarily, but that’s all it took.

  He looked her square in the fabsp;

  “How do you fug know that?”

  She smiled and nudged his shoulder with her little ringed hand.

  “I’m in your head, remember?”

  He looked her over for the first time. Geous. Sparkling. As vibrantly alive as he was dead and doomed on this fug rooftop. That was it. He was now like a thing dropped from high up, his destination ainy a matter of mathematics. Everything that happened between that look and the final dull thud was and would be just window dressing. Far away and far ahead, another him took it all in and measured the arc, searg fns that what happened after impact had been something more than a dead cat bounce.

  But on the rooftop,

  “Then why aren’t you naked?”

  Her smile didn’t falter, didn’t increase. Like he had burped or something. Still, she replied.

  “Maybe you’re more into the tease than you think?”

  “Or maybe my subscious knows once you give it up, I’ll stop listening to you.”

  She rolled ba her ass, with her hands ft on the ground behiits pointed up like howitzers, knees bent, legs together, shoes ft on the roof o his shoulder, so that her ehigh and full round hip was out in pin view under her skirt, and her soft calf just barely blocked her pussy. Still, it occurred to him he could reach out and touch it, but he didn’t. Maybe he really did like the tease, or maybe he wasirely certain she was just a thing of his mind.

  “Maybe,” she purred. “But do you think—”

  “Just fug say it.”

  She flipped her hair out of her fad her tits bouhen she cocked her head at him.

  “Say what?”

  “Whatever it is you want to tell me. Whatever message is so important you’ve taken the form of my ideal fuck doll and strapped me to a roof to tell me. Speak, oh great and powerful subscious!”

  He pointed a fi her fad the skin of his hand caught fire. He wao touch her so fug bad.

  “Well,” she rolled her legs out from under her until she was ying on her side o him with her head resting in her hand and one knee poiowards him, like the cssic Pyboy pose. Like a pillow talk monologue in an old bd white.

  “You’re ly strapped down, but ok I’ll tell you.”

  She swung her arm up to the sky and followed it with her gaze. Her profile was siingly adorable. Still, for some reason, he didn’t touch her.

  “This is not a dream world! All those people—”

  He hadn’t taken his eyes off her, so she grabbed him by the jaw, arifying tact that he felt all the way to his toes like a fug teenager, and turned his face towards the sky.

  “All those people are real. Just like you. Just like me. They wake up in their sad little beds and their shitty lives and fet any of this ever existed. But while they’re here, they have a lot of fun.”

  She pulled his face back towards her.

  “Do you want to have a lot of fun?” It was a soft sm whisper, and she left her lips parted at the end.

  “You said it isn’t a dreamworld. Sounds like they dream to get here,” he said, defiantly, trying to keep the heat out of his voice.

  She let go of his head with a sigh aed her fa her hand and frow him.

  “Are you really going to make me try and expin how all this works?”

  “Should be no problem if you’re real. If you’re made up of some piey brain matter, I expect you’ll just say we’re all just brains plugged into a puter or some shit.”

  She stared at him a moment, then scoffed and rolled onto her back. She scooted up o him so they were both ying side by side, staring at the sky. A craft built like a skate park rolled into a tube floated by overhead, and a skater went up a half pipe and came towards them and stopped for a moment, before falling back down into the park's gravity.

  “Do you remember how you got here? How you first dropped into all this?”

  Now, a few things happeo about three different Lukes. The Luke on the rooftop cast his memory backwards, and found a stomach-ing drop. He saw himself running through dream schools and falling out into endless suburbs with strange crafts in the haze overhead. He raced down surrealist highways and flew through portals like things out of a PS1 game and he woke up a huimes. It was all half there, like dreams within dreams, like it had happened in that foggy period of childhood that was often papered over with dreams and imagination when viewed from the present.

  That Luke on the roof tried to expin, a like he was saying nothing, but she had uood pletely, and even firmed things he had fotten to eveion, which, at the time, only made him more certain she was a refle of his sleeping brain and that none of this was real.

  Ahing that happehat could have been said, by certain Lukes, to be happening at the same time, was that the extractor stuttered. Even the best ones had a hard time extrag memories of memories, so to speak. They worked better when starting from a distinct sensatioed directly to the memory they were extrag, but since Luke couldn’t have given them such a memory of his slow birth into the Otherworld even if he had wao, the extraade do.

  Also, the Luke lying iractor realized two things; Firstly, the uny simirity between the girl ying there, so that only her voice was with him, while coaxing out memories he had thought lost forever, and the present, to this Luke at least, feeling of being iractor itself. Or more so, the simirity between his first time in aractor and her method of teasing out his memories. And sedly, he realized that in sharing his memories, the rooftop Luke had taken part in his own ens.

  He soled himself with the fact that it hadn’t helped anything, but had also been basically unavoidable, like an object pig up speed after being dropped from a height.

  The real tragedy he realized, as the extractressed unflingly afterward, was that for the rooftop Luke, terminal velocity hadn’t even been reached yet.

  But she was getting to it.

  Manic pixie dreamwirl, or something more? ime, Luke tries everything, and it all es up short. episode, OneiRory.