November 15, 1963 - 07:07 pm
The light that filters through the store's smoked window is dull, this evening, and my eyes wander over the arched, inverted letters that spell out the name Merelec. On the sign announcing that the store is closed. On the pile of component boxes and the accumulation of TV sets awaiting to be repaired. In my hand, the soldering iron hasn't moved for a minute now, and I finally turn it off. My head rests on the table in the crook of my arm. I'm tired. Exhausted. And I know it's probably the same for Lloyd, who has even more TV sets lined up to be fixed, at the Dallas Centre store right now. I don't know if we'll get it all done in time for Kennedy's 'coming' on November 22. And we'll have literally seen each other three hours, since he returned from Houston.
I sigh. I haven't heard from Klaus since we hung up amidst a troubled silence on Monday. He didn't say anything about it, but I sensed he was fighting the urge to jump into the Dodge Polara and drive all the way here. If he really fancied it, it would take him a good twenty-five hours of driving, interspersed with stops, to get to Dallas. About three days, assuming he didn't kill himself. I sigh again. I don't even have the strength to think about it.
As my eyes close, the circuit board gradually merges into a dreamlike star map, with the bright spots of soldering no longer making sense to my exhausted mind. I no longer have any energy to flow through the copper wires, not even enough to keep me awake. Capacitors and resistors seem to dance around me as if the universe itself were nothing more than a machinery. And I fall asleep - right where I am - the acrid smell of resin and white-hot metal dancing around me.
*Crack!*
How long have I already slept, when this space-time anomaly rips the fabric of my sleep? I don't know, just as I don't know whether I'm dreaming or not. I don't want it. Not right now. I need to sleep, and not yet another restless dream in which Five's pointy face stares back at me over the lined-up cathode-ray lamps. I turn my head and bury it in my arms, as if desperately trying to protect myself from him, once again.
"Go away," I tell him through my numbness, to where sleep and consciousness intertwine.
I've tried to do this time and time again, and I've always failed. The dreams I have about Five are always far too vivid and realistic for me to keep them away, or even to distinguish them from reality. I know that - this time - I won't succeed either. I can even feel the air he moves as he leans against the nearest cardboard boxes.
"You'd better ask me how I found you."
I remain silent. Since those dreams began on my first day here in 1961, this is the first time one of my visions of Five is speaking to me. I think I must be getting worse and worse, but in the end, this isn't so surprising. And anyway, as in the days when Five was for real in front of me, he seems prone to doing both questions and answers.
"I'm still trying to figure out by what quantic wonder I was given to see through your eyes".
I frown against my wide-knit sweater. And slowly, painfully, I finally turn my head and contemplate what torture my subconscious is to inflict on me this time.
He stands there just as he used to: in his rumpled Umbrella Academy uniform, with his high socks and... the bowling shoes we hadn't had time to take off before escaping, in 2019. Really, my brain is getting better at making me hallucinate. I inhale deeply, forcing myself to sit upright in my chair, as if my head weighed even heavier than before I fell asleep. And I stand still, staring at him with a jaded expression.
"What's going to happen, in this dream?", I say somewhat provocatively. Since this time we can talk, then let's just do it.
"A good old-fashioned shootout? A time warp? A nuclear apocalypse?"
He freezes at my sassy joke, as if relieved not to have to tell me all of this himself. And - before I fully understand - he walks over to the coffee pot, which is almost buried among the boxes of soldering wires.
"So you've also experienced seeing what I see. It's a side effect I hadn't suspected, when we opened the vortex together."
I run my hand over my eyes, while he smells the coffee I've made and seems realistically satisfied with it.
"What... what side effect?"
He pours himself a large shot of black liquid into one of the 'Merelec' mugs.
"We combined our wills and paired our powers to allow this bend in space-time, at the Icarus Theater. Something must have circulated between us at that moment. As if a tiny part of us had blended together."
I let out a sardonic laugh.
"You're both too young and too old for me to be interested, Five".
He doesn't even raise an eyebrow.
"Joke if you will: we've remained connected somehow".
I sigh.
"So what? Why are you coming to haunt me this time?"
This comparison is actually Klaus's, because he too had to endure Five's intrusions into my head, night after night, over the past few years. I've often offered him to swap Five for Ben, and - I can sort of understand why - he's always chuckled and declined. His nose in his cup, Five looks at me with his little blue eyes, sharper than in any of my previous dreams.
"I'm trying to locate everyone. That's my only immediate priority".
"Everyone..."
I repeat this, as if it hurt. How many times have I returned to the alley behind the bank and Commerce and Knox, just to look for the slightest hint of an arrival? I hate this dream. I find it far more realistic and cruel than all the others before it.
"I have been hoping as well."
He stops sipping, but keeps the mug against his chin.
"Did you find anything? Besides Klaus, because thanks to you I already know where he is."
I can see he's reasonably not worried about him - as a matter of fact - when honestly he could be.
"I had a doubt about Luther, once. Because of a blurry photo in a newspaper article, about fight rooms."
I can confess this, since Five is just a dream, but I shake my head slowly.
"I preferred to dismiss the idea as if it couldn't happen."
I've crafted a fragile reality, here and now. It's been hard enough to earn for me to jeopardize it by 'chasing waterfalls', as Klaus would say. Despite that knot in my stomach always hitting me while passing by the Avon movie theater, I've always tried not to let myself be consumed by uncertainties, and instead focus on the life I managed to rebuild with what I had. But Five seems satisfied with my answer, which he mentally notes down.
"Perfect," he says. " I'll dig that up."
I take a deep breath, and for a moment I can't help thinking I'd be happy if this dream wasn't a dream. Despite his annoying grin and the fact that it feels weird to admit it, I've missed Five. Really, it's a cruel dream, and my shoulders slump as I can't stop looking at him.
"Are the nightmares going to go on for long, Five? Or can we... give each other back what's been circulating between us?"
He arches an eyebrow.
"I don't know: I'm not the one bending matter and energy."
Our gazes lock, and I think back to the first conversation we had, in his room at Hargreeves Mansion, under the roof. When he had said that I was 'not another him'. Today, we know just how much. And maybe he's right, I'm the one who should be figuring this out. I have nothing to lose, since this is a dream. I nod, and my drowsiness fades a bit as I clench my fingers in anticipation.
"Come here," I say, and without hesitating, he drops his mug on a radio box and walks over to me.
I keep staring at him for a few seconds, then lower my eyes to my hand, which is now resting on his arm. I close my eyes. And just as if I'd been awake, I channel the energy of the room. All around us, from the floor tiles to the ceiling, from the copper wires to the TV resistors... and right into our beings, through our nervous systems. There is no clear boundary to what energy permeates, I know this now better than many. We are all part of a continuum, with each other, with living things and with the objects around us.
"Do you know what you're looking for?" he asks me, not caring that maybe I should focus.
"I have a vague idea," I murmur, and this is strange to me, because I've never talked about it openly before.
"I've already felt ~them~ in Klaus, and in me."
"Them?"
"Some kind of particles".
Over the last few years, especially on my return from Varanasi and after so much yoga, I began to sense that our energy were not completely like that of 'ordinary' people. That it was dotted with twirling, ethereal particles, sometimes appearing to me as tiny amber spheres. And now I see them in Five, just as in me. Like the ones Klaus sometimes stirs in all directions inside him. Like the ones Lloyd - for his part - doesn't carry. For a moment, the televisions waiting to be repaired crackle around us, as I maintain the flow in the Glen Oak small store. And even outside on the street, the public lights turn on, earlier than usual.
"What do they look like?" Five asks, and I don't really have any words other than a comparison:
"To the sacred marigolds on the Ganges."
I can almost feel his silence in the stream of his own power, and after a moment, it seems as if two tiny particles of golden energy swap back between us. Just returning to where they were before being disrupted by the vortex of the Icarus Theatre. The TV I'd been repairing turns on and sizzles with static noise, even though I hadn't finished reassembling it. David's radio-cassette, which had been waiting to be repaired, turns on to 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance', and the ceiling light begins to flicker quietly.
"I think...", I stammer. "I think we're unplugged."
I open my eyes again, and the whole room falls back into silence and the dim light coming through the smoked windows. Five says nothing, but smirks. In this insane dream, it seems I'm daring to hope for a peaceful sleep.
"I think you did it," he replies, factually. And looking at the store and the electronic devices around us, he adds:
"In less than three years, you've done better with the machines than just pushing Hermes's engine, I see."
I smile, and joke:
"I feel like I was literally born for this".
He quietly pulls his arm free and goes back to finishing his coffee in one go.
"Rin, I also came to ask you..."
I sit back in my chair, frowning. I never like it when Five has a request, even in a dream.
"Do you - as a matter of principle - still agree to take part in my plans B?"
I stay silent for a few seconds, letting out a deep sigh. Maybe I would have struggled to be this sincere if I'd been awake.
"No. I have a tiny form of happiness, here and now. I won't gamble with it."
He squints, finally unsure whether I know or not what's coming. And I don't want to know. I just want to get on with my reasonable little existence here. With Lloyd, with the store. Even in this crappy era, which I've finally gotten used to.
"What if this was our only chance?" he says, and I get annoyed:
"I can't take it anymore that my nightmares always circle back to this."
"Rin, would you do it?"
"No. Now leave, please. I'd like to have less crappy dreams now."
My tone is frank, almost dry. And as I rest the side of my head on my arms again, Five returns his cup. Then he stuffs his hands back into his pockets, with a look of temporary resignation. Even in my sleep, having mobilized such an amount of energy has exhausted me, and I can feel my eyes already closing.
"Even if it was the end of the world again?" he whispers.
I no longer see him. Once again, I see the stars from the inside of my eyelids, where more peaceful sleep awaits to take me away. My breathing becomes calmer, much calmer than on any night since my arrival through the vortex. And I reply, truthfully:
"Especially if it was."
Notes:
Was it really a dream this time? In this in-between state of exhaustion, Rin probably couldn't realize that it was really Five who had come to visit her.
She understandably no longer wishes to risk endangering the life she has laboriously built up. Like Allison, like Viktor. The truth is, she has a reality, in 1963.
It's probably a more important chapter than it seems. About the marigolds (if you've watched the series, you know what they are), about how Rin connects to them and to the machines. Five is probably right: in just a few years and thanks to the life journey she's been on, she's been able to progress. Let's hope this isn't simply what was expected of her.
Any comment will make my day!