Jesse threw his momentum to the left, and the sliding closet door scraped open. When he looked out, Jesse saw that the walls of his room were dingy and greasy with dirt. Some parts were entangled by glossy black and brown roots. He saw Yusef standing in the middle of the dark room between two mattresses. Marcy and Lita slept on the bed in the far side of the room while Alfredo and Jesse slept on the one closer to the hallway door and closet.
Marcy and Lita were surrounded in their hazes as smoke, dust, and shards of debris swept all around them, with occasional sparks of light popping off, like the Fourth of July.
Alfredo lay in his bed, but he was a shadow of himself. When the light from the haze popped off next to them, it would not reflect on Alfredo’s silhouette. Instead, it seemed like the darkness from his body just killed the light when it reached it.
“Is he dead?”
Yusef wore a very thin, dark-blue coat that went down past his knees and a white robe underneath that went down to his ankles. On his head he wore his... keffiyeh, is what Yusef had called it. It was a white cloth wrapped around his head and draped down at the back a little bit, and it was held together with a thin red rope. “No, Mubtadi. He is just not yet in the part of his REM cycle that produces dreams.”
There was a second blackened silhouette of a body laying on the edge of the bed where Jesse fell asleep.
“The fuck? Is that -- is that me?” Jesse asked, pointing at the dimensional shadow on the bed.
“That was your chrysalis. Now it is your husk -- until you return to your body. Come. We have much to do. Stay close to me, and do not wander off. No matter what.”
Jesse stepped away from the bedroom closet and out of the corner of his eye, he saw a black tentacle hanging down right above him. He instinctively ducked and hit the floor, sitting up and turning around to face it while scooting back to Yusef’s feet. “What the fuck is that!”
“That is putrisomn. It’s the waste and residue of dreams that form here on the Plane. It won’t harm you. Mostly.” Yusef let out a short sigh. “Please, Mubtadi. Try to remain calm. And let us use some more controlled language.”
“Yeh. Sorry,” Jesse muttered as he looked all around with wide, nervous eyes. “And why was I in the fucking closet?”
“Language.”
Jesse rolled his eyes. “Why?”
Yusef shrugged. “It was the closest location I could engineer your pylon, and an image I already knew you were familiar with.”
The tentacle pulsed briefly, but did not move. It was connected to more putrisomn that was entangled and wrapped around the walls of Jesse’s room, like ivy. It reminded Jesse of Lita’s arms and the back of her hands: of scraggly veins, bulging and glossy with the oil of her flowery lotion. “Fredo used to think monsters would come from there. Guess he was kind of right.”
Yusef walked to the bedroom door and opened it slowly, taking a peek through the crevice of the doorway and waited. Jesse looked down at himself and realized he was wearing his clothes from that day, typical black hoodie and black pants, and his white sneakers.
“‘Ey. What’s a pylon? That how I got here?”
Yusef bobbed his head then tossed his head forward. “We will go. Quickly, and quietly.”
More putrisomn stuck to the walls in greater patches, and even smothered entirely where furniture was supposed to be. Jesse and Yusef walked past the other bedroom where the Arcos family slept. The door was ajar and they saw most of them in the haze as well. There was a huge amount of lights going off where Dominique slept. The haze was moving so quickly and violently, Jesse flinched every time he heard a light pop. They were red, purple, dark blue, and even… black.
How could there be light in black? Jesse thought. He opened the door and stepped into the bedroom. Instead of giving out light, the black spheres seemed to dim the light around them. They were moving, floating shadows.
He could begin to hear other sounds as the cloudy debris swept around Dominique like a sideways tornado. Jesse thought he heard someone calling out. His chest suddenly felt like cement and his stomach felt like it dropped to his legs when the faint voice turned into a sudden scream, tearing through the haze with rage.
“Jesse!”
He turned away from Dominique's haze and rushed out into the hallway. Yusef stood at the opened front door of the apartment. With his palm up, Yusef put out his hand toward Jesse.
Jesse closed his eyes tight in focus then opened them again. He walked slowly to Yusef, as if to prove his confidence to whatever it was that had startled him, and walked past Yusef’s hand and out into the pale evening. He looked up at the darkened sky, which appeared to have a strange tint to it. The sky was dark, but there appeared to be some kind of thin overcast that he couldn’t exactly spot. A refraction of light through it was barely noticeable. He couldn’t quite tell if it was purple, blue, green, or a mix of a lighter color like yellow or orange set against the darkened night sky. The moon’s position flickered across the night sky in different phases of its cycle and in differing hues of white and yellow.
“What’s up with the moon?”
Yusef now walked past Jesse, who was lost staring up into the sky, and started walking down the concrete stairs that jutted out from the second-floor walkway. “It is there. Find the one not moving.”
“Wha’?”
“What you see up there is putrisomn. Since everybody sees stars and the moon in the sky when they are dreaming, but no one really seems to know exactly where they are in the sky, the putrisomn up there reflects a scattered projection of what everybody perceives in their dreams.”
Jesse was halfway down the stairs and came to a stop. “The eff did you just say?”
“Come here, Mubtadi. Sit.” Yusef motioned for Jesse to join him on the grass outside the apartments.
Still looking around with wonder, Jesse did as he was told as he focused his eyes here and there along the way. “Is this real?” he asked, grazing his hands across the grass after he sat down.
“In a way, it is. That grass is a natural substance in the waking world that is connected to the Earth. So here on the Plane, it exists just as it does in the waking world, and cannot be altered. Go ahead, try pulling that grass out.”
No matter how much he yanked and twisted, the grass bent but did not break. Not even the dead parts. There was a greasy, black and green residue on his fingers. “You messing with me?”
There was silence as Yusef allowed Jesse time to look around and process what he was seeing. He squinted here and there, moving forward and backward, side to side, as he focused on certain places around the apartments and beyond around the neighborhood.
“Why… What…? Are those holograms?” Jesse pointed at the cars that lined the curb at the far end of the apartments.
Without looking, Yusef replied. “In a way, yes. Go investigate, Mubtadi. You are doing what all intelligent people do: asking questions. Go on, be curious. Do not mind any walking shadows. They are not ghosts, they do not see you, they cannot harm you.”
Jesse stood up and made his way to the curb. He did notice a few shadows, like the ones of his family and the Arcoses, floating through the street in the distance as if they were riding in a car. A few walked on the sidewalk.
As he approached the parked cars, they shifted. The cars stayed in place but some looked like they switched places or disappeared then reappeared only a few feet further down the curb in either direction. Some were fractions of a car. All of them changed type and color as he walked and his visual perspective changed. He stopped and looked back at Yusef.
“Go on. It is fine.”
As Jesse approached, the car continued to shift around. It reminded him of when he was a kid and he looked into a cheap kaleidoscope at the Mexican mercado. The twisting of the tube caused pieces of color and shapes to dance and morph, rotating and repeating in a complex manner. This same function was happening right in front of him, before his very eyes.
He got close and reached his hand toward a car. Or two? The image of the cars continued to shift and switch around.
“That’s close enough. For now.” Yusef said, grabbing Jesse’s hand.
“Where the fuck did you come from? This isn’t my dream anymore, right?”
“Correct. We are definitely on the Plane.”
“So you can’t do crazy shit like that here. That’s what you told me before. How did you move that fast?”
“Focus. And practice, Mubtadi. Lots of focus, and lots of practice.”
“Wack.”
A blur, then he was gone. “You expect greatness from nothing? You wish to be born a mage or a mutant with innate abilities, undiscovered and unearned?” Yusef yelled from the middle of the grass lawn.
“Fuck yeah.”
“Such fantasies of hidden gifts and natural power are for the weak-minded, the weak-willed: the plebs.”
“Okay, sabio. What the fuck is going on here?”
“Before, I was able to construct and control your entire dream because we were inside your head, inside your haze. Those same ‘rules’ and abilities do not all apply here on the Plane.” Yusef appeared next to Jesse again in a blur. “These are not cars.”
Sighing, Jesse slumped his shoulders and stared toward the street.
Yusef lifted his arm and twisted his wrist. A car was lifted and as it left its place, its sides began to change, like it was made of a multitude of screens that were all changing pictures and video at the same time.
Jesse’s eyes grew large as the car lifted higher from the ground. The images of cars blinked away from the car and in its place were blackened screens… no, a greasy black body of a car, with no clear design or angles. It hovered there as Yusef held up his arms. “Name an object.”
He stood there with his mouth slightly hanging open at first, then his jaw snapped shut. “AK.”
Now Yusef returned an odd stare. “Pardon me?”
“AK-47.”
“I was afraid that is what you meant.” Yusef closed his eyes for a second or so and then reopened them with intense focus. His arms were outstretched and his wrists and fingers danced.
The levitating car crumbled. Huge chunks fell to the ground and they immediately lost their illusion of a car as it turned into a black mass.
One chunk remained in the air, and smaller pieces broke off. It appeared to slowly lose its shape. Then it seemed to melt. It formed an oblong figure and then edges began to mold. Black sludge drooped off here and there. Textures appeared, and there it was: an AK-47.
As it drifted toward Jesse, the rifle took on colors. By the time it reached his excited hands, it was unmistakably an AK-47.
“Holy shit.”
Yusef stood relaxed, with his hands clasped behind his back.
“I can… I can shoot it?”
“You can try. But it--”
The rifle clicked. Jesse was poised with anticipation, frozen in place waiting for a powerful recoil that never came.
“What the fuck?”
“... But it will not fire any rounds.”
Jesse stared at the AK-47. “It feels real. Not like a toy. Uh....” his fingers fumbled around the sides of the rifle and along the magazine. The clip angled and slid out of the rifle. Jesse looked inside through the top. It was hollow. There wasn’t even a spring. He shot a look at Yusef that bled with betrayal.
“A combustion of a primer on a metal-shelled cartridge followed by the sudden release of energy from another chemical combustion using the gunpowder inside it, requires numerous elements. Those need a bit more time and focus to manifest, Mubtadi.”
“So you didn’t bother making this with all its parts because I wouldn’t have bullets anyway.”
“That is correct. You do not seem impressed.”
“I was just excited to finally shoot one of these effers.” Jesse stared back at the black chunks on the ground. They, too, had started to lose the hardness of their form, as if they were beginning to melt.
“What’s up with--”
A loud shriek erupted from an apartment building behind them, followed by rumbling and crashing of heavy things.
“Her again. Jesse, come. We must go now.” Yusef extended his hand and turned toward Jesse’s apartment building.
“What was that?”
“Nevermind th--” A large window and its surrounding wall exploded open. Jesse instinctively threw an arm up for protection, dropping the useless rifle on the ground. Blackened debris and huge chunks of putrisomn flew all over the apartment complex’s grass courtyard, headed straight for Jesse.