Chapter 2, Dreams

Mark was unconscious and he could feel….hunger. Three months back, on an unexpected visit to Europe, he had taken ill and fallen into a coma. A strange scar shaped like a 3 in italics with pointy edges ran across his right forearm half way to his elbow and just before the hand. It marked him as one of the survivors of the prima flu. The prima flu was an epidemic that hit the east of Europe for a week and then disappeared after incapacitating nearly half of that town's population. It affected the ability of people to heal and caused immobility of important functions.

When Mark had cut himself on that knife, he knew something was wrong but regarded it with a simple nod of his head, as if it was any old injury. He had wrapped his hand around a hotel towel and put on a TV show on the tube to pass the time while it healed. One could say Mark was cooking but, in reality, he was trying to remove black soot from an old pot, so he could make himself a decent breakfast in that weird area. The knife had slipped from his left hand and cut him but that's not what marked him with the weird symbol. It wasn't until an hour later, when a white towel, turned crimson from his own blood that he realized his cuts had grown out, instead of closing. It had, instead, cut him further along his forearm, causing serious damage. Two minutes later he tried to get up from that old brown and smelly couch. His knees gave up on him and his head felt like an inflated balloon and he passed out.

According to doctors, who went on to study him in a fancy European hospital with armed guards at every door, which Mark knew were there because in his coma state he could hear the doors opening and closing and high-pitched voices asking for identification, the fact that he passed out saved his life (although, they were speaking in terms of him breathing, not him being awake). The prima flu took advantage of things that happened. If he hadn't passed out, his hand would have bled until he died. Since he passed out, the flu had switched onto a different thing to hold permanent; his consciousness. Mark knew that others had died from permanent nose bleeds or stomach-aches which didn't go away. Mark, however, feared that the flu would eventually do what it did to his cab-driver. The cabby had slit his hand on a piece of paper, so he bled from his hand constantly (although in small amounts) and then he'd cut one of his nails and the blood draining had switched from one place to the other. It had switched three other times before the man died. The prima flu had taken an innocent man's life because of a paper-cut and Mark had survived a gushing wound that had spiraled into a shape.

Mark knew to recognize life as a serious of feelings which he could make out. Even the warmth of people's breath's as they tried to speak to him (the lady doctors would try to sound out familiar words to him to get him to wake up) seemed like part of being alive, although he had no recollection of ever being so. He could feel the shivering coldness of the room but he was unable to shiver. He had been frightened for a moment because no one he knew was talking to him. They (whoever was holding him as their lab rat) did eventually inform his loved ones about the accident. Mark learned to recognize their footsteps or their heartbeats. Sometimes, because of an inescapable recurring dream, he couldn't hear them at all but, mostly, he caught a sign of their presence or heard them speaking to him. Leroy, although Mark didn't know where he wasn't getting the money to travel all the way from Los Angeles to Europe, came often. Mark had many friends because of his father's involvement with private security but Leroy was never part of that group. He had been Mark's friend before joining The Lonely Pirates. It was a name that they adapted after Mark's father had disappeared two years back. They used to be called The Westside Pirates but because their leader had left, the pirates had felt uncomfortable with the name, almost like it didn't belong. Mark, their new leader, was on a mission to find his father in Europe, which had gone astray from the start as Leroy liked to point out to him whenever he visited. Mark preferred to think that Leroy was learning something, although when the public schools had been opened in Los Angeles, he was still a big slacker. Leroy would show up unexpectedly and always with something warm to eat, though he knew Mark couldn't chew or move. Still, he knew that even the smell of cinnamon would make Mark happy.

Mark was breathing the pudding air. Almost every day a lady would come in with a tray and manually feed him, though it was just a shake of nutrients needed to live. The disgusting slosh smelled too much like chocolate pudding to Mark. It didn't matter. In all his life, he had hated pudding with a passion and after three months of it, he much preferred to have had the scar kill him than eat it again. Still, he couldn't move or do much, although it wasn't for lack of trying. Mark commanded his eyes to waken and yelled at them and screamed in his head but it was a futile effort. He redoubled his efforts to wake that day but, instead of waking in reality, the dream came back to him…..

It was warm all around and, to Mark, it felt like a breeze that made his heart light-headed. Green tree leaves and pinecones littered the floor. The hill on which he sat was slanted, bending up and down toward a duck-filled pond. A twelve-foot arched bridge for observers stood six feet off the ground over the small pond. Mark was hiding behind a tree, his back to it. He could feel etched markings on it. The curved letters were all wrong. It was as if he was part of a past that wasn't real. He turned around to observe the small circle. Inside it was an M loves B with the heart etched deeper than the rest of the letters. The two lovers had taken some time to carve the symbol out, together. Mark had, a long time ago, probably when he was seventeen loved a girl named Bianca. The dream was strange to Mark because she had never loved him back. It felt unreal but familiar. Mark couldn't figure it out. The present day Bianca had moved on; she was twenty-three years old and had a kid named Steve who she bought a plastic bicycle for on his third birthday.

The seventeen-year-old Bianca with blue eyes was sitting against a tree in front of him, inviting him to sit with her with her right hand forefinger. She was a short girl, standing at a mere five-foot six and she wore, for that occasion, a white yellow-tulip-embroidered sun dress. She didn't wear any make up, or at least, Mark had no reason to suspect she did, even though her cheeks got abnormally red from time to time. She was blonde in that dream, which he didn't think was accurate but, after the coma and everything else, he figured it was about as accurate as one of his dreams was going to get. She wore glasses, which, to Mark, was what made her original. She had often adjusted them when she approved of something he did or when she was trying to tell him a story that she knew only he would be interested in. It often was related to how badly her relationships were going with other guys, which is partly the reason Mark had never asked her out because he guessed that he was never going to jump over the best friend hurtle.

In this dream, the dream Mark, settled down in front of her and laid his head on her stomach, lying down to the shade of an old pine tree. Pinecones often fell off the trees but nowhere near them, it seemed. Mark seemed to question her in his head because she said to him in her low-toned voice, "You need me here."

"I don't know why," Mark said, "Do you?"

"Maybe, you need to move on?"

Was that part of his conscious trying to answer his prima flu question? Maybe, there was a cure, Mark thought. Moving on from what? He hadn't even thought about Bianca since he last saw her seven years ago. Yet, he felt like he loved her in the dream. It was like he was traveling to the past. Mark had a deep concern with this or, at least, the feeling of it. He got off Bianca's stomach and turned to look at her, "I'm going to ask you something personal, you mind?"

"Shoot," said Bianca, adjusting her glasses at him.

"Do you remember a time when we walked along the railroad tracks and you told me not to kick the rocks?"

"It's blurry," Bianca said, "What happened?"

"I stopped kicking them," Mark said, "And fell in love with you."

Bianca blinked at this and looked at Mark with her glasses of. "No," she said, "I don't remember you at all."

A cold chill brought him back to the smell of chocolate pudding. A tiny hand was spooning it in his mouth. Mark knew it was only a matter of time before he could not sense anything anymore. A commotion broke out of a sudden from what Mark could tell. It was about a tear in his eye. Mark didn't feel it. He felt the pudding like a distant memory but the tear might as well have been part of the hospital.