In a different world

I did not know what woke me, only that I found myself sitting bolt upright, my forehead a cascading Niagara of steaming hot perspiration, and my bones turned into ingots of premium grade plutonium. It could have been a noise, but I wasn’t sure, since I had been in a very deep sleep. I gazed through the window in amazement. The strange brightness outside reminded me of when I was about seven. I was down with flu at the time and had gone to bed during the day, woken up an hour later and thought it was morning. I went about my usual morning chores meticulously, getting myself ready for school in record time. I’d been baffled that both the bedroom and the kitchen clocks said 4:30 when it was clear to me that it was dawn, so I pointed out to my dad that both clocks were faulty. I remember how he had roared with laughter and said, ‘You have just committed a perfect case of deduction by “Least Plausible Hypothesis”’. Then I realized what had happened. I was so embarrassed that I sulked back to bed. Well, I had the same funny feeling that I felt that day, looking out of the window at the deep blue sky with its silver gilded clouds, the gleaming rooftops, and the simmering road below.
      I felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu as I turned towards the communal park at the top of the hill, expecting to see a rainbow and I was astonished at my own prescience. The rainbow was so perfect it could have been etched on the windowpane by Leonardo da Vinci’s masterful hand.
      I noticed a shape under the sheets at the same spot on the bed where I had been sleeping. Probably a pile of duvet, or pillows, I thought. I sometimes slept with pillows placed lengthwise to assuage those little telltale pains that came with middle age. My hands trembled as I lifted the duvet and I was alarmed at what I saw. It was me, lying there. I could see my own face and hands as though I was looking at someone else’s. His – or dare I say ‘my’ – eyes were closed and his hands were clasped across his chest. When I touched his hands, they were cold and heavy. I held him by the shoulders and shook him but he did not open his eyes. Then I pulled his shaggy brown hair and slapped him hard across the face. A large, mottled pink, patch formed on his left cheek and spread slowly down towards his neck, but he remained motionless. Calm down, Toby, I told myself. This must be a dream.
      I was no stranger to weird dreams. I’d had dreams where I was the guest of honour in an underwater dinner party. I was wearing a double breasted black suit and a fedora, and attentively conversing with a very attractive, but talkative, stainless steel teapot. I’d even had a dream in which I’d turned into an icon on a computer screen, someone clicked on me and I broke wind. But I was always able to tell when I was in a dream, and if I did not like the way it was playing out, I shook myself awake. To me, dreams were meaningless and irrelevant, unlike Helena who attached a world of meanings to them.
      I looked at her side of the bed and saw that she was sleeping. I was surprised that she hadn’t been awakened by my behavior. She was normally a light sleeper. I peered nervously at her face and was disturbed by its parlous quality and its curious peacefulness. O God, she’s not breathing! A thousand volts of pure fear raced up my spinal cord and exploded in my head. What on earth is going on around here? I shook her gently by the shoulders and shouted. Helena! Helena! Helena! I did not give a toss about disturbing the neighbors.
      Then something hit me that caused me to go into panic overdrive: although I had been yelling at the zenith of my possible vocal range, I was as silent as a goldfish. I could not hear myself. I burst into a wild laughter of genuine relief. This can only be a dream. OK, Toby, it’s wakey-wakey time! But, however hard I tried to shake myself awake, I couldn’t break out of it.
      I went to the bathroom. I resisted the urge to use the toilet. If this was a dream, the last thing I wanted was to wake up and find that I’d done it on the bed! I splashed some water on my face but the water did not feel like water. It felt like fine sand, which upon colliding with my face, bounced back, fell through my fingers, and ran smoothly into the sink. When I looked in the mirror, it occurred to me that something was amiss but I did not immediately know what it was. The blue towel draped on the door hook behind me did not cover where the paint had been peeling off - Another bit of work to be done in the coming weekend. Best to repaint the door before Helena started complaining about it. As it was, her complaint list was starting to grow out of control. The kitchen door was not shutting properly, the ironing board was starting to wobble, the external TV aerial needed adjusting, the hot water tap was a bit leaky, and there was faint smell of smoke in the kitchen even when she wasn’t cooking... She was always noticing these things and constantly whining, and I had long concluded that she was at her happiest when she was complaining.
      For a fraction of a second, I thought I was going to have a stroke, because I suddenly realized what was amiss: I could see the door and everything behind me, but I could not see myself in the mirror. I began to scream again, but stopped when I was reminded that I had lost my voice. I yanked the towel off the door and wiped my face. I might be invisible but, at least, I was definitely solid state.
      I ran to Richard and Michelle’s bedroom and was only partly relieved that Richard was not on his bed. But when I found that Michelle was not in the room, either, it got me very worried. I leapt down the steps to the ground floor of our townhouse, and stopped short when I saw Helena sitting on the long sofa. She was curled up like an injured kitten, vigorously dabbing her wide, pale blue eyes with a soggy, limp tissue paper, her Bible by her side and her rosary in her hand. I rushed over and held her. ‘What’s wrong, Helena, Where are the children?’ I was relieved to find that I had my voice back, but still terribly confused.
       ‘I can’t find the kitchen.’ she sobbed
      I stared at her, ‘What do you mean, you can’t find the kitchen?’
      Twin flames of naked fear danced in her eyes and her glistering forehead reflected the strange light coming from outside. Her lips trembled and she clutched the rosary like a lifeline, rattling off her Hail Mary with quick fire precision. The only time I’d ever seen her in such a state was when we took a ride on the Brighton Pier roller coaster. ‘Never again’, she had said afterwards.
      I stumbled into one of the dining chairs on my way to the kitchen. She sniffed. Even in her distress she still could not overlook my awkwardness. She’d often remarked that even when there was no obstacle, I would imagine one just so I could trip on it. I was her ‘clumsy professor’.
      I found myself pacing up and down along the wall the divided the kitchen from the dining area, becoming increasingly frustrated and alarmed.
       ‘Where is the bloody kitchen, for Christsakes?’
       ‘Please, don’t –’, if there was one thing that she couldn’t stand, it was the calling of the Lord’s name in vain, even though I had all but muttered it - her ears were so sharp she could hear a gnat fart from a hundred miles.
       ‘I don’t know what’s happening, dear, but I can’t find the kitchen either’, I finally had to admit.
       ‘You don’t know what is happening?’ She sniffed and dabbed her eyes, ‘Can’t you see?’
      Ah, of course, let me guess; it’s the last days, isn’t it? ’
      Her face relaxed into a dreamlike countenance and I could see that she was going into her evangelical mode, which I dreaded more than her complaint trips. ‘And they shall be taken up...’
       ‘Look, Helena, I hate to knock you out of your heavenly trance with a controlled dose of healthy reality, but I think this is just a silly dream’
       ‘So whose dream is this, then; yours or mine?’ she snapped
       ‘That’s it. I’ll show you…’ I bit hard on my arm until it hurt like hell, but that did not wake me up. I gripped my nose firmly between my thumb and my index finger, and I held my breath until I was about to pass out.
       ‘You should try walking into the wall; if you can walk right through then it is a dream. Or jump up and see if you can fly!’
       ‘Why don’t you try?’
       ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
       ‘OK, so it is not a dream, so what is it then?’
       ‘It’s the end of the world and the lord is taking his own to be with him…we who are still alive will be caught up together in the clouds …’
       ‘So you reckon that the children have been caught up?’ I asked, looking out of the window in mock despair.
       ‘I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left’
       ‘OK. So why have you not been taken? Considering you are the Mother Theresa and the rest of us are bloody infidels. And how does that explain the missing kitchen? Has that been taken up as well? I guess they’ll need the kitchen up there more than we do.’
       ‘The Bible says in the last days there will be an increase in the number of people like you, who don’t believe in the signs - 2 Peter 3, verse 4’ she was riffling through her bible.
       ‘You can’t fool me with any of that nonsense, I attended a Catholic school, remember?’
       ‘The sun will become dark and the moon will turn to blood…’
       ‘Yeah, I wonder what Jeremiah was smoking when he came up with that one.’
       ‘That was not Jeremiah, it was Joel; and it’s no time to be blaspheming.’
       ‘Well, so what happened to Armageddon? Did we miss that one? What’s coming next?’
       ‘The righteous shall _’
       ‘Listen, Helena. I have an alternative hypothesis’
      She shook her head and turned away.
       ‘I think that, somehow, we have become trapped in different dimensions in hyperspace.’
       ‘Yeah, the claptrap universal of theoretical Physics’ she made a sound that was halfway between a giggle and a sob.
       ‘Yes, you may well laugh, but wait until I have fully developed my theory. Look at the clock; it has been on the same time since we have been here…No, actually, the hands have been moving backwards. I think we have entered into the realm of relativity and may be stuck behind a virtual wall in a Reimanian Manifold.’
       ‘I don’t see how you can believe such nonsense’
       ‘Well, you can talk. But, hey, it’s just an idea’ I wasn’t particularly confident about it either. What sort of scientific observation can you make when you look into the mirror and you can’t even see yourself? But the thing that kept me sane was the weird sense that that all this had happened before.
       ‘There are valid mathematical proofs for the behavior of time, energy and matter in hyperspace.’
       ‘So at what point did we enter into this hyperspace dimension of yours?’
       ‘Good question. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember beyond... The more I try to work it out, the harder I find it to determine that point of reference. Where were we yesterday?’
       ‘Ah, perhaps there is no ‘yesterday’ in hyperspace’
      She was laughing at me, but I did not mind. ‘We should expect to see some evidence of String Theory. As an object traverses the space-time path…wait…if the Hyperspace is a discontinuous domain, the kitchen may well be situated on the other side of the universe..,’
       ‘… or a different timeframe altogether and our dear children may be stuck in the Jurassic age, staring hopelessly into the eyes of a vicious, but grateful, Tyrannosaurus rex!’
       ‘This is serious stuff, you know. The normal laws of physics do not hold in hyperspace.
Time may become elastic - stretch and bend back on itself …’
       ‘Oh please stop it...the trouble with you scientists is that when you don’t get results, you change the meaning of everyday concepts of time and space to suit your ridiculous theories. Talk of stretchy, bendy time, or, dear professor, are you talking about ‘flexitime’? You know, sometimes you sound like the people of the olden days who thought people could fall over the edge of the earth…’
      I could not hear the rest because suddenly there was an ear piercing vibration, very much like an immensely amplified version of the noise from the Large Hadron Collider in the middle of its energizing phase. The house was hurtling through a turbulent magnetic field. It became even brighter outside, so much so that the curtains emitted visible energy waves. Then there was a loud screech and an almighty flash that caused me to become temporarily blind before my eyes slowly recovered their function.
       ‘Helena!’ I could hear my own shrill voice as if it was coming from someone else, ‘Where the hell are you?’ This time there was no protest to my indulgent profanity. She had simply vanished, and where she sat, all I could see was a pile of ash.
      I ‘d never felt more alone and dismayed. The seriousness of my circumstances rested on my shoulders like a barrel full of mercury. Has she really been taken up, and the children too? Golden light streamed through the window, casting ominous patterns that danced on the wall. The TV and the Hi-Fi unit were wearing a shimmering halo of pink and blue. I’m sure all this will eventually make sense. But the rumble that immediately followed filled me with the most awesome premonition and dread. My scalp began to twitch and my eyes stung with sweat. I expected by now that my blood pressure would be stuck firmly to the ceiling. How much more of this I can take?
      Then I realized that I was in pain. A pain that had been there all along but I hadn’t noticed. It occupied my chest region and spread like fire up to my throat. Maybe Helena was right after all; I was on my way to hell. But I could still not see any sense the whole idea of life after death. Everybody knows that the sensation of awareness is generated in the brain. So, once that is kaput, and your vital organs have shut down - once your nerves are no longer carrying any signals - how can you possibly register any form of consciousness? It would be like expecting a piece of software to carry on functioning long after the computer has been switched off. That’s just insane.
      But the pain only got worse, my guts felt like they were being fed through a strip cut office paper shredder. Perhaps I could still save myself. But from what? I could hear Helena’s voice ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish…’ It was difficult for me to ignore the implausibility of such a statement when taken through a rigorous reasoning mill. I saw the whole area of spirituality purely as a domain of primeval imagination and fantasy. It would take an enormous dose of self-delusion for me to acquiesce to the notion of God in the form of anything other than a concept. Santa for grownups. I certainly couldn’t stomach any of all that nonsense about childbearing virgins, self-partings seas, non-burning flames, and never-dying souls. Except that the pain had become truly unbearable. It felt as if someone had ripped out my eyes out of their socket and set fire to my lungs. If this was a taste of hell, then please give me Pascal’s wager. Where do I sign? Self-delusion and mediocrity are only a small price to pay for a sure relief from perpetual torment. When the pain envelope is exceeded, the threshold of reality gives way to gray areas where reason becomes altogether irrelevant.
      But in the mist of my pain, I was still assailed by an overwhelming anxiety. What has happened to Helena and the children? And where is all this leading? If all this is a dream, why have I not woken up by now?
      Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgggggggggggghhhhhhh! I saw red. An explosion erupted inside my head. A rapid dimming of daylight, as if my consciousness was being sucked into a black hole, the way dirty water runs down the kitchen sink. The whole of my infinity was gathering itself together and rapidly retreating into singularity. Blackout. Sweet, sweet oblivion.

      At first, I thought I was lying in the field. I felt the coolness of a breeze on my face. I was hearing voices but I could not move and could not open my eyes. But it was the potent smell of a hospital ward that nudged me back to reality.
       ‘I think he’s coming round’ A man’s voice, I felt a hand on my forehead, ‘Dr McDonald, don’t worry, you just relax’
      I could feel a dull pain in my chest and my throat. But soon I was overcome with a panic more dreadful than the pain. What the hell happened? Where are the children? Where is Helena?
      But my concerns were to be short lived.
       ‘Phew, what a relief! Can we see him now?’
      Helena! I shook myself out of my paralysis and forced my eyes open. The effort caused a minor tsunami in my head and my consciousness was almost drowned by a cloud of mental dust.
       ‘Daddy!’ Michelle’s voice was the sound of music.
      Helena threw her arms round my neck. ‘We’ve been praying for you all day!’ her pale blue eyes glistered like a sample of Copper Sulphate in a Petri dish.
       ‘Dear, you had carbon monoxide poisoning while you were sleeping – a leak from underneath the hubs in the kitchen. Good thing the children and I had gone to Mum and Dad’s for the weekend!’
      I sighed, and then whispered ‘Thank God!’ almost certainly meaning it.

……………………………………………………………………………………………..
Next story
Due date: 20 Sep 2010
Working Title: The little wolf and the three bad pigs
This is a reworking of a well known children’s story, 'The three little pigs and the big bad wolf'. Here are the roles are somewhat reversed and the settings 'slightly' different. Terry is the little wolf. His adventures begin when he is thrown out of their luxurious penthouse in New York by his step mother. His encounters include a brush with Henrietta the vain and irritable teenage pig in Downtown Manhattan; Simbad the half pig half, giraffe in Las Vegas; and Masood the disgruntled Arabian pig .