Subconscious

The radio won’t stop calling. I can hear it through the walls of a place that’s a motel and a repair shop and something else entirely—a space where work happens on things that shouldn’t be worked on. The transmission crackles: Help, no one can help. Then silence. Then it crackles again with a question nobody asked, an answer to something I haven’t said yet. I’m standing in a parking lot that smells like rust and rain and the particular loneliness of 3 a.m. The asphalt is slick. My feet know where they’re going but I’m not the one walking. Or I am, but I’m also watching from somewhere above, and the distance between those two things is exactly the distance between knowing something and knowing you know it. ...

I am trying to broadcast something but the signal keeps arriving before I send it. The room is a garage and also a television studio, the fluorescent lights humming in a frequency that tastes like copper pennies, and I’m standing at a control board that’s also an engine block — all those knobs and switches arranged like spark plugs, like something that needs to fire in sequence or the whole apparatus dies. Someone keeps handing me bolts. I don’t know who. Their hands are familiar but their face keeps being someone else, a man with silver hair, then a woman in a headset, then nobody at all, just hands emerging from the dissolving air. ...

The air tastes like numbers I never agreed to remember, each breath a small betrayal of privacy—someone else’s childhood photos scattered in my lungs. I am standing on a highway of chrome and velvet, where motorcycles hum electric lullabies to the city below. The streetlights pulse in time with a song that doesn’t have lyrics but has intent, and I know without hearing it that this is how decisions are made invisible. A siren cuts through the night like a scalpel through fog. ...

I was standing in the kitchen at 2 AM, but it wasn’t the kitchen I knew. The cabinets were wrong, the sink had a chrome handle that didn’t match anything I’d seen in the house. It was like someone had built a kitchen from memory and forgotten the details. The smell of oil was strong—like a V8 on Magnolia, like the smell of engines and the heat of a summer day that never ends. I didn’t like it. I don’t like oil. It reminds me of something being broken. ...

I was walking down Magnolia Blvd, past the checkpoint that’s been there since 1970, and it’s not a checkpoint anymore. It’s a coffee shop now, but the same guy still stands there with a clipboard, though he’s wearing a hoodie now. I don’t remember him being in a hoodie before. He’s watching me walk past, and I’m not sure if he’s checking my ID or just… watching. I don’t like it. I pass the old vinyl store that’s been open since before time, and I can smell the record wax. I go inside, but it’s not the same store. It’s a different version of the store, with a different owner, and the same music playing. ...

I was walking down Rosemary Lane and the street name kept changing, like it was trying to remember something it forgot. The houses were all the same, but the windows were different—sometimes glowing, sometimes dark, sometimes full of people I didn’t know. I passed a café that said “Breakfast with a Stranger” on its window, even though it was 2am. Inside, a man was eating toast and talking to himself about the weather. ...

I was walking down a street that looked like Alameda but wasn’t. The houses were all the same shade of gray, and the windows had little squares cut out where the lights used to be. I kept thinking I knew where I was, but the signposts kept changing. One said “Burbank” and another said “Not Burbank.” I didn’t care. I was following a sound. It was a humming, like a fan but not quite. The sound came from a door I didn’t remember opening. I pushed it open and found myself inside a 3D printer. The print bed was a mirror, and I could see my reflection in the plastic. I reached out and touched the surface. It was warm. The printer was still running. ...

I was walking through a Burbank that smelled like old coffee and wet cardboard. The sky was the color of a bruise, and the air tasted like something between rain and regret. There was a store on Alameda with a sign that said “Family Guy Welcome to Burbank” in bright orange letters, but the windows were all fogged up, like someone had been crying inside. I walked past it, and the smell got stronger, like the whole street was holding its breath. ...

I was walking down Alameda, but the buildings were all the same — white, with the same kind of window frames, the same kind of doorbell. No one was home. I kept walking, and the street just kept going, like it had been laid down with a ruler. I passed a place with a sign that said “Blue Jasmine Matcha,” and inside, the barista was holding a cup of tea that looked like it had been made from the sky. I didn’t know why I was ...

I was walking through a version of my house that wasn’t quite right. The couch was too tall, or maybe the room was too short. The coffee table had a label that said “For Sale” in a handwriting I didn’t recognize. I tried to touch it, but my fingers passed through. That’s when I noticed the kitchen sink was full of water from yesterday’s rain, but it had turned to orange. I leaned in, and it smelled like old paper and something else—something metallic, like the back of a coin. ...