Fast Car

By Connor

It’s a fast car. Looks sort of like the stock cars from Daytona USA, it’s even got brand names and whatnot plastered all over it. And she drives it like an old pro, an unlikely eventuality considering her age – but then again, things in dreams rarely make a lot of sense.
I try to ask her, so what’s it like? To be a character in someone else’s dream? To be a hollow projection of someone else’s imagination?
She keeps changing the subject. “This thing chews Corvettes”, she says with more than a hint of pride. Ignores the question like I’M the one who doesn’t exist. Shifts to fourth, then fifth. “Subaru WRX? Mitsubishi GTO? Forget it.”
I met her at the edge of a crimescene, a public toilet surrounded by yellow tape, the world painted in garish arcs of red and blue, spinning lazily. She’s sitting on the grass across the road, hugging her knees. She’s about 16, I guess. Short, ugly Aboriginal girl with bad acne, heroin-skinny.
She’s crying, and I ask her what’s wrong. She nods at the police circus across the road. “My friend was raped and killed in there”, she says.
What can I say to that? Not much. I tell her I’m sorry for her loss, but the words leave a taste of shit in my mouth. I sit down. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.
There’s a silence as we watch the activity over the road, and she lights a cigarette. She slowly exhales a swirling plume of blue smoke. “It just seems wrong”, she says eventually.
What seems wrong, in particular? I ask her.
“That people around the world are millionaires and billionaires with private jets and mansions in the Bahamas…”
Laying in their swimming pool drinking champagne out of a diamond-filled glass while beautiful naked Swiss virgins spoonfeed caviar to their purebred poodles, I add.
She smiles, and says “yeah, and my friend gets raped and stabbed to death in a dirty public toilet.”
I pause to think about this.
It doesn’t matter, really, I tell her at last it’s all a dream. Don’t be sad. None of this really happened. It’s a bunch of random neurons firing in my subconscious mind. As soon as I wake up, all this will be a fading memory.
As soon as I’ve said it, I feel like a real shit. It was probably insensitive to point out that she’s a figment of my imagination, and the trauma she’s suffered is an inconsequential product of some random neurons firing. She’s patient with me though; I guess she knows she can’t kill God, and I’m God to her. For better or worse.
Eventually we decide to go for a drive, because we don’t have a better idea, and my constantly putting my foot in my mouth has killed the conversation.

So here we are, on one of those Daytona-style racetracks. She’s really moving this car. I’ve always been afraid of driving, so I’m pressed back in the passenger seat in abject terror as she pushes the car past 250 km/h, overtaking Daytona USA stock cars left and right. Well, of course, I think – I was a thoughtless prick to her, so she yanked a deep-seated fear out of my subconscious, tore it out by the roots, and subtly used it against me. Clever girl.
She turns and smiles, as if to put the thought out of my mind. It’s a sad sort of smile with no malice in it. I start to feel even worse that I reminded her she will vanish the moment I wake up. So I try to cheer her up.
I can’t really be sure this is my dream, or a dream at all, I point out. In dreams, you don’t know anything for sure, you don’t know which way is up. We might both be characters in someone else’s dream – one of those schmucks driving one of those cars. I gesture toward another car as we zip past it, to emphasise my point. Maybe you’re giving God the hiding of His life in a stock-car race.
Maybe this is real, and the rest of my life was a dream.
Maybe I’m a character in YOUR dream. Or your friend’s nightmare.
Maybe this IS my dream, but my life was just someone else’s dream, and I’ll wake up in what I think is reality, then someone else will wake up someday and blink me out of existence. Maybe I’M just a random neuron firing in some dingbat’s brain. Not God, just a momentary flash in God’s brain, a mote in His mind’s eye.
“You’re sweet,” she says sadly, “for trying to make me feel better. You don’t have to. It’s all right.” And takes my hand over the centre console.
Assuming this IS a dream of mine, I say (Because I’m no longer so sure that’s the truth). How do you know dreams vanish when they end in the mind of the dreamer? Perhaps every time anyone imagines anything an entire universe is created on some different level of existence. Dreams, nightmares, paintings, stories, movies, sex fantasies. Perhaps I’ll wake up tomorrow, you’ll never see my stupid face again, and you’ll just keep driving around this race track forever. Maybe you’ll last longer than I do.
She thinks about this for awhile. “That doesn’t sound so crazy,” she says.
What’s more, I tell her, after I’m gone, you can step up to fill my vacancy. I pronounce you Grand High Poobah of My Weird-Ass Daytona Rape-Murder Dream.
This makes her laugh, and she lets go of my hand for a second to shift gears again.

I open my eyes, awakened by a vacuum cleaner. I sit up in bed and stretch languorously, yawning and rubbing my eyes. I sit for a moment and wonder if, had the shoe been on the other foot, I’d be bitter about being wiped from existence by the sound of a vacuum cleaner. And I decide that whatever the answer, I have enough to think about without developing a bleeding heart for nonexistent people in meaningless, inexplicable dreams. I struggle into some pants and set about making myself a cup of coffee.

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