Remembering
A Surreal Story
This story is the sequel to “Some Peanut Butter to Last a Couple of Days,” which of course is a line taken from the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime.”
The déjà vu hit Brad so hard he wanted to throw up. He could barely focus on Lisa as she was demonstrating an exercise for him. All of a sudden, his body felt weak and he wondered if he might actually pass out.
Brad hadn’t slept well the night before and he’d awoken that morning with a bad case of dream déjà vu. Normally, déjà vu wasn’t something that caused him physical illness, nor was remembering his dreams. But occasionally in his life, he had experienced déjà vu from his dreams. That is, when remembering weird bits from weird dreams, he had suffered from vertigo. It was difficult to put into words what the dreams were, other than that they involved a series of wild impossibilities – physical, logical, temporal, and linguistical. Brad wondered whether this senselessness contributed to the vertigo, or maybe it caused a temporary misfiring in his brain – as though his mind sensed incorrectly that his body was upside-down and being subjected to multiple G-forces.
Dream déjà vu typically came and went throughout one single day, and then it wouldn’t come back for years. Today, he’d had four bouts already and each one was about a different dream – weirdly, dreams he’d probably had many years ago, not the night before. Each dream existed outside the back of his mind and he could just almost recollect the rest of it. But touching that bit of his mind set off the nausea, and he immediately backed off.
Had Brad been a different sort of fellow, he might have believed these were signs of, variously, prophecies and portents, visions of past lives, communications with extraterrestrial interdimensional beings, blips in the multiverse,1 repressed memories of hideous child sexual abuse at the hands of a cannibalistic Satanic cult, messages from a ghost or a demon, or deeply meaningful insights into his own self and the fundamental nature of the universe.
Since he wasn’t that sort of fellow, he knew it was just some odd physical reaction stimulated by some sensory receptor temporarily producing a false reading, and he was glad that his mind didn’t self-destruct based on the false reading of one single sensory receptor like it might if it had been designed by the people who designed the Boeing 737 Max.
“Brad? Are you paying attention?”
Lisa waved a hand in front of his face. “Seriously, dude,” she said, “you spaced out for a minute there. Everything alright?”
She stuck her face closer to his and narrowed her eyes. Before he could respond, she added, “You don’t look well.”
“I feel kind of sick,” he said.
“Some excuse,” she said. “It was bad enough dragging you here this morning. Every one of my friends whose boyfriend didn’t already work out has been able to get him to go. Why’s it so difficult for you?”
“I guess I’m just not the gym type,” said Brad as he glanced over towards the free-weight floor, where at that very moment one of the local trainers was shoulder pressing 100-lb dumbbells with each arm. There was a crash from the squat rack in the far corner where a man who looked like an alternate for Andre the Giant had just dropped a bar with seven plates on each end.
“You need to lose that pandemic fifteen,” said Lisa. “Nobody in here cares what you look like. Literally, that dude in the corner deadlifting 675 or whatever doesn’t care that you think you’re out of shape. You don’t need to be shy or intimidated.”
“If you say so,” said Brad, who didn’t say that the only person in the room who intimidated him was standing in front of him berating him. It didn’t make him feel self-conscious when he saw a bunch of strangers who had the discipline to spend six days a week at the gym. It made him feel self-conscious that his girlfriend had the discipline to spend six days a week at the gym and he didn’t. Sometimes she would say something like, “it’s not about discipline, it’s about getting a routine,” which was easy for her to say. She liked being here.
Lisa turned back to the cable tree and grabbed the handle. Brad sighed and wished something would happen. Maybe a helicopter would crash through the glass wall at the far end of the gym and his world would be turned on its head. Maybe this terrible feeling of déjà vu would pass.
And against all odds, as if on cue, a helicopter crashed into the far wall made of glass. It shattered into exactly one million pieces. And Brad felt the déjà vu pressing in on him worse than ever. It felt like something was stuck in his throat. Lisa was yelling. Everyone was yelling. And then he remembered. He remembered what was going to happen next. He didn’t predict it. He remembered it.
Brad awoke in a cold sweat. He shook himself, trying to dislodge the gym.
“Still dreaming about it?” Lisa asked. She was up, too. From the looks of it, she hadn’t been asleep. She was sitting on the bed in front of him, although she hadn’t dressed herself.
“Yeah. What about you? Can’t sleep?”
“No.”
“What’s it look like outside?”