My grandma was dying. Everyone in the family thought so. My mom decided that she and my dad and my sister and I should take a vacation for a while to get our minds off Grandma's illness.
Before the trip, my mom surprised me and my sister Tricia by buying us new clothes. She lay the purchases out on her bed for us to see. Since she didn't have much money, she'd gone to a store that made black-market copies of trendy clothes. I grabbed an American Eagle shirt that looked pretty authentic, and Tricia took an Old Navy shirt. We gave my mom the shirt that looked the least authentic -- a blue sweatshirt that said "Gap Athletic" on the front and "Guess Jeans" on the back.
I remember just a moment or two of my family being on the plane. We watched B-movies from the 70s.
And then we split up, somehow. My parents and sister went somewhere tropical, while they arranged for me to go visit Chris (the ex-boyfriend who pops up in every single one of my dreams) in Rhode Island. They told me that after I was done visiting Chris, I should meet my Uncle Frank Bailey in Detroit, Michigan. He was going to drive me back to Georgia.
I have an Uncle Frank, but his last name isn't Bailey, and he's a rather corpulent gay guy from Baltimore, not Detroit. This difference confused me greatly. I was also unsure of how I'd get to Michigan from Rhode Island, but I decided I would somehow figure it out on my own.
The visit to Rhode Island came to me only as a memory in later parts of the dream. When I did somehow end up in Detroit, Michigan, I had a memory of the events that had happened at Chris's house, though I never actually experienced them in the course of the dream. I recalled that Chris and I had been civil to each other -- not overly friendly or romantic, but not vengeful and angry either. Also, we had spent the whole visit in the living room and kitchen at his parents' house. I started to wonder why I hadn't gone into his bedroom at all. When I pictured his bedroom, though, I pictured it wrong. I thought of my old friend Melanie's bedroom instead (the only two-story bedroom I've ever seen and perhaps ever will see), and was convinced it was Chris's bedrooom, for some reason. I didn't realize the mistake until I had woken up.
Meanwhile, I was wandering around the outskirts of Detroit. I had a heavy bag slung over my shoulder as I wandered into a cluster of old Victorian-style houses shaded by large trees. It looked more like the deep South than Michigan, but I wasn't concerned with the scenery at that point.
I walked up the steps to the house in the center of the cluster and knocked on the door. An old man answered.
"Yes?" he said, looking at me suspiciously.
"Um," I said, "I was wondering if Frank Bailey lived here."
"Frank Bailey," the man said. He opened the door fully, revealing a nicely furnished front hall. "He used to live here. He's nothing more than a name to us, though."
The man's wife joined him in the doorway, as did a teenage Japanese girl who was either an adopted daughter or a maid.
"You can come in for lunch, if you want," the man's wife said to me.
Just then, an old Chevy van pulled up to the house. A man hopped out. "Laurie?" he said.
"Uncle Frank Bailey?" I said.
It was, in fact, Uncle Frank Bailey. He looked like a white-collar businessman: pressed pants, golf shirt, good haircut. The scratched, dented Chevy van didn't quite jive with the rest of his image.
Though Uncle Frank Bailey was ready to leave, I still took the old woman's offer to stay for lunch. I also went up to a lavishly furnished bedroom in the house, where I opened my bag to make sure all my things were still there. I also brushed my hair in front of a full-length mirror. I noticed that the bedroom had the very same setup as my room at my parents' house, except that the furnishings in the Michigan house were much nicer than my own furnishings.
I recall waving goodbye to the old couple as Uncle Frank Bailey drove us away from the Victorian house and out of Michigan.
Transition time. I was back in Georgia, supposedly at my parents' house, though it looked a whole lot nicer than it actually does. There were beveled glass front doors, shiny hardwood floors in the halls, and thick new white carpet everywhere else.
The rest of the family was home. I discovered that they had sent me to Rhode Island and Michigan because they thought I was too mentally unstable to be in Georgia when Grandma died.
And this is where things get screwy.
In chronological time, Grandma had already died when Uncle Frank Bailey and I got home. However, I found myself experiencing the events of a few days previous to my return, when Grandma began having a seizure in the front hall of my parents' house.
I was lying on the floor of the dining room. Tricia was lying beside me. We were both reading. I had a Kurt Vonnegut novel, which made me realize what had just happened to myself. I had become "unstuck in time" like Billy Pilgrim, the main character in Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. I realized that no time was chronological, that everything that had ever happened was, in fact, always happening, all at once.
Tricia, though she's three years younger than I am and not a Vonnegut fan, had gotten the time concept before I had. She had already seen Grandma's seizure and knew what was going to happen. She looked rather bored.
Grandma fell over on the hardwood floor and began thrashing around. My parents, my grandpa, and Uncle Frank Bailey all rushed to help her. She had nearly hit her head on the beveled glass door.
"I can't die now!" Grandma yelled. "I'm incomplete! All of you -- you're all incomplete!"
"God, I hope those weren't her last words," I said to Tricia. My eyes began tearing up.
"Are you okay?" Tricia said.
"I'm fine," I said. "Did you cry when you saw this the first time?"
"A little," Tricia said.
We went back to our books.
The novel I was reading didn't exactly concern Vonnegut's usual subject matter. Instead, it was about an eighteen year-old guy who had never been out of his hometown. Everyone in his high school was telling him that he was the only one in the graduating class who had a chance of making it to college.
"You're not Harvard material," someone told him, "but maybe you could go to UMass."
I was then in the novel itself, observing what was going on. I walked through the main character's high school, which had the appearance of an elementary school. The halls were narrow and decorated with messy construction paper cut-outs. There were a number of different offices, all of them filled with perky volunteer moms and all of them using the sliding windows you usually see in doctors' offices. I eventually figured out that so many offices were needed because so many kids were in trouble all the time.
When the guy graduated from high school, the novel moved away from the school setting. Since I was stuck in the novel somehow, I had to move along too. I got stuck in a TV show instead: Dawson's Creek.
In this particular episode, Pacey was working at the Jersey shore for a summer. His companion was Will, Bailey's friend from the defunct series Party of Five. Pacey and Will were sitting on a dock. Will was doing carpentry work. Pacey wasn't doing much of anything. Suddenly, there was a female voice behind him.
"Ahoy, mates!"
Pacey and Will turned around to see Taylor Caswick, a fictional character I created when I was twelve or so. I wrote about her in a number of stories of mine from middle school and high school. She looked right at home in the Dawson's Creek episode, however. She was rowing herself to shore on a shoddy little raft like the ones used in the Survivor's first immunity challenge. Her clothes, hair, and makeup were perfect, of course.
"Well, well," Pacey said. "Look what the tide dragged in."
Apparently Pacey and Taylor had known each other before. Of course, this was just the show's convenient way of introducing an attractive new character to tempt Pacey.
Taylor explained that she, coincidentally, was also spending the summer in New Jersey. Her parents had a condo a few miles up the beach.
When Taylor left, Pacey lay down on the dock and gazed into the murky green water. "You know, Will," he said, "I've got the greatest girlfriend in the world back in Capeside. I should be happy with that, huh?"
Will suggested that Pacey quit pondering things for a while. He proposed a trip to Six Flags. So they went. It was only a short walk: the two hopped off the dock, hiked through the woods for a few minutes, and ended up at Six Flags. There was only one attraction: the river-forging immunity challenge from Survivor.
"Wow, there's hardly any line!" Will said.
Pacey looked unamused, but he went to get in line anyway. Naturally, a pretty blonde girl ended up next to him in line. She said, "Well, hey there," before being signalled to hop onto her raft.
Finally, I was set free from the Dawson's Creek episode. I was back in the dining room with Tricia, but things had changed. Apparently, the second time that Grandma had her seizure and fell to the floor, my family was able to save her. She was alive after all.
