by Jake Wilson.
Mum calls out my name. ‘Ilsa!’ So near, so out of reach. She’s coming from the sky.
I phase through her bedroom wall. The bedside is a capsicum. ‘Ilsa!’
Then it’s onto the porch, where we keep the typewriters. Jellyfish are floating across the black sky. The world is daylit. She’s not here either.
Back into the hospital then. ‘Ilsa!’
Kylie Minogue is behind the service desk in scrubs. ‘I need to see Paula Nassar.’, I tell her. She points out a door with shifting text, illegible, but when I open it, there she is. Frail under the microwaved blankets. Vacant.
‘Ilsa!’ The voice morphs. Pulled apart like mozzarella, it contorts halfway through. Less maternal, more girly. Underscored by thinking machinery.
The overhead tube lights suddenly click off and our skins connect. Bumps drive up my skin.
‘Big Mac meal, for… Ilsa!’
That’d be it. Pulling up from the sticky table, my temple remembers the palm’s pressure.
The pimply girl shoves the paper bag to me, white press-ons curled over the top’s roll.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Nodded off.’
I roll the car seat back and start with some fries.
It’s funny how dreams throw similar memories in a blender, pick out the chunky bits, put them on a skewer, make them make sense.
The burger is picturesque. It has the same nurturing notes as a cigarette. Maybe the kids are alright.
KRIK!
Or maybe not. No part of this meal should crunch, not even the lettuce.
I’m a child, peering under the bed for monsters, lifting the top bun. A plastic press-on stares me in the face and I pop the door to vomit.
It doesn’t come, but the memory does: losing my first job, exactly like this, at a now-defunct Burger Palace when I was fifteen. Before my mind’s eye, it all appears as impressionistic flashes.
When I realise what doesn’t – what’s lost – I fall against the Forester and apologise to it. I can’t remember her first job.
On my ankles, the kitty rubs ‘hello’ when I enter our apartment. She gets fed before me. Wet food.
‘Happy Friday,’ I tell her. Her teeth pinch at the foodstuff.
Pulling back the blackouts, I feel watched against the panoptic skyscrapers. They are inscrutable shapes, form suggested only by floating, glowing panels. Windows like mine, but with life behind them.
One ham and cheese toastie later, Malfred calls.
‘Hey boss.’ I shift around the kitchenette in my nightie.
‘Hey honey, good work today. Just wanted to circle back – Monday week, your presentation?’
My Anthropic-sponsored execution. ‘Uh-huh.’
The elder-millennial’s sweet-voice implores me not to freak out, but can’t fully conceal his finger quivering over the redundancy button. He’s tasked me with building an employee-file consolidation system against a vibecoding agent. It’ll be used for future ‘performance evaluations’, as he’s calling this.
I throat my prescription benzos, my mind elsewhere. It crackles alive. ‘I’ll handle it.’
Of course, dreams can be controlled with sound. Earlier, mine contextualised the girl calling my name, even the repetition.
If I do this right, I can conjure my mother. She can remind me of her first job herself.
It’s tomorrow. I gore the smartwatch I bought on my work desk, my most common vista. Beneath the thick transfer cable, the OLED screen closes its eyes and loads my custom runtime.
Its sensors will monitor my heartrate, blood-oxygen, and skin temperature to detect REM sleep states – those when dreams take place.
I draft the executable:
if (heartRateVary >2 || < 0.5)
{
systemVolume = heartRate / 3;
Process.Start(C:\\users\Ilsa Nassar\Documents\Sound Effects\example.mp3);
Console.WriteLine(“Hey Mum”);
}
// If my heartrate’s variation aligns with that typical of REM states, system volume will adjust proportionally to the estimated depth of my sleep and then play the sound.
Research states that dreams always have at least one autobiographical element amongst the nonsense. To cut through it, my cue noise must be specific and recurring, conjuring relevant memories and shutting out the others. But what?
Evening again. Spring rolls for tea.
‘Computers are dumb, Mum. You have to tell them what to do.’
‘You must be pretty dumb then.’
The memories are glass fragments belonging to multiple panes. They come back linearly, like a receipt pulled from its printer, prices attached.
I can’t date this one, but I know its cost. Said above the unspoken, chest-high fog of our difference: ‘Your computers are a fad, Ilsa. You don’t love anything that lasts.’
I watch the kitty plod around her bed, collar sounding out a Christmas carol. An hour later, I slide into bed, mount the smartwatch, tuck the earbuds in.
I’ve got it.
Ding! The bell rings. ‘Double American, for Alice?’ In his booth, Bugs Bunny pouts, disappointed. The pink-haired woman collects her order.
Off the clock. The escape hatch recedes and I duck through it. The watercolour skies are hyperreal, the setting sun tracing a line perpendicular to the horizon. At its end: her, in the Forester, studying Jane Eyre.
Ding!
Bugs pouts. Alice receives her order. I clock out. She’s there.
Ding!
Alice wants to speak to the manager. There’s an unwelcome acrylic in her lunch.
‘I’m so sorry–’
Ding!
Malfred’s breath is hot against my neck. ‘Scoop and flip, Ilsa. It’s not that hard!’
Ding!
The scenes overlap and merge and reality derails. Memories, people I’ve known, haven’t, consolidate into choirs and shared flesh. Sensorily piercing, the opposite extreme to numbness.
It builds. Swirls and swirls. And then–
Ding!
In the car, with her white press-ons draped over the wheel, her face locked outward.
Removed from my ears, brown fibres of hair are wound round my fingers. A spark. Recollection.
They’re related.
Benzos. Chamomile tea. Papers on memory. I ingest it all at once, picking out useful strings, interrogating them with my mind’s tongue.
A memory is a bracelet where each bead represents a piece of ideational stimuli. When presented with a bead in isolation (fingernail in burger), the mind autocorrects the most relevant bracelet (memory of first job). With time and frequent reinforcement, certain autocorrections dominate.
That’s how I forgot her first job. Memories of mine overrode, merged, with it. Common when they’re similar. Chunks on a skewer. Beads on a bracelet.
The memory’s still there. I just need the password.
Wednesday night. The blackouts have been down for… I don’t know. Some time.
I’ve updated the codebase:
if (heartRateVary > 2 || < 0.5) && (skinTemp < 34)
{
Process.Start(C:\\users\Ilsa Nassar\Documents\Sound Effects\MumVoicemail.mp3);
}
// v.2 – Added Mum’s voicemail to dream cue mechanism.
Her voice will make the dream cue stronger and the nightmare more vivid. I can handle it.
I grind through the next three days the same way: typing instructions into a machine whose existence plots the end of mine. I work on Malfred’s assignment. I work on my own.
I see her face again at night. It doesn’t move. I hear her voice – a message she left. Unopened.
With the lumping motion of my heart the quote is sidechained: ‘… you’re busy with work … call Mum when you can… could see a movie… love you–’
Ding!
Then I’m awake again and she’s gone.
string beadOne = “Burger Nail”;
string beadTwo = “Shedded Hair”;
string beadThree = “???”;Sunday. I’m ready to give up.
No more benzos. The empty bottle catches some morning light, projects orange against the counter.
Sugary cereal. I’ve let myself go. Hovering hairs now interfere with the food transfer, reminding me of why I crop it.
The kitty paws at the door lugubriously.
Fucking Malfred calls. ‘Hey boss.’
‘Hey honey. You’re not in the office? Big day today.’
Crunch. Milk. ‘Malfred, it’s Sunday.’
‘You hallucinating? It’s Monday.’
Standing in front of him, I’m sartorially equivalent to a dinner thrown together with near-expired ingredients. Malfred curls his fingers in front of his pill-shaped head, expectant. My code should be flawless. I’m not some dope.
‘The program is incredibly malleable.’
‘Right.’
I isolate and run a particular function. I was wrong. The application stalls, fails to find the dummy employee records, and spits out a fatal error.
A painful moment passes.
‘Sorry, honey,’ he says. Malfred looks ajar and steals my projector screen with a few tinny keystrokes. ‘Claude, remember that consolidation system we spitballed? Write it.’
His laptop chirps. ‘Absolutely!’ And with every perfect line of code projected on my skin, I feel my employment dissolve, slip like sand between my open sections.
He squeezes a full day out of me anyway, uploading my old projects to the company AI.
Now I’m at the pharmacy, waiting in line for my sleeping pills.
I shouldn’t care about the familiar cavern in my chest, but I do.
string beadThree = “Loss of job”;
I remember. Mostly.
Her first job was at a fast-food place, like mine. She lost it after shedding hair into someone’s food, contaminating it. Like I did.
I reconstruct the true end of that nightmare. I clambered into the SUV and told her they sacked me. Cried. Cried like a girl.
She closed Jane Eyre– no, it was Wuthering Heights. Put it safely in the glovebox. It was the book she got glimpses of, waiting for me at a myriad of places, in a dozen car parks.
She told me her story, scored by the ringing clink of her gold hoops. The ones I have, neglected in a drawer somewhere, incompatible with my virgin lobes.
‘We’re the two drums that make the bongos,’ she told me, veering onto the street. She loved her metaphors.
There’s just one bead missing. The name of that place. It doesn’t matter now, I don’t remember. So it never did, not to me. Which I already knew.
A bottle of red for the big girl. Project completed. Even sober, I’m too weak to tear the pill bottle seal. I gnaw it with my teeth.
Moggie’s pawing at the door again, yelling. I neck a glass. She wanted me to be a writer.
I squat and try petting the cat. Her back moves smoothly away from my hand and she whinges, turns, glares at me with nebular eyes.
‘You want out?’ I unbolt the door, pull it open. A liminal hallway beyond. ‘The world’s your oyster.’
She used to say that, pretending to give in.
The cat wanders out.
I wheel my office chair before the massive window and watch the city lights, twinkling like neurons, like memory-bearing cores. I pop the smarties, one by one.
We had nothing in common.
‘Ilsa, you’re in a dream.’
In the car, parked at Burger Palace. With her. The sky is black with pin-prick milk drops.
I am awake. My apertures gape and cram in this place’s sensory thickness. I taste, hear, and smell all that there is to see, touch, and know.
‘This isn’t real, you’re dreaming, and you need to wake up, now. Something’s wrong.’
‘Mum…’ I leap to hold her. She’s immaterial.
‘Mum, what was your first job? Tell me your first job.’
Over her shoulder, through the window, the stars dwindle second by second.
‘Burger Palace. Right here.’
‘No– your first job! Please!’
‘Don’t you know who you’re talking to?’
I thought I did. I think again.
What was my first job?
If I tell you, promise you’ll wake up?
I’ll try. I don’t know if I can.
I thought so. Sorry, honey.
Mum. Please. My first job.
Pizza Paradise.
The bracelet reconstructs and I relearn the truth. Flashes, brushstrokes. The colours return, sights, sounds, smells. Feelings. The dream undulates, recontextualises. We now wait outside the Paradise.
I keep her promise and disappear.
