Adam Kavulic
Brownsville, PA

^{"Music... she be my master."
-Jack Black}

Other works:
On the Eve of Anew

A  N o r m a l  L i f e

     I fall, rocketing past hovering seagulls cawing over a bluff. I land in a pool of sun-warmed, emerald packaging peanuts on the beach. The clean squeals from the rubbing peanuts pierce my ears. I sink.
     I finally surface, gasping for the salty, crisp sea air. Peanuts still rain around me from my plunge. The sun smiles. I close my eyes and smile back, glad to be home.
     Familiar music plays over the sea.
     From a boardwalk pier, a calliope - steam driven, coal powered - of a carousel toots and hoots an old timey melody. Through the foggy air, I see the once brilliant horses, frozen in mid-gallop, rising and falling, circling each other, never gaining. I know each horse’s face, steadfast and driven. I know their dull, black ceramic eyes. I know their names: Cinnamon, Shadow, Magnum, Goldie, Oreo, Apache, and Sierra. Cinnamon, her saddle polished from riding, is my favorite, and the most vibrant, but not as vibrant as years ago.
     I swim over to the edge of the peanut pool and pull myself out of it. Barefoot, I stroll through the warm sea, letting the waves rush over my toes. I stop and move away from the water and plop down in the sand. The sand is the color of porcelain and feels as soft as raw cotton. It sticks to nothing. The wind picks up; the temperature drops.
     Behind me, someone trots over the sand.
     “Took you long enough,” a man’s voice says.
     I turn, and Peter, carrying a briefcase, walks down towards me in his alligator suit. His hair shifts in the wind bursts.
     “You sound sick, Peter. You never sound sick. You can’t…”
     “Sure I can. Pretty soon I’ll be as lifeless as those horsies.” A wind gust blows sand into Peter’s face and open mouth. He coughs and laughs, spitting. “Serves me right for talking so much.”
     “Where is everyone?” I say.
     Peter drops his suitcase, rolls up his pant legs and sleeves, and sits down beside me. His legs and arms are whiter than the sand.
     “I said-”
     “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard,” Peter says. He sits his suitcase on his lap and opens it. Inside it is a cheeseburger wrapped in wax paper, a strawberry milkshake, and a spool of blueberry cotton candy. The milkshake cup and cheeseburger wrapper say “Frank’s Food Emporium.”
     “That’s exactly what I wanted.” I take my burger, milkshake, and cotton candy and eat.
     “I know.” Peter closes the briefcase.
     “So, where is everyone?” A piece of bread and butter pickle from the burger slides down my chin and falls to the sand.
     “I’m looking at them, right now,” says Peter looking out over the sea. “The captain took them in his ship. They sailed somewhere over in that direction.” He points.
     “No!”
     “Yup. Sorry, big brother. They left.”
     “They couldn’t have.” My burger slips from my slack fingers, landing in the sand. No worries. The sand doesn’t stick to anything. I reach to pick it up. The sand touches my finger tips; it is rough. “Whoa.” A few grains actually stick to my moist fingers. I brush them off.
     “Things are changing. Well, they were always changing. That’s what things do. But now you can really notice,” Peter says.
     Peter throws sand over my stretched legs. The sand feels like tiny knives against my bare legs. I flinch.
     “Now that is real sand. Not as soft as before, eh?” Peter smiles and then hangs his head.
     “What happened?” I say.
     “You’re getting better.” Peter talks to the sand in his cupped hand.
     “I don’t want to get better.” I can’t believe this. What does Peter know about anything. “I never told you.”
     Peter lifts his head. “You forget where you are?”
     “I’m…we’re in San Diego. There’s the boardwalk, there’s the carousel, and there’s the cotton candy stand.”
     “How long ago was that?” Peter says. His voice is stern.
     “What do you mean? All that stuff is right there. Can’t you hear the carousel?” My eyes well up with tears.
     “It’s not there. Nothing is.” He huffs. “Nothing is there.”
     “Why are you talking like this?” I stand up; the shake and cotton candy drop from my lap. I run into the sea until the water is at my knees.
     Peter walks down towards the sea but stays out. “How’s the water?”
     “Fine!”
     “Colder than, than what you remembered?” Smirking, Peter folds his arms.
     Every wave that crashes against my legs sends chills through my body. “It’s as… as… as warm as it always…always…” The words come out in short gasps.
     “Listen to yourself!” Peter bounds into the water. “Your mouth can’t even move. The water is freezing!”
     “It was warm just a minute ago. I just had my toes in it, Peter.”
     “No it wasn’t. You just thought it was. What about the sun? Look.”
     I don’t.
     “Look at it!”
     I crane my head up but the noon sun isn’t there. The sun, poking behind some gray clouds, is just above the horizon. The sky is pink, purple, and soft blue.
     “It’s getting dark,” Peter whispers. His voice sounds as hurt as I feel.
     “It can’t!"
     “It is.”
     I fall onto my knees; the water is above my waist. “Why, Peter?”
     “You’re getting better.”
     “I don’t want to. I wanna stay here with you, with mom, with dad.”
     “I know you do, bro.”
     "I wanna eat cotton candy and hotdogs and ride the carousel.”
     “You can, but just not here.” Peter picks me off my knees and leads me out of the sea.
     We sit at the water’s edge.
     “Peter, how long have you known?” I gather sand into small hills.
     “I’ve always known. It was just a matter of time, Bro.”
     “Can I stop it?”
     “Can you stop medicine from working? No.”
     I dip my hand into one of the small mounds of sand and hurl it at Peter. “You don’t know that!” I grab another handful of sand and shake it loose from my palm. “I made this!”
     Peter brushes the sand off of himself. “Tell me ‘Goodbye.’”
     “What? Wait!”
     Peter stands. “Say it while you still can.”
     “I don’t… I don’t want to.”
     Peter chuckles. “That’s why all of this is here.”
     “I just can’t say it, little brother. I’m sorry.”
     “There’s another reason: guilt.” He grabs the collar of his shirt and pulls. The suit tears away like paper, revealing a one-piece, candy cane striped bathing suit. Peter balls up the suit and throws it to the sand. “Just let it go, Bro. Oops. Almost forgot.” He reaches into the suit pile, separating it into smaller ones. His hands come out of the pile with a green, rubber swim cap. He tucks his hair into the cap, wincing at the pulled hairs. “No goodbyes, Bro?”
     “Peter, I just-”
     “Say, ‘Hi’ to the doctor for me.” Peter skips into the icy water. He dives into a rolling wave and begins to swim.
     “Peter, wait! Please!” I jump in to chase after him but the water is too cold. My legs, feet, and toes are numb. I run back out, shivering. “Peter, Wait,” I whisper.
     He is no more than a red and white dot in blue now. My attention wavers from Peter to the silence. Absolute quiet. No noise sounds. I do not hear the calliope’s music or the crashing waves. The cackling seagulls over the bluff are no longer there.
     There is no wind. The ocean is like glass. The carousel is motionless; its lights are out. Its horses are paralyzed. Cinnamon no longer prances. The world wavers and fades, like a dissolving stain.
     “He’s coming out of it,” a woman, says. “Here is our most promising patient.”
     A bright light shines into my right eye then my left. Someone starts speaking as fingers lift up my eyelids.
     “Aidan Thatcher, thirty-six. Admitted at age eighteen. Does he have family?”
     “None that we know of. His parents and twin brother died in a fire,” the woman says. “Aidan here was older by only a few minutes.”
     The light goes away and men and women in white coats stand around the foot of my bed starring at clipboards. The woman, who spoke when I woke up, stands at the head of my bed.
     “The fire?” asks a man.
     “Accidental. Or, we think,” the woman says. She fluffs my pillow.
     Another woman steps forwards. “Is he cognizant?”
     “We believe he is. We also believe he does not want to be.”
     “What do you mean, doctor?”
     The woman clears her throat. “The firefighters found him dead: smoke inhalation. They revived him. We believe he was abnormally affected from being brain dead for some time. Once brought back to life, the patient had the ability to slip in and out of sleep whenever he so wished. After studying his brainwaves, I believe he sleeps so often for the dreams, lucid dreams specifically. It is something of the reverse effect of the Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome. The patient did not lose his ability to dream but gained the ability to control it.”
     I stare straight ahead; my mind looks for the switch in my head. The switch that lets me fall.
     A man steps forward. “Where was his brain affected?”
     “We weren’t sure at first. His MRI scans looked fine,” the woman says.
     “Then how was it that you discovered his problem area?”
     “I didn’t. We didn’t. It was more of a scientific guess.”
     The white coats sway, mumble, and look back to their clipboards.
     “There were scientists in Switzerland that found a correlation between the optical lobe of the brain and dreaming. From that, our team went about creating a hormone treatment that targeted that area of the brain.”
     I can’t find the switch.
     “The treatment rebuilt what we thought might have been the damaged area,” the woman says. “Soon after the first few treatments, we noticed the patient stayed awake longer, and more frequently. We feel today is the last day for our treatment. After adjusting the MRI and studying the optical lobe more closely, we think we have cured him, and today will be the last step of that cure.”
     It is not a disease. Where is the switch?
     “Doctor, was the patient a threat before your treatment?” a man with a kempt beard asked.
     The woman laughs. “By no way in the slightest. Would anyone be threatening after an REM cycle of twenty hours?” A few white coats laugh. The kempt beard does not.
     “So, you tell us then that you have deprived a man the powers of God?”
     The woman turns to face him.
     “You told us that your patient could control whenever he wanted to dream lucid dreams.” He points to me. “He created a universe, doctor. And you took it away.”
     The woman turns red.
     “He may not have been a threat before, but have you thought about what he will be like now, after you have cured him?”
     The woman looks at me and then away.
     “I think you made a terrible mistake,” the kempt beard says.
     I try again, but the switch is not there.