Chapter 10

I think to myself: should I just cut my losses? Should I pull a Charlie? Maybe it’s time to focus on a new project. Maybe we should adopt? I don’t know.

The only reason I started investigating my dreams was to try and save myself from an early death. I was at least 50% sure that I had accomplished that.

So why should I keep going? Fame? Vanity?

It’s probably the same reason that anybody does anything. Because they don’t know what else to do.

I serve my wife an egg-white omelet with a question on my mind. “Did you see what happened to the machine I was building last night?”

“Yeah, you guys were pretty crazy.”

“Do you remember how it broke?”

“All I remember is Charlie kept yelling ‘Pants Party!’ and then everyone started taking their pants off. Then you wanted everyone to burn their pants. That’s when I went to bed.”

“Wow, that got out of hand. So, last night was a setback for my machine, but I think — “

“You’re not still going to go through with this, are you?”

I crack three eggs into a pan for me, yolks included. “What do you mean?”

“I figured once you saw that it’s impossible, you would give up.”

“I think I was close. I think I can get it to work.”

“Look, James, you know I love you and I think it’s great that you’re pursuing things like this, but it’s time to be serious. You can’t build a lucid dream device. It’s just not possible.”

I’m chopping ham and dicing onions. “All I need is to buy another EEG and spend a few more weeks working on it, and I know that I can get it to work.”

“We can’t afford that.”

“What do you mean? We have plenty of money in our savings accounts.”

“That money is for savings, for something important like kids or college or retirement.”

I’m sprinkling shredded cheddar. “This is important to me. Why is that so hard to understand?”

“Look, we just can’t afford for you to spend thousands of dollars and years of your time on something that’s never going to work.”

“It will work.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But you don’t know that it won’t.”

“This is our money. And you can’t just keep spending it all.”

“Yeah, it is our money. But half of it’s mine, and half is yours. And I can spend my half however I want. And I’m going to buy what I need to.”

Lara gets up from the table and sidles next to me. She grabs my face and looks into my eyes. Right past my cornea, deep through me. “What’s gotten into you? You were never like this before.”

“I don’t have time for this. Fuck it, I’m going to Charlie’s.” And with that I walked out the front door, my omelet still cooking over medium heat.

I’m on my way to Charlie’s place — just hours after I had kicked him out of my own.

Charlie’s apartment doesn’t have crown molding. It’s on the basement level. When you walk in, you sort of feel like you’re in a potted plant. You feel like you’re in soil. And that maybe if you got enough water and sunlight that you would start growing bulbs. Or thorns.

“I might need to hang out here for a while. Is that okay?”

“Mi casa is your house buddy. Did you and Lara have a fight?”

“Sort of.”

“Was it about last night? Oh God, was it about the pants party?”

“No, it didn’t have anything to do with you. Charlie, do you think I can get the lucid dream machine to work?”

“Sure, why not?”

“I mean, you really think it’s possible?”

“Anything’s possible. I mean, I might not think it will work, but what does that mean? I didn’t think people would go crazy for a fried onion. So what do I know?”

“Good point.”

Using Charlie’s old desktop computer I reorder all the parts that I need. This time I have them shipped to my office. Either I don’t want Lara to know that I bought them, or I don’t want her to be able to return them. Or break them.

When I walk back into our condo that night, I feel like a criminal breaking in someplace I didn’t belong. Lara hears me but doesn’t respond.

I should have been content to just go to sleep and avoid any confrontations, but I have to go and open my stupid mouth, “I just want to let you know that I’m still going to build my dream machine. And it’s going to work.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

“What?”

“What is wrong with you? You just walk out like that, don’t call all day, and then come home 8 hours later, still pissed off? You’re such a fucking asshole.”

“I’m pissed off?! What about you! You’re telling me what I can and can’t do in my free time.”

“Just imagine if this was reversed. Would you be okay if I wanted to spend all our savings on a reincarnation seminar or something? No, you’d flip out and say that it was stupid. But I wouldn’t even do that. I wouldn’t want to spend our money — money that we’ve worked hard to save for our kids one day. I wouldn’t want to spend it on something that you weren’t supportive of.”

“If it meant that much to you, I’d support whatever you wanted.”

“Oooh, you are such a fucking liar! You are so full of shit. If it means that much to you, then go ahead and build it. But I’m not going to sit around and have you flush our money away. I can’t believe you! What happens when you’ve got nothing to show for it? What happens next year on your birthday when you’ve got the same bunch of wires on your face and it doesn’t do shit? Then what?”

“So that’s all this comes down to. You don’t believe in me. You can believe in all of this other bullshit. You can believe in chakras and that you’ve had past lives but you don’t believe that I can do what I say I can.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Fine, I’m going to bed.”

Fine — that’s what people say when they’re not fine.

“Fine, I’m leaving.”

“Where are you going?”

“What do you care? I told you I’m not going to stand around while you waste your life locked up in your workshop.”

“Lara, wait! It’s late. Where are you going?”

It’s her turn to walk out on me. She won’t even look at me anymore.

I don’t know where she is going and a part of me wants not to care. Of course I do, but I don’t want to. You can’t control everything in your life, even when you’re awake.

I go online to find new plans. Perhaps a circuit diagram of a homemade robot dog holds the key to my invention. Or someone’s electronic blueprint of a remote control car.

Maybe the key is locked away in my mind somewhere, or sitting at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Either way.

Lara comes back in the middle of the night. She didn’t really have a choice. We don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s not like we’re going to divorce over something as meaningless as this.

Right?

A UPS truck pulls up to my office on October 11th — Columbus Day. With my new parts in front of me, I feel connected to the Spanish explorer. I feel like I am close and that I think I will get there, but truth be told, I don’t really know if I will end up where I am trying to go.

The only thing I am really confident of is that it could work. Not that I know how to make it happen.

That night Charlie comes over to watch Monday Night Football to root against the Vikings and their pervert quarterback. I feel like even if I’m not getting anywhere, having Charlie here helps. It’s not as if he knows anything about what I am building, but at least the time isn’t wasted.

We start talking about writing, discussing the pros and cons of fiction.

Charlie says, “See that’s where James Frey fucked up. He had a great story that everyone loved, Oprah was eating that shit up, and then had to go and slap ‘A Memoir’ on the back cover. If he doesn’t do that, he’s still rolling in dough.”

“But do you think Oprah would have liked it as much if she knew from the beginning that it wasn’t real?”

“The funny thing is that the sickest stuff you can imagine, the dirtiest thoughts that pop into your head…that’s all real. Some authors have to say that it’s fiction just so everyone won’t think that they’re fucked up. But the best fiction is always based on truth. No one can just imagine up the sickest shit out there. If Frey calls that book fiction, everyone just thinks he’s an imaginative writer. That’s all he had to do.”

“It sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. Don’t take this the wrong way, but how come you’ve never finished a book?”

“You really want to know?” Charlie puts down his pen and looks at me. I’ve never really thought about it, but Charlie and I almost never look at each other when we talk.

He says, “The first half of every book I write is the best book ever written. And then I get halfway done and I realize it’s just a bunch of bullshit that no one wants to read. So I move on to something new.”

“Maybe you should publish two first halves together. Let the reader figure out the endings.”

“If you weren’t making fun of me, I might think that was a great idea.”

“Here’s what gets me about books and movies. I can never put much stock in reviews because they can always find some shmuck to say it’s the best movie of the year. There’s always some asshole willing to say it’s the best film since Forrest Gump. And these loser critics have caught on. They see a stinker as their opportunity. If they can come up with a good pun, they can get their name on the poster. DVD cover, too. Like a murder mystery is dead on or a hospital comedy will leave you in stitches.”

Charlie chimes in, “Or the Rodney King parody is a laugh riot.”

By the end of the night I finish rebuilding my machine. Of course I have no idea if version two is any better off than version one. For all I know, this might not even make a complete circuit. But it didn’t work before, so how much could I have to lose?

I sort of doze off, staring at this pile of circuits and wires and try to imagine if other famous inventors before me ever felt this way. How many tries did it take Eli Whitney to remove the seeds from cotton? How many sleepless nights did Marconi stay up messing around before creating the first radio? I bet he stared at a collage of electronics not that dissimilar from what’s on my desk right now.

That’s when the thought pops into my head: what if all I’ve built is really just a radio? That would suck.

But that’s just the famous guys. How many naïve men and women came before me who just had to give up or die failing? How many pompous bastards thought they were as close as I think I am? How many assholes didn’t have a clue? These are questions I don’t want to answer.

It’s time for another test. I bid Charlie farewell for the night and hope it will be the last of our late night sessions. But I have a sneaking suspicion it won’t be.

Before I drift off to slumberland, Charlie’s stupid theory of nightmares flashes in front of my eyelids.

My eyes open to a field of blurry vision. I’m lying down in the middle of a white room. I hear beeps and hushed talking and machines running. I try to stand up but I can’t. I’m either strapped down by restraints or I’m paralyzed. Either way I can’t move. I try to speak but only silence comes out.

Objects begin to come into focus. Tones of white and blue and gray become nurses and doctors and machines. I’m strapped to a hospital bed and can’t say a word. But I feel fine. I don’t know why I’m here.

I hear snippets of muffled conversations.

“Atherosclerosis.”

“Damaged blood vessels.”

“Extensive tissue death.”

“Peripheral arterial disease.”

I don’t know what it all means, but it sounds serious. Poor bastard.

And then other phrases trickle in, reverberating throughout the room.

“Site of incision.”

“Prep the anesthesia.”

“Vascular surgery.”

And then there’s the whopper of them all.

“Double amputation.”

They’re going to chop off my legs and there’s nothing I can do about it. They’re going to roll my ass out of this hospital in a wheelchair with nothing but stumps. And then they’ll ask for their wheelchair back.

People are moving quickly now, buzzing over me. They’re taking away my legs and they’re not even going to ask for permission. Of course, I can’t talk right now anyways.

I hear some more instructions. “Deliver the isoflurane.”

Isoflurane is a general anesthesia that you inhale. It relaxes your muscles and numbs you to the pain. Here’s the thing: in my dream I know I’m fatally allergic to isoflurane, even though I’m not in reality. But I can’t speak.

I’m lying there with only moments to spare and cycling through my options.

I’m either going to suffer from this disease, have both legs amputated, or die because of an allergic reaction to isoflurane.

Suffer or die or lose my legs. I don’t know what I would choose. But it’s not my choice.

A nurse places the anesthesia mask over my nose and mouth. The isoflurane ether drifts into my respiratory system. The vapors enter my body and start attacking it.

My air passages begin to close. Not only can I not talk, now I can’t breathe. My lips start swelling. My face becomes irritated and red. But no one notices. I’m going into severe anaphylactic shock and no one seems to give a fuck.

They only notice when my heart monitor starts going crazy. They don’t know it yet, but it’s too late. My heart rate is increasing and my blood pressure is dropping. I’m about to die surrounded by experts in medicine and there’s nothing that I can do about it.

But at least I’ll die with both my legs.

The doctors and nurses, God bless them, they’re acting as though they can still save me. That’s nice. They’re yelling and rushing around as though I still have a chance. It’s not their fault.

Although I do wonder why no one bothered to read my chart.

The only thing worse than having a big fight with your wife is coming to the realization that you’re wrong. I hate being wrong.

Another thousand dollars poured into this project and my dreams are the opposite of lucid. I’m still dying in my dreams.

My Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria are stuck in the Bermuda Triangle with no signs of getting out.

What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

I’m back to the five stages.

First, there is denial.

I can still get this to work. It’s just a matter of time. No one can invent something new in just weeks. I can do this. I just need more research. More money. More parts. Please, you’re telling me that those piece of shit Wright brothers were flying around just like that. I’ll figure this out.

The second stage is anger.

Oh my God. I‘m a fucking failure. I’ve been an asshole to Lara, I’m blowing all our money. I’m never going to get out of this — this life. This rut. This.

I’m trapped and it’s all my fault.

Then comes bargaining.

Who cares if I can’t invent something? I’m still a damn good architect. I mean, I haven’t designed anything significant, but that doesn’t mean I can’t. I’m good. Really, I am.

The fourth stage is depression.

I’m the biggest failure I know. I’m the most recent disappointment in a lineage full of failures. That’s our family tradition. Not amounting to shit. And once again, the Cubs didn’t even make the playoffs. Cubs fans always say, “Wait ’til next year.” Well, I’ve got a news flash. “Next year” is never coming.

Fucking World Series Champion Giants. San Francisco thinks they’re so great with their sourdough and their earthquakes.

The last stage is acceptance. But I refuse.

Pardon the pun, but I’m not about to let my dream die.

Maybe I’m still on the first step. Or maybe I’m on to something. Either way, I’m staring at my laptop searching for answers. I’ve looked at too many homemade blueprints and gotten nowhere.

Actually, I guess I am on acceptance. I’m accepting that I can’t do this on my own.