Imagination And A Monster Chapter Six

You get an email from Enlighten at lunch. You’re in your room, lying on your bed, scrolling through your phone absentmindedly, when the notification pops up on the screen. 

Thank you for your application, the letter reads, and you try to ignore the nervous buzzing in your stomach as you read the rest of it. It’s either you get kicked out of the dorm or you don’t, whether you’re gonna have to call Leone or you don’t, but then you see the lines telling you to drop by for preliminary assessments, and you let out a breath. 

The only way to confirm Meteor dreamers’ existence is through assessments, the letter tells you, which is understandable. The very reason they’re trying to get brain scans from volunteers is because they want to know if it’s a viable way of telling them apart, after all, but before that, next to anyone can say that they’ve had weird dreams. The quickest way to verify anything would be to check their addresses - or at least where they were during the Meteor Event - and their ages, but even if it lines up, there’s still a possibility of them lying. 

And then there’s you, who wasn’t even born yet during the Meteor Event. You wonder if they’d overlooked your birth year, or if they took it seriously when you wrote in that your mother swears she’d gotten hit by a meteor.

Although that would be an interesting thing to document, wouldn’t it? The effect of the Meteor Event on pregnancies. You wonder if there’s others like you, whose parents had seen the meteors - minus the getting hit part - and had strange dreams too. 

There had to be right? Even if your mother hadn’t actually been hit by a meteor, she had to have seen it. Why else would you be having the dreams? And if that was the case, then there was no telling how many pregnancies there were that were affected by the Meteor Event.

You’re looking through your contacts before you realize it, hitting Leone’s number. They pick up on the second ring before you can exit the call. 

“Hello?”

“Are you stuck in traffic?”

Leone laughs. “Ah, no. I’ve arrived, actually, just getting lunch. My friend and his brother’s still picking me up from here to our apartment, though.”

“Roommate?”

“Yeah, the labrat money’s not gonna last forever, after all,” they say. “What’s up?”

“I got in for interviews,” you say. “That’s something.”

“That’s great!” they say. “Are you getting cold feet?”

“No, no - just - I don’t know, I guess I thought you’d want to know,” you say, and there’s a pause, not long enough to be awkward but long enough that you’re already cringing that you said that. 

Leone laughs gently. “I did, thanks for telling me. I was worried about your apartment,” they say. “Call me about what happens to the interviews.”

“Yeah,” you say. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

There’s a honk in the background of the phone call. You flinch, pulling the phone away.

“That’s - that’s my ride, sorry about that,” they say. “Talk to you later.”

“Yeah,” you say. There’s a beep as the call ends, and you toss your phone to your side, landing on your mattress with a slight bounce. 

You stare at the ceiling for a moment. Maybe talking to people sometimes isn’t so bad.

-

Arden’s nice enough to ride with you to the lab, on the day of your assessment. You hadn’t even had to ask. It’s mortifying that the nervousness had been obvious on your face, but now that you’re here in the building, you find that it was worth it. Everything is so bright and sleek and intimidating, all silver and white and glass. It looks like you’re gonna get lost from how plain everything looks. 

You show your I.D. at the front desk, and the receptionist gets someone to walk you to the waiting room. Arden opts to sit in the waiting area up front and wait for you, although you doubt the receptionist would have let anybody other than the actual interviewees through, considering the break-ins the lab has been having. 

There’s already a couple of people in the waiting room you’re led to. The chairs they’ve set out aren’t full yet, so there’s still people arriving, but you duck your head under the attention set on you when the door opens. Thankfully, they all turn away to mind their own business once they see it’s no one important. 

You’re ushered to sit down, your name is asked again, and the person who’d brought you in goes to a filing cabinet in the corner to look for a folder, presumably your application. He heads for one of the offices on your left once he finds it, and when he comes back out, he calls someone’s name out. A girl across from you stands, it’s her turn. The employee closes the door behind her after she enters.

“Just wait here a bit and wait for your name to be called,” he says, as he passes by you on his way out. You nod, keeping your gaze at your shoes until you hear the door click shut. 

There’s a couple of magazines on the table; standard gossip fare to keep people entertained in waiting rooms, and since you don’t have anything to do, you pick one up, skimming over the headlines at the front. There’s interviews of several celebrities you don’t know, some tips and tricks on how to dress like characters from a popular TV show, and an exclusive interview on an online personality who happens to be a meteor dreamer.

You flip the magazine open to find it. 

It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, or dreamt before, even. They talk about how it was like they’d seen the beginning of everything, and how life started to form, how the universe seemed to stretch, before it felt like they were being ripped apart. Their dreams end with them crashing into a city, though, which you take note of. You know how the endings differ, sometimes. Your own doesn’t end in a city.

They hadn’t seen the meteor head on, the interview says. They’d been a child when it had happened, and were heading to bed before the Meteor Event. They’d seen the light outside through the curtains and shut their eyes from the brightness, turning away, and when they’d opened them, the lights in their city had gone out. They’d ripped their curtains aside then, and looked out their window, horrified to find that as far as they could see, all the city lights were out. 

Above them, the milky way, clearly visible, for the first time in their lives. 

They hadn’t lost their sight, and the doctors say it was likely due to how they hadn’t stared straight at the meteor. Their dreams started almost immediately, they say, bits and pieces at first, at least from what they could remember of their dreams, before they started being able to remember things more clearly. 

You’ve tried to find footage of the Meteor Event. There’s a couple that have survived, although they’re very corrupted, and they’ve made their way into the public consciousness in the same way that famous video of Bigfoot has: pixelated, grainy, and invoking a sense of mourning that it’s not in high definition. As your mind wanders, you think it must have been a sight to see - the auroras, the meteors, the milky way fully visible and stretching out across the night sky with the absence of light pollution. 

You shake the fascination off. You shouldn’t be fascinated in the first place. It was a disaster, and you’d been lucky enough to have the rare dreams but none of the trauma that came with it.

In the time you’ve spent reading, some new people have arrived, and a few others have been called and dismissed and have gone home. There’s only five people in the room, you included. 

One of the offices to your left opens. Someone’s called. The guy beside you unfolds his walking cane to take his turn.

You stare at the window across you. The curtains are pulled aside, and you’re treated with a view of the orange sky, overlooking the city, since you’re in one of the upper floors. You have no idea if this even resembles the world before the Meteor Event. You have no idea what’s changed and what’s not, and you can’t grasp just what’s been lost or forgotten, because you’ve never known what it’s like to live before the disaster. You were born into it, after all, and your poor little village had gotten through, because by their circumstances, virtually nothing had changed, save for the fact that there was no electricity.

You wonder how your mother is doing. You wonder if she knows you hate your stupid town.

A door opens, someone’s calling your name.

You get up. 

-

And you regret ever submitting your application almost immediately. 

Not that the doctor is rude. In fact, she’s been rather nice, but it’s just that you haven’t talked about your dreams to anyone other than your mother, Leone and Arden, and it feels a lot like you’re being scrutinized under a microscope for every single thing you say. The doctor’s been customary, writing down your answers and listening to you talk, but you can’t help but hunch your shoulders together, waiting to be called out as a liar. 

It’s a hard thing to admit to, after all. You’re not a witness to the Meteor Event, you were born after it. You’d never been diagnosed because you didn’t have access to hospitals that could, and couldn’t afford to go to the city. Even if your mother had believed you when you told her, she also didn’t know the first thing about contacting anyone who could help with your dreams, and she hadn’t. She still doesn’t. 

But you’ve had these dreams for as long as you can remember. They’re not always there - every meteor dreamer doesn’t just dream of the same thing all their lives, but it occurs often enough that you know exactly how it goes: 

You wake up and see the universe start, it breathes in, stretches and expands and it fills with stardust and space debris. The space debris around you grows life, like petri dishes left in laboratories, although you feel like the words mean nothing to you as you watch everything begin.

You’re pulled apart, torn to pieces. You land in a crash in the middle of buckass nowhere. 

The doctor continues to write down as you answer her questions. You wait for her to snap at you, to tell you to get the hell out and stop wasting her time. 

She looks up at you. “Can you tell me your mother’s name?”

You tell her.

“Address?”

“Mine or hers?”

“You don’t live with her?”

“No, I got a scholarship and moved here for college,” you say.

“I see. Her address.”

You tell her.

She writes it all down, and when she’s done, she closes her notebook and sets down her pen. You stiffen.

Surprisingly, she laughs. “Calm down,” she says. “You’re not our first case of a meteor dreamer getting it from their parents.”

“I’m not?” You blink. Thank God. You were right. Of course you wouldn’t be the only one out there.

The doctor nods. “Plenty of those who were pregnant and were in the affected areas at the time gave birth to meteor dreamers. They’re all your age.”

“Oh,” you say. Of course. How stupid of you. You should have spent time reading more into meteor dreamers the second you’d moved into the city, it would have saved you the panic. 

There being precedent for your case means your mother truly might have been a witness, then. Should you apologize to her? You still don’t buy the ‘getting hit’ part, but she had to have seen the meteor.

The doctor laughs. “Relax,” she says. “Do you still want to do this?”

“Yeah, sure,” you say, because it’s seven grand, and you need the money. “Why not?”

You’re scheduled to return next week. You’re supposed to stay at the laboratory for two weeks, so you’re told to pack essentials - clothes, medication, essential toiletries. You’re asked if you have any allergies, and your list of pre-existing conditions is reviewed, in case you forgot anything, since they’re going to be providing you food and other necessities for your whole stay here. The doctor dismisses you when you’re done. 

It’s surreal, once you’re finally out of the room, walking out to the hallway to let out a breath. You’ve never done this before. You’ve never bothered with the whole meteor dreamer stuff.

“Hey.”

You turn. The voice is familiar, and you learn why as Leone raises a hand at you in greeting. Beside them is your seatmate from earlier. They both look like they were in the middle of a conversation. 

“Leone?” you ask.

“Everything good?” they ask.

“Yeah,” you say, “Everything’s fine. I’m - I got in?” You don’t really know how to say it. It’s not like it’s an audition. “What are you doing here?”

They motion to the tall guy beside them. “Roommate.”

“Oh,” you say, turning to him. “Hi.”

He turns to the sound of your voice, and raises a hand. Leone introduces you both. His name is Jude Cameron.

He raises an eyebrow when he hears yours. “Your old roommate?” he asks, turning back to Leone. 

“Yeah,” Leone says. 

“You talk about us?” you asks. 

“Who do you think I talk to on the phone all the time?” Leone asks, and you blink, thinking back to all the times you’d noticed them talking to someone on the phone throughout your four years of college. You’ve never really minded it, even if you noticed it. 

“Ah, man, how much embarrassing stuff have you said?”

“Trust me, I’ve embarrassed myself more on those calls than I’ve embarrassed you and Arden,” they say.

Cameron snorts, muttering, “Yeah, you don’t even have to try.” 

“Dude,” Leone says. 

“Not like I’m lying.”

“God, I hate you,” Leone says, but with a laugh and a shake of their head.

“Sure.”

The sight makes you smile, somehow. There’s a sense of nostalgia in your stomach that you can’t understand. You’ve never talked to anyone in college unless absolutely necessary. You’ve hit it off with a few of them, but you’d never really put in the effort to maintain any sort of relationship. 

You think of the baker’s son, back home. He’s the closest person you can consider a friend from your hometown. You’re sure you had friends, once, when you were younger. Maybe you’ve drifted so far apart, the way children naturally do, that you’d just started telling yourself you’ve never had friends. 

“I saw Arden at the front desk,” Leone says.

“Yeah, waiting for me,” you say. 

Leone nods. “Well, we’d give you a ride - “

“No, we wouldn’t,” Cameron says, to which Leone just laughs again. At least he’s blunt, you think.

“ - but we’ve a festival to catch.”

“Summer Lights?”

“Yeah,” they say. It’d always struck you as odd, that people celebrated when the world’s power finally came back on. Mostly because it didn’t come back on all at once, but gradually. But people threw a dart at a date on when ‘everything had gone back to normal’ anyway, and celebrated in the summer. Now that you think about it, though, maybe they’d sorely needed it, for closure, so they can tell themselves that the awful horror was over. You don’t blame them.

“Have fun,” you say. 

“Thanks,” Leone says, giving you one last nod before turning to Cameron and softly saying, “Let’s go.” 

You watch them disappear down the hallway for the elevator, talking lightly. You wonder how often Leone’s been here that the receptionist just let them come up to meet Cameron. 

Friends don’t look too bad, you think. You wish you had friends.