Author's Notes: Don't mind the ending—it's supposed to be that way. This is a pretty graphic chapter, so be prepared!
Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.
Oneirophobia
3.
Ken feels himself coming back into being—and 'being' is a relative term—in jerks and spurts. He wiggles his fingers experimentally, relishing in the sensation after going without it; he stretches his arms, bends his legs, and blinks. All around him there is nothing but milky grayness, while he feels the heat of an intense light situated somewhere above him. He is naked and sweating profusely, sheathed in the perspiration rolling off his skin.
His palms are fascinating networks of interconnected lines, the naturally occurring creases from pre-life. Each spot has a name: heart line and marriage lines, girdles, random planet-inspired swells. An entire lifetime could be summed up on the right palm. Palmistry is something unconventional he sought out when he was a kid, a practice he could prove or debunk however he wished. A fortune-teller—a silly, fake gypsy who had set up a tent in the neighborhood carnival—told him that if you have no lifelines, you are not meant to be alive. Ken has always had two lifelines, thank you very much, but he looks at his palms anyway to ensure that they are still there.
One glance later, he discovers that his lifelines are gone. Nothing seems amiss about the hot grayness or the nakedness or the unscented sweat that lets his thighs slide together easily, but the lack of lifelines feels terribly wrong. He had them before, didn't he? Sweat glitters in the remaining creases, clean and beautiful, half-hidden within hollows created by his folded fingers.
"The human body is composed of anywhere from 50 to 80 water," someone says. "It depends on the individual."
In the grayness that runs on into infinity, Ken finds the single blemish: a black rectangle, its dimensions unmistakably that of a standard door's. Ken cannot see the knob or panels because its color is that seamlessly dark. The voice came from there. The voice is almost familiar to him, hovering at the brink of unmemory as if it belongs to a time that has long since passed. An intimate anachronism.
"Water is a universal solvent," Ken says and floats toward the voice.
"Why is it critical to all organisms?"
He stops in front of the door. "It forms hydrogen bonds," he says. His fingers, dripping warm sweat, nervously comb the hair plastered against his neck. Something indescribable prevents him from going inside the blackness to confront the voice. "It has two lone pairs—"
"Unlike what other compound?"
"Ammonia. That has only one lone pair, which makes all the difference."
"Continue," the voice says, conceding speech as a teacher might to his willing pupil.
Ken remembers Tamachi, a school that shouldn't exist here but does anyway, and his mind shivers before his body has a chance to. "The other reason it is critical—its high polarity."
"Describe that in greater detail."
"High polarity is responsible for making water such a good solvent," Ken says without hesitation. The information simply comes to him; the words pour from his mouth, taken almost verbatim from a textbook he simultaneously sees being written in his mind's eye. The words crawl across each blank page like an army of ants. He delights in the simplicity of his answers. "There are nonpolar substances like fats that cannot dissolve in water. But in ionic solutes—for example, those containing table salt—"
"Chemical formula?"
"NaCl. The ions that form ionic solutes are easily taken away from their crystalline lattice and discharged into the solution. Water's partially negative charges are attracted to any of the positively charged components in the solute—"
"That's enough," the teacher snaps.
Ken immediately stops talking. He catches the flicker of something shifting in the darkness, a ripple of black against black, and he squints into infinity.
I have perfect vision, he thinks without meaning to.
He has perfect vision, even after decades of abusing his eyes on another plane of existence called "reality." Then, with increasing consequential lucidity, he understands that he is thirteen years old and his nakedness is the ultimate vulnerability.
"You're missing one important thing." The teacher steps through the doorway, metamorphosing from shadows into something solid and definite. He smiles at Ken, almost kindly, but his eyes are crueler than an early winter. "I doubt you'll figure it out on your own."
Recognition pulls at Ken slowly but surely, just as everything else has; soon, with increasing fear now, he identifies the teacher and stumbles backward as part of a poorly coordinated retreat. The teacher looks like him—is him!—which elucidates the mystery of the voice's familiarity and the reason for its displacement in time. Unlike Ken, the teacher shirks nakedness in favor of wearing a plain blue jumpsuit with fancy gold snaps and latches along its front. Their hairstyles are drastically different, too: for Ken, limp and dark and long; for the teacher, wild and eccentric and aesthetically pleasing in its spiked chaos.
"What? What is the most important thing?"
"Water is also essential in making coffee," the Kaiser says.
"I hate coffee," Ken says petulantly and decides to run away.
But suddenly they are standing in a coffee shop, one of those modern clubs with an Internet connection and many patrons who hope they look trendy just by being there. However, instead of pretentious humans, furry burros personified sit at the computer terminals or read crappy poetry from squat, compact books. One burro wearing a black beret uses a stalk of milkweed to stir his cappuccino. Fresh hay is strewn out all over the floor and occasionally a burro reaches down for a tasty handful. Fresh dung rests untouched beneath every stool. The room smells like a barnyard.
Grimacing at first, the Kaiser removes his signature glasses—gold frames and purple lenses that the burros would be sure to consider attractively retro—and then snaps the wide nosepiece underfoot. The sound is loud and definite, even frightening, and Ken flinches.
They walk together past the line of stools to a small, quiet booth in the corner. One of the walls is a window that looks out onto a nameless metropolis that Ken doesn't know the name of. When he sits down, he realizes he is still naked, but he doesn't care and no one else seems to either. No one notices the Kaiser unzipping his jumpsuit, peeling the sleeves off of his arms, and pushing the upper part of the outfit down to his waist. No one notices Ken crying or how the Kaiser's wrists have holes in them that mimic the factually accurate Crucifixion.
The Kaiser looks at the menu hanging on an adjacent wall. "What do you want?"
"What are you doing here?" Ken asks, dismayed. He is more worried about the foreign setting than the pack animals drinking out of dinky little cups. He is more worried about the Kaiser's presence than the way his own ass slips comfortably into the seat because the skin is so slick with sweat.
With his hands folded together and his chin propped atop them, the Kaiser leans forward and regards Ken. Blood that is the correct color drips down his forearms; fat globules of it leave streaks like rain down glass. He smiles. His teeth are fashioned from razorblades.
"I'm setting up shop," the Kasier says, clicking his metal teeth. He exudes nonchalance. "I'm visiting it personally with you for the sake of appearances."
The Kaiser twists one wrist and snaps his fingers, and soon a waiter that looks more human than the burros do rushes over to take the order. The waiter has a telling gold collar around his neck, and Ken doesn't feel much surprise, at least when compared to his other shocks, to see that the waiter is Daisuke—albeit a battered and broken and willpower-less incarnation of him.
"How may I help you?" Daisuke whispers. He appears to be more human than the patrons, but his eyes and nose are bovine and he has a pair of long, floppy brown ears.
"Coffee. Black. Add anything and you die," the Kaiser says. "My associate here will have the Hippobosca equina Super-Saver Special with some whipped cream on top. Actually—bring the whipped cream separately."
Daisuke carefully scratches the order into own skin with a painful-looking etching tool, right alongside a number of other orders for "black coffee" and the occasional "orange scone." Once finished, a burro calls Daisuke over and Ken watches the hairier patron complain about his drink in a mixture of human words and grunting noises.
"What do you mean by 'setting up shop'?" Ken asks eventually.
"I think that is fairly obvious."
"No," Ken says, deadpan, "it isn't. Tell me."
The Kaiser sighs. "Have you been getting any headaches lately?"
Across from them, Daisuke goes into the kitchen and fetches a small butterfly net with an extra-long handle. The net's gossamer fibers twinkle as he swings it through the air, hoping to catch the horseflies that congregate in seething clusters over every burro. He hops a few times, traps an especially large number of flies, and then deposits them into the opaque jar he holds in his other hand. It looks like a smooth operation to the outside observer.
"Sometimes," Ken says. "I get headaches sometimes. Lately."
"At the base of your neck? Does it spread upward from there until you have to sit and put your head between your knees so it will stop hurting as much?"
"Isn't . . . Isn't that where the Dark Seed is?"
"Ah—here's our order!"
Daisuke carries over a tray and places it on a collapsible stand. Black coffee he sets by the Kaiser, while Ken receives a fancy glass cup with a beveled top. The glass is clear and he can see the horseflies inside of it, buzzing angrily from their confinement, desiring blood. A rotten strawberry rests at the bottom with the few flies that do not bother to protest.
"Hippobosca equina," Ken says, growing pale. "I get it now. The scientific name for horseflies."
"It didn't cost all that much, too." The Kaiser sips his drink. Daisuke leaves the requested can of whipped cream and hovers nearby, always courteous, until the Kaiser waves him off. Nothing has been added to the coffee and unnecessary carnage always ruins his appetite for caffeine.
Ken frowns. "But the headaches—and the Dark Seed—"
"If this has never occurred to you before, you have been wasting the intelligence I cultivated."
"The Seed—is it becoming active?"
The Kaiser touches one forefinger to his nose, grins, and takes another sip. "Eat your Super-Saver Special, Ken. It's good for you. High in protein."
"You want to take over my body again?" Ken exclaims before he even knows what he's saying. Here comes the panic, the pain, the fear. "Is that what 'setting up shop' means? But you're me! You can't . . ."
"I am you, sure. I am that little part of you that you refuse to acknowledge as ever having existed in the first place," the Kaiser says conversationally. "You are only half the person you used to be."
"My doctor said—"
"Your doctor doesn't understand what is happening because you never really told him the whole story. You enjoyed being me. I wouldn't have stuck around if you didn't."
"But I take colloidal mineral supplements!"
The Kaiser nods. "And a cocktail of antipsychotic drugs. I know. I know everything that you know, and then some."
Ken's eyes move aside to seek out Daisuke. It is a reflex.
"Yes, I even know how delicious the back of his right thigh tastes."
"This can't be happening! I've been diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder!" Ken exclaims desperately.
"And paraphrenic schizophrenia, right?" the Kaiser asks, batting his eyelashes. "I remember the day you heard that news. You were frightened and relieved because you finally thought the Kaiser could be explained away by chemical imbalances and other theories of modern medical science.
"But you don't feel any different, any saner, do you? Sometimes you cannot help yourself: you look at Daisuke and you remember how he crushed the dreams you had for the Digital World. You go and hide in your room, pop pills, watch the world spin, and hope you'll get better. You try to squash what you feel, but it comes back within a day. It always does."
"Your words do echo inside me, even now . . . but that does not mean I want to be like you again!" Ken's voice goes jagged with pain. "I'm happy!"
"Sorry, but that is a lie. You are sick, but you aren't the kind of sick that professional attention can help." The Kaiser reaches over and picks up the can of whipped cream, but he pauses and frowns when he notices the untouched Super-Saver Special. "I didn't pay for that so you could look at it."
"I hate you," Ken says. His hands clench. "I hate you. I hate you so much."
"That is a wasted effort," the Kaiser says, scooting away his coffee and popping off the can's top in one fluid motion. He smiles and opens his mouth, pushes the nozzle, and welcomes a helping of vanilla fluff. "But if it is any consolation, I hate you too."
"You'll never take my body back. Even if you somehow manage to, Daisuke and the others will—"
"They are tired of you. Daisuke is especially tired of you. I'm the objective party here, okay? You have your own best interests in mind when you talk. You don't truly see how he agonizes whenever he is with you."
"He loves me," Ken says, but now he doesn't sound so sure. Something about a cemetery flashes into his mind, an old snapshot of gray rain and cold dirt, but his mind cannot process what that means and thus banishes it. "And I love him back. So he'll help me."
"If you look hard, you will see what I'm talking about. But I want you to know that I'm here for you. I'm here and waiting for you." The Kaiser grins wolfishly. The metal teeth cut into his tongue when he licks his lips clean. "I am the strength you don't want to admit you have. You need me, or else you will break into a million pieces."
Something hot twinges Ken's belly. His eyes, which had been progressively becoming narrower the longer the Kaiser spoke, widen again. That heat is a familiar sensation. Soon that heat will intensify, advancing into a fire that cannot be ignored; it will spread through his lower body, gather in his loins, and make his knees melt into gelatin. It will be more real than he wants it to be. It will demand relief—something to quench its flames. Discreetly, Ken folds his wet legs, but the Kaiser knows. He knows everything.
"You look in the mirror sometimes, right after a shower, and you spike up your hair," the Kaiser says. He tousles his already-messy, impossibly buoyant hair. "It isn't the same thing, but you're too afraid to try out Motomiya's styling gel. The Digital World helped you get that style before, and you're curious to see if you can replicate it in what you like to call 'real life.'"
"That is not true," Ken whispers, trembling. "That is not true!"
"But it is. And every time you encounter leather, you think of me. Your wallet is made of genuine leather and you like to smell it—you bury your nose in the folds, into that one nook above your credit cards, and just breathe."
"Stop telling me these lies!"
"I have watched you do these things. It's flattering, in a strange way."
"You're absolutely insane!"
"Ken," the Kaiser says, and suddenly he possesses great gravitas in spite of his semi-nakedness and the whipped cream on his chin. "Listen to me, okay? I want you to know that I'll wait forever for you. Daisuke is going to hurt you like he hurt me, but it is will be a lot worse because you feel actual drippy emotion for that fool. Just know that you can come back to me. I hate you, but we share a body, and I don't want you to do something stupid like flay your wrists and ruin whatever dreams we might still be able to achieve."
A mixture of blood and sweat from the Kaiser's pierced wrists and Ken's sopping body now covers the surface of the table. Glaring, Ken plants his palms in the sticky liquid and stands up. His groin is burning up with want, but he risks exposing it so he can run away for real. He does not want to be here any more.
"I'm done with this. I'm done with you. You will never succeed with such a stupid idea," Ken says darkly.
Although he is a nonsuperimposable image of untidy hair and jumpsuit bottoms and radiant evil, the Kaiser stands up and places his hands into the liquid as well. He leans in close, reaching up to cup Ken's cheek with a dirtied hand. A thumb presses into the soft, fleshy hollow alongside the jaw, studying the stress there, and Ken is overcome with the untimely and unwished-for immobility of nightmares.
"Try saying those exact words the next time you get what you'd like to believe is a tension headache," the Kaiser whispers. His tongue slithers out, striped red and pink from the steep number of cuts it underwent due to his teeth. He pulls Ken against him and licks the half-open mouth, leaving a smear of blood and saliva. "Honor me the next time you touch yourself."
Ken cannot do anything to resist. His heart accelerates, his hands start to shake, something twists inside his chest, his intestines become a knot of pain, and the strength goes out of his knees like he had anticipated. The Kaiser is on top of him in an instant, staining his jumpsuit in the table's muck, blood trailing from wrists and tongue. His greedy and dirty hands coast over the skin covered in so much clean condensation. Conquest. The Kaiser laughs in his ear. This is conquest. The violating hands glide down, down, down; they glide down his chest and across his stomach and around his hips and then——
