A.N: "Lake Pontchartrain" by Ludo is one of my favorite Ludo songs because it tells such an engaging story. And while I can say it about a lot of Ludo songs, this one has one of the best opening lines...though I absolutely love the way "Broken Bride" begins, too.
Arthur shifted uncomfortably in his seat. It wasn't because of the seat, really. It was the situation that always got to him. Sessions with the psychologist always made him nervous. Sessions with Dr. Cobb left him drained; he'd feel so fatigued afterwards because there were only so many times Arthur could talk about happened to him, to his friends…
And this new doctor, the one that Dr. Cobb referred him to when they had not made enough progress together, was supposed to do what Cobb couldn't.
I can't get into your mind, Cobb had said, miming the motion of knocking on the side of his own head. Door is locked. You've hidden the key, and aside from breaking in I don't know how to help you with this problem. You've got to be completely honest with me, and I can't help feeling that you've still got something to say but are holding back.
Before- well after what had happened, he'd started to wear dental guards to sleep because he'd been grinding his teeth in his sleep from the stress. Cobb and his analogies made him want to grind his teeth while awake. Arthur often had to check the impulse to do so, reciting to himself relax your jaw, relax your jaw.
His mind was locked, he wasn't saying something, which was obvious because he'd tried to say it before but at best was ignored and at worst nearly landed in the hospital with a temporary psych hold.
And here he was in the new doctor's office, sitting uncomfortably in a comfortable chair, focusing so hard on not grinding his teeth that he'd not noticed when the doctor entered the room.
"Hello!" The man lacked the white coat that Dr. Cobb had loved so much, and didn't immediately read as doctor of psychology. The man was dressed comfortably, but still professionally- slacks, oxford, conservative sweater. "So sorry I'm late, but I called ahead and made sure that my secretary at least let you take a seat and be comfortable."
Relax your jaw, Arthur thought hard, forcing himself to make eye contact with this doctor. He was willing to try, because despite Dr. Cobb being a bit off, he'd sang the new doctor's praises.
"Hi," Arthur finally answered, aware that he'd taken a little longer to answer than was polite. He straightened up in his seat, remembered that slouching wasn't the best way to present himself to others. He almost smiled and offered to shake the other man's hand.
"I'm Dr. Eames," the man said, and once he'd moved closer to Arthur to comfortably shake his hand, Arthur noticed that while the man was dressed appropriately, he hadn't shaved the scruffy hints of stubble. "But please, don't stand on ceremony here. Call me Eames, if you like."
He felt his hand being squeezed gently, like a reminder, and the touch forced Arthur's attention away from the sweater and up to Dr. Eames's face. The man was smiling still, but looked a little expectant. Arthur shook Dr. Eames's hand and tried to will away his embarrassment over being caught examining the other man's clothes, noticing that he'd not shaved this morning.
"I'm sure that Dr. Cobb told you the story, gave you my file, and maybe bought you a coffee for taking me on such short notice, Dr-" Arthur paused watching this doctor, this Eames. "Thank you, Eames," Arthur corrected himself, wanting to set a good tone for their doctor-patient relationship.
Because regardless what Cobb had thought, Arthur did want to get better. He did. It was just every time he explained what happened to him and his friends, he could see the looks on his doctors faces become caged and dark. He'd been dropped and picked up more times than he wanted to admit, been traded from doctor to doctor with new theories as to why he felt the way he felt, what had happened, and was he really sick?
Eames nodded and moved to his own chair, picked up a clipboard and slipped on his glasses so he could read the fine print without straining his eyes.
"Excellent! So I'm sure that Dr. Cobb explained what it is I do?"
Arthur shook his head. Cobb did the equivalent of verbal gymnastics explaining why his treatment wasn't working, suggesting that maybe seeing another doctor would help, one who was on the cutting edge of psychoanalysis and dream theory. Because Arthur's major complaint was that after his experience; whether it was something he imagined, a reaction to something that he wasn't willing to face, changing what the meaning was by creating something fantastic to replace an accident that happened while traveling to Louisiana with his friends; Arthur still couldn't sleep nights without pills. He'd become dependent on something that would knock him out. And when he couldn't get it, he drank himself to oblivion so he could sleep without seeing the faces of his friends...
Arthur shook his head in answer to Eames's question. "Something about sleep. About dreams."
Eames nodded. "That's half of it. You are a prime candidate for the use of a new technology that will allow us to see the face of your nightmares and better come up with a way of treating your specific worries and fears."
"Like talk therapy and dream analysis?"
Once again, Eames nodded, making another note. "First I'd like to hear, in your own words, what happened. I could read Cobb's report on the reports of others, but I think that the focus should be you. You telling me what happened will be a good start. Then we can begin with talk about the technology we'll be using for the therapy."
Arthur took a breath and then breathed out, hoping he didn't sound too shaky. Relax your jaw. He doesn't think you're crazy yet, he's willing to try. Give it a shot.
He cleared his throat and began, forcing himself to speak slowly- previously the words would spill out like he was racing to get them past his lips before something horrible would happen.
"I'll tell it like it happened," Arthur said, looking at Eames who nodded encouragingly, pen already poised to write brief notes on his clipboard. "It was Darius and Noland and me…"
This technology wasn't brought up at the next session, or the one after that. The other sessions involved Arthur's detailed retelling of what happened to him and his friends. Every time he stopped, or struggled to explain something, Eames would ask Arthur to take a moment and put his thoughts in order. He'd tap his pen against his clipboard and say, "Don't worry about losing your place, I'm drawing you a map. If you get lost I'll walk you back to the last familiar location. How about we move back to one of the earlier events?"
Arthur had been struggling to explain, even in the broadest terms, what the hell happened once they were at the lake. He nodded thankfully to Eames and reconsidered which even to turn to.
"We were on a trip," Arthur said again, "We were on the 55 to Louisiana- we stopped at a place on the highway to eat." Arthur made a face and Eames looked up in time to spot it.
"Unpleasant memory associated with the food?"
Arthur shrugged a little, recalling how both Darius and Noland had happily eaten their crawfish.
"They ordered the crawfish and I got the chicken. Their food came first, these big bowls full of boiled crawfish."
Arthur wasn't mentioning how Noland had picked up one of his crawfish and held a brief conversation with it.
Arthur doesn't like you, Mr. Crawfish.
Of course they'd laughed. Arthur had made a big point about staying away from seafood. He didn't care if it was one of the dishes Louisiana was known for, that eating crawfish would probably do the state a favor considering the number of crawfish there were and how invasive the species could become. Noland had made his crawfish- the very dead, completely boiled crawfish that still had a head and beady eyes and claws, too- hover over Arthur's plate of chicken and veg once it arrived.
Arthur's not shellfish, Mr. Crawfish! He'd love to say hello, chat over lunch, too! Go on, say hello to the delicious cousin of the lobster and prawn!
Then Noland made the crawfish dance over Arthur's plate, and Darius had nearly choked on his first attempt to suck the meat from a crawfish, using his thumb and forefinger to push the meat from under the shell, sucking it out from the tail. The memory, brief but so sharp, made Arthur's smile disappear as he thought that he'd never have that again. His friends were gone.
Arthur cleared his throat and said, "Noland, he teased me a little about the crawfish. Made one dance over my plate, pleading its case about how I shouldn't be selfish."
"Or shellfish, right?"
Arthur looked up quickly and caught Eames's slight smile as he held his pen in place against the clipboard, as if he were marking the place on the map. His glasses were slipping down his nose, just a little, and he hadn't pushed them back in place like he had the last dozen times when he'd leaned too far forwards and almost dropped them.
It was a fairly obvious pun to make when talking about crawfish or seafood, so it shouldn't have surprised Arthur so much.
"How about we take a break?" Eames said, putting aside his clipboard. "When we get back I'd like to move on to the next stage."
"Okay," Arthur said, ready to move on from the awkwardness. "I could do that."
"First, I have to tell you that before we start the treatment, I need to get some lab work done for you. Blood draws, clearance from your regular doctor to try the treatment, and so on."
This concerned Arthur a little. He sat up straight in his chair, plucking at the material of his sleeve with two fingers. "You never said what this actually involves. Just that it's cutting edge technology."
"Are you afraid of needles, Arthur?"
"No, not really. I can do the blood tests just fine."
"I can show you more and then you can decide if you want to proceed. There's a reason why Cobb sent you to me."
"This is called a PASIV- with this technology; together we can build a dream that will help you reenact what happened to you and your friends. If this is done carefully, we can reach catharsis. So far, this technology has been used for all sorts of things- it's big in therapy."
"It wouldn't surprise me if it had a military application."
Eames stopped what he was doing, holding the silver case of the PASIV open and showing Arthur what the inside looked like.
"True, this was originally used to train soldiers, but the methods outside of national security and warfare proved to be too advantageous."
Arthur examined the machine carefully, listening to Eames's explanation.
"So we hook ourselves up to this thing and dream together."
"The medicine from the IV lines allows us to share dreams. This way, I can enter your dream, watch what happens as a spectator and help you work through it."
Arthur's eyes narrowed. "And you'll find out if I'm lying about what happened. You'll see whether or not I killed them like the cops still think, even if they didn't find the evidence to support it!"
"No."
Arthur had been prepared to leave. Well, he'd been prepared to make it known how fucking pissed off this all made him- how being blamed for a crime he didn't commit, that there was next to no proof of him having a part in made him want to scream and rant. That most of all he wished he could go back to that spot, back to the lake to see if what he'd thought he'd saw, what felt so damned real, if it could possibly have been true. As if he would go back there and find both Darius and Noland waiting for him, cracking jokes about the Camry and the rain which had driven them to take the road to the lake.
He turned and looked back at Eames, still standing next to the mysterious machine.
"Really?"
Eames nodded for Arthur. "Yes, Arthur. I know that this has been troubling you. I'm not the judge, jury, or executioner. I'm just a doctor who wants to help you."
"Well," Arthur began, staring at the device that Eames still hadn't closed. "If we're dreaming together, and using the machine and some kind of medicine to do it, why have we spent the last few sessions talking about what happened? If you could just jump into my dreams, why bother?"
"Oh, if only it were that easy. The ins and outs of dream theory are varied, but what I've determined is that your subconscious has become quite dangerous- to you and most likely to anyone it considers a threat. Our best bet to successfully share the dream and work out the problems you're having is to set the stage."
"You mean build the dream," Arthur said, sounding a little excited. "Actually build it? Like the landscape and any buildings?"
"Cobb mentioned your background in architecture. He thought that if we took this route, you'd excel in playing the dreamshare equivalent of an architect. Build the world, shape the dream, and populate it with structures so your mind and mine can populate it with people."
This got Arthur's attention more than the technology itself had.
"Blueprints or models?"
"Either or both," Eames said to Arthur, not hiding his pleasure in Arthur's agreeing to continue the therapy. "Whichever you think will help you work through this. To practice the concepts of shared dreaming, I'd take you down into my mind for some practice runs. The real work will be done in yours. I want you to have the extra comfort and assurance when you attempt to start this therapy. I want you to trust yourself, your memory."
"You think it will prove what happened."
"No, I think that it will give you some reassurance. You need to be able to sleep. To rest. And eventually, to move on with your life. Finding out more about what happened will do this, Arthur. The blank spots that you have now might be filled in after the trip into your mind."
Arthur considering all of this before finally nodding in agreement. "We can try. We can practice it all. When can I start building?"
Eames closed the PASIV case. "Now, if you like."
Arthur had started by sketching and identifying specific scenes.
"It doesn't have to mirror your memory exactly. Though we will be examining pieces of your experience, building it exactly from memory involves a great risk."
"How so?" Arthur asked as he patiently sketched the bayou, the road, the lurking man ready to beat his fist against the windshield of Arthur's Camry.
Eames wasn't looking over Arthur's shoulder. He was sitting across from him at the same table, near to the window where his office had the best light. He was keeping busy, reading and rereading case files and studies.
"There's a theory floating around in dreamshare about building a dream that resembles reality too closely. That this blurring of the lines between reality and dreams makes it easier to get the two mixed up."
"Considering everything I've already mentioned about what happened, how can I start to resolve that?"
"You've stated multiple times to the police, their psychologists, and every other medical professional you've visited trying to find a way to resolve your reoccurring dreams of what happened to you and your friends, that what happened defied all logic. That even you were having trouble figuring out if it really happened, it was so fantastic and horrible."
Arthur stopped sketching, pressing the point of his pencil against the paper, digging the lead hard enough into the sketched arm of the crazed man that Arthur expected him to rear up and slap pencil away. "Someone's been rereading my files long enough to pull direct quotes."
"Arthur, I want you to say it for me. What happened to your friends?"
Arthur was silent at first then he slouched in his chair a bit, resigned. "The lake ate them. Or something inside the lake. Some monster."
Eames didn't say anything in response to that. He nodded and returned his attention to the files before him. "What you'd need is something called a totem. Ideally it would be something small enough that you could carry it on your person, but it would have a very distinctive feature. Like its weight or appearance; it will be something that would let you know the difference between dreams and reality. Or, at least allow you to know if you're in someone else's dream."
Arthur would have said something about how vague that sounded. What was the use of a thing that didn't really tell him if he was awake or dreaming? But there was something about it, something he just couldn't rap his head around. He wanted to believe Eames. Arthur wanted to be well again.
The day that it was time to go under, to enter the dream space with Eames after weeks of preparation to get over the strangeness of lucid dreaming, Arthur felt comfortable enough to try the therapy for real.
There Arthur was, standing in front of the machine, ready to enter the dream he'd been building in a series of parts. Physical locations that had been off the 55 highway, suggestions of Slidell, the Chocktaw motel, and finally Lake Pontchartrain itself.
"Ready?"
Arthur didn't jump when he heard the sound of Eames's voice. He'd become too familiar with his doctor- the therapy was, in a way, much more personal than he'd expected. He'd spent several hours inside his doctor's mind, for god's sake! The hours he spent at home thinking about Eames made Arthur wonder if that was some odd side effect of the PASIV- that the medication and the technology somehow gave the other man a greater presence in Arthur's thoughts. He sometimes wondered if it was reciprocal. Then he'd bury his face under a pillow and curse himself for thinking such ridiculous things.
"Yes," Arthur said, trying to get his head into the game, moving to sit down next to the PASIV device. The woman he'd become familiar with through the times he'd used the PASIV was waiting for him to get comfortable. Her name was Ariadne and the first time she'd patiently searched for a suitable vein, she'd spoken to him softly about her experiences monitoring others use of the PASIV, and assisting them with the IV lines.
"You'll be fine," she said as she rubbed an alcohol swab against Arthur's wrist, expertly finding a vein and inserted the needle gently. All Arthur felt was a small pinch.
Eames sat on the other side of the machine, making himself comfortable before submitting to Ariadne's deft hand, not wincing in the slightest once the needle was in place.
"Okay," the doctor said, locking eyes with Arthur and nodded encouragingly. "We'll start slow, just like we practiced. We memorized your architecture, the models. I'll see you down there."
Arthur nodded shallowly, trying to relax into his comfortable chair. He closed his eyes, listening to Eames tell Ariadne to press the button.
Arthur was on the side of the road, Highway 55 and the clouds were a like a dark, murky soup set to boil in the upturned bowl of the sky. He began to walk down the road, not really knowing for sure what he was waiting to find.
He'd not been expecting the sound of a car horn. Arthur watched a truck begin to pass him by but slow to a stop not too far ahead of him.
The window rolled down and revealed Eames. He smiled and gestured that he should hop in. Arthur opened the door and got into the passenger seat next to Eames, who was fiddling with the radio.
The rain began to fall, pattering the windshield. Eames flipped on the windshield wipers, as he worked the dial on the radio. The low crackle of the dead air between radio frequencies and the sound of Southern Soul was suddenly interrupted by a familiar song.
Arthur had been in the middle of putting on his seat belt when he heard it.
Come down to Lake Pontchartrain, rest your soul and feed your brain. That's where you'll get to see, everything the water can be!
Arthur shuddered as he listened to the music.
"It sounds the same as before, just like when I heard it by the lake."
Eames didn't look away from the road. "From another radio playing at the lake?"
Arthur shook his head hard. "No. It was- I heard it from the people in the lake. The ones that Noland and Darius dove in to save. They lured them down into the water so the monster could eat them, so the lake could eat them!"
Arthur looked at Eames and said, "This is happening like it was before- it's unstructured now. Look out the window and you'll see a homeless man coming to hit your windshield."
And it was so.
Eames slowed down so he couldn't directly hit the projection of the yellow-eyed man with black teeth, the one that lurched from the banks of the lake and began to beat one fist against the window.
He screamed at them, and Arthur sank down into his seat, irrationally frightened of the man who'd been much closer before. Before, Arthur had been driving the Camry. He'd pulled up outside of the Chocktaw Motel, ready to argue with Noland and Darius about what to do, which map to follow, and where was probably the safest place to go because of the sour turn in the weather.
In response to Arthur's thoughts maybe, the rain began to hammer the windshield as hard as the homeless man. He was yelling over the pounding rain, telling them about Lake Pontchartrain; what waited for them there.
Arthur ground his teeth; he already knew what waited for them there. A monster and death and no explanations that would satisfy the police or his doctor. They just kept coming back to this problem. They wouldn't believe him, no matter what he said!
He was possessed with it now; he had to show Eames. He had to prove it to someone who at least pretended that they gave a damn about what happened and how it affected him.
"Get away from him now, his part is done," Arthur urged Eames on, telling him where to go.
"Take roads through the woods."
Eames did so, the wheels of the truck getting stuck in the muck and mud. He frowned and plowed on, but the way became more difficult in the rain.
"Arthur, I know that you experienced something similar; that you got stuck in the woods and that it was raining hard enough for you to not know you were heading towards the lake. But you have to allow me to drive there on roads that disappeared in the rain, not roads that became Penrose paths of mud."
Arthur was silent for a moment, taking a deep breath and reaching into his pocket to grasp his totem, a loaded die. He wasn't in the Camry, he was going to be fine. He was only reliving the experience as a spectator. "We need to finish this," Arthur said, looking out the windshield and willing what had likely become multiple interlocking muddy pathways into a single twisting path that Eames could follow to the lake. In the distance Arthur could already see the sign that proclaimed where they were; bold as brass the sign said Lake Pontchartrain.
And Arthur could hear those voices now- louder than before. He even saw a pair of arms waving from the churning water, pierced as it was by the falling rain.
"This is when Darius jumped out of the car. He saw somebody out in the swells," Arthur swallowed hard. "Noland, he followed after him!"
And now Arthur was seeing it all over again, played out right before his eyes as he and Eames took shelter in their truck and watched the action near shore where the Camry had come to a stop.
There were projections of them all in the Camry; Darius jumping out of the car and running towards the water, Noland following quickly after him while Arthur the projection got out of the car, but didn't go to the water, calling out to his friends as they waded into the water.
"Come back!" Projection Arthur yelled after them, his clothes and hair getting soaked in the rain. And even though the rain was making it harder to see, Arthur knew that his projection probably saw the bodies in the water, mesmerized by the impossible sight he could barely make out.
"Come back," Arthur said to himself, safe in the truck with Eames at his side. Without giving it a second thought, Eames grasped Arthur's hand and watched the scene play out. He saw them, too. Their waving arms, the way they were singing and calling out to both Noland and Darius as they continued to swim and dive down deep to rescue the poor person they'd thought they'd seen drowning out in the swells!
It was like a chant, the corpses' song, enticing others into the water for what was to come.
"They kept going deeper," Arthur whispered as he saw the projection of himself stare at the rising waves, his unknowing friends. The terror was written across his face, it had frozen his every movement. "I- I couldn't even move! I could only watch as it took them down."
As they watched, the face of Arthur's nightmares revealed itself; water swelling, drummed by rain, a creature, large and scaled opened its mouth and roared. Sitting beside him in the safety of the truck, Eames saw it as well, eyes widening as he saw a monster reminiscent of something from Lovecraft!
The creature took little time and didn't draw it out. Noland and Darius never knew what hit them as the monster pulled them inside, going beneath the water and not coming up again, even as the projection of Arthur stood on the banks and screamed for his friends.
Arthur and Eames sat in the truck and listened to the rain till the timer went off.
When they both woke up, there was an awkward moment where Arthur tried his best to avoid Eames's eyes. This was where they'd have to talk about what Arthur's subconscious had shown them. Eames had already spoken to Ariadne about this, and before she left to give them privacy she unhooked them from the device.
So Arthur launched into his speech. It was sad, but after the number of times he had to tell the story, it had become a speech.
"So that's how it happened. Why would I lie?" He didn't shrug or try to appeal to Eames any more than he'd already had. He continued to explain what was no doubt in the report. "There were no bodies; I looked and looked and when I called the police they couldn't find anything. They assumed that I was making it all up, that I'd killed them both and hid the bodies. But I didn't have any to hide. There were only so many times I could exclaim over a monster swallowing them, so I finally stopped talking about it."
Eames nodded and said, "You were just a boy who lost two friends in the rain, Arthur. But you did lose them to something. Something that defies explanation."
Arthur almost laughed. What a silly idea! Going down to the lake to conduct a concrete investigation? We're they to become monster hunters? Arthur had given up on the idea of finding Noland and Darius. It had been so long, there were no leads, they might as well be left for dead. He'd seen them swallowed up the by monster and if they hadn't been eaten, they must have been drowned.
But what Eames was suggesting interested him. Hadn't he suggested it to one of the more persistent investigators who interrogated him again and again, not listening to a single god damned thing Arthur had to say. The man had wanted the truth! And no matter how many times he'd explained it, the man wasn't satisfied by what Arthur had to say.
So Arthur had slammed his fists against the table and yelled at the detective. "If you have any more fucking questions you can go and ask Lake Pontchartrain!"
"Yes," Arthur said to Eames. "I'll have to go back to the lake in reality. I need to see if the monster is out there."
"Would you like company, Arthur?"
Hearing those words made Arthur put one hand in the pocket where his totem lay. He squeezed the little red die, reassured by the sharp edges of the acrylic cube. He wasn't going to take it out and roll it on top of the nearby table. He wasn't going to do something so embarrassing in front of his psychologist. The urge to check if this was reality was strong for Arthur because this wasn't something he'd expect out of a doctor. Arthur knew about the ethics and rules involved, and even though it didn't immediately sound like Eames was asking to come along in order to offer his services as a psychologist, Arthur had doubts.
Finally he decided that the offer was innocent; the man had seen Arthur's recurring nightmare, had worked with him to recreate and face it. Arthur wanted to ignore the popular 'character a falls for character b, their (psychologist, doctor, teacher)' stereotype. He was going to ignore Eames's little kindnesses, the honest attraction Arthur felt growing during the planning stages of this therapy, but buried. It wasn't an appropriate or smart move on either of their parts.
"I appreciate the offer," Arthur said, still holding his totem. "But I think I need to face this one on my own. How about I set another appointment for when I get back? That way I can talk to you about how it went."
And leave the door open, just in case. Though Arthur was thinking about the trip he'd plan to get back to Louisiana and Lake Pontchartrain, he was also thinking about a future where he might- maybe, he still wasn't sure- ask if Eames wanted to go out for a cup of coffee. Because there was going to be a point where Arthur was well again and didn't need to use the PASIV, or go speak to a psychologist.
Maybe Arthur could consider making that sort of move once he was no longer a patient of Eames's. That when Arthur could sleep without dreaming of the unbelievable accident that stole away his two best friends, that forced him to go into therapy, he'd try.
Eames was nodding as he adjusted his glasses."Okay," he agreed. "But I would suggest a few more sessions here before you make your trip. When you do make the plans, I can set up your next appointment for when you return."
"Then it's a date, Mr. Eames."