I’ll say it one last time, in case you didn’t hear me before. I hate to have to point it out to you, but you’re terribly self-absorbed and always have been. You often say that you’re listening even when you aren’t. You think that what I’m saying is totally unimportant, so you just nod your head and agree with me and you don’t feel that you’ve lost anything when you haven’t heard what I’ve said. It just makes it easier for you to ignore me if you pretend that you’re listening.

It’s gotten to the point that I imagine I can actually see cotton in your ears. I imagine actual physical impediments to your hearing. There are little brick walls inside your earlobes. I think I might be making some sort of apology for you. My mind is trying to find a reason why you can’t hear anything. I don’t want it to just be your obstinacy, or your ego, or your low esteem for me. I know that you don’t want to hear me, but I refuse to believe it.

So what I’m asking is that you not tell me you can’t hear me. Don’t bother, because I don’t believe you. Or at least, I’m trying not to believe you. It makes me feel like I’m being fooled or taken advantage of. So I’m trying not to believe you anymore.

And what I’m saying for the last time is that I’m going to be quiet now. And you’ll wonder what’s happened and why I’m so quiet. You won’t understand because I’ve said it for the last time and you weren’t listening. But you won’t hear another peep out of me.

There was a terrible secret that he had kept to himself for years. It was something about him that you couldn’t get away with. There were many things, even most things, which could be uttered. You would probably horrify a few people, but most would just laugh and share their own secrets. And everyone would drink some more, and it wouldn’t be so bad.

But this was something that he knew no one would laugh about. No matter whether they thought it was funny or not, they would grimace and clam-up and end the evening. Even if they did think it was funny, they wouldn’t want anyone else to know that they did. So, they would just look uncomfortable for a minute, and then they would have to get going, and he would be left sitting there, exposed. And no one would ever invite him again.

So even towards the end of the night, when everyone was pretty drunk, He still managed to keep his mouth shut. He knew that people thought he was a bit of a tight ass because he didn’t talk as much as other people. But whatever they might think of him for keeping quiet, it was better than what they’d think if they knew.

While he was walking home from the bar, he whispered it to himself. He was a little drunk and in the mood for something dramatic, so he decided that he wanted to say it out loud. But he still knew enough not to let anyone else hear it, so he waited until he was walking down an empty street. There was no one around, and even if he had failed to notice somebody, they would think he was just some crazy guy talking to himself, and that he wasn’t saying anything important.

He knew better than to tell me what the secret was. If I knew, then even though I’m tired of judging, inevitably I would judge him. And he also knew that if I knew, I would tell you. Then you would judge him as well. He understands. He knows it’s not vindictive or anything. We all make judgments in order to survive in the world. But the last thing he needs is to be judged, so he’s not going to let us know.

And now you’re thinking that the secret must be really horrible, like a rape or a murder or something. I admit that his unwillingness to tell seems to indicate that his secret must be pretty awful.

But, after giving it a little thought, I can see that that’s not necessarily true. Let’s face it, there’s only two ways this can go, you think the secret is really horrible, and by extension, you think he’s really horrible, in which case he’s right not to tell you. Or you might think that the secret is kind of stupid and lame, and so, by extension, he’s lame as well. So, then you would be judging him in another way and no matter what he does he loses. He’s better off keeping the secret to himself.

Sarah remembered a certain morning in the summer when the sun had already come up and was pushing light into their bedroom. Nathan sat up suddenly, but he didn’t gasp as he would have if he had been waking from a nightmare. Instead, he just sat still in bed and stared at the far wall. After a minute, he swung his feet onto the floor and grabbed a cigarette out of the package on the night table. He lit it and then looked back at her over his shoulder while he smoked.

After watching her for a while, he called her name and asked if she was awake. There was something about that morning which made her pretend she was still asleep. It was quiet and she was feeling very peaceful. She knew if she sat up and started talking to him, the peace would be shattered. So, she kept lying still in the bed and hoped he wouldn’t realise she was awake.

He figured she was still asleep, but he started talking to her anyway. He told her about a dream he’d been having, and with her eyes closed she almost felt like she was having the dream herself as he described it to her. “We were riding a motorcycle, I remember, we went very fast. And every time I turned around to look at you… I was trying to talk and my teeth kept falling out. They were like ice in my mouth, breaking to pieces. They flew past your face when I tried to talk, but you didn’t seem to notice. I was worried about it though.”

“We got going really fast. It felt good. There weren’t any bugs. That’s funny, eh? I didn’t even notice it during the dream, just now. We weren’t wearing helmets or anything, but we didn’t get bugs in our faces. You’d have thought we would. Anyway, we were going really fast. I think I was trying to forget that my teeth were falling out. That’s why I kept speeding up.”

“Soon enough the cops were after us. Chasing us down. I just laughed and kept going. You were laughing too. All my teeth were gone by then, and it felt kind of good. Nothing but gums. Kind of like the worst was over, you know? Plus, it felt like I could breathe better because my teeth weren’t in the way anymore. More room in my mouth for air.”

“The cops kept chasing us and we kept going faster. The cops put down spikes, but they couldn’t blow out our tires. I don’t know why, but they didn’t pop when I ran over the spikes. Then they put up roadblocks, but we just jumped over them, like in a movie.”

“Finally, they put up a big brick wall across the road. I looked at you and you just smiled, so I kept on going. We just ploughed into the wall. It didn’t hurt. For a second, I thought we had gone right through it to the other side.”

“The wall was still in front of us, though. We were lying on the road laughing. The bike was wrecked, and you were in pieces, still laughing. I saw your head and went over to pick it up. Then you seemed to realise what had happened and you stopped laughing. You started saying my name. You looked so surprised and disappointed, but I couldn’t stop laughing. I don’t know… it was just the look on your face.”

“I kissed you. I picked up your head and kissed you on the mouth. You still looked good. Then one of your teeth fell out and I woke up.”

Sarah was tempted to sit up, but she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to respond to his dream, so she just stayed where she was. The early morning peace had been broken in spite of her ruse. There wasn’t much point in faking sleep anymore, but she still couldn’t bring herself to stir. He put out his cigarette and left the room, and she lay staring out the window hoping if she kept lying there long enough the quiet would return and she would be able to doze again.

Nathan was quiet in the kitchen, but soon the gurgling sound of the coffee maker started up. She sat up and got out of bed and then she followed the coffee sounds to the kitchen.

He sat at the table waiting for the coffee to finish dripping. He’d lit another cigarette while he sat and popped the kitchen window open so that the smoke twisted in the breeze. As she watched him she still couldn’t help feeling like it was a perfect morning. She knew that it wasn’t anymore, but she still felt like it was. Or that it should be, anyway. She went to the living room and turned on the radio. Classical music came blaring out of the speakers, and she went back into the kitchen.

“Is that all right?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said without looking at her. “Do you want eggs?”

“Sure.”

He got up and dug out the frying pan and a carton of eggs from the refrigerator. Then he cut up a few mushrooms and green peppers and fried the vegetables first while he scrambled the eggs in a bowl. When the veggies were done, he added the eggs. By this time the coffee was ready, so she poured two cups and made sure he had sugar in his then handed it to him. Nathan divided the eggs roughly in half and slid them onto two plates, then placed one in front of her at the table as well as a fork. He sat down with his own plate and she said, “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” he replied with a confused smile.

Sarah took a mouthful of eggs and then made a happy sound. She chewed a couple of times, then made a little face and put her hand to her mouth to take out a piece of shell. She put it down on the side of her plate.

“Is everything all right?” he said.

“Just a little shell,” she replied. “It’s no problem.”

“Sorry about that.”

Sarah looked over at him, about to speak, but she couldn’t find anything to say. She had been sure that something would come to her, but there were too many words in her head, and she couldn’t choose the right ones. She knew that her silence would make him uncomfortable, but then she decided that she didn’t have a problem with his discomfort. It had only been a dream, and she knew that he couldn’t really be held responsible, but still, it had bothered her.

Before, in the mornings they had generally talked. About how stupid the people at work were, or how stupid a particular movie or song was. It struck her that they’d spent a great deal of time talking about stupidity. And she felt kind of stupid for missing it.

But now she had nothing to say. So, instead of speaking, she just looked over at the fragment of eggshell on the side of her plate. Silence was becoming more and more of their daily life together.

In the interest of accuracy, I’ll tell you now that this is about dreams I had. Some people just hate hearing anything about dreams. “Oh God, not more dream crap,” they say to themselves. But I’m going to tell you about them anyway.

They were weird dreams, but they were excellent. I say that, and you immediately jump to the conclusion that they were wet dreams. They absolutely weren’t.

I used to dream about flying. When I was a kid, I dreamt about flying quite a bit. But I never took off from the ground. It started by falling. The first few dreams made me scared, because it seemed like I was just going to plummet to my doom.

But whenever I fell–whether it was a tall building or a mountain or whatever—I always started flying before I hit the ground.

After I’d had that kind of dream a few times, I started looking for high places to jump from. I’d stopped being scared at all and just went in search of places to jump from.

It was better if I was running from someone, so being deliberate only worked a couple of times. It was usually I was being chased and suddenly found myself on top of a cliff or in front of a twentieth story window. And so, I’d either get caught or jump. And so, I always jumped off, started falling, and then started floating before I sailed away.

I began trying to sleep all the time. I started missing school and extra-curriculars so that I could get more dreaming in. I had been a decent student, if a little unmotivated. But, by then, I was just useless.

My parents worried—of course they did. They tried forcing me to keep going to school at least, but I just kept dozing off in class, and eventually even the teachers didn’t want me there. They encouraged me to skip if all I was going to do was come to school to fall asleep.

I didn’t really hurt anyone. In fact, if anyone was getting hurt, it was really just me. The other kids had thought that the sleeping was funny at first, but soon they were making fun of me. I was that weird kid who slept all the time. It wasn’t about being a sleepy rebel against the teachers, but just that weirdo who dozed off constantly.

Eventually my parents sent me to a psychologist. I know now that he was actually pretty sketchy, but at the time, I got along with him really well. It initially seemed like narcolepsy, but it was quickly apparent that it wasn’t compulsive. I was very deliberately trying to sleep.

And even then, he eventually understood that it wasn’t really sleep that I wanted. What I really liked doing was flying. And he understood why I might try to sleep constantly if that led to flying.

But he also pointed out that I couldn’t just keep sleeping away while things were happening in the waking world. He told me the story of his cigarette dreams.

He had quit smoking about a decade before, but he said the best cigarettes he’d ever had were in the previous ten years. They were dream smokes, and they were way better than the real cigarettes had ever been.

In dreams, the cigarettes opened his head up to the heavens and made him feel like God was massaging his brain using nicotine. And then he woke up, and after a minute or two, he realized he’d never smoked at all.

So, it was even better than he’d thought. Because he never even had to feel bad that he’d been smoking again. The feeling of the heavenly smoke was gone by that point, but he’d had a cigarette without consequences. And it was excellent.

But the dream cigarettes had never made him want to take up smoking again. And he’d never had dream smokes when he was actually a smoker. The dream smokes only occurred because he’d quit smoking.

And I only flew because I couldn’t actually fly. Which is why it was so fantastic. But he convinced me that it was things in the real world that failed us and that failure is what made things in the dreamworld fantastic.

I still wasn’t a great student. But I stopped trying to force myself to doze off all the time. Only when things were really hard did I try to go to sleep and find a cliff.

William was facing the wall, but he was still able to hear the men talking behind him. He was on his knees in front of a brick wall. They were only about ten feet away, discussing his fate. What they were saying was extremely clear. As he listened, he stared up at the ravaged, brick wall in front of him. Though he couldn’t see the men’s actual faces, he started to associate each voice he heard with a different section of the wall.

There was a deep voice that he put with the rough mortar between the bricks. There was a high, smooth voice that he placed with a brick that was smooth instead of ridged like the others. There was a gravelly sounding voice that he associated with a part of the wall that was below him to his right. It was pock-marked with bullet holes, and some of the mortar was falling out completely. There was some graffiti on the wall above him, but he listened in vain for a voice to go with it. Someone had gone to the trouble of painting a rebel logo on the wall. Maybe it was before the shooting had started. It seemed a bit pointless, but it also seemed to demonstrate the belief that support for a thing was actually valuable. That belief seemed to have demonstrated itself false, but it was a belief that William kept wishing were actually true. He kept trying to match it to a voice, but none of them seemed quite right.

Those were the main voices, but there were others as well.  There were eight men and most of them didn’t speak. And even when one of the other men piped up, he generally had very little to say. Even though it seemed like it was a fairly big decision for the men to make, there wasn’t really much to talk about. They were on the march deep behind the lines and couldn’t take prisoners, so they had to make other arrangements. They weren’t sure whether to execute him, injure him so he couldn’t keep fighting or just let him go free and depend on him to leave. This was obviously what William wanted, and he was, actually, intending to just leave if they let him go. He really didn’t care who won, and certainly not enough to keep fighting about it. Naturally, he was curious about what was going to happen to him, but at the same time, he found it disconcerting having to listen.

The gravelly voice was really pushing for execution. He was arguing that they definitely wanted William out of the fight, and the only way to get that done was either to take him prisoner or kill him. Since they couldn’t take him prisoner, they’d have to kill him. William found himself sympathizing with this argument until he remembered who they were talking about. Then he hoped that the best argument wouldn’t win.

For a moment they talked about injuring him instead. The idea was brought forward by someone that William hadn’t heard before. The voice seemed unsure of itself, and even though it had brought the idea of an injury up, it didn’t seem to think it was actually a very good idea.

It was an unremarkable voice, and he couldn’t decide which part of the wall it would even go with. It definitely didn’t fit with the graffiti. William had to smile despite himself about how snobby he had gotten about that graffiti. There was no way that a hesitant, mediocre voice was going to get that spot.

The deep voice immediately objected, saying that injury was nothing but a cruel and cowardly method of execution. It pointed out that any injury they inflicted would almost certainly be fatal. William would just lie on the ground and bleed to death without any help. So even if the intent was simply to ensure William’s removal from the conflict, it would likely result in prolonged suffering and death. The deep voice said that, though he would have preferred imprisonment, a straight execution would be a better option than just leaving him to bleed out.

After this admission, the two voices argued for a while, but the gravelly voice was clearly winning. The other voices agreed with him, and the deep voice was the only holdout left. William could hear a bit of desperation seeping into the voice, and he kind of knew that he’d lost. Both of them had lost.

The gravelly voice pointed out that William’s side wouldn’t hesitate to kill one of them. The deep voice responded by saying that that was an even better reason not to do it. They were fighting an actual war so as not to be like the other side, and so if the other side would have had no problem with an execution, it was an even better reason not to do it themselves.

However, the first voice had already convinced the others. Different voices expressed varying degrees of sympathy for the deep voice and for William, but the discussion was now just focussed on how they would kill William, not on whether they actually should. They were feeling bad about it, but it didn’t change anything. They still had to deal with him, and they had limited options for how they were going to do that.

The idea of a firing squad was briefly considered, but the deep voice proclaimed that he wanted no part of it. William heard the swishing sounds of someone walking away—presumably the deep voice leaving. After he had left, nobody else seemed to be that interested either, and even the gravelly voice was hesitant. There was no longer any discussion, just the sound of uncomfortable silence. Eventually the gravelly voice spoke up again, saying that, if no one else was willing to help him, he would take care of it himself.

William heard a mechanical click behind him and then felt the muzzle of a rifle under his left ear. William had often been accused of thinking too much, and that came back to him as the muzzle rested under his ear. He should have been angry or desperate or something, but he mostly just felt sad. It was depressing that his own death seemed so reasonable.

After a while, William started to get a little impatient. The execution was happening, and it seemed like it’d be better to just get it done with. He wondered what the gravelly voice was waiting for, and then the muzzle of the gun jerked, and he stopped wondering. He’d never figured out which voice the graffiti should go with.

 

Northrup was going through his old files when he came across the folder that his mom had put together many years before. It was full of newspaper clippings about him and the machine that he’d invented. Most of them were from the weekly local paper of the small town that she’d been living in, but there were also a few from larger daily newspapers as well. Looking through the articles, he realized that, at least for some of them, she must have had to go searching to get them, since they weren’t from papers that she’d have even subscribed to.

Twenty years earlier Northrup had invented a kind of “life alarm.” The machine had been very popular for a few years. How it worked was that you entered your goals, and then you entered your actions as you went about daily life. If the machine saw that you were getting off track and doing things that wouldn’t help you get to your destination, it let you know. Unlike a standard alarm clock, it didn’t beep at you, but instead, the voice of a gentle British woman reminded you of where you were actually trying to get.

In spite of its initial popularity, it wasn’t long before the machine started to cause some controversy. The troubles culminated in Northrup being sued over one young man’s goals. An aunt took him to court because her nephew had entered that he wanted to get as high as possible. Whenever he wasn’t stoned, the alarm would gently chide him, and encourage him to smoke something or take a pill. They had to forcibly separate him from the machine before they could get him into rehab. The young man got himself straightened out eventually, but he became very critical of the machine, blaming it, in part, for his problems with substance abuse.

In the end, the judge found that Northrup couldn’t be held responsible for the goals that people punched into his alarm. However, even though he won the court case, the machine quickly lost popularity. It wasn’t long before no store would sell it, and Northrup faced bankruptcy. Soon no more alarms were being made.

Northrup had continued working on it, regardless. He hoped that he could fix some of the flaws that led to the court case. However, he found the problems insurmountable, and wanted to just put the whole thing behind him. He’d grown sick of the alarm, and he soon stopped even trying to fix it. The machine became nothing more than an idea when Northrup scrapped the last prototype. He was hoping that he’d never hear any more about it.

However, the alarm had been popular for long enough to spur quite a few articles. His mother had carefully clipped and stored as many as she could find. Northrup himself hadn’t bothered to keep more than a few of them and at the same time as he’d junked the prototype, he’d also burned the articles he’d kept, wishing that he’d never even imagined the machine in the first place. As a result, other than the articles that his mother had kept, there was no evidence left of the success that Northrup and his invention had enjoyed.

His mother had died several years before. It should have been old age that got her, but it was a car accident instead. Her car had been hit while she was pulling out of her driveway onto a busy street. A younger person in a newer car would have been all right, but she was in her eighties and the car was too old to have effective air bags. So, she held on for a little while, but after a few days, she died of her injuries.

Northrup was devastated, but he wasn’t sure that he was devastated enough. Even in his relationship with his mother, the alarm had taken its toll. Right up until the end, she had continued to insist on his brilliance, and that had made Northrup angry. One utterly failed invention, and she would not let go of the belief that he was a genius. At the time, he’d been working in a shoe store. He kind of liked it and wondered why he’d ever even tried for anything else.

His mother wasn’t satisfied with it, however. She kept forwarding him job offers to teach in Engineering departments. He’d told her many times that universities didn’t hire failed inventors with a bachelor’s degree to teach courses, but she wouldn’t listen.

After her death he had found the articles while he was going through her stuff. He was still working at the shoe store, but at least he had become the manager. Most of his staff were too young to know about his past, and those that were old enough to remember were also too smart to bring it up. Since he no longer had to serve the public very much, it was only very rarely that he had to deal with any random customer knowing who he was. Or at least, even if they figured it out, it was very rare that anyone said anything.

Looking through the articles, most of them described him as a visionary of some sort. His mother hadn’t kept the later articles that described him as deluded or arrogant or other unpleasant things. She didn’t like to think of him that way, so she had just willfully ignored what people actually thought of him by that time.

He found himself angered by the articles. If there had been at least some of the negative articles as well as the glowing ones, he might have found the experience less irritating. Though maybe he wouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have been great reading that he was delusional any more than it was reading about his genius. When he found them, he thought about taking them out to the backyard and burning them like he’d burnt the others.

However, he soon calmed down. Besides the articles, his mother had kept a box of his report cards and his awards. The report cards portrayed Northrup as a budding genius, like the articles had. He had always gotten good marks, and his teachers gushed about his natural abilities and talent.

So instead of burning them, he placed the folder full of articles into the same box with the report cards. He put it to one side, determined that when he started packing everything back up, it would go on the bottom. He’d be able to forget about it without actually having to get rid of it.

The folder was hers and even though it was about him, he didn’t feel right about destroying it. She had been deluded about him right until the end, and no matter how much he might want to, he couldn’t change her mind anymore. The delusion was hers, and he didn’t feel he had the right to wreck it even after she had died.