In Another Dream

Chapter 1

This is a terrible way to start a story, but death is where it began and death has been following me ever since. If that's too morbid or depressing or futility isn't your thing, I’ll give you this chance to back out.

If you're still up for it, then you have to understand what Ben's death—my Ben’s death—did to me.

He wasn't my best friend—the person who knew me best of all—but we were close. I wasn’t secretly in love with him nor he with me, if that’s what you’re thinking. We had a legit mutual respect for each other and a shared love of thrift store T-shirts and dancing awkwardly to Best Friend and Up in pitifully empty frat houses back in college. Neither of us had dressed properly for the occasion, given that love for thrift store T-shirts. But when he was there, not caring about the eyes on our out-of-place-ness, I didn’t have to feel it.

Sure, maybe we hadn’t spent as much time together since college, since dorm life had us within minutes of each other, but he was a fixed feature in my life like a random piece of surreal art that you can’t stop staring at with its almost psychologically disturbing imagery of flesh stretched into a balloon being gripped by the small hands of a child who is really a robot. You think the art has no place. You question why it’s there and how it got there, but the second it’s gone, you notice. You miss it. The wall is empty and nothing that you put there will ever be the same. Will ever make you feel the same. The magic of it vanished and with it, some piece of you. A piece you will always be missing. And you miss that piece of you just as much as you miss the art.

You remember I’m talking about my dead friend, right?

It began, or rather ended, while I was sitting in some Lutheran church near Irvine’s campus with its dark wood plank ceiling and its stained glass windows and its rows of connected chairs split apart in the center by a wide aisle. I’m listening to people say all sorts of nice things about Ben—my Ben—which they should; he was an incredible dude. I’m wearing my stupid black clothes, trying desperately not to cry for the umpteenth time that day. That week. That month.

I knew enough to know that when he was transitioned to hospice, the end was coming. I did the only thing I could: threw myself deeper and deeper into the job I already was sick of. Placated myself with a show I’d watched several times through because it was safe. I knew what to expect. There were no surprises or moments that would make me feel anything I didn’t want.

Back to the funeral. It was like a dark cloud hung over the place, controlling the thoughts and feelings of every person gathered there. People were rising from their seats to go up to greet his family. To look at him lying cold and stiff and lifeless in a box with an aspect ratio that was unsettling to me. I didn't go up and look at his body. I couldn't. I didn't want to remember him that way. I wanted to remember pulling his overgrown hair into pigtails to match the ridiculous black and pink paid skirt that didn't remotely cover his boxers paired with some nearby middle school dance club T-shirt in hues of purple and lavender and of course glitter that stretched over his lanky frame.

That's the way I want to always think of him. Complete with his flat-bottomed, black tennis shoes and a star-shaped wand I found near the checkout and shoved in his hand. As I giggled like a freak who just needed his light-heartedness so much to balance out my seriousness that I never needed an ounce of drugs to enjoy our adventures. Didn’t need them. Occasionally, still did them.

I stayed rooted in my seat like my limbs couldn't comprehend taking action, like that ominous fog overhead that pulled people to the front had no control over me. I could only stare at the gray fabric back of the chair in front of me as our little group of friends trailed sluggishly up to the front like there was a band they reluctantly let us drag them to see, and thought only of him with pigtails and a wand in hand like some indie kid fairy god person who in that moment granted me the wish of freedom from myself.

You're thinking I’m selfish. That I only wanted him to exist for my own benefit. I want to say that's not true. But do any of us truly get the extent of what goes on in our psyche?

Even if I am or was selfish, he still brought good into the world with hardly any effort expended. With a confident little smirk while wearing purple velvet pants and clinging to a Sponge Bob pillow like he couldn’t let childhood go. I had never tried to make sense of this power he had before. Didn’t think twice about what it did for me until it was gone and the absence crushed me, sucked the life out of me like a vacuum—not a vacuum cleaner, but the literal pull of nothingness.

He was pure good. Net positive if you’re into that line of thinking.

Unlike me.

Of the two of us, if someone deserved to get an inoperable brain tumor and die eight months later, it was hands down me. The person who has brought nothing to the world. Who's been a disappointment to her parents. To herself. To the boss who tried to give a girl straight out of college a job she barely knew how to do just because I had potential and then had to fire her for failure to perform.

I was on the edge of being let go again. I could feel it in the pause in my manager’s voice when I requested the days off for the funeral with short notice. The unspoken, “We have a big deadline Friday that I know you haven’t hit milestones on.” I laugh. I’ve probably been fired by now. Guess none of that really matters. I wonder who is doing my job while I’m not there.

I digress.

A snap. Like that, the funeral was over, and I’m still staring at the back of the gray fabric chair in front of me. Feeling the coarse material scratch the backs of my knees raw. But it was a feeling. Something.

After crying so much, screaming into my pillow at night demanding whatever forces in the universe to leave him alone, to make him better, all while trying to drown myself in work during the day to deal, that moment—at the funeral—I felt numb. Spent. Like some clown had come along and done that trick of pulling the unending scarves but instead of scarves pulled out the contents of my body.

Even as I sat there floating unfilled, wishing to be anywhere else for any other reason, I could see Jay, with Matty by his side, and Avery and a few other friends who had traveled back to Irvine for the funeral. That’s where Ben was from. The four of us had driven down together from the general vicinity of San Fransisco. Jay and Matty in Mountain View. Me south of San Jose. And Avery—my little Bird—at Stanford. She complained for a third of the drive about her PhD advisor. Apparently he liked to invent chemistry that didn’t exist and not in the cool, let’s-go-file-a-patent-and-get-rich way. He also was the eight-mile high, circumference of the earth wide, fifty feet thick concrete wall that stood in between where she was and graduating. The three of them were huddled to the side of the church as though they had escaped the doom cloud lingering over everyone else. No one was smiling. But also, no one was crying.

Except for me.

In my numbness, in my thinking that I was all cried out, I missed that I wasn’t.

Jay sat in the chair next to me and put a long brown arm around the back of my chair. “You look like you don’t want company. But I’m not used to your wanting to be alone.”

I shrugged. I hadn't seen Jay for a month. Not since we got the call from Ben's family that they were moving him into hospice. We both waited from seven or so hours away, separately, for our friend to die.

And then he did.

And the world was stripped of his humor. That side-eyed blue gaze that said, “What are you doing?” Without a word. Not to judge, but as a “whatever you’re doing, I want in.”

And I…I lost my counterweight. I lost the color opposite me on the wheel. I lost the person who made me look at things from my exact opposite perspective. Whose opinion I took without a challenge. Who could brighten life just by walking in the door or commenting on my poor attempts at social commentary posts.

The worst part was that I needed it more than ever, given where my life was headed. Or not headed, for that matter. I expected to get decimated any day. Despite everything I put into that fucking job…all the energy I tried to give it…I couldn’t ever seem to break out of the bottom of the barrel. Sure, maybe I was prone to procrastination on some occasions when a particular project was too overwhelming. But I made up for it by working every moment. Trying to inch ahead, out of the “shit show” as my manager called it.

She had told me, “I know you know what you’re doing just as much as anyone here does, but I don’t get why what’s in your head doesn’t seem to translate to the quality of your actual work.”

Regardless of how many times I checked and rechecked and used tools to check my work, I always had errors. It was like they lived in my blind spot. It was like my brain glitched and I couldn’t notice my mistakes. Like reality was distorted and my 98%-accuracy model was really 89%, which wasn’t terrible, but didn’t meet the benchmarks. I even got tested for dyslexia. But it wasn’t that. I just wasn’t good enough at creating good algorithms that made some random business more money or helped them spend less money. Either way.

I'm whining and that's not the point of this.

The point is that I was mute next to Jay, who'd known Ben just as long. Loved him just as much. Palled around together like they were some ill-trained, anachronistic comedy duo, playing off of each other's blend of wit. Jay more literal and observational; Ben more abstract and creative.

“How are you?” I forced myself to ask, complete with a smile.

“This isn’t what I want to be doing. I don’t want him to be gone. No one should die so young.”

“He's at least in the club with the other twenty-seven-year-olds.”

“Another month and a half and he would have missed the membership requirements. He would have overturned the afterlife if he had to die young and didn't get to be with Amy and Kurt and Jim.”

“And Jimi,” I added. “He would have hated that.”

“Ben” had become “he” like neither of us could bear to speak his name. Like the name held some strange power we didn’t understand and feared using.

“I feel like this is when we should be pouring out some alcohol for him.” I mimed holding a bottle in my hand, tilted it towards the floor.

“Then let’s go, get out of this church and be away from his death and remember his life.”

“That’s what he’d want, right? Us to keep going.”

And then we were drunk or high or both in the living room of his sister's tiny apartment. My head in Avery's lap as she slid her hands through the poker straight strands of my hair and told me she missed me this past month.

Just as I had avoided Jay, I avoided Avery. My interest in Bird and Cat Mixed Species Beach Day dried up before I could blame it on the weather. And out of the two of us, somehow I was more social. More apt to plan outings. I just hadn’t had it in me to do.

“I’m sorry. We’ll start doing stuff again.” I knew this was likely a lie, but I didn't want it to be. And now I couldn't even call her if I wanted, let alone see her. Or at least not the Avery underneath me in the post-funeral attempt at celebrating our friend. Though I've still seen her a few times.

“You should About Damn Time for us, Cat. I could use some ‘I got a feeling I’m going to be ok.’” She was making reference to how I learned the moves to the song and used to lip-sync it for her all the time back in the dorms.

I laughed, then groaned. “I can’t, Bird.” There wasn’t anything in me to be able to do this for her. Maybe if I were more like Ben, I would have turned on the song, stood up and brought some joy to my friends when they needed it, but I wasn’t like him.

Then Jay was there, pupils wide and smiling like he had forgotten what today was. He put a finger to his lips and shushed, I guess, himself since I hadn't been talking.

“You need to see what I'm working on. When we get home”—he meant back to the Bay Area; we were not roommates—“you should come see. I can get you in. I know it's all hush hush. It will help.”

“Ignore him. He’s obsessed with his job.” Matty patted my legs until I bent them up, then sat at the other end of the couch. “He demoed Scrapper’s tech the other day himself and came back a new person. I guess. Or that’s what he reported having happened.”

I wasn't sure what he meant by those words: it will help. And I doubt I ever will.

If that's what he thought. If that's what this is. He was more wrong than he had ever been in the ten years I'd known him.

But maybe now you understand some of why Ben’s death hit me so hard.