Thanks so much! I'm glad you like it. I haven't written much lately, as I'm on the tail-end of a move from Texas to Florida. If you've ever moved before, you know what a huge effort it is. Not sure when I'll write more - hopefully it won't be too long

Part 14
He was obsessed.

And he knew it. The reunion with his mom was wonderful, but he wanted more. The near-reunion with his dad was heartbreaking, having ended just before he would have actually seen him, leaving him so frustrated, it hurt.

And the experience of waking up in bed with Diane, only to lose her once again had all but killed him. He wasn’t sure how it all worked – back here in reality he had to have been walking during his memory/dream. He’d fallen down when it was over, and now had a large purplish bruise on his lower back. God it was sore!

But besides the physical pain*, his soul ached*. He needed to see his dad. To tell him all the things he’d told his mom. Not to clear his mind or conscience of any long-standing unresolved guilt, but just to tell him.

In the years since his dad had died, he knew how important it should have been for him as a boy, to be closer to his dad. All of the things he could have learned from him. All the things he needed to talk to him about, to ask him. To experience with him. So what if it wasn’t real? It was real enough for the moment, and that’s all that mattered.

He needed to tell Diane not to leave. To hold her tightly against him. To make sure she knew how very much she meant to him, and that he would never again be so foolish as to drive her away.

But it was gone. And he was alone.

He couldn’t do it. He had tried for the better part of a week, to slip back into these specific memories, with no success. Sure he found himself re-living some good memories, but with being so fixated on these very ones, they all left him feeling unfulfilled.

Indeed several times he found himself in situations where he was a boy, playing with childhood friends, or playing with his dog in the yard. But always the thought that perhaps he’d be able to see his dad again, drove him dream-running to the house, leaving friends and toys behind in the time-shrouded tatters of his remembered landscape. And always, he would wake just as he was bounding up the front steps, or reaching for the door.

Every time he came so near to having Diane’s warm body beneath him as they slowly made love, or even just to kiss her, it ended and he awoke, frustrated, He would find himself still in the OSO, sometimes in bed, sometimes in other parts of the structure, unaware of how he got there. Invariably he found himself cursing the damned device for its maddening ability to take him to the very edge of what he sought, only to yank him back.

He even tried a different tactic; he attempted to just relax and let the memories take him where they would, certain that they would eventually lead him to what he sought. He was just going along for the ride, but hoping somewhere deep in his being, that the memory pulling him in, would be the one he sought . But this reverse psychology bore no more fruit than his earlier attempts, and the entire experience drained him.

Each day he seemed more tired than the one before. Once he awoke from a memory, he rarely fell back asleep again, but rather turned over and over in his mind, the thoughts, feelings and emotions he had felt. What might he have done differently? What could he have said to make it last longer, or turn out some other way? Such a rush of feelings couldn’t easily be turned off and he invariably found himself beginning to doze just as his alarm clock sounded, to awaken him for another day of drudgery.

Exhausted, he would shuffle tiredly down the stairs, and begin his day, trying not to think about what he’d just been through. But the device tricked him. It connived him. Wormed its way into every moment of conscious thought, teasing him with delicious ideas and the promise of wicked pleasures. He couldn’t resist thinking about it. Using it. Even though it let him down every time, it always assured him that with just one more use he could get what he so desired. It never worked, but he couldn’t quit. Just one more time. Just one more!

He remembered reading about a similar phenomena in history studies as a boy. People used to put foreign substances in their bodies through a variety of methods, wanting to alter reality, to make them feel better or even just to forget about how miserable their existence was. Or at least their perception of it. They knew what harm it could do, but they felt powerless to stop. It’s how he felt now. There was a word for it. What was it called?

He turned the question over in his mind several times before it came to him. Addiction! That was the word! He was happy with himself for remembering it.

Was that really what was going on? Was he addicted to this thing?

No that couldn’t be it. Addiction was a physical thing. If a person was physically addicted to something, it could do them harm to not have it. This was different. It was an emotional thing. An emotional desire. But…. Addiction.

He hesitated to even use the word, for the ramifications it brought with it. It couldn’t really harm him physically if he didn’t use it. Could it?

Perhaps it could. Already he was in bad shape from using the thing. And when he didn’t use it, he felt just as bad. Worn out, in pain. Depressed.

Whatever the name he wanted to put on it, he knew he would die at this pace. The emotional strain, coupled with the lack of significant rest would do him in very quickly.

For the next week he did little more than work, doing his very best to focus his mind on his job. He attempted to convince himself that if he could zero in, laser-like, on work, and nothing else, then he would be so much better off. When he wasn’t working, he would lay on his bed, staring off into empty air, praying that he would doze off, yet afraid to do so. A point on the ceiling would fix his gaze and he would glare at it with such intent, that he was sure his mere vision would burn a hole in the metal. Afraid to look to either side, for fear that the device would catch his eye and tempt him beyond his means to resist, he stared for hours at the ceiling, doing his best to empty his mind. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

He managed fitful naps, but restful sleep eluded him, as disturbing visions chased him through the nightmare landscape that had become his mind. If he could just not think about the device, perhaps it could give him the opportunity to rest. If he could just escape back into a restful memory. Perhaps a memory from when he was a boy, and hadn’t a care. Maybe the vacation he took in the ancient Scottish Highlands, where all he did for ten days was hike in the mountains, drink beer and catch up on some long-neglected reading. That was a memory he would love to go back to. But what if he couldn’t? He had tried to force certain memories to come to him, but only rarely was it successful. More often than not, he ended up in an entirely different memory, which so far hadn’t really been a bad thing. No, the memories themselves hadn’t been bad, but coming back to the present was awful. The memories played themselves out in such bright, vivid detail, that they evoked an incredible emotional response from him. Leaving them behind was the exact opposite; it was so emotionally devastating that it left him a wreck, unable to cope, nearly unable to function physically. And he knew what the result of that would be: Another experience with decompression. If there was a more awful way to be punished, he certainly couldn’t think of it

That was so far.

At times he suspected that perhaps this whole experience was itself an implanted dream. That maybe he was really still in suspended animation, on his way to the OSO, and this was some kind of cruel experiment that the administrators or a group of government paid scientists was subjecting him to.

But every time he thought about that, he found himself facing what he’d heard as a boy – that to have a dream within a dream was impossible due to mankind’s limited mental capacity. So he abandoned that train of thought each time it seeped into his head.

He had to focus on what was at hand, not what he was fairly certain was mere conjecture; he needed to try and wean himself off the device. But in order to do so, he would need something to keep his mind occupied.

Fashioning some crude paint from the rudimentary food paste that the re-supply team brought on board, he tried his hand at painting. Using a metal rod, with scraps of cloth tied to the end for a brush, he painted on any surface that struck his fancy. Soon many of the walls in the OSO had splashes of color, albeit dull, on them. Most of it was mindless drivel; streaks, and marks with no real form, no real expression in them. Ironically, the only painting that made any sense to him was one of a bowl of fruit. He joked to himself, chuckling over the fact that it was a picture of food, made of food. That he could literally eat it if he wanted to. The thought usually distracted him momentarily, but always his mind was pulled magnetically back to the device.

 

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My cousin Jack can speak to beans. That's right.... Jack and the beans talk