The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

Chapter 1

It was dark as night in Malcolm’s bedroom when a half-heard sound startled him from sleep. The sound hung in Malcolm’s head, existing partly in the dream and partly in the real world without committing to either. He looked at the window. Not a hint of morning light peeked from around the edges of the shade. It was too early to get up, way too early, which could only mean that he was being visited. The blue digits of his alarm clock strobed brightly, pulsated as his eyes tried to adjust. Transitions from dream to waking were a gray area of experience, leaving a confusion of what was true and what wasn’t. He tried to remember what had roused him from sleep and his nightmares, but that took more energy than he had. The thought faded as fast as his memory of his dreams.
The uncertainty of perception confused Malcolm, the sensation of being hopelessly surrounded by darkness and of being in a room which pervaded with the sudden and jarring silence that comes only to someone who has woken from a nightmare just before death, but is not yet ready to open his eyes and find out if he really was just dreaming. In his dream, whatever it was he had been fighting was pouncing on him, but he usually slept through the scene of his own death.
His first coherent thought of the day was tinged with paranoia. What caused him to wake? There was a sound, it came back to him. Or maybe he’d felt the telepathic perception of movement in the room, but now that he was more awake, he was sure it was definitely something external to the dream itself. His eyes were still heavy, groggy, desiring to remain closed, forcing him back under to delta wave, rapid eye movement and more nightmares.
The next time he woke up, the covers had tangled around him. He could feel the sheet wrapped around his leg, and snaking up his chest into his clenched hand. He was acting out his dreams again, another fitful surrender to the subconscious. He thought it was just moments since he’d last found wakefulness, but couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t move.
He wondered if he was waking in a dream within a dream, and scanned the room for clues. He couldn’t tell. Had he left his shirt draped like that over his dresser, or was that a shrouded figure?
He forced his eyes open. This time the sun must have been just rising above the horizon, a small amount of blue light slipped in around the shade. Even this dim light was painful, unexpected, lambent.
He took in what information he could without moving. There was no need to alert anything that shouldn’t be in the room if he could avoid it. It was unnatural for him to wake up like this, he knew something wasn’t right. He couldn’t move no matter how hard he tried. He pushed hard, his heart started beating faster under the strain of his exertions, and hearing the rapid dull thud in his head, he got nervous, which made it beat even faster.
Then a half-heard sound came from across the room, like the sound of his cat, its claws looking for a blood fix. It couldn’t have been the cat. The cat never left the front room, and had died years ago. Malcolm blinked and grunted. Had he woken up before today? Or were those in dreams?
The sound came again, just at the edge of perception. It had woken him before, too. It was real. His confusion told him to be wary, but something kept him from knowing quite why.
Early morning noises always made him suspicious. Human intruders don’t come into apartments like Malcolm’s. It had to be something far worse. The urge to sleep was much greater than if he’d woken up early and was still drowsy, it was unnatural, and impossible to resist. It silently eased any fear he had, comforted him, lulled him into forgetting why he was suddenly awake. His joints were stiff, his motor responses resisted his desire to turn, to find a position that wouldn’t knot his muscles by the time the alarm goes off, every thought fell to sleep.
The sensation worked against him, he tried to push his arm off his chest but it exhausted every effort of his whole body, and he couldn’t even be sure if it had moved at all. The notion that this was just a hypnagogic delusion occurred to him, but he dismissed the thought even before it completed itself.
He just wanted to sleep, an artificial instinct told him all was safe. Just go to sleep. Just go to sleep. Over and over, they lulled him, gained strength of effect in the incantation. Just go back to sleep.
He knew then that something was wrong, he fought to stay awake, despite the overwhelming desire to return to the false safety of night, trying to hear what had woken him. The room remained silent, pushed him back over the edge to fall back to sleep.
He was just out of a sleep cycle enough to be relieved that he didn’t slip back into his dream.
Then he heard more sounds, and a half-felt tug came at the blankets near his feet, then a movement on his chest, the sensation of something with no weight pouncing. He awoke again, this time suddenly fully aware, and eye to eye with a Mara. Malcolm could only barely make out its form in the low light. The glow of its eyes faintly illuminated Malcolm’s face. The illumination was like a candle, traveling only those few inches before being lost in the darkness.
Malcolm shuddered in surprise, his body convulsed, every muscle fired once in unison trying to break free of the Mara’s hold, and the Mara uttered a singularly unimpressive squeak of surprise. Prey never moved that much when under its control. The prey never moved at all. The little creature closed in anyway, feeling confidence in its powers.
Another warning sign it ignored: Malcolm continued to stare directly into its eyes.
The Mara went on with its feeding, sensing that the prey had already moved into the first stage of fear: awareness. It wrapped its tiny hand around Malcolm’s throat, ready to feed.
Malcolm was alert now, and saw through the deception, saw it for what it was. Malcolm’s perception was this: a small, translucent green creature, knee high at best, large bright yellow insect-like eyes, a large round head supported on a tiny body, strangling him softly with delicate hands more befitting something out of a cartoon than a predator. What the Mara thought Malcolm saw was this: desiccated flesh stretched taught over a huge frame, claws long enough to go all the way through, tattered black skin stretched over bone wings, spiky gray hair covering its body. Or maybe just eyes, large and glowing red, a body unreliably outlined by dark perched above the prey. Or maybe two figures in the room, lights outside the window, the abduction psychodrama.
The Mara realized then that something wasn’t happening that it was expecting, the energy rush of feeding wasn’t coming. The thought that something was wrong broke through its primal thought process a very brief moment before it was too late. Malcolm knitted his brow, and reached up. Now it was the Mara panicking, now it was the Mara being strangled. Now it was the Mara that was screaming and tumbling through the air, striking the wall, falling to the ground, and now it was Malcolm feeling only drowsy and angered, and knowing he wouldn’t get back to sleep.
The Mara ran through its instinctual devices, wondering what it had done wrong, but then it saw its prey rise and look directly at it. It wasn’t the time for learning processes. It was the time for survival. It looked for a way out of the situation, but no ideas were forthcoming. The thought occurred to it to flee, but as this thought flashed through consciousness like an uncertain leap into fog, it found Malcolm standing overhead, impassible. The cornered Mara geared up the fiercest responses it could muster.
Malcolm recoiled his leg and kicked the Mara, his foot striking with a satisfying thud that felt as if this creature had a measurable mass. This always troubled Malcolm, how they had no weight but still could be felt and handled, were just as deadly as anything anyone else could see. The physics of the phenomena was something Malcolm had only just begun to study.
The Mara doubled over and moaned. The first kick hadn’t satisfied Malcolm’s frustration, and so he kicked again, and again for good measure. He hesitated a moment as the creature, still only half-seen by morning light, tried to recover.
As he recoiled his leg for another strike, Malcolm decided he could not take out enough frustration on the little Mara to salve himself, and so he picked it up again by the throat and carried it, kicking and protesting like a petulant child, its little hands prying at Malcolm’s grip. Malcolm walked it determinedly down the hall, turning left into the kitchen, his eyes landing on the coffee maker on his counter.
The little glass pot waited to fulfill its purpose in life, and it gave Malcolm a new thought on this early morning, a thought of his curse, a thought of his ability, his own personal stigmata, and how it just cost him another morning’s sleep. And a thought of coffee. How much of a relief it would be to wake up to a simple cup of coffee without something like this happening. It didn’t seem like it would be too much to ask.
Malcolm paused here, holding the Mara, flipped the switch on the coffee maker. The light came on reassuringly. He waited for a promising gurgle, and then continued to his back door.
As Malcolm opened the door, the Mara screamed loudly, a sharp and piercing cry that cut especially deeply in the auditory nerve this early in the morning. It was like a demonic dog whistle, and Malcolm was the only one who could hear it. This made him want to kill it even more. He dropped it to the stoop, as nonchalantly as if he were putting out a cat. The Mara began to writhe, rolling on its back, kicking and turning, but it was too late. Its figure began to dissipate and disintegrate in the sunlight as it got to its feet. It ran for the open door, but it had already mostly disappeared, only its legs were running, then only its calves and feet, then only its left foot stepped on the threshold of his apartment before also disappearing into a vapor. Malcolm stepped away, back inside.
Such an attack had to be recorded in his journals. He opened a battered notebook, recorded, date, time, what happened, and his thoughts for later analysis, then moved on to his cereal.
The cereal he chose from a systematic filing order in his pantry was the same cereal he’d been eating every Tuesday since he was seven: Cap’n Crunch. He removed the milk from the refrigerator and a bowl from the cupboard. He opened the jug of milk and poured, but only a small trickle came out. Funny, he thought. There was a full gallon a couple days ago, and he definitely hadn’t used it all.
So now Malcolm was awake, and had almost consumed a light breakfast. He had to head out, breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and he wasn’t going to let a little mara keep him from it.

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It was evening where I was when they made themselves known. The sun was setting across the Arizona sky, and the clouds on the horizon were small, purple-blue and broken apart into sparse bunches against the orange-peach background of the mountains to the east. I was at the grill, cooking dinner for the rest of the shift at the fire house. It was my turn, and I didn’t mind doing it. The day had been quiet, not even a single call, and in six hours, we’d be going home from our shift.

“What is that?” Javier asked.

I turned around and saw it, a cloud that was much more regular in shape than the rest, it was something, I couldn’t tell what. Then it dawned on me that it was a spaceship, and not one of this world. I tried to come up with a verbal response, an expletive that was adequate, but my mind was blank. By the time I came up with one, it was much too late.

It looked like a cloud, dark blue, fairly round, but as the wind blew the clouds away, the ship remained, still. You could call it vaguely saucer-ish from the right view, but not like in the movies, not like that at all. You could tell this craft was real, you could see panel lines on its skin, irregularities and flaws, like ships which had just crossed the ocean in a storm, and they hadn’t caught up on painting over the corrosion.

“Hey come take a look at this,” he yelled into the firehouse. Some of the other members of the crew came out. They stood there for a silent minute before any of them even moved.

The silence was interrupted by sonic booms. We knew what those were, the Air Force had scrambled F-16’s from Luke. They went full throttle overhead, direct intercept path and the ship was just over the edge of Apache Junction. The thing itself was silent as a cloud, you couldn’t hear it, at least not as far away as we were. Sound carries a long way out here, we heard the F-16’s from Luke all over the place, from all directions; it bounced off the taller buildings in Phoenix back to us. There wasn’t anything in the desert to absorb sound either. We’d have heard something if it was making any amount of sound.

Some of the others had gone into the station to watch what was happening on the television.

“Rick, Javier get in here,” they called to us. “You can see it better.”

I never did finish cooking the hamburgers. They turned to solid bricks of carbon on the grill.

There were local reporters on TV, broadcasting from the tallest buildings in Phoenix, they had crews rushing out to get just below the alien ships to report from the scene, but this view was enough to put on the air for the moment. They were quickly switching to affiliates all over the country, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tampa. The ships seemed to be everywhere. They even had shots from Paris, Beunos Aires, Berlin, Tokyo. They weren’t all the same ship, it was a fleet, lots of different shapes and sizes. They were all hovering, doing nothing.

You forgot everything at times like these. Your life, your job, where you were, your name. It was just too far out of comprehension to grasp. I stood there just watching, not a thought passing through my head. You’d think you could come up with a thought of absolute wonder, but no, nothing. Years of training, of running into burning buildings, of dealing with life and death emergencies was just gone. What else could you do? A couple of the guys called their wives and kids, their girlfriends, but it was hard to get through, the switchboards were jammed. And when they did get through, there wasn’t much to say. “I know, can you believe it?” was about all they could get out. The world was never so silent as right then. The roads were empty and clear, you couldn’t hear any traffic noise. Most airliners had been turned around, ordered to the ground, so the skies were clear, except for those ships and the Air Force.

For the first half hour, things went just this way, and nobody could say anything. The news reporters did their job, which was to keep talking. They had nothing that they could say, other than the ships were there, which we could all observe for ourselves. The only new thing they could report was another confirmed ship outside another city. Boston, Madrid, Jakarta, New Delhi, Moscow.

We got bored watching it, so we turned the TV all the way up, left the windows open, and climbed up on the roof. The surface was still hot, even though the sun had long since reached its apex in the sky and crawled back down into evening. We brought up blankets, whatever we could find that would insulate us from the heat. We were so far out from the city that there was an unobstructed view for us all.

My thoughts had collected into something resembling coherence by then. I thought of being a kid, seeing Star Wars, and all the creatures. I wondered what they looked like. Were they bigger than us, smaller, did they have two arms and two legs? Of all things, I remembered an assignment when I was in fifth grade, when my teacher asked me to invent and describe an alien, but I couldn’t remember what I had written anymore, not now.

At one point, they mentioned that a special session of Congress was being called, the President was meeting with his advisers. The stations tried to tap into C-SPAN, but the feed got cut off. They said the government did it, but that was it, no other reason was given.

So far nothing indicated any hostile intent, but nobody was taking any chances. The F-16’s circled, everybody else waited. We were afraid, no doubt about it. We’d seen Independence Day, we’d seen all those movies. They just waited until things were quiet and we let our guard down and they open fired. In the movies we always won, and none of us thought that was really possible with something like this, not with what their technology must be like.
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Note: My apologies to Borges.

The guard approached my cell like it was the last thing he wanted to do. I had gained a Hannibal Lecter kind of rep, and while my past might have earned it, I wasn’t about to make a daring escape set to classical music, killing everybody on the way. I wasn’t going to ever leave this prison. I knew that much for a fact. I looked up at him to see what he wanted.
“Lawyer’s here,” he said.

He tossed in shackles, and I put them on before he opened the cell door. I don’t mind talking to lawyers. They provided company. We walked out of the death row block,  and eventually made it to a private room that could be locked. I sat in a metal chair, across from a lawyer and a pile of papers. Two guards stayed in the room with us. It was procedure.

“Hello, my name is Tom Meyers. I’ve been appointed to direct the appeals process of your case,” he said. He was young.

“No appeals,” I said.

“I’ve noticed a few technicalities of your case that we might be able to use to commute your execution.”

“It won’t stand up. I know.”

“But…” He was confused.

“I did it all. Not entirely like they said in the case, but it was close enough. I wouldn’t sweat the details.”

“You don’t want appeals?”

“Won’t change nothing. You’re the third one they sent. I’ll tell you the same story as the others, and then you’ll go back to your office, have a shot of that 20 year scotch you like so much, then probably another, and then you’ll try to forget me, but you won’t be able to.”

He looked at me funny, wondering how I knew. I smiled back at him to set him more at ease.

“I can’t drop it. The Office of the DA will need a full report,” he said. “Start at the beginning.”

“You’ll see,” I told him.

“There are neighborhoods that are dead ends. You know them. You probably lock the doors when you drive through, if you ever found a reason why you’d have to drive through them. You don’t want to break down there. You don’t want to get off at the Dunton exit on the freeway, that’s why the freeway goes clear past. If you saw my neighborhood in your windshield, you’d turn back. I don’t know what business outsiders have there anyway. And if you were born in a neighborhood like mine, you were dead before you even got started. It’s just a matter of time. You can talk about the crime, the poverty, the drugs, the pollution, they’re all parts of the same beast. The neighborhood is a predator, it’s always stalking you. All around you are its claws and fangs, its hot breath seeping into your lungs, and the sound of its heartbeat that lingers in the back of your mind. It gives you fear. We all live scared there, no matter how much we deny it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oral History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

By Bryan Lee Peterson

Polonius paced the dressing room space nervously, trying to pull his lines back up from memory. He’d been going like this for the hour since he’d arrived with Fortinbras, who lay asleep on a hard wooden bench.

“And keep these precepts in memory: Look after your…thy character. Give your …thy thoughts no tongue, and no unappropriate thought an act. Be familiar, but in no way vulgar. The friends you have, their adoption tried, Bring them into thy soul, and hold them like steel. Do not dull thy palm with the entertainment of every new hatched, un?edged comrade. Beware entrance to a quarrel; but, finding yourself there, bear it in mind that the opposed may be wary of thee,” Polonius said. He scratched his head and then started over. He’d never been this nervous before a performance in all his time in performance.

“I hardly remember these lines. How long has it been?

Fortinbras lifted his head only enough to directly address Polonius.

“Too long,” he said, and put his head back down. He had large bags under his eyes, they hadn’t let him sleep either.

“I’ve lost track of the last time we did this. When was the last time we were even together? I was in the camp for months, I know. Before that, there was a time where I never saw day or night, and I lost track of time. None of us knew what day it was. There were only days.”

He shook his head.

“I lost track as well. After a while I stopped wondering, it caused too much pain.”

“There are so many lines to recall. Why was I cast as Polonius, anyway? He just goes on and on. He’s a prattler, and I’m not a prattler by nature.”

“Sure you’re not,” Fortinbras said.

“Maybe a bit when I’m nervous.”

“Sure,” Fortinbras said with a sly nod, and a slight wink. “When you’re nervous.”

“But there’s so many lines to remember. It just feels so much like it was another age when we last did this. So much has happened to us.”

“Hm,” Fortinbras grunted in agreement. “Last time we had better accommodations.”

“We’ll never get back to that, will we? This performance can’t possibly change anything for us, right? I’d like to think that we could somehow make it out, but that doesn’t seem very likely.”

“To thine own self be true,” Fortinbras said.

“Is that the next line? I wish I had a book somewhere.” Read the rest of this entry »