Devil Dream, or New Day

I had spent the past day and night wandering the streets and the back alleys searching for the devil or the animal-headed man. I assumed either would give me some clue as to the nature of the other. They weren't to be found. The crowd had eventually dispersed with the faint light, replaced by a bright and cold day. The smoldering remains of the mosque and the books sent twin black snakes curling into the daylight. I retraced my steps from the past few days, hoping that these manifestations would gravitate toward where I had been. No luck.
Night had overtaken the city and it remained quiet, resting after the revelry of the morning. I headed toward the carnival site. The rides and the tents were long gone, but the debris remained. A few stray napkins and paper plates brushed the ground in the wind. The red devil was standing alone in the center of the lot, smiling his yellow smile and glistening, naked in the moonlight.
I approached him, hesitantly. He leaned over, placed his wet hand on the back of my head and whispered in my ear.

I awake to a sulfurous smell permeating my room. The ceiling fan spins lazily above me, creaking. The afternoon sun pokes through the shutters on my window and casts shadows across my typewriter. The empty page that sits in the machine taunts me with it's whiteness, it's cleanness. My body is smudged with ink and dirt, my hair matted to my head, my fingers brown with grease.
Next to the typewriter with the empty page sits a neat stack of typed papers. A manuscript. I slouch out of bed and open the shutters. The sunlight permeates the room. I look down into the street. The animal headed man slinks out of an alley and skitters down the road. I decide to go out.
As I step outside for the first time in two days I can feel a tension seep out of my body. My lungs fill with fresh, new air and the rain began to wash away the dirt and ink. It is freezing. I don't care. I walk across Katz toward the Butcher's. I need some meat.

Firelight, or Devil Smile

I wake to the sound of crackling flames. My window pane glows with an ominous light. I check my clock - it's far too early to be awake. I think maybe it's another manifestation. Sometimes I'll wake up from a bad dream to find it's horrors standing materialized over my bed. I keep a gun under my pillow now.
I approach the window, cautiously. A bonfire roars in the empty lot behind the library. I can see a crowd gathering. Women are convulsing in a strained rhythm around the flames, cackling, drunk. It's far too early to be drinking. I dress and stumble out of my apartment into the elevator. On the way down to the street, I remember the fire in the windows of the Tower, glinting in the light of the carnival. I remember the animal-headed man, stalking the alley. Was he real or a stray manifestation? Did he slip out of my dream and wander out into the night, full of my angst and repressed emotion, ready to lay waste to my waking world? Who was the girl that he was stalking?
I wander out into the street. At first I think the sky's getting lighter. There is a reddish glow in the air. However, I feel a heat on my back and, turning, see the mosque. It's terrible and hellish in the darkness. The flames licking at the building's dome cast an eerie glow on the surrounding area. The black smoke disappears in the black sky. The smoke is giving me a headache. I can taste the burning wood on my lips and tongue. I turn toward the library, intrigued by the howling coming from behind it.
I approach the crowd of derelicts. They surround the prostitutes that surround the flames that consume the books. To the left a group is gathered. I can see their lips moving in silent prayer.
My head throbs with the smoke and the frantic screams of the prostitutes dancing around the fire. I get scared. The faces of the homeless, the delinquent and the dilapidated men become hellish masks. They laugh and jeer at me. One of them is on my back, clawing at me. I scream. He's shoving me. I feel the familiar pop. I half-turn my head in time to see a red devil, naked and glistening in the firelight, approach the man from behind and swipe at his head with it's pitchfork. The devil's weapon connects with the man's ear and he drops to the ground.
The creature faces me, his pointed nose and mustache only inches from my face. he smiles a yellow smile, and then leaps off into the dawn. The cackling of the women reverberates in my ears. I can't move. The man lays motionless at my feet, blood pouring from his face. I can't move.

Keys, or Animal-Headed Men

Dusk. The lights from the carnival reflect off the windows of Wilshire Tower. It stands, glowing with the delighted fire of those lights, monumental and lonely against the fading sun. I see something small and metal on the sidewalk outside of the apartment building. A key. I pocket it.
A memory:
I was wandering the halls of the new institution they had me in. This was after the hospital, of course. They had me at this new place. It wasn't quite a mental house but it wasn't the most comfortable place either. I wasn't told where I was or how long I would be there or why they had me locked up. They never told me what all the experiments and tests were for either. Anyway, I was wandering the halls, and turned a corner and there was this red door. I figured it had to be important, so I went in. The door led to a hallway that receded into darkness. There were no overhead lights. I walked forward, groping the walls. I guess I got scared or something, so I ran back toward the door before I went too far. There was something ominous about that darkness.
The door was, of course, locked. I banged on it for what felt like hours, screaming until my voice went hoarse. Eventually I felt that familiar pain in my head and then a pop. I passed out in exhaustion.
I remember waking up hot and sweaty, unable to breathe. Something was pressing down on my chest. Forcing myself up, I heard the pile of keys that had been covering me fall to the ground, clinking. The light from under the door made them glint in the darkness. I was surrounded by them. Keys of every make and color. I immediately knew that none of them would fit into the lock on the red door. That just wasn't how these things worked. I sighed, and leaned back on the pile of keys, resigned to my fate. Thousands of keys and one lock. You'd think the odds were in my favor. But at this point I knew better.
The noise of the carnival brought me back to reality.
I was getting close. There were people in the streets. We walked as one, past the closed storefronts and the run-down alleyways toward that promising glow. I passed on front of one alleyway and stopped. I could see, barely, down the alley, a man holding a baseball bat, silently pursuing an oblivious young girl. What struck me was his head. It wasn't human. He had an animal head, just like in my dream. I've never been one to follow 'signs' or 'omens' but I'm not exactly in the best position to disregard events such as these either. Animal-headed men didn't strike me as odd, but this felt significant. I yelled something at him. I didn't know what else to do. He disappeared. I blinked, and stood in silence. Looking back at the carnival, I turned around and made my way home, lost in thought.
I think eventually I heard someone walk by on the other side of the red door. I don't know how else I would've escaped. I probably banged on the door as they walked by and they had a key and let me out. Then again, I'm not really sure. Was that animal-headed man real? Did he have something to do with my dream? Did I ever actually escape that hallway behind the red door?

Apparition, or Dr. Bob

I'm out of meat, now. I went to the butcher's only yesterday but I've already eaten all the meat. The meat's gone, and the page in front of me is still blank. I'm suspended in memory. My life now feels like nothing more than a product of my past. Everything that happened then was so important, so monumental. Everything that happens now is just an invariable result of what happened then. I'm simply playing out an unavoidable role.
I need to get out.
I walk to the carnival. As I'm walking, memories flash through my head. Random freeze-frames of my past life appear and are gone. My synapses fire. I remember a specific night spent in that hospital.
I dreamed that night. I hadn't dreamed in years but I dreamed that night. I remember the dream, because every once and a while I'll have it again. In my dream, everybody has these animal heads. The rest of their bodies are normal but my parents both have pig heads. My friends are foxes and hyenas and monkeys, playful things. My grandfather is a lion and my grandmother an owl. Anyway, I remember always feeling pretty guilty in the dream. I feel like it's my fault they're this way. Like I caused them to lose their heads, to turn into animals.
I remember something really bad happened in the dream and I woke up with a start in the hospital bed, sweating. It was midday. A doctor was sitting next to my bed. He was young and sad. His face was graven as he tried to explain my "condition." He said that most people require outlets when they get agitated. Whenever someone becomes afraid, or anxious, or angry they need a way to express that or to let it out. He said this was natural and healthy. Most people scream or yell or punch a pillow. Their physical action is dictated by their emotions, and from that physicality the emotion is relieved. I couldn't really understand most of this at the time. Years later I would find my medical report and, after reading it once, throw it into the ocean.
I'm different. Instead of relieving my emotion I simply bottle it up, stuff it back inside. From an outsider's perspective I would seem emotionless and stoic, but I'm not. Inside I'm a whirlpool of anger, fear, nausea, angst, sadness, anxiety, etc. Eventually, like a balloon filling with helium, I pop. My psyche can't handle the emotional overload and it needs a release.
When this happens, my brain activity shoots up. My emotion materializes in front of me in a physical form. This would explain the mythical creatures, archetypal characters and inanimate objects that would randomly appear throughout my life and eventually cause me to leave my home and everyone I knew and move here.
Everything about me - my loneliness, my lack of hygiene, my apartment, my inability to write, all stems from this "condition." It consumes me.
I remember that, after the doctor had finished explaining this to me, a nurse approached the bed to my left. Albert was only sixteen, but he had lung cancer. On bad nights I could hear him through the curtain coughing and crying to himself. The nurse was holding his medicine - they were trying an experimental treatment that involved sticking Albert with a two inch needle every morning.
The doctor's face turned as white as his smock when he saw that needle. He quickly stood up and tried to leave, but as he turned around he saw the man in the bed to my right. He was in some kind of accident and he had to get some stitches on his head. The doctor puked. He was getting hysterical. Everything about the hospital seemed to scare him to death. He ran screaming out of the ward. Minutes later I could see him outside my window on the front lawn of the hospital, still screaming and running.
Looking back on it, I think he was another one of my "apparitions." He probably grew from some underlying anxiety I had about needles and hospitals at the time. Anyway, after that encounter I wouldn't see him again for a few years, and when I tried to inquire about him to the hospital, I realized he never gave me his name. I decided that if I had conjured him out of my own repressed emotion, I was allowed to name him. I named him Dr. Bob.

Emergence, or Dirt and Ink

It had been two days since I'd had anything to eat, two days since I saw the sunlight and two days since I ran out of cigarettes. Two days since I'd left this room. My body was receding into itself - my stomach gnawing at my insides, my eyes twitching with repressed anxiety. I could feel the stagnant air of my one-room apartment pressing down on my damp back. The ceiling fan spun lazily above me, creaking. The afternoon sun poked through the shutters on my window and cast shadows across my typewriter. The empty page that sat in the machine taunted me with it's whiteness, it's cleanness. My body was smudged with ink and dirt, my hair matted to my head, my fingers brown with grease.
I ripped the paper out of the typewriter and meticulously tore it into tiny pieces. I tossed the shreds into the air. The slight breeze from the fan caught them and they seemed almost to linger there, frozen in time, like this town, like me. As they drifted to the ground around me, I heard the sleet begin to pick up again. The cold light of the winter sun disappeared under a devilish thundercloud and rain and sleet began to barrage my window. I decided it was time to go out.
I didn't bother with a coat, or even a hat. Just the dirty white button up shirt and jeans that I'd been wearing for the past two days. I left my apartment and pressed the button for the elevator. As I lingered there, I let my mind wander.
The sleet reminded me of the hospital, of waking up in the infirmary to what sounded like rocks smashing against the window. I had been awake only moments before a nurse rushed over to me and began checking me, probing me. I remember the noise of the rain was so loud, I thought I was still in my living room with the screaming TV. I remember not being able to piece it together - my mind was a blank. I couldn't remember what happened on New Years or how I ended up in the hospital. Just the noise. I began to cry. The nurse tried to quiet me but she couldn't. I sobbed relentlessly, and I didn't know why. My head pulsed with a familiar pain. I could feel the tension building.
It grew, louder, harder, more painful, with every sob and sniff.
Ding.
The elevator. Back to reality. I stepped on, dazed.
There was that kid. Chambers? I couldn't remember. I acknowledged him with a grunt as he beamed up at me. He asked what floor. The bottom one. He hit 3.
I got off at three and took the stairs.
As I stepped outside for the first time in two days I could feel a tension seep out of my body. My lungs filled with fresh, new air and the rain began to wash away the dirt and ink. It was freezing. I didn't care. I walked across Katz toward the Butcher's. I needed some meat.

Reflection, or Hippocampus

I think my first "episode" happened when I was about nine years old. It was New Years Eve, 1999. The world was in a frenzied uproar with the excitement of the new millennium. Predictions of an apocalyptic corporate meltdown were running rampant through the emerging world wide web, and the already apathetic teenage population had collapsed in an orgy of revelry and self-deprivation. I had only a faint understanding of the events that were whirling around me, and I held them in little regard.
However, as the clock drew closer to midnight, to the future, a painful anxiousness began to rise in my stomach. I sat on the couch, eyes glued to the TV screen, my face clenched with repressed emotion. What was going to happen when that huge, glowing ball dropped down into Times Square? Would I be different? Would the world change? What about the people I knew? How would they change? Would I be able to recognize them? The tension mounted as the minutes passed.
It was almost midnight. I remember thinking that it was dumb for me to be so worried, but the fact that I was only agitated me further. I couldn't understand where this anxiety was coming from or what it was about.
I remember the countdown. I remember my dad enthusiastically trying to wake my mother, who had fallen asleep on the couch.
And as the noise on the television grew, I imagined myself swelling like a puffer fish and popping. the tension was too much, I felt something click in my head and all of a sudden the living room door burst off it's hinges and fell flat with a thud. My parents screams were drowned out by the sudden climactic roar of the crowd as the ball dropped and an enormous hippocampus careened in through the shattered doorway. The noise was deafening, but I could still hear it neigh and grunt as it flung itself about the room, slapping it's fish tail against the pictures hanging on the wall and crushing the coffee table with it's hooves. Because it's rear was that of a fish, the horse creature only had two front legs to stand on. It was clumsy and awkward, and it flapped about the room in a terrified frenzy, unable to control it's twisted body. My parents compressed into the couch in fear and the TV thundered with the debauchery of the celebration in Times Square.
I remained immobile, baffled, petrified, until the animal's enormous, slimy fish tail whirled around and slapped me into blissful unconsciousness.