That night I had a very long dream. Or something close to a dream.
I was walking down a path in the woods. On a heavy, overcast winter afternoon, a light dusting of white hard snow swirling in the air. I had no idea where I was. I was just aimlessly walking on and on. Searching for something, apparently, but what, I didn’t know. But that didn’t bother me. Whatever I was looking for, I was sure I’d know it when I found it.
In the densely deep forest, all I could see was the thick trunks of trees. The dull sound as I trampled over fallen leaves, and the occasional squawk of birds high overhead, but no other sounds. No wind was blowing.
Eventually I emerged from the trees onto a flat, open glade and found a small, old, abandoned building. Perhaps used as a little mountain lodge in the past. No one had taken care of it for a long time, and now the roof leaned over at an angle, the pillars termite-eaten and half decayed. I climbed three suspect-looking steps. The door creaked as I carefully opened it. The inside was dim and musty, with no sign of anyone inside.
One look told me, instinctively, that this was the place I’d been aiming for. I’d made my way through the thick forest in order to arrive here. Pushing aside thickets, crossing over a frozen stream as birds’ sharp warnings rang in my ears.
I quietly stepped inside the cabin and looked around. The windows were dusty and I could barely see outside, but not one was cracked (a minor miracle considering how dilapidated the building was) and a faint light shone through the windowpanes. It was a simple, one-room cabin. I had no idea who had used it, and for what purpose. I stood in the middle of the room, carefully scanning the inside as my eyes adjusted to the dimness.
The cabin was literally empty. There was no furniture or other implements. Or any decorations or ornaments. At some point people had vacated the cabin and the building was abandoned. The wooden floorboards bowed as I stepped on them, groaning loudly, as if sending out a vital warning to the creatures in the forest.
I had a vague memory of having seen this cabin. I’d been here before…but when and where I couldn’t recall. An overpowering sense of déjà vu hazily numbed my entire body, as if some unseen foreign object had infiltrated the blood coursing through me.
On the wall in the back was a small wooden door. A storage area or closet by the look of it. I decided to open it. Not knowing what was inside, I didn’t want to open it but couldn’t resist. I’d come all this way in search of something, and I couldn’t go back without opening the closed door. I tiptoed as carefully as I could to the door, trying not to make a sound, and stood in front of it, taking a few deep breaths. I steeled myself, grabbed the rusty doorknob, and slowly pulled it toward me.
The door made a dry, grinding sort of creak as it opened. As I had thought, it was a kind of storage space, a place to store tools. Narrow and deep, dark in back where the light didn’t reach. Unopened, I imagined, for ages, it had a rotten, stagnant smell. The sole object inside was a doll. Since it was dark, it took a while for me to realize that it was a wooden doll, a quite large one, over three feet tall. The doll’s legs were bent, like a person slumped to the floor, exhausted, its back resting against the wall. Once my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I saw that the doll was wearing a kind of parka. A green parka with a Yellow Submarine drawing on it.
I leaned forward to study the doll’s face. The paint had faded a lot, but it was definitely M**’s face, a caricatured face like the clownish face of a ventriloquist’s puppet. Its expression was neither here nor there, as if it had started to smile but thought better of it.
And then it struck me. This was what I had been searching for. No doubt about it. I’d come here in search of that doll. Clambering up steep slopes, making my way through a thick forest, avoiding the eyes of darkish beasts. I stood there, breathing quietly, staring straight at that wooden doll.
This was M**’s cast-off skin. I was sure of it. Deep in this mountain forest, M** had sloughed off his body, which then changed into an old, faded wooden doll. And his soul, liberated from the confining prison of the physical body, had transitioned to the town surrounded by a high wall. That was a fact I had wanted to verify.
But what should I do with this leftover wooden doll, the boy’s cast-off shell? Should I take it back to town to show his brothers? Or just leave it right here, as it was? Or dig a hole somewhere and bury it? I couldn’t decide. Leaving it alone might be the best choice. The boy might be able to use it in some way later on.
Just then I noticed something. The doll’s mouth was moving ever so slightly. It was dark, and at first I thought it was an illusion. Maybe I was seeing things that weren’t really happening. But it was no illusion. I looked more closely and saw that the doll’s mouth was moving, albeit just a fraction. As if trying to say something. The mouth seemed made to only move up and down, just like a ventriloquist’s puppet.
I thought I needed to hear what it was saying, so I focused and listened as alertly as I could, but all I could catch was a windy rustling, like a broken old bellows. But soon that sound of wind seemed to form words.
More…, it seemed to be saying.
I held my breath, totally focused, waiting for the next words to emerge.
More…the word, or a vague sound close to a word—repeated in a faint, hoarse voice.
Maybe I was mishearing. Perhaps it was a different word. But to my ears that’s what it sounded like. More.
“More what?” I said aloud to the wooden doll, the corpse of Yellow Submarine Boy. What did he want me to do more of ?
More…the same word, intoned in the same way.
Maybe he wanted me to get closer. Maybe an important, confidential message was waiting there, from a faraway world. Undaunted, I brought my ear closer to that mysterious mouth.
More…, the mouth repeated. More loudly than before.
I brought my ear even closer.
And right then the doll leaned its head forward with surprising speed and bit my ear. So forcefully, so deeply, I was sure that my earlobe had been ripped off. It hurt like hell.
I screamed, and that scream woke me up. It was dark all around. After a time I knew it was a dream, or something akin to a dream. I was lying in my own bed, in my own house. I’d been having a long, graphic dream (or dreamlike experience). This hadn’t really happened. Yet my right earlobe still ached from the bite. This was no illusion. It throbbed something terrible.
I got up, went to the bathroom, switched on the light, and checked my right ear in the mirror. But no matter how closely I examined it, I found no trace of a bite. It was the usual smooth earlobe. The only thing that remained was the pain of having been bitten. But the pain was real enough. That wooden doll—or someone who’d taken on the form of that doll—had snapped down hard on my ear. In a flash, hard and deep. Had this taken place in my dream? Or in some deep, submerged part of my unconscious…
The clock showed three thirty a.m. I took off my pajamas and underwear, heavy with sweat, tossed them into the hamper, and gulped down several glasses of cold water. I toweled myself dry, took out a fresh pair of underwear and pajamas from the dresser, and put them on. That calmed me down, though my heart was still pounding like a hammer banging a board. The shock of the memory had my muscles tense and tight. I could recall the images of what I’d seen down to the smallest detail, and the pain that still buzzed through my earlobes was actual, honest-to-God pain. And that acute sensation didn’t back down as time passed.
The boy bit my ear to pass on some kind of message. That’s why he wanted me to come closer—that’s the only way I could see it. But what could he possibly be trying to tell me by biting my ear? Was there something disturbing in that message? Or by biting my ear was he (in his own unique way) expressing a kind of closeness? I couldn’t say.
Even so, despite the pain, deep down I felt, somehow, relieved. Deep in that out-of-the-way forest, inside that dilapidated old cabin, I had finally discovered it. The body that Yellow Submarine Boy had left behind. Or, he had shed his skin. A valuable clue to explain the puzzling question of the boy’s disappearance (or spiriting away).
Not that it looked like I could report all this to his brothers. The news would only trouble and confuse them. And above all, this had only happened in a dream (probably). Yet they had the right to hear about this, as a piece of information. Several times I took out the piece of paper the younger brother, the med school student, had written his cell phone number on. I was unsure what to do. In the end, I didn’t call him.
During lunch break that day I walked down toward the station and went inside the coffee shop. The place was more crowded than usual. I sat at my usual seat at the counter and ordered black coffee and a muffin. The woman had her hair neatly tied behind her, as always, and was working briskly behind the counter.
The pain in my earlobe had mostly faded, yet I still felt traces of the dream. An ache still pulsed in time with my heart, faint yet beyond question.
A Gerry Mulligan solo was playing from the small speakers in the shop. A performance I’d heard a lot in the past. Sipping black coffee, I searched my memory and came up with the title. “Walkin’ Shoes,” I was sure. A performance by a piano-less quartet, with Chet Baker on horn.
After a while, when the other customers all seemed set, she had a free moment and came over. She had on slim jeans and a plain white apron.
“You look pretty busy,” I said.
“Yeah, for a change,” she said, smiling. “I’m happy you came. Are you on lunch break?”
“Right, so I don’t have a lot of time,” I said. “There’s something I’d like to ask you to do for me.”
“What is it?”
I pointed to my right earlobe. “Would you take a look at this earlobe? See if you can see any mark? I can’t really see it well myself.”
She rested both elbows on the counter and leaned forward. She closely examined my earlobe from different angles, like a housewife checking out broccoli at a supermarket. She straightened up and said, “I don’t see a mark or anything. What kind of mark?”
“Like something bit me.”
She frowned, as if on her guard. “Someone bit you?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Nobody bit me, but when I got up this morning my earlobe hurt like it had been. Like some big bug had stung me, or bit me, in the night.”
“Not a bug in a skirt by any chance?”
“No, not that kind.”
“Good to know,” she said, and smiled.
“If you don’t mind, could you touch my earlobe?”
“Sure, I’d be happy to,” she said. She reached over the counter and took my right earlobe between her fingers, gently rubbing it.
“It’s a big, soft earlobe,” she said, as if impressed. “I’m envious. Mine are so small and hard. Seedy-looking.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You touching them makes me feel a lot better.”
Which was true. After she gently stroked it, the pain in my ear—the faint vestiges of the dream—vanished without a trace. Like morning dew dispelled in the fresh sunlight.
“Would you be okay having dinner with me again?”
“I’d love to,” she said. “Just say the word, whenever you’d like to invite me.”
I walked back to the library, and as I went about my daily tasks at my desk in my office, my mind was filled with thoughts of that dream. I tried not to think about it but couldn’t help it. Memories were plastered on the walls of my consciousness, not about to come off anytime soon.
Why did Yellow Submarine Boy have to bite my earlobe so hard?
I focused on that. That question had rattled me since morning, fraying my nerves. Why did Yellow Submarine Boy have to bite my earlobe so hard? It had to be some kind of message. And to convey that message to me, he’d led me into the forest.
Or maybe the boy wanted to leave a clear trace on my mind, and imprint on my body, a vestige of the fact that he indeed had existed in this world. Indelibly imprinting it on me with a physical pain not easily forgotten. That’s how painful it was.
But why? Wasn’t the fact that he existed in this world already clearly etched in my mind? I wasn’t about to forget him, even if he vanished from here forever.
This world, I thought.
I looked up and gazed around at my surroundings. I was in the second-floor head librarian’s office. The ceiling, walls, floor I was used to seeing. Several vertical windows set into the wall, afternoon sunlight brightly shining in.
This world.
But as I gazed at them, I knew that their overall scale was a bit different from usual. The ceiling was too wide, the floor too narrow, which made the walls buckle under the pressure. A closer look showed that the whole room was wriggling, wet and slimy like the inner walls of an internal organ. The window frame expanded and contracted, the glass undulating unsteadily.
My first thought was that we were having a massive earthquake. But it was no earthquake. The shaking was coming from inside me. The shaking inside me was merely projected in the external world. I rested my elbows on the desk, covered my face with my hands, and closed my eyes. I slowly counted to myself, patiently waiting for the illusion to pass.
A while later—two or three minutes, something like that—when I removed my hands from my face and opened my eyes, the feeling had gone. The room was back to normal, its usual stationary self. No shaking, no moving, everything to scale.
Still, it seemed like the shape of the room had changed a fraction, the measurements of all its components transformed, ever so slightly. Like the furniture had been moved somewhere else and then lined up again in its same position. It had been very carefully moved back to where it had been, but subtle details were changed. Nothing major. Most people wouldn’t have noticed the difference. But I did.
But maybe I was just imagining it. I might be overly sensitive. Maybe my dream from the previous night had put my nerves on edge. The borderline between inside the dream and outside it was no longer clear.
I gently tried touching my right earlobe. It was soft and warm, with no more pain. The pain that remained was all in my mind. And that pain, that vivid residual memory, might not disappear. It felt like that. It was like a hot seal, an actual painful mark that made it possible to cross over the border from one world to another. And one that would most likely remain a part of me for the rest of my life.