Apperception

…stared back at me for a moment before I grabbed the dog, two paws in each hand, and threw him around my neck.  I glanced up for a fraction of a moment before I turned to run; no one in the room was moving.  They all just stared at me, none so coldly as the man in the middle of the room.  I booked it back to the front of the plane in half the time it took me to traverse the distance going the other direction, the weight of my canine passenger non-withstanding.

Upon reaching the open hatch next to the cockpit I found that my vantage was significantly lower compared to the hatch of the plane parked opposite.  What had been a relatively dangerous yet possible jump from one passenger jet to another over the choppy waves of a stormy sea had become an almost impossible leap.  I yelled for someone in the other plane to help me.  A face appeared and I hurled the frightened dog over my head into the man’s waiting arms.  Before I jumped myself I looked down to see the front landing gear slipping into the inky black sea.  I took three steps back, and propelled myself forward with every muscle in my legs, out of the hatchway, out over the deadly water…

…and barely grabbed hold of the bottom of the frame of the hatch of the adjacent aircraft.  As I screamed for help I could feel my fingers slipping from the rain-slicked metal.  Almost instantly arms appeared over my head and I was hoisted inside, out of the rain, and out of immediate harms way.  I stood in the doorway and watch as what could have turned out to be a long metal coffin for me and the recently saved passengers roll off the end of the runway, into the cold black waters.  At the end of the plane was an over-sized window, whose placement was wrong.  It should not have been there.  A yellow light burned inside that window, and a face stared back at me as the plane continued its descent into the depths.  My face.

I turned to the pilots, whose questioning faces were still pointed out the hatch.

“Start the engines.  We need to get out of here.”  It took a second for my words to register, then the co-pilot said something about unsafe flying conditions.

“Get us the fuck out of here NOW.  That was not a version of me we want to deal with.  Now MOVE!”

The school bus slowed down as it pulled closer to the state capitol building.  On a command from the driver the children began to load their smooth-bore muskets, tamping the cartridges and then opening the windows on the right side.  As the bus crept slowly up on its target the excited chatter of the kids escalated to a shrill crescendo, then stopped suddenly as the driver hit the brakes.  There was a brief pause where it seemed like the world stood still, and then…

CRACK!  The children opened fire, the barrels of their muskets poking through the open windows of the bus.  The sound of musket fire in such close quarters drowned out any possibility of communication.  Every thought was left half finished, interrupted by the deafening noise.  Even with the windows down the smoke became so dense it grew impossible to make out the target any longer.  The bus driver stepped on the accelerator and the sudden lurch forward ended the broadside attack.  As the smoke rolled out of the way the capitol building became visible.  Shattered glass lay on the steps, and the gray stonework was pocked with marks where each musket ball had impacted.  The last of the smoke disappeared as the bus turned a corner and the building was left behind.

No one is as surprised as I am to hear the beautiful, soulful voice emanating from my throat.  The deep, resonant crooning made even a simple “Mmmmhmm” sound as if it were coming from the deep barrel chest of a lonely blues musician with one foot in the grave, drawing his listeners down into the sorrow of his being.  Lyrics flowed through my mind and then my lips and tongue as I gave shape to the raw power that sprang from some well buried deep within my consciousness.  As I sang I was only vaguely aware of my fingers drawing themselves into accompanying chord shapes on the guitar in my hands.  I turned my head, trying to get a good look at my audience.  Try as I might to see them, their faces remained un-detailed, nothing evident to my comprehension but that they had dark skin.  One woman’s face seemed kindly and she may have lent her voice to my song, but she faded from view.  The song trailed off and I found myself in the house now alone.  With nothing to distract me I was able to finally take in my surroundings.

The house was old, wood, and simple.  I could tell this just from the room I was in.  I walked or floated out the front door; the means of my transportation were not important to me.  An outside perspective let me see just how small the house was, two bedrooms at most complemented the living area that I had been sitting in and I assumed there was a kitchen and bathroom.  The paint was peeling over the entire outside, and weeds grew up through and around the porch in the front.  But the windows still held their glass, and my mind’s eye was able to show me what the house would look like if someone would just put a little care into it.  I surveyed the land around it, and I felt comfortable and at home.

The house sat about half way up a slight rise that stretched from one horizon to the next, with gentle rolling hills to either side.  To the right of the slope, sitting in a depression, sat a small pond.  Or rather, there was a perfect place to put a pond and I could already tell that there would be one.  A well kept horse fence of evenly spaced posts and three horizontal rails ran up and down the slope.  Suddenly an old man appeared in front of me, leaning up against the fence.  Had he been there before?  It didn’t seem to matter.

He appeared to be in his sixties, although that weathered and sun-browned face could have been much older or younger.  Dressed in coveralls and a light green work shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his boots well-worn but cared for, his manner embodied the very essence of hard work.  He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it.  No words had come out, and I had said nothing, but an entire conversation had taken place.  At least, I now knew that the house was mine if I wanted to put in the effort required to make it livable.  I nodded my head in assent, and he turned to walk back up the slope.  Was there another house in the distance that he was returning too?  It seemed not to matter and I turned my attention back to the house to start planning its improvement.

A detailed examination uncovered the realization that there was a lot of work to do to turn the place into something that I would be proud and comfortable to call home.  The inside was in much worse shape than I had first noticed, and the whole house gave me a horrible unclean, creepy-crawly feeling as I walked from one room to the other.  To live here, I would need to gut the inside before I could start making improvements.  Wasting no time, I appropriated a crowbar from a shed that I found out back and got to work.

As the pile of scrapped wood and moldy carpet grew in the front yard of the house, so did the list of materials in my head that I would need to complete my plan.  After a lengthy, but undetermined amount of time, I decided to rest.  Back inside there was a bed that at least appeared clean, and I laid down.

More tired than I realized, I began to drift off to sleep.  Just before I slipped off to dream a feeling that something was wrong invaded my consciousness that kept me aware of my surroundings.  My body was paralyzed with sleep, but my eyes were open and I could see the room.  Someone was standing to the right of me, just out of view, and was using both of their hands in an effort to turn me over onto my side.  I screamed inside my head, and I knew it was the old man from earlier.  I had been set up, trapped in a state where he could use me.  For what I did not know, but I knew that it would be against my will.  The scream in my head grew louder, and I began to regain control of my body.  His efforts did not cease, until I began to flail my limbs in an effort to ward him off.

I crossed a threshold, some barrier in my mind, and control of my body was returned.  Immediately I left the bed, the house, the man, and the field behind to find myself back in my own existence.  My faith in my instincts increased, and my thoughts turned from relief to questioning.  Who sets such traps?

The rotors overhead continued their spinning, almost silently.  I could not tell what they were powered by.  It could be an engine of some type, but there was almost no noise.  It could be by my arms or legs, but I wasn’t aware of any effort on my part to keep them going.  Perhaps it was something the other occupant of this flying contraption was doing, but I couldn’t quite divert my attention from the activities on the ground long enough to get a good look.

There were people on the ground.  Large and small groups: walking, running, driving, all streaming in the same direction.  There was something in the way the groups were made up.  They were all in multiples of two!  How did I notice that?  Where were they heading to?  Apparently to the same place we were.  Finally I was able to pull my eyes from the ground and take a look at what my mysterious fellow passenger and I were flying in.  Or was he the pilot?

Above my head blades spun so fast that they appeared as one solid object, very similar to a tiny paper umbrella one would find in the “fruitier” of drinks available at a quasi-nice bar.  The part of the vehicle that I sat in was nothing more than a bowl large enough to accommodate two people comfortably.  Before I could get a look at the person sitting next to me my attention was again drawn to the ground.  Someone was calling out, smiling up at us, and pointing ahead.  The long streams of people were now all ahead of us, filling the streets between buildings and becoming a densely packed crowd.  We were being left behind!

The acceleration of the craft picked up and we banked into a turn that set our course for a few hundred feet above the center of the mass of people on the ground.  I could barely feel the change in speed, and then a sense of being pulled toward our apparent target took over.  As we skimmed over the tops of buildings I saw what everyone was crowding around in the distance.  A huge escalator, thousands of feet in the air, towered over the growing crowd.  Why would anyone put an escalator here, and why so high?  It didn’t go anywhere!  Still we flew to it, now aiming for the top.

We reached the top of the escalator at the same time as many who were riding the moving stairs to the top.  There, perched on the edge, was a normal looking man with sandy brown hair and smiling eyes.  He looked directly at me, and then sneezed into his hands.  Smiling, his nose running a little, he stepped off into the air and flew out of sight.  With that the feeling of being pulled ceased, and the stairs stopped moving.  Those who had reached the top at the same time as our craft began talking to each other about what had just occurred.  They all were agreeing with each other that that had been the weirdest thing they had ever experienced.  As the craft floated away, higher than before but back in the direction from which we had come, a few words followed on the wind.  They assured me that I had just been taken on a gentle excursion in the wild…

I found myself playing putt-putt golf in a beautiful hall with ceilings of a height on par with those of a cathedral.  It felt like a party, with clusters of elegantly dressed fops in victorian era clothing wearing powdered white wigs atop their heavily made-up faces.  Although everyone pretended to be aloof, engaged in conversation with those close by, all eyes were on me as I prepared to line up my shot.  It dawned on me that this shot would determine my standing among these people, and all I could think about was how awful at any type of sports I have always been.  I looked down at the position of the ball and the hole, and then the difficulty of making the shot in one stroke sank in.  If I had any skill at the game it could be accomplished by banking off of an obstacle to the left of the hole.  It wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done.  The safer approach, which I also determined to be more realistic for my level of expertise, would be to take two strokes, using the first to assure a better line to the hole for the second.  I brought my club back, and the low hum of conversation died away as my field of view narrowed to the course in front of me.  I swung lightly at the ball.

It rolled directly to the obstacle at the left of the hole, and at contact with it the dimpled white ball burst apart into a slinky.  As if falling down a set of stairs the slinky proceeded to trace a course around the hole, each arching movement of its segmented approach bringing it closer to the edge.  Three quarters of a full rotation around one end finally fell inside.  The rest followed half an instant later.  I looked down, and saw that the slinky had returned to its previous incarnation of a golf ball.  I looked up, to a room full of beaming faces, each with a carefully placed mole to the left of the mouth.  These mouths then errupted in jovial laughter, the sound supplemented with a polite smattering of applause.  Approval, apparently, had been won.

A beautiful lady of some social standing, enveloped in the very essence of haute couture, took me by the hand and led me to a white-clothed table, full of candelabra and delicacies resting on silver plates.  We began to converse, about what I can only imagine, and my perspective gradually changed until it appeared that I was watching the scene from another’s table, an observer of my own actions.  Watching myself from this distance, it took some time to realize how much self control it took to remain still, seated, and civil.  Every polite laugh and empty comment took an increasing amount of effort.

Suddenly two girls, beautiful like the first, darted into my line of sight from the right and grabbed my own arms.  The two of them, quite alluring, radiated something that spoke directly to the core of my sexual being.  Obviously distressed and quite annoyed at their presence, the woman who led me to the table stood up suddenly, and I was at once returned to my body, seated across from her.  Both girls, still smiling mischievously, let go of my arms and backed away.  They walked backwards across the entire hall, sure of their step, never looking back, always beckoning me, until they reached an exit and disappeared from view.

The conversation at the table returned, the woman sat down and shifted her attention back to me, and I tried to pay attention to what was being said.  I did not have the energy necessary to remain still after the previous spectacle, and my perception was already fading away from my body and across the room.  With a half-mumbled attempt at politeness I excused myself from the table and strode in the direction my viewpoint was already traveling.

One well-dressed man found himself directly in my path for an instant, and I tapped him on the chest with the thumb and each finger, excluding only the pinky, of my right hand several times in rapid succession, quickly tracing a design in the air between each tap.  I then made a gesture as if I was pulling his heart out through his chest, brought my hand up to my mouth, and took a huge bite of the nothing I was holding.  Only I was holding something, that I couldn’t see directly, that shimmered faintly in my palm.  That shimmering covered my lips and dripped down my chin, but was only barely visible and then disappeared.  The man walked on, oblivious, and my eyes went wild.  I covered the remaining distance between my body and my outside perspective quickly, each stride longer and made more vigourously, and then we were one again.