Conniveo

Chapter 3: Bivalence

"Stop doing that, it's weird."

I looked at Greg who had his studio headphones on. He was inserting the musical score to his work, giving it the emotional ambience it required. I was barely done modifying the sound volume on my project, and I wasn't even considering soundtracks. If I was going to use anything at all, it would probably end up being something deejayed off Blink-182 or Sum-41. I looked around. Irene was somewhere further down the room, tweaking some features.

I had seen her film. It was different - you could definitely see her vision - yet was incredibly easy to follow. It started in a small tailoring shop in Albany and followed the 'life' of a dress as it was worn to several dinners, a wedding reception, handed down through two generations - once being witness to an attempted date rape - and then thrown into a charity bin. It was rescued by a thrift store owner whose daughter recognized the potential value of the dress, and then it got sold off to a museum for a startling price, to be watched and admired for the rest of its days as the tailor had intended over a hundred years ago. It was beautiful, shot with a wide-angle lens and actually quite moving. You wouldn't believe you would actually feel something for a dress.

She had reviewed my work too, even though I thought she had tried to let me down slowly. It was the collage story of a group of prostitutes, each with a back-story about how they all ended up doing what they did. It was a little graphic in some parts, including a child sexual abuse scene which was incredibly difficult to shoot as the actors were not at all comfortable with the directions, but somehow I had pulled it off. Greg said it was moving yet gritty, Irene thought it would have been better if I focused a little bit more on the back story of one of the characters who was simply doing it to make money for her family, as she had a son and 'kids pull the biggest tears'. She was right, of course, but what was done was done.

I slapped myself again.

"Seriously, man. Stop it."

Greg looked a lot more irritated than amused. I had been slapping myself infrequently for the past five hours. Greg was laughing at the beginning, even offering to slap me if my arm got tired. But I was doing it for my own good.

I had to remain awake.

When I woke up this morning, I wasn't in my room. I remembered meeting a girl. She was blonde and fair and beautiful I remembered gold colored eyes. I thought I was dreaming, but I didn't think I had the mental capacity to imagine someone even half as breathtaking. I remembered her body and what it had done to the little Eugene in my pants. She was slim yet shapely, with what I could declare to be a perfect bust to waist to hip ratio. Her boobs had been perfect and perky, I assumed her to be about a 32C. And she had been so unconcerned about it, making me wonder if it ever really happened. The standard reactions to walking in on a nude girl were having her scream and cover up and call you a pervert. This one was too weird. And then she did something I couldn't understand; it was like she used telekinesis to get her closet door to open before she threw me in. I had wanted to get out so badly because of my claustrophobia but it didn't budge.

And then I woke up in my room. I was on the floor, far away from my bed. I didn't understand how I got there. I didn't understand how I had felt her touch and how everything had been so real. I could even remember the scent of her when she shoved me amidst her clothes. And then after I came back, I found a piece of cloth stuck to my hand. It was from something I had touched, a dress maybe. The fabric was between my hand and the closet door when I tried to open it. When I found myself back in my room, it was still stuck to my sweaty palm. If I thought I was dreaming before, that piece of cloth told me otherwise.

The girl, the room, the closet. It had all been real.

I'm going crazy.

I slapped myself again.