The Lunatic Messiah

  I don't really want to open my eyes, because I know exactly what I'm going to see and I don't know if I can handle it. There are noises, very familiar and yet only from the depths of memory. Noises I haven't heard or wanted to hear in quite a long time. Eventually, I allow the lids to slide open and there in front of me is exactly what I was fearing the most. It's not my bedroom, but it looks the same. It's dark, but there's enough light to see by, coming from the open window and the early morning light outside. Evan grunts as he grinds away on top of Ada, whose breath is coming in short, panting gasps. I'm sitting in the chair at the end of the bed, which is strewn with their hastily removed clothing. Despite not planning to be here, I feel like a voyeur. I cough once to test the reaction. There isn't one, except for a slight increase in intensity.

  'I love you, Evan,' whispers Ada between breaths.

  Evan just grunts and carries on, like a terrier with a teddy bear. I get to my feet, trying to keep the noise to a minimum even though, as usual, they seem oblivious to my presence. Just as I reach the door I hear Ada climax with a throaty moan, and Evan follows almost immediately after, as if his own orgasm was dependent on hers. I stop, the door handle still in my hand, as Evan rolls over and they both lie side by side, sweaty and content.

  'You know, I didn't want to be here. I'm not some sort of pervert.'

  Ada snuggles up against him placing an arm lazily across his chest and starts to kiss his neck.

  'That was nice,' she whispers.

  'Uh huh.'

  They lie there for a while, and although I want to leave I find that I can't. The bedroom looks so much like my own and the way that they're lying, as if there's nobody else in the world except for the two of them, reminds me of the first years of my marriage. That was back when we were actually in love and were naive enough to think that it would last forever. When we believed that love would be enough. I feel a strange sense of compassion for the two of them.

  'Gavrilo Yama is going to kill you,' I say, willing one of them to hear me.

  'Do you want a glass of water?' Ada says, sliding out from underneath the sheet.

  'Uh,' replies Evan, and she touches his cheek with her hand before coming towards the door.

  I'm momentarily distracted by the sight of a beautiful naked woman walking towards me and I don't get out of the way, so she stops just in front of me, as if she's forgotten something. It's exactly how Evan reacted when I tried the same thing with him.

  'You know I'm here, don't you, Ada?' I say, trying not to stare at her breasts.

  She looks at me, but she doesn't see me. Eventually she turns back to Evan.

  'Are you hungry?' she asks him, and gets another affirmative grunt for her trouble.

  'I feel like bacon,' she says, and reaches for a gown from the back of the door next to my head.

  I'm grateful as she pulls it on, as it makes me feel less like a dirty old man, but I don't move out of the way.

  'Ada. Gavrilo is going to kill Evan. Grey told him to do it. You have to get out of here.'

  'What about eggs?' Ada says.

  It's no use. I could stand here all day and she would simply come up with excuses for not leaving the room. She seems absolutely determined not to acknowledge me in any way, and I stand aside, defeated. She opens the door and walks out, without a care in the world and heads towards the kitchen. I decide that I should try Evan instead, and I go and sit next to him on the bed, where he has closed his eyes with his hands behind his head. Subtlety seems ineffective, so I lift up his head in one hand and slap him hard across the jaw with the other. His head buckles to the left from the force of the blow, but he only scratches his chin to deal with the slight irritation.

  'Evan! You are going to die! Gavrilo is going to kill you with his ridiculously oversized gun. You have to listen to me!'

  He begins to snore, so I punch him once in the stomach for my own gratification and follow Ada into the kitchen.

  There's fat flying from the pan, and I can see now why she decided to put the gown on, as she is splattered with it. She's pushing the bacon around with a plastic spatula and singing to herself. It's an Irish folk song of some sort, and her voice is perfectly suited to it. She has a high, strong tone, with something distinctly sad in the timbre of the notes. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard.

  'Ada, shut up! I'm trying to sleep,' comes Evan's irritable voice from the bedroom.

  Ada scowls, but she lowers her voice and sings under her breath. She cracks two eggs into the pan, and they sizzle and spit even more than the bacon.

  'Can I ask you a question, Ada?'

  I take her silence as a yes.

  'Why did you marry that man? He doesn't seem to care about you. Does he ever tell you that he loves you?'

  She continues to cook and I turn and walk back towards the living room, almost screaming in frustration. I can't see the point in my being here if I'm unable to affect anything. It's nothing but a cruel torture to be witness to things and have no control over them.

  'He loves me,' she says.

  I turn back to her, but she's still trying to flip the eggs without breaking the yolks, and she doesn't seem to have said anything at all.

  'What did you say?'

  She doesn't answer. I don't know why I expected any different.

  I can hear Evan get up and stumble his way to the bathroom, so I decide to follow him instead. I'm getting desperate for attention now. The door is shut, but I open it to the delightful image of Evan, naked apart from his socks, sitting on the toilet with his head in his hands. He doesn't look up as I sit on the edge of the bathtub.

  'How can I explain this in a way that you'll understand?'

  Evan groans, and rubs his temples. He seems to have been drinking the night before, because I can smell the sickly smell of alcohol in his sweat.

  'You are going to be killed. You need to get up right now and get out of here.'

  Evan doesn't move, so I reach over him and flush the toilet. He shouts out as the icy water from the cistern invades him and he leaps to his feet.

  'Jesus!' he shouts, and Ada comes rushing to the door of the bathroom.

  'Evan, we may be married, but I don't think we're at the stage where you can take a shit with the door open. Let's preserve a little of the mystery, shall we?'

  'Now that you're both here...' I say, and pick up the ceramic soap dish from the sink, hurling it as hard as I can at the mirror.

  It splinters into a thousand pieces, and each of those pieces explodes into a thousand more, as they rain down from the wall and sprinkle the ground like snow. The frame of the mirror, a large wooden arrangement, wobbles on its hook and then it to falls to the floor, bouncing off the sink and splitting in half.

  'That's seven years bad luck,' Ada says after they both sit looking at it for a while, neither one of them nearly as surprised as I’d hoped they would be.

  'Well I've only got four months left, so luck can talk to my estate,' I reply.

  Evan and Ada sit eating their breakfast in silence, and I sit on the lounge. Lucy can see me, and Grey can see me, but nobody else can. What's the difference between those two and everybody else? It's making my head hurt to think about it, and for all I know there's no real answer. These are just dreams. They may be incredible lucid, and episodic for that matter, but dreams don't have to make sense. Trying to apply waking logic to dreams is a pointless exercise.

  'What if I die? In here, I mean. I'm dreaming, so I can't really die.'

  'It's good,' Evan says, cutting off another piece of bacon.

  'Thanks.'

  I stand up and walk over to the balcony, sliding the door open. It's a windy day and the gust blows some papers off the table where they're eating breakfast, but they don't bother to pick them up. Looking over the balcony I can see that the fall would probably be fatal, at least if I managed to land head first, so I clamber up onto the railing and brace my arms against the roof.

  'I will do it,' I say, as they sit indiff
erently at their table.

  Logically I know that I'm dreaming and therefore even if I throw myself from the balcony I will wake up in my bed, or in the shed and nothing bad will come of it. But trying to apply waking logic, as mentioned, is pointless. As far as I'm concerned I'm standing on a ledge, two storeys up and looking down at my own demise. My dreams over the past month have all seemed so much more real to me than anything that's happened while I'm awake that I find it hard to take the plunge.

  'You know, I lost my job today and right now I'm more worried about a fictional character from my dreams trying to kill another fictional character from my dreams. And Evan, your sole reason for existence is probably nothing more than my subconscious trying to inform me that I'm a bad husband. Does that sound crazy to you?'

  'Shut the door, sweet, there's a gust blowing in.'

  'Huh,' Evan says, and in two steps, leans over and pulls the sliding door shut.

  I almost feel like laughing. I know already that there's no way I'm going to jump to prove a point, because I'm not completely certain that I'm correct. The last thing I want is for reality to prove a point to me and have me die on the concrete below. I keep picturing the sound of impact, first an internal explosion of noise, reverberating through the skull and then bursting outwards. I imagine the sound becoming audible as it escapes through the fractured bone. It's simply the rational knowledge that I don't want to die but I feel like I've just lost a game of chicken with my own perceptions. I'm about to clamber down when I see a car pull up in the street below. I've been in that car before. I've sat in it. It has an aura of malevolence to it. It's too big, and too flashy. It's the automotive equivalent of the Magnum pistol that Gavrilo carries. The scar on my left hand begins to throb, trying to talk to me. The scar on my back joins in the chorus and I know exactly what they're trying to tell me.

  'He's here,' I whisper.

  15