Filling Empty Shoes

Lucid dreaming: a type of dream wherein the person realizes they are dreaming. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of control over the dream’s characters, narrative, or environment.

One night, I had a dream in which I stood on the edge of a building, a skyscraper, overlooking the sights of an endless, silver metropolis. I had this vivid fear of slipping and falling off, but at the same time, I couldn’t step away from the edge as if my feet were glued to the concrete. Then I looked down and saw a bear walking on its hind legs across a tightrope in the air, and I realized I was dreaming.

This wasn’t my first time having such a dream, where I sobered to the illusion and realized everything around me was imagined. Before, when I dreamt of being stuck in my old school and figured out I could blow it up with rockets, I learned that I had the power to change the world to whatever I wanted. So, atop that skyscraper, I summoned for myself my blue lawn chair, and once I sat in it, the creaky thing floated up and away, drifting between the glass towers.

I gawked at the tiny cars below, spat at people to hear their appalled gasps, knocked on the window of a twelve-story building while a meeting took place. For some reason, I felt like being mischievous. But then, I passed by a massive metal ball on top of a pointed building. In its shiny reflection, I saw who I was. I was Michael, young Michael, the Michael from when I was still in my twenties, with a young face and a full head of hair.

A face looked back at me that hadn’t for so long.

I reveled in seeing it again—eyes so much livelier than I remembered—turning my face to witness every side of its smoothened skin, no longer dry and shriveled. Until, suddenly, my lawn chair was rocked around. Panicked, I gripped the arms tightly, bracing with all my strength, and looked to my side. A floating deck chair had bumped into me, and in it was Zach, my twin brother, grinning mischievously.

“Having fun up here?” he said.

“Fuck you,” I scoffed.

He cackled to himself as his chair spun in place, kicking at mine as soon as he had the chance, sending us both tumbling through the air.

“Pick something more interesting,” he said. “This place is boring.”

“Like what?”

Once the chairs settled, we ended up hanging upside down with the city streets above us.

“Dude, anything. Something underwater would be cool.”

“Like those tubes through an aquarium?” I said.

“Or just the bottom of an ocean. Be creative, bro.”

I let go and plunged down at a frightening speed towards an undisturbed sea. The moment I broke the water, bubbles swarmed my vision, and as they dissipated with little pops, I saw that I stood amidst a reef of coral shaped like trees, fish swarming between rock arches, and a doghouse half buried in the sand of an open clearing.

“That’s better.” Zach walked past me, cracking open oysters to snack on before leaning against a reef plate. “Gotta flex your creative muscles, or Paul will be disappointed again.”

“I don’t think anything I make will be good enough for him,” I said, sitting down on a soft, squishy jellyfish stool.

“‘Zach, that button is on the right instead of the left, and it has hard edges. That’s too aggressive,’” my brother quoted, and for a second, I could hear Paul’s whiny voice scratching at my ear.

I shook my head with a flattened mouth, edges creeping to a smile, which made Zach happy. He always loved seeing me hold back laughter… all the way to the end. But once we let a lull crawl in, he started looking around the fantastical underwater area, and a somber expression took over.

“What’s got you like that, by the way?” he asked, a very direct tone to his voice.

I scanned my body, feeling like a parasite in its skin for a brief moment, but then I distracted my mind with the colorful fish swimming by and latched onto this fantasy with all my willpower. “I’m Michael,” I said. “Young Michael. What’s wrong with that?”

“So…” Zach looked at his hand as he scratched it—his nervous tic. “The roles are reversed, huh?”

“Yes,” I replied sincerely.

“All right, but he’s… I’m dead. Your brother is dead,” he said. “That has to sink in for you one day—I ain’t ever coming back.”

“I know that. Trust me. I just…” Looking up, I saw a shark circling above us. “When I dream like this, do you think an essence of him comes back to us? Does this, even for just a little bit, make him exist again? Of course he’s gone, but once, he was a collection of signals in a brain, and he lived. So… is there a point where my brain can recreate enough of those signals that, technically, he exists again?”

“My brain is still in the ground, as decomposed as ever. I don’t think any signals make that less of a reality, and you can’t become your brother.”

“I’m not trying to be. I’m trying to have another conversation with him.” I stared Zach down, and he turned away.

“What do you want to say?” he mumbled.

“A lot.” There was a rosy, spiral seashell at my feet. I picked it up, sticking it to a stick so I could fend off the fish trying to grab and lift us away. “Do you think if Mom dreams of him, he would look and sound the same? It’s been so long since I heard him; I’m not sure this is even the right voice. She might remember him in a higher pitch, or maybe she still sees him as a fourteen-year-old boy and imagines him that way.”

“Or as you. We’re twins, so I probably would’ve looked like what you look like.”

“Have you seen my belly?” I scoffed, raising the side of my mouth to Zach.

“Who knows, maybe I would’ve turned out as much of a slob.”

We both laughed for a moment, our identical snicker that turned into the snort of a pig, him always a second sooner than me.

“What do you think his last thought was?” I asked.

“Probably, ‘I shouldn’t have jumped from so high.’”

“Do you believe he had a dream right before dying? Maybe he was in a pretty place like this…” I glanced around the orange and pink reef. “And it slowly started going dark until he was in complete blackness, and his thoughts ended just like that.”

“Maybe… but then what would ‘I’ have dreamt of?”

The currents above us began to surge violently, and fish used it to speed through the water, bringing them places far beyond this quant little reef.

“Would he have seen the tennis court or Jessica?” I asked once the idea popped into my head.

“Those were your things.”

“Yes… that’s how this works.”

Zach nodded to show his understanding, saying, “I guess… if it were me, I would’ve thought about the tennis court.”

“Not Jessica?”

“She was nice, but if I could’ve grown older, I would’ve married someone else. Maybe a city girl from Minnesota who plays piano. Then she can sit down with our son and show him how to play Mary Had a Little Lamb, but he’d give that up for football instead. Our daughter can pick up the piano a few years later. Who knows, maybe she’ll go pro.”

“Very specific,” I mumbled.

“It’s good to look into the future, isn’t it?”

For an unmeasurable amount of time, because it was both instantly short and endlessly long, we stared at each other with piercing eyes. Then, a shark flew down and bit Zach’s arm. He hissed and slammed on its nose to let go, but in his flailing, a fish darted in and stole the red diamond in his hand.

It swam away into the clear water above, so we had to chase. Calling on dolphins to take us, we raced after the black and white angelfish, holding onto the dolphins’ fins. But before we could catch up, a strong current swept us along, shooting us upward and upward until we broke through the water and were sent tumbling into the sky.

Before long, we pierced the clouds and landed on them like cushions. A low sun burned deep within the distant horizon, edging the white fluff with a warm orange glow. Zach front crawled to me, drifting close with his head sticking out as if hovering in water.

“Do you remember when we tried to see who could swim the fastest?” I said.

“You don’t have to remind me,” Zach smiled, kicking puffs of cloud in my face.

I swatted them away and spit some out. “What was that older girl’s name again?”

“No idea, but she was hot.”

“Lola, I think, and she was way too old for us, man. We were, like, fifteen.”

“Easy to be judgmental when you won.” Before I could respond, he dipped his mouth down and spewed a string of mist at me. I sneezed, and he said, “You know I was super jealous, right? I watched her squeal for you and thought, ‘Damn, I wish I could drown this guy.’”

“No, you didn’t.” I shook my head, half smiling.

“Sure I did. I wanted you to be gone and me to get the pretty girl.” With an idle glance, Zach explored the vast cotton field of gold fluff. “And Mom’s attention, the good grades, the top bed. Good looks were the only thing we shared, and even then…”

A moment of sober silence passed, leading the sun to somehow drone at us with a heavy grumbling.

“Sometimes I wanted to throw you out the window,” Zach said.

“You didn’t.” My voice was blunt and low, and my face tensed straight. “The real Zach wouldn’t say that.”

He looked back at me with a twisted sort of expression, vacant of malice or discontent but not pity. Then he turned to the sunset again.

“I thought we were playing pretend.”

“We are,” I said, I stated.

And that was it. That was everything we had to say for an eternity, and we spent that eternity staring at the sun forever rising.

Near the end of time, eventually, it was swallowed by a black hole, alongside the clouds, the earth beneath us, everything that could be, until we drifted through empty space, floating before a ring of fire. I stepped onto the black hole’s belt, a shifting bow of colors, and walked up to its edge. Facing the orb of pure black, I crouched down and saw my own face inside—the face of Michael.

“Sometimes… I think about how you would’ve done things,” I said. “When I married or had kids, I couldn’t help but imagine if you would’ve made them happier. Every argument I have, you are at the back of my head, telling me how I should’ve gone about it differently, and sometimes, when I feel really low, when I’m too tired or can’t handle the stress anymore, I tell you—you in my head—that it would’ve been better that I died instead, and you were here now.”

To my side, Zach approached, standing instead of crouching. “Who are you talking to? Me or him?” He gestured at my reflection.

“Myself.”

With slow steps, he joined me, dangling his feet off the black hole’s ring. They warped as if viewed through a distorted lens, slinging in and out of the black hole.

“I think I finally get why you dream about this,” he said, looking up at the star dots being sucked up into nothingness. “It’s nice to experience things that won’t happen. Almost like living in a ‘what if’ scenario, or an alternate dimension.”

“Is it childish of me to cling to this dream for so long?” I asked. “Ever since he died, I’ve thought about this scenario over and over again.”

He shook his head, rattling left to right, then shrugged. “It’s weird that you don’t dream about the both of us being alive.”

“That feels like asking too much—I don’t know.”

I watched Zach’s reaction, which was surprisingly little. He simply stared at the stars above, their sparkle reflected in his eyes, until his gaze lowered to his legs and, with a weak smile, he said, “I think… I understand.”

A planet hurtled by, brown red, and massive, pulled into the black hole and crumbling into pieces as it was swallowed up, quickly turned into emptiness. I watched, enraptured at such an enormous celestial body being devoured so quickly.

“But Michael…” Then Zach’s voice pulled me back to him. “I think it’s time to return to normal.”

“Do we have to?” I muttered.

“Unfortunately. I can feel our brain waking up again. I can even see parts of the bedroom. The worlds are colliding, and this one is going into the trash.”

“Will I ever be able to relive this again?” One last time, I took in the grandeur of the black hole and its fiery fringe.

“Maybe, but next time, you should do it alone. Being around me… you do that enough already.”

Somewhere outside the universe, an intrusive chime rang and abruptly ripped me out of the dream. In one blink, the infinite vastness of space was gone and replaced by my bedroom. In the brief confusion, when both worlds still seemed equally genuine, I looked around for Zach since I wanted to ask one last question… until it dawned on me what was reality and what wasn’t.

Right, I thought. I dreamt all of that. My brother isn’t alive.

It was a tough truth I had to accept once more, a shock that felt fresh again, even though I had already come to terms with it many, many years ago. After lying still, staring at the ceiling, and trying to remember the dream for a bit—which inevitably faded away from me—I got out of bed and lumbered over to the hallway.

She must’ve heard the door being shut because my wife immediately shouted from downstairs, “Zach, honey, are you awake?”

“Yes!” I yelled back.

“Breakfast is ready! Are you coming?”

“Yep, just a minute!” I went into the bathroom, washing my face from the cumbersome haze, which jolted me awake a little. Then, while brushing my teeth, I found and stared at the photo on our counter of my brother and me during a fishing trip.

In my head—as I always do—I said, “Miss you, Michael. You were always my better half.”