Refreshed and untroubled, Marshall lay in bed, smelling Herbal Essence shampoo and seeing nothing.
Little of this was surprising. Take seeing nothing. Aware that darkness fostered sleep, he made sure, every night, to cover his two little high-up windows and the light on his laptop as well.
Nor was it surprising that he felt untroubled, his father’s death years earlier having shown that no matter what he faced, there was always a period, just after waking, when he was free of it. He didn’t think of it; it didn’t hang over him. He just lay in his bed, tranquilly, without it. Did anyone else experience this? He didn’t know, but named the phenomenon anyhow. Soap bubble amnesia he called it, because it was so fragile, so easy to demolish. One wayward thought and . . .
For instance, it now dawned on him that he couldn’t remember covering his windows the night before, and suddenly the bubble had burst, the tranquility had vanished. Fear and confusion were pouring in to take its place.
He hadn’t covered them, had he? Or even come home. Or found his boot. Or his carry-on.
In fact, the only thing he could remember, before lying here, in the dark, was lying there, in the dark, and before that a series of idiotic mistakes. Going to that stupid camp. Climbing that hill.
And, worst of all, paying no attention to the clouds that were blotting out the stars to the west.
Instead, he’d just stood there, freezing, until everything around him disappeared, and something did come for him after all.
Though not a spaceship, a blizzard. A howling tantrum of wind and snow that blasted him off the rise and into the fringe of trees at its base. Which was OK, he assumed at first, since the fringe bordered the road, and it was definitely time to leave. The trouble was that the fringe on this occasion turned out to be a fringe no longer, but a forest. He stumbled and fell and stumbled and never came out the other side. He went left, went right, tried backtracking but couldn’t because wherever he went, trunks and branches stood in his way, along with mounds of snow that swallowed his legs and sent him sprawling. Soon his right boot was off, buried, the roller luggage abandoned. He fished his phone from his ski jacket but it showed no bars. Did he expect otherwise? The rendezvous site was, after all, the rendezvous site for a reason.
At last, when his legs had given up and he was lying where he had fallen, only one thought remained: that maybe he hadn't been idiotic, that this was what he wanted.
An out. An end.
And now?
Had he somehow roused himself, found his car, driven home and forgotten it completely?
He reached for the old lamp that had illuminated him since childhood . . . kept reaching . . . kept reaching . . . touched instead a strange wall, threw off his covers, stood up, groped about until he found a switch, and flipped it.
He was looking at a squarish light fixture that, along with a night table and the head of a large bed, ran along the wall he had just been touching. He pivoted and found, against the opposite wall, a small desk and a dresser topped by a TV. On his right was a broad bank of floor-to-ceiling drapes, closed tightly enough to satisfy the most photophobic sleeper. While on his left was a wall with a framed picture on it, though past the foot of the bed it gave way to a broad opening.
So part of the mystery was solved. He hadn’t gone home. He'd found a hotel. But part wasn’t remotely solved, because he had no memory of arriving at this hotel, or any way to explain how he felt as he stood barefoot on its prickly, industrial-grade carpet.
He felt . . . fine.
In fact, he felt so fine, he felt . . . strange.
Life and death struggles with blizzards left at least some residual soreness, didn’t they?
But he didn't feel any.
And likewise, days of misery and insomnia didn’t usually lead to sensations of well-being and alertness.
But he was brimming with well-being and alertness.
And there was something else, too—about his environment or perhaps himself that he couldn’t identify, but was so odd it actually made him wonder if he was still in the snow.
Which, come to think of it, was possible.
For had he not read about people on the verge of death experiencing highly realistic dreams and visions?
So maybe he was now one of those people. On the verge of death. Hiding in a hallucination.
Despite all his bleak hopelessness, panicky twinges broke out on the back of his neck. No, wait, he told himself. It wasn’t that. It couldn’t be, because . . .
Well because . . . where was the bright light?
The tunnel?
The fantasy fulfilled?
The dead person returned?
Everyone knew those were the hallmarks of a near-death experience. Not bland furniture and a clock radio which announced in dull red numerals that it was 11:53 a.m.
Obviously, then, this was a real hotel, which he, really awake, really unharmed, ought really to be learning more about.
So he began hunting for his clothes, which brought his attention to the bed.
It was so big he had used only half of it. And the covers he had tossed while getting up had landed in a large lump on the unused half.
Now this too was reassuring, since his clothes would make a lump that size if his ski jacket and sweaters were included. And he could well imagine himself, post blizzard, dropping into bed first, undressing later.
But then he took hold of the covers and stripped away, along with them, every last speck of reassurance.
For after all, what would the dying brain of Marshall M. Shmishkiss conjure up to shield him from the truth of impending oblivion . . .
If not what he was looking at now?
* * *
It was a given she would be naked. And she was.
And it was a given that her body would be perfect. And it was.
And likewise, it was totally predictable that as soon as he noticed her, she would wake. And that, when this happened, instead of screaming or fighting or, at the very least, asking some pointed questions, she would express a great yearning for him. She would part her lips as if hungry for him and begin moaning things like “Oh, baby,” while attempting to involve him in various enjoyable activities.
And she did. She did all of it, except for the “Oh, baby” part. She didn’t say that or anything else, even when briefly, pantingly, he asked her name. She only made noises: great long needful noises when they were the tiniest bit separate; wild, breathy noises when they touched anew. But could it be otherwise? Could he really expect a dying brain emptying its resources into such a fantastically realistic, sweaty illusion, to bother with dialogue as well?
No, he could not, and didn’t mind, either—didn’t trouble himself with anything beyond the immediate now. Who cared what her name was? He loved her—loved her with all the passion that nobody real had ever wanted from him. It was his last chance, so why not? Why, even the shampoo smell coming from her hair didn’t unsettle him. Yes, yes, he recognized it. Herbal Essence. The brand his mother always used. Well, so what? So Freud was right. So what? He would allow nothing to mar the ecstatic moment.
And nothing did, for a while. Was it minutes? Hours? At some point, however, she sat up. All at once she became very rigid and attentive, staring out and away as if hearing something, and then, without a backward glance, bolted through the opening in the left-hand wall.
Briefly he stayed where he was, listening to a self-closing door self closing, its locking mechanism thunking into place, then he was out of bed too, after her. To hell with his clothes. This wasn’t a hotel. And there wasn’t anybody to see him. And true, she wasn’t an anybody either. But boy was she a non-anybody he wanted back.
Or so he told himself, before colliding with a white cardboard box.
* * *
It was a box cradled in an arm—the left arm of a large man in neatly pressed suit pants and a dress shirt open at the collar. A man who had parked himself squarely in front of the hotel room’s entrance.
But Marshall had no intention of being blocked by a figment. Rudely shouldering it aside, he jumped on the handle, pressing and pulling, twisting the deadbolt until it put grooves in his fingers and batting back and forth the hinged metal doohickey that most hotel room entrances have above their deadbolts but few hotel guests ever really figure out.
He did all this, and then did it again. And again.
Only when the pain in his hands made it impossible to continue did he finally turn around and slide to a squat against the brutally unbudgeable door.
There was no denying it: that pain felt real. As did the objects that had caused it. And might they be? Could this strange situation somehow not be a phantasm after all?
Briefly, yet again, he began leaning towards that conclusion. But then, looking up, found something so phantasmagorical, so utterly weird and impossible, it could have come from nowhere, he was certain, except an unleashed unconscious.
* * *
For there, above him, was Myron Crennick—yes, Crennick, the Carb-Berater—returned from the dead and about to eat . . . a donut!
And not just any donut. A donut like an asteroid, huge and lumpy, which he had taken from his cardboard box. Crennick looked at it, then at Marshall, then back at the donut again. His eyes grew wide. His lower teeth jutted. His hand rushed to his mouth, his mouth to his hand, and . . .
The resulting collision sent geysers of fruit jelly everywhere—onto the carpeting, onto Crennick, and also onto Marshall, who greeted the mess with a shrug and a resigned smile.
For if he was about to be dead, and at this point he could see no alternative, he had to admit he was getting quite the consolation prize: a dream at first so unsurpassably erotic and now so unsurpassably absurd. Why, reality couldn't touch it, when he cooperated. And so that, he'd decided, was what he was going do. Embrace whatever it offered him. Surrender whatever it took from him. So when the end did arrive, no one could accuse him of having wasted a good coma.
“Here, help yourself,” growled Crennick, as if to test this resolution. And as he said it, in his trademark tough-guy (yet-on-your-side-guy) manner, he shoved the box at Marshall’s head.
Marshall didn't hesitate. The vision wanted him to eat a donut? He’d eat it. And tossing aside months of good habits—inspired, ironically, by Crennick—he took one and bit in, setting loose a sensation only slightly less pleasant than that of a person sliding herself across his . . .
“Buh-thuh-cuh,” he mumbled, still mid-mouthful. “Whuh-buh-thuh-cuh?”
“Carbs?” came the response. “In this place?” The diet doctor turned sideways, exhibiting a wall-flat stomach. “Do you know I go through two boxes of these a day?”
“Mmm,” said Marshall.
“And that’s only a fraction of what we get here, as you have already discovered.”
He jabbed a thumb at the door, and Marshall quickly swallowed. “You know where she is?” he asked.
“Now?” said Crennick. “Oh, in transit I guess. But in another few minutes, released from the mind control and back asleep in her farmhouse the way we found her. Actually, the way I found her. Pretty good, huh?” He winked and waved his confection. “I thought to myself, that one, she looks so much like that—what’s her name?—that bitch who screwed over our boy Marshall—that if I can just pluck her up here, she is going to absolutely blow his mind. What a way to introduce him to his new life. Am I right? Am I right?
“You have to void?” he added, as an afterthought.
“What?” said Marshall, derailed. He was intending to ask a follow-up about the girl.
“I said void. You know, urinate, micturate, pee. You’re a science guy. You know the terms for it. And I know it’s been hours since your last opportunity, so one would suppose you’d be feeling the urge by now.”
“Well, I guess—”
“Then you need my help.” Crennick stepped into a room beside the entry door and switched on a light. “Because the solution to that urge is not quite as obvious as the solution to your last one.”
Marshall looked in and saw a sink, a shower, but no toilet.
Instead he saw a green square imprinted on the floor, and on the wall beside it a bulbous green button.
“Stand on it,” said Crennick, indicating the square. Marshall complied. “Now, see that button? Push it.”
Marshall did, and after about five seconds a friendly chime sounded and an abdominal pressure he hadn’t been paying much attention to had disappeared.
“Guess what it’s called,” said Crennick. “A telepotty! Or that’s what the translator calls it, anyway. Turns out teleportation isn't quite what those science fiction bozos imagined. Not nearly precise enough for rematerializing things, but perfectly adequate for dematerializing them. In other words, ideal for excrement. Pretty good, huh? Am I right? Don’t even need to wash your—hey, what’s the matter? Why the long face? Don’t like the idea of never having to wipe your posterior again?”
Marshall was perfectly OK with not wiping his posterior; that’s not what he was thinking of. He was thinking of what had really happened when the pressure inside him abated. If he was still hallucinating, then surely he'd been found and taken to some hospital where, just as surely, he'd . . .
He imagined the nurses and orderlies having to attend to him, and was sorry to have caused them such unpleasantness.
But as the locked door had proved, he could do nothing about it. And as Crennick was now showing, even a misplaced frown could begin knocking the dream off kilter. So he banished the nurses and orderlies from his mind, remolded his face to express only thrilled amazement, and, with as much earnestness as he could muster, begged Crennick to tell him more.
“In due course, my boy,” said the doctor, leading him back out of the bathroom. “But first, much as I enjoy gazing on your mighty physique . . .” He opened a couple of folding doors. “May I suggest some clothes.”
* * *
It was all there—everything you’d expect in a closet like that. The collapsed ironing board, the iron on the shelf above it, the hangers . . . But the hangars weren't just hanging. Each held something of Marshall’s, whether his pants, shirt, rocket belt or bolo tie. His sandals, which had been in his roller luggage, awaited him on the floor below. And beside them was the carry-on itself, handle still up and at the ready.
After showering and dressing and making liberal use of the towels and toiletries he found in the bathroom, he brushed his hair in front of a large mirror, then returned to the main room, while announcing his most recent discovery.
“It’s astounding. I sensed something strange the moment I turned on the light, but couldn't say what until now. It’s my eyes. For the first time since kindergarten I can see without glasses.”
“That impresses you, does it?" said Crennick from a corner of the room where for some reason he was reaching behind the floor-to-ceiling drapery. “Well, how about this?”
He then began pulling on something, causing two heavy curtains to go their separate ways.
At first Marshall couldn’t understand what the doctor meant, because the parting drapery was admitting sunlight, and how was that impressive in the middle of an afternoon?
But then he had to allow it wasn't ordinary sunlight.
It was, rather, brightness so blazing it bleached everything it touched and forced him to hold his hands to his face, squinting through his fingers.
While outside, where one might have expected a parking lot or a road, there loomed . . .
A star.
And below it . . .
A world.
Filling the lower third of the wall-sized window, all blue and swirly white except where a hint of Asia poked through the cloud cover, it was in fact the Earth itself.