When ill-intentioned people figured out that beating Jim up did not work, they did their best to ostracize him, and succeeded almost completely. He perhaps had four friends worthy of that name, had never been kissed (not that he cared too much either, but he did yearn for love like everybody else) and generally led a lonely life. That he had no taste, or will to conform, in pretty much anything -- from clothing to music -- did not help, either.
And lately, the nightmares... they were always in the same setting, almost as if following a theme. Some sort of post-atomic world... a constant feeling of fear, of being hunted... and this girl, just about the only recurring character. Impossibly athletic, kind of heart and swift of hand, watching over him flying with some weird cape/glider contraption like an angel out of purgatory... his dream world was way too dark to have a heaven. Yet, somehow, despite the thousand scares and the thousand sweaty -- or worse -- wakeups in the aftermath of getting killed in another nightmare, Jim felt a sense of belonging. It had come to the point that he almost regretted getting out of bed, and -- if at all possible -- was withdrawing more and more from the real world.
His mother, a previously submissive woman who had turned career tiger after the death of her husband, was too busy working her way to a long-overdue success to notice. Her son's grades were excellent, and that was all that mattered.
Over the past few weeks, the nightmares got more and more intense. Jim's new project, a miniature parcticle accelerator he was building out of a 1950s hobbyist book he found at a garage sale, was nearing completion and with it the realism and pregnancy of his dream life went worse and worse. From time to time he took it as an omen, as if the device he was building could somehow trigger nuclear armageddon -- even as he knew, scientifically speaking, that it was impossible.
Yet the nightmare world, with its skewed laws of physics, desert landscapes not devoid of a feral beauty, monsters out to get him and this unique precious note he only knew as Karen, lingered, somehow closer and closer, more and more real. Jim had taken the habit of sleeping with his grandfather's rapier -- a prize won in a fencing competition -- under his bed... and despite the constant fear that filled his nights, he found himself daydreaming more and more of finding a way to enter that savage world that was beckoning to him. By now in his mind, everything was preferrable than this suburban nothingness...
Sat Oct 27 13:08:10 2001
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