Chapter 19: The Unreal - A Dream of Waking Life

“May!” Matt wailed through his old, decrepit voice.

Her brains exploded all over again inside his mind.

“Fuck!” he shouted inside the insidiously familiar, sterile corridor.

I’m not this old fucking man! Matt knew with total certainty. May is real. May is all that fucking matters. I don’t care about anything else.

“May!” Matt wailed again in anguish, shutting his frail eyelids and replaying her death in his mind from a million sordid angles all at once.

“Where is he?” Matt seethed. “Heron! Where the fuck are you!”

Heaving his withered body upright, Matt swung his legs over the bed and stood without even giving it a second thought. The stars to his right shone with indelible, piercing wrath, and the icy world outside the doors to his left raged silently in chaotic anguish.

“Heron, you fuck!” Matt demanded, his wide eyes like smoldering embers at the pit of some long forgotten cavern. “I’ll kill you!” Matt screamed, and he forced his body forward despite capillaries and veins bursting beneath his skin. His old body could only take so much, and Matt felt a detached shock that they were able to resuscitate his broken body after he’d split his face open last time.

No! Matt seethed in response to his shock. This isn’t real. He reached for May in his desperate mind, but he could only imagine her lifeless corpse falling into the pit beneath Dr. Heron’s office.

“Heron!” Matt barked, his voice cracking as he huffed to keep moving, though he didn’t know where to. The corridor appeared infinite, but Matt reasoned once again that it must only be an illusion.

“Mr. Willish?” came the silken, sweet voice of one of the nurses.

Matt turned to see May – or at least one of the many perfect copies of her.

“She’s dead,” Matt told her as the exhaustion of his every cell finally caught up with his murderous rage. His knees gave out, and the nurse ran to catch him before he fell and broke himself all over again.

Her touch – it filled his body with blanketing warmth and security.

“But it isn’t real,” Matt sobbed in May’s embrace. “You’re not real,” he told her sullenly.

“Come now, Mr. Willish. Back to bed. It’ll all be all right,” she assured him soothingly. More nurses entered the corridor from various doorways.

“You’re all copies,” Matt urged as the immeasurable exhaustion of his decrepit body caught up to him. Limp in May’s arms, Matt cried, “Copies of an original. Do you understand?”

The nurse nodded with seemingly perfect understanding.

“I do, Mr. Willish. But we have to keep going. The procedure –”

“No!” Matt practically snarled. “That’s enough! I want answers. Bring Heron. Now!”

The nurse holding Matt looked to the other nurses, then nodded, sending them in various directions.

“I think Dr. Heron will agree that we’ve reached an end point,” the nurse explained, and she kissed Matt on his forehead. “You did great,” she told him in a whisper. “I hope you’ll assess our work as satisfactory, sir.”

Matt shook his head. She’s speaking to me like I’m her boss.

“Mr. Willish!” a familiar voice called out before Matt could answer her.

Struggling to twist his neck, Matt saw the unmistakable Dr. Heron approaching. Rather than his usual nightmare-black clothing, Dr. Heron was dressed in all white. Even his glasses had a translucent pearl hue.

A flash of Dr. Heron in the office gave way to May’s body exploding against steel over and over again in his mind.

Kill him, every cell of Matt’s body pleaded.

“You killed her! The only fucking thing that matters. The only –” Matt seethed, and his rage forced him to a standing position as if inflating a withered balloon. “I’ll kill you!” Matt resolved.

“Mr. Willish,” Dr. Heron issued with his arms held defensively. “You’re going to end up passing out again if you’re not careful with this form. Why not be…” Dr. Heron considered, searching for the right word, “less withered.”

“What?” Matt demanded, caught off guard by Dr. Heron’s question.

“Your body...I just mean…it looks so uncomfortable.”

“Uncomfortable? To be old?” Matt checked, uncertain now if this was the man’s attempt to stall him.

“Well, yeah. That’s one way to describe it. I know this always happens with the procedure, but you can go back to something more comfortable now, sir.”

Sir, Matt repeated in his mind. Just like the nurse – he’s treating me as if I’m his superior. But that can wait, Matt told himself.

“How do I become young again?” Matt urged, breathing laboriously with each lead-heavy step toward Dr. Heron.

“How, you ask?” Dr. Heron almost laughed. Then his demeanor changed suddenly as a new understanding overtook him. He eyed the nurse who had been holding Matt.

“It...it worked?” Dr. Heron asked her.

“It seems like it,” the nurse said cautiously. “In some ways, at least.”

“What worked?” Matt growled before losing his footing and falling face first toward the hard tile floor. He braced himself for the familiar fatal impact, but the nurse caught him just in time.

He imagined that she would probably try to put him back to sleep once again.

“Don’t!” Matt told her preemptively. “No more dreams!”

“Dreams,” Dr. Heron repeated disappointedly. “So you do remember, then?”

Matt shook his head. “Remember what?”

“That...that this is the real world. That...everything else is a dream.”

A dream, Matt repeated inwardly with seething anger.

“May isn’t a dream, you fucking psychopath,” Matt accused. “You killed her! And I already died here. I know this isn’t real.”

“And you died in the video game designer’s dream too,” Dr. Heron explained measuredly. “I monitor everything, as you know. May and Chike and the Reaper and even me, the Dr. Heron that shot you, that was a dream, Matthew. But look at you. You really think that was the real world?”

The real world, Matt repeated to himself. What the fuck does that even mean anymore? He felt the forlorn confusion of every one of his identities cry out with pleading anguish all at once.

“I don’t fucking know what’s real,” Matt admitted through sobs.

He used all of his remaining strength to lift his arm and remove the nurse’s face mask. It fell away, revealing the only thing in any world that ever made sense.

“I don’t know anything except that I love you, May. I don’t fucking care what’s real. I just…”

Rather than offer him her predictable, comforting smile, the nurse looked anguished, and she raised her eyes to meet Dr. Heron’s equally concerned gaze.

“Not a complete success, then,” Dr. Heron lamented. Then he allowed himself a final nod. “But at least we made progress, Mr. Willish.”

The nurse nodded along with him and clung slightly tighter to Matt’s utterly depleted body.

All of a sudden, Dr. Heron lifted his gaze to look behind the nurse at something occluded from Matt’s vision.

“We made progress,” Dr. Heron told someone, suddenly sounding like a nervous, young boy in the presence of a cosmic authority.

“Progress?” the unmistakable voice of Fernanda repeated with obvious sarcasm. “You mean like last time? And every other time?”

Matt wanted to call out to her, but it took all of his remaining energy just to breathe and blink.

“No,” Dr. Heron huffed, and he lowered his head, seemingly in shame. “Although, the last procedure provided important and necessary insights that we utilized during…” Dr. Heron trailed off, apparently not impressing the importance of his work on Fernanda. “Anyway, the one in the tower will be satisfied with the results, I’m sure,” Dr. Heron offered. “I mean, once we get this one reoriented.”

They’re referring to me as “this one,” Matt considered. Are there others like me? Is it May? The real May?

Though he couldn’t see them, Matt considered the last time he woke and saw the Fernanda and Souvik of this world; these people were titanous beings compared to the Fernanda and Souvik of the real world.

The real world, Matt considered hollowly. Or the unreal world. It’s all the same, really.

“Matt,” Souvik checked, evidently standing beside Fernanda, “did it work?”

What are these people talking about? Matt thought in horror. The infinity of space outside the windows shone with the dizzying brightness of equally infinite stars. Whether inside or outside the corridor or inside or outside his own mind, it was all the same. It was all inscrutable madness.

“Matt?” Fernanda checked.

“Come here,” Dr. Heron offered, beckoning them closer with a pleasant wave. “Look for yourself.”

What should I do? Matt wondered, hopelessness coursing through his decrepit but still-beating heart. There’s nowhere left to go. I already came to this conclusion, and it did me no good then. But it’s still the truth. There’s no sense to anything. Madness. It’s all madness. Everything and everyone. Including me. It’s all –

“Holy shit,” Fernanda cooed as she and Souvik came into Matt’s field of vision. “He still didn’t shake it off?”

“You see?” Dr. Heron offered. “He still doesn’t understand how to change his body.”

One of Fernanda’s eyebrows popped up with incredible surprise at Dr. Heron’s words.

“What else?” she checked with genuine intrigue, inspecting Matt as if he were an anomalous lab rat.

“He thinks the dreams are real, or rather, he doesn’t know what’s real.”

“No one does,” Fernanda reminded the doctor ominously. The nurses couldn’t help lowering their heads, seemingly fearful of Fernanda’s spoken truth.

“That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” Souvik added, which seemed to inflict Dr. Heron with a measure of physical pain.

“Still,” Fernanda continued, “look at him, Souvik.”

“Progress,” Souvik admitted stoically, assessing Matt’s nearly extinguished body and broken mind as some measure of sordid achievement.

“The one in the tower,” Dr. Heron repeated, urging the point.

“Yes, yes,” Fernanda said, waving him away. “We’ll tell him.”

“Him?” Matt croaked as he peered through the small slits of his dream-heavy eyelids.

Then it isn’t May, Matt groaned inwardly. Maybe Chike. Maybe he knows, Matt considered.

“Souvik,” Matt breathed, and a hulking, glowing version of the already Adonis-like man filled Matt’s field of vision as the man pushed an ebony fountain of cascading locks over his right shoulder.

“Souvik, where’s the real May?” Matt pleaded, using all his remaining energy to offer her name to this mad world. All he could do now was wait to be sent back to the real world...May’s world...or for some new lashing of insanity to penetrate his mind.

Souvik ignored Matt’s question and offered Dr. Heron a look of impatient disappointment.

Dr. Heron breathed deeply and stood his ground, though he still avoided direct eye contact while addressing Souvik.

“He will be pleased,” Dr. Heron assured him. “Progress is progress. It’s not like there’s any rush.”

No rush? What does that mean? Matt wondered as his mind flashed imagery of May straddling and kissing him in her apartment, then of her body splattering against unforgiving steel, then of her pleading anguish as she gripped Matt for safety inside his apartment as it was ransacked by Dr. Heron, then of her dizzying compassion as she called for help when Matt first resurfaced to his own mind and all this madness seemed to have first started.

But I don’t know, Matt admitted, his newborn-like frailty and ignorance painfully clear to him at this moment.

Fernanda bent and lifted Matt’s obliterated body into her arms as if he really were a newborn.

May, Matt lamented, absorbing every inch of the nurse as he was peeled away from May’s physical embrace.

“Maybe,” Souvik began, “maybe if I found a way to inspire urgency in you? Maybe then you’d be less relaxed about all this and start rushing a bit?” Souvik said, taking a single step toward the man a whole body length beneath him.

Dr. Heron physically cowered, though the nurses didn’t seem at all threatened by Souvik’s presence.

“We treat Mr. Willish’s work with the utmost seriousness and urgency. It is our entire lives. You know that…” Dr. Heron finished, stopping himself from saying Souvik’s name.

“We’ll be taking him with us,” Souvik announced, and Fernanda grunted at Dr. Heron, sending him jumping back a few paces.

“Of course,” Dr. Heron offered, lowering his head. “But please. Take this with you. Just in case he wants to go back.”

From his white laboratory coat, Dr. Heron removed a pill bottle filled with crimson pills and offered it to Souvik.

Serotel, Matt knew, but he couldn’t tell Souvik to ignore the treacherous man from his dreams.

Dreams? Matt checked himself. No. That’s the real world. This is clearly the dream.

Souvik shrugged. “I don’t know why he wastes his time with you and this laboratory,” he said, accepting the pill bottle.

“There’s no such thing as a waste of time,” Dr. Heron urged.

Souvik nodded, then shrugged with a sliver of capitulation. “Maybe,” he admitted stoically.

Totally depleted, Matt allowed his eyelids to fall shut, but he was still perfectly lucid.

Now what? Now what? he wondered again.

The titanous pair turned and sauntered toward the exit doors.

“Or maybe not,” Fernanda growled, glaring at the raging, icy world outside the lab.

“He’ll die if we take him out there like this,” Souvik reminded her.

“Counting on it,” Fernanda said.

“You think it’ll shake off the effects of the procedure?” Souvik asked.

“Only one way to find out,” Fernanda finished resolutely.

They’re going to kill me, Matt repeated to himself as they arrived at the exit.

The doors slid open, revealing a torrenting hellscape of ice with torturously penetrating gales whipping the world from every direction all at once. Matt screamed in total horror, and his eyelids were jolted open by the air instantaneously crystallizing the heat and vapor of his body.

I’m going to die, Matt said, preparing himself to return to May. But this time there’s no nurse or syringe. I’m really going to die this time…in this world.

Fernanda and Souvik, despite wearing only thin loincloths, were unfazed by the frigid chaos.

Dark glacial walls towered over them on the left and right, and though Matt thought it was just a cloud formation at first, he realized they were walking toward an actual tower stretching above them to unseeable heights.

Matt began convulsing as hypothermia set in, making the world around him appear as if it were shaking with seismic vibrations. He was reminded of May’s world and the existential vibrations that always preceded a portal.

I’m going to die, Matt repeated as the blood under his already purple skin began to crystallize, stopping his heart.