I think this one may be my strangest one yet. I had the idea in the middle of the night and had to scribble down the gist of it before going back to sleep so that I wouldn't forget it. Given more time, I think I'd like to develop it into something longer because it feels like there could be more story here.

---

Double-Doubles And The Sea Shore

Eleven of them stand at the corner of Portage and Fort as their supervisor, Jack, doles out final instructions. They stand in a loose cluster and people on the sidewalk pass amongst them with virtually no interaction. Like elementary particles, thinks Alison. She recently read an article on a neutrino detector built into an abandoned mine in Northern Ontario. They act as if we're not real, but does that make us the neutrinos, or them? They are dressed in dark grey dress pants and shirts of a lighter grey. It's a uniform but at least it doesn't look like a uniform. If you saw one of them by themselves you might just think they weren't that into colours. When Alison worked in another department, she had to wear lame, blue coveralls. She had nothing against auto mechanics, but she didn't want to dress like one either.

"We've been slipping behind in our quotas lately, gang," Jack has been going like that for a while now, "and you all know they've been talking about deregulation again. What I'm saying is: try to get in a few extra jobs tonight. You've all got your regular assignments in your PDAs, but I loaded up a few extras. See if you can get through some of them."

Tom shoots up his hand, "They just slashed our allotted time per job by another ninety seconds and you want us to go even faster to squeeze in more assignments? We're going to have to start cutting corners."

Jack waggles his hands in front of his chest. He's grown a mustache again because he thinks it makes him look more authoritative. "Now, come on. We're still all about delivering a quality product. All I'm saying is to maybe put in a little extra effort the next few nights. Alison?"

"Um, yes Jack?" Her mind had been wandering.

"What do you say?"

"More effort? Absolutely. Sure thing."

"You've barely hit your targets any night this month. Let's try to stay focused, okay?"

"Focused. Yup."

Jack looks at his watch. "Alright people, remember we've got a staff meeting at the end of shift. So be back at the office for 4:00am sharp."

He clenches his right fist and holds it out towards the group. Alison sees her friend Brandon trying to suppress a smirk. The ten of them shuffle reluctantly into a huddle and stack their right hands on top of Jack's fist.

"Be the dream!" Jack shouts along with Tamara, Tom, Brandon and Lucy. The rest of them have varying degrees of enthusiasm, with Alison hardly more than muttering it. Alison is for once happy the regular joes passing by their group are oblivious to their presence.

They break apart, going their separate ways. Alison and Brandon's route is in the same general direction and they walk together for a bit.

"Lacking a bit of pep tonight, huh?"

Alison rolls her eyes. "The slogan is a joke, right? It was picked for irony?"

"You shouldn't have skipped the retreat when it was selected."

"You hate it too. You just get a kick out of how retarded we look shouting it."

"I just like to look on the bright side."

Alison punches his arm.

Brandon says, "This is my street. Your turn for coffee tonight. Double-double for me."

"See you later."

---

Alison stands on the front steps of the apartment and checks her watch. She rushed through her first two jobs and is now a bit early. She has no real way of being sure, but you just develop a knack for that sort of things after being on the job a while. Five minutes. She isn't sure what to do with herself. If she was a smoker, she could have a cigarette. She's a little jealous of smokers, who have a natural way to kill to a few minutes. Instead she has to stand around feeling awkward. She has a paperback in her bag but she doesn't like to read unless she can settle down and get into it.

A couple walks down the sidewalk, across the street. They aren't in a hurry, even though it's nearly three. The boy has his arm around her shoulders and they go along as though they have all the time in the world. The boy says something and the girl laughs. Alison bets dollars to doughnuts that when they finally get to where they're going, they'll fall into bed, have sex and then sleep utterly dreamless sleep.

She sighs and opens the door to the building's lobby. David Walker's apartment is on the fifth floor; the building is a walk-up. She pads up them slowly, still with a bit more time to kill. A man on his way down passes by her between the third floor and the fourth. He's yawning and rubbing his eyes and doesn't spare her a glance. Their shoulders nearly brush because Alison walks up dead in the middle of the staircase. We're not invisible, Brandon likes to say, merely unobtrusive.

David Walker's apartment is 507. She checks her watch again, takes hold of his door handle and gently twists it clockwise and counterclockwise until she feels the tumblers inside click open. She glances left and right to make sure the hallway is empty and then slips inside. The door closes after her softly, the sound is hardly even a ripple. The red, illuminated exit sign above the stairs buzzes and flickers but otherwise the scene might as well be a still painting.

Inside, Alison looks around. The lights are all out but he's left the blinds in his living room open and in the downtown apartment there is enough light from offices and billboards to create a fake sort of twilight. She steps over the pile of shoes in front of his door, tempted each night to straighten them out neatly along the wall. She's happy to see he hasn't fallen asleep on the futon in front of his TV. Not that it matters in a professional sense, but she's pleased nonetheless.

Alison opens the door to David's room just enough to slip through and closes it gently behind her. The first two months of their apprenticeship are devoted solely to closing doors. She stands over his bed and watches him. A small bit of drool on his pillow. For most clients, she'd find that gross, but from David it's endearing. Curly brown hair has fallen across his forehead and covers his eyes. She kneels down, unties the laces of her sneakers and slips them off, then walks around to the other side of his bed and slips under the covers. She nestles up against him, slipping her right hand under the pillow his head his rests on. With her other, she brushes the curls away from his forehead, runs the back of her hand across his cheek and then lies there for a while, smiling at his slight snore. When his sleep cycle changes and REM begins, she lays her hand on his temple.

Strictly speaking, this is completely unnecessary. She can do her job by simply sitting on the edge of the bed and placing her fingertips on his head. Alison suspects she would be fired if Jack or anyone else found out she gets into bed with David. At the very least she'd reassigned, probably to another city. But it isn't like she does this everyone. Just David.

---

David is dreaming about the ocean again. Alison wonders if he grew up on the coast. It's hard to tell the difference between memory and desire, a longing that comes from something lost or something never had. But he's been dreaming of water a lot lately and she's done some prep work. His mind is drifting over the grey surface, whitecaps rising and tumbling over. Alison imagines the cry of a seagull and that echoes across his dream.

In the bed, she nuzzles is closer and whispers into his ear:

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

She memorized that in the library that afternoon, from a book of poetry by John Masefield.

David's view changes and he's now standing on the shore. Alison conjures a rocky coast and a sunset, stormy clouds dyed reds and oranges as the sun melts into the water. She's cribbed the scene from a documentary about native groups on the West Coast. Far off near the horizon lightning streaks down from clouds to the water. She has the seagulls call out again and if she were really there she would take David's hand in hers.

After that, David dreams about his office. He's arranging the birthday party of someone who hasn't worked there in years and he can't find any candles for their cake. He runs through the building in a near panic, pulling open desk drawers and cabinets before shifting into deeper, dreamless sleep and Alison slips out of his bed, picks up her shoes and leaves. Outside, in the hall, she cries quietly for a little while. No one passes by and they wouldn't have noticed her if they had.

---

Alison sits on a couch in the staff lounge with Brandon, chatting with Sam and Martha, who work a different part of the city than they do. Somewhere out in the 'burbs.

"So then he decides that he needs to make a baked alaska and I have to shift the scene from an amusement park to a restaurant I think he worked at when he was a teenager."

"What is a baked alaska, anyhow?" asks Brandon.

Martha rolls her eyes. "How the hell would I know? The last time I baked was when I was six. I set the rug in my room on fire by stuffing my Barbie's hair into my Easy Bake oven. I figured it was a dessert of some kind so I had him run off to the walk-in cooler to get eggs, chocolate and whipped cream. But the expiry date on every carton of whipped cream was expired and when the head cook started screaming at him he woke up."

Sam laughs and says, "I can't top that tonight. Although every single one of my clients dreamt about being late to an exam. It's like they got together to co-ordinate it before hitting the sack. Why are dreams so fucked up anyway?"

Martha says, "It's just peoples' brains filtering through junk."

Alison shakes her head and tells them, "I read an article the other day about how dreaming is a training mechanism. These scientists deprived rats of dreaming by never letting them settle into REM sleep and after a few days the rats lost most of their self-preservation skills. They figure it's how animals practice running from predators and things like that. Think about how many dreams you facilitate that involve being chased."

Martha and Sam are startled for a moment; Alison usually hardly says a word.

"But how's making a baked alaska a survival mechanism?"

Brandon puts his arm around Alison and says, "You better watch out for Ali. She's got subscriptions to Discover and Scientific American."

"When was the last time someone had to run from a sabre-toothed tiger?"

Martha's head is tilted a bit to the side. "No, I can see it. The things people stress about these days - they're not exactly life threatening anymore, are they?"

Sam says, "Makes us sound sort of redundant, though."

Brandon finishes his coffee and drops the cup in a wastebasket. "So we're an evolutionary throwback? Don't tell management. They'll lay us all off." He looks at his watch. "Well, let's get Jack to get the meeting going. I wanna go grab some breakfast before the Pancake House fills up. You guys in?"

Alison lingers on the couch for a little while. She's thinking that dreaming isn't atavistic. They just have to figure out a new use for it.

Author's Note - I was quite tickled with this idea when I had it, thinking I was quite original. But I realized while writing it that, to some degree, it's sort of a rip-off of Dead Like Me :P

6 responses to "Week #13 - Double-Doubles And The Sea Shore "

Erinn, destroyer of elder gods wrote: Tuesday, 04 Mar 2008 00:53 Dana, I am going to say this and mean it. I enjoyed the shit out of this story. Also, nice use of "unobtrusive". You don't see that word in print often enough. Bring it back!

Debs wrote: Tuesday, 04 Mar 2008 01:21 Wow Dana, I REALLY love this one, it definitely leaves me wishing for something longer!

Beast wrote: Tuesday, 04 Mar 2008 02:43 Hey Dana, I just read 13 weeks of FFF in 2 sittings! Now what am I going to do for the rest of my year off?!?

Ginny! wrote: Wednesday, 05 Mar 2008 03:22 Editrix says: "middle on the night", "regular joes on passing", and something else I lost near the end. I like this quite a bit. ^_^

D.J. wrote: Monday, 10 Mar 2008 05:48 There are far worse shows to rip off. ;) This is good stuff -- I can't help but feel like it's a set-up for something longer, though ...

Victoria wrote: Sunday, 24 Aug 2008 11:11 I want to know see more! One of the best I've read of yours.

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