If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
-A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
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He returns to work that following day. Four people casually ask him how his weekend went and he isn't so sure what to say. How do you explain to people you've never seen outside the office complex you spent most of the weekend sleeping on a hospital bed? He merely tells them he had gotten a lot of rest, it wasn't a total lie, and he doubted it would make much of a difference to them either way.
A group of interns are shuffled through the office in some kind of tour. Mark probably wouldn't have registered their presence at all if not for one intern with waist-length red hair that passes by his desk. She must've been a natural brunette, her eyebrows are too dark and the contrast makes her hair look too red, too flat.
He eats his roast beef sandwich in the corner of the break room with Kurt like he does every day. Kurt has a lot of complaining to do concerning Henderson's recent promotion, which Kurt thinks is undeserved, and the intern they've saddled him with that obviously doesn't know how to use a spreadsheet. He starts in on his neighbor's noisy black labrador when he abruptly stops.
"Hey, Mark? Earth to Mark!"
"Huh…"
"What's wrong, man? You've been staring off into space." Kurt eyes him suspiciously. "I'm not boring you, am I?"
"Uh, sorry. I was just thinking…" Mark takes Kurt's silence as an indication to continue. "Do you have any of you have any of your old toys, Kurt?"
Kurt's face twisted. "Old toys?"
"Yeah, like old action figures or trains or comic books…"
"Comic books? Man, my house is cluttered enough without all that crap."
"Oh. So you don't have any?"
"Nah, are you starting a collection or something? Having a yard sale?"
"No… no I was just curious…" Mark considers elaborating, but it was clear Kurt wasn't interested in talking about his childhood. Somehow they get back to the topic of Kurt's neighbors, though Mark is more occupied with his own thoughts than absorbing Kurt's.
XXXXXXXXXX
The rest of the day goes by like a dull crawl. The instant five-o'clock hits he sprints to the parking lot. He cuts about fifteen minutes of rush hour traffic out of his drive home, but when he gets there he's at a loss of what to do with himself. As a toy they had rough days, slow days, even years where they had nothing to occupy themselves with, but at least then they had company. Buzz always had people in his situation he could talk to. Mark forcefully reminds himself that what felt like years only amounted to two days in reality.
He powers up his computer and spends several hours looking up old comic books and model airplanes and toy rifles. He smiles when he recognizes a few toys he used to own on eBay and saves their pictures. He also finds a vintage Etch-a-Sketch and several variations of the Potatoheads and a remote racecar that looks an awful lot like how he remembers RC. His searches for Woody's Round-up Gang and Buzz Lightyear prove fruitless, as does his search for a Tri-County area. He wasn't really expecting to find anything, but he still can't help feeling a bit disappointed.
XXXXXXXXXX
By Wednesday, he's exhausted his interest in internet searches and the idle chatter at work and reruns of cop shows. He can't shake the feeling of unease, the tightness in his chest, somewhat similar to the feeling he got after watching a certain television commercial in the dream. Only now there was no Woody to reassure him of his place in the world. He phones the research facility and when the receptionist asks him what he wants he isn't really sure how to respond. He needs to talk to someone, not like the earlier debriefing session with strangers, but with someone who understands. Someone who might be able to piece together what made reality so empty and the dream so… real.
The receptionist is about to blow him off when Mark quickly blurts the name Cyrus Anderson.
"I'm sorry, what?" the woman asks, stringing the words together in one hurried breath.
"I want to talk to Cyrus Anderson," he repeats firmly, adding a polite 'please' for good measure.
After a short pause, she mutters, "Hold, please," and he spends the next fourteen minutes listening to a loop of a synthesized piano rendition of Chopin's Prelude in C major.
"This is Dr. Anderson." The blunt voice finally sounds.
"Cyrus, this is Mark… Mark Balfre… from the Davis High School reunion…"
"Ah, yes, I remember," the man's voice instantly brightens. "Mark, I never did get to personally thank you for volunteering, it's difficult to find people willing to give up their lives and their families for science, even if it is just a weekend. We're still in the process of reviewing your notes, absolutely fascinating material…"
"Cyrus, I… I know this request is going to seem strange but, I need speak with some of the other volunteers."
The voice at the other end goes silent, but Mark can almost hear the gears in Cyrus' head turning, processing his request, carefully deciding how to respond to it. "Is there something wrong, Mark?" he finally says.
"No… well, yes… I don't know…" Mark stutters, removing his glasses to rub at the bridge of his nose. "In the dream everything felt so real and I just…"
"You wish to cross-reference your experience with the others?"
"Yeah, pretty much."
Cyrus clicks his tongue and sighs. "Mark, you cannot affirm your own reality based on the testimony of others. Besides, I can guarantee you all the other participants are complete strangers to you, they could not distinguish between your conscious and subconscious mind…"
"They were in my mind, Cyrus!" Mark interrupts, "I need to know what they saw, I… I need to know what was my subconscious and what wasn't."
"We can try to determine that, Mark, but we need time…"
"I need someone who understands, Cyrus. I've been trying to live my old life but I feel like I'm living in some kind of void…" Mark finds himself stopping, whatever thought he had previously now lost. He had never told anyone anything like this before, never had he expressed such a strong dissatisfaction with anything, not his boring job or his empty house or his distant family; mostly because he never really realized himself how dissatisfied he was.
It takes Cyrus three tries at Mark's name to get him to snap out of his reverie.
"Mark, I'd like you to take tomorrow off and come down to the facility, if that's at all possible. I can't arrange for you to speak with the other participants, unfortunately, you've all signed confidentiality agreements. I'm sure you remember, no information regarding the volunteers may be disclosed to anyone outside of my staff. However, I think it would be beneficial if you and I talked."
Mark feels his stomach drop. Cyrus still didn't understand, and what was worse he probably was under the impression that he was headed for a mental breakdown and needed psychiatric help.
"I… I don't know if I can get the day off," the sentence sounds hollow, even to him. "I'll try to come down."
"Very good, you're scheduled to come in Saturday for another debriefing but if we can meet sooner I think it will help."
"I'll try, Cyrus, I'll try."
XXXXXXXXXX
A/N:
-Don't read too much into the "science" (or lack thereof) with all this dream stuff. I know it doesn't hold up, for the sake of the story, let's say this all happens in the same universe as Inception only without all the illegal-ness and mind-theft.
-Chopin's Prelude in C Major is also called Reunion. It's a short little tune, I don't know if anybody would actually use it for music on hold but I included it for, um… foreshadowing purposes.
-How's the chapter length? Too short? Too long? Too obvious? Too vague? (lol, actually I'm not gonna worry about the last one. Stuff that's vague is usually vague for a reason.)
