How long can you make an apple last?  Quite a while, it turns out, if you really put your mind to it.

So it's what, Tuesday?  Sure, why not, it's Tuesday.  Unless you'd rather have it be Wednesday.  Either way it's been a while, over a week and counting, since the fateful day I finally decided to take that ridiculously round and thoroughly green apple, slice it up into little pieces, and shove one of those pieces into my mouth, only to discover that it was no ordinary apple, which of course I'd already suspected, no this particular apple was ... magic. 

I could probably find a safer word.  A word less susceptible to skepticism, or outright ridicule.  How does psychotropic work for you?  Is mind-fucking a bit too crude?  Maybe we need a whole new word for a substance which, once ingested, gives you dreams that aren't really dreams, more like memories, but not your memories, memories of an imaginary person you've somehow made up, only now you're beginning to think he's not exactly imaginary after all, which is starting to make you feel like maybe you are.

And if someone really is imagining me right now, all I can say is, could you please try making things a little less complicated?

Not that I've got any complaints about the dreams themselves, or the memories, or whatever it is they are.  No, that part has been fantastic.  The one great constant, the endless rub of human consciousness, is that we can never, ever get inside somebody else's head.  You can love them, hate them, know every square inch of their bodies, but you can never really understand what it's like to survey the world from inside their skull.  Is their red your red?  Their orgasm your orgasm?  And what is art, literature, music, all that inane scrawling and scratching and sawing away except an eternal, eternally vain attempt to negate the fact, to bridge the gap, to try to express to somebody else hey, this is what's going on in here.  This is who I am.

Only now I've discovered there might be a way.  Relatively quick.  Guaranteed painless.  All you've got to do is go crazy.  Lose your mind, and maybe, just maybe, find somebody else's in return.

The first time out - our trip to antclear, that single, solitary apple, dangling from her tree - was almost a loss.  I didn't know where I was, what was happening, what to look for.  And then came round two, that wild night in the restaurant, which left me scratching my head for days.  Maybe it was seeing Simon.  Maybe it was seeing the other Claire, the one I seem to keep on seeing, every time I close my eyes.  During both dreams, I'd been a passenger, not a participant.  Just along for the ride.  Which is, I suppose, something that both dreams and memories have in common.  They have their own agendas.  They go where they're wont to go.  As much as they're a part of us, they never do what we want, what we expect.

Still, that doesn't mean we're without options.  Years back I read about something they called - I think - active dreaming.  The concept was to take charge of your dreams or, more often, your nightmares.  Is the bogeyman waiting for you each night?  No problem.  Just reach down into that nasty dream, assert your conscious will, and tell the bugger to kindly fuck off.  I figured maybe I could tap into some of that same mojo.  Even if they weren't my dreams per se, I could be an active, not a passive, observer.  Keep my eyes open.  Try to glean whatever message or meaning they might be willing to impart.

And it seems I was on to something.  As if each dream, each slice of the apple, had its own little lesson to pass on, if only I were able to discern it.  Third time out it was one of those crazy, stressed-out work dreams, where there's some huge deadline that's always getting pushed up, and people scurrying around like ants, and me floating above it all, watching the cool, unflappable Simon slowly come unwound.  Then the next night brought this weird, impressionistic collage, where words were mere sounds, people no more than a pair of eyes, a waft of scent, a touch.  The dreamer at six months.  And then, just to keep me guessing, came the most bizzaro of them all, this convoluted shaggy-dog where everyone was a character out of Peanuts, and I couldn't figure out who was who, until Peppermint Patty came along and started calling Charlie Brown 'Chuck', and suddenly he was Chuck, Simon, only a 2-D, cartoon version with squiggles for eyebrows, two dots for eyes.

But no matter how much each dream varied, no matter how crazy things got, I began to detect continuities, connections, the underlying reality their creator had drawn upon to fashion each one.  To know the dreamer, and not just the dream.

So where to begin.  How's this?  His name really is Chuck.  It'd been a nod, apparently, to his father's brother Charles, who decided to repay that honor by insisting on calling his nephew Chuck instead.  A name that stuck, even though its owner, its victim, turned out to be about as un-Chuck a person as could be.  As for the Simon thing, that's where it gets really baroque.  In one of my dreams, a nine- or ten-year-old Chuck is playing in his yard, conversing back and forth with an invisible, imaginary friend of his, another quiet, standoffish boy who goes by the name of - you guessed it - Simon.

I don't have much to go on, but I think they spent a lot of time together, those two.  That Chuck had to make up somebody to be close to, because that somebody had never been around.  Even in dreams, his father was a shadow, an absence, the thing that was always leaving, or about to get home, but never really there.  And his mother, while physically close at hand, had that same, distant, MIA vibe about her.  Sure they loved him.  Gave him everything a spoiled, middle-class kid could want.  But their real gift was something they'd passed on, some quirk in the genes, a fluke of evolution, whatever it was that culled one particular animal from out of the pack, and set him out on his own, a  restless wanderer, traversing the snow.  Nowdays they'd pin a name on it, call it a syndrome, or employ some ominous-sounding acronym, then send you home with the latest round of meds.  But for Chuck there were no explanations, no cures.  So instead he'd made his own adaptations.  Learned to weather the storm.

Watching it play out, seeing his life in moments, snapshots, was liking watching one of those Up films.  Give me the child and I'll give you the man.  Only it wasn't some external force, a parent or teacher, that was shaping him.  It was a young boy creating himself.  He used his mind, his imagination, to charm the grown-ups, win praise, wheedle out of punishment.  And if any bullies came skulking around, he grew silent, invisible.  Beneath their notice or contempt.  There was something sly and mercurial in his manner, and I remember in one dream seeing it for the very first time, that hint of a smirk, as if he was in on some joke that would always be just out of their, out of everyone's, grasp.

When the hormones hit, things started to change.  Girls entered the equation.  They were drawn like moths to his sepulchral flame, his pale, gaunt frame, his solitude.  Naturally enough he wanted to reciprocate.  To find affection, or at least cop a feel.  But whenever he tried, something happened.  Like opening your mouth to speak and finding there were no words, no voice, within you.  Thanks to his parents, he'd never learned the vocabulary of sharing, of being with somebody else.  Still, for some of the girls it was catnip, a challenge they couldn't resist, and willingly they'd play the waves, battering away at his ramparts.  But the walls were too strong.  Eventually they just gave up and left. 

Till finally Claire came along.

By then he'd made his accommodations.  Learned to get by on microwave friendships, casual hook-up's, relationships where little was given, even less asked.  A father's gift for numbers, a mother's artistic bent, and a timely explosion in IT had conspired to create for him a perfect little niche.  He was the game master.  The digital dreamer.  Fabricating new worlds, and the rules to go with them, for all those other lost, solitary souls out there, and getting paid quite well in the process.  Not that the money mattered so much.  It was more about the acceptance, the adulation.  Or maybe just simple math.  All those people out there who loved what you did, well they had to be worth a lot more than having one person loved who you were.

Maybe that's what let it happen.  The fact that he was already convinced he had everything he needed.  When a new temp stopped by one day, all jangly earrings and lemon verbena, he actually looked up.  Smiled.  Saw a face that made the women he'd been seeing lately, every one of them CG, pale by comparison.  She was smart.  Funny.  Didn't give a shit about all these over-aged boys, their toys, their games, the big, bright digital con that was helping pay her rent.  And then there was that final hook.  The name she shared with his aunt.  Like maybe she was a second chance, another fork in the road, a reprise of the one he'd been too young, too scared, to even consider taking the first time around.

And how do I know all this?  Me, the dreamer, the voyeur, the guy who's just along for the ride?  Because I've seen her through his eyes.  Fallen in love with her through his eyes.  Seven nights of dreaming, all those countless jumbled memories, and no matter how real, how vivid each one had been, the moment she appeared I knew.  We both knew.

This was it.

Being with them, seeing them together, was the final bit of proof I needed.  He was real.  His life, his memories, were real.  But all that left were a thousand more questions.  What was he doing banging around in my head?  Were my life, my memories, banging around in his?  And if so, why?  Were we soul mates somehow, connected at birth, unwitting partners in some weird psychic bond?  Or was it all just some random crossed circuit, a glitch in the system, like one of those feint, ghost radio signals that haunts your car radio, Mexican dj's and old Everly Brothers.  Questions, questions, a thousand questions, and only one dream left.  Only one more slice of the apple.

So come with me now.  Walk into the kitchen, turn on the light, open the refrigerator door.  Find the tiny round Tupperware container, the one with the bright orange lid.  Peel back that lid to find it there, looking a little lonely, a little worse for the wear, and by now more of a dull beige than a golden yellow, in spite of all that lemon juice it's been soaking in.  Whatever you do, try not thinking about how crazy this is.  How crazy you are.  Try thinking instead about all the questions you've got, all the answers you need, and how pissed off you're going to be if they're not waiting inside that little hunk of fruit.

That little hunk of fruit you just ate.