Evidence

The story of my dream is like this: when I was seven I dreamt a man with grey eyes. Grey is an inconspicuous colour; the colour of the sky on a day when no one notices it. But his eyes are grey in a hollow way that catches your attention. A way that is so placid it’s violent. Like a declaration; not of a war that’s about to be fought, but a death that’s already occurred.

Looking into his eyes was like being eaten alive, and that was before he moved.

The first time is foggy. I thought, because it was the first dream of him, that I would remember it. But since then, the long list of dreams containing the grey-eyed man has coiled in on itself and it’s impossible to tell one nightmare from another.

I’ve had dozens, or hundreds of these dreams. In them he holds down my wrists and cuts them, or presses his thumbs into my throat until I forget what it is to breathe. I wake feeling as though I’ve been stabbed in the chest.

I remember when I had fewer dreams. When I moved to Oxford, I was convinced that I’d left him behind. I did not dream about him the first night. Nor the second or third. For two weeks he was not in my dreams at all. England has a perpetually grey sky, but this didn’t bother me.

I kitted out the apartment with things that suited me; new/old bookcases from vintage shops and roadside trades. I filled them with my books, then got a new mattress to celebrate the two best weeks of sleep I’d had in a while. I got a coffee every morning for a week at the café two blocks away, so the baristas came to recognize me and remembered my regular order. They smiled as if it were a secret we shared. I tipped generously.

On my fifteenth day in Oxford, he appears in my dreams. He kneels on my back, a rope wraps around his hands, pulled taught between them. He puts the rope under my neck and wraps it around, squeezing and lifting so I look toward the sky. I know I must be dreaming; I’ve always been lucid while this happens. But knowing that I’m dreaming doesn’t chase away the terror, does not make my heart beat more slowly when I wake.

I’m not a stupid person. I know about lucid dreaming, about night terrors and sleep paralysis and anxiety disorders. I know that the feeling of being unable to breathe isn’t real, because if it were, my body would wake me up immediately so I could do something about it. But they are long minutes, the ones between the grey-eyed man appearing, and my breathing reflex stopping in the dream.

I have no routine when I wake up. Some nights are worse than others. That morning, after the first dream, I check my neck in the bathroom mirror for a red line. It is my greatest fear, that I would never admit to anyone. That I would see some evidence of the grey-eyed man’s actions. Proof that he exists in the same world as me.

The students live in what they call the Oxford bubble. They do seem contained to their lives within the residences, colleges, and library. Oxford itself seems to exits in a bubble. It is old and, when the grey sky presses down with the promise of rain, it feels isolated from the rest of the world. It is comforting when one runs to the café with bags under one’s eyes, every morning. Oxford never changes. It is one of my favourite things about the place. I hoped to make it permanent, when I first moved. Permanency was a tricky thing. The idea of it was impermanent.

This night, when I open my eyes, he’s at the foot of my bed, where a dog would be. He’s watching me, as though he has been for ages. His grey eyes are the most startling thing in the room. Even his shape seems more frightening than any black shadow. Without raising a hand, he reminds me of claws. Not a creature with claws, but claws themselves, and the way they curve, like beckoning fingers, like hooks, pulling you in.

I can’t take my eyes off him. I’ve never been able to. My heartbeat drowns out all other noise until he moves. He comes to the side of my bed and straddles me. I can feel the heat of his body as he leans over me and puts his hands around my neck, pressing his thumbs into my windpipes. I could draw marks on my own neck in exactly the shape of his thumbs. He begins to squeeze.

Light flashes through the room as a car goes by outside. There’s a digital clock in the living room. I can’t make out the hour, but the last two red numbers are 57. His thumbs press a little harder, and a bubble of air gets trapped in my throat. The last of my air. When the last air is gone, there’s no more. As though the world has filled with water. I can’t breathe. I can’t

The next morning, I don’t get coffee. I walk and walk until I find a bookstore. I buy enough to fill the last two shelves in one of my recently acquired bookcases. I buy lunch and eat it in Oxford University Parks. I buy produce for dinner, a loaf of bread, butter, and jam. I go home and put the produce away. I’ll use it another day. I make my toast and scrape butter and jam over it. When crumbs get stuck in my throat, I wash them down quickly with white wine.

I’m not sure when I fall asleep on my couch. Sleep creeps up slowly, but then it is right behind you. It has you before you can see it. A crafty thief or assassin. It brings with it the grey-eyed mad.

This time he has a washcloth. He puts it over my mouth and think that this time he means to suffocate me, like he once did with a pillow. But for a moment I lie on my sofa, with a cloth over my face, blind and smelling the clean cotton smell of the cloth.

Then he pours water on my face. It’s as if the world has filled with water. There is nowhere to turn where I won’t inhale water. My lungs begin to splinter as oxygen abandons them. My brain turns to mush, and spasms all at once. Every bit of me tingles like pins and needles. I reach up to claw at him. I’ve never touched him before. I scratch his skin. It feels like normal skin. My hand comes away wet.

In the morning, my body is heavy as iron, my eyelids feel like lead. I force myself to get up. I’ll leave Oxford soon, and I’ll try to leave the grey-eyed man behind with it. I put off going to the bathroom, but I do it eventually.

I don’t know what kind of marks drowning would leave. I don’t feel anything sloshing around in my lungs (not that I would know what that feels like), and my mouth is dry. I look at my cheek. There is a long red cut, as though I’ve run a knife across it.

I look at my nails. There is blood under them. I wash my hands. Then my face.

I wash and wash until there is hardly any evidence.

Art by Kira

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Time Not Looking

Leslie never looked at me wrong. As the lesser-twenties-year-old friend of my brother, this was not a surprise. It was unlikely that my brother had ever told him that I was “off the menu”, but Leslie never went there. We weren’t like that to one another. We were hardly even friends. It didn’t matter that I knew almost everything about him, and that I’d catalogued it in my brain (which catalogued most things, whether I wanted it to or not). I also had my own best friend’s birthday memorized. Her favourite food. Her idiosyncrasies. May 16. Sweet potato tempura. She has an innate and extreme sympathy for lobsters.

But I doubt Leslie knows that much about me, and I never put any effort into knowing that much about him. It never matters, because he doesn’t look at me like that.

Which is why, when we got off the ferry on Kerry, and Leslie turned to help me down, not to take my bag or one of the others’ bags, it took me a very long moment to reply. In that long moment his face didn’t change. Sometimes he could be so still it was like he’d grown out of the landscape around him. Like he was a part of the moss and rock under his shoes.

He gripped my elbow, because it was close to him and because I was born all angles, and I’ve grown into even more angles. The knobs of my elbow give a person perfect indents to dig their fingers into. I’m light. I’m practically made for hauling around. Or for helping down off a ferry.

His fingers were solid on my elbow. He wore a ring on his right hand, his non-dominant hand. He almost never took it off. I felt it pressed into my skin now, as warm as his skin, and, strangely, almost as soft, as if it weren’t even there.

Leslie had met me in the same year as he’d met my brother, but, in the way that people do when they’re making a new friend, he had only eyes for his new friend. I was a wave, or a nod, not even an afterthought, for several months. I was Travis’ little sister to the world, and not sure what that made me to Leslie, except maybe Travis’ little sister. I didn’t even know if there was an adjective thrown in there. Travis’ annoying little sister. Precocious little sister. Maybe he forgot Travis had a little sister. I was twelve when they first met. Now a senior in university, I’d had plenty of years to evolve into a grey area. Not a friend, but more than an acquaintance. A carved banister in the architecture of his relationship with my brother. Not a function, but a presence.

Leslie let me lean into him, and took a single step back. In that way that one can see accidents coming, I could see immediately that the distance between myself and his back foot was not enough to stop me from bumping his shoulder with mine when I descended. I could see the shoulder I was going to hit, just touched by sunlight, covered in his soft maroon tee shirt. It had been cloudy, and raining earlier, and his shirt had somehow dried, but there were wrinkles in the sleeves where he’d wrung it out.

The others came behind me, with suitcases and equipment for the shows. When you start in a band, you bring your own equipment. You save up with your friends and look for cheap used stuff- good quality – on the web, and buy it off people who can only meet you at the border. Then you pray to God that you don’t leave anything behind while you’re packing it all, tight as Tetris, in the back of your van. The others had written checklists, while I only had a mental one, kept sharp and up-to-date only by my anxiety. I could never relax; I was either an inch from panicking, or so unbothered I was comatose. Part of why my brother had first been against me touring with them, even if I did play and could replace any one of them were they to get too drunk or sick to make a show. Leslie had stood up, physically, quietly, and that was almost all he needed to do. My brother was one of the few people who could argue with him, but not for long.

I’d come simply to escape school. I followed the music, but I knew that this was my brother’s music. This was in my brother’s bones, and though it made mine hum, it always left me feeling bereft. I never mentioned it to my brother. I have time, I kept saying to myself. Time for music. I played with Leslie my brother and the band, or kept an eye on their stuff while they played. I did what I was doing now; loaded and unloaded equipment and bags on and off ferries. Of course, I had help. Right now, Leslie’s hand under my elbow was supporting half my weight as I dropped unsteadily to the ground.

Our shoulders bumped. And more than that. My side brushed his ribs. My hair whispered against his bicep. I was aware of every way that I was touching him, in case he wanted me to pull away. Because Leslie and I did not do this. He still held my elbow, as tightly as though I were falling, though I was completely steady on my feet.

I’d gotten used to watching them play, or finding another way to amuse myself while they played. A way that didn’t involve getting hit on, or drowning myself with guinness. As long as I was back for the last set. I got the occasional comment about how inappropriate it was that I travelled with my brother and his band of vagabonds, but none that apparently made this assumption based on more than a cursory glance at our lifestyle form the corner of a pub. The first time such a remark was made to me in front of the others, I tried to scoff, lost my nerve, and turned away until the offended left of his own accord. The others looker neither impressed, nor unimpressed. Now I could scoff or, if I was feeling particularly contrary, I could turn it into an argument, and continue until the other party left, feeling assaulted and stunned.

Leslie held my elbow when I stepped back. His fingers hooked themselves in the knobbly geometry of my elbow. His breath on my ear was faint as the touch of a bug. I had to resist the urge to scratch my ear. The warmth of his breath stirred the hair at my temple. I had the thought that he was going to kiss me, and I did not know how to feel. This was Leslie. And we were never interested.

I held his gaze. More out of fear than anything. I was caught. I’d looked straight into his face before, hadn’t I? But the more I stared, the more I thought of all the time I spent not looking at Leslie, or thinking of him, the more I was convinced that I hadn’t ever seen him that way. I felt a couple of the others looking at us now. If I stepped away, we can pretend this never happened.

Leslie tugged me a few feet from the ferry, out of the others’ way. His hand is still on my elbow. He wasn’t looking at me any certain way. But it could be, absolutely, no wrong way. The thing is: he’s never looked at me that way. Never looked at me. I try not to tell myself that it means something.

Art by Adam S. Doyle

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Fake Eden

When she saw Aidan again, leaning on his car, his posture so perfectly slanted that she knew he’d been waiting in that exact position for her to exit her work and see him, she gave so many damns at once her heart felt bruised.

“True or false,” he said. His voice was high and low, rumbling and full of starlight. “You are surprised and delighted to see me?”

Things cracked at the edges. Truthfully, she hadn’t seen him for years. Decades. She’d spent two of those decades in the same place before realizing that even in ten years, if you didn’t physically age, people gave you an odd look. She’d been in Memphis, then Portland, then a number of small towns in Canada, and finally she had settled in San Francisco. The weather was nice, and she had orange juice every morning. No one questioned her ageless face, because so many people wanted one. That was the magic of Los Angeles, she realized. Everyone within it or without wanted it to be Eden, so much so that they wouldn’t recognize a God if they saw one.

No one recognized Gods. The attention Aidan attracted probably had more to do with his pretty face and his vitality.

She lifted her bag onto her shoulder. “What are you doing here?” She checked to make sure that she’d left work at the right time, that the sky was still above them and hadn’t fallen down, and that it wasn’t snowing. No, there was only one impossible thing happening right now.

“It is possible,” he began, “That I’m considering a natural disaster.”

“In California?” she said. “They’re already experiencing a water shortage.”

Aidan stepped forward. “Maybe a flood, then.” He opened his arms and though he didn’t move quickly, shock sped his movements. Time lapsed between the moment Aidan was in front of her, at arm's length, and the moment his arms were already around her, her face pressed into the sleeve of his bamboo shirt.

Synapses in her brain died. She forced her surroundings to come into focus. She stood and waited for the hug to finish. It did not, for a long time. “How did you get here?”

“Plane. I got into LAX two hours ago. Are you hungry?”

“Am I- Hungry? I don’t know. I guess.”

His smiled stretched. There was little of his face that wasn’t taken up with it. It was a little dazzling. A man walking past them stumbled over his own feet.

“Stop that,” she said.

Aidan’s smile wilted slightly, but his energy did not. “I know a place to eat.”

That was amazing, because she didn’t. Two years in San Francisco and she’d never been to the same restaurant twice. It took three visits or her to remember a single place. She’d thought that San Francisco would suit her. It did, more than any other city, but indoors, crowds, people, noise- none of those suited her. She wasn’t sure there was a way to isolate herself from any of those without becoming a hermit. This is it. This is what humans do. This is life.

“Is this your car?” she asked. It looked like a Mustang. One thing she’d come to be enthusiastic about was cars. It was something about the speed and the technological advancement. She was sure that’s what being human was all about. Riding in a vehicle that ran on transient resources. Being in a car was like touching mortality.

“I got it in Virginia. There are some nice races down there. I had a mitsubishi, but it got stolen.”

“Oh dear.” She touched the window. The glass was hot. When Aidan opened the door, heat billowed out. He must have been waiting for a while.

Aidan rounded the car. While she could still see his smile over the top of it, she asked, “What are you doing here?”

“A better question,” he said. “Is what are you doing here? Come on, Akina. Let’s talk.”

The restaurant was a treasure. One of those places that people walked into and asked how you’d found it. The correct answer was Two minutes on Google. The right answer was I just passed it and got curious, it’s got the most amazing smoothies/orange juice/booze/meat dish. Neither Jace nor Akina said such a thing when they entered.

Akina sniffed the air. It did smell like meat, and spices, and orange juice. And the perpetual gasoline and hot tarmac smell that California had in the summer. The walls were covered with wooden panels, hung with Turkish lanterns, decorated with paintings by local artists that were either minimalist or lazy.

A waiter directed them to a table. He couldn’t take his eyes off Aidan. The air around Aidan sucked in attention like a blackhole. She knew he could temper the effect. She did. But Aidan thrived on the notice of others. His mirror was one of his best friends. Possibly his only best friend.

Aidan ordered a smoothie with beets. She ordered orange juice. The waiter departed. Aidan leaned back and stared at her; they’d once had staring contests, which she’d thought was quite human, but humans couldn’t hold stares for hours. They could barely hold them for minutes. She often wondered how humans got anything accomplished with so much of their lives spent with their eyes closed. Though she had to admit, sleep was a precious thing. Her appetite for sleep had grown in the last few decades.

“You have a job,” Aidan announced.

She stared at him. He’d ambushed her at her job. She didn’t understand why it mattered. Dozens of people had jobs.

“But dozens of people need them, unlike us,” Aidan pointed out.

She sighed. She hated when he did that.

“But I love doing it,” Aidan said.

“It’s a good job,” she said. “I have regular hours. And it’s near the tram. It takes me twenty minutes to get home.”

“How adorably human.”

The waiter reappeared with their drinks. Aidan’s was red, a violent vibrant colour. Akina sipped her orange juice; the sign outside the store had advertised it as liquid sunlight. It might not be changing her in the way ingesting liquid sunlight might, but as far as orange juice went, it was quite good. The waiter took a few steps away. Then a few more. She and aidan got older while he did.

When they were alone, Aidan drained half of his glass. “Is that why you moved here?”

She tapped her fingernails on her glass. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a pit of humans. An epicenter of some of their most ridiculous dreams. On the way to your work someone asked me if I model. Someone else asked me to read a script just because I told them I was a producer.”

Ah. Yes. There was a lot of that. She felt bad for their hope. As far as she’d witnessed, human life was made of cycles. Births beget births. Death beget death. But hope did not beget hope. More often than not, hope was a narrow hallway that led to disappointment. It was one aspect of human life she did not envy.

“That isn’t why I moved here.”

“So why did you?”

“Change of pace,” she said.

Aidan laughed. Somewhere, a hurricane hit a building. “A change of pace? What the hell does that mean? What kind of pace do you think you’re going at?”

She shrugged. The same one as our waiter, she wanted to say. But she was not a liar.

“Why would you want to go their pace?” Aidan asked. His eyes were burning. To anyone else, he might look like he’d been shooting up. But he was as indomitable as a star because he chose to be. It was a benefit, or a curse, of their beings. Neither of them would ever feel the fatigue of a hangover, or the hopelessness of flunking out of school, or the physical exhaustion that followed a long workout. Listlessness was not unheard of but, Akina thought, it was a poor consolation prize.

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” she said. “They’re going quite fast, aren’t they?”

“But they’re not getting anywhere.”

“I think that’s a matter of opinion.”

Aidan made a face that said he didn’t care about anyone’s opinion. He probably didn’t. He cared about her’s, and they’d spent years apart, when she’d decided that she wanted years to matter, and he couldn’t understand why.

Aidan leaned across the table. He was warm as a tropical island. He smelled like beets. “You’ve had your fun. It’s been decades. Aren’t you a little tired of working?”

She gave it some thought. She wasn’t tired of working. That was the whole problem. “No. I don’t think I am. What would I do if I wasn’t working?”

The waiter came and gave them a basket or organic bread with quinoa on top. He took their orders, removed their menus, and came back with water. He cleared away Aidan’s empty beet juice glass, and Akina’s empty orange juice glass, then brought them refills. Outside, someone had dropped ice cream, and someone else was flying a kite on Venice beach, and people were building up their hopes and burning down their dreams and reinventing themselves in this fake Eden.

“You would do whatever you wanted to do. You would have whatever you wanted to have,” Aidan said.

“But that isn’t what I want.”

Aidan looked at his hands in his lap. His voice sounded a little odd. “You don’t want whoever- whatever you want? Even if you could have it now, without having to wait?”

Akina looked at him. She hadn’t seen his in a little over four decades. She hadn’t given him her address or telephone number. There was so much land, so much ocean, and they were in a restaurant in san Francisco, thousands of miles from the last country they’d inhabited together. “I have the rest of my life,” she said. “What’s the difference between now and a few more decades?”

Aidan gave it some thought. He said, “Nothing at all.”

Art by RovinaCai

Text by Lucie MacAulay