t first he was relentless: persuading, cajoling, and apologizing in email after email, night after night—locked in horrible dialog with a silent Sol he constructed from pieces of himself. This Sol read with cold fury, discarding his words as worthless operator doublespeak meant to puppet her emotions and unlock her female parts by operation.
But he came to believe that there was no Sol reading his email—that she had dug him from her like a wart, going about her life with no more care for him than one gives to excised tissue. How could any person with heart read the dissociative self-dialog and not want to intervene? So either she wasn’t reading it, or she wasn’t a good person. He vacillated, but however the coin landed, there was nothing for him to do but get it together and press on.
He drew the Bible out and sought some solace from its pages. He scanned the table of contents laboriously. Matthew. He once heard Dan say the name of that one. He began on the book of Matthew, reading Jesus’ genealogy up through “Ram begat Amminadab,” carefully sounding out each name and looking it up—to little avail. He lost hope. Maybe the Bible would eventually yield its pearls, but for now he needed something to distract him. Not the begats. Wait. He knew what he would do. He picked up the flashlight and left his room.
The shadows in the hall were deep as forgotten history—the pale LED did little more than illuminate the living things of the surface while the dead slept in the dark of cracks and corners, shadows of the living. When the grandfather clock sang out sonorous midnight he froze. His parents were sleeping, dreaming for the Mind as they always did. But his humor reacted to the spiritworld’s invisible provocations with lurches and jumps as he tiptoed down the carpeted stairs, down through the living room, down the unfinished wooden stairs, down into the forgotten but undiscarded world of the basement, soft beam sliding across the dark moonscape walls of pocked and cratered cement as he reached the last step.
The ghost LED turned the world on its head, illuminating a figure whose ground was in the shadow. A poking ski cast a bone shadow, and a garbage bag stuffed with clothes cast a yawning grave. The bookshelf cast the ruin of a skyscraper, a rebar and cement shell.
But the books were trim and colorful, well-spoken ghosts whose shadow was etched clear in letters, warming the light. He stood before the metal bookshelf, browsing, then reached out and pulled a blue one from the shelf, clutching the flashlight between neck and shoulder.
Victor Frankl. “The Will to Meaning.” Interesting. The letters on the cover were white, glowing blue as though by an inner light. But this wasn’t the direction he was going.
“The Hobbit.” Hobbit? He pulled it out and on the cover was a blunt-nosed, round-bellied short man in front of a hill with a round red door. Oh! Hobbit! The tiny yet powerful mages who slew dragons with thought. A chronicle of their Middle-Earth empire, no doubt. Boring. What tiny people are all-powerful? He recalled that the vid had been based on an old movie. Like a photo of a photo of a photo. He slid it back into the gap and plucked forth a book with a kindly golden dragon small on the spine.
The title drew him deeper, “The Neverending Story.” That was what he needed, a story that never ended, a story to keep him from ruminating on the loss of Sol.
Wait. There was a vid of this, about a boy who lost himself in the lucids but used his new-found dream powers to project a dragon, frightening off the boys that bullied him. Which had also been based on a movie, he recalled. He needed a story that would give him power like that.