Forgotten Nightmare
by Charles Moulton
We were lightyears away now, grey skies a reality, government
properties guarding us, faceless guards locking us up, music playing
though black loudspeakers that was no music at all, created only to
cause the listener to deteriorate. Art that consisted of steel
constructions spitting paint upon randomly selected canvases. Planet
upon planet filled with dictator aliens from the suns of Proxima
Centauri using us humans as live bait in their game of eternal hide and
seek. Earthlings who chose to escape into their dream machines. Factory
upon factory with people just passing the time, making stuff no one
needed or used.
They told us the Earth was a dying planet, destroyed by nuclear war,
but there were rumors, stories about one safe haven, untouched and far
away from Hell. They caressed us colonized workers into dying,
whispering, cackling, smiling, nodding ourselves into misery.
“Sunday,” it read in silver letters on the white surface on my
kitchen screen. “Mashed potatoes with synthesized meat. Plastic Jell-O
with Paper Cream.”
Synthetic meat. Artificial potatoes. Robotic sauce.
My gaze lifted solemnly and granted me a look at my wife, the only
person left over from Earth that meant anything to me. The only woman
worth living for.
The intercom overhead produced a humorless voice telling a short,
unfunny joke followed by a solemn crackle that echoed out between our
aluminium walls.
The voice aimed to soothe us, but all it did was threaten us to a slow
death.
There was a short pause.
“We are working with your human governments in order to create a
New Earth,” the neutralized voice of the alien boss spoke through our
apartment loudspeaker. “It is being cleaned up as we speak, the bombs
are being dismantled, Mars is being terraformed, you will soon return
and will be able to choose from a variety of planets available for
colonization.”
I looked down at my steel table, my aluminium floor, my plastic
kitchen, my cliché workman’s clothes, living a grey life, wearing
clothes the aliens thought we humans should wear. Was this my future? I
looked back at my wife, wanting her, needing her. She was in another
world. The real world, but reality scared me.
The dreams were safe.
“Turn yourself off,” I told her, looking at her washing the
dishes. “Join me in my fake world. We will live in American Suburbia in
a clean world, drinking Root Beer and watching the Cubs win World
Series. Hogwash reality. All the beer you can drink, all the burgers
you can eat. Who cares if it’s fake? We’ll be happy.”
She said nothing. All she did was wash the dishes, dishes that had
been washed a million times before, dishes nobody ever used.
"I want to go back to my dream, Kayleigh," I moaned, holding my virtual
goggles.
She raised her hands, a tear falling down her cheek.
“Huh?” she sang in a long, druglike moan.
“I want to take a nap in my dream machine,” I crooned with a sad hint
of haunted hope
shivering in my spirit. “You want to join me? Let them plant the chip
into your brain, so that we can live together again in our dream world.
It’s fake, but, damn it, it’s more fun than this.”
Kayleigh blinked, her worried glance pleading for me to wait and not
fall asleep just yet. A resigned puppydog plea. Her ladylike graceful
clothing, decorated by a useless 50’s style apron never used, the only
thing left over in an otherwise lost life living in the underworld. Her
sudden confusion seemed absolutely out of tune with her beauty. Like
two flutes playing badly composed melodies on weird instruments,
emoting impossibly perverse quarter tones. An alien world forced upon a
tired soul.
“Stop bugging me with that dream shit,” she hollared, crying even more.
“It’s the only thing we can do,” I screamed back, banging my fist
against the steel table. “The dreams are the only thing worth living
for, damn it. The only thing that remotely resembles a life at all.”
She grabbed the shoulder-length locks of her conformed alien hairdo,
for one moment overcome by the ever recurring jab of guilt, and groaned:
“I should’ve listen to my father. He told me they were coming. He told
me there was still time. He told me and I didn’t listen.”
My wife looked out the window, sighed, looking at the uniform
landscape.
She was thinking the same thing she always thought, I knew it.
“I want to go back to Earth, Josh,” she moaned, slumping over, with me
in body but not really with me in mind. “No more aliens. No more
terraforming. No more artificial sunshine, no more artificial dreams.
No more identical homes.”
She sat up, suddenly alert, provocative.
“Forget it,” I mumbled. “In my dreams, life is perfect.”
She turned to me and snapped:
“You're spending more time in your dream world than with me. That’s the
reason why I never had one of those things planted inside me. I wish
they had not planted that chip into your brain. I choose my boredom,
Josh. At least it’s safe.”
I looked at her, the wheels in my head turning. I thought of the people
I knew in my dreams, people stored into my chip. Kayleigh looked out
through the fog onto the high government building beyond the settlement.
“The space folder back in the alien government building,” she whispered.
“What about it?”
“Your ID-card from the plant,” she whispered. “It’s in my pocket.”
“It’s Sunday,” I responded.
“Exactly,” she answered me. “Nobody is there. It’s the perfect
oppurtunity to split.”
“Kayleigh, no way ...”
“Baby?” she crooned. “Please.”
I sighed, shivered at the thought of breaking the rules.
“Darling?” she spat, leaning over toward me again. “The trip will only
take us ten minutes through the galactic slipstream, but we’ll end up
in the Polynesian zone. In reality, Kayleigh. On Earth, on our own
planet.”
“We could end up sick,” I answered, “imprisoned or dead. If they catch
us, we will spend the rest of eternity in deep freeze. Let’s just
dream. That’s safe. Have that chip planted into your brain. Please.”
“That’s what you want, Josh,” she screamed again. “Damn it, you’re in
that dream world all the time. You’ve fucking given up. If you’re not
trying this, I’m jumping out the window.”
She cried, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Kayleigh ...”
I reached over and caressed my wife’s face.
“Honey,” I said. “Come on.”
“Josh, please,” she whispered, grabbing my face and crying. “This is
not a life.”
I looked up, laughing sadly.
“It isn’t, is it?” she sighed.
She shook her head, squeaking something resembling a negative response.
“That old Rock Hudson and Doris Day-movie of your dream makes me barf.”
I realized how much I loved her and that I might lose her if at least I
didn’t try.
One spark of lust is all it took and soon, the kiss became a cuddle.
Within a minute, we at it like rabbits, bending the aluminium floor
again, sweating and crazy perverts dancing the bone-breaking mambo.
Ten minutes later, the grey factories were still there, sniggering at
us, smiling, crap-barfing sardonic wit upon our broken hearts.
Reeking of sex, we stood up, in unison this time, forgetting our safety
protocols and our constant surveillance machines planted into our
brains.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
“We have to give it a try,” she pleaded.
One look is all it took. One look, one mutual understanding.
One dream of going back home to reality.
“Okay,” I nodded, “but hold me.”
“I will.”
No guard waited in front of our domestic apartment building and the
road to the plant had no speed vehicle whizzing by.
Acid rain fell on us. Even that damn soot that came from the coal
factory made us look like chimney sweepers. If we still knew what they
looked like, that is.
Half way there, I thought I would fall, my head spinning, my stomach
grinding and turning, those mashed potatoes turning my intestines into
a battlefield of morphine attacked chemistry.
Kayleigh got me into the space folder. I don't know how, but she did.
Tht machine hummed at us, growled, spat, giving us the benefit of the
doubt, wondering why we were trying this again.
How we flew through that galactic slipstream. How we laughed when we
landed in Polynesia. How we smiled when we saw the beach, the sun, our
sun. Our fellow humans.
This was not the world we remembered.
Pirates, criminals, convicts, thieves, murderers, mutants, zombies, all
raging, fighting, screaming, killing each other for food or realizing
that they could only survive if they ate each other. Cannibals, we were
among cannibals.
The machine stopped humming, its groan-like wheeze dying down and
leaving us in the back-room of the plant again.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “We never left.”
“The acid rain, the slipstream, the arrival on Earth. Our homecoming.
Our ...”
“No,” I said, reassuringly. “Look.”
And from inside the light beyond the plant, I saw a ten foot alien grab
my wife by her right arm and pull her into the dream factory.
I did what I had done a million times by now. I ran.
“Kayleigh,” I bellowed. “Let them plant the dream chip into your brain
and we can be together forever in our dreams. We can’t go on like this.
The dreams are our only hope.”
“Never,” she shouted. “There has to be a chance that we can escape this
planet and go back home.”
Soon enough, I found myself running through the acid rain again,
watching them extract her memories and put her back in our kitchen.
So I forced myself to sit down by our kitchen table again, like a
million times before.
“I want to go back to my dream, Kayleigh,” I moaned.
“Huh?” she sang in a long, druglike moan.
“You want to join me?”
Kayleigh looked up at me.
The ten foot alien now returned, holding a fresh dream chip in his hand.
THE END
© 2019 Charles Moulton
Bio: Charles E.J. Moulton has been a stage performer since age
eleven, growing up triligually as the son of opera singer Gun Kronzell
and actor, author, singer and playwright Herbert Eyre Moulton. He has
138 productions, 700 concerts, 16 books, 165 published pieces to his
credit and is a chorus master, drama- and vocal coach and the
editor-in-chief of the theme-based, bimonthly journal “The Creativity
Webzine.” He is a steadily working actor, opera-, jazz- and pop-singer
and an Elvis-impersonator. He has also worked as a tourguide and as a
translator. He is married and has a daughter.
Comment on this story in the Aphelion Forum
Return to Aphelion's Index page.
|
