Dressed all in black, and smelling faintly of one of the more expensive colognes, he sat rigidly on the plastic subway seat, trying not to breathe in the fumes emanating from the fat cigar that dangled precariously from the thin lips of the woman beside him. Her name was Samantha Leanne Botts, and she had read somewhere that cigars were the next Good Thing. She wanted to be a model, in a vague sort of way. The subway moved on.
Sitting back and pointedly ignoring the woman beside him, Julien immersed himself in his thoughts. “What the hell am I doing here?” he wondered. He had always felt, with some sort of vague certainty, that there was more to life than expensive cologne and places with “new” in their names. Vaguely he contemplated whether or not the original places that were the namesakes of such things were still around somewhere, perhaps locked up in one of the more eclectic museums in Jersey. “Something’s not right.” He continued on in his silent self-reflection, as the bundle of sticks and stogies beside him sighed and rearranged her limbs on the seat, rather like a praying mantis would do if it felt inclined to stretch upon waking. Julien sat back and prayed silently that none of the bits would touch him. He wasn’t very fond of people, on the whole. And vice versa works surprisingly well with that statement, too. Most people don’t take too well to people who go around wearing black at people and not talking to them. They find it rather unnerving, like carnys.
The subway was fairly empty, except for the two of them. Which makes it all the more hideous that the would-be model had squished herself up next to the only thing with a Y-chromosome on board. But fairly empty isn’t completely empty- there were, in fact, a number of people around, but none of them were really worth mentioning.
The model made a conscious effort to stretch languidly, or at least would have done so had she the vocabulary for it. As it stood, she was hard-pressed to grasp the concept of stretch in the first place, as all her useful brain cells had been mistaken for excess weight and promptly lobotomized in a dietary misunderstanding. It had been an ultimate scandal of the 60’s that insane asylums in Sweden were secretly and innovatively transformed into illegal weight loss centers, although it is also one of the greater ironies of those years that people of about the same mental state ended up going there, anyway. Lobotomies were all the rage, and people raved about what it did for their overall enjoyment of life, too. “After just one visit, I lost 10 pounds, the ability to do simple math, and all the worries of my former life!” The model smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes as those bits weren’t really connected anymore.
Julien restrained an urge to yawn. It would probably be mistaken as an invitation to speak by the animate kindling beside him.
“Are you alright?” The question broke through his thoughts like a freak on a unicycle might burst through a paper-covered hula-hoop. He started, and looked up towards the source of the sound. There was nothing there. He stole a glance at the mannequin beside him, but she was busy gazing out the window in what she took to be a dramatic fashion. Julien sat back and contemplated his sanity.
“I said, are you alright? Life seems to have been getting you down lately.” The voice was undoubtedly and unquestionably coming from a completely unknown source. A confused look did a small dance across Julien’s worried features.
“Did you say something?” he asked the thing beside him. It shook its head prettily and emptily, like a buoy on perturbed waters. Julien continued to look confused. “Did someone say something?” He aimed this question at the other unmentionables, who lived up to their name doubly so by not saying a word in response. Julien decided to sit in silence and contemplate the doings of his own inner self, as the outer world seemed rather incomprehensible at the moment. “La, la, la.” He hummed a bit to annoy the other passengers, otherwise lost in his thoughts. The rest of the ride continued in relative silence.
The silence was immediately broken the moment that Julien stepped into his well-furnished apartment. “What a well-furnished apartment!” someone exclaimed. “What a delightful life you must lead!” If there was one thing Julien couldn’t stand, it was sarcasm. That and disembodied voices speaking to him out of nowhere. But sarcasm was the worst, unless it was emanating from him in his normal scathing manner, in which he quite enjoyed it and found it rather witty.
“Who the bloody hell do you think you are? And where are you?” Julien looked around accusingly. “I’m sure this is illegal, at least in some states.”
“I’m your conscience, Julien,” the voice whispered dramatically.
“I don’t have a bloody conscience!” Julien stormed about angrily, looking under and inside different bits of furniture that might serve to hide someone.
“I know, I know. I’m just messing with you. I’m really… well, who I am doesn’t really matter right now. It’s you I’m interested in.”
Julien quavered, and tried to make it sound aggressive. “Wha-what do you want?” he snarled, feebly.
“I want nothing. With the single exception of having you want the same.” Julien had a sudden vision of a scruffy teenager with a gun to his own head: -‘Don’t do it! You’ve nothing to gain!’; -‘Yes, I gain nothing.’ and then a gunshot.
“What do you mean?” some, but not all of the quaver had left his voice. “I don’t understand.” The voice seemed to consider this quite seriously, or so Julien inferred from its silence. It reappeared again in a moment, though. “You’re right. You haven’t a clue.” And then it vanished out of existence.
Julien sat there, in the silence, and contemplated his sanity, or lack-thereof. His life had been getting a tad bit beyond his control, what with people being horrible in general and all, and life being meaningless, but this pretty much knocked the last snowball off the ol’ snowman of sanity. Never before had anyone spoken to him so frankly and, perhaps, truthfully. Never before had anyone spoken to him out of nowhere. Both factors confused him immensely. It was a long while before Julien could get to sleep that night.
The next morning, Julien stretched lazily after a dreamless sleep in his expensive down sheets and opened his eyes slowly only to find that his entire house was missing. And that his down sheets had somehow reverted to the geese they had begun their existence with.
“Dear God!” shouted Julien, pushing the webbed-footed things off him.
“Quack,” protested the geese. This is not making any sense whatsoever, Julien thought to himself, and resolutely tried to wake up from sleep again. It didn’t work, so he concluded he was delusional and rolled over, trying to fall asleep on what seemed to be grass and geese droppings. His face rolled right into a goose dropping. I am not asleep, concluded Julien, beaten. And he got up.
He was outside. He was standing by a beautiful lake, surrounded by overly tame geese and covered in their overly smelly droppings. He wondered vaguely at the brilliance of the scene, then remembered that he was delusional. “Right,” he thought, with determination. Then he realized he hadn’t a clue where to go. There were some benches nearby, though, so he decided to begin by sitting down on the nearest one and wiping the mess off his face. It seemed the logical thing to do at the time. But after a few minutes or so, the bench dropped him. Julien had never been dropped by a bench before, so he sat there on the ground, looking a tad bit confused, as a dragonfly flew circles around his head. “What are you doing here, Julien?” the dragonfly asked him, before it flew away. Julien shook his head in bewilderment. This wasn’t the way Tuesdays normally went, not for him, at least. Maybe off in some remote corner of Africa they have Tuesdays like this every week, he thought to himself, but not in America. Not within my explorations of the world have I ever come across a Tuesday like this.
“That’s cause it’s Wednesday,” said someone. “Oh, right,” answered Julien, although he couldn’t figure out, for the moment, why that almost made sense. Then he thought: wait, did that someone just hear my thoughts?
“Most definitely not,” it replied, and left, without ever having been seen. So he sat there a moment longer and pondered that. Until, of course, he realized that the pondering really wasn’t getting him anywhere. Then he merely sat.
After awhile of such activity had passed, he decided that it would be better to perhaps go find something a bit more productive to do. So he got up, tried to knock the worst of the mess off his pajamas, and looked about hopefully. In New York and New Jersey, this approach to getting somewhere usually worked rather well. A subway sign or other such feature could normally be found to guide him wherever it was he wanted to go. However, as Julien soon found out, this method doesn’t have quite the same effect for someone who is standing on the grass by a pond. One of the geese began to stare at him hopefully, in an act of retaliation. Or maybe it just wanted some bread. Julien gave up the hopeful look, and stared despondently at the only sign around, which read “No Fishing.” It featured a very brutal comic picture of a man being swallowed by the monstrous fish-creature he’d caught. Julien eyed the placid surface of the pond skeptically. There didn’t seem to be any brutal devourings occurring right this moment, so he turned his attention back to the bench that had “dropped him.” On closer observation, he realized that there wasn’t anything holding the planks of the bench together; they just sort of floated in space in the correct positions. He wondered if all benches were like this, perhaps he’d just never looked at one close enough before. A bit daft, he though, rebuking himself, to have just assumed that they had something to hold themselves together with logically all these years. At some point he should have checked, because to miss something like this would be just… well, impossible.
Confusion had not only set in at this point, but had also pitched the tent, dug an outhouse, and started cooking dinner. Julien played with the bench a bit, bouncing the planks around in the nothingness that held them together.
“Please don’t do that,” someone said. He turned around, and was startled to see an actual real flesh-and-blood person standing there, as opposed to a talking dragonfly or some other such nonsense.
“Who are you?” asked Julien. “I was about to ask you the same thing.” The man smiled a wry smile and ran his fingers through his reddish hair. He was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, and he looked remarkably at ease with himself. “Although I’ll assume you’re a visitor, what with the pajamas and all. The wry smile turned into a laugh. “Unless you just like to sleep a lot and find it more convenient to wear those all day so you can fall asleep wherever you want.” Unsure what to make of all this, Julien stood there in his wealth of silent confusion. “I see you are standing in a wealth of silent confusion,” the man added, as he read the “I’m standing in a wealth of silent confusion” expression that was evident on Julien’s face. “Perhaps I can help to explain a few things.”
“That would be… good.” Julien continued to do what he was becoming best at. “Um, where exactly am I?” he asked, for starters.
The man turned around and made some nice expansive and utterly random gestures. “Here!” he said. “Where else?”
“Home,” said Julien. “In bed.” He stood there for a moment, looking about at the lake and the grass and the geese and anywhere except at the man. “Might I ask you what your name is?” he asked.
“Sure.” The man waited a moment, just to make sure that Julien realized the full idiocy of his question. “The name’s Larry.” He extended his hand for a handshake, then withdrew it before the thought of shaking it had even reached Julien’s conscious mind. “I’m sorry, I don’t like to be touched.”
“S’ok,” mumbled Julien, content to stare at his shoes and wish they were red, or had rubies on them, or had any chance of doing anything remotely involved with bringing him back home and away from this nutcase right now. His shoes continued to do none of the aforementioned things.
“So…” his newfound friend stood there on the grass, looking rather self-satisfied, only now in a more confused sense of the word. I always knew confusion was contagious… thought Julien.
“Yeup.” Larry nodded, in a rather complacent and understanding way which made Julien feel even more out of his league. It wasn’t just that the man had nodded in that way, it was that he was responding to his thoughts again. To my thoughts, thought Julien. That’s a bit mean, considering they’re mine and all. “Oh!” suddenly Larry continued to look confused, only in a more surprised sense of the word. “I’m sorry. Most people don’t seem to mind. Well, much.” Larry looked guilty, and Julien was damned if he wasn’t going to take advantage of it.
“It’s intrusive as hell. Not to mention it goes against all known science.” He glared self-righteously, something he was very good at. “I’m sorry.” He looked it. Julien merely contented himself with continuing the look of righteous indignation, although in the end it still didn’t prepare him any better for Larry’s next sentence. “I mean, it’s not like I couldn’t read your thoughts to know that it annoyed you or anything, which makes it worse since I knew that you knew that it annoyed you, so I knew I should have stopped.” The righteous indignation meekly bowed down from its fifteen seconds of fame and gave way to the more stable look of confusion on Julien’s face. Ironically, he now felt more out of his league as his facial expressions worked their way back into the only form they felt comfortable in.
Larry shook his head. “I’m really not helping, am I.” Sitting down on the grass cross-legged, he stared up at Julien imploringly. “What do you expect of me, anyway?”
As if pulled down by some invisible wake, Julien sunk down into the grass beside his confusing friend, hugging his legs like a lost 5-year old, not minding the condition of his pajamas. “What do I expect of you?” he asked desperately, “Why don’t you just tell me where I am?”
“You want to know where you are?” Larry grinned. “You really do, don’t you? Bloody idiot.” Then everything disappeared.
There was absolutely nothing for some indefinite amount of time. Then everything reappeared.
“Um…” Julien was lying on his back in the overly lush grass, with a look of utter despair and confusion embedded into the very features of his features. Beside him, Larry stretched languidly, secure in his vocabulary. “What are you so worried about?” he asked placidly, and then flashed an evil grin in the direction of the almost physically tangible void of distress that had once been Julien.
“Er…” No intelligible response seemed forthcoming, so Larry contented himself with stretching in new and unique ways.
“Um…” distracted from his confusion into an sudden eddy of lesser confusion, Julien flailed into being for a second: “How do you do that?” he asked, as his friend bent his leg around his arm in a way that made the Cirque du Soleil seem like an Aussie rugby team forced into gymnastics at gunpoint.
“S’easy.” Larry yawned, and something vital within Julien imploded. “Oh,” he managed, weakly, “I suppose it comes from being omnipotent and all.” As if enlightened by this statement, he suddenly sat up and aimed his frantically bright green eyes into the more placid depths of the other. “You’re not God, are you?” he asked in disbelief. “You couldn’t be…” Larry shrugged. “Why does it matter?” he replied.
“Well, cause then, cause then, well, you’d be God.” Julien answered, before resigning himself to staring down at the grass between his toes. Larry stared at him blankly for a moment just to make sure that the absurdity of this comment had set in fully. “For what it’s worth,” he finally responded, “I’m not.” There was another moment of awkward silence.
“So…” he finally said after a while, “I suppose there must be some reason that I’m here.” Beside him, the blue eyes fixed themselves upon his face, and a different expression, something built of intentness and expectation, alighted upon Larry’s calm features, making Julien even more aware of the words he spoke.
“And I suppose that this means nothing to you, but I really am not who you think I am,” Julien continued, looking finally as if he possessed some sort of conviction.
“Aren’t you?” asked Larry, softly. His face turned towards the sun, lighting the reddish hairs upon his unshaven chin as a light smile flickered within his expression, not noticeable in anything but a slight movement of the lips and something in the brightness of his eyes.
Suddenly Julien felt very young, like his presence there was of no more import or merited no more surprise than sand toyed by waves on the beach. He sat up straighter and took a long look at his companion’s expression, as if trying to discern the meaning of life from the sunlight reflected in his eyes. “Who do you think I am?” he asked softly, confusion buried under something greater.
Larry turned back to look at him, fixed his eyes upon the other’s face. “I think that you are you, my friend, and that today, for once, that is all there is to you.” Then he sat up, dusted himself off, and offered Julien a hand up. “Come on.”
Julien took the proffered hand and, upon rising, found that he was now dressed in jeans and a blue shirt, not unlike Larry’s. “Where did my pajamas go?” he asked.
Larry smiled. “If you really like being covered in goose droppings you can have them back,” he joked, “but I don’t recommend it.” Julien decided to not press the subject.
His new-found genial, albeit eccentric friend grasped his hand and lead him along the path that ran past the bench and along the side of the pond. Men holding hands had always been on Julien’s list of things to be “not noticed” and avoided if possible, but now he found it quite natural to walk alongside him, noticing for once how lightly Larry’s grasp was, his motions quick and agile, more like a fox or some other graceful animal than a man.
The two of them walked around the pond, their feet making no sound on the packed-dirt path, leaving no trace. The geese cleared their way in advance, for once silencing their harsh throaty cries as they passed. They walked for some time, in silence, this way; Julien caught up in the absolute madness and beauty of this remarkably comfortable dream. The grass, bright green, waved smoothly to and fro in the slight wind, the water rippling from its motion. Tiny fish swam in the shallows, visible only as flashes of light stirring in the soft muted depths of the muddy water. Every now and then a frog, complacent in its frog-ness, would cry out “EEP!” and hop down from the banks into the cool water, awakened from a midday sunbath by their quiet passage when the path brought them close to the swampy edges.
After some time, they came to a small wooden bridge at the end of the pond, where the stream that fed it entered. Larry stopped, let go of Julien’s hand, and knelt down by the place where the bridge met the water, staring down into the deeper water under the planks.
“Look there,” he gestured, pointing out what seemed to Julien only a pool of larger ripples on the surface of the water. “No- underneath.”
Adjusting his gaze to see into the murky depths, Julien caught a glimpse of a massive tail, smooth on the sides and ridged like some prehistoric beast on the top, swirling gently through the water, cruising away from the two of them. “What is that?” he asked.
Larry stood up and turned to face his foundling. “An ogopogo,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “There aren’t many of them left in this world.”
“This world?” asked Julien, and then, “I mean, what’s an ogopogo?” But Larry had already turned away, and was heading up the path away from the lake. Julien cast one last glance at the now still surface of the water before turning to follow.
Wandering along the perfectly manicured path, Julien vaguely wondered where they were going. After a bit more walking, he realized this did not really matter since he didn’t know where he was, in general. And he had no way of knowing where that was, either. Or how he’d gotten there. He looked down at his shoes in a fair amount of distress. “Um…” he asked the man who walked silently but steadily in front of him, “how did I get here?” Larry shrugged without breaking his stride.
Not one to easily be fazed, Julien quickened his pace to catch up and grabbed the man’s wrist with a sense of some urgency. “Why aren’t I back at my house? Asleep in my bed? This must be a dream.”
Larry stopped and, though he was too kind to glare, sent a stern look in Julien’s direction. “I’m no wizard,” he retorted rather uneasily, “but this is no dream.”
Julien ignored the stern look and kept going. “Well, surely you know where we are. Tell me that, then, if you don’t know how I came to be here.”
Larry sighed and, to Julien’s surprise, flopped right down on the warm dirt of the path, his hands outstretched behind his reclining form. “Look.” He paused, looked off to one side of the path as if for confirmation of something, then sighed again and continued with a look not entirely devoid of frustration. “I have lived here all my life. You, evidently, have not. Yet neither I nor you can give an accurate description of where we are, you in your world, and me in mine.”
Julien looked like he was about to say something, then stopped and closed his mouth instead, just for a second. “So you won’t tell me anything,” he retorted, finally.
Larry nodded, and laughed. He lay back on the path, and turned his sharp gaze to the sky, relaxing with all the ease of a cat on a windowsill.
“I can’t take this,” said Julien, softly. “Where can I go to find out anything?” He looked down at his friend on the ground, who seemed to know everything but was rather short on answers. “Where should I go?” A shrug answered him, adding to his general sense of unease. “Well,” he continued, giving a cursory look to all sides, “I bet there’s people out there who know more than you and me put together.” He risked a smile at his friend, who altogether missed it. He suddenly had the feeling he’d be a bit lonely on his own. “Um…” Larry yawned. “You don’t want to come with me, do you?” Julien looked down on the sunlit form a bit anxiously, but it only stretched and shook its head. So he left it.
Julien decided to head west. It was what all good explorers did, he reasoned lazily, not too concerned with the details of this logic.
