by Duncan Tierney.
“You’re on mixing duty today.”
“What about tomorrow?” I asked.
“Let me clarify, you’re on mixing duty until you die or quit.”
“Ah.” I said, following the foreman through the dream factory.
The dream factory was a factory like any other, a factory filled with people who were slowly and graciously becoming machines. It was lit like a grocery store after midnight. The place smelled terrible, like sweat and oil and pension taxes. The only difference was between this factory and other factories is what this factory made. The dream factory made dreams. We specialized in the mass-produced spontaneity of the subconscious, or rather, we specialized in the chemicals that created dreams.
“So anyways,” the foreman continued “this is where you will be working for the foreseeable future and given the general health and safety factors included in this work, that will not be a particularly long future.”
“What?”
“Go ahead, try to sue us, our lawyers are better than yours,” said the foreman. He was a brusque man with skin as battered and dirty as the boots that had started to become a part of him.
“These are all the line guys,” said the supervisor, not bothering to look up from his clipboard. “They package all the dreams, ship ‘em out to the sleepers.” A crowd of smiling forty-generarians looked up from the wet brown powder that they were scooping into clear plastic bags. They looked jaundiced under the lights. Their smiling made the place sadder.
“So, this is the shit that makes people dream? This powder does it?” I asked.
The supervisor glanced back at me an eyebrow raised. “Yeah, buddy, the fuck else do you think would do it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, like brains and stuff.”
“Brains? Anybody ever tell you that you’re just about dumb as shit?”
“I don’t know, it just seemed so natural, I just never really thought about it.”
The foreman stopped and turned around sighing. “Does water seem natural to you, son? Does it seem like it flows pretty naturally out of faucets and shit?”
“Yeah, I guess but—”
“And how about concrete? You ever get real caught up in concrete? You ever ask about where concrete comes from? It seems pretty natural right, all over the ground, great for cars and shit. You know where concrete comes from?”
“Well I—”
“Well you don’t, and matter of fact neither do I. I know that the government does some of it, I know that businesses do some of it, I know that I’m not paid enough to give a shit, and I know that I have a meeting in ten minutes, so are you done asking stupid questions?”
“Yeah I guess, dreams just seems like a pretty important part of human existence to…” I trailed off. The foreman had already started walking away.
He led me up a stairwell adjacent to the line and the workers that stood like mannequins. At the top of the stairs was a huge bowl, something like a blender but several feet in diameter. “This is Justin, he’ll be teaching you the rest of this horseshit. Don’t get in trouble and don’t quit and don’t die and we won’t ever have to talk to each other again, sound good?”
Justin frowned at me. He was built with the kind of thick-wristed pragmatism that implied strength without ever saying it. His hair was cropped tight to a big round skull that sat atop a too-thick neck.
“What happened to Tim?” Justin asked the supervisor
“Died.”
Justin shrugged. “Damn shame,” he took off his glove to shake my hand. “You Abel?” Justin asked. He stared at me with a startling intensity.
“Yeah.”
“I’m Justin. Come here, let me show you how to make dreams for the millions.” Justin grabbed a bag from a nearby shelf, around the size of a cement bag. He hoisted it up and pulled a boxcutter from his waistband, slicing through the brown paper and emptying the powder into the bowl.
“So basically,” said Justin as he walked back over to the shelf where more bags sat. He shouted his words like the singer of a punk band, heaving his sentences angrily and aimlessly onto the factory floor. “We just empty these bags into the mixer. The mixer then blends all of this up into dream dust, wets it down, and shits it out on the other end, for those idiots at the other end to package up for us. When you run out of bags, press that button over there, and more get delivered.”
“What’s in the bags?” I asked. Justin emptied another bag and handed me a boxcutter.
“All sorts of stuff. Changes day to day. Essentially, it’s whatever the content team decides the general public needs to see.”
I grabbed a bag a split it open. “What exactly though? Is it like drugs or something? Vitamins? Chemicals?”
“A little bit of all of that, plus some” said Justin. “Changes with every order. This one has a lot of bovine methane hydrate, which is just cow shit purified. Some PCP. Virgin’s tears. Last week there was something that I’m pretty sure was dried up bat blood. For some reason all of those packages had Lebron James drawn on them. No idea what that means.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish, read the labels.” I glanced at the sack I was carrying, ‘Meth’ it read.
“And so how does all this get to people.”
“Municipal water supplies. Cities buy packets. Bottled water companies too. Gets into the food that way. Minute amounts, just enough to make you dream. Same way they do with fluoride. It’s not a secret but most people don’t care enough to know.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, how did you not know this?” Justin asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you work here, how did you not know that this is what you would be doing?” he asked.
“I got a job offer and I took it,” I said, “Didn’t ask too many questions. Thought the dream factory was going to be a toy store or something.”
“Fair enough,” said Justin, emptying a bag of powdered rat ears into the cylinder.
….
As the days turned to months, the excitement of a newfound misery quickly faded. The whirring of the dream blender rang through my head well into the night, only to be replace by a scene I had manufactured for my own subconscious.
The pains that cricked my spine were made worse by the knowledge that they would continue well into a subpar retirement. Days became a series of beige nothings broken up by factory whistles and union required breaks.
Justin was my best friend there, but only in as much as he was my only friend there. All the others, the line workers and janitors, were so caught in their own sadness that they forgot it existed. They weren’t worth talking to. They used language in the same way that toddlers use paint: liberally and without any recognizable purpose. Conversations with them were a collection of ‘Happy Friday’s’ and ‘Wednesday, am I right?’s’. The supervisors didn’t care to talk to us at all if they could help it.
“How do you do it?” I asked Justin, finally, as he sat across the table from me in our small cafeteria.
“Do what?” he said. He wasn’t paying attention to me. He was staring at a football game that was being replayed on the ancient tube tv in the corner.
“This shit.” I said, “Waking up and coming here with these fucking idiots every day.”
“I snort the dust,” he said, casually.
“Fuck off, I’m being serious.”
“Swear to Christ,” said Justin, not bothering to take his eyes off his sandwich. “Helps me get through the day.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. Justin set down his sandwich and took his boots off the table, leaning forward.
“You can snort dream dust. You could probably smoke it too. I do it, I know a lot of those tools on the line do. The yuppies up in the logistics and content department all do it as well, but they’re real annoying about it. That’s why they wet it down once its mixed. So you don’t breath it in.”
I set my sandwich down. “Isn’t that bad for you?” I asked.
“Probably,” said Justin, returning his eyes to the game and leaning back once more.
“What does it do?” I asked. Justin paused for a moment chewing thoughtfully.
“You know when you’re having a dream? And something dumb is happening, something really stupid, but you don’t really care because why would you? It all seems like it makes sense. That’s how it feels. It doesn’t make things better. It doesn’t make things worse. It just makes things what they are.”
I laughed. “You sound like one of those pricks that works upstairs. ‘What things are’. Christ almighty man, that dust must be messing with you.”
Justin shrugged indifferently. “Tell you what, follow me to my truck after work. Snarf some. If you like it, cool, if you don’t, no skin off my dick. It’s free for us here, easy enough to take off the line and dry out overnight, the supervisors all take some too, so they look the other way as long as you’re cool about it.”
….
Justin’s truck was a mess. It was a beat-up old thing with mismatched doors. Justin seemed indifferent to the whole thing. He pulled out a baggie from the glove compartment as I sat in the passengers seat, my hands shaking like I was about to have my first kiss.
“You look nervous,” he said.
“No, not at all. But, can this stuff, like, kill you?”
“Yeah, absolutely. How do you think you got this job?”
Justin piled up some of the dust on his key. It was a fine brown powder, with the texture of glitter and the color of feces. He pressed his thumb against his nose, sealing one nostril and huffing in sharply through the other. His eyes watered as he handed me the bag.
It was lighter than I expected, nearly weightless, as if the bag itself was the only thing that had any weight or relevance. Justin handed me a key, which I took and scooped out the powder.
And then I inhaled.
There was, at some point in history, a creature which had the honor of being the first to stick its head out of the primordial ooze, into the clarity of daylight. As it stood there, drenched from the neck down in eons worth of birth and death and feces, I know now what it felt like. As the dream dust ran through me, I realized what it was like to know without knowing what you knew. I was suddenly alone in the cock-eyed absurdity of the forever that I had thus far ignored.
The dust was as familiar and as far off as the next freeway’s McDonalds. Dream dust would have brought me Zen if it hadn’t erased a world full of dogma’s and ism’s. I realized that the reason why I had never known about the stuff was the same reason I never questioned dreams. The dust was the good telling of a bad plot, beautiful in its needless abstractions.
I looked up to see Justin seeing me.
“How long does this stuff last?” I asked.
“We have enough to last however long you need it to.”
…..
Footsteps echoed from the stairwell adjacent to the line and the workers that stood like mannequins. I looked over. Some supervisor who’s name I couldn’t remember stood there with a young guy, fresh-faced and nervous.
“This is Abel, he’ll be teaching you the rest of this horseshit. Don’t get in trouble and don’t quit and don’t die and we won’t ever have to talk to each other again, sound good?”
I frowned at the newcomer. I knew what happened without ever having to ask. I knew that Justin was lying face up in a morgue somewhere, brain caked in all the clarity of an ending easily predicted. But I asked anyway, because he was my best friend.
“What happened to Justin?”
“Died.”
I shrugged. “Damn shame.”