Anamnesis (Short Story)

“I had the dream again. It’s not a recurring dream exactly; I mean it changes a little bit every time. But mostly it stays and always ends the same. You know the dream where I know I’m dreaming but I don’t wake up? The one I sometimes can control?” Jacob said as he flopped down beside Chris on their aggressively fading, puke green couch. The color was awful and the pattern was even worse. It reminded Jacob of the kind of tapestry wallpaper from the seventies he used to see on the walls of his grandmother's house. She had been long dead now for seven years now, but the memory of that tacky house lived on. It was probably the real reason he convinced Chris to let him buy the blasted thing when they went furniture shopping at the thrift shop. You can always find the best quality in "tacky" down at the local Fifty Nifty Thrifty’s. Chris didn’t look up to his roommate at all. His focus was entirely upon the video game he was currently trying to defeat.
“I know the dream,” he said.
Jacob tried to settle himself more comfortably on the couch. He lifted his legs up under him and leaned his torso heavily upon its big cushy armrests. “I hate it and love it at the same time.” Uncomfortable with that position, he stretched his legs out into the side of Chris’ torso urging him to move over.
Complying in a nonplussed way he scooted and said, “Ugh-huh—”
“You were there.”
“Really…” said Chris as eyes darted to Jacob fleetingly in surprise, then back to his game, where Renkyu was currently severing the head of some zombie.
“Yeah, this time it was homecoming,” Jacob added quickly, knowing he had sparked some interest in his friend.
“Was I wearing the big sombrero?” asked Chris.
“Of course,” said Jacob smiling. Chris looked up again from the television and returned the smile with interest.
“You have too much to drink last night, or something?” he asked as he began to hammer away furiously at the controller in his hands. His tongue crept halfway out the side of his mouth. His brows narrowed in a v-shape.
“Not really. The dream doesn’t always occur after I drink too much,” said Jacob, whose smile had disappeared. “Last night I was just sitting in my room doing homework. I think you were at that chicks—”
“Michelle…” Chris blurted out.
“Yeah. You were at her house,” Jacob said nodding. “Anyway, I was just at my desk studying when I guess I just simply shut my eyes. It was only for the tiniest second, but it was enough because the next thing I remember was waking into my dream.”

I don’t know how long I was in darkness, but as soon as I gained consciousness of my nothingness I began to hear music. There was faint music coming from a far away source. Then it began to come in clearly, as if someone was turning an invisible knob up ever so slowly. Other background noises started to come into focus too now. I could have sworn I heard girls giggling. Then a voice from somewhere in front of me shouted.
“Hey Jacob, whatchu doin’ out here? The girls are inside, dude.”
“I opened my eyes and I was back in my old high school. I looked down, and to my astonishment, I was wearing a dark green sports jacket, a lighter green tie, and kaki pants. I couldn’t believe it. I wore this when I went to… “Homecoming!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah… Homecoming is right. Boy, you’re a quick one. Now let’s get you back inside before your girl runs off with another loser. Mixing up you losers ain’t that hard to do.”
“Chris!” I shouted in exuberance. I ran up and put my arm right on his shoulder. Of course, he immediately pushed it off. Chris was wearing a green and faded orange, plaid sports jacket, white t-shirt with a Mr. T Experience logo on it, a green clip on bow-tie, faded blue jeans, Chucks, and to top it off a big sombrero. He never could help to dress formally for these occasions. “Where’d ya get the hat?”
“Oh… this little number? Funny story, but me and my date ended up stealing them from the Mexican restaurant as the band took a break. We dashed out with the hats, and skipped on the bill.”
That was Chris alright; always ready to impress the ladies with his remarkable skill of skirting trouble. I put my arm around his shoulder again, and again he threw it off.
“Ger-ooff me you big oaf. You okay? Had a little too much to drink there buddy? I knew you were gay, but I have to say that you just aren’t my type. What’s a matter with you anyway? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Maybe I have.’ I said and flashed a big grin.”
“Okay, okay, whatever. You can back away from me now. Do it or I’ll kick you in the nuts…” he said and smiled a toothy grin.
“Well, I wouldn’t want that tonight—”
“No you wouldn’t. Now let’s get back inside,” Chris said as he held the door open for me. We walked along the hallway of short alternating green and yellow lockers on our way to the gymnasium. The D.J. was playing some pop number, so he started to dance ridiculously, arms waving in the air like some wild crazy guy beside me. I was walking calmly to his side as we entered the school gymnasium, laughing heartily, when a soft voice interrupted from behind us.
“Hello stranger,” a velvety voice said. I whipped around so quickly, that I thought I was going to lose my balance. She giggled. I looked her up and down. God, I forget every time how beautiful she is. She was wearing her dark lavender hair up tonight, but she left a couple long bangs flow down to rest teasingly upon her right cheek. She was quite tall for a girl her age; this was probably due to her long and very slender legs. Those legs were being shown in full glory tonight in her simple, but short, ashen colored evening dress. The color of her dress completely accented her dark creamy skin. It was a revealing dress, to say the least, as it only seemed to be hanging on by a few threads and it snuggly fit her proportionate body. I realized that my jaw had swung open, and I hadn’t said anything at all. Reaching up her hand to my jaw, she shut my mouth for me and whispered in my ear, “So you don’t catch any flies…”
I nodded dumbly and blushed severely. I began to fumble with my hands which were beginning to sweat profusely. I tried to put them in my pocket, and then around my back, finally I rested them uncomfortably by my side. Why was it when she was around that I could never find a thing to do with my hands? In truth, I just wanted those hands to take a hold of her and never let her go again. Like she was sensing my awkwardness, she took her left hand in mine and stared into my eyes with her deep green ones. The uneasiness that had seized my body with tension melted away. She could hypnotize me with those eyes. I gave her hand a squeeze and finally said something that resembled the phrases, I missed you and you look great, at the same time, so when I said it, it came out all garbled. I blushed again and tried once more but all I could manage was, “Jen, you look wonderful…”
“Thank you, so do you handsome. I’m glad you invited me.”
“I am only glad that you finally got here,” I responded.
This time it was her turn to blush. There is nothing cuter than when Jen blushed. My snide comment left me feeling ashamed, but also a little self-satisfied. Her full name was Jennifer Anna Maria Martinez, and she had not gone to this homecoming dance of my memory with me, or any others. She in fact had moved away from Wilmington at the end of our sophomore year in high school. It was not her fault she had to move. Her mom had been stricken with a lung illness earlier that year, and when Jen’s dad got a job offer in Phoenix later that year, he jumped at the offer, because it was more of an arid environment.
We had been together for little over a year, but I was completely destroyed when Jen had told me the news. After she left, we tried to communicate as often as we could for the first few months, and when October rolled around that year, I asked her if she could come for a visit, and invited her to go to homecoming with me. She had to regretfully decline because her dad couldn’t afford the ticket. He took a huge pay cut by moving out there. Plus, her mother also needed to be attended to. She promised to eventually come out after her family situation leveled out, but she never did fulfill that promise.
Eventually the phone calls and letters became less frequent, until one day they stopped coming from her end at all. She had moved on with her new life, and that was the thing that had hurt me most of all. Last I heard she was still out west and going to Berkley for pre-med or something. This information was given to me by one of her high school friends I ran into a couple months ago.
I became aware that I had been staring at her for a very long time. Self-conscious, I looked around the room and all the people in their Sunday’s Best were frozen. Actually, from the moment she spoke, it seemed like everything and everyone in the room had stopped moving and breathing. My focus had been elsewhere, too busy to notice. I looked back at her. She had followed my gaze around the room. When our eyes met, she smiled and shrugged. To me the shrug simply meant it’s your dream not mine buddy. I looked over to the frozen Christopher and his date. She was also wearing a matching sombrero. Jennifer reached into her small purse at her side and pulled out a black tube. Noticing my puzzlement she held it up to me.
“It’s an eyelash comb,” she said. Then she pulled out the little brush and walked over to Chris and his date. Smiling, she brushed two thin, black lines on the upper lips of Chris and his date. “Perfect,” she said stepping back to eye her work.
“I thought they were missing something.” I said and returned her smile. She leaned up (which is not that far for her) and gave me a peck on the cheek. My doubts faded away, and I grabbed her into my arms and hugged her heartily.
“God, I missed you.”
“Diddo,” she said still smiling. “I’d like to believe that was true.”
“Couldn’t you?”
“Well, not exactly—urgh—well seeing as this is all in my head, I hardly think that I can.”
She pulled back out of the embrace and pouted her lips up at me.
“Well, how about you pretend for at least one dance.” It wasn’t a request. I knew she was going to force me to dance. Jennifer grabbed my hand and led me onto the dance floor. “If we had an ‘our song’ what do you suppose it would be?” She asked me. I just shrugged my shoulders.
I racked my brain, a song… love song… did I know any? Heartbreak Hotel started playing on the speakers. Jen pulled back and hit me squarely on the shoulder. When she did this the song cut out after my baby left me… like the needle had been shoved off the record.
“What? You don’t like Elvis?” I said grinning with my eyes.
“Ha, ha, ha,” she said dryly. “How bout you pick something we will both enjoy.”
She flashed a warningly seductive smile and I closed my eyes. I shut my eyes, and then I took her left hand and placed it in my right. Her right went automatically to the small of my back. Instead of music flowing from out of the speaker, a big band orchestra appeared on stage and started playing an intro to You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To, by Frank Sinatra. Then Ole Blue Eyes appeared out of nowhere on stage in front of the band. Jen gasped with surprise and we started dancing. The lights of the gymnasium turned off and a spotlight popped out of nowhere upon the two of us. We both laughed as we danced in circles. She put her head on my shoulder and I felt like I was king of the world. The sultan of the subconscious, even if it was all make believe within my head. She pulled apart from me.
“If this is you pretending—you’re doing splendidly.”
We embraced again and she pulled me in for a kiss. Her lips pressed softly to mine. It was subtle but very powerful. My knees went a little weak, and I wasn’t sure, but I thought hers did too. The song ended and the band began to continue to play on. Frank began to sing Come Dance with Me, and I asked Jen if she wanted to go for another try. She smiled and we danced among the frozen statues that were our classmates.
When the song ended, she took my hand and we made our way out to the courtyard. We walked through the gymnasium doors and out into the cool evening air. Jennifer shivered a little and I took off my jacket and draped it around her shoulders. We began to talk casually about what had been going on in my life up till then.
“So what have you been doing with yourself these days?” She asked.
“Oh, nothing much really. I mean, I am going to school still—” I started to say something else but she yanked my hand and halted me to a stop. Her brow was arched and I could tell she was either excited or in severe pain. I hoped it was the former.
“Oh good—Really? Where? What’s your major? How are your classes?” she fired out at me.
“Yes, UNC Wilmington, undecided, and tedious at best—wait—are you surprised that I am?”
“No, God no, nothing like that,” she cautiously said before changing the subject. “No major? Well, have you found anything you liked yet?”
“I kinda like the marine biology program they got there, but right now I am just taking the general stuff. Though I might take a few biology classes in the fall—” I lied trying to make myself sound a little more interesting. I don’t know why I did it.
“I think you should do something in psychology,” she said giving me a devilish grin.
“I’m afraid to ask—why?” And I was. I was scared because she was always able to see through me when I lied before. Now I wasn’t sure what was going to come next.
“Cause you’re mental…” she said. I groaned and she giggled gleefully as if she had said the funniest thing ever. God she had a quirky sense of humor. And boy was I a sucker for it.
We continued to walk along the back courtyard outside of the gymnasium. We talked about other things I had been up to. She asked me all sorts of trivial questions like where I was living. I told her that I was bunked up with Chris in an apartment near my school. Then she asked me about all the girls who had replaced her, I told her the answer was “tons.” I told her that girls were hounding me day and night. She called me a liar and gave me a sad smile and we continued to walk slowly in silence drinking in the atmosphere.
I stopped abruptly and Jennifer walked on unknowingly. I looked up to the stars and moon which were high up above in the sky. I waved the moon toward me and it started to creep closer until it was very big and bright. Noticing the change in lighting, Jen turned around to catch me waving to the stars ridiculously. I was actually unscrewing a variety of them and putting in even brighter ones. It was all for the mood I told myself. My eye caught Jen looking at me like I was the silliest thing on earth.
“Look my dear; I have brought you the moon and stars…” I said in the most regal way I could. I was going for my best Carey Grant but only ended up sounding like Jimmy Durante instead. She giggled and began to nod, slightly impressed. “Ah, this is exactly how I imagined this night would be. Funny, this is better because it feels like I am actually here.”
Her smile began to wane and she took a seat on the nearest bench. She crossed her legs and turned her head upward to the sky I had been adjusting moments before. “It’s all very beautiful,” she said.
I stared at her in the soft moon light. “Yes it is.”
She looked back to me and then back to the sky. “I was talking about the sky. Well, not just that. It’s everything really. It’s all just—”
“Beautiful,” I interrupted.
“Oh Jacob—that’s not necessary. Now come here and sit down.” She patted the spot right next to her on the bench.
“No, no, I don’t think I will just yet. I need to get something out or it might haunt me for the rest of my life. Since I won’t get to ever see the real you again, I guess this will have to do. I loved you, you know… love you…” She nodded. “And I kind of still miss you now and then. But who wouldn’t? I mean you were the perfect girl. I guess what I am trying to say is that I wonder about what if.”
“What if?” she asked.
“I guess what I’m trying to say—I have come to the realization over the past few years that our relationship never worked its natural way out. Perhaps we would be still together if you had stayed—”
“But the chances of that are slim to none. One or the other of us would tire and it would be over,” she said interrupting me.
Annoyed, I continued on, “But the nagging question of what if has plagued me since you left. I know that it isn’t healthy. But I guess I really never got any closure.”
“Jacob, come sit down,” she said. It was not a request anymore. She had a stern look on her face and I knew it would be in my best interest if I sat. I crossed the yard and sat next to her on the bench. I looked into her dark deep green eyes once again. She smiled a tired smile. Her eyes looked though they had aged many years since I had looked at them last. “So that’s why I am here I suppose, for closure?”
“I guess so.” I said.
“Well, what do you want me to say? That I am sorry or that it’s over between us?” She sounded a little affronted. She tilted her head and one of her bangs fell in front of her eyes. She tried to blow it back out of her way with a huff from her pouting lips. But all the strand did was flutter a little bit. Angrily she used her hand to brush it out of her face. “You’re upset because of a what if. You cannot change the past you know. I left. There is nothing in the world that is going to change that now. You’re what if questions do not really matter. It’s the what’s going to happen that you should really worry about. Don’t you think?”
“I dunno…” I sighed.
“Neither do I.”
“No, I suppose not.” I looked down to my lap and she reached over and took my hand.
“I guess this is going to have to be good enough.”
“What us talking like this?” I asked.
“Yeah…”
Uncomfortable, I stood up and quickly tried to change the subject. “Well, we better go in. We don’t want Mr. Brantlinner to catch us out here do we?” I asked her.
She laughed and replied, “Well, I don’t think Mr. David frozen Brantlinner, will care what we do out here.” She eyed me seductively and with her finger told me to come here. Instead of sitting back down I grabbed her hand and pulled her back up to me. I swung her around and dipped her upon my knee, then swung her out into a pirouette. As she spun out, I took her arm in mine and we headed back to the gymnasium.
“I think we should go check on Señor Christobol, you never know what kind of trouble he’s causing right now,” I said.
“But, he’s frozen isn’t he?”
“Wouldn’t put trouble past him, even in that condition…” I said and we both laughed.
We made our way arm in arm back to the two sombrero wearing effigies. Jen leaned over and gave me another one of those long soft kisses and everyone in the gymnasium began to unfreeze. Well, that’s not quite right, they all began to melt. The whole scene did. It was like someone had taken a big bucket of thinner and threw it upon a painting. Blues, greens, tans, reds, amongst other colors began to run down in streaks and globs before me. Oh not again, I thought.
Desperately, I started to grab the melting blobs of scene and tried to put them back into place. But the blobs ran through my fingers easier than water does through a sieve. The walls of the gymnasium began to peel away like someone was using a colossal invisible cheese shredder to grate them. The rolled peels began to melt as soon as they reached the floor. I ran over and fruitlessly tried to roll them back onto the wall. But I couldn’t roll them up fast enough. For every shoddy wall I replaced, three more curled, and melded into the floor, which now looked like some kind of swirling psychedelic collage of colors from the sixties or something.
I quickly looked back at Jennifer. Relieved that she was still there, I called for her to help me. But she just stood there looking at me with great big sorrowful eyes. And then I knew that my effort was futile. There was just too much chaos happening for me to rectify it all. Then as if on cue, she began to meld into the swirling background before me. I clasped my hands over my eyes. I couldn’t bear to watch. When I finally took my hands away from my eyes again, the scene had completely dissolved away to a new one. One I knew oh so well.
The sun was setting on the horizon. A twilight purple haze began to thaw into the blue sky above and the moon had barely become opaque. I could hear the crashing waves of the Atlantic somewhere in the distance before me. I whipped to my left and saw her. She was right where I knew she would be. This was where she always ended up. Though it grieved me to see her, it was hard not to be elated too. She was beautiful. The wind swept a strand of her lilac colored hair into her perfectly tanned face. A couple strands stuck to the bottom of her lip. I reached up and swept it away from her high structured cheeks. Her emerald eyes were staring longingly into mine. Goosebumps began to pop up everywhere as she leaned in. I pulled back, hesitantly and her eyes began to tear up. I couldn’t bear to look at her anymore. My eyes fell solemnly to the sandy ground below.
“Maybe I should just go…”
When I did not respond, she quietly glanced around longingly at her car and shuffled the keys in her hands impatiently. I couldn’t find a single thing to say. Why, I asked myself. Why does she have to go? It wasn’t fair. For the entire world I wished I could make her stay. Force her to see why it was so wrong to let her leave right now, or ever again. She just couldn’t leave me again. Silently I asked God to somehow intervene, but I knew the attempt was useless. It always is.
Jennifer placed her one of her soft hands on my shoulder and still I could not think of anything to do. It wasn’t until the hand began to slip that connections fired within. I had to say something, do something, anything at all. I had to make a lasting impression. I tried to open my mouth, but I couldn’t. I reached up to pry it loose, but my lips had vanished and all I could feel was a foreign scab of skin where they once were. It was like they had been burned off in some freak accident from long ago.
She began to walk away. I wanted to grab her and give her one last parting passionate kiss (as disgusting as the thought would be, with missing lips, but I did not care). I needed to do something, but I could not. All I could do was watch her walk away. I tried to run and catch her, but when I looked down to my feet, they were being held captive by nearby dune grass strangling my shoes.
“Goodbye Jacob.” She finally said. It sounded more like a sigh, than a real goodbye.
Then the night swallowed up my angel. Literally, every one of her particles dissipated into the cooling night air. And I could still say nothing. I would never be able to get that moment back. Ashamed, and finally restored to normal, I turned around into the purpling horizon and walked toward it, staring up into the sky. I walked over a sandy bluff crawling with browning sea grass. The moon was clearly visible now over the Atlantic.
For awhile I walked up the coast. My head hung low as the cooling water played upon my feet. I looked up to the moon again which had arched higher into the sky since the last time I peered at it. It looked as pale and lonely as I felt, and this thought eased me. I chuckled aloud to the moon, ‘Aren’t we two lovely peas in a pod?’
But as if the moon had suddenly disagreed, its glow began to increase ever so slowly. Fascinated, I just stared up into that moon which began to grow hot, and soon it became brighter than any sun, blinding me to all the colors the sky once beheld and the beach that sat below. The sky was now blacker than soul of Hades himself. It was just me and that burning bright orb locked intently in an old fashioned staring contest. And I wasn’t about to lose to some figment of my imagination.

“But I did lose, and that’s when I realized that I was awake, with my desk lamp staring brightly back at me. My face was glued from dried drool to page of my Psych 211 textbook I had been studying.”
Jacob sat up in the couch and punched his friend in the shoulder. “Were you even listening?” he asked. He knew he had hit Chris harder than he meant to because his hand was swelling just a bit.
“Ow! God damn it, no! I stopped listening to you years ago,” Chris said, rubbing his arm as he smiled.
“No?!”
“It was interesting,” replied Chris.
“What was?” asked Jacob. Chris finally pressed pause on his remote, and looked over to his friend.
“Well, it’s just that you say you can control the dream, and yet every time you can’t ever stop her from leaving, or how ‘bout the fact that the dream always, always ends the same way. It’s just interesting,” he said.
“Is that supposed to mean that deep down I wanted her to leave or something?” asked Jacob.
“You said it not me. I’m just saying that every time you tell it, or dream it, she always ends up leaving, and that’s interesting.”
“Is that all you’re going to say that it was interesting?”
“What else do you want me to say, Jacob? ‘Hey that’s too bad man, but wow! What a crazy dream?’ or how ‘bout something more sinister like, ‘Give it up man, ‘cause she’s long gone…”
Facing away from his friend with sullen eyes, Jacob responded in the saddest voice he could muster, “How about some sympathy?”
“What? Okay, the first time I heard the dream, yes, I felt sorry for you. The second time, hey there was a tear in my heart for you pal. But come on it’s been two years, and this is the ninth variation of the dream you told me. I don’t know why I even listen anymore. It’s getting old man—wait, scratch that—It got old a long time ago. I only listen ‘cause I am your friend, and I got nothing better to do. But as your friend, let me tell you this, again, get over it. Find a new girl and start dreaming about her for a change, ‘cause frankly son, these dreams have started to really bore me.”
“It’s the tenth variation, and that didn’t sound like sympathy,” said Jacob. His mouth was scowling but his eyes were full of laughter. He suddenly realized how very thirsty he was after such a long anecdote. He got up and marched surly into the kitchen.
“Man, you’re pathetic,” said Chris in an indiscriminate manor. He returned to his game and started hammering away at the controls again.
“You know you’re a jack-ass, right?” said Jacob as he reached into the fridge for some orange juice. His voice sounded hollow from within the fridge.
“You know you’re a whiny little shit, right?”
Jacob poured himself a tall glass of juice, drank it down, and then started to pour himself another. One good turn and all that, he thought. “Maybe——anyway—whatever happened to that little number with the sombrero?” asked Jacob, as he tried to shift the conversation to a more pleasant one. “What was her name again?”
“Oh—er—what’s-ser-face?” Chris had paused his game again, and he started to scratch his head. “For the life of me, I can’t remember her name. I think we dated for a week or two, then we sort of just drifted apart. I can’t remember who stopped calling who, but it really doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” gasped Jacob as he almost dropped the glass out of his hand.
“No, not really.”
“She stopped calling you, didn’t she?” said Jacob, as he scrounged around in the bread box for a bagel.
“I don’t remember.”
“I’d remember,” said Jacob as he pulled out a plain wheat bagel from the box. Jacob sniffed at the bagel before taking a bite. It was a little hard and stale.
“I’m sure you would make sure of it,” replied Chris.
Chewing and talking with his mouth open, Jacob snuffed out, “What’s that supposed to mean?” and little crusted crumbs flew everywhere on the carpet around them.
“Oy! I just vacuumed yesterday. Watch it!” Chris said.
“Okay—sheesh, sorry. You’re skirting the issue,” said Jacob, now covering his mouth with his left hand and pointing to his friend with his right.
“I meant nothing by it, absolutely nothing…”
“Whatever,” Jacob said as he sat angrily upon the couch, making the couch whine in contempt. They sat silently for awhile, Chris in his futile attempt to defeat the last boss and Jacob watching him waste his many lives away.
“Urgh—hey! You’re coming to the party tonight, right?” asked Chris hopefully. “It starts around eight. But I don’t think I’ll get going till about nine or so.”
“Oh—that’s tonight?” said Jacob as he looked emotionlessly out the window in the nearby corner.
“You know that sorority chick Lindsay’s goin’ to be there. I think she really likes you. You can use that ‘I-felt-her-thigh’ pick up line from the Family Guy. Sorority chicks like that, especially when they’re drunk, always go for shit like that.”
“Um—Sorry, but I forgot—I got to study tonight. I have an exam tomorrow,” said Jacob as he stood up, meaning to go take a shower or find something else to do.
Chris eyed him suspiciously. “What are you doing right now?” he asked Jacob as he started to leave the room.
Pausing and looking back, Jacob hopefully said, “Nothing, why? Wanna go get a beer at Sparky’s or something? I know it’s only two in the afternoon, but at least it’s after noon, right?”
“I’ll say it again—” Chris said, shaking his head.
“What?”
“Man, you’re pathetic.”