Lucid Dreaming Read online

  “Why the fuck are you doing that?” I demanded, when I couldn’t get by him.

  “The fairies will give me a lucky cornflake,” he answered.

  I started to tell him he needed to head for West Hollywood, but realized it was pointless. The way he sounded reminded me of Ms. Conroy, back at the hospital. They both mumbled the words, as if they could barely open their mouths.

  They sounded like people who talk in their sleep.

  But that was silly. They were both awake. “Do you actually see fairies?” I asked the old guy.

  “No…now they’ve scurbled back to their…”

  I couldn’t make out the rest. He stopped his dance and just slid down the wall, staring at nothing.

  I ran up the stairs to Tommy’s apartment as fast as I could. Tommy was the best friend I’d ever had. He knew about my problems and didn’t care. In fact, he thought it was cool. He’d asked me a lot about the drugs I took, because he was major into both computers and chemistry, especially drug chemistry. He really wasn’t a total stoner, just an occasional tripper, but one who liked knowing how things worked.

  Maybe he’d know about this, then.

  My stomach turned over when I saw his door was open. Tommy had three locks, because he had a lot of really valuable electronic and computer stuff; he never just left his door swinging like that.

  “Tommy?” I called, going in real slow.

  I didn’t have to go far. Tommy was dead on the living room floor. He looked as if he’d been dead for a couple of days, because his skin was white and mushy-looking and he smelled. There were some little bits of brown stuff spilling out of one hand, and when I looked at them I realized they were magic mushrooms.

  Shit. Tommy had OD’d on ’shrooms.

  I started crying, but couldn’t stay there, mainly because of that smell. I stumbled out onto the street, trying to stop bawling, trying to figure out what to do now.

  It was getting dark, and I needed someplace to stay. A lot of people were still out on the streets, and they were starting to freak me out. One huge, foul-smelling man—a local transient Tommy and I had named The Ogre—was looking at me really strangely, and I didn’t want to hang around to find out why. I thought about going back to Tommy’s, dragging him out, but knew I couldn’t do it. Instead I tried other doors in his building until I found one that was unlocked. I held the gun out before me and went through the whole place, but it was empty inside. I locked the door behind me, then huffed and hauled a big bookcase over to block the door, just to be really safe.

  Feeling a little calmer, I dried my eyes and tried to force myself to think. First I decided to take inventory.

  Whoever had lived here had had even less money than Tommy. There wasn’t much in this place: A stained and tatty futon couch, a cheap coffee table, a television and stereo on top of some bricks and boards. In the kitchen, a few packages of Top Ramen, cans of chocolate pudding, and beer.

  Obviously a guy’s place.

  The bedroom smelled musty, like old sweat, and held only a double bed, an upended crate for a bedside table, and some posters of girls with racing cars. I think it was safe to say this guy didn’t get laid much.

  Of course neither did I.

  Fortunately he had some okay clothes, and I hadn’t put on lots of weight during my three fun months in the institution, so they’d probably fit me, with some rolling and belting. Good. That was something.

  I took a beer from the fridge (fuck, this asshole bought the worst, cheapest swill), and downed another Prolixin with it. Then I curled up on the futon couch, and tried not to think about Tommy.

  It took a while, but I finally drifted off.

  Chapter 3

  “HAHAHAHAHA!”

  I had no idea what time it was when the high-pitched, hysterical laughter outside woke me up. I only knew that it was pitch dark outside—darker than I’d ever seen L.A., with no lights creating a red nighttime haze over the city—and it felt like the middle of the night. The laughter went on for a few seconds…

  …and then was abruptly silenced by a loud, sharp BANG.

  I waited, panting, heart hammering, disoriented. When it stayed quiet, my heart rate slowed back down, and I remembered where I was. It was so dark I couldn’t see a fucking thing, but I remembered where I’d seen the TV and I lumbered over to it, barking my shin once on that stupid, cheapass coffee table.

  I found the power button on the TV and pressed it, but remembered that there was no power. Nothing happened, of course.

  I thought about the pudding I’d seen in the cabinets, and I stumbled into the kitchen. I rifled blindly through some drawers until I found a spoon. I took every can back to the futon with me, and ate them all.

  Then I sat there, listening, thinking.

  I had to start treating this sitch like it was permanent. Here for good. I should stockpile canned food, water, batteries, and flashlights. Guns and ammo. Prolixin.

  I made mental lists until dawn. It stayed fairly quiet the rest of the night. Once I heard something thumping overhead, and realized some of the other apartments still had occupants. Maybe I should go see them, make sure they—

  —there was a lot of screaming overhead. I decided against seeking anyone out.

  Dawn came at last. Light slowly filtered into the apartment. I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: A pile of newspapers next to the trash in the kitchen. So my vanished host hadn’t been completely illiterate.

  I brought the stack over to the window, and sat down next to it. I reached into the middle of the pile and brought out a paper that I thought was about two weeks old (I couldn’t be sure, since I didn’t really know the current date). The headline read “MAN KILLS TWENTY-FOUR WITH CAR.” There were a couple of other articles about ordinary citizens doing extraordinarily violent things.

  Business as usual.

  Two days later, the headline read “DREAM SICKNESS SPREADS.” Now we were getting somewhere. This article talked about outbreaks of something called “dream sickness” in Connecticut, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Arizona and Oregon. There were also reports of the illness appearing as far away as Kolkata, Berlin and London. There were some side articles about scientists trying to identify the “vectors” of the disease, and lots of tech talk that bored the shit out of me.

  What I did get out of it was that people were acting crazy. Or, more specifically, as if they were asleep. Asleep and…

  Dreaming.

  I’d done some reading about dreams, mainly as they related to schizophrenia and mental illness. What I’d got was that dreams were the brain’s way of organizing information into symbols that could be stored, the way a computer splits everything into ones and zeroes. This storage process usually happens when we sleep, so it won’t get in the way of anything else.

  But what if something had happened that messed up the brain and made it process those symbols when we were awake? Some people thought that was what schizophrenia was, although I’d never remembered one dream in my whole life, so I couldn’t compare. But I knew lots of people had falling dreams.

  And one of them was lying outside on the sidewalk with a broken leg right now.

  My next brilliant conclusion was that it hadn’t happened to me because of the Prolixin. Or it had happened to me, and I just didn’t know it.

  I opted for choice #1. Great—so the rest of the world had finally caught up with me.

  The second-to-last headline read, “PRESIDENT SAYS DREAMING SICKNESS UNDER CONTROL.”

  Asshole.

  The last one, dated two days later, stated boldly, “WONDER BOY SAVES WORLD, THEN HIS TEETH FALL OUT.”

  No more papers after that. Too bad—I was kind of curious about what happened to Wonder boy.

  I set the papers aside and thought. It didn’t make me feel any better to know that I’d probably figured out what was going on better than those CDC doctors; for one thing, plenty of folks had violent dreams, and those were the ones I needed to worry about. For another, I had no idea how l
ong whatever this was (Virus? Bacteria? Cosmic radiation?) would last.

  This could be the rest of my life.

  That thought was pretty fucking depressing.

  I caught a whiff of something rank then, and after sniffing around briefly I realized it was me. I might as well start trying to get my life back together, and it should begin with cleaning myself up. I went back to my host’s bathroom (which thankfully was fairly clean), and experimentally twisted the sink taps. Nothing. Of course, L.A. basically had never had its own water, so there was no reason to expect any now. Fortunately there were two untouched five-gallon jugs in the kitchen (that was another thing about L.A.’s water—no matter how many flyers the Department of Water and Power sent out assuring us that the water was drinkable, it wasn’t). I poured some into some pans and gave myself a cold shower in the stall. I felt better afterwards.

  I dressed in some blue jeans and a leather jacket that I found in the closet (they actually looked pretty good on me), then I went out. I took the gun with me, of course. The street was quiet outside, just the dreamers staggering or laying around. The car was where I’d left it.

  The nearest market was six blocks away; I’d shopped there a million times with Tommy, laughing as we filled up the cart with Oreos and Pop-Tarts and Cokes. I had to drive slow, to keep from running over people, but the parking lot was quiet, only a few cars present. One had the doors hanging open.

  That got to me. Nobody in L.A. would have left the car doors open while they went into a market.

  Fuck. I was about to cry again.

  I waited, willing myself back to calm and determined.

  And then I heard gunshots.

  They came from inside the market. I sat frozen behind the wheel of my SUV, watching, paralyzed, as two people, a man and a woman, came running out. Both were holding bags of food. The man had a gun, too. He waved it in my direction and shouted, “Just stay there!”

  They got in a car (not the one with doors open) and drove off.

  I almost went after them. They’d been angry and scared and they’d also been wide-awake.

  But they’d come out of the market with food. And I was hungry.

  I pulled the SUV up right in front of the market, checked my own gun, and climbed out.

  I was just stepping through the glassless front doors when I heard someone call for help from inside the market.

  I made my way in and found a man spread out on the floor near the cash registers, a can of beets still clutched in one hand. There was a bleeding hole in his chest.

  “Help me,” he cried. He was maybe forty, Latino, a sweet face, nice black hair. He was also nearly dead.

  “I can’t.”

  He choked on that. I wanted to do something for him, but didn’t know what. He’d been shot over a can of food. Which meant he’d been sane enough to know he had to eat.

  “Why aren’t you like the rest of them?” I asked.

  A blood bubble formed in his mouth, then popped. “Rest…?” he wheezed.

  “Yeah, you know. Crazy. Like you’re dreaming.”

  “I’m not now,” he whispered. Then he died.

  I backed away from him and thought about it. After the brain had finished its processing, the dreaming would have to shut down while new data was taken in.

  Which only meant it was worse than I’d thought, because now I knew that all these sick dreamers would have a few lucid moments, and during those moments they’d be hungry and hurt and very pissed off, and I’d have to fight them for what I needed.

  I hefted my own gun and went up and down the aisles of the market. It was dark and creepy in there, starting to smell of decaying vegetables and meat. The shelves were still about half-full, but frankly the place scared me, and I didn’t spend a lot of time going over what I grabbed. I ended up with a few cans of fruit cocktail, soft drinks, sauerkraut, and boxes of kids’ cereal. I found some empty boxes out back, and filled them up with bottled water and Slim Jims and saltines. I did grab a couple of bottles of an expensive vodka I’d never been able to afford before.

  I pulled the SUV up closer to the front of the store, and was just trying to fit the last box in when I heard footsteps, fast, behind me. I turned, and saw a man running in my direction. Fuck. I’d set the gun down in the front seat while I’d loaded the back, and now I cursed myself for my stupidity—I’d have to learn to think smarter, or I’d be dead.

  I was about to run for the front of the car when I got a closer look at this guy, and I stopped. For one thing, he didn’t look like he wanted to hurt me—he was smiling from ear to ear, and his arms were outstretched like something from a gooey love story or a commercial. And for another thing, he was the most gorgeous hunk I’d ever seen. Young, glistening black skin, just over six feet, a body that’d obviously had some serious work put into it—I mean, he was cut—and he had gleaming white teeth and beautiful brown eyes. He wore a sleeveless t-shirt that bore the logo of a local Buddhist temple and nice tight jeans.

  He ran right up as if we’d known each other our entire lives, and I let him throw his arms around me. He hugged me tightly, then pulled back, looked me right in the eye and said, “I love you.”

  I don’t know why I said it, but I did. “I love you.”

  He hugged me again, only this time he picked me up and whirled me around, my feet flying out behind me.

  When he set me down, suddenly his eyes squinched shut and his back arched. Then the front of his pants got wet.

  I’d just seen my first nocturnal emission. And it wasn’t even noon yet.

  He relaxed against the car, looking dazed and happy.

  I made an instant decision. I reached down, took his hand, and he let me lead him around to the passenger side, where I opened the door and placed him in the seat. I buckled his seat belt while he smiled sweetly and muttered, “My soul’s golden forty miles.”

  So he was a New Age freakazoid. But he was beautiful, and he did what I told him to do. I’d meant it when I said I loved him.

  I still do.

  His name, which I got off a driver’s license still in his pants pocket, was Theodore. That was gross, so I called him Teddy (besides, I’d once loved a soul singer by that name, and they looked slightly alike).

  I spent the rest of that day finding us a new place to live. I’d thought about going back to the apartment I’d spent the night in, but decided all the people in the neighborhood made me nervous, and I could do much better. I wanted to give Teddy something nice. So I headed the SUV west, into Beverly Hills. Just as I’d guessed, the streets here were largely free of dreamers, and I was able to pick up a little speed. I drove down streets with ritzy names like Roxford and Beverly Glen until I found what I was looking for: A house set back from the street, behind a high, protective hedge. The gate was open, and the driveway clear. I drove the SUV right on in like I owned the place…which I guess I did now.

  Except I did something really fucking stupid that nearly got both Teddy and I killed.

  The front door was locked, so I shot the locks out with my gun; I figured we could always just bar the door with furniture or something. I took Teddy right in, not even thinking to check the place over first. We walked into the living room, and stood gaping at more wealth than I’d ever seen put together in one place. There was a huge fireplace with a carved wooden mantel, lots of uncomfortable looking chairs and couches, some old-looking framed paintings and real wooden floors.

  I was still standing there with my mouth hanging open like an idiot when a bullet whizzed by my ear.

  I turned, and saw a crazed-looking woman at the corner of the room, wielding a pistol. There was no question that this was her house: She was in her fifties, but had had enough work done that her face had that gross stretched look, and her hair was brittle. She was thin as a rail, and I knew it wasn’t because she was out of food.

  She was probably bulimic.

  “Get out of my house, you filthy pigs!” she screeched.

  I held up one hand in
a placating gesture, and grabbed Teddy with the other.

  “It’s okay, I’m sorry, we’re leaving—don’t shoot!”

  “Get out NOW!” she screamed, then looked pointedly at Teddy. “You animals think you can just come in here and take my house?!”

  I really didn’t like this rich bitch.

  I edged toward the doorway, pulling Teddy along. “Okay, we’re going, we’re going…”

  “NOW!”

  She fired the gun again, and a vase (that was probably worth more than three years of my salary at the record store) exploded by me. She didn’t care; she just didn’t want poor people in her fine home.

  “Christ, stop shooting! We’re going!”

  I fully expected her to kill us.

  And she probably would have, except that suddenly her eyes kind of went blank, the gun dropped from her hand, her head fell forward, and she started to mutter softly.

  “…pool man’s bill still needs…” was all I caught.

  Jesus—even her dreams were boring.

  I waited for a few seconds, not quite believing that Teddy and I were still alive and uninjured. Then I walked up to her and bent down. There was no question—she was doing the awake-dreaming thing.

  So now I’d seen it kick in. It was kind of like watching someone drop off to sleep, just a little faster.

  I picked up her gun and shoved it into my waistband, then I thought about what to do. I probably should have taken Teddy and gotten back in the SUV, just searched some more until we found an uninhabited house that was just as nice, taken that one.

  But you know…fuck it, she’d pissed me off.

  It didn’t take me long to decide what to do. I took Teddy out to the SUV first, and buckled him into the back seat. Then I went back to her. She resisted a little when I gently took her arm and pointed her towards my car, but finally she let me guide her to the front passenger seat, where I buckled her in.

  Fifteen minutes later I dropped her off in the apartment I’d left behind. The old man was still doing his peculiar little dance on the walkway. Maybe they would become good friends.