THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: THE LAST CITY

I know where you go when you sleep. Where we all go. Hell, I’m not sure if it’s that, or maybe we come here from there when we wake. It’s so hard to tell, now. We’re in week 7. I can tell that it’s week 7 because it’s on everything. On my meal tray. On the pill tray. On the vials that the doctor that looks like Tony Dow from Leave It To Beaver injects me with before I go to sleep at night.

Before I dream.

We reported to the facility in North Carolina as ordered ninety-one days ago. I know this because I mark the corner of my daybook with a line each time before I write about my day, before go to sleep. The facility said GENOTECH on the front sign, and it looked like a place that sold insurance. Two stories. Reflective glass, crouching in a green spray of trees. Waiting to gobble us up.

Waiting for me. I went willingly. It’s like I knew what was waiting for me, there. I was so docile because I knew what was coming. And what does that mean? If I hold still and look out the window now, do the trees undulate like they are underwater, or is a windstorm coming? Why is that man in the blue coverall standing in the middle of the lawn? Why does the hole in the clouds look like an eye? Is this a dream now? It feels like one.

But nothing feels like the dream on the drug.

And dreaming on the drug, the drug that they won’t tell me about, isn’t like dreaming at all. It’s like the world and the dream have slowly spun, like an old- timey haunted house secret doors, leaving me here, at the pivot point with a foot on both sides. I hope it turns soon. I hope I go there for good. If I’m lucky, I’ll never leave this facility. 

We all know in our bones this world is unbearable.

Have you ever dreamt of a place that was so assured of its reality, no matter how outrageous it seemed, that you were forced to believe it was real? That’s the place I go. The place the drug takes you to, only awake unlike the rest of the world, who only go there unconscious.

First you see the gates. Ancient, sandstone gates that climb to blot out a sky so white it makes your eyes water. And it’s hot. And you’re being crushed in a procession of every person imaginable. Screaming and shouting and struggling. And the city resolves itself before you. Hangdog, bleached wooden buildings with exotic rugs hung over the windows, stone buildings carved with sinuous curves with narrow, ever-wrapping steps. Red mud huts clinging to ancient, long-rotted wooden beams. And the streets are a choking red dust. An ancient city, the only city.

The last city.

And you go inside, and you realize you are not you, but you are the you you are supposed to be. And you push off the boulevard to one of the darker, winding side-streets of faded, once-black cobblestones, and you find yourself moving up. Forever upwards. Past shadows in the dark off on their own intrigues. Past open, black doorways. Past cats and goats and camels and piles of dung. Past bodies, bled out and pale. Up and up, cocooned on both sides by buildings and shadow, up until you come to the plaza.

And there, in the supernova-bright plaza, you see it: the temple. A vast complex of stone, carved with the faces of every demon, wraith, and monster imaginable. A tableaux of every imagined horror. A record of all of earth’s nightmares. The priests come and go from the temple, wearing the masks. Golden skulls, with red robes. And they enter the temple bearing litters with bodies on them, and you know, you know they carry the dead inside.

And those bodies don't ever come out. And it's all so real. So vivid. 

And then you see them. In a vast and nearly empty plaza, you see the others, the only others besides the priests that pay you no mind. Lone travelers staring at the temple, and you know who they are. You approach one.

“Do you remember Strange Days by the Doors?”, you ask before you know what you're asking, and the traveler turns to look at you, blank faced and alien. You have never seen her before. Her mouth works for a moment.

“Yes. Do you remember Friends?”

And you feel the uncertainty of doubt cross your mind. A flitting image of a blue room appears. A nondescript man miming something in alien clothing. And then there’s a click. You remember it. You remember the whole other, false world. You can hold its tiny emptiness in your mind like you might hold a once-beloved, but ultimately too simple, puzzle.

“Yes. Jenna?” you ask tentatively.

“Mark?” You consider this name and try it out in your mouth for the first time, and then nod.

“OK. Let’s go over the plan again.”

You both sit in the dust, while the priests that collect the dead ignore you, and plan your plans to never return to that broken world again as the stars come out in an empty sky.