Welcome back to The Listening Room for the next installment of “Hypnotic”. David made a swift escape after his last test run but finds himself in another prison.

In chapter eight, his plans are set into motion.

8.

Friday came and it was time to set plans in motion. David got dressed in dark gray chinos, a gray button down shirt and black sneakers. He put on a light weight black sweater and zipped it up half way. He smoothed a steady hand over the front. He grabbed a tote bag from his closet which was a gift from Molly. A black bird was stamped against a white circle. He would turn it on the blank side later.

He hadn’t shaved in weeks and the coils of his beard poked out from the sides of his face. His hair had also grown in thick on his head. He picked at his tapered Afro with his fingers and tucked the coils in. It would all be shaved off soon.

Before shutting the door, he looked once more at the room that had been his cocoon day and night during his recovery. He had the familiar sense of leaving a cloister just like this behind but knew he wouldn’t be able to place it. The fog was still heavy. There had been fitful nights and restless days spiraling between a sort of fugue state and stone cold reality. It was the withdrawal, they assured him. He was coming off hard drugs and needed time to kick remnants of physical addiction but most importantly, the psychological addiction.

There was one problem, however: David couldn’t remember doing what Molly said he did. He was never on drugs or even been inclined to try them. He didn’t even smoke weed because it made him paranoid. After his last stint as a truck driver, a confusing spattering of memories followed that seemed mixes of fantasy and truth. He was hesitant to say aloud exactly where he’d been.

“Hell of a bender,” he’d say, feigning remembrance of a time that didn’t exist. He came to shaking in that very bed with a man in a suit jacket holding a syringe. He read a “Chambers” name badge on the lapel, but never saw the man’s face. Dr. Chambers had been directing his treatment from afar, always missing David by a hair. He talked mainly to Molly and another social worker, Peter.

One night, in the midst of a vivid dream, David saw himself murder an important man in New York City. It was an exercise in espionage and after he stood over the man’s lifeless body on a carpeted office floor, David disappeared. He pieced together the rest of the plan while he was awake, hunched over books at the library downtown as a cover. The walls had eyes in New Directions. He went back into the same dream over and over until he got a name and location. He became fixated on the idea, especially when Molly suggested that his transfer was a long way off. It infuriated him, made heat rise from his belly and into his chest. He felt it every time he heard Molly’s voice with its tone of confidence and finality. He felt it at the dinner table with a strangely familiar group of people who were somehow odd and frightening.

He needed to get out and used fragments of his memory as inspiration.

David snuck downstairs, stepping gingerly over the creaking steps and boards along the way. They were a simple repair in the large, Victorian-style house, but proved a no-cost security measure.

Gerald, his first link, met him at the bottom of the stairs. David passed by silently and gave him a nod. Gerald would say that David had been in his room all morning. In exchange, David hooked him up with a job after his release from the program. It was no small feat considering Gerald’s past and the continuing fight for parental rights of his son. For his part, Gerald didn’t ask why David was going out that morning.

Gerald was not just smooth, but a good talker. David thought he’d be a good fit for sales. A company employing ex cons was happy to place him with a small chemical company. Gerald would have a chance at least.

The front door closed to a sleepy house awash with silence. In the kitchen, Peter was gathering cereals and fruit for breakfast when a small pineapple toy dropped out of one of the bowls. He looked at it and chuckled, disbelieving. What a strange little toy in an adult center. Maybe a child had left it there at some point but he couldn’t be sure.

The figure was a smiling pineapple with little white limbs and gloved hands. There was a winding lever on one side. He wound up the toy and placed in on the counter. It walked jerkily against the Formica and Peter leaned in to watch it. Then a smell hit him.

Gerald came in just to see Peter leaning up mechanically like a wind up toy. He looked questioningly into Peter’s blank face, then to the boxes of cereal on the island.

Peter turned, crossed the kitchen to the back door, and left without a word.

David’s next link in the chain was Kareema, who would meet him at the bus stop and hand him an unregistered pistol she borrowed from a friend. Kareema overheard bits of conversation with Paula one evening, brashly offering to help. She never forgot that David was the only person to check an abusive trucker who’d threatened her. After David gripped the man’s throat and whispered what Kareema hoped were the man’s greatest fears, the abuser quit at Carlsbad Logistics. The same man ended up a suspect in a series of roadside murders along his delivery routes. She could have been next but David didn’t turn a blind eye. He actually stood up and she felt indebted for that.

They stood close in the brisk morning and Kareema passed a brown paper bag into his tote.

“You even know how to use this?” She asked with a side eye.

“Can’t miss shooting point blank,” he said. David was a mask of nonchalance, but inside, he trembled.

She scoffed. “You are dumb as hell. Good luck with this little plan. Paula meetin’ you after?”

“She’ll be at the house when I get back,” he said

Kareema turned to look down the street. No bus just yet.

“There’s easier ways. Like patience,” she said.

He shot her his own sideways glance. “You say that as you hand me a piece.”

“I’m just saying. This is a one-way street. You go one direction and don’t come back,” she said

He turned to face her. The familiar bright smile she was know for was now shrouded in concern. Kareema crossed her arms against the chill.

“I need to figure out what happened to me and I can’t do that here or anywhere near these people.” He looked in the direction of the house.

“I understand. But what if you get caught?” she asked.

“At this point, I feel dead anyway. And there will be no love lost for the senator. He’s a coward anyway,” he said.

“A coward who deserves to die?” She asked.

“You’re a part of this, Kareema, an accessory. Don’t get high and mighty on me now,” he warned. His jaw clenched.

“Planning and really doing something are the same things, I guess. Just wonder how this helps the rest of us,” she said.

“I won’t forget about you. Chambers been holding your release up for almost a year, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” she said quietly.

“Once I’m out, I’m coming back for you. I swear it,” he said.

Kareema swiped a tear away with her fingers and cleared her throat. She had people and a life to get back to. She embodied her advice, doing what she was asked and remaining patient, but she was being used. Long term, well adjusted residents made the program look successful. While the others also helped the center’s image, she had been there the longest.

The bus came bobbing down the street and they felt the rush of the air breaks when it stopped in front of them. They boarded and sat on opposite sides of the near empty bus.

The announcer heralded the next train pulling into the station. David boarded a rapidly emptying train and counted the four stops to his destination. He’d get off north of the senator’s office, then switch trains to go in another direction. He was going opposite the midtown rush which made it a bit easier for him to be identified. That was good. He wanted to be seen or for people to think they’d seen him heading into another borough. No one could escape surveillance, so you might as well show up somewhere.

One day his movements might be scrutinized and making a B line for the senator was not a good move. Once he’d pinballed around the city, he’d get off a few blocks from the office building. Once done, he would leave at the nearest subway opening to go back uptown, then take a different route home.

At the next stop, Peter, stepped into the car. David stiffened and tried not to panic. Of all the people to see today, a program counselor or more accurately, a narc was feet away from him. Before David could rise from his seat and slip to the other end of the car, Peter unzipped his hoodie to reveal a bright yellow square. David slipped back down into his seat and his body went slack. His head leaned to one side and he fell fast asleep.

Peter stood up and walked over. His eyes were focused, yet far away. He loomed over David, watching his head bob lazily to one side. Peter leaned over and whispered into David’s ear.

The rocking of the train coaxed him awake right before the next stop. He sat up straight and apologized to the woman he’d been leaning against. She scowled and clutched her shopping bag tighter. He gripped the rail next to him and hoisted himself up, still swaying from the train’s motion. Despite the sleepy fog, he wasn’t tired, but quietly energized.

Instead of his crisscross plan, David diverted from the path to the office building, traveling further downtown now, to a short street that was the closest thing to an alley he could get in the city. A man was waiting, leaned against a brick facade in a black bomber jacket. When he saw the tote pressed against David’s side, the black bird in full view, he approached.

He motioned for David to remove his bag and David handed it over. The man rested the bag between his feet and removed his jacket, while David removed his sweater. They swapped without a word between them and David patted the chest of the bomber jacket to feel a long barrel underneath.

The two stood face to face. Their scruffy beards, brown skin, and coils in need of a shape up were near mirror images. Any witness would do a double take. The man nodded and walked away to continue David’s circuitous route.

Senator Langston Filmore ambled into his office with a briefcase in hand. He greeted his assistant warmly as he unlocked his office door. He set down his briefcase next to his ornate wooden desk, which was framed by large windows overlooking a bustling city.

“Senator, you have your first appointment in 15 minutes,” the assistant said as she leaned through into the office doorway.

“Yes, thank you, Gianna. Can you get some coffee brewed?”

“Sir, you could just get a Keurig,” she said with a hint of snark.

“Come now,” he chided playfully. “It’s bad enough I don’t have my French press. I can at least have a dignified cup of coffee in the morning.”

Gianna sighed.

In the reception area, she pulled a hermetically sealed container of coffee beans from a lower cabinet and put three scoops into the coffee grinder. She went about the rest of her tasks automatically, snickering to herself that she’d moved up to a glorified coffee girl.

Vincent slipped into the reception area, his steps muffled by the thick burgundy carpet. He paused, waiting and watching the woman move about her tasks. Gianna was pouring the ground coffee into the filter and just shut the top of the coffeemaker when a sound came from behind her. A low whistle came in a familiar melody. The melody continued and her arms fell to her sides.

“Turn off the security cameras, Gianna,” Vincent said, his voice just above a whisper.

She walked silently back to her desk and clicked her mouse to disable her screensaver. She logged into her account and navigated to the security controls. She had convinced the senator to adopt this one modern thing because he could monitor the office from his phone. She went to the program settings and switched the feed off, opting to not notify connected users. Then she sat at her desk and typed away as the coffee brewed.

“You’re going to forget about what you just did, Gianna. When I count to three, you’ll turn to me and say ‘Good morning,’ then walk me into the senator’s office. Don’t forget the coffee, though.”

She slowly nodded her response.

“One… two…” he said, leering. “Three!”

Gianna turned to him with a bright salutation.

David knew that there was a security camera in the senator’s office only operable from the inside, so the assistant could not disable it. But he also knew that upon entering the office, he would be blocked from that camera by a campaign sign propped against the wall. He would point, shoot, then close the door. Certainties. His chest swelled with anticipation. The mission would soon over.

The senator’s assistant had stepped out on a break just as David entered the reception area. He crept along the carpet with noiseless steps to the office door. If he squeezed the doorknob and turned it slowly, the click of the lock wouldn’t sound. Okay, here goes, he though. But before he could turn the knob, a hand clapped against his wrist. He gaped at the small but firm hand and followed the arm up to a woman with amethyst eyes.

“Mother…”he whispered. “What are you doing here?”

David faltered and eased his hand off the doorknob. She kept hold of his wrist and led him back onto the landing outside the reception area, a heather gray sweater billowing behind her.

“I thought, I thought…” he started.

“The mission is over. We found a much more elegant solution that didn’t involve so much fuss,” she said.

“The Alchemist,” David said, pleased.

Her answer was a slowly spreading smile. He didn’t know what overtook him, but he leaned in and hugged Mother tight. They rocked together for a few moments.

“It’s time to leave,” she said. Mother reached into her pocket and pulled out a train ticket and a wad of cash. She planted it in his hand and closed it. David stuffed it into his jacket’s inside breast pocket. Then she handed him a key on a length of thin black leather.

“The plan remains the same. Make that stop that Carmine told you about. You know the one, “ she said.

It was a storage space in north western Jersey. David would find everything he needed there. He just knew it. Maybe Carmine had survived after all and he’d see him again. Maybe Sam too.

Mother interrupted his thoughts, turning her palm face up and curling her fingers in a “give me” motion. David pulled the gun from his breast pocket.

“You won’t need this. You could get in a lot of trouble if anyone caught you,” she said smiling. She went over to the secretary’s desk and planted the gun in a lower drawer.

“Get what you need, then take that train ticket and leave. Don’t come back here. And don’t answer any wanted ads,” she said grimly.

“Thank you, Mother,” he said. He welled up with gratitude.

She brushed aside his coils and roved her eyes around his face like someone who wanted to commit every feature to memory. They embraced again and he held her tight. Mother broke his hold and her eyes bore into him in a way that calmed him.

She squeezed his forearms. “Now go!”

He kissed her forehead and walked briskly down the stairs. He threw open the door to the building and strolled to the nearest subway opening, looking more purposeful than rushed.

Mother stood for a moment longer in the landing and slowly exhaled. She pulled a small white container out of her pocket and opened it up. She leaned her head over and swiped a finger into each eye, one at a time, plucking out the amethyst contact lenses.

She stared into the reception area to the closed doors of the senator’s office. She was the unseen hand that kept it closed.

Vincent sat with Senator Filmore, tapping his foot against the expensive area rug. The Senator sipped freshly brewed black coffee as he launched into a story about his childhood upstate. The Catskills were not mountains, but had actually been a massive sea that eroded the plateaus into peaks. And so on and so forth, he went, naming charming towns along the Hudson River his family knew well.

Vincent planted his chin in his hand, his eyes glazed over as the senator’s tales continued. He excused himself a moment and peered out the door to find the assistant typing away.

Vincent checked his watch, waiting and waiting in a silent rage.

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Welcome back to The Listening Room for the next installment of “Hypnotic”. David Fuller, a man being housed in a sleep research facility Dr. Vincent Vogel and his assistant Molly Fitzgerald, has just undergone his most extreme dream test run yet.

In chapter seven, something sinister is in the works.

7.

David stretched out his aching limbs on the bed. The artificial light in his room was still low signaling early morning. He pressed his palms against the sides of his head and let out a long, low groan. What a night. Snippets flashed before his closed eyes. The casino, the target, the van, and then… he couldn’t remember. He pressed his eyes shut tight but the memory would not surface.

He heard shoes scuff against the floor outside. The lock slid open with a muffled clang and the door creeped open. David quickly rose to his elbows. He was stunned almost into silence before managing to croak out a question.

“Sam?”

Sam stood in dark green coveralls with dirty blonde hair tucked under a cloth hat. A devious smile spread across his face. David dug the heels of his palms against his eyes and rubbed. Impossible. Again?

“No time for pleasantries, friend. We have got to get out of here. Leave your things. You won’t need them.”

David leapt from his bed and threw a shirt on. He put on a pair of sweatpants and dipped his feet into slip on shoes. He grabbed Sam’s bicep and stood close.

“I’m really glad to see you,” David said. His body was a mess of oddly firing emotions all at once. He was aflutter with excitement and grief which burned deep while his eyebrows turned down at the corners with concern and bewilderment.

“And you’ll see other friends too,” Sam said, tapping the hand on his bicep.

David paused to take in the last of the space. His table was nearly folded away with a stool underneath it. His bed, where he’d spent countless hours slipping from daydreams to patches of night behind his eyes, was a crumbled mess. He winced.

A visage of himself projected from his mind pacing, reciting poetry, laughing, weeping, and shielding against the stinging loneliness of isolation. The visage faded. He looked over at his friend and shyly tucked away a smile. David would usually look for an inconsistency, some crack in the façade of his dreams, but he didn’t want to risk finding one. He wanted to believe his friend was freeing him and that there’d be some new adventure on the horizon.

Sam pulled the cap low on his forehead and led David down the hall passed the gym on the right all the way to the end where a steel door was at the left. A sign adhered to the door read “This is not an exit,” which made David’s body tense at the sight. He had never considered leaving, only seeing the experiments through so he could come out the other side.

David combed through the experience in his mind. He spent six months in facility being pried open, drugged, manipulated, and wrung out. His memory was a punchcard full of missing pieces that made him shudder. What had he really done here? And why? The questions sat heavy and demanded resolution.

It was unnerving the way time blew away like sand. He’d been convinced over and over that he was doing something worthwhile and in the moment, it seemed justified, but now that reason drifted like a fleeting rain shower. It pattered quickly away leaving a mist of something he didn’t grasp, only felt.

Sam dug into his pocket and pulled out a key to unlock the door. They slipped out. David did not look back.

A camera pointed toward the exit captured a lone man skulking down the hall and pushing open the exit door.

The room in New Directions Treatment Center was threadbare. A twin bed was pushed against the far wall with a night table beside it and a small lamp on it. There was a desk and chair in front of a picture window in the middle of the room, overlooking a busy avenue. A chest of drawers was on the other wall with a small closet to the left.

David had taken down the bargain pastoral scene painting at the end of the bed and put up a poster. His favorite band stared down from a fish eye perspective. Fresh yellow flowers from the corner store sat on the chest of drawers in a clear, curvy plastic cup he’d found abandoned at the laundromat down the street.

He was beginning to settle here. After being clammed up for weeks in a haze of near dissociation from the world, he started inching back to consciousness and other people. He had started making friends with the other residents and even liked his social worker, Molly. She was helpful and had eased his transition in.

Just then, Molly knocked on the door.

“Morning!” she said brightly as she entered.

“Morning Molly,” David said. He gestured for her to take his chair. He sat on the bed.

Molly balanced a small notebook on her leg before hesitantly setting on the desk. She crossed her legs and glanced at the flowers.

“It’s a good sign that you’re decorating. We make a home wherever we are.” She said the affirmation as if it were the first time. It wasn’t.

David smiled weakly. His hands shook and he clasped them in his lap.

“Now, you’ve been clean for 90 days which is huge, but I wanted to think about where we can go from here.” She pulled her pen from the spine of the notebook and she clicked it. She opened the notebook to a blank page.

David moistened his lips and looked up at the poster at the end of the bed. The group members were in the foreground of a bridge, bathed in dark blue with the lead in a white, patterened Kangol hat. The drummer’s usual Afro was laid down in braids and his eyes were closed.

“David?” Molly asked. She flicked her strawberry curls behind her ears and looked at him expectantly.

His mouth pursed to form words that didn’t come. The walls sometimes loomed over him in a foreboding embrace. That’s when he had to get out, sometimes cutting close to curfew, to escape that trapped feeling. Once outside, though, he could feel his pulse quickened with expectation. His senses sharpened and every face volleyed from friend to adversary. He feared a gaze that lingered a little too long or a bump to the shoulder would send him spiraling into a rage.

That’s when he started to sweat and his chest tightened. David would race back to the house and barrel into his room, shutting the door behind him. His breaths would come in gasps before slowing to deep sighs. He told no one about these bouts and could not remember a time it ever happened before. Whatever he had been addicted to did a number on him.

Finally, he spoke.

“I’m just worried about staying clean right now. I did start sketching a bit, though,” he said with a trace of pride.

“May I see?”

He gestured to the top of the desk which had a neat stack of paper. Molly flipped through the sheets past still lifes of the flowers, the desk chair, and lamp. She kept flipping. There were portraits of the mailman and one of the residents, Paula, who so far was his closest acquaintance.

“This is good, David. Very good. Anything else?”

“No, Molly, that’s all I’ve come up with,” he said, managing a weak smile. His hands were still clasped in his lap.

“I think you should do the food shopping this week,” she said without looking up. She was fixated on sketch of a 90s model sedan with a shrouded driver.

“You and Paula seem like pals. Maybe you two can plan a few dinners for the group,” Molly said, laying the sketch back on the desk and turning to look at David.

Her eyes were ocean blue with dark rims. They bore into him and he suppressed a rising discomfort in his chest.

“That’s fine. I think I could do that,” David said nodding.

She smiled cheerily and jotted down a few notes.

“That is good news. I’ll let Paula and Dr. Chambers know. You can meet with her tonight after dinner when you’ve come up with some ideas.”

She stood up and gripped his shoulder reassuringly. Without another word, she left his room and closed the door. David sat still and waited to hear her footsteps depart down the hallway, then the stairs.

He stood up from the bed and moved the chair away from the desk. He opened the desk drawer and under some other sketches was a portrait thick with pencil strokes and charcoal. He held it up to the light streaming through the window. He squinted at the sketch, willing himself to remember. The mental strain yielded nothing.

The woman had braids intricately fashioned into a bun atop her head. Her high forehead sat above jeweled eyes. At the bottom right corner of the page was a single word: mother.

The residents had dinner in the backyard that early evening. He preferred to think of everyone as involuntarily committed patients, though. Picnic tables dotted a well kept lawn reclaimed from an oil-stained parking lot years before. Tall hedges shielded them from noise and neighbors. David usually sat alone, or with Paula. There was something about the others that repelled him, though he didn’t know why.

He’d gone to high school with one man, Gerald, who was heavyset but graceful and almost dignified in his movements. David half expected another face to greet him when he turned around but it was never what he expected. It was wrong somehow. The pouty mouth and thin eyebrows. The round, flat nose. Something about his face was familiar, yet misplaced, and it bothered David.

There was a tall woman named Kareema who had worked with him back when he was a trucker at Carlsbad Logistics a bit farther north. She had broad shoulders, narrow hips, and a singing voice like a siren. With Kareema, it was her teeth. She had a movie star smile that beamed. The guys used to call her Lighthouse. The name was chopped and screwed over time until it became Elly. When David looked at that smile, a memory that wanted to force its way up from the dirt could never break through. It made his skin prickle with goose flesh.

He pressed his fingers against the bridge of nose and steadied his heart through deep breaths. He closed his eyes and tried to remember. Then someone tapped his shoulder. He sprang loose from his thoughts.

“David? I just wanted to go over dinner plans,” Paula ventured louder than necessary. She stood at a distance, timidly waiting for his response, bobbing on the balls of her feet.

He motioned for her to join him. She slipped in close and balled her hands inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt despite the late spring heat. She quivered with nervous energy. Her eyes darted from David to the surroundings. She took a few more moments to reassure herself no one was close enough to hear, then dropped her voice to above a whisper.

“When?” she asked.

“Friday afternoon. I’m going to the city to his office.”

“What about the others?”

“They’ll know where to be. Wont be long now, and we can get this charade over with,” David said, barely masking his disgust.

Paula’s cheek twitched. That happened when she was excited. She rubbed the wooden surface of the picnic table with her fingertips.

“And then what?” she asked eagerly.

“Once he’s dead, I have a contact who will get us transferred out of here,” David said.

Paula knitted her brow. She looked around to see the other residents laughing as they finished up their meals.

“Don’t you think that guy is a bit high profile?”

“That’s the best part. There will be so much attention on that case, no one will pay attention to two addicts going to step up housing in the suburbs. From there, we’ll disappear,” David said. He suddenly felt a chill and wished he had his own sweatshirt to curl into.

“We can’t just do that now?” Paula’s voice was getting higher. The twitches pulsed like a slow metronome.

David’s scanned the backyard. No one had heard Paula. At least they gave no sign they did. One of the counselors, Peter, a mostly serious man in his late twenties, was in an animated conversation with one of the residents. They seemed absorbed in whatever he was saying and didn’t look in their direction.

“Sorry.” Paula put three fingers over her mouth and rested her chin on the table surface.

He shook his head and dashed away her apology with a flick of his hand. They were under pressure and the window to do the deed was rapidly closing.

“Molly and the elusive Dr. Chambers are likely to tell the court we’re not compliant. That means possible jail time. We’d be fucked after that.”

Paula considered it, nodding.

“So what’s for dinner this week?” Paula asked.

“What?” David responded, confused by the topic change.

“Well, we still have to decide on dinners. Can’t chat this long and not come up with something.” She blinked at him with childlike and innocent eyes.

He chuckled. When Paula was sober, she was sharp. She asked all the right questions too. The problem was that her intelligence also came with obsessive and addictive tendencies. She could have gone anywhere in the country to any university studying medicine or physics, but in the end, she got hung up on a boy who was into coke. The rest was history.

As the two discussed menu options in the descending gloom, Molly stood inside the screened back door with Vincent. A “Chambers” tag adorned the breast pocket of his suit jacket. His face was shrouded in shadows.

“How’s he?” Vincent asked, tipping up his chin in David’s direction.

“Good. He doesn’t remember anything. He’s just drawing parked cars and other nonsense,” Molly said with a wave of her hand.

“We’re set for Friday then?”

“Yes. He’s going to plan with Paula over the next few days. The others are already in place,” she said.

The residents sat talking in the light of golden hour and none would know this was a collection of strangers who’d become friends and each other’s support.

“You know, the thing about free will is as long as people believe they’ve made the choice, it doesn’t matter if you make them do it. The choice itself is enough,” Vincent said.

“Mmm. The fight breaks the programming,” Molly said flatly.

“Exactly. And we need to keep him programmed for a little while longer.”

Vincent let out a chortle. He could not have anticipated this going so well.

“The inmates are planning an escape that the warden has designed,” Vincent mused.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” Molly said shaking her head.

They stood in the darkness of the house looking out on the residents of 18th Avenue’s drug rehabilitation center. The six other members of the plan would soon be awakened to orchestrate a single performance. In a matter of days, a state Senator might be dead.

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Huge thanks to new paid subscriber Sangit and founder R. M. I’m so grateful for your support and confidence in me.

Welcome back to The Listening Room for the next installment of “Hypnotic”. If you’re just joining, we met David Fuller, a man being housed in a sleep research facility while Dr. Vincent Vogel and his assistant Molly Fitzgerald, examine David’s dreams. Tobias Mancuso sits at the helm recording those dreams and monitoring David during test runs.

In chapter six, we pick up with an Atlantic City, NJ mission, when David meets his target Gamal, his most formidable target yet. And a startling truth is revealed.

6.

Gamal stood with both hands raised. He breathed heavily against David’s cupped hand. After an awkward moment, still exposed, Gamal emptied the rest of his bladder. He gestured toward his open fly. David moved his hand off the man’s mouth and motioned for Gamal to finish. He zipped up and started backing away from the urinal. David moved with him, keeping the blade against his flank. He glanced over his shoulder to size David up, then turned back to face the wall.

David shook with his attention focused on keeping the knife steady. It made him nervous and sick inside to think this man would die at his hands. It seemed wrong somehow, but then again he had never asked why. David was too preoccupied to notice Gamal’s hand balling into a fist. With a quick motion, he shifted left away from the blade and struck David in the stomach. The wind rushed out of David’s lungs and he stumbled back into the stall door, catching himself before falling onto the toilet. He hoisted himself up and looked out just to see Gamal turn to escape.

Carmine emerged from a bank of stalls and blocked Gamal’s dash, knocking him to the floor. He was momentarily stunned but sprang to his feet. David caught up and wrapped his arms around Gamal in a bear hug and they collided into the wall. He held the knife firm and the two wrestled on their feet while Carmine rounded them to assist.

In the frenzy, David made contact and plunged the knife deep. Carmine’s face blanched before a twisted scowl showed the betrayal. He stepped back and a bright red spot widened on his shirt.

Gamal spotted the gap and pushed past the two, sprinting toward the exit through the men’s sitting room. His wide stride slowed like he crossed from air to amber before stopping completely.

David stood panting and bewildered at the scene. Carmine was a leaning tower in mid collapse with a mask of surprise. David opened Carmine’s shirt and saw the gaping wound he created. He pressed it together with his thumb and forefinger until it sealed, then swiped down with his palm to remove the blood. Good as new. At least he hoped so.

Gamal’s was in a photo finish stride as if crossing a checkered portion of track. His head was turned back to check on the competition.

He pulled Carmine upright from his freeze frame.

“What happened?” Carmine asked.

“I made a mistake. Trying to salvage things,” David said, swiping a hand over his sweaty brow.

David walked in front of Gamal and positioned the knife dead center in his chest and braced with both hands.

He pressed play.

“Sam, who is this guy?”

Sam gripped the steering wheel and pressed his lips into a line.

“Sam!”

He didn’t startle easily, but hopped a little in his seat.

“He’s an Egyptian ambassador to the UK,” Sam said quietly

“Are you f*****g kidding? A whole nation will come looking for him. This is insane!” David groaned.

“Lower your f*****g voice when you talk to me.” Sam whipped his head toward the passenger side and his handsome, smooth face was coarse and shrouded in shadows under the moonlight. He turned back to the road. David kept his mouth shut for the moment.

“This needed to be done. He was using diplomatic immunity for all sorts of s**t. We don’t know everything because that’s not our business, but he was—”

“You and Carmine always say that. The people we kill are the worst of the worst,” David said shaking his head.

David thought of how badly this mission had gone. When he pressed play, Gamal’s sternum was crushed against the knife and Carmine had been knocked back by the force. He slid on his back into the doorway of the men’s sitting room. There, Carmine came face to sole with the shiny leather loafers of a shocked patron.

Without a moment’s thought, he grabbed the man’s ankles and pulled him down. While Carmine pounded his fists into the helpless man’s face, David tried to steady himself on the rapidly spreading pool of blood under his feet. He slipped and the two men crumpled to the floor in an inelegant heap. The force of the blow caved the center of Gamal’s chest inward. David panted as he looked into the man’s glossed over gaze. He laid his head on Gamal’s shoulder to catch his breath.

David took tentative steps toward the doorway and saw another man laid on his back with a bloodied face. He’s dead, David thought. Carmine emerged from the main doorway with bloodied knuckles and a wild look in his eyes. His shirt was pulled from his pants, revealing remnants of his stab wound stain but also a fine mist on his chest and face.

David’s face must have registered his disappointment, because Carmine put his hands on his hips and lowered his head in apology. Then a coded knock came on the bathroom door. He gestured for David to join him. Sam was at the door with the bin.

Sam and David wheeled the two bodies into the panel truck then took off into the night. Carmine stayed behind. Getting rid of blood was not as simple as wiping it away. It quickly coagulated to a stubborn jelly. Before David left, he created a drain in the floor to ease the gruesome task. The newly christened Alchemist would have to do the rest.

David leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. He hoped Carmine would manage alone and that his stab repair had held. Sam seemed to read his thoughts.

“Carmine can take care of himself.”

Sam raked his fingers over his mouth. Even he didn’t believe that. He suddenly jammed on the brakes and the car skidded in the dirt.

“It’s better if you don’t know where the bodies are,” Sam said looking around in the dark, almost as if he expected to see someone emerge from the shadows.

“It’s never good for a conspiracy of men to stay together once the job is done. Better to scatter.”

David looked out the passenger window into a swampy bank only lit by the fading rays of casino marquees.

“Where should I go?” David asked.

“I don’t know. This is fucked right now,” Sam said.

Then a thought crept up and out into the open: Carmine told me where we should meet. It was a certainty.

“Nevermind. I know where to go.”

Color rose into Sam’s cheeks and he let some burden he was carrying go. Getting rid of the bodies seemed the easier part.

“It wasn’t your fault. S**t happens,” Sam said.

He turned and held out his hand for a shake. David grasped it tightly.

“I’ll see you around,” David said.

Sam nodded.

David got out of the car and watched the taillights disappear around a bend bordered with reeds. When Sam was out of sight, he ran.

The sun was rising over the Atlantic Ocean. David sat beside Carmine on a bench overlooking the gently lapping water. The metal was cold in the early morning with a biting chill that made David think it was late November. Carmine sat to his right, looking pale and haggard.

“Did you know Gotham City in Batman was originally in New Jersey?” Carmine asked.

“I didn’t,” David replied.

“Never looked it up. Might be b******t but it sounds nice. We need to be on the map for something other than being New York’s punk kid brother.”

He stifled a cough and brought his arm up to let it out into the crux of his elbow. Bright red blood sprayed onto his white shirt. He shivered. He turned to David. His face was pale and almost chalky with all the color drained out. His lips were peeling.

“I have a son. 15 years old and taller than me. Better than me. No one else knows that.”

Carmine reached into his breast pocket with a grimace and pulled out a shiny metal key. He held it out in his open palm.

“Take it, you b*****d,” he said coughing again.

David took the key and held it a moment to feel the warmth left from Carmine’s hand. He stuffed it deep in his pants pocket.

“Storage space in Hackettstown. Once you get inside, another key will open a locker at a gun shop in town. Only one. Phil will help you.”

He held Carmine’s hand.

“Mother will take you out of here. Not sure if I’ll see you again, but take care. Pleasure working with you, buddy,” Carmine said.

David started to cry and a his chest tightened with the pain of welling grief. This could not be it for them. He was sure he’d spin up another dream and Carmine’s smiling, round face would be there. The finality of the moment was crushing.

Mother stood behind the bench. David turned around to see a woman in a dark gray wool coat buttoned up the neck and black leather gloves. She had a bun of intricately woven braids against a high forehead. Her eyes were a sparkling amethyst. He braced himself against the back of the bench and stood up. She looked up at him with a warm and reassuring face.

“We have to go, David,” she said softly. Her voice barely rose above the sound of the waves.

They walked away and David looked back to see that Carmine’s hand was still planted on the bench and his body was eerily still.

They disappeared into tall pines and trudged through the thick wood. He didn’t question, only followed the slight, statuesque woman whose wingtip heels stepped easily over gnarled roots and small sinkholes. David’s body ached trudging the path behind her.

It picked at him, the pull toward the dear friends, two men he had conjured from his imagination that were so real they took on an existence of their own. His history with them felt like it stretched back through ages, though he knew it wasn’t true. Sam said she was the unseen hand. Maybe she knew.

“Sam and Carmine: Will I see them again? And who are they? To me, I mean.”

The crunch of leaves was from David’s feet. Mother’s heels struck noiselessly against pockets of air. She glanced over her shoulder but kept walking. David scurried beside her.

“They’re not real, but you already knew that. They’re what’s called composites.” She bowed her head, almost sorry to break the news

“What?”

“Composites. Bits of people you know put together, they don’t actually exist. It’s why you feel like you know them, why you’re drawn to them so strongly. You know them well, just not in these forms. One benefit is they can’t be found.”

The revelation stung.

“You created them? Why would you do that?”

She stopped and faced him. Her amethyst eyes gleamed.

“You needed people you could trust to help you complete the training.”

“What training?”

“The test runs! Did you think you were just going on spy missions? That it was going to cure your insomnia or help you with your Daddy issues? This is not some f*****g choose your adventure. It’s all part of a plan.”

David was reeling. She knew about the waking world. Early on, Carmine had showed him how to create doors in his dreams to escape. Even after their countless dream hours together, there was never a suggestion that he knew anything outside of their experience.

“What’s the point?” he asked.

“To make you a drone. To give you a target to hit. Once you were ready, they’d send you out to do exactly what you tonight: murder someone you don’t even know, but for a good cause, of course.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It is.” she said. “You won’t know the difference.”

A laughed rattled in her throat with a knowing sense of doom. It chilled him. He had been trained to have his own will broken down with a look, trained his mind to conjure worlds and people in lucid dreams, and soon he would exit the dream world to get real blood on his hands.

“Mother. Mother…” David said with rising panic. “What’s happening to you?!”

Mother looked down at her hands which were blowing away like dust in the wind. “Oh no.”

She fell apart piece by piece like clumps of sand that wisped up among falling leaves.

“David,” someone called behind him.

He whipped around to find Vincent standing amidst the pines. Mother was gone.

The forest melted like watercolors revealing a stark white canvas underneath. Chains rose up from the floor and clamped on his wrists. He writhed and tugged at the chains. His old exam chair rose up from the floor right underneath him.

A metal restraint clamped across his neck.

“I call this The Chamber. You are in a sleep state where you are not easily roused but can be influenced by what’s outside. I’ve gotten the balance just right so I can speak to you in a dream and your mind will fill in what it needs to. I can implant sounds, smells, and images while you’re here and you will believe it’s real.

“I really have to credit Molly with this. She gave me that little nugget. God! It unlocked the entire thing!”

Vincent loomed as tall as a pine, falling over David like a shadow with eyes just as black and empty.

“David, you’re going to do what I tell you. You’ll follow my instructions to the letter and carry out what I need you to do. Then you will simply forget.”

“No. You can’t do that. People don’t forget, they bury things. You’re just putting a sheet over it but I’ll remember.” He struggled against the restraints.

Vincent chuckled. “You won’t. I’m smart, David, so I’m not just going to bury it, I’m going to corrupt it, so that when you find whatever it is you’re looking for, it’ll be nonsense. You won’t trust it. The truth will be in shards staring right at you, but you won’t be able to put it together. That’s because you’re not smart, David.”

“Where is Mother?” he asked.

“Mother? Who the hell—“, he trailed off and his pupils darted from side to side as if he were processing something.

“Vincent, please—“

“I’ll get away with it!” he interrupted. “I will get away with it David because I am smart and you are stupid! I want you to remember that when you’re brushing your teeth or paying a parking ticket. I am smarter than you! And I am ahead. Far ahead.”

He trailed off again, spiraling through rapid thoughts. The plot behind his eyes was intricate and expanding with the pieces laying together as he envisioned they would. Perfection. Brilliance. And none but he could see the magnificent landscape for miles and miles.

Wait. A small snag. He drifted out of his mind and whispered aloud to himself.

“I need to do something about her. She’s the only one who can operate this equipment. Single point of failure. That’s my fault,” he said raising his hand. His tapped his chin and paced. He mulled over his next move, oblivious to the man laying as helpless as ever with both his mind and body trapped.

Welcome back to The Listening Room for the next installment of “Hypnotic”. If you’re just joining, we met David Fuller, a man being housed in a sleep research facility while Dr. Vincent Vogel and his assistant Molly Fitzgerald, examine David’s dreams. Tobias Mancuso sits at the helm recording those dreams and monitoring David during test runs.

In chapter four, we got a glimpse of David’s life before the facility and of what triggers his rage. We continue in this chapter with a major breakthrough.

5.

Molly ran as fast as her pencil skirt would allow with her strawberry waves bouncing behind her. She zipped around the corner, gripping the wall to steady herself, then down a long corridor. This was it and she could barely contain her excitement.

Molly thought about the span of this experiment, of when it first occurred to her to use dream states to implant information back in graduate school. It was no more than a sci fi movie fantasy but she told Vincent about her idea. He pondered on it, as he usually did, rocking in a high back chair with his fanned out fingers pressed together and his sloped nose planted between them like a knock off Sherlock Holmes. Vincent was tall, gangly, and brilliant, so at least he looked the part.

She knew that in his hands, the idea would be sculpted into something well beyond her capability, but she had to be careful. Unlike the famous detective, who refused credit once a case concluded, Vincent had a way of intertwining himself in a project until the two could not be distinguished. He became the project and everyone who didn’t think so made their way out. She wouldn’t do that so easily.

What one had to do was pay close attention and map the direction Vincent was headed so he could be carefully diverted. He had to believe he was driving and that everyone else was a passenger. If he thought he was fighting for control, he got aggressive and that’s when things got uncomfortable. So far the polite deception had worked and he trusted her. It took longer than she wanted to for him to accept suggestions, but things had a way of failing when he didn’t listen.

While brilliant, Vincent was just another arrogant prick convinced of his own specialness, but what was actually special was the seed, her ideas and her direction. He was an overgrown drone.

She threw open Vincent’s office door without knocking.

“You have to see this,” she said panting.

Back in her office, she scrubbed through surveillance video. Vincent sat down quietly behind her.

“I usually check the video before we wipe it and I caught something.”

The video paused on a seated David in his room with an empty food tray on the table. His head was leaned back against the wall. His eyes were open. She pressed play. He jerked his head and upper body as if propelled by some force in the wall, then rocked back and forth on the chair. He scanned the room with the wondrous look of someone discovering a new and interesting place. He looked to his left and squinted. His lips mouthed the words to something he read from thin air.

“What’s he doing?” Vincent asked.

Molly didn’t answer.

David looked to his right and appeared to speak with someone. The exchange ended and David stared off into the opposite wall above his bed. Molly scrubbed forward. David stood up and mimicked a short stair climb as his right hand rested on a railing no one could see.

“Molly, what the f**k kind of charade is this? Molly!”

“I think he’s acting out a dream. Most times he dozes off after breakfast but he started miming things. I’ve watched this like fifteen times and there’s a moment when his eyes close and his body loses some muscle tone. Then his eyes open and he starts this s**t.”

Vincent gaped. One puzzle had already been solved under his nose and he felt a tangle of emotions swelling inside him. He could not decide which parts were pleasant but his heart was ready to thud straight out of his chest. He scooted closer to the screen. The revelation was dizzying: the project would be able to move to the final stage.

“David is probably ready for the field. We can get Toby to create some mission with only a few rooms. Wheel him into the big room after he’s sedated?” Molly ventured.

“No, not yet. We should start changing things. We need to develop his senses now,” Vincent said. More acute senses meant the dreams would be more real and in themselves, become a reality. It could then be manipulated at will.

Molly turned to the video and smirked, satisfied by where the experiment was heading next. David was seated on his bed talking to thin air, but really, he was at a bagel shop, meeting with Carmine for the first time.

The gray walls of David’s room were warmed by a dull amber light, but David remained asleep, exhausted from his test runs. He had been tasked with a number of odd missions, from changing the colors of flowers in a field with his mind to finding his way through mazes. Vincent said he was honing skills in his dream world and they were making good progress. David was taking control, he said, and would have more satisfying sleep. He would finally figure his life out and stop self sabotaging. The insomnia would be gone.

Still, it made him uncomfortable to think how he was whittled down to a stump in Vincent’s presence. It wasn’t a matter of physical strength because David could easily take him down, but of that crushing influence that manipulated his will in the dream room. He would only recall it much later and feel ashamed.

In his quiet hours, of which there were many, in between reading and the occasional w**k, he thought about his fire. He thought about how angry he could get when someone pecked at him and the heat rose from his belly and into his chest. He hadn’t felt that since coming to facility. Maybe it was good to be calm so he could be prepared for the outside, for when a boss sassed him or maybe he encountered some a******s on the highway—

He rubbed his face briskly with both hands. He never got angry without a reason and he never made the first strike, that was for sure. It might be time to call up the fire and resist.

David’s breakfast came as usual with the slide of the pass through and clack of a metal tray being laid on it. He was sprawled on his bed, disinterested in the meal for the moment until something caught his attention: the smell. He perked up and leaned on his elbow. Pale yellow eggs speckled with black pepper practically gleamed from his vantage point, but it was merely the centerpiece. He scooted out of bed and grabbed the tray, folding down his table and setting it on top.

To the right of the eggs were lumps of dark green spinach with pops of red from cubed bell pepper. He wafted garlic off the spinach and a vinegary heat from the eggs. At the top left was a spongy square of bread, probably challah he thought, with a thin film of butter on top. At the top right were slick slices of peaches in a small pool of juice.

He stared at the tray for a few minutes. He took in every color, shape, and scent. The memories burned into a brain that had been starved of stimuli for five months. He could hardly believe how heightened his senses were. He was aquiver with interest but was barely hungry.

David’s hand met the smooth sides of the tray and it was warm. He ran his fingers across the rim and exhaled deeply.

The taste was another experience altogether. He let each morsel linger on his tongue before chewing with his eyes closed. The crust of the bread crunched under his teeth and the slivers of peaches practically slipped down his throat whole.

He leaned his head against the wall after finishing and though he didn’t smoke, a menthol was probably due right then. That and a cocktail made especially for him by Sam. Maybe something with pineapple juice, coconut rum, and blue curaçao in one of those curvy glasses. It sounded so good he could taste it.

David drifted off into his thoughts and could not tell if he had been asleep until a knock came at the door.

“David!” the voice whispered. “It’s me, Sam. Can you hear me?”

David jolted forward and strained his ears to hear what was most certainly carryover from a dream. That happened sometimes. His eyes creaked open in the dark and the outline of an object followed him into the waking world. After a few blinks, the apparition was gone. Sam was a friend who visited again and again after he closed his eyes and existed nowhere else.

“I can’t stay, but we’ll have to get you out. I’ll be by after your next test run. Good luck.”

David was dumbstruck. His limbs were heavy and he couldn’t move. His mouth was still agape when the usual voice announced it was time for the gym. Had two hours passed? He slid his tray through the opening and sprawled onto the bed. He ran his hand along the blanket and realized it was soft like a sheep’s coat. He’d never noticed that before.

He thought about where Sam could be hiding and whether he had access to all those locked doors. Did the cameras see him and mistake him for someone else? He rummaged through his memories and could not find Sam. He knew him so well and yet he didn’t entirely exist.

“David, this will feel different from the usual tests. I want you to pay closer attention to your senses, really interact with your environment.”

Vincent’s hand was on David’s shoulder and his face was close enough to smell candy on his breath. There was something else too, maybe sandalwood and bergamot, he thought. He could not believe how good his sense of smell had become.

David shook Vincent’s hand off his shoulder and looked away. He always felt his will slip away into those deep and penetrating eyes. They were a rich brown with pupils that were a swallowing abyss. They seemed to spread like oil over the whites of his eyes until you were overtaken completely.

Vincent’s hand hung in the air as he studied David. It could have been crankiness from the continued schedule disruption or something else, he wondered. A subject pulling away was nothing to be alarmed about, but to watch. He had noticed David’s resistance growing in tiny increments. Easy, number seven. All will be revealed in time, Vincent thought.

This was just the indication he needed to push David further. The man was hungry now, truly ravenous for something other than his gray walls. He must be tired of being forced into a descent, so he would make those descents on his own with just a nudge. Vincent would create the nudge and ever so gently apply it.

He straightened up and crossed his arms on his chest.

“David,” he said in a scolding tone. “You know It doesn’t make me happy when you’re like this.”

He watched for a reaction but David was surprisingly stoic.

“You don’t want to upset me, do you? That’s not a good idea.”

He walked around the chair to look David in the face.

“I’m not the one to f**k with, believe that.”

Something inside slipped and folded like playing cards. David’s face was a penitent whine. Vincent looked on but said nothing, withholding any morsel of approval until he was sure he had complete surrender.

“That’s better,” he said. “Now, the yellow square, David. Look at it.”

David’s neck creaked over to the color block in the blank wall. His body went slack and his eyes hovered above closing.

“You have a difficult target this time but you need to use what you’ve learned.”

“Yes, Dr. Vogel,” he said plainly.

Vincent smirked. “Descend.”

David stretched his hands over stiff but soft sheets. He was groggy as if an afternoon nap had gone on too long. Beyond the sheer curtains and floor to ceiling windows were lights of some bustling city. It was nearing evening and he had to get up. The hotel room had two queen sized beds, a round dining table in the left corner by the window and a large television to the right.

A suit lay on the other bed. He got dressed and grabbed his key card on the way out.

The elevator opened to a swank lobby with guest enjoying live music. Beyond it were rows and rows of slot machines. They weren’t the modern kind with touchscreens, but ones where you could hear the gears turning inside. Each crank of the side handle spun the colorful symbols round while upbeat instrumentals tinkled through the air. Cherry, cherry, gold coin. Maybe next time.

Step right up and try your hand at blackjack, baccarat, or poker where each hand is a loser and the house always wins. He smiled to himself watching old ladies balance their dwindling cigarettes between two fingers. One long drag, one more pull, maybe this time will be a winner.

The ping and jangle of coins plonking into metal trays were base notes in a symphony of laughs and flashing lights. The stench of cigarette smoke mixed with the sting of cheap perfume and floor cleaner.

David stood at the edge of one cluster of card tables taking it all in. He rubbed a thumb against a neatly trimmed beard. Someone gripped his elbow. It was Sam.

“My god, you and Carmine really need to stop doing that. Send a text or something. F**k.”

“Sorry. It’s more discrete if we’re not hovering over our phones.”

“Who’s hovering? I could literally glance at it for two seconds instead of needing a pacemaker.”

“The drama…” Sam said rolling his eyes. They were dressed in identical black suits. Sam perched an arm on his shoulder as they watched the rise and fall of riches minute by minute.

“All right, all right. So this guy is a hit from a private payer,” David said.

“Yeah. He’s on a high stakes baccarat table. Carmine isn’t dealing but just—“

“Hovering,” David cut in. “Very discreet.”

Sam barely hid his amusement but continued.

“Carmine loves a good poison. That’s his specialty. We haven’t settled on a name that didn’t sound like a comic book villain.”

“How about The Alchemist?”

Sam turned down the sides of his mouth and considered it.

“Might grow on me. He definitely turns s**t situations into gold.”

He held his palms out to weigh the balance of David’s suggestion against his own but it looked like neither made the grade. Sam placed a hand on David’s shoulder and they both stared out at the gambling floor.

David peered over to see Sam’s six tapping fingers on his shoulder. An inconsistency. He breathed out. It was becoming hard to tell. The visual resolution, sound, even the bite of cold air conditioning was so convincing. He often awoke in his room and it took minutes at a time before he realized he wasn’t dreaming. Sam had come to him at his room door back at the facility. How long had he been cycling through REM sleep?

He looked over again and there were five fingers. He blinked rapidly. Five fingers.

“There’s cameras absolutely everywhere so our best bet is getting him in a bathroom. For that, we have to make sure a camera is turned away from the men’s room entrance and we get a large rolling bin. We’ve gotta ride in the blindspots though so no one even sees us transporting him,” Sam said.

“That’s how we’re disposing of him?”

“Not really. I have a panel truck around the side of the building. No cameras. We’ll drive him out to a spot.”

David considered this as his eyes scanned the lively casino. He had a different take.

“You know, I was a funeral director for like three months. I go to pick up a body from the morgue and I ask the guy, joking obviously, what’s the best way to get rid of a body.”

Sam turned his head and the two faced each other.

“He said to do a drive by. Day or night doesn’t really matter, just needs to be the right setting. Happens so quick that witnesses don’t get details correct or they’re too scared to snitch. The county government does the cleanup.

Sam gave an open mouthed smile showing a set of gorgeous teeth. David smiled back, then recovered himself and turned back to the slots.

“Can we just leave him right there?”

“That might work for another type of job, just not this one. Appreciate your contribution to the team, though,” Sam said with a rising tone.

“There’s someone else you should know about: Mother.”

“Who’s that?” David scoffed.

“She coordinates all of this. Without her, nothing would be possible.”

“Will I meet her?”

“Not likely. She’s an unseen hand,” Sam said, wiggling his fingers. There were six.

“Pity,” David said absently. “We should get started.”

They parted to opposite directions.

Their target was a man in his 50s, Gamal Rashad, who was impressively fit and sharp. He looked like an experienced gambler whose movements were smooth and confident at a table. He checked in alone tonight, which meant no companions would be looking for him if he didn’t return to his room. Even in the casino, no one latched onto his arm, so he was riding steady and solo.

His wide shoulders and thin waist suggested a consistent workout routine, but he still took diuretics for high blood pressure. That would be their in. Carmine had already slipped him a higher dose. Racing to the bathroom in no time, David thought. Gamal eventually cashed out of a table and set down a few chips for the dealer. He nodded his goodbye.

Gamal went to the same bathroom for the fourth time that evening and positioned himself in front of a urinal. David noiselessly emerged from a stall behind him and clapped a hand over the man’s mouth with his left hand. He pressed a knife against his right flank.

“Don’t move.”

[end of audio]

Author’s note:

Thanks for sticking with me during this intermission. I admit I didn’t even look at The FLARE while I was away, didn’t mull over new subscribers, just tried to sit in stillness. I appreciate you for following along or simply showing up for the first time. I look forward to continuing this journey with you.

Welcome back to The Listening Room for chapter four of Hypnotic. In chapter three, David’s allies came to the rescue, both inside and outside the dream world. We resume with who he was before the experiments.

4.

David grabbed his lunch pail out of the fridge and put it on the table next to Janine. She was dead set on completing a game of Candy Crush and didn’t look up. Her tousled hair was in a ponytail tucked into the back of a well worn ball cap. She learned the art of blending into a boys club where she neither got harassed nor included. It was this unsexed limbo where she existed as a neither, invisible.

Janine’s elbows were planted on the circular table and bright, flickering colors danced across her pale face. David knew her lunch was either long scarfed down or ignored completely until break was almost up. One or the other.

The break room was a dull and virtually colorless room with grimy Formica countertops in a regrettable light brown and a white fridge probably on extended loan from someone’s garage. One would assume it was full of beer instead of lunchboxes and an aging box of baking soda. Next to the fridge was a silver microwave that no one used because it had never been cleaned.

David laid paper towel down as his place mat, then zipped open his lunch pail and took out a sandwich and chips. Janine exited the game and nodded in his direction.

“Good game?” he asked.

“No, an unfortunate addiction,” she replied grimly. She laid the phone down in front of her.

“I hear that. Where you headed after this?”

“North Carolina. I’ve done it before.” She yawned and swept her elbows out to lay her head on the table.

“You’re just headed near Pittsburgh, right?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s quick. But I’ve never been out there.”

“Really? Like Pittsburgh?”

“Nah, the state.”

She scoffed and rubbed a hand against her cheek. Her nails were short with a thin layer of grime underneath.

“I usually take the longer hauls down to Florida or Louisiana so I’ve been all along the East coast and the South. Never been to PA.”

“It’s like a hour from here,” she said.

“So what? Never had a reason to go.”

“What? There’s Philadelphia, Amish country, there’s farms, Crayola… that’s so lame,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said casting his eyes down to his lunch.

“I think it does. It’s a bordering state.”

“It’s not a big deal, Janine,” he said, his annoyance ascending.

“Jesus, what other basic human things haven’t you done?”

He widened his eyes at her, squaring his shoulders. Her smirk evaporated like steam and her mouth gaped in an unspoken apology. She was like that, though, always pressing someone over some little thing, digging her dirty nails in needlessly. But when he saw her shrink away, he relaxed. It wouldn’t do to embody a threat. It wouldn’t work in his favor anyway. He folded his hands on the break room table.

David had done this often over the years, kept this heat from burning his insides. It was probably some vestige of childhood he couldn’t place, something he only remembered in his body. He had never snapped thankfully but he had been close many times. It was the tiny cuts that got to him, not a drunk throwing a punch or an ex spewing their heartbreak on the street in front of strangers. It was the mockery, the smug look of victory when someone finally got to you.

He remembered this now and quieted himself. Janine did not want to hurt him, but he had to flip that switch and behave.

“A friend told me he had a college professor who was born, schooled, lived, and died in the same 5 square miles. Sometimes its choice, other times chance. The guy was from PA, by the way and had never been anywhere else.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel weird about it.”

They sat in silence as he finished his lunch and she busied herself looking in every direction except his. Tiring of her fidgeting and expectant, furtive glances, he spoke up.

“It’s fine. But it’s really weird you’re talking since you don’t even have a passport!”

“Oh, screw you!” Janine shoved him playfully, but was mostly relieved he wasn’t mad at her.

“Nah, you were getting on me about not being to PA, but I’ve actually been outside the US.”

He reached into his back pocket and thumbed through his wallet. When he reached what he was looking for, he hunched down onto the table. She mirrored his stance and they stared at each other in amusement like two lion cubs ready to pounce on each other and roll in grasslands.

David slipped a £5 note out of his wallet and popped out of his chair, slamming down the note.

“Bam!”he said triumphantly.

She threw her head back and shrieked with excitement. The raucous between the two escalated and soon they were both on their feet with comedic jabs and pats on the back. Before long, they were stretched out on their chairs, panting and wiping away tears.

This is what he always clawed his way back to: that lightness of forgetting. But he did not forget. Just as that heat inside him flared for reasons he didn’t consciously know, all those tiny offenses piled up ready to feed that flame.

“Oh my god, this is why I should never be on shift with you,” David said.

“It’s definitely a problem,” she agreed.

They both looked up simultaneously to see their break was over. It was time for both to take their overnight assignments for supply deliveries in different directions. They packed up their things and walked together to the docks.

“Just take 95 to 78, then 81. More scenic and less a******s than 80. The state cops don’t shoot radar like in Jersey so you can make good time.”

“Yeah, it’ll be a breeze,” he assured her.

“Oh, definitely,” she said raising an arm to give him a hug.

“Call me when you get there, J.”

“Sure thing,” she replied.

The neon lights of Carlsbad Logistics shone blue light onto the pavement made slick from an overnight drizzle. Some spots reflected multicolored swirls from oil that mixed with the water. It was beautiful and calming. He stood there a while not exactly watching Janine board her rig and pull safely from the dock, but the pools of water and oil awash with light.

It was pitch black along the stretch of Pennsylvania highway. Must be a time of night for only truckers and demons, he thought. The air was crisp with traces of winter but the day would be warm by the time he got to his destination. He opened the window and wafted the scent of deep woods with the occasional sting of manure.

A pair of headlights ascended a hill behind him, rapidly closing the distance between them. He looked in the side mirror and squinted against the car’s high beams. He adjusted himself in the seat and placed his hands firmly on both sides of the wheel.

The car pulled up beside him and two men rolled by in a cherry red convertible with the top down. Their hair whipped around their heads like strange halos, stabbing the midnight air. David glanced over and caught the gaze of the passenger. He made a fist and pumped his arm, signaling for David to sound the horn.

David hated that. He could get that lame request from schoolchildren and hip grandmas alike. In the beginning, he let that request drive this strange twinge of guilt. It was stupid. But there was something in their eyes that demanded it. He could feel it burrowing into him and it twisted his will until he gave in.

Now he looked at the two men beside him and felt the passenger’s eyes burrow in. He didn’t know why, but it made him angry now. The rage formed deep in his belly, rising up as heat into his chest. His body jittered to dissipate the tension.

The driver tooted his horn playfully and the passenger again pumped his arm. Before, he would have wished for some glittering skyline or multicolored fall foliage to give his eyes somewhere else to land, to break the awkwardness. But there was nothing out here at this hour. He was alone, in the dark, with two eager sets of eyes compelling him to act.

David looked straight ahead and sped up a little to get ahead of the car. The pair persisted, pulling next to him and shouting. The passenger scooted up and out of his seat, waving both arms to get David’s attention. The man teetered but was no less determined. They were both cracking up and having the time of their lives. David glanced over again and saw they were young, maybe in their mid twenties, with too much money and too much time. He paid them no mind and kept driving, but his grip tightened on the steering wheel.

The convertible’s engine roared as they sped up, pulling in front of him. His rig was 18 wheels with a load of over 30 tons. He could not play games with these fools. The rear lights blazed red and David depressed the break.

“A******s,” he whispered to himself. He threw his hands up in disbelief. He checked his mirrors and no one else was around.

The car darted between the two lanes, hugging the center median in the left lane before swinging back to the right lane and breaking hard. The passenger flipped his middle finger and laughed in the glow of the rig’s headlights. That rage in his chest moved up and filled his head, beat at his temples, and locked his jaw.

“Move out of the way,” he growled.

The car came back into his lane for another brake check but instead of slowing down, he sped up. David rammed into the left tail light and for a moment, the driver swerved before recovering. The passenger turned with a mixture of interest and mischief on his face. They slowed down again and the back of the car crunched against the grill.

David could not believe his eyes at the damage to the car. Who would risk that for some highway play? He quickly decided he did not care and sped up. This time the passenger sloshed on the bench seat then turned to look at David. This time the childish playfulness was gone and the man carried a deep foreboding like maybe he had done something wrong for which he would pay dearly.

David rammed them again, knocking the car into the next lane where they slammed into the median. The tires squealed and painted dark strokes against the asphalt. Liberated metal fragment littered the road as the driver over corrected and skidded to the right, into the darkness and out of sight.

In the dream room a tear streamed back into his hair.

The car’s front end tipped into a ditch and it tumbled end over end through the brush. The passenger was quickly thrown from his seat and whacked against the bark of a thick tree, crushing his chest. The driver remained in the car, repeatedly banging his head against the steering wheel, then breaking his upturned glass with one smack. His left arm flailed over the door, flattened under twisted metal during the roll.

The car came to rest far in a field. Fuel leaked from the punctured gas tank and spread before catching exposed and sparking wire. A whip of flame began in the undercarriage of the mangled car. Both passengers lay still in the dark at the roadside.

Ahead, David floored it down the road and did not look back.

David pulled into the warehouse dock and made sure his load was secure before checking in at the main office. He was greeted by a short, burly man with an amiable face.

“You didn’t have to come in. Donny should be outside,” the man said, with his hands planted on his hips.

“First time here, figured I’d show my face. David Fuller,” David replied with an outstretched hand.

They shook hands while they stood in his doorway. The man flashed him a friendly smile, though he didn’t actually introduce himself. David was left to read off a name plate on his desk: Aaron Stoltzfus. The man saw him mouthing the name and broke in.

“Stoltzfus. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch. It’s a common last name.”

David nodded and withdrew his hand awkwardly. He detected a mock sincerity in Aaron that twisted his stomach with a mixture of disappointment and disgust. This would probably be their last interaction up close and the charade would soon be over.

“Say, did you hear about that big accident on 78 in the middle of the night? Last stretch before 81?”

David searched his mind for answer. Was that where he was last night?

“N-no, I didn’t,” he stuttered. He swallowed hard and clasped his hands behind his back.

The man opened up a file cabinet at the far end of the office and rifled through a drawer stuffed to its limit. He flicked each piece of paper he passed. The sound was like a drill to David’s skull.

“These two guys were drunk and lost control. Real shame. Some actor’s kid and the cousin or someone.”

“Did they make it?”

“Nah, both are dead. The passenger wasn’t even wearing a seatbelt.”

“News travels fast,” David mumbled.

The man turned around from the file cabinet. “What’s that?”

“That’s… really sad,” David said.

“Did you see anything out there?”

David drew his lips together and shook his head. The man appraised David this time, with that expression of helplessness those far from tragedy often wore. It was a spectator’s closure to hear the details firsthand that would illuminate some unassailable fact about life or give them an answer to the why. David bit his lip to keep his secret and for that man, those details would remain a mystery.

Aaron finally resigned himself with a sigh before finding what he was looking for. He marked off David’s arrival and load details on an intake sheet. There would be something to take back to New Jersey in about an hour and he would be free to wait seated in the hallway until it came in.

“Well, tragedies happen every day. Stay safe out there.”

“Sure will,” David replied.

It was fortunate that Aaron had walked away and that the hall was empty because at the moment the door closed, David’s face betrayed him. It was a dark mask of mischief with a satisfied smirk spreading.

On a cork board outside the office was an ad for participation in a sleep study.

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Welcome back to The Listening Room for chapter three of Hypnotic. In chapter two, we learned that David volunteered for the sleep study, but not yet why. We resume with a new dreamscape.

3.

“We’re going to send you into the next test run,” Vincent said. He was standing next to a reclined David in the dream room. He put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. David nodded and turned up the corner of his mouth into a half smile.

“Look at the yellow square. You’re going to descend smoothly and identify your target. You will be given information about how to accomplish the mission. You will not leave until it is done. Do you understand?”

His glazed eyes fixated on the yellow square as his body relaxed and his eyelids drooped. Vincent held up his index finger to the control room and the induction started. It was more fluid now which made his subject more compliant. That was the important part. No one could be thrust in while in a state of panic. You had to work twice as hard to undo the damage.

Vincent cocked his head at the now sedated subject and could hardly believe his luck. Of all the subjects tested, David was the only one so far to incorporate advanced dream control. It would not be long before he was ready for what came next.

He left and did not bother standing by in the control room. There was no telling how long the run would take andhe had other experiments to consider. The woman in wing F was interesting. Her dreams were like watching a video streaming service. A man in wing Y had particularly strong senses of taste and smell. Back in his office, Vincent swiveled in his high back chair to face color monitors of six other subjects in identical rooms to David. Each had a talent and would be knit together to complete the project. All the pieces would come together perfectly.

David materialized in front of a glass door overlaid with wood slats. The word “Marcel’s” was etched in gold on the display window. He looked down at his outfit. Navy blue slacks, a cream and blue striped shirt, and heather gray waistcoat. His shoes were black and dull. He rocked forward and back on them. Comfortable. It made him think he had to look good from the waist up. He glanced at himself in the glass. He had a tapered fade with twisted coils at the top. His beard was gone.

“Are you coming in?” He looked at the lithe woman who had stepped out of the door with one foot on the sidewalk. Her hair was jet black and bone straight, cutting across the breast of a black dress that looked like a suit jacket.

“David! Hello?!” She impatiently waved him in. “It’s Friday, so I need you focused. We’re booked solid.”

David glanced around at the restaurant. There was a long wood bar neatly lined with stools. Small tables peppered the remaining space. Behind the bar was frosted glass illuminated from above and below by light strips. He note the time on a clock opposite the bar. 3:00pm.

“Do you need me to tell you where to go to?”

“If you could? I… uh, I didn’t look at the schedule.”

“You’re downstairs with Sam and Amir.”

He looked back at the clock. It was 3:01. The big hand moved. He sighed and looked back at the woman. At the hostess post was a stack of business cards and tablet with seating arrangements. The screen was surprisingly vivid and he could easily read the names on each reservation. He knitted his brow. This was an exciting, albeit disorienting amount of realism.

He turned left down a steep set of stairs into a lower level with brick walls and stone floors just outside the bank of guest tables. At the end of a rectangular room was a short bar and two men prepping for service.

Sam, he mouthed.

“I saw you at the bus stop. You were a typical space cadet and didn’t even see me wave,” Sam said as David approached.

He shook his head as if he glitched. “Did you?”

“Yeah, by the mall.”

David had begun to call them certainties, the things he knew to be true without asking. The information was preloaded. Sam was making reference to an event that occurred in 1997 in a previous dream, but now it was 2024. And this bar was in New York City. He knew this as he knew his own name.

He looked at Amir and knew he had an Iranian mother and French father. He grew up in Lebanon for six years before a regional conflict forced the family to move to France. They eventually settled in Maryland before he moved to New York in his early 20s.

David looked at Sam and drew a blank. File not found. Instead he was drawn in by the graceful movements of his hands during the bar prep. He could work in a 3 foot space with ease by just pivoting on a heel. Everything was laid out within reach and his hands glided where they needed to without even looking. Light blue shirt. Suspenders. Tasteful mustache. Easy smile.

“Can I help you?” Sam asked. “You’re staring.”

He cast his eyes down but David could tell he was amused, if not flattered.

“What do you think people will order tonight?”

“Probably the apple pie martini.”

At another time, the flirtatious look would have drawn David in completely, but he was preoccupied with the feeling there was something he needed to do, something he had forgotten.

A heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder. David whipped his head around to see the man he spoke to at the bagel shop.

“Carmine Delavecchio,” David said automatically.

“Yeah. Don’t you f*****g forget it.” Carmine cackled. “You ready for tonight? This is the big test.”

“I’m pretty sure I got this. No big deal.”

He looked into Carmine’s plump and friendly face. His bald head was shaved smooth and under thick but trimmed eyebrows, his eyes were a forest green that glimmered like the surface of a pearl. That’s the detail.

He wore a crisp white shirt with a double breasted black jacket that draped on him like jewelry. In the dim light of the bar, he was more sultan than server.

“I’m glad you’re here, Carmine.” His chest tightened. He was grateful.

Carmine’s lips were curled into a playful grin. “You’re too f*****g sentimental sometimes. It’s alright. Nice to be needed.”

In the dream room a tear streamed back into his hair.

“Holy s**t,” Toby whispered. “Look at this.”

Molly scooted beside her and watched David’s changing hormone levels.

“Dopamine and oxytocin are up. Cortisol is down.”

“He’s emotional. Push a tiny bit of sedative to calm him. I don’t want him to wake up.”

“He won’t,” Toby said firmly.

“How do you know?”

“Watch.”

“You see that lady by the bar? Red sweater?”

“With the highball glass.”

“Yeah. She’s the target. Sam is going to make her a drink but the guy next to her is one of her bodyguards. He’ll be watching Sam very closely. You need to sneak beside her and drop in this pill.

Carmine opened his hand to reveal a small metal box with a nondescript white pill inside. There was no inscription.

“Carmine, we’re going to roofie this woman?” David groaned.

“Whoa, whoa. The dossier I gave you was not there for leisurely reading. She’s a human trafficker. Lowest of the low. This is a tender mercy.”

“Your buddy Sam will recommend the apple martini and some concoction with bourbon. She hates bourbon. But she likes a dirty blonde,” he said elbowing David.

Then his smile dropped as he handed David the pillbox. David slipped it into his suit jacket pocket.

“The pill is a delayed release cardiotoxic agent. Very dangerous and very effective. You’ll take this pill and drop it into her drink. It’ll be a cloudy drink with lots of foam and bits of apple on the bottom. Should dissolve unnoticed. It’s also tasteless.”

David nodded and rubbed his hands together nervously. This was it.

“Samuel Verdan is your partner on this who will save the operation if it starts going sideways. We call him The Magician. You have to trust him. If this all work out, the coroner will think she had heart failure.”

David nodded again and Carmine gripped his arm. “Be cool. You can do this.”

He stared over at the woman, who was laughing loudly with a companion at the bar. Sam was right behind her, cleaning a long stem glass and looking out onto the steady stream of patrons.

David walked to the bar as if he were the one facing death, with a stiff and awkward gait. He sat beside the target. Bangles tinkled and rattled on her delicate wrist as she held her fresh apple martini.

Sam tipped his head to David and set down a round cocktail napkin. “What can I get you, tonight?”

David fidgeted on the stool beside the woman. She was facing another patron with her back to David.

“Recommendations?” he asked shakily, peering up over his listless hands.

“We could keep it simple. Whisky soda.”

“Sounds good. Thank you.”

Sam winked, then pivoted on his foot to grab a seltzer out of the fridge behind him. He decanted it into a chilled glass, then grabbed a bottle from under the bar and poured it into a jigger. He emptied it slowly onto the rising bubbles.

David looked around and was thankfully near the corner of the bar with no one beside him. He looked over to see a tiny place card that said “reserved”. A detail. No one reserves a bar stool, but if you don’t want a drunk patron knocking a deadly and probably hard to come by drug out of your untrained hands, this was the way to do it.

David leaned over to see the bodyguard seated one stool over. He was scanning the room and looking the target’s companion up and down, more out of suspicion than interest. David turned away just as the man looked over at him. He could feel the man’s stare setting him ablaze and broke out into a sweat. He feigned a sip of his drink, then set it down, and rubbed the tops of his thighs. Sam was busy making one more of the night’s very popular apple pie martinis.

They locked eyes and Sam’s glare told David to use the moment to his advantage. The sound of the cocktail shaker masked the pop of the metal container with the pill. David removed it and placed it onto the bar with his hand over it.

He inched closer and lifted his hand slowly to drop in the pill. The bodyguard had turned around completely to speak with someone beside him. David shifted to block the view of people behind him and was nearly at the rim of the glass, feeling the heat rise from his collar but not wanting to move any faster. A sudden crash in the kitchen made him jump and he fingers snapped open, dropping the pill. It rolled toward the woman’s glass and he smacked the bar top over the pill. She whipped her head around, glaring at David with disgust.

Just then Sam called, “There it is!”

He pointed at a large fly buzzing just out of sight. The target, her companion, and the bodyguard all looked at it flying away. Sam cut his eyes at David, who slipped the pill into the glass. It disappeared into the foam.

“Can’t catch them all,” Sam said jovially.

“Thanks for trying,” she said over her shoulder at David.

“Sorry for the commotion.” He waved a hand, then slipped off the stool dazed and stumbled into the bathroom. He gripped the sides of the pedestal sink and looked into the mirror. There was nothing there.

The video feed crackled and faded out.

“He f*****g did it,” Molly said.

“He f*****g did it,” Toby repeated.

“How did you know?”

“You get by with friends,” she said with a satisfied look.

Molly rapped on Vincent’s office door and called for him to open it. She was practically hopping up and down with the news of David’s success. The last few weeks had been sedating to say the least, watching monitors and writing reports. It was the boring but necessary part of research.

For those weeks, she had reluctantly trusted Toby and they started David on a regimen of twiddling his thumbs. He would wander in versions of his childhood home meeting absurd characters or doing mundane tasks.  All part of getting him comfortable, she assured. Credit where it was due, but Molly was eager to stay on track. Toby had no investment in the enterprise, just an annoying curiosity.

Toby had worked on getting the resolution issues solved but this had been the first time she flipped the switch. It made a world of difference watching David move through a 4K world where he carried himself with a casual swagger worthy of a man far more refined that the scruffy dream room captive.

His little friends would work to their advantage, too. David trusted them and would follow them anywhere. They needed one more major test run with all modifications in place. Then David would be ready.

There was still one thing that lingered in the corner of her mind. She hadn’t pressed, but Toby didn’t tell her if she found out who Sam was. They knew David’s story from top to bottom, down to the movies he’d seen. It could not have taken that long to find the man. It bothered her.

Vincent threw open the door and glared at her.

“He got the target!” she said with her hands clasped at her mouth.

It took a few moments for the information to register. He gaped and still made no response.

“He finally did it!” She shook his shoulders and stepped past him into the office. She sunk into a chair a sighed slowly.

He shut the door and leaned against it. He shook both fists in the air.

“I knew he could do it. He was the only one who could have.”

They sat across from each other beaming. From inception to execution took years under this partnership of equals and they could finally enjoy this breakthrough. They chatted excitedly about the early days and how they would proceed from here.

A sandwich lay half eaten in crumbled paper. He picked it up from the side of his desk and sniffed it. The pesto was fragrant and earthy.

“Scent is... an overlooked ally. You know, I unknowingly performed a double-blind experiment on a good friend in college.”

“Really.”

“Yup. I’d been gifted a scented thing for my car and didn’t really need it. I tossed it on a bookshelf and it slipped behind some textbook. My roommate sat at his desk for hours in front of that bookcase. He was a very analytic, very stoic, and sort of guarded person who you had to peel the layers off. So he’s sitting there day after day and neither of us realize this scented thing is there. We go out one night and he orders a piña colada. My word!” Vincent clapped, laughing and highly amused.

“‘You?! That’s hardly your speed.’ And he says ‘I know! I just have this hankering!’ So here’s this whiskey in the jar type of guy having this fruity concoction at our local spot. He was so pleased with this drink! Anyway, maybe six months later, I’m cleaning out this bookcase in our office. We’d graduated and didn’t need all these texts. We were going to sell some, toss the rest. Anyway, as I pull out a book, this scented thing falls out. Ha! Guess what the scent was?”

Molly shook her head. She was genuinely at a loss as to the answer.

“Piña colada.” Vincent rocketed from his chair.

“Do you see?! That little experiment changed my life. Set me on the course to this very moment. Here was a man who was virtually stone, a perfect subject. A skeptic and a curmudgeon. Embarrassed every corner hustler with a card game.” Vincent clasped his hands in a praying position around his mouth, deep in the memory.

“I guarantee you would never be able to fool that man, hypnotize him, get him to believe in magic or anything! But I changed him in the tiniest way. Implanted a preference from something so minute and imperceptible. To this day, decades later, he still orders that drink.”

Vincent fell silent, enraptured by his own accidental genius.

“I never told him what I found on that shelf and in his mind, he just tried something spontaneous and liked it. At the time, it did make him more open, a bit less difficult of a nut to crack.”

“Vincent, that’s extraordinary,” said Molly.

Folding his arms in front of him and vigorously nodding, he sat back down, staring at nothing in particular.

“We’re going to move forward. We already have powerful tools. His routine helps. Now we have to amp him up.”

Molly smiled widely.

“You know, I had something like that happen to me.”

Vincent was still absorbed in his thoughts.

“I woke up one morning from this really vivid dream that I was in a band and we’d wrote this smash hit called ‘Primetime’. I flew out of bed to get the lyrics down along with the melody. It wasn’t the type of music I would’ve made if I had any say, but it was this catchy pop hit.”

Vincent swiveled around and narrowed his eyes at her.

“Anyway. I was so excited about it! I had written a song or at least part of one, in a dream. This is the type of s**t you see on some musician’s interview.”

“But…” Vincent countered.

“I forget where I even was, but that song came on. I remember a bottle slipped out of my hand and I didn’t even hear it crash. I just heard my song over loudspeakers. How? I’d never heard that song before so how did it get in my head?

“I went home and turned on the radio set with my alarm. I listened to that radio station for days straight before the song came on again. Primetime,” she said pensively. “I’ve been an unwitting subject too.”

“The alarm went off and you were in the right stage of sleep for it to be implanted without waking you,” Vincent concluded.

“Until I heard that song, I would have sworn that I came up with it by myself.”

“The important part of that story is the absolute conviction. I think this will work with one of the other subjects. But you’ve also given me a possible solution in case I have a problem.”

Toby waited for the click of the lock as the control room swung shut, then counted to ten. Molly would probably be celebrating this win with Vincent for a while.  She turned to her console and keys clacked quickly under her fingers. There were mere moments to spare before the dream file was fully uploaded.

She could not have imagined this mad dash on her first day in Vogel Laboratories. She was fresh off an academic position doing research statistics when she took a chance at working in a sleep lab at a nearby hospital. There, she monitored patients overnight watching as charts spit out heart rates, incidences of impaired breathing, and brain activity. It was interesting work and she liked working with patients. More than anything, it was comfortable and she needed that. Academia could be a place where all the cracks in the walls and in people were only visible from the inside.

One night she wondered if there was a position that married what she’d learned thus far. Having a satisfying career was always about integrating skills and applying them to the next venture. Eventually, you could find a job that didn’t feel like work. She liked the idea of that.

When the position for a sleep tech with a statistics and psychology background opened, she jumped at it. Wowed by her spunk and unconventional thinking, she was hired on the spot. What good fortune! But it was confidential research project and after signing a non-disclosure agreement, she was presented with a cover job to tell anyone if they asked. It should have given her pause at that moment, but making another leap seemed like trusting her intuition and going where the road bent.

Once employed, Dr. Vincent Vogel, a disgraced and ostracized academic she later found out, started introducing bits of the experiments at a time, but of course, never the whole picture. Then again, no one really did, because a consultant wouldn’t understand the implications of the study anyway. What he was clear about was creating a software package and acquiring equipment to record dreams and imprint information into the brain. Toby could figure out how to do that too. Her teenage years were spent building servers and coding with her older brother in her parent’s basement. She was also a science major in college.

Vincent was stubborn and despite the input of Molly, who was actually trained in neuropsychology, he wouldn’t budge on his methods. Little by little, Toby started suggesting changes to Molly and those got through to Vincent. The study finally gained steam and Toby was proud of that.

She stopped typing and in that moment realized why she was there: she was supposed to be. Her work demanded the sharpest tools she had and during this project, she used them all. Only what she was about to do was try to save someone. And she wasn’t sure how to do that yet.

David was blinking away waves of vertigo when Carmine came into the bathroom. Without a word, he put a maintenance sign on the door, locked it, and popped open the two bathroom stalls to be sure no one was there.

“She’s going to be here for another 20 minutes before we have to close out her tab. You did it, Dave.”

David looked over at him, still in a cold sweat with knees on the verge of buckling. He rubbed his face with both hands and when he looked up at the mirror again, he could see his reflection.

“I have to talk quickly,“ Carmine said with his hands in his pockets. He looked back at the locked door.

“I’m going to teach you how to make exits.”

David shook his head in confusion. “I can just go right through the door.”

“That may not always be possible, so you have to be able to get out of here,” Carmine said gesturing up and around him. David turned to him and instantly knew what he meant.

“Imagine a door. Really concentrate on it. You don’t need to create a lot of details. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. Imagine that on the other side is the waking world. Turn the handle, walk through the door, and you’ll wake up.”

David chuckled bitterly. “I make a door and walk through it.”

“Yes. If you ever need to get out. Imagine a door.”

“Jesus, should I carry a purple crayon?”

“Shut your f*****g mouth and listen. One of these days, Vogel won’t let you out.”

The words gripped him and wrung him loose. His knees finally buckled and he slid down onto the floor.

“You know—”

“Yes. Someone helping you does. Now imagine the door. Do it.”

David sat in a stupor, unfocused and struck with this knowledge that two existences were intersecting. Carmine crouched down and moved in close.

“Do it now before we’re found out,” he said in a low growl.

David turned toward a blank wall with a framed poster of a lavender field near sunset. He let his eyes relax as he traced rolling hills and an orange-red sky. The stalks began to sway and in the silence of the men’s room emerged the sound of crickets. Carmine held back his alarm at hearing them too.

The picture frame elongated and met the floor tiles below. The beating stalks of lavender blew away like dust and wood paneling replaced it. A crystal doorknob appeared.

“Talent,” Carmine said plainly. “Now get out of here.”

He helped David to his feet and patted his back. David turned the knob and opened the door to a void with in bright orb in the distance. He turned back to Carmine, who nodded to urge him on. David took off running and braced again the rapidly expanding light.

He jerked awake. He was in the dream room.

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Welcome back to The Listening Room for chapter two of Hypnotic. You can go back to listen (or read) chapter one to catch up.

We encountered a scary descent into a dreamworld for David and a suggestion by tech Toby about how to improve mission results. In this episode, we see what comes from the stillness.

2.

The hinges of the pass through creaked open at the bottom third of the door. A silver food tray lay in the opening.

“Meal,” a voice said dully.

David got off his bed and walked over to get the tray. He brought it to his fold out table against the wall and pulled up a stool. He could tell it was morning in the windowless room since the lights brightened and dimmed on a timer. Even bathed in golden yellow photons of supposed mid morning, it was dreary and dull against the cement walls.

The food met caloric and nutrient needs but nothing else. Protein, carbohydrates, vegetables, and fruit were partitioned neatly on the tray.  At least there was salt and some pepper but not much else. Vincent had assured him that keeping his environment bland meant he was more suggestible in dreams.

He plunged a fork into the square piece of meat product and took a bite. Not bad, but not that great. Just the routine. There was no television or radio permitted, only selected literature that did not include horror. He wondered if this is really what it took to get results, to be starved of flavor and color just to meet the project goals, but also his own.

His own goals. He pressed his eyes shut for a moment to remember why he even let someone lock him in a room day and night, asking questions, taking readings, taking blood and piss. At the end of this, he would not only achieve what he’d set out to do, but maybe helped someone else. Maybe thousands of people. That made him crack a smile.

He could call his parents with good news for once instead of being the last in the litter. He bristled at the thought, of still clawing toward who he was supposed to be. It felt juvenile. A hundred talents and not one to make a solid living. But he could never latch on to a world he thought was fake. Debt was numbers on a screen and interest, arbitrary. Career climbs meant the same contortion scripted from similar playbooks. Find someone to open a door for you, then walk through. Nonsense.

David rebelled with every cell against what he was supposed to do and so he lived in dreams. In dreams, people were pushed by the wind down a path or could finally say what they meant with conviction. They could be strong and capable, driven by some imperceptible energy. He levitated once because he wanted to and walked across the air down the halls of his high school.

He shoveled the food into his mouth and was still deflating a bloated cheek full of peas when he opened the pass through door and set the tray on it. He snatched up a book of poetry and sat back on the stool to read. He flipped to the bookmarked page and read a piece about rediscovering the places you already know.

“A Day of Never by Gale Kearney. Hmm,” he muttered.

David stopped a moment to contemplate the unnatural, penetrating quiet. There was a low electric buzz in the stillness that put him in a trance. He became acutely aware of his limbs in a way could hardly explain, only that it was detachment. His conciseness drifted outside his body  and he would stare at his hands, watching his finger curl and uncurl like foreign things.

It was month three of the same circular journeys inside himself, of a gray and sterile routine. He tried to be grateful instead of bored, but it was hard when the hours crawled. In two hours, the door would be unlocked and he was free to use the gym. His room was large enough to be comfortable but not for any serious exercise. Opposite his table was a extra long twin bed with a beige metal frame and standard issue gray sheets. Behind the headboard was a dividing wall concealing a toilet, small sink and mirror. At the foot of the bed was a inset cabinet where he kept an extra set of clothes.

The only way to consume time during these hours was in his mind. He had done that a lot before he entered the facility. At his first job as a security guard at a toy store, he wandered into a world behind his eyes until a manger noticed people stealing on his shift. That was the first of quite a few times he was let go for the same inattentiveness.

David lay his head back against the cool wall and his room faded away into a bus stop by the Greenwood Mall in Edison. To his left was an elderly woman in a navy blue custodian uniform and tote bag pressed against her side. The faded logo of Bamberger’s was stamped across it in styled text. Defiant tufts of grass poked out along the curb in front of him.

There was a moment of confusion amixed with a realization slipping away. He looked around and the air was filled with fine dust scattering afternoon sun. He didn’t know how he knew it, but it was 1997. He rocked back and forth on the bench as if to confirm it would squeak and it did. He stifled a guffaw. What a strange proof.

Then a faded brown, boxy sedan rumbled by and there was no doubt. He heard the boom of an expensive trunk stereo rattling the car’s panels. The driver was blasting a song David knew well and he bobbed his head instinctively, recited the lines that trailed out the driver’s open window.

When the car passed, David noticed a man dressed in a dark suit and wide-brimmed hat across the street with a high shrub behind him. The man wasn’t moving, just staring at the ground. David squinted and saw he was clean-shaven. Other cars passed and blocked his view before he was able to focus on the man again. Brown hair?

Suddenly another man scooted beside him to his right and excused himself for squeezing into too small a space on the bench.

“Hey pal,” the man said.

David turned to him questioningly, “How’s it going?”

The man stared straight ahead and his smooth round cheek barely moved as he talked.

“I have information, but we can’t talk here.”

“Oh yeah, then where?” David kept his eyes on the man across the street.

“There’s a bagel place on the main drag in Fords.”

“Liberty?”

“Yeah. Meet me there in an hour.”

The man rose with his bookbag and slung it over his shoulder. He plucked a phone from his pocket and answered.

“Nah, I’m by the bus stop. I’ll meet you by the hibachi place. No, no, not tonight, I’m watchin’ my cholesterol.” He let out a halting snicker into the phone and walked away.

It was that detail that broke the veneer. No one on the street had a mobile phone in 1997, much less one without buttons that didn’t need a dial up tone to access the internet. The phone use was for misdirection and in that moment, his brain defaulted to the easiest way for anyone to exit quickly: an important call. Only he was still in elementary school in 1997, when someone could not be reached if they weren’t near a landline. He had not been old enough for a pager either. A beeping pager and a nearby payphone would have filled the gap better.

David didn’t want to dwell on it. That preoccupation threw him out of a dream more quickly. He was still working on that. Each time a trial. Each task a skill. Had he heard that somewhere?

On the bench where his new companion had sat was a white envelope. David tucked it into his pocket, then looked across the street to see the suit clad stranger was gone.

The bagel shop menu was standard fare. David ordered a bacon, egg, and cheese on an everything with a side of home fries and a coffee. It was a proper New Jersey meal if there was one. He looked at his watch. 45 minutes. His companion would show up shortly, but didn’t have to starve waiting.

He heard the dunk of a wire basket into hot oil and the sizzle of eggs and bacon on the griddle. Besides the teenage waitress and a young man who wasn’t much older, the place was deserted. Weekday morning, probably.

David sat facing the door and looked out on the sleepy street outside. The waitress slid a cup of coffee in front of him and set down a bowl of creamer packages. He flipped through the sugar packets on the table until he found brown sugar. A very small detail. It was sugar substitutes and regular in the 90s. He selected a French vanilla creamer from the bunch and slid the bowl toward the sugars and condiments.

Inconsistencies, he thought. They were the parts filled in for the purpose of continuity but sometimes got wrong. He found one in each sequence. Maybe there was always one. Maybe he didn’t need to rely on an external object like a chess piece or a spinning top, just those inconsistencies. He would have to make sure he found one.

The man from the bus stop pushed open the door and waddled in with his bookbag. He tossed it onto the bench seat across from David before sliding in. He tried to push the table for more room and was frustrated to find the table was anchored from underneath.

“Hey buddy,” he said shifting to find a comfortable position. “Damn, everywhere you go these things are too small. Lucky you.”

David gave a spiritless smile.

The waitress brought out David’s meal and pulled a notebook from her pocket.

“Hi, can I get you something?”

She swept her hair behind her ear and pulled the sleeves of her gray sweatshirt over her hands.

“Just a black coffee.”

After the order was delivered and the waitress returned to her perch behind the register, his companion spoke.

“I’m glad I caught you. Been trying to link up for a few days. I have some information on your target.”

“Oh yeah?” David asked.

“Looks like she’s been having a nice leisurely summer. Couple trips down the shore. Little shopping in the city. Even went out to a farm in Milford for raw cheeses. I got a cousin in Jersey City sells the same s**t. Whatever. Suit yourself, I say.”

He shrugged, then reached into his bookbag and froze. David studied the scene that had paused like a VHS tape without the need for adjusting the tracking control. He sipped his coffee and scanned the corkboard advertisements near the door for little league fundraising, music lessons, and landscaping services, among many others tacked on business cards of varying ages.

Behind him, the cook stood with his hand open and a spatula suspended above it while the waitress looked on in amusement. She was just leaning off her stool to stand. David turned around toward the door again to see the suited man in the shop window. He gasped.

The lock slid open and a voice announced, “Gym!”

David tipped his head forward. He ran his hands through his thick hair and scratched his scalp. He went farther this time, but was in no rush. Pausing the dream had become easier but the suited man moved outside his control. He shuddered.

Yawning and stretching, he lumbered through the open door to the gym where his footfalls were the only sound.

High in the upper corner of David’s room, a red unblinking eye captured something extraordinary.

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Welcome listeners and readers! This is the first chapter of The Listening Room presentation “Hypnotic”. We meet David Fuller who is a test subject of Dr. Vincent Vogel, a man doing disturbing research into dreams.

1.

“You know, the closest we get to the feeling of death is the moment before we fall asleep. It’s an utterly delightful, warm, and peaceful transition we do not study enough.”

Were it not for the man reclined with his arms outstretched on a modified exam chair with restraints, Vincent would have been mistaken for a lecture hall professor with his hands clasped behind his back as he paced. He shuffled his feet against the cement floor and glanced down, oddly pensive in front of what looked like a hostage in an interrogation room.

“You see, you are actively engaged in processing, whether it be how the day made you feel, thoughts on what’s for dinner, perhaps the next movie you’d like to see. Then there is a slow, imperceptible depression of higher level function before you start slipping away. Until the very instant your brain converts to delta waves, or light sleep, dozing if you will, you believe you’re awake. It’s only a groan or a nudge that clues you in.”

The low buzz of overhead fluorescent lights filled the consuming quiet between Vincent’s words. David lay against the stiff gray-blue padding of the exam chair, which pressed into the back of his knees where it hinged. The chair also bowed at his lower back, forcing him to sink his body into the hollow. He squirmed against a developing cramp.

His head was strapped down tight enough so he could not look left or right, only straight ahead at a white wall with a yellow color block at the center. Behind him was a two-way mirror with a control room beyond it. Technicians had paused the audiovisual recording to allow Vincent his monologue. Even if David could crane his neck to stare into the dark, rectangular panel, no one would help him.

David panted, staring at Vincent with pleading eyes. He dragged his tongue over his dry, quivering lips and pursed them as if to speak. To beg. But all he could muster was a choking cough as the words got lost on the way out.

Vincent opened a drawer under the exam chair and pulled out a rubber mouth guard. He roughly fitted it into David’s mouth before giving him a wry smile and roving over David’s face with a pitying stare. But like clouds streaming past to reveal a blazing sun, his face brightened.

“David, I am on the cusp of something extraordinary. My hope is to suspend someone in the stage right before they sleep, to reach out and touch that sleep.” He clamped the air with his hand as if catching an insect, then crushing it.

“You’re helping me do that. I want to see what precisely is severing all those connections at the moment you fall asleep, so I can keep them tethered and induce a waking dream, an active dream. Imagine all society would be able to work through in their dreams. Imagine therapy through waking dreams, recreating a circumstance and making a new choice.” Vincent paced and continued lecturing his immobile subject, who tracked his movements with a mixture of horror and stubborn hope.

“You’re going to help me, David,” said Vincent, tugging on the straps holding him to the chair. “We’re going to see exactly how your brain works.”

David’s eyes welled up and his body quaked. He had read about horrific sleep experiments performed on prisoners of war and death row inmates. In mapping the sleep and wake mechanisms, researchers disconnected people from their reality. Subjects eventually could not tell the difference. Worse yet, there was no epilogue for unlucky survivors.

“Sorry about the… accommodations,” Vincent said gesturing to the chair. “We’re not fancy here. Gotta take what we can get. This is from an internist’s office. I would’ve liked a dentist’s chair instead. I want you know I’m working on it.”

David nodded against the head restraint. Vincent always kept his promises, especially when it came to the little things that mattered. The thought brought a momentary reprieve and his back sank into the hollow of the chair. He jerked against a cramp.

Vincent swabbed David’s arm with alcohol and prepared a syringe. The injection was like a drop of water splashing against cement, nearly noiseless, before a pipe burst. Onset was rapid before David would feel he was lifted out of his own mind into a sea of blackness.

“Look at the yellow square. Look at it, David,” he said flatly. “You know what to do when you go under. Find Mr. Feldman. Find him!” he hissed.

David’s eyes fixed on the square. A slow, warm wave washed over his body. He suddenly grimaced and fought back a creeping, nauseous feeling in the back of his throat. Breathe, he said to himself. It was the top of a cliff before free fall. Suddenly he was floating, his body light and tingling before going limp. He winced against the lights and suddenly could not remember why he was struggling. His breathing slowed and his eyelids were heavy with the promise of sleep. Wonderful sleep.

Vincent leaned over next to his ear and whispered, “Into the fog.”

He rapidly descended into an awaiting abyss.

David clamped his eyes shut, then blinked against the glare of the lights. He sat up from the exam chair drenched in sweat.  He leaned over and put his head in his cupped hands. It’s so hard. It’s so much. He shook himself and swung his bare feet down to touch the floor.

He had a more comfortable exam chair like Vincent had promised, not with restraints, but plush supports that fitted the shape of his body. He went on another mission that night but did not find his target. He could not manage to alter the dreamscape this time and the target slipped away. He’d have to try again another night.

Molly stepped into the control room and looked out at a now shirtless David stretching and twisting his body. He slowly removed electrodes from his chest and arms, then peeled away the Velcro strap under his chin, and removed the electrode cap.

“You’re going to burn a hole in his back,” Toby said. She side eyed Molly and shook her head.

Toby had three large screens at her console with blue text and graphs streaming over black backgrounds. She scanned the information and highlighted points of interest for further review. She pulled up a templated document and began fulling in the night’s observations. Molly was seated at a second console waiting for results to be compiled for comparison to a previous test run.

“How close did he get to the target?”

“Closer than the last time but he’s… not there yet.”

Molly frowned. The test runs had begun in earnest weeks before but David had made little progress. He got stuck at similar points in the dreamscapes and rarely moved past them before eventually waking empty-handed.

“Can I offer a suggestion? I mean, I know you and Dr. Vogel are the brains, but I wanted to tell you what I noticed.”

“Go ahead,” Molly said absently, scrolling through the telemetry data on heart rate and brain activity.

Toby sighed. “I don’t want to liken this to a video game —“

“But you’re about to liken it to a video game,” Molly interrupted. She scoffed and kept scrolling through the data.

“You sent him in brute force on missions where he had no skills and no tools. He also had no allies. It’s just one of those things in gaming. Before you go on some big quest, you have to get familiar with your surroundings, look in your closet, talk to villagers, and have an inventory of your food and weapons.”

“Sorry, where are you going with this?”

“Your hero needs to start small. He needs to acquire basic skills before doing anything. I don’t mean to s**t on your experimental design, but—“

Molly had turned toward her and crossed her arms on her chest.

“But you didn’t scale this. You had a good idea but have taken this hurried way of approaching it.” She fell short of calling it boneheaded.

She swiveled away from the console and rested her forearms on her thighs, facing Molly.

“David needs signposts. He needs to recognize where he is and he needs faces he recognizes. Having watched his test runs, I’d say that’s a big part of the problem.”

Molly scrunched his nose and considered her. There had been so much planning to secure their testing grounds, acquire equipment, recruit staff, and build in David’s daily routine that neither she, nor Vincent had considered such a small, albeit critical part of the study’s success and reproducibility. That oversight might be expected for a study like theirs—one that only a few knew was even taking place.

“So what’s your fix for this?”

Toby perked up. She swiveled back to her console and placed her hand onto a red trackball. She scrubbed through a video and stopped. She zoomed in on a figure in the background. The still was of a bartender cleaning a long stem glass. His face was partially hidden by a hazy vignette.

“Which dream sequence is this? From last night?”

“No, a week ago. This was the Bond themed one,” she said smiling

Molly smirked at the failed attempt to create a path to the finish that David knew how to navigate.

“This is the fourth time this man has shown up in the background.”

“Fourth? Who is he?” Molly squinted and moved in closer to Toby’s screen. She could see his slicked back, dirty blonde hair and the shadow of a mustache. He was tucked behind a laughing bar patron but she could see two black bars on his shoulders that could be suspenders.

“He’s cute.”

Toby smiled. “Ovulating?”

“Ugh, yes. The breakup was very poorly timed.”

Toby raised both eyebrows, but kept any more comments to herself.

“Whoever he is, he’s probably deep in David’s subconscious. That’s someone who can play a bigger role somehow.”

“Can you do a search?”

“Sure.”

Toby pulled up another video and scrubbed through to find a clearer shot of the man. She soon found him standing at a bus stop in a test run where David had been speaking to a contact nearby. She copied the still of his face and dragged it over to another screen, placing it within a square panel. She toggled onto a green search button and pressed it. A blur of photos whizzed on the bordering panel.

“Let me know what you find.”

“Will do, boss.”

Molly stood up to leave, considering who this mystery man might be and how to use him.

“Uh, Molly, one more thing,” Toby said meekly.

Molly stopped in the doorway. She was backlight by the harsh hallway lights and appeared in silhouette, tall and imposing. Toby inhaled deeply.

“See this vignetting around the video?”

She pointed to the still of the bartender, then at the bus stop. “We used to think it was rendering artifact but it’s the way David sees in his dreams. I didn’t really think about it until I tested the other subject. Their dreams are in really high resolution. Maybe that’s something else to consider?”

David moved like the beat of a metronome with pieces of his routine clicking into place by the minute. Outside what he called the dream room was a long, gray hallway with cement floors and walls. On his first tour of the space, it reminded him of a fallout bunker and he imagined all the blocked off and unexplored corridors that might be down there. He had access to only a few doors, none of which led out of the facility.

David turned into the small changing room with a center bench between a few wood-paneled lockers. No one else was ever there, though. He stripped off his sweaty clothes and dropped them into a nearby hamper. There was an adjoining sitting shower where he’d run the water hot for a few minutes while he breathed in the steam. Then he’d grab a wash cloth and a bar of unscented soap.

When David returned to the bench, his clothes were laid out: always a pair of soft gray chinos and cream long sleeved shirt with white socks and gray slip in shoes. It had ceased to be strange after a while and was just the routine. He got dressed and headed down the empty hall to his room.

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You’re in the Listening Room, a podcast series by The FLARE Substack. I’m Chevanne, the voice behind both.

If you’ve been a fan for a while or at least gone through my podcast archive, you know that each year on October 3rd, I share an audio presentation. Today continues that tradition as both a celebration of a medium I’ve become more passionate about over time, audio performance, and of my birthday.

I’m 40. Saying it out loud feels heavy because this time felt so far away when I was up at night watching X-Files reruns or reading Fear Street novels as a teen. Time is no longer a slug, but an arrow and I feel it.

My birthday has always been a big event with high expectations, mostly of myself. In recent years, however, I haven’t been able to meet them because it is after all, just another day. I remember telling someone it had never rained on my birthday. It was always sunny, until one year it wasn’t. As I got older, big plans for solo vacations were rapidly scaled back by my own fear and sometimes family obligation.

Was this day a happy event? I’d spent a long time thinking so but a therapy session revealed I was unwittingly raging against this feeling of being in the same place, of doing the same things. I was disappointed but showed up every October 3rd as if the sadness never came.

This year, rather than work myself up with expectations of this big day, I’m changing the narrative. One relates to feeling like I’m in the same place. If I cannot be somewhere new, I can find something new in the places I already go. I’m hoping to lean into that shift and adjust my expectations. In the end, it’s better for me.

I’m also making October 3rd a beginning. Nothing has to be formed and ready but it’s a good day to get started. I’m starting now.

At the end of the show transcript are two deals for a Forever Founder and Forever Fan, both 40% off for life.

Now let’s get to the fiction.

In this season, we meet David, who signs up for an extended sleep study to find a potential cure for his insomnia. He adopts a rigid routine designed by a researcher and his assistant who use certain cues to induce his sleep. David doesn’t know he is being studied in other ways as well.

We go into his dreams but it’s uncertain if he’ll be able to leave them, as the waking a sleeping worlds become two sides of a coin.

To note, this story is still under construction. It’s a potentially complex topic I’m working through so the goings may be slow. Feel free to email [email protected] with questions or insight.

Episodes will premiere each week on Tuesdays at 2pm starting October 15th. Hope to see you there.

Happy listening!

I’m offering two deals for founding and yearly subscriptions starting today. As always, thanks for your support of this newsletter and of my work.

Put in $120 for your founder discount. I’ll send a confirmation to approve the Forever Founder status.

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And now for the conclusion…

When school let out for the summer Martin was dangling at the end of his rope managing the two starkly different parts of his life. He had finally gotten done wrapping up the year a week afterward. The classroom had been cleared out and he headed home, tired but satisfied. 

He fantasized about a hot shower and crisp, cold bed sheets as he trudged up the front steps. Before his key entered the lock, he could hear laughter coming from inside. It was Lena and someone else he didn’t recognize. Martin shrugged it off and opened the door. His work bag slipped from his hand as he saw the guest sitting comfortably at his dining room table.

“Marty!” Alonzo hollered before jogging over to meet him at the door. “Welcome home,” he whispered mischievously.

Lena playfully shoved Alonzo out of the way and planted a kiss on her husband’s stiff lips. “Alonzo was just telling me about the work you do together. Logistics, client recruitment… seems like you could get in full time over the summer with school out. You could make a lot.”

She joined Alonzo at the table and motioned for Martin to join them. “Why you still standing with the door open?! Wastin’ all my air conditioning.” 

“You know,” Alonzo started somberly. “You remind me of my mom, of what little I remember.”

As Lena’s face softened, she didn’t notice Martin lowering himself slowly into the chair between them.

“She was kind, welcoming, and really really loved me, you know? Like, I couldn’t do wrong in her eyes.”

“What happened to her?”

“She, uh, she passed away, unfortunately. Car accident.”

“Goodness! I’m so sorry. You were young, right?”

“Yeah. Uncle Leo took me in with my sister Cariann. We’re like his kids. Everyone here just made me feel real welcome. Like I wasn’t alone.” Alonzo lowered his head and brought his hand up to his dry eyes.

Martin glared at Alonzo with disgust. “I thought you and Cariann had the same mom and she’s very much alive.”

His head rose with a cold and blank expression. “You got it wrong, Marty.”

“I’m not sure I do.” 

“Martin, leave the man alone!” She scurried to Alonzo’s side, patting his shoulder. “Let me get that book you wanted to borrow.”

He smiled sweetly, holding onto her hand for a moment. He turned quickly back to Martin.  

“Relax. You’re going to have to. She’ll be back in a second and you’re, uh, telling on yourself.”

Martin did not take his eyes off Alonzo.

“Here you go: Scattered Poems by Jack Kerouac. That’s a pretty specific request. Most people want the big titles. How’d you hear about it?”

“Oh you know,” Alonzo said, still looking at Martin. “Just poking around you find interesting things.”

Martin forced a twitchy smile, but under the table, was gripping the chair until his fingers cramped. “You got what you came for. Better get going, friend.”

“I sure will.”

“Come back anytime. I have lots more books.”

“Appreciate it Mrs. LaSalle.”

“Oh, call me Lena. It’s fine.”

His feigned shyness nearly evaporated when he turned to Martin. The men grasped hands, each applying more and more pressure. 

“Okay, you two! Good night, Alonzo. See you later,” she escorted him to the door. There was more giggling and playful banter on the porch before Lena returned amused and refreshed.

“Jealous much?” she said, rolling her eyes. “He’s a kid and I remind him of his mom.”

“I don’t want him here.”

“Wow, okay, it’s that deep? You think something’s going to happen between us?”

“No, I just—”

“Martin. We’re in a new neighborhood. He’s a friend.” Exasperated, she left him sitting at the table and closed the door to her office.

Martin was no longer a guest at the Filbert Street building, but a member. He entered without an escort and passed Uncle Leo on the stairs, waving as he went. He had business with Matthew. He could not work with Alonzo anymore. Things had gotten out of control. He pounded on the apartment door, breathing heavily, but not from his swift ascent. He had a lot to say about what had been going on. He was filled with a mixture of fear and rage. Martin pounded again, more insistent this time.

The door creaked open. Martin’s face tensed as he stared at Alonzo. Just the person he didn’t want to see. “Where’s Matt?”

“He left.”

“To where?” 

“Not sure,” Alonzo said nonchalantly. “New assignment.”

“I need to speak—”

“You can speak with me. I’m your new boss.” He opened the door widely to reveal a newly designed apartment. 

The fear dissipated and was entirely replaced with rage. 

No one was in the trailer in PA. He’d had the summer to case the area and noted that associates only occupied the house briefly when they were due to deliver. A big shipment had come in the week before and there would be nothing coming for a month. Martin brought the bulletproof vest Alonzo gave him. 

He opened up the trailer and found a scant dwelling with no personal items. A few snacks and soda cans in the refrigerator. The bed was made. 

Martin returned right before he knew he’d be called for a pickup and knocked on the door. Before the occupant could say a word, Martin pointed a gun in his face. “Get inside.”

“You dumb as f**k.”

“Shut up.”

He began stuffing his duffel bag with money and drugs. 

“You won’t get far, trust me.”

“Shut up!”

“Hey, LaSalle.”

Martin’s head whipped around to find Alonzo casually standing in the doorway.

“How the hell—”

“While you were learning our habits, we were learning yours. Shame. You teach, but don’t learn,” Alonzo said. He held the door open for the other man, who quickly ran out into the dark.

“I have a gun.”

“I know. One of mine.” Alonzo shrugged, “Martin, you don’t know what you’re doing. You could be living just fine. You got the new apartment, a nice little office in the front room. You could have quit anytime. That’s the beauty of it. We don’t hold on to people. But that’s because…we’re your neighbors, your students, employers, shop owners… if you stay, you need to keep quiet. And if you go, you still gotta keep quiet. Cuz I might be a neighbor again.”

“You’ve killed people. You’re kidding yourself.”

“How do you think heat has never been in our neighborhood? There’s nothing to see. Old ladies coming from the airport. Students bringing home science projects…” Alonzo opened the fridge and got a can of soda. “It’s perfect. We live like rich people. People in the organization don’t pay for anything. We eat good food, and we don’t have to be where we are not welcome.”

“Police are watching you. They always are.”

“They know what we tell them. We might sacrifice a shipment and some unfortunate dudes to keep up the lie, but for every kilo they catch, we already sold 20.” Alonzo chuckled then belched loudly and laid on the bed. 

“Relax LaSalle. You’re not leaving this trailer. Not tonight.”

Martin made a running start toward the lounging man and was struck with a quickly raised elbow. Falling back, he came at Alonzo again, punching him in the jaw, then in his belly. Alonzo fell forward wheezing then rose fast, headbutting Martin, who stumbled back without falling, catching himself against the trailer wall. Alonzo grunted, his mouth dripping blood, and went on the attack. 

The men tussled violently, shaking the trailer and knocking over what little was on the shelves. Alonzo tried to keep his distance. The kid wasn’t as confident with his fists as he’d been with a gun in hand. He began hurling whatever he could find to stop Martin’s advances. 

After deflecting a flying drawer, Martin lunged forward, suddenly close enough to grab Alonzo, who he threw to the ground. Martin quickly settled his weight on top of him, beating him about the face and chest. Bloodied, exhausted, and nearly unrecognizable, Alonzo fell still. Martin quickly tied him up, with a piece of torn bed sheet already stained with their blood. 

Just then, Martin noticed the headlights of cars pulling up. He ducked down behind a seating area and looked out a broken window. Alonzo groaned in the next room. He was still down.

Men approached the trailer, donned in black with sunglasses and fitted caps. They were armed. A deepening dread filled Martin as he thought of Alonzo’s last words to him.

You’re not leaving this trailer. Not tonight.

A loud bang rang through the metal siding, startling Martin. He fell back and knocked over a kettle. The men outside could hear the commotion and knew their target was still inside. The first few shots blew holes in the upper cabinets. A few others knocked out the front window. One hit a wind chime. 

Martin stood up and started firing back, ducking down and shifting position when the strangers returned fire. They started emptying their clips with a tighter grouping of bullets. Martin did not relent and emptied his own clip.

One man stepped forward and fired directly at Martin through the broken front window, hitting him in the neck, then the chest and hand. Martin slumped back against the cabinets and powerlessly grasped at his wounds as he slowly bled out. The man stepped closer and continued firing as Martin's vision blurred and his senses faded. His body grew limp as he desperately fought against his diminishing strength. He was hit twice more, in the chest and thigh.

When the men entered the trailer, Martin was leaning against the splintered cabinets and barely breathing. They turned toward Alonzo, who sounded grateful to be found. His tone quickly changed. There were scuffles as Alonzo pleaded and struggled.

Blood dripped over Martin's eyes and burned. He could faintly hear Alonzo screaming now. Everything was distant and all he could think of was going to sleep. Then a single shot was fired. The trailer fell silent.

“What do we have here?” the detective said.

“One dead, tied up, beaten, and shot. 

“F**k.”

“I know. The other one was shot multiple times. He’s in the ambulance.”

The detective rushed over before the ambulance could leave. “Wait, wait, let me see him. Is he conscious?”

“No, he’s dead. We pronounced him an hour ago.”

“Did he say anything?”

“His throat was full of blood. Too far gone. He was barely alive when we got here.”

Dejected, the detective approached an officer taking notes at the scene.

“Say, Matt, what’s your theory?”

“Looks like the guy in the vest came to steal. Definitely. Maybe his friend is the inside man who set up the heist. The crew makes an example of him.”

“Nice. And we already know the  guy inside?”

“Alonzo Perez. Bronx native. No ID on the other man.”

“You’re from there, right? You knew Alonzo?”

“Yeah, he worked for my Uncle. Nice kid.”

The detective patted his shoulder and went to give a statement to the growing crowd of reporters. Matthew stared at the trailer, dutifully scribbling notes. His burner started buzzing. He had a new text. “Dinner’s done?”

“Yeah .”

This season was written and directed by me. Story editing by Leigh Green. Sound effects from freesound.org.

These seasons are never easy.. to write them, but especially to record and add sound and richness to it.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this presentation and I’ll see you next time.