Conniveo

Chapter 5: Clarity

"I'm still in Los Angeles."

Geography had never been my strong subject, but I could at least recognize basic map forms. What the Homini girl - Kana - had showed me was clearly a map of North America. I looked at the area labelled 'Ixor', the name of the city she had said we were in, and it was right in the area where Los Angeles was supposed to be. It was well demarcated, like a clean square, but I was sure of what I was looking at. I looked at her. She seemed confused by my expression.

"But that says 'Ixor'. It has been so for over one hundred and twenty years."

"In America, that is Los Angeles. In fact, this," I motioned at the larger continent "...is America. So what the hell is going on?""

She looked back at the map, still confused. I wanted to ask another question but I stopped myself. I had made a huge gamble by talking to her after she had kissed me. It had felt so real, so I decided on the theory that I had been abducted by some alien race and it was all going well until she said that I was still on Earth. And this map before me was proof that I had lost it. It was obvious now. She was just a hyper-realistic figment of my imagination that had fed me some psycho-babble about Accelerons and Blands and a bunch of other crap I couldn't make sense of. If I had this much power of imagination, why couldn't I make better films? Why did it choose, instead, to complicate my life with these irrelevant mentally generated images? I considered that train of thought. I couldn't be this creative. The girl had spoken with a calm certainty. Even my imaginative process was prone to lapses and uncompleted thought patterns. Maybe I was dreaming and unable to wake up, so my brain had stimulated my other senses. After all, many people say that dreams feel real until you wake up.

Kana was visually breathtaking though. She was wearing a sort of negligee gown but I couldn't see anything. It was like the colors in it swirled into each other, like an oil slick, except that the colors were that of her skin. Her long platinum blonde hair was hanging loosely and framing her face, pin straight, save for a few stray wavy strands. I was itching to touch it. What am I thinking? I want to touch my imagination? But she had touched me. I felt it. And the time she kissed me...I felt a jolt of electricity. Maybe it was her quazer thing. I felt she was real that time. I could perceive something flowery coming from her hair and she had made the barest touch on my chest. No. No, this is impossible. Maybe my brain was trying to jolt me awake by showing me that I was still in Los Angeles, and that none of this was happening.

Oh God, please let this nightmare end.

I squeezed my eyes shut and fought back a headache. All this thinking was doing my head in. Maybe I had consumed so much mental energy to conjure these sets of impulses that the after-effects were beginning to get to me. I rubbed the sides of my forehead and tried to think. If she was real, if all this was real, then how was I getting here? And if I wasn't here and she wasn't real, how was my brain generating all these crazy thoughts? Maybe I was beginning to collapse on myself. I had been thinking hard to get a good plot for my end of year project, and maybe I had exerted myself to such a point that my brain was biting me back, giving me more juice than I needed. I thought about studying that map again. Maybe I could use the info from it in the plotline that was unfolding in my head. That's what this had to be, right?

I opened my eyes. It was dark. Slowly, my eyes readjusted to the darkness. I was facing a poster of Green Day. I looked up at the ceiling. The last luminescent stars had begun to die out. I was back in my room. I felt relief. I spun around, just to make sure the weird girl and the white room were not here and my brain wasn't playing another trick on me. I heard the sound of a car drive past. Oh good, I'm in Los Angeles again. I sighed, walked over and collapsed on my bed. I looked at the digital clock. 23:17.

Starting tomorrow, I was going to be taking enough antipsychotics to kill an adult male elephant.

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