Late the next morning I woke up as always, the same old me. The paralysis of the night before was gone, and I could move my arms and legs. Daylight shone faintly in through gaps in the shutters, and everything around me was perfectly still. Just like every morning.
As soon as I awoke, I remembered Yellow Submarine Boy from last night, and immediately tried touching my earlobes. The right earlobe, then the left. Neither one, though, was swollen, and I felt no pain. Situation normal—a soft, healthy pair of earlobes.
Last night the boy had bitten me so hard. So hard and deep there had to be toothmarks. I could still remember the pain, yet now there was none, and no marks. Which was pretty odd.
I replayed our entire conversation. I could recall it all accurately, verbatim, like it was all transcribed.
He got my permission and bit my left earlobe, and that action, perhaps, allowed him to merge into one with me. Yet I felt nothing strange about my body or my mind. I shut my eyes hard, searching my consciousness in the darkness as deeply as I could. I took a deep breath and stretched out the joints of my legs till they cracked. I gulped back a few glasses of water and had a good long pee. No matter how I looked, though, nothing was different about me this morning from the night before. Was the boy really able to meld with me? Wasn’t it all just a vivid dream?
No, that can’t be. That awful pain was real when he sunk his teeth into my left earlobe (despite the pain, I’d fallen straight asleep right after), and I could reproduce, word for word, our entire conversation. That couldn’t be a dream. No dream could ever be that clear.
However—there isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.
Winter was nearly over, and the day was bright and sunny. I lowered the shutters and spent the afternoon hours until evening in the dimly lit room, mulling over random thoughts about my own existence.
If Yellow Submarine Boy and I had really merged into one, there should be some apparent changes in me as a person—how I was, what I thought. A new personality had taken up residence inside me, after all. But I couldn’t detect any such changes, no matter how carefully, how attentively, I scrutinized myself. Nothing felt out of place. This was the usual me here. The me I always thought of as myself.
I didn’t think, though, that the boy had just made up some baseless story. What he said as he sat next to me had to be true. He’d tried as hard as he possibly could to convince me, his eyes glowing with sincerity. He’d insisted that by biting my left earlobe he and I would meld into one, and he’d done it. I’d given him authorization to. The way he bit me was so very intent and focused. This melding he spoke of must be completed now. Why would I doubt it?
So that’s what had happened—deep at night, as I lay asleep, Yellow Submarine Boy and I had merged. Like water blending together with other water. Or, to put it another way, we were restored to our original state.
Would it take some time for me to psychically feel the changes brought on by becoming one with him? Or could I only wait, quietly, for these changes to manifest on their own? Or did melding mean that I could no longer sense these changes? Did my new self just feel natural?
I am he, and he is me, the boy had declared. The two of us becoming one was, he said, entirely natural, and by doing so I could become more the essential, real me.
Had I become more the real me? Is this—the me here now—the essential, original me? But who’s to decide? How can you distinguish a subject and object that meld together? The more I thought about it, the less I understood about who I am.
As evening approached, I changed my clothes, left my house, and headed toward the library. I took the dimly lit road along the river to the town square. I stopped, looked up at the clock without hands, checking the nonexistent time. I didn’t see anyone on the other side of the bridge. No unicorns either. The only thing moving were the river willows, swaying slightly in the wind. I closed my eyes and asked myself, my question directed at Yellow Submarine Boy.
“Are you there?”
No response, just a deep silence. I asked again.
“If you’re there, could you say something? Anything, just a sound.”
Again, no answer. I gave up and set off again along the riverside road toward the library.
We must have completely become one. Or were restored to being one. Which meant I was talking to myself. So how could I expect a reply? If I did hear anything in response it would be but an echo.
When the girl in the library saw me, she came over and checked out my earlobe. Without a word she observed my right earlobe that had been swollen. She gently held it between two fingers, caressing it. And she checked out the left earlobe, too, just to make sure. Then the right one again. As if all this held some profound significance. She tilted her head a fraction.
“It’s odd. The swelling from yesterday is totally gone. The color is back to normal, too. It’s like nothing ever happened. And it was so swollen and discolored. Are you having any pain? Does it still ache?”
No pain or aching, I replied.
“So one night’s sleep was all it took for the swelling and pain to disappear?”
“That new ointment you applied last night may have helped.”
“Perhaps,” she said, not sounding convinced.
But I couldn’t tell her about Yellow Submarine Boy showing up in my house last night. Or how he’d bitten my left earlobe, making us into one being. The boy wasn’t permitted to enter the town. Maybe by becoming one with me his illegal status was no longer an issue. Still, for this town he was an alien who, if discovered, would be eliminated in no uncertain terms by the powerful Gatekeeper. And since I was one with the boy I might be kicked out as well—no, no doubt about it. I would most definitely be excluded from the town. So I couldn’t reveal to anyone what had taken place the night before.
Now I had a secret I was keeping from the girl. And a significant one at that. Up till then I’d never had anything I had to hide from her…and having one now made me more than a little anxious.
As always, she made some hot, green herbal tea for me. I took my time drinking it, letting it soothe my nerves. I watched her as she quietly moved around the room, her graceful movements as she briskly went about her tasks, and savored the time we could spend together, just the two of us. Nothing there had changed. The calm stillness, the warm comfort…Today was a complete repeat of yesterday, and tomorrow would be a repeat of today.
That made me feel relieved. Nothing around seemed changed. The air there was the same air as always, the light the same. The sound of the kettle beginning to boil, the faint creak of the wooden floorboards, the smell of the canola oil lamp. Everything was in its rightful place. With nothing to disrupt the harmony.
After I’d finished the herbal tea, the girl and I, without a word, moved to the stacks in the rear and began the task of reading old dreams. I settled down at the old desk and held the old dream she’d brought to me in both palms as I gently, cautiously, coaxed the dream to emerge. Over time I’d grown used to the work and mastered it, and could get the dreams to be less wary. They silently slipped out of their shells, emitted a faint light, and I could feel their warmth in my palms.
I could sense how relaxed they were, how they let down their guard and gave themselves up to my hands and began relating their tales. The tales that had been locked away—how long a time, I wondered—inside those shells.
Strangely enough, though, on this day I couldn’t directly hear the voices as the old dreams told their stories. I could only sense the distinct, faint vibration they made as they began to speak. They were speaking, that much I knew, yet their voices eluded me.
My guess was that the boy was the one reading their dreams. I was the one who woke them up and got them talking. But the one who actually could hear their voices was the boy. In other words, we’d divided up the work of dream reading. No, that wasn’t it. He and I had become one and were already a single entity. Labeling it a division of labor wasn’t correct. I was simply separately using several parts of my body in the appropriate way.
Honestly, I never fully understood the stories the old dreams related. Their voices were small, and they spoke fast, in most cases their words were hard to catch, their stories hard to organize. I understood little of what they said, so I let most of their words just flow on past. I came to see my job as Dream Reader as helping them open their hearts and speak freely, but not to accurately read the content. Not understanding what they said didn’t cause any particular problems, though, and I never regretted it. So if the boy could understand what they said, I should welcome it. I imagined him precisely hearing all the details of their tales, and all this content steadily storing up inside him. All I did was gently warm up the old dreams I held in my palms and coax them out of their shells.
Once a dream had spoken everything about itself, it was peacefully freed. It would hang there vaguely in the air, then disappear without a sound. Leaving an empty shell in my hands.
“You’re moving right along with your work today,” the girl said. She was seated across from me, gazing into my eyes, and she sounded impressed.
I just nodded. No words came out of my mouth.
“You must have mastered the skill of dream reading,” she said, smiling tenderly. “Nothing could be better. For this town, for you, and for me.”
“I’m glad,” I said. I’m glad, Yellow Submarine Boy inside me whispered as well. At least I felt like I could hear that whisper. Like an echo from deep in a cave.
That night we read five dreams in all. Until now we’d been able to get through only two, or at most three, so this was a major step forward for me, one that made the girl happy. And—need I say it—her bright smile made me happy too.
After we closed up the library, I walked her home as usual. The click of her shoes on the flagstone road along the river seemed lighter and more cheerful than usual. I didn’t say much as we walked, merely entranced listening to her footsteps.
“Reading old dreams is no easy task,” the girl confided. “It’s not something anyone can do. I’m so happy to know you’re so well suited to it.”
I watched as she was enveloped by the door to her home, then set out down the riverside road, and as I walked I directed a question to Yellow Submarine Boy. Or to myself, rather. Hey, are you there? I asked.
But there was no answer. No echo, either.