The MatchmanShe had been having that horrible dream again. As she tossed and turned uneasily in the sleep of her disordered bed, the dream unfolded with a horrible, monotonously familiar progression. She (but it wasn’t really her, was it?) was walking along a sunlit beach, somewhere (where?), and then - it was like a movie being advanced frame by frame. All she could do was watch.
She (whoever she was?) saw something shining in the sand, half-buried.
She fell to her knees.
She brushed the sand away from around the object.
It was a golden effigy of an apple.
It shone in the sun.
She touched it.
She lifted it in her hands.
And then everything went gold.
This was the part of the dream that truly terrified her. She thought that she was dying. She thought that she (whoever she was) was going away, never to return. And she enjoyed that sensation. Which was why she was so scared. Because why should she enjoy this inadvertent departure? She didn’t know. All she knew is that she did enjoy it. And it was invariably in the ecstasis of this enjoyment that she was engulfed, that she ceased being herself, and in the midst of which that she was translated back to consciousness. Every single morning. This morning was no exception to the general rule.
She watched the rain spatter against the panes of the window opposite her bed for a moment before she was seized with a fit of anxiety. Hurriedly she withdrew her hand from beneath her pillow. The golden apple lay safely cupped within the hollow of her grasp. She sighed, an exhalation of sheer relief. Sometimes, even when she could feel the apple in her hand, she couldn’t be sure that it was actually there. It was too important a matter to leave to such a blind sense of contact. She often needed visual reaffirmation.
She sat up in bed, and stared at the golden apple for a while. Despite its shiny surface, neither her face nor anything else was ever reflected in its skin. The apple was always and only itself. She sensed dimly on some subconscious level that the apple’s sole purpose was to take in the world, to manufacture everything and everyone into a portion of itself. This rarely bothered her, however - it rather inspired a sense of comfort, of relief that somewhere there existed a place where she was always welcome, of which she could indeed always be a part of the whole.
The golden apple, in a very real sense, was her home.
She shrugged off the remnants of her bedclothes and, wearing only an oversized T-shirt with the prominent logo of a skateboard manufacturing company on it, padded barefoot to the bathroom, apple in hand. She brushed her gleaming golden teeth carefully, examined her perfect golden complexion uselessly, and finally turned on the shower. She took off the oversized T-shirt. Her naked golden body cast strange gleams and shadows amid the half-light of her small apartment bathroom, on this weekday morning drenched with a petulant small rain. She stepped into the shower with that agile fluency of motion peculiar to dancers and those in threatening surroundings.
As she showered, she thought of something that she had read, some scrap of fact culled from who-knows-where. The fact that all apples had poison at their cores. In the seeds. Cyanide, in small amounts. She registered this fact unblinkingly, without attaching to it an undue amount of meaning.
She toweled herself dry as though she were searching herself for concealed weapons, which, in a sense, was exactly what she was doing.
She never let go of her golden apple, even while she was brushing her thick, luminescent hair. The constant contact was something that she had long since learned, through negative reinforcement, never, never, never to break. She had learned that therein lay the true death, not the threatened fictional death presented to her night after night in her dreams that were like movies. She had learned it in her body and her bones, and to a lesser extent in her mind.
She tried not to think too much about the repercussions of being without her apple, even for a moment. She didn’t want to remember too much.
She slithered into her working clothes: a golden skin-tight tank top, a golden pair of equally tight biker shorts, and a rather incongruous but nevertheless very fetching pair of glittering golden boots to top off the ensemble. The tint of her clothing matched to perfection the uniform tint of her skin, her hair, her entire body. Even her eyes were part and parcel of that uncannily even shade of sparkling rich maize. She had other outfits to wear - for all of the apple’s power, it either couldn’t or wouldn’t alter the color of her clothing to conform to its overall pattern of chromatic reality - but this was her preferred outfit for her busy days of work and play.
She stood and stared out the window into the morning drizzle, apparently lost in thought. An independent observer, had one been present, would have overheard a rather one-sided conversation ensue.
“Yeah. I think so, too.
“I don’t like that dream. Why?
“If you say so.
“I know that he’s attracted to me, in his own weird sweet big lunkhead way. What, do ya think I’m stupid? I’d have to be blind to, like, miss that one. The question is: whatta we wanna do with this weakness of his? We can use that. We have used that. We’ve done it before and we can do it again.
“I’ve done it before. Right.
“I’d better get going. I’m going to be late. Doctor Dejection is expecting me, and you know what a, like, pain in the butt public transportation can be, especially at this hour. I gotta go.
“Who am I? That’s easy. I’m…
“I’m…
She stood and watched the rain for a long interval. Her apple nestled in her hand beside her as though it were alive, and hungry. Insatiably hungry. For food that could not be seen by human eyes.
“That’s right. I’m Discordia.”
She turned abruptly and left her apartment. The soft closure of her front door nevertheless managed to echo for several minutes behind her in the emptiness of her living room. Nothing heard it but the rain.