Molly: A Rather Silly Story
"Really, Doctor. I have a problem."
"Okay. Tell me about it. What is this problem?"
He had found this psychiatrist in the phonebook. The doctor had a nice small listing and lived in a very quiet section of town, with a modest yard and a non-imposing front door.
"Well, you see. It's this. I met this girl, you see. I was at work yesterday."
The sounds of the doctor's scribbling stopped suddenly.
"I understand. Is that your problem?"
"No. I spilled coffee on my keyboard, accidentally of course. And, well, she appeared."
"Where?"
"I don't know. I called in Mike, that's our computer guy, and he came up and fixed it up, cleaned it off, and then it worked fine."
"The keyboard?"
"Yeah. Then she walks up behind Mike and smiles over his shoulder. I look at her and smile and ask her name. Mike's still there, you see, and he looks at me kinda funny. He turns around and he looks around and tells me I must be crazy since there ain't anyone there. She says real crisp and clear, 'Hi. I'm Molly'. Then her eyes look straight through me to something behind me, my computer screen, my cubicle wall? I don't know, but anyway, she looks there and I'm thinking, you know, she needs something. Maybe she's the boss's new secretary and maybe Mike is blind, but I push him slightly aside and ask her if she needs anything, but she shakes her head, puts her hand on my shoulder, then turns around and walks away. Into nothing, disappears. Then, Mike looks at me all crazy like and he says I look really really wasted and take it easy."
"Are you puzzled over what you saw?"
"Yeah, but that's not the strangest part. I'm more puzzled at what happened after. Okay, so I finish work, see? It's four pm and everyone's getting ready to go home, and so I do, too. I go down the elevator, not the stairs as I usually do and walk to the front door. And there she is, right on the sidewalk. I walk out, call her name. She says hi to me and puts out her hand. I take it and she walks toward the cars, pulling me along. I'm polite so I ask her what she does. We're in front of my car. She says, 'I help people like you.' And I go, oh really? So what do I need help with? Then she goes, 'Well, take me with you and you'll see.' So, I'm ever the gentleman and agree and I open the passenger door, let her in, and I go to the driver side. I have no idea where to take her and so I ask her where she wants to go. Home, of course it's her talking and I'm thinking where you talkin' about, girl? and then she does that twisted all-dreamy smile smirk of hers, and I say, fine, okay, we'll go to my house. She's real quiet on the trip and when we get to my house, she suddenly asks me if she can stay for dinner. She says that she might really get to like this place. Which was all fine and everything, but not something that I hear every day. I agreed anyway."
"So, have you seen her before any of this? On TV? In a magazine? On the street? Maybe you recognize her face from somewhere."
"I already told you I just met her yesterday."
"Well, it's very possible you have seen her before and this might be a hallucination. But is that your problem? I wouldn't think so. Please go on. You're a very good storyteller."
"Hmm..so I go into my house, hold the door for her, and she walks in, sees my big mess. Do I really want to eat at home tonight? I thought not, so I apologized and said how about some place fancy? She's way nice, soft on my shoulder, says 'Let's clean it up.' That just wasn't right. I couldn't have a guest clean my house! So I go, no, really, I know a little place down the street, has some really good stuff, we can eat there. Nope, she seems to know what's going on and so an hour later, I have a clean house, tired aching muscles, and she's still there, smiling cheekily. If there's one thing I remember about her, it's that ghostly smile. She was always doing it."
"Did you like the smile?"
"I could say yes, I could say no. Yes."
"So that was yesterday What happened after?"
"She stayed for dinner. I grilled some beef and she toasted the buns. I get us some drinks and then we go on eating. I start up some conversation and we talk for a long time, two hours or so. When we finished, I cleaned up, and she helped to dry the dishes. Then we sit out on the balcony off my room, looking out at the dark and the sky. It was real nice, I remember that. She talks on about everything, her thoughts and words rambling out like a wandering comet, trailing across the heavens, and me softly breathing, listening, staring at the fragmented sky, the lights outside my little cube of land. I don't understand most of it, but it sounds really beautiful, like an Impressionistic painting or a clash of notes on a page that flows really good. Then I get drowsy and her voice seems to come from all directions, hollow, like the night sky, and full and rich like chocolate flowing down the river Jordan with milk and honey and sweet fruits and poetry and flying creatures and the pleasures of deep, deep..sleep. I'm maybe dead or something, because I can see myself lying like a stoned hobo on a bench under a light in the middle of a park and she's hugging me or something, tears flowing down her cheeks, the rouge coming off, my pasty drugged cheeks wet with her tears, the phone being dialed, her smooth voice now cracked and broken, the sirens heading in my direction."
"You are a good storyteller. I like your tangential moments. Now that's not really what happened, did it?"
"Well, I did fall asleep, accidentally. I might as well have died..that was a very inopportune moment for me to fall asleep, while she was talking. Anyway, in my dream, she's still talking and I don't fall asleep and then we go inside and turn on the TV because I find she likes SNL too and so we watch. She lies on my bed because she's cold and I'm finishing up a Coke and sitting on the floor, so I don't spill anything on the bed. She makes snappy comments and I laugh, and she laughs and I crack jokes and she laughs at me during the commercials. And then, after one sketch, I turn around to judge her reaction and she's not there. I'm all confused, and it seems as if she's there, but she's not."
It was all there. The sheets were still warm and the indentations were still there from where she had been. It was uncanny. He had felt her presence there, her eyes on the TV, her high tinkly laugh mimicking the studio audience. One joke was hysterical and the soda he had been drinking dribbled out of his mouth. He knew she was there because she had laughed, a different laugh, a low giggle that he guessed was reserved for times like these. The commercials had started and when he turned to the bed, she was gone.
The door was still closed, but of course she could have closed it on her way out. He tried the door. It was locked, from the inside. Turning, he scanned the room. She wasn't there. The commercials had ended and now, she was coming back on.
"Did you miss me?"
He whirled around. It was just the other Molly, the one on TV, her schoolgirl bangs shaking in front of the leather and sweat biker toughs. He swore and went back to his chair. He sat down, stiffly, a little bit uncomfortable and tried to relax. She was here someplace.
The sketch was funny. The audience laughed on cue and so did he. From somewhere beside him came that high tinkly laugh again. She was here, inside the room but he couldn't see her.
He turned off the TV, crawled into bed, and called it a night.
The next morning, he woke up, a little dazed from a hyperactive dream. She had been there. She was beside him, all around him, running too fast to be seen. Molly was there, trouncing the toughs that lay on his chair while he watched them from the stage and she ran round and round. Her face, as she ran, blurred and finally disappeared altogether. She seemed to be saying catch me if you can but of course he couldn't. At one point, everything had stopped, and now it was Molly's turn to watch. Molly was back on the stage, while he was sitting on his chair, but it was now she who was the chair, and he that was running around, gasping for breath.
The coffee machine was on. It had been on since he got into the kitchen, so she must have been up already. As he added sugar to his coffee, he had the slightly unnerving feeling that someone was watching him. He turned his head quickly to see who it was and she was there. She had a forlorn look on her face, but that disappeared as static waves overtook her familiar shape and melted her into thin air.
He had had enough of the house, so he prepared to go to work. A tie, a jacket, his shoes, down the steps, to his car, the key in the lock, and her, in the passenger seat, as if nothing had happened.
"Where were you?"
She put out a hand. He took it. She smiled. He smiled. She stepped out of the car, up the steps, into the house. He waved.
Perplexed, he went to work. His computer monitor at work was acting up again, displaying a running zigzag down the screen as it switched on and off between screen saver and desktop. A sip on his bland office coffee dripped drops of hot coffee onto the keyboard. Short circuit. One roll of his eyes and a call on the office phone and he had Mike, the computer guy, up in his cubicle.
"Hey, Mike, nice to see you. Seems I spilled coffee on my keyboard again."
"What's with you, man? You did the same thing yesterday. Better watch it, wouldn't want to get fired for that. Go home, get some sleep. You look like a horse slept on you and snakes bit out your eyes. I'll take care of it."
He thanked Mike, clocked out and went to the front door of his office building. Cars streaming past, the mailman dropping the mail on the sidewalk again, some old lady pushing a cart down Fifth, a kid on a scooter, some dirty guy carrying groceries, that burgundy Explorer hitting the curb for the fiftieth time. Normal people. What was wrong with him?
She was in his car again. She rolled down the window, smiled, waved. Loosening his tie, crumpling his cup and throwing it in the corner, he ran back to his Rabbit.
"What are you doing here?"
No answer, a warm smile on her face. She turned on the radio.
"And back to more Car Tunes! From your favorite radio station, K.."
He turned it off. He sat in the front seat, staring at her face. Her clear, expressionless face, a touch of rouge on her cheeks, a loose lock of hair on her ear, a scratch on her chin, her smooth forehead, her perfectly lipsticked and glossied lips to pure white teeth. Unreal. Mike, waving his arms, running down to the car.
"Hey, man. Changed your keyboard. Your monitor's screwed, probably happened overnight. Hey! You listening? What y' lookin' at?"
"Uh..yeah, yeah! What?"
"You forgot your car keys. You really are actin' funky today. Get home safely. Don't be seein' things now that ain't there. It's a bad habit. Happens to me a lot."
He grinned.
"Anyways, you'd better be going now. See ya."
He watched Mike run back in when, from behind him, she breathed loudly, striking his neck with her breath. Cold. Glacial. He turned. She was gone.
His hands mechanically backed up the Rabbit and he pulled out onto the street. A little girl with her grandfather and her dog crossed the street in front of his car and they turned and looked at him. Their blank looks turned questioning, confused. He sped home.
He only needed a little nap. Peeling back the blankets, he slid into the comfortable warmth of the sheets and dozed. His dream was more surreal this time. She was there again, slowly walking toward him while the sky, the ground, the horizon, all changed. Mountains. Beautiful sunsets. Despairing wastelands. Cubic nightmare. Appian Road. Mile-high Kyoto castle. She stopped, her hair flowing in with the wheatfield background behind her. A scream, a laugh, an enticing look. Then she turned, leaped, blended into the background of the Parc Sur Le Lac, the Scream, Pipe on a Red Chair. He seemed drawn in but he couldn't move, stuck, only there to watch.
He awoke with tears of fatigue running down his face. The air was heavy with her scent and seemed to clog up his nose. He walked downstairs, more slowly than usual, taking his time, not stepping on the always-sleeping dog, treading lightly over the creaky step, clutching the staircase lest he fall, his nervous legs stumbling down a step. Molly awaited at the bottom, her patient complacent eyes boring into his and making all his tiredness and nervousness disappear, fly into the depths of the clouds behind her pupils, the wet glistening teardrop on the edge of her eye reminding him of a waterfall, a morning mist, seaspray glinting off of Triton's pitchfork.
"That's quite an adventure, son."
The psychiatrist stood up and walked to the window. He opened the shutters wide, shedding light on the room. For a minute, it looked as if he was flickering, but a quick blink showed that the doctor was still there.
"I have one question for you. Did you ever awake from your first dream?"
"No..wait, where am I then? Am I dreaming? Am I dreaming that I see you talking to me?"
"You know, in all the works of Freud and other psychoanalysts, they've never told us what power hidden in your soul drives dreams. They can say that you will soon experience disaster if you see yourself falling down a never-ending hole, or some sort of complex, if you're dreaming about certain people, but they can't say where the soul gets the drive to bring these images to mind. Sleep is a very dangerous thing. It magnifies all your desires and your fears and generates dreams. Your life had taken a wrong turn and if not for your soul, you would be at a dead end. Your soul cries out for something, for retribution, for the right thing to happen. It wants to experience the world, not just that rush of time between birth, your wrong turn, and death. It wants limbo, it wants that heavenly commercial break."
"What do I do then?"
"It's your dream. You don't need me to help you. You can switch me off, get rid of me. You can go home, change the world, paint it green, leap the sky, make yourself happy, because it is your soul that asks for it. You can do what I want. We are all meant to be existentialist. Live life and love it. What is Molly? She is a vital part of your dream. She is a reflection of that which you crave in your soul, and that which life has not given you. Life has given you the plain, but she gives you the bizarre, no, she is the bizarre. She has the power to bring you beyond what you have seen to what you have not seen. She shocks you, chills those hairs on the back of your neck, surprises you with everything she does, even makes you spill your coffee. And you like her being there, being happy, making you happy. You can do anything, get what you want, live like you want, and finally catch her, running on the stage. You can be the spotlight. Remember, in a dream, you do what you want."
The doctor flickered and went out, his TV sermon ended. The patient stood up, more confused than ever, and went home. He was tired. He went to sleep.
This new dream looked rather nice. In fact, it looked like home. He was awakening, as if from a long refreshing sleep. He turned and looked straight into the deep eyes of Molly. She was talking about life, milk and honey, her dreams. She stopped suddenly, looking calm, collected, smiling at his face. His eyes, searching, questioning, looking for the matrix of life, the pearl of heaven, the perfect light, the ecco fantastique, the answer to all his questions. The stars glinting off the one tear in her eye told him far more than he needed to know. From here, there were a million places he could go, but it was his dream, just like it had been his soul's dream, and Molly's dream, and Mike's dream, and the psychiatrist's dream, a dream that cruises the waves of the night, invading the quietness of sleep, tuning into the radio broadcast of the desires of each and every person, enlightening and enriching the soul and the body as it passes.