Posted on by Claire

Through the Window Glass and how Tracy Got There

Alice went through the looking glass.

Tracy went through the front window of her car.

The average person doesn’t often ponder the physics at work during a head-on collision. In a split second before Tracy’s face smashed against the pavement—crumpling her nose and sending scattered shards of bone into her cerebral cortex—some six trillion neural signals fired in her brain, giving her more than enough time to contemplate the violent forces acting on her. She recalled from a driver’s education class some ten years ago that the bumper of a car is designed to bump the object being impacted without causing damage. This was considered an elastic collision.

At higher speeds, however, the collision was an inelastic one. In these situations, the bumper will crumple in order to release some of the energy from the collision. In many ways, Tracy concluded just before her skull split open, the last few months at her workplace had been like watching an inelastic car-crash in slow motion—and she, in many ways, was a bumper.

Tracy Schmidt worked at a company called the Deepwater Corporation.

The company was a massive thing; a global conglomerate that had a monopoly producing, refining, and transporting dreams—not in the metaphorical sense either; literal, physical dreams that you could take home and plug into your brain to live out as you fell asleep. Tracy and the rest of the world once touted the idea of selling dreams an impossibility and a laughable business proposition even, but the Deepwater Corporation had turned the impossible into a profitable industry in less than a year. The company sold big dreams, small dreams, sweet dreams, erotic dreams—anything you could think up could be done.

Tracy applied to the corporation at her first opportunity and was certain that working in such a blossoming field would bring her great success. She was fresh out of college and full of drive. The man who interviewed her liked that about her. He liked her mahogany red lipstick even more.

“Well Miss Schmidt,” he grinned. His face was like a knife, his smile a glint of light across the blade. “I don’t think that there’s need to peruse any more interviews. You’re more than what we’re looking for here at Deepwater.”

“Really?” the corners of her lips cautiously rose to mimic his smile. “Thank you so much sir! This means so much to me.”

The two of them got along for about a month. Tracy was one of the best dream salespeople on the Deepwater team and had increased the month’s sales 12% from last year. She kept her cubicle tidy and had a picture of her fiancé propped up beside her computer monitor along with her vast collection of permanent markers. She brought in doughnuts every Friday and could hold quite lengthy conversations with the other employees, talking in great detail about her last vacation to Europe and pouring over the descriptions of all the castles she had visited.

Her boss had no family portraits in his office, or permanent marker collections, or Friday doughnuts, or conversations with his employees about his vacations. Maybe he once did. Maybe he was a different person before he industrialized dreaming.

Now he took to torturing Tracy.

He would circle her like a shark, any minute mistake blood in the water. He chastised her for every bathroom break, every time she showed up a minute late to work, any single sip she took from her water bottle. He would stroll into her cubicle and give her a friendly reminder on the company policy, dick hard enough to kill somebody with.

“Miss Schmidt,” he said one particularly dreary day. “Somebody just called in wondering why they had a dream about playing Olympic foosball with George Clooney!”

“I sent you a memo,” said Tracy. “Factory recall on a line of vacation dreams.”

“I didn’t get any memo,” her boss said. “You need to keep better track of these things and keep me in the loop. Communication is key wherever you work!”

“Of course, sir,” Tracy said even though she knew that he had received the memo. She handed it to him in person and he even made a comment about it. She watched the rain patter against the window and it reminded her of a dream she had had as a child, before Deepwater had patented them. In the dream she had watched a giant eye cry a gentle storm over the infinite horizon, pierced by the sunbeams of the fiery sunset. It was curious, Tracy thought, that she could recall this dream from over ten years ago with perfect accuracy, but she couldn’t remember the dream she received from Deepwater just last night.

Next week Tracy’s boss held a meeting with Tracy and the rest of the office.

“As some of you know,” he said. “We’ve been working on a new way to experience your Deepwater dreams. Our folks in the lab have started work on a new line that will allow you to learn a new skill while you sleep. So far, they’ve had some success with new language retention, so we’re going to move things ahead and plan for a Q3 product line release. Tracy, can I trust you to take on this project and make that deadline?”

Tracy reluctantly nodded. “Of course.” She didn’t want to do it, but she had been fishing for a promotion so she and her fiancé could put some money down on a new house. She hoped this could finally put her in good enough standings to move up the ladder.

The next day Tracy headed down to the dream lab to introduce herself and get a firsthand look at the project. “So,” she said to the head developer after shaking his hand. “How far along are you?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “Well, we were mostly messing around and taught Derryl the Spanish word for shit while he was napping on break. We’re a year away from having the ability to do any sort of advanced skill retention.”

Later that day, Tracy sent her boss a very long email asking to have the release date pushed back. She was granted an extra week.

Tracy put in sixty hours every week to meet her deadline. She learned REM encoding since the company was short on dream developers following recent layoffs and filled in anywhere she could. In the end, her team was only able to make a three-part dream series of Learning Spanish. It sold below the projected numbers since Tracy wasn’t able to focus as much on marketing like she usually did, but the series made a profit nonetheless.

She didn’t get her promotion. All she got was a note from her boss saying that they were going to have to cut her hours. Tracy started to look for a new job after that.

Tracy also started experiencing abdominal pains after that. At first she thought it was stress related, but after a bout of heavy vaginal bleeding she decided she should go to the emergency room. She asked her boss permission to get time off from work but he was less than convinced of the severity of her condition. After all, he thought, wasn’t that a normal thing to happen to women?

Tracy tiptoed around him to get an okay from his board of directors, and when she arrived in the ER the nurse said she’d never seen that much blood before. Tracy was admitted and given a couple blood transfusion, where she was later diagnosed with endometrial cancer.

Her boss called her once he heard the news from his subordinates, insisting it couldn’t be cancer because his mom had cancer before, and he knew if she really had cancer she would be tired and losing weight. Tracy quit her job after that. She put in her two weeks’ notice and spent her final days at the company doing nothing.

“Why are you playing video games on the work computer?” her boss said.

Tracy shrugged. “If you don’t like it then fucking fire me.”

That really made her boss angry. Suddenly he wasn’t just mad about his company’s diminishing returns because apparently dreams were just “last year’s fad”, or how he had been too busy with work to be with his mother when she passed away, or how he had complimented Tracy’s mahogany red lipstick a year ago and asked her out and she didn’t even consider him worthy of a chance. There were countless other reasons for his anger, less significant, and hardly worthy of mentioning.

In the end, though, it was this culmination of anger, bitterness, and isolation that drove him and his car into Tracy’s own. As Tracy’s brain fired its last signals, her boss felt only disappointment. Not in himself, but in that this moment had always been more satisfying in his dreams.

Posted on by Claire

The Spaces He Leaves

My lover is suffering from a terrible disease. I don’t know how he caught it, only that one morning he was heaving rose petals into the toilet and the next the doctor explained that there was an entire garden within his chest. It’s been a month, and now he’s shaving blades of grass off his legs.

Nobody knows what is wrong with him. We’ve tried doctors and surgeons from across the country without a stroke of luck. Every treatment to remove the malignant matter is fruitless, for everything that is cut out of him regrows at a more furious pace. There are roots strangling his veins and climbing vines marching their way up his spine and into his skull. There were a lot of calls at first, people asking when he would be back at work, that his coworkers were worried, or that he had missed his appointment to get the oil changed on his car. Eventually the calls had stopped. Now it was just us.

The last day he was healthy, he had been sad about himself.

This was not something that was unusual. He was often sad about himself, and it was one of the reasons why I loved him. We would sit together on the couch, him laying his head on my chest with my fingers in his hair because I knew no woman had held him in such a way before. He never said a word to me about it, but the pool in his dark eyes made my skin lift with emotion.

That day we were sitting just like that: his head on my chest and my fingers in his hair. It was raining outside, gently moving from our gutters to drip onto the sidewalk. He lifted his head and said to me, “There’s not enough sun in the world.”

I thought about that for a bit, listened to the rain hit the roof and the sound of him breathing. “I think it’s easy to say that on a day like today,” I murmured.

“It’s not just today,” he said. “I’ve thought about it often.”

“Why do you think that?”

He pressed his head into my shoulder and held me tighter.

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t press him, and was surprised when he added softly, “I just don’t know who the person I am is supposed to be.”

“The person you are is whoever you want it to be,” I said. “Maybe there isn’t enough sun in the world because it encourages us to always grow towards the light.”

He looked at me with those unwavering eyes and didn’t say anything more. I took his fingers in my own and leaned in and kissed him. Took his face in my palms and the kiss was soft and sweet and our faces were too close for anything else to be happening. I made love to him. I told him I loved him and meant it. I could feel the void within him, my affection falling into it like a star being devoured by a black hole. For a long time I thought I could fill the void, that somebody wicked had stolen a piece from him and I could put it back.

I don’t think the same anymore.

This morning, over a month later, he is especially bad. I wake up and find him at the toilet again. He hasn’t left the house in a week and spends most of his time lying in bed. He hasn’t eaten anything in that time, only drinking copious amounts of water. I help him heave a nasty clump of dirt and plant matter. I rub the back of his neck and can feel something hard underneath, like the bark of a tree.

“You’re not getting any better,” I say to him. I don’t try and hide the pain in my voice. I had stopped that after the third surgery.

He had stopped replying for a long time, and when he does I’m not expecting it. His voice is like creaking wood and rustling leaves.

“I don’t want to get better.”

“What?” I say, taking my hand off him.

“This is who I am,” he murmurs. “But I don’t know if I’m ready to go.”

This is the limit of my limits. I cannot bare to see him like this any longer. I wait until it is midnight, and then I hold his hand and lead him to the passenger seat of the car. I drive him to the park, the same park where we had first met. We lay out under the moon and the stars and I hold his head against my chest. His breathing is so shallow it’s almost inaudible.

“I love you,” I say to him. I truly mean it. “But it’s time for me to go. You can be the person you are, now.”

He closes those dark eyes, those tiny pools reflecting the stars, for the last time. When he opens them again, he is someone different but not unfamiliar.

His rips crack open like a flower in bloom. From his chest comes a thousand petals of all sorts of colors: reds, oranges, pinks, and purples. Most of his flesh and bone are gone, having nourished the plants within him for a month. His skin, paper-thin and hardly able to contain the garden inside, tears from everywhere as his chest rips open. The rest of him spills out onto the ground and quickly takes root, covering the last remnants of my lover in their foliage.

I turn around and walk back to the car.

Sometimes I think he’ll return to me some day. A naked man who dropped out of a tree somewhere, looking for his way back home. I make sure my phone number is listed in the paper. I know deep down, though, that he’s happier this way. I take up gardening and keep a small plot of flowers by the house. Somebody compliments me on them one day, telling me that they really fill out the space under the porch. I think about that as I lay in bed that night in the quiet of my small bedroom, and wonder if the plants growing inside my lover had filled all of his spaces, too. I wonder if the plants had been inside him all along, just waiting for the proper moment to grow and fill the void.

I close my eyes and the dark spaces waiting inside were so numerous I thought there wasn’t enough sun in the world.