“You have had an accident.” The man told him. But his voice was light, airy, untuned. Perhaps this person wasn’t a man. His voice did not sound familiar, and yet, his was a familiar presence, something or someone that he knew. “How do you feel?”

“Terrible.” His body felt as though it was on fire. “Am I dreaming?”

“Yes,” the stranger responded. “And no. This is more than a dream. You are in a coma.”

Finally, he opened his eyes. The ground was hard beneath him, and the scent of summer evening air nostalgic. He could hear crickets, perhaps, or some strange beeping that he unconsciously filtered into the rickety chirps of seasonal insects. The air was moist. All around him was dim: a roadway. Off to his side a car was crumpled against a tree. Debris lay strewn across the road. He had the feeling that his head should hurt a lot right now, and in fact, that everything should hurt, and yet he felt lighter than a feather. If he jumped, he thought, he would float back to the ground like a ghost. Save for the uncomfortable stiffness in his neck.

“Steven.”

The man called for his attention. He looked familiar, very familiar. He was forgetting something important. The more he looked at the stranger, the harder it was to place him. He was a familiarity when viewed through the periphery, but when peered at intently his features seemed to disappear into uncertainty—a man at once seen and yet not really looked at, who did his best to remain so.

“I’m forgetting something important,” Steven said.

The man nodded. “Yes, you are. Many important things, in fact.” He smiled, but Steven felt the compulsion to look away when he did. “But we can start at the end and work our way backwards.”

“Who are you?”

He received a short smile, and the hint of a shrug. “Part of your unconscious, perhaps.” Steven already suspected that this was not the case. But it was a dream. Or at least, he was told that it was. “Trust me, I’m here to help.”

Steven looked around at the mess. The car, the burned tracks of rubber skidding a path off the road, the glitter of broken glass and the speckled chips of paint all presented an obvious scene. There were fluids around the car and smoke rising from its hood.

“I must have seen something in the road and swerved to avoid it,” he suddenly said. “Or, well,” he gazed at the tire tracks with greater intensity, stood up, and moved around to a position behind the car from the road. “No, maybe I just drifted off the road and tried to correct myself too late.”

“Hm,” the stranger said. He offered nothing.

“Aren’t you here to help?”

The stranger nodded, after a moment, and then nodded more. “Yes, I am,” he said, “I’m just a little surprised.”

Steven wasn’t sure what he meant by that.

“If this is a dream, then none of this is real, anyway,” Steven said. “How can I trust that it was even a car crash that put me here?”

The man walked over to the car and squatted down behind the rear passenger side wheel. Whatever he looked at, he did not reveal. “Your brain will recreate the trauma as a process of fixing itself,” he said. He seemed to be speaking without attention. “If it wasn’t a car crash, your unconscious mind is presenting it as such in order to process the event.”

“Is that how it works?”

“You’re the psychology major,” the man said, looking back at him. Steven frowned. “Shouldn’t you know?” He didn’t remember.

“It’s possible that this scene has just been on my mind a lot, and that I’m recalling it now because I’m in a coma.”

“Yes, but you are in a coma,” the stranger said. “Two and two do still equal four.”

Steven frowned and shrugged but the tension in his shoulders set off a pain across the stiffness in his neck. He had noticed it before, but it had grown stiffer and more painful over the intervening period.

“My neck hurts,” he said.

“Seat belt, perhaps?”

“That would make sense.”

Steven regarded the stranger who, head bowed, picked through the debris on the ground. He shuffled bits of detritus with his polished shoes, leaving his hands in his pockets like the protagonist of a story that he was too cool to be in. He did not look as though he fit in the scene.

“I guess it can’t hurt to analyze the accident,” he said. “After all, what else am I going to do, here?”

“It’s a coma. You can do pretty much anything,” the man mumbled without looking at him. “We could go away from here and catch a bite to eat. Or go find some girls.”

“I’d only be reconstructing the accident in different places if I left. There’s some reason why I’m here and not at a club or a restaurant. There’s something I’m supposed to figure out.” To what extent certainty seemed possible in a dream, this at least a certainty that Steven clung to. “If I’m wrong on this, then there’s probably no hope of getting out of here.”

“That doesn’t seem so bad, does it?”

“It does if I’m stuck here with you.”

“Come now,” the stranger said, hands upturned. “You know me, we’ve been around. I might not look the same but that’s an awfully harsh way to treat an old acquaintance.”

Steven, unable to deny the sense of familiarity the man exuded, frowned again and looked away. But the man seemed to relent.

“Okay then, we’ll stay here and see what we can see. Then we’re either here forever, or something like it, or we aren’t.”

“That’s a little too easy,” Steven said.

“I’ve got time,” the stranger said. “You’re the one in the coma.”

“But aren’t you part of me?” He vaguely recalled some of the psychology material that might have been coming back from his college days. “You’re just some projection my mind is using to organize itself.”

The stranger shrugged and walked back to the vehicle. “That’s fine.”

There was no moon or stars, nor were any rays of the sun visible in any direction. Steven idly checked that he wasn’t sure which direction North lay. He filed that fact away somewhere, presumably in the back of his mind, but instead quickly forgot it. “It’s hard enough to keep track of things in dreams,” he said. “Best to just use the starting point as… well, the starting point.”

As he fumbled his words, the stranger smiled and straightened. He looked at him. Steven looked away.

“Anyway,” he said, “if I had to guess, based on what I’m looking at, I probably got distracted by something on the road and swerved off. Tire tracks like this mean I applied the brakes, but they weren’t enough to stop me. Maybe it was too little, too late, or I was going too fast, or possibly a bit of both.”

The stranger, again, stayed quiet and observed him. Some aura seemed about him now, more threatening than before. He projected the sort of null-space quiet of a predator immediately before it strikes.

“What were you distracted by?” Steven frowned. “And was it so simple as that? I wonder.” The man maneuvered around to the driver’s side door. The hood was caved inwards and the front end of the car had been turned into a V-shape around the tree that it had collided with. Gingerly, so as not to get his shoes dirty from the fluids that had leaked out under the engine, the man peered inside the battered cabin. Glass from the windows sparkled around the interior like the remains of a party. He said nothing as his gaze passed over the ruined seats, the white dust and the remains of the deployed airbag.

Steven did not join him. He could see that there was something in the passenger’s seat. He could not tell if anything was where the driver should have been.

“Maybe the airbag is what did it,” he said to himself as he rubbed the back of his neck. But it didn’t feel as though he’d sustained a blow. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

The stranger looked at him and then back at the car. He nodded toward the mess. “Remind you of anything?”

The broken glass glinted.

“Was I at a party?” He squinted his eyes. He found recollection difficult. He could almost hear the music playing. The glass in the car was catching light from somewhere. Steven pulled himself away from the wreck and took several steps back. From the direction of the burned tracks was the road, and his gaze followed the black line of macadam into the darkness where it became obscured. A dim yellow light was not far off, shining through the windows of a modest house. The more he looked, the more he could see. The front lawn had figures lying upon it, and there were cars parked in the street before it. The door was open. Music seemed to emanate outwards, distorted, as if being played from underwater. Nothing moved. The figures were like shadows, amorphous, indistinct.

It was a sad song that played, something reverberating and unharmonized, muffled, bass-heavy and dulled. He did not like it. Any approach toward it seemed to weigh like some sort of resignation.

The stranger stepped out onto the porch from inside. His eyes narrowed in a smile and he gestured inside. “Find what you’re looking for?” Steven was standing on the front lawn. A glance behind him revealed his wrecked car far away now, down past the road and off the embankment. Distances were different in dreams.

He traversed the porch and didn’t look at the stranger. There was no one inside, but empty bottles cluttered the surfaces and various entertaining flotsam hung draped about the furniture. Various articles of clothing, papers and mail, disused and unidentifiable objects that indicated the unkempt remains of a good time. Steven grimaced. Was it a good time? Some dim recollection flirted at the edge of his mind. It was just out of reach. Something had happened, and it had happened here. Maybe it wasn’t something; maybe it was only something to him, something that held meaning in the grip of his own presumptions. He didn’t know. This was a dream.

But maybe not. He was dreaming.

“It’s a coma,” the stranger said. “It’s not a dream.”

“Nonetheless.”

He was at a party. People moved, gyrated, danced to songs unheard. But they were shades, blurred, unimportant, unnoticed save for the periodic flash of color or the glint of a glare or glance that was there burned into the archive of Steven’s dimming memory. A girl stood by the sink in the kitchen that caught his eye. Perhaps she was real. Her blonde hair reached about the middle of her back, and her jeans were familiar ones he’d made some glib remark about in the distant past. When she turned around, bottle of water in hand, she looked at him and smiled.

“She looks familiar.” The stranger’s voice came from beside him, remarking on the observation that had passed across his thought like a shadow. The stiffness in his neck inflamed just then, cripplingly painful. Her eyes would turn down in shyness after looking up into his, her shoulders would roll back, relaxed, as the unpracticed expression flooded her body with the force of an opened spigot. This was a scene he had seen dozens of times. Perhaps they weren’t always at this party, but on the sidewalk, between buildings of a campus, under the trees of a well-manicured park, on the couch of an apartment. It was an image burned there in recollection, singed golden-blonde and decorated with the pale grey-blue highlights of her glance, red and white in blush. He could feel the impression her hands made in his just from her expression at the sink. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

He saw the a strand of blonde hair that lay outside the ruined passenger side door, as if set there deliberately to be found. The pain in his neck subsided only a little, but it was enough for him to feel like he could move again. Broken glass reflected off the road in silver-crystal and blue dots.

“I didn’t meet her at the party,” he said. The stranger drew back. “That was my girlfriend.”

He picked up the strand hair. It glinted. He knew what he’d find in the passenger seat of the car.

“Remembered something else, eh?”

“These were things I didn’t want to remember,” Steven said. “I feel like I’d be better off without them.”

The stranger maneuvered himself between Steven and the broken out window of the car. “Maybe that’s why you’re still here.”

“Emotional purgation,” Steven muttered to himself.

“You’re the psychologist.” He still wasn’t quite so sure about that. Whatever knowledge of his profession or field of study remained irrelevant to his current circumstances. They seemed, in fact, so totally alien to his concentration that, had he been in righter mind or brighter spirits, he would have wondered whether he’d recall those things at all. He wondered also about whether he was inventing his presumptions about the field simply because he was told that it was his field, imagining that he knew things about it on the basis that some aspect of himself—or some stranger in this land of dreams—told him so. But he tried not to follow this line of reasoning too deeply, as it folded back in upon itself, circled around, turned his own reason inside out. Was he a psychologist suck in a dream, or was he dreaming that he was a psychologist?

“Coma,” the stranger corrected. “Not a dream.”

Steven refocused himself. Before his mind’s eye there lay the battered car and the accident and the lost future that sat sprawled and stained into the upholstery of a ten year old car with bad brakes. The darkness was closer then. The glitter of the broken glass pierced the gloom like needles, sharp, brazen, deliberate.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Steven suddenly said. “This car accident took place a year ago. I have recollection of it. It wasn’t on my mind when I awoke here, but this isn’t the accident that put me in the coma.”

“Perhaps that’s a false memory,” the stranger suggested.

“A whole year of false memories that I can’t even remember?” Steven asked. “That’s ridiculous.”

“How do you know a year has passed?”

“I just do. I know it’s been a year. I remember that much.” He pointed at the car. “I haven’t had that car for the past year, for one thing. I think.” Suddenly Steven was doubtful. “Isn’t that right?”

“Time works a little differently in dreams, remember,” the stranger said. “Or comas.”

“Unconvincing,” Steven said, after a short silence. “What am I doing here? Why am I reliving any of this? This is wasting my time.”

“Let’s not get ourselves too riled up.”

Steven turned away from the accident and walked back toward the road. All around in the black night there was no movement: the imitation of a perfect stillness wrapped in the cover of the dark that obscured any attempts to see past it.

“You didn’t look inside,” the stranger said.

“I’m not going to,” Steven called out. “I’m going to find a way out of here. I want to wake up.”

He walked for a while. He could not hear even his footsteps, but he judged, or felt, that the stranger was by him the whole time, behind him, just out of reach but certainly not out of sight. They moved like ghosts in a haunted land.

“A lot of time has passed. You might return home an old man,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to come home like Momotaro, would you?”

“Who?”

“Don’t play dumb with me.” The voice took on a dangerous edge. “Rip van Wrinkle, if you’re unwilling to be honest.”

“Ridiculous.”

The road brought them back to the car accident. Nothing seemed to have changed. Fluid still leaked out onto the ground, glass still sparkled in the road. Smoke still rose ominously out of the broken open hood. Still, he would not look into the cab.

“I should have guessed it’d be like this,” Steven said. He put a few more pieces together in his mind. “You were there when I crashed my car, weren’t you?”

“A year ago?”

“Or however long ago it was.”

The stranger’s eyes wandered. He made a vague gesture. “I wasn’t in the back seat, if that’s what you’re asking. How could I have been? You’d have recognized me by now.” He smiled. “Unless you already have.”

“I’m not saying you were in the back seat,” Steven said. He spoke with the slow deliberate tones of one still working through the puzzle. “Your face I don’t recognize but your presence I do.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” He approached Steven, who did not back away. “Is this your degree talking, or your experience?”

It was his gut speaking, but he didn’t say anything. And his neck began to hurt again. Suddenly, like white fire that curled around his throat. The pain made him choke, and he thought for a moment that he was seeing red, and he was, but it was the world around him that had gone red. There was pain everywhere. It was clear to him now that the dark curtain of gloom that hung about these scenes obscured the fiery-red heat of pain, and that the more he peered into the night, the more that crimson evening flame coiled itself around his neck and tortured him. Amid the red-bathed imagery, he looked down the road and saw something far away in the light. Something in him was bursting, bleeding perhaps, an organ or some memory of one. He could not tell which. Above him, standing with feet that seemed only lightly secured to the ground, the stranger offered his detached sympathies.

“How are you feeling? Unwell?”

The pain subsided enough for the world to go back to being dark and pale. He finally asked, “What is that?”

“Didn’t you suggest it was a seat belt?” The stranger had crouched down next to him, and he extended a hand out to help him back to his feet. “Or perhaps the airbag when it went off in your face.”

“But this car accident isn’t the reason I’m here.” He stood up without taking the offered hand.

“That you know of.” Steven made a noise at that but didn’t make any other response. His throat throbbed and there was still a great pressure in his head. The pain seemed to indicate that he was getting closer to something.

“At least being in pain tells me I’m still alive,” he said, though he was unaware of the error in the statement.

“Of course you’re alive. If you were dead, I wouldn’t be here in this form, would I?” The stranger’s tongue flashed briefly in the light of a terrible strobe. “We have our reasons.”

Steven found it hard to follow him. “We?”

“You and I, of course. I’ve been here with you along for the ride for a very long time. You’re one of my pet projects, you see.” Steven focused back on the wreck of the car. “You can’t just throw me out, now. This car wreck is mine as much as it is yours. Though it is mostly yours. I am glad you’re taking most of the credit, though. I told you, I’m on your side. I’m like your coach. I’m in your corner, gunning for you, but you’re the one throwing all the punches. And taking them.”

“Gunning for me to crash my car,” Steven said.

“Well,” the stranger said, “yes. But like you say, perhaps I was right there with you. Isn’t that any consolation?”

With a familiar gesture, Steven brought his hand up to his throat and massaged around his larynx. Some emotion must have passed over him then, because the look on the stranger’s face shifted.

“You’ve remembered something else, I see.”

That wasn’t quite true, but again, the dizzying haze of distant recollection seemed to organize into images at the edge of his intellect. They were, again, indistinct. Hard to make out. He looked away from the wreck toward what horizon could be glimpsed down the road. There was something down there. He didn’t think it had been there before.

“Best not to look that way,” the stranger said. “I’m on your side. I’m not on anyone else’s side. And I can assure you that you don’t want to see whatever that is.”

“Just like I don’t want to look in the passenger’s seat?” The stranger shrugged. “Can you even tell what that is from here?” Steven narrowed his eyes in an attempt to discern the far off sight.

“It’s best not for you to see, in my opinion. You might come to regret it, and it’s not time for that, yet.”

“Regret which?” Steven returned a glare at the stranger. “Regret what I see, or that I see it?”

The stranger didn’t reply at first, but let the silence speak for himself. Then, “it’s best if—”

“Best for whom?” He narrowed his eyes, and the stranger’s silence suddenly ran very deep and very cold. His aura of danger was back. “You are trying to scare me,” Steven said. “But that light down there is more important than whatever you want with me.”

The stranger grabbed him. “No,” he said. “In here, I can do whatever I want. You gave me this power. All of this is your fault.”

A sudden jolt of familiarity struck him at those words. “All of this is your fault,” he repeated to himself, but the stranger recoiled as if struck. Knowing what he’d done, the man again moved to lay a hand on him as Steven met his stare. “No, all of this is your fault, isn’t it?”

“You were complicit. You helped, you agreed with it, you followed along.” He moved toward Steven again, but Steven stepped back. He was far away from the car accident now. Steven looked past him, and there, looking at the front end of the car pushed up against the trunk of the tree, he saw in the passenger’s seat what he had refused to look at before. He did not look away. For some reason, this infuriated the stranger.

“Are you mad because I saw, or because I didn’t look away?” The stranger then was something else. His appearance remained, but it seemed to Steven that he was wearing a costume that shielded some greater power over which he would have no authority. Although he had not grown in size, he had grown in some other way, blocking out even the dark curtains at the edges of Steven’s interior space. It was a presence that drew his vision toward himself, almost fully, consuming and hungry, but harboring a deep and perhaps bottomless malice. Whatever presumptions of psychological method Steven held onto seemed to have no answers to the utter coercion of his will toward the shadow before him then. He did not have the power to stop it, to run from it, nor to face it. Perhaps it was some unconscious reckoning, some deep-seated guilt. Even as these things occurred to him, they were rejected out of hand. He knew that this was something else. This was a stranger, a true stranger, a familiar one who had trespassed his thoughts for so long that he’d come to claim squatter’s rights in his soul. And it was deeply malevolent.

He wrenched his vision away from the creature and focused on the room bathed in orange-white light. It was there, at the far end of the road. He could see it now: there he saw a chair and a bed, straight walls and an open ceiling, exposed rafters, and there, too, hanging over one, was the recollection of his deepest despair. Indeed he had already come to regret it. The world was red again, his face flushed, blood unable to escape his head. He knew why his neck hurt. He knew why he could not breathe.

The only thing he did not know was the stranger. His hold was broken, then. It was not regret that had broken it, however, but something in the light of the room that pierced deeply into Steven’s mind like floodlights turned upon a murder scene. All was made bare to see for examination: for Steven’s examination, but also for that of the stranger’s. Steven could not grasp this, but as much as the stranger was there with him, often, even there in moments of his deepest despair and greatest tragedies, the stranger held as his enemy one that Steven had only the dimmest and most distant knowledge of. And that one was in the light.

They were fighting each other, the stranger behind him and the light before him. He did not understand this struggle, nor could he even properly witness it. He could only lay in agony as the world turned deeper shades of red. It was an iridescent pain that, if it did not stop, Steven knew would last forever: a pain with perfect justification and without blockage, one that would surely increase and that he would never become accustomed to. One that he knew he deserved. As the redness ran so thick that it began to turn to black, the light thinned to the width of a razor and pierced Steven’s mind, penetrating through the sting of pain and puncturing what seemed like his own heart.

Behind him, the stranger’s shape had taken on a more evil form than he could see. It was trying to drag him away. It was throttling him. Its pain was his pain, too. And yet whatever pain it was inflicting was utterly insignificant compared to that red-drenched torment Steven already experienced.

But that razor streak of pure white light cut him in two. He knew then the words to say. It told him the words. The light smote him, or perhaps it smote the pain. It was a message from some other place, some place where perhaps the stranger had come from, too, some place he was clearly accustomed to, familiar with, and someplace he obviously hated. He did not dwell on these things. The time was ripe. It was now or never.

—

“It’s a good thing he was found when he was,” the doctor said. “Any later and he’d definitely have suffered brain damage. Or, well.”

“You got him back?”

“Yeah, incredibly enough. If I had to guess, the fall wasn’t high enough to do the trick. Brutal moments between then and unconsciousness, though. Thankfully, they weren’t his last.”

“You’re serious that he didn’t suffer any brain damage? That’s unbelievable.”

“We’ll have a better idea when he comes around, but no… I think he’s out of the woods. He’ll obviously need to be under watch and psychiatric eval for a while, but, at least for today, there’s no need for a headstone.”

---

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