The Long Wait for Tomorrow by Joaquin Dorfman Read Free Book Online

manner. “What I mean, Patrick, is what you yourself said. Coffee keeps you awake. That being the case, when we dream, and dream of drinking coffee, what then? I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve dreamed. The shit they’ve got me on, side effects won’t even let me dream, I still don’t know how all this is happening but …”
    Something caught his eye, and he turned to the row of windows behind him.
    Patrick followed his gaze, tried to. Caught sight of a robin hopping around on the table outside. Chest an orange-rusty color, it cocked its head a few times with a 570 heartbeats-per-minute enthusiasm, let out a chirp.
    Kelly raised his hand to the window. Caressed the spotless surface, as though patting the robin itself through some untold agreement with space and perspective.
    Patrick leaned to his right, tried to catch Kelly’s expression in the window’s reflection.
    Daylight. Too bright.
    Though Kelly must have sensed it, and he turned back to Patrick with a sad smile.
    At least, Patrick thought it was a sad smile. Seeing it on Kelly’s face made him wonder. It was very much like trying to pick a professional acquaintance—the guy at Blockbuster, Waffle House, BP station—out of a lineup. Without the right environment, some people were simply unrecognizable. Members of the workaday world just walked on past each other on the streets, in parking lots and stores that weren’t their own.
    All like Kelly’s displaced smile, suddenly gone as he continued to lecture. “Point is, to the best of my recollection, dreams elicit emotions. Right? You run into a monster, you’re scared. Fall off a cliff, your stomach does a jig and the breath gets sucked right out of you. Kiss a girl, your heartbeat quickens. Hell … screw some pretty lady in your dreams, you
wake up
with a mess in your pants.”
    Patrick gave an awkward half nod.
    “I don’t mean you, Patrick,” Kelly assured him, shadow of a smirk lost somewhere behind unrecognizable green eyes. “I mean everyone else.” He leaped down from the counter and pointed in several directions at once. “Mugs?”
    Without thinking, Patrick pointed to a cupboard in the far left corner.
    Kelly jogged over, took down a coffee mug, and trotted back to the coffeemaker. “At any rate, if dreams have that kind of influence on our bodies, both sleeping and waking … well, then.” Kelly dislodged the coffeepot and poured himself a cup. He turned to Patrick and held the mug under his own nose, eyes closed. Two deep inhalations, and his lids fluttered open; content and lazy, almost lecherous. “If we grant the premise, Patrick … what happens when we drink coffee in our dreams? Does our body treat it like a wet dream and act accordingly? Do we wake up? Or, being in a state of consciousness
within
the dream, does the caffeine affect
that
reality? Does all that roasted goodness, in fact, get further and further from waking us up, while sending us deeper and deeper into our dream?”
    Kelly shrugged, took a deep breath. “Only one way to find out.”
    He raised the mug to his lips and took two large, scalding swallows. His eyes closed once again, cheeks imploding against his face, as though trying to suck out any rogue drops that had escaped his tongue. Eyes opened, rolled back momentarily in an eerie kind of ecstasy before righting themselves, lids wide, pupils dilated.
    “Damn on a hot tin roof, that’s good shit!” Kelly exclaimed, words peppered with pleasure-domed vowel sounds. “Oh! Damn, that is so—
Hell, yes!
Patrick, you’ve got to try some ofthis, amigo. It’s like there’s a party in my mouth and everyone tastes like the best damn coffee I’ve ever had!”
    Patrick found the mug shoved under his nose, and his brain became one with his reflexes.
    “No!” he cried out, swiping the coffee out of Kelly’s hand, watching it fly across the kitchen.
    Both of them watching it fly across the kitchen, through the doorway leading to the dining room. Soaring over