The Narrator

“Open your eyes.”

It’s still dark.

“Open your eyes.”

It’s still dark.

“You’re not opening your eyes.”

Why’s it so dark?

“You have to open your eyes.”

But all was a silence of vision.

1. Before

Growing up he’d always been fond of daydreaming. He’d walk to school, and imagine trees on the city sidewalks. Birds on trees that he’d seen in books. Sometimes he’d walk around the trees, but that was for fun when he was alone.

As he got older, he thought he needed to grow up. So he’d stopped imagining the trees and reminded himself of what he needed to buy on the way home and follow the cracks running through the pavement till he could hear the earth making them around his feet. If he walked on the cracks he’d seal the wounds, and nothing could stop him from healing the concrete world.

He learned the word ‘quirk’ in school and was charmed to know that he had some. He used to sit with books and puzzles late at night when he should have been trying to sleep. He’d think about how nice it would be to rewrite the story of your life changing details so that pieces from your puzzle fit into the pieces of someone else’s puzzle so that in the end no one could tell which puzzle the pieces came from because god had given you the completed puzzles and let you paint over them however you’d like and took them apart again and let you put it together yourself one more time after you’d forgotten the story. Those were good days till Mother started noticing that nothing was clean. So she started cleaning the books, sometimes painting over the words with a paintbrush meant for a wall or white-out when there was no white paint in the house, or peeling the pictures off the puzzles one piece at a time because they weren’t clean and he too, had to be clean, so he’d learned to hide in the shed so she wouldn’t scrub him raw. Those were bad days till Mother was taken away.

Then one day going home from school a woman ran after him shouting that he’d forgotten his receipt for the milk and he thought that she was still a stranger to him – he didn’t even know her name – and strangers were dangerous, especially if they run after to you shouting your name. He’d tripped and fallen and the strangers were upon him and after making it out and getting home he stopped daydreaming for a while and focused on the dangers of the real world.

2. How it came to be

It had started as a bit of fun with memory in college. A sort of lucid-daydreaming. Lying to oneself about the past as an amusement. Thinking in the present and dumping it over the past. Memories weren’t being replaced, he thought: they couldn’t, not deliberately. But memory was a foam-like structure, hollow and only present when recalled, and his new habit coaxed it to conform to the shape of his fantasies; soon he’d started forgetting the old memories, and found only knots of fresh fiction to cling to. Then it was more, instinctual self-deception, some deep rending of memory being filled through the incentive of novelty: the new memories were more fun, more fulfilling, and ultimately more malleable. He was malleable. It got quicker, it spent itself sooner, so that thoughts he’d just had were disappearing within the moments they’d created for themselves. It stopped being gaslighting the moment he didn’t have to think about replacing a memory: it was an autumn afternoon off work and he’d tripped and he’d only remembered throwing himself to the leafy forest floor in joyous rapture at being out in nature, in the earthly world.

Then he went home and remembered he was asleep, dreaming.

3. Being there

The dream always started in the same way, but he never remembered that. The voice he heard was unreliable, he realised. It told him to do things that weren’t possible; it refused to follow dream logic. Periodically a clown in his mother’s clothes would tell him to clean his room, and the voice agreed, but he just remembered his room as clean and all should have been fine but a man with his father’s voice in the living room spoke to someone and said simply, “I’m worried about him.”

Once he’d woken up, he still heard the voice. A few weeks ago he’d named it ‘Narrator’. It was like having a pet. An invisible pet that wasn’t quite a friend, to walk around with in the real world. People were fine, they couldn’t hear Narrator. Narrator was a bad dog, he wouldn’t listen, he wouldn’t respond. Narrator said things were bad. Narrator said he was dreaming. But he knew, he was just editing the memories. Sleep and dreams are fun, he thought.

4. Where are you?

Yesterday he’d dreamt that the alarm clock woke him up at 5 in the morning and a helpful note on the fridge door lent itself to the undecipherable till Narrator lost patience and told him he had a shift from 7 in the morning to 1 in the afternoon. In the shower he opened the cold water tap but he wasn’t about to shiver in a dream. Outside it was sunny but a man who walked by said he looked cold and Narrator said to him that things were bad again. People were fine usually, but he’d started saying what Narrator said to him out loud. The man hurried away.

At work things went well, people left him alone and he stacked the shelves and before he knew it, it was time to go, but he felt tired and knew he had to sleep. Just a nap, he thought. But he dreamt that things were upside down: he lay on a cloud and the ocean was above him. He watched water condense from the ocean and pool under him, he laughed when the clouds began evaporating. He walked across the cloud until he saw land above him and Narrator told him his shift was from 8 to 2 in the afternoon and he told Narrator that that couldn’t be so; had he not just worked? Bad dog.

He went back to bed.

5. Being there

“Open your eyes.”

It’s still dark.

“Open your eyes.”

It’s still dark.

“Things are bad.”

You always say that.

“We are here to help.”

He closed his eyes and imagined the sympathetic faces of the doctors and nurses. He couldn’t change the memory.

“Open your eyes.”

He opened his eyes, but all was a silence of vision.