Dream architect Hank Utah is suffering from crippling ennui, and faces a reckoning.

Image generated with OpenAI

The word Styrofoam was written on the wall inside the elevator. A floor wasn’t chosen. I knew where to go but refused to commit, pondering what eternity would be like in this small box of metal and wire. The claustrophobia that would set in when I yearned to be horizontal. Would I be able to sleep beneath the fluorescent lights, curled on the floor in a fetal position, wearing a teal and black long-sleeved sweater, with a pair of jeans that didn’t fit me without a belt? Would I survive the loneliness before my brain devolved into a monkey in a cage, spewing leftover thoughts at the inside of my skull?

Something had been stolen from me. An invisible thief had reached through my skin and obtained my ambition, turning me into a walking husk of brown skin and black hair. Earlier, on the train, commuting to the eternal elevator, I saw mouths moving but heard no words. I saw shapes that danced, allured, and frightened, except my senses forded rivers to the wrong areas. An attractive woman became a screech of tires, and a man with a violent face transformed into a smell of freshly cut grass. I was off-kilter, unhinged, unmolded, a blob with no surface or purpose to rest or pollute. A heightened sense of alienation nagged me while I checked the forecast on a small screen in the elevator. Meteor showers in half an hour.

Eight. That’s the number. Eight years on the eighth floor. What’s different now? Why wouldn’t my simple self, searching for a simple check, push the button? An inner conflict. I had awakened a sleeping giant who snored and slumbered since birth and now was ready to lift the earth with its hands and cry to the moon. An imaginative thought. Time became elusive until responsibility crept down my spine like a centipede, tickling my vertebrae, clinging to my nerves, forcing my hand to outthrust my index finger. Closer I came to pressing the button, inches away, before the doors opened themselves. A caravan of people trampled in, squeezing me into one corner. Someone in the throng pressed the eighth floor, so I didn’t have to. A cacophony of sneezes and coughs and weather talk and silence entertained me until I arrived at my destination. Dreadfully, I stepped from the eternal metal box and walked onto a soft lavender carpet at the end of the hall beyond two glass double doors.

A short man in the hallway, whose ego was ten feet tall, turned to me and said, “Late again?”

“Or early, depending on the shift.”

“Which shift are you?”

“The nine o’clock.”

“It’s ten-fifteen.”

“The elevator got stuck.”

The lie landed between his eyes, rattling around in his sector of problem-solving skills. Moseying to my desk, I plopped on a soft leather seat I stole from the other side of the office. It makes relaxing easier as the job siphons my soul into a jar that spits back a bi-weekly check. My office was a mess of technical equipment long overdue to be taken out to pasture. A mousepad with a bankrupt company’s logo in the center. Two monitors, only one worked. A rattling noise inside my desktop made me think some poor critter had crawled into the vents, got chopped by the fan, and its carcass kept slamming against the chassis repeatedly.

The first client of the day was Kenneth Gray, thirty-nine years of age, prone to lapses of depression and anxiety. Somewhere in the world, Kenneth was taking a nap. I maneuvered my mouse to log into the dreamscape of his mind. That’s my job, to architect his dreams. When the program opened, I was provided a blank canvas, and the job of any dream architect is to start with the familiar. I opened his file from my explorer and glanced over his childhood trauma, which was neatly organized alphabetically and sorted from oldest to newest.

On Kenneth’s blank canvas, I inserted an unkempt backyard with patches of grass and dead flowerbeds littered next to a fence that was missing a few pickets. I drew his father bent over, holding a baseball glove. I drew a ten-year-old Kenneth ten feet away with a smile on his face so wide it hurt and a baseball in his palm that he thought would be a curveball. Once I pressed play on the dream, pushing him into the flashback, I had ten-year-old Kenneth release the ball straight into his father’s eye at lightning speed.

The dialogue in the dreams I architectured was tug-and-pull. Kenneth’s subconscious was more potent than my machine, so I inserted strikethroughs in his speech. This caused confusion and kept the ambiance alive.

“Dad, are you alright?” ten-year-old Kenneth asked, cautiously walking towards his father, who I’d turned into a corpse.

The father’s eye had a crater bigger than the ball – absurd at first glance. With each click, stroke, and drag of my mouse, sliding over the mousepad of the bankrupted company, I was forming a nightmare. Before I could edge in the horror, a cup of coffee arrived beside my elbow.

“You can’t keep doing that,” my co-worker Melissa said, sipping her cup.

“I’m going to turn it around. I always do.” I took the cup, acknowledged the courtesy, and proceeded to drink what seemed to be black gasoline. A concoction of bile and caffeine that spurred on more horrific thoughts that I would transfer to poor ten-year-old Kenneth. Really twist the knife into his heart and soul, make him wake in a sweat.

“You keep pulling these nightmare stunts, and they’re going to transfer you to daydreaming. Not much room there. You can only insert possibilities and vague thoughts. Is that what you want?” Melissa asked me while finishing her cup of black gasoline and pushing her zebra-striped glasses up the brim of her retrousse nose. Physically, she was round in the wrong places. Attractive, like abstract art, meant for those with refined taste.

“If I knew what I wanted, I wouldn’t be here,” I said.

“Just clean it up before anyone notices. Your client is going off the grid.” She about-faced, leaving me in the mess of my own creation.

When I turned back to the dream canvas, ten-year-old Kenneth had called 911. A group of overweight paramedics were buzzing his open-shirt father with a defibrillator. After each shock, the EKG got worse. A faint line, into a thin one. I clicked on abort and sent adrenaline into Kenneth’s dreamscape to wake him up. Joke’s on Kenneth; he never knew his father and was raised by his mother and her girlfriend Pam, who smelled like stale cigarettes at all times of the day. A noodle scratcher for adult Kenneth to think about and share with colleagues at the watercooler. I considered that a job well done.

Next on the client list was Amanda Starr, twenty years old, with all her marbles in the right bowl. I planned to flip the bowl upside down and insert some philosophical nonsense where she’s talking fondly to her cat named Pockets, who reveals herself to be God almighty and tells Amanda that each sin will be forgiven if she cuts off her hair, puts it in the microwave for thirty seconds, and eats it slathered in spaghetti sauce with a spork. Specifically, a plastic spork. The type found in elementary school lunchrooms. The type used as catapults for meatballs to start food fights.

I hovered my mouse over the commence button to begin architecting the dream before an annoying voice sounded over me from a speaker which dangled on a nail from a cracked wall.

“Hank. Hank Utah, report to HR. Hank, Hank Utah,” the voice said on repeat.

I had almost forgotten my name. Luckily, a gold-plated nameplate resting on the corner of my desk reminded me, when I turned it back the right way. My back cracked when I stood up. The effort to move my legs reminded me of pursuing a pretty woman who hated our conversation. How many vowels could I fit in this word to get her to listen and stand still? The answer is still unknown. I locked my machine by winking into the retinal scan and began my peregrination down the long winding hallway to a square office with glass walls so the staff could see my lashing. I hoped it was a good one. Maybe then I’d feel something.

The oversized, misaligned desk inside doubled as a fish tank. zebra plecos, African butterflyfish, and silver carp stared me down like we were at odds. Maybe we were in my aquatic past life? Maybe I ate them? Sitting at the desk was my perplexing and stocky HR representative with a giraffe neck and a plunging striped tie that made it hard to take him seriously when he parted his lips.

“How have you been, Hank?” the HR representative asked, leaning forward with his fingers interlocked.

I searched for a nonexistent chair, straightened my posture, and conjured a web of lies that fell apart when I spoke. “Nothing.”

The HR representative cocked his bulbous head to the side. The fish followed, in sync with his movements.

“A very peculiar answer. It’s clear something is troubling you. Is it because your last name is Utah? You had a choice, you know. Utah doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s New Nevada now.”

“Sheboygan was taken.”

“Do I have to pull out the chart, Hank? There’s nothing worse than the chart.”

“I know the nightmares have been high, but it’s on purpose.”

“What’s the purpose?”

“Dreams are boring.” I scratched my eyebrows. “You don’t learn anything from them. Fear inspires. It molds people. Keeps them alive.”

“You feel dead?”

“Every day.”

“Do you have nightmares?”

“Every day.”

“You’re disproving your own point.”

“Not when I sleep. They’re waking nightmares. Daymares. Stuff like this,” I pointed to the fish tank desk, then to the other cubicles of the other architects who zombie their way through a capitalist existence just to spend it on drugs the moment their car starts in the parking lot. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

“Ok.”

Much to my dismay, my chart was pulled. A slot manifested on the HR representative’s desk adjacent to his elbow. The printing of the elongated receipt sounded like a Goliath grinding his teeth. He ripped it at the seam like a sheet of toilet tissue and cleared his throat, preparing to orate. In his tiny hand, disproportioned to his wide wrist, was a resume of my entire life from birth till the dismal year of thirty-eight. The government loves tabs. Every pencil stolen. Each grape eaten at the supermarket unpaid. Cheating in any relationship is calculated like a car crash. Sometimes, it’s deemed reasonable to be cheated on depending on your accolades and contribution to the union. A slacker deserves to see his lover raptured by another because, according to the law, you allowed a toxic environment in the residence. It all accrues to one calculated number, and that number seals your fate.

“There’s no other occupation that you can do, Hank. You’re negative three. If you didn’t score high on the decipher exam, the government would’ve eradicated you at age seventeen.”

“Maybe the firing squad has terrible aim.”

The HR representative stood from his desk and slowly unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a clear glass over his stomach. Unfortunately, the large intestine, small intestine, and his rectum were in plain view. He tapped three sections.

“Ulcers, Hank. Three from working this job. And I never complain.” He reached into his pocket and tossed three diamond rings on the desk. From the sound of the clink, I could tell at least two were cubic zirconia. The exotic fish below tried to eat them, ramming their nose into the boundaries of the tank, thinking it was sparkling fish food. “Four failed marriages.”

“With three rings?”

“One was spiritual. The point is no one likes it here. No one likes it anywhere. You have to squeeze happiness from every second of your life.” To illustrate his point, he wrung an invisible neck. “Breathe it. Cherish it. Because one day you’ll expire.”

A delicious escape plan entered my head like a giant light bulb hanging above me.

“You’re right, HR representative. According to the news, I only have ten years left. I should be optimistic. I never thought of it like that before, but your words, your powerful words, have moved me and changed me. I stand here with sore legs but a new man. Thank you.”

The HR representative sat down. “You’re fired.”

I choked on my spit, and he watched me struggle to breathe again. “What?”

“No need to clear your desk. A replacement is sitting there. Give her this on the way out.” He handed me a nameplate. It read Celia New Nevada. A check printed from the same slot as the life receipt. “Take that too.”

“Two weeks?”

“An invoice for wasting my time.”

What felt like such an expedition to his office turned into two steps when I returned to the graveyard of my cubicle. Beneath a whorl of red hair, a young woman was changing the settings on my chair. She leaned it forward so much that her nose grazed the monitor. Seconds later, she entered her newly crafted password into my computer, typing like a stenographer. I attempted social engineering but lost track after the forty-ninth character.

“Cecilia?” I asked defeatedly.

She nodded her head, rubbing her face on the liquid crystal display.

“This is yours.” I placed the nameplate on the corner of the desk facing the right way.

An awkward silence became dreadful when Melissa bumped past me to leave a scalding hot cup of black gasoline for the new girl. My pride shrank with my testicles, and I strolled my way back to the eternal elevator. Once inside, alone with my thoughts, I pressed the ground floor button without hesitation.

A light meteor storm hassled the outside world. Forgetting my carbon fiber umbrella at home was a mistake I wished I hadn’t made. I tiptoed into the street. The small comets burned through my sweater. I made it to the corporate parking lot and unsheathed my card. The kiosk slash parking manager powered on with my arrival. A bright cerulean glow on the UI prompted me for identification.

“Please insert your occupational card,” the machine said in the voice of a cherub.

Angrily, I stuffed it into the corresponding slot, imagining it was the mouth of my HR representative. A symphony of clicks and fizzes erupted from inside the machine. Colors indicated the progress from azure to auburn to crimson to unyielding black. An error message appeared.

“You are not an employee of this corporation,” the machine said.

“I just got fired ten minutes ago.”

“You are not an employee of this corporation. Please vacate the premises.”

“My car is inside. The electric blue hover in section 5-G.”

“Please vacate the premises.”

“Do you see this weather?”

A police siren protruded from the top of the machine. The siren blared. I hurried away as best I could, dodging meteorites until I found myself sheltered by a bus stop. On the bench, waiting for public transportation, was a motley crew of the unwanted. The disabled, the elderly, the off-worlders, and the unemployed. Quietly, I sat near my brethren. A subterranean sob got caught in my esophagus, attempting to exit my mouth. I swallowed my sadness when the triple-decker bus arrived silently, for it had no wheels, only hover units in its four corners.

I was the last to enter. The droid, complete in a denim driver’s outfit and trucker hat, turned to me with red pulsating eyes.

“Bus fee.”

Patting my pockets revealed an unseen tragedy. I had left my wallet in my car. There were no credits left on my mobile device because I had spent them on audio self-help books titled “How to Survive Monday: A Guide to Waking Up.”

“Can you print out a ticket, and I can pay later? I left my wal-”

The stairs transformed into an escalator, which rolled me out into the street. I crashed backward into a gutter as the meteor storm increased in intensity. My sweater became a crop top. A minute later, I was shirtless. During the three-mile trek home, I serpentined back alleys to avoid losing more of my clothes to the relentless weather. By the time I got to my front door, I was naked but not cold. Broken but still breathing. Unfortunately, my wallet in the car, which I assumed would be crushed into a cube, also had my house key. Defeated, I rang the doorbell.

My off-world wife answered the door in a flowy green dress accentuating her tentacles. She had three eyes, and they all looked furious. The amphibian humanoid that stole my heart when, after an arduous night of drinking, I held back her fin so she could spew ink into the toilet of my one-bedroom apartment. She held up a relationship receipt with her slimy tentacles and slathered on the other side of the glass. Our score had dropped to negative thirteen.

“Xenapolo, please. Baby. This isn’t a good time. I have something to tell you,” I yelled, hoping she could hear me on the other side of the door.

A glowing antenna rose from the center of her face. Telepathically, she said, “I want a divorce.”

“Those bipedals didn’t mean anything. I thought we were past this.”

“You never listen to me.”

“Your mouth doesn’t form words that I can comprehend.”

“You don’t even listen to me in your head.”

“It’s complicated in there. Read my thoughts, you’ll see.”

“I can’t babysit you anymore.”

“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m naked?”

She scoffed, which sounded like chickens in a gladiator fight to the death, with an audience of bobcats drooling at the mouth. “Ask that two-legged woman for some clothes.”

Night arrived. The meteor shower ended. Naked and freshly divorced, I walked to the government building down the street. There was one per block in residential areas. The government needed to be close at all times. No one vaulted strange looks when I entered the room. With a deep sigh, I approached a small booth and said, “Where’s the firing squad?”