Nightmare Man (11 page)

I flip around, staring into the bright, flickering screen to stave off sleep. I haven’t seen this side of ten PM for too many years.

But I’m afraid to sleep. The nightmare man will come. Last time, he almost got Logan. He hurt him. With every visit he gets bolder, gains more substance. I didn’t take those damn green pills today, but Dr. Turner didn’t sound confident that would solve the problem. I’ve heard how difficult it is to get medication across the blood-brain barrier. That’s why so many crazy meds take so long to build up to the point that they have any effect, and why the effects tend to linger. But it sounded like this could be more than that. It sounded like there’s a doorway in my brain, and those little green pills might not have just opened the door, but ripped it off the hinges entirely.

I can’t stay awake forever. Maybe I can find a third-shift job, start sleeping during the day. Maybe the nightmare man still needs shadow. He crossed the lit hallway, but was it like a dash through fire? He probably still needs the darkness to grant him substance.

That reminds me of the episode of
Art 21
Leslie wanted me to watch, the one about light and shadow. I check the DVR and it’s still there.

I turn it on, skip to the last segment and within minutes I’m no longer sleepy.

Her name is Margot Johnson. She works in shadow. These artists are always “fascinated” with something, something I can’t imagine being even mildly interested in. The motion of water. The concept of space in a crowded world. The way the brain processes the shapes of everyday objects. But Margot is fascinated with shadows, and I’m there with her.

Her work is amazing. Shadow in and of shadow. Ink on oil. Darkness on darkness.

“It’s easy to see racism in our categorization of light and dark, especially when some people insist on using the terms ‘white’ and ‘black.’ But it’s beyond race. It’s earlier than race. Our associating light and dark with good and evil probably goes back to the beginning of our ability to conceive of good and evil. As diurnal creatures with nocturnal enemies, we rely on our eyes and fear the dark. But there might be more to it than that.”

The video switches to a brain scan side-by-side with a night vision image of a person watching a dark room.

“This is a live, interactive performance piece I did at MOMA for a week. On the left is the activity in the visitor’s brain. On the right…”

I jump as, on the screen, a black cloaked figure steps out of a corner. I hadn’t seen it.

“…is a video of the visitor in a dark room. That’s me in the black cloak. The room is perfectly dark. A white noise machine is running. The visitors could neither see nor hear me. And I should point out that I also avoided wearing any fragrance. But watch what happens on the brain scan as I move closer. And watch her face.”

The woman grows more agitated as Margot moves closer. Her eyes seem to know where to look.

“You can see how the part of her brain responsible for processing visual stimuli is working hard, despite the fact that there is no visual stimuli. This is her watching darkness. But then look over here.”

Another portion of the brain begins to activate.

“She reported being able to ‘feel’ my presence. Here I move away, and you can see the activity reduce. The thing is, no one knows exactly what that part of the brain does, but it’s behaving very similarly to the sensory processing sections. Here’s the oddest thing, though, I swear that as her brain activity ramped up, when she reported being able to feel me, I could also feel her.”

The segment ends on her most technical, impressive, beautiful, and terrifying work yet. A dark hologram. Instead of light being refracted to create a seemingly three-dimensional object of solid light, it’s refracted away to create a space of solid darkness.

“Light never destroys shadow, it simply moves it, sometimes traps it. Think about it. If you illuminate the top of an object, the shadow moves beneath. Illuminate the top and bottom and it moves to the sides, or to the points of connection to the floor. Oh, but suspend the object, illuminate all sides. There, you’ve beat the shadow, right? Then what’s outside the boundary of the lights? Our existence is light-based, and being narcissistic, we imagine light being dominant. We like to think of light as destroying the darkness. But there is far more darkness than light, there’s far more empty space than stars, and all that light can do is shift the dark around a bit.

“But this shadow goes one further. This shadow moves light. This shadow can only be extinguished by darkness.” The lights go out on the video, and as promised, the shadow hologram disappears. The living room goes dark with it, and panic rises up in me as I scan the corners of the room. Then the preview of the next episode of
Art 21
plays, and the light from the television chases the shadows back to the corners.

I settle the television on some classic sitcom reruns to give my brain space to process what I’ve just seen. I marvel at how deeply Margot Johnson has gone into the subject, and wonder if she, too, suffers from night terrors. I’ve had them my entire life, yet the deepest I’ve ever examined them is with the
Nightmare Man
comics I created before my balls dropped. She’s doing the work I should be.

My thoughts slow. The sitcoms slide by, slide away.

* * *

My eyes snap open. I sit up and stare around the room. This is not my bedroom. TV. Sofas. Bubbling aquarium.

Somewhere out of sight, a shadow stirs. I roll off the sofa and land in a snarling crouch.

The nightmare man is after Logan. I’m after the nightmare man. Down the hall to Madison’s room.

Gripping each side of the doorway like a man about to hurl himself from a plane, I take in the scene. Shannon and Logan sleep, though Logan has begun to whimper and twitch. The nightmare man has just begun to crawl up the bed.

I’m frozen, until the phrase “This shadow can only be extinguished by darkness” plays across my brain, and not in my voice. I don’t know what it’s from, but I believe it, and shut the door behind me, shutting out all the light. Shutting in all the darkness.

A switch in my head flips, and I no longer piece together the nightmare man from bits of shadow as he crosses light. He’s a dark pressure in my head.

I charge.

He looks at me, surprise emanating from that black pit face. Before, he would have slipped through my grasp like something drenched in oil. Now, fully clad in shadow myself, I’m able to grab him around the middle and snatch him from the bed. The core of him writhes in my arms, and I know I can’t hold him long.

This shadow can only be extinguished by darkness.

Logan’s whimpers grow louder. Shannon says, “What’s going on? Jessie?”

I have to get this thing out of here.

This shadow can only be extinguished by darkness.

The nightmare man has portals into this world. Portals I open for him. The darkest places.

I run for where I know the closet to be. My enemy twists in my grip, rakes icy claws through my flesh, but I don’t stop. I glance off the closet opening, but continue at full tilt. I expect a crash. It feels more like hitting water, resistance, a shock, a gasp and then I’m through and the world has gone quiet.

If Logan whimpers, if Shannon says my name again, they do it in another world. I’m in the shadow world.

The nightmare man has stopped struggling, hangs limp in my arms. I drop him at my feet.

“Wake up.”

He doesn’t move.

“Wake up!”

He moves, stands. Anxiety smashes at me, makes me gasp for breath, hold my arms out to catch myself though I’m not falling.

It’s not the nightmare man that’s scared me. For a long few moments, I don’t know what has. Something has tripped an instinctual alarm. Then I know what it is. I shouted, and no echo came back to me. My subconscious waited for one, calculating the size of this dark space as it went, a sphere of nothing expanding at the speed of sound for one second, two, three…forever.

Then what’s outside the boundary of the lights?

Infinite darkness. My sense of perspective goes crazy. I see myself and the nightmare man alone from one mile up, two miles up, three…forever.

And it’s worse. It’s really only me. He is of this place. His delineation goes soft. He begins to melt into the shadow surrounding him.

This shadow can only be extinguished by darkness. But we’re not done yet.

“No.” My awareness of him draws his lines sharply again. I feel the cold blast of his gaze as whatever passes for his consciousness returns to what passes for his body.

“You made me. You make me. I do what you make me to do,” he says in his child’s voice. The voice of the child me.

“And what is that?”

“I punish the ones who kill dreams.”

“Then punish me.”

“I have, for years. I am still. But you opened the door. You let me out.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“And yet…” He gestures, and I see what I didn’t see before. The outline of the door that stands between the shadow world and the real world.

“No one can kill another person’s dreams. Dreams can survive anything. They’re stronger than the outside world. The only way a dream can die is if the dreamer stops dreaming it.”

He stares at me, unspeaking. Maybe I got too abstract. I distill my words. “Logan didn’t kill my dreams. Shannon didn’t either. I killed my dreams.”

And with the saying of the words, a black hole opens in my chest and sucks my heart in, because the words are true. I am not bargaining with the nightmare man. I am revealing myself to myself.

“You didn’t believe that when you made me.”

“I was only a little boy when I made you.”

“No. You made me tonight. You make me every night.”

He’s right. Some logical part of me had to acknowledge that what Leslie said was true, that I let my dreams die, but deep down, the part of me that builds the nightmare man into existence every night still pushes the blame onto others. Even as I watched the program about the shadow artist only an hour ago, jealousy, anger and vindictiveness still burned at the center of me. It’s an oily resin, built up over years of frustration, and it burns so hot it burns right through logic. But with the speaking of the truth, with the arguing of it to the creature that threatens my family, I can feel those dark corners being exposed, and I can feel myself scraping the anger away.

I think of Logan, on the other side of that door, the best thing that ever happened to me. Yes, he changed me, but he changed me for the better. I changed myself for the worse.

Shannon has raised my children. Every day she thinks of them first and last. Every day for years, all of her energy has gone into their well-being and happiness. And I blame her for not instantly knowing what she wants to do now that she has all these moments that don’t have an obvious purpose?

“My dream isn’t dead,” I say. “My dream is evolving. I’m not who I was at age nine, thank God.”

I can see the shadows absorbing the nightmare man, but something at his core holds. Something at my core still burns. It may no longer be valid, but it still has substance, that concentrated resin of disappointment and frustration.

He lunges for the door, slides his claws into the indistinct gap. He yanks, and it grows more distinct.

I grab the end of his cloak and pull, but his grip on the door is exactly as strong as my feelings of victimhood and persecution. I clench my jaw and close my eyes and pull.

And that’s when I understand. Because I can still see him. Because I can still see the edges of the door and the immense darkness.

How can I still see this with my eyes closed?

Because I’m looking inside.

That isn’t a door into the real world from the shadow world. That’s the door from my head. That’s the door the pills opened. But its outline has been there for years. It’s my door, and it’s mine to shut. Permanently.

My eyes still closed, I stop trying to pull the nightmare man from the door, and start pulling him to myself. The distinction seems small, but it is immense. My night terrors have always created a borderland. I drag him across that border into myself. I own my nightmare.

It feels like shoving my brain into a blender.

The nightmare man shrieks like a child. He spins and rakes with his claws and all his other icy sharp edges as I drag him farther and farther inside.

“You could have been something! You could have been wonderful!”

I don’t argue with him. He’s right. Who knows what I could have been? But then I wouldn’t be who I am. And even more importantly, I wouldn’t get to become who I will be.

I focus on the part of my brain that knows his presence and his pressure. I turn my closed eyes in toward it. I see the door. I step through it; then I shut it. It bulges as he heaves himself against it from the other side, from the inside, my inside, but I focus on it until the edges disappear.

It feels like I dropped my brain into an icy blender, and I drop to the ground.

I could have cast him out, but it wouldn’t have solved anything. It would have made things worse. He’s mine, my nightmare. And your nightmares motivate you just as much as your dreams. I’ll need him.