Eleven Twenty-Three by Jason Hornsby Read Free Book Online Page A

myself.
    Tara has been working on her lucid dreaming
now for months, since before we left. After watching Waking
Life one night with Jasmine and Julie, Tara suddenly became
very interested in controlling and learning from the secret lives
carried out in her sleep. She went to Barnes & Noble and picked
up books on the subject. She read about the symbolism of the
subconscious. She browsed through multiple articles on Wikipedia.
She brought Saint Birgitta’s holy visions and Richard D. James’s
unnerving lucid dream-inspired music on the album d rucQks into daily conversation. Soon after, I was pretending to listen as
Tara read from her dream journal on a regular basis. Not long
before the flight East, she awoke with a start and regaled me with
a dream in which she was able to fly over the End and shrink
herself down to the size of a molecule in an anthill before
transforming herself into the living pain of my blackened lungs and
into her sister Chloe’s sniffling, wounded soul, lost among the
ghosts of a million waiters and cashiers.
    She never had much luck with it in Suzhou,
though. In fact, with the exception of the recent nightmares
involving her mother, Tara could never recall a single emission
from the night before while we were living there. I told her it was
because in Communist China, dreams have you while they are
sleeping, but I knew the plain and simple truth: my girlfriend has
always dreamed in American, whether she admits it or not, and no
amount of her Internet research or soap box lamentations will ever
change that.
    Tara suddenly tosses from one side to the
other and moans fitfully. She takes in two large gasps and clenches
her eyes shut even tighter.
    “He’s a writer, Layne. Mr. Scott isn’t a
courier…He’s a writer.”
    “And what is it that he’s writing, Tara?” I
ask, not laughing anymore.
    “He’s—he’s writing out our deaths,” she
whimpers. “He’s killing us all. Layne—he’s killing us all! ”
    I quickly stub my cigarette out in the
ashtray and grab Tara gently by the shoulders. I shake her, but she
keeps moaning and tossing her head from side to side, as if
refusing to wake from her nightmare. I shake her even harder, and
her eyes flutter open and she goes limp in my arms and I let go of
my girlfriend and stand back, waiting for it to end.
     

06:57:00 PM
     
    I hide everything but my eyes and forehead
underneath the covers in bed, watching Tara as she smokes marijuana
from a small pipe while getting ready for dinner. Outside,
everything is a shade of blue. The world is bathed in whispering
azure shadows and nebulous cobalt moonlight, the early winter
evening engulfing Lilly’s End. I keep glancing down at the darkness
below my waist and wiggle my toes to make sure they are there.
Tara’s pot smoke tiptoes toward me and I cough at it and think
about the nightmare she was having earlier.
    He was writing out our deaths.
    “Your cough is cute,” my girlfriend says.
    “So is your ass,” I say, slipping completely
under the covers.
    “I love you, Sunshine. You do indeed make me
happy when skies are gray.”
    “Yeah, well, you’ll never know, dear, how
much I love you,” I sing-whisper, suddenly sliding the sheets down
and exposing my bristly face and sagging eyes to the soft light of
the bedroom.
    I smile at Tara, who is wearing black pants
this evening and a blood-red sweater. She pouts her lips at the
mirror above the armoire and inspects her mascara. She sprays
perfume and slips on those stupid little earrings I hate.
    “Please don’t take my Sunshine away,” she
mouths silently, but I catch it in the reflection and am
inexplicably moved. I blow her a kiss. She snatches it and pretends
to eat it, giggling.
    “I’m nervous about dinner with my mother,” I
say finally.
    “Because of your father?”
    “Yeah. I’m not really sure how she’s taking
it. We didn’t talk long on the phone when she told me about it. She
didn’t seem too shaken up, but then again