Someone Else’s Dream

Chapter 5
The Department of Desire & Expectations Management

Chapter Description: Mia is spirited through the corridors of power and becomes entangled in the dreams of another.

From the top of the newly formed stone steps, Mia and Desideria descended. The sea before them had ossified into a dark, dull stone as far as the eye could see. Mia was wracked with trepidation, naturally, but her curiosity urged her onward. Desi’s beauty and charm struck her as otherworldly, like nothing she had ever seen before, with powers beyond anything she could have imagined. When the pair reached the seafloor, the stony waves before them parted in meandering motions that revealed a blank space the same colour as the pitch-black sky above.

Oddly, it was shaped like a door.

Mia hesitated but Desi looked down at her and smiled, telling her it “doesn’t hurt” and encouraging her warmly. Fear dissipated as intrigue took over. On the other side, a scene quite unlike the one the two had left greeted Mia.

It was an office building, like a stereotypical office from American television or a film from the Nineties, replete with rows of desk cubicles and frosted glass partitions covering all the walls around them. Mia had not imagined some supernatural governing body of spirits and demons (or whatever else Desi could be called) would be working out of a place like this. Before she could process any more, Desi followed on behind. When she appeared, she was no longer dressed in her powder blue cocktail dress or gleaming pearl necklace. Now, by the flickering lights of this unadorned office, she cut a less glamorous figure altogether: her auburn hair had lost its shine and volume, her cocktail dress was turned into a pastel blue blouse fronted by a loose bow, and the trousers she was now wearing matched the same dull grey aesthetic of the room in which they stood.

“You look… different…” Mia was lost for words. The best she could summon up was “different”.

“I know I said humans are cute, but don’t get cute with me. The dress code wasn’t my idea.” Desi walked as she spoke, taking strides towards the centre of the office where a clearing – devoid of desks, partitions or water coolers – lay. Standing in the middle of the room, Desi faced the wall behind Mia as the girl approached her.

“Whose idea was i-…”

“His,” Desi interrupted. Her finger pointed squarely at the one solid wall that surrounded them.

Upon said wall, a portrait hung that stretched from floor to ceiling and spanned the width of a workstation. It was a painting of a man from the shoulders up in a light jacket and collarless shirt, a thick shaggy beard that covered his neck, and jet-black hair slicked back behind his ears. Behind him, the cosmos flickered with pulses of light in every imaginable colour and even some Mia found difficult to describe. The man stared off into the distance, yearning in his eyes and a neutral stoicism across his lips.

“Who is that?”

“That, my sweet Mia, is the head of our department. Fabian.” Desideria spat his name out like a bad taste. “We can discuss him later. First, I promised you a tour!”

Before Mia could step a foot any further into this strange nightmare, she paused and turned to Desideria.

“Where is everyone? Won’t we be caught?”

“They will all be preoccupied with their cases – their Sophies and Fleurs, if you will – and so you needn’t worry. Nobody works in the office at this time of night. Now, come on!”

Through the frosted double doors at the far end of the room, Mia and Desi walked into a labyrinthine set of corridors all coloured the same shades of greyish beige as the cubicles in the main room. As they strolled along, Desi stopped at this door or that door to explain the goings-on inside. Most remained locked, according to Desi, because of the “time of night”. How exactly anyone could tell the time in a building outside all mortal existence with no clocks was a mystery to Mia that she did not intend to ponder for long.

“The Fulfilment Centre: this is where we measure human fulfilment to make sure we’re hitting our targets. It’s all targets and performance indicators now, you know?”

“And here we have the Consequences Calculator: one of Fabian’s so-called innovations and a room I try to avoid if at all possible.”

“Now this splendid little place is the Finance Office. Do not, whatever you do, get on their bad side…”

“And this i-…” Suddenly, Desi stopped dead in her tracks when she looked over her shoulder. Mia was no longer following dutifully behind but was staring face-to-face at the limestone bust of a man with his eyes covered by a cloth wrapped around his head. Upon that carved cloth was an infinity symbol broken in half down the middle. Desideria winced as she walked back a few paces and turned to stand beside Mia.

The inscription in the limestone beneath the man’s chest read:

PROXIMUS

???? – 1991 CE

“Who was he?” Mia asked innocently. Desi said nothing but began walking with a quickened pace back to the room where they had entered. Mia chased after, asking her alternately to slow down and answer her question. When she finally caught up with Desideria, she was sitting in a cramped office with the glass door swung wide open.

“His name was Proximus. He was… he was one of us.” Desideria’s voice suggested only pain in the story she was about to tell – and yet tell it she would.

“If he was a spirit, how could he have died in 1991?” Mia’s question barely touched Desi’s ears and she carried on as if her words had been greeted with silence rather than questions.

“He was one of the old guard, like me. Back then, people still tried talking back to Fabian and filing complaints. For all the good it did”, she scoffed. “One day, he had the notion that he was going to flout Fabian’s rules and grant a radical desire – the sort of desire that would have driven emperors and prophets mad once upon a time. Proximus had a case – a woman – who wanted more than anything to live forever. I can’t even be sure that he really cared about her so much as he cared about insulting Fabian. So, he did it: he made this woman immortal.”

Mia’s eyes could not have gotten much wider, nor her mouth much more agape.

“Proximus didn’t account for reality. Where the desire is incongruous with reality, it eventually becomes apparent and gets flagged to the head of department. When Fabian found out... it was awful. He thought it would be ironic to strip Proximus of his mortality and send him to your world, to live a life he never desired.” Desi paused to compose herself. “He lived a whole human life and then, one day, simply died.”

When Desideria looked up from her hands, she wasn’t quite crying. Spirits were not the sort to start blubbering, after all, but there was a palpable melancholy in her eyes. Mia saw it and gulped, as if more frightened of having to comfort this supernatural being than all the other madness of this oneiric adventure put together.

“This is why I need you, Mia. You and I can help one another and get everything we want.”

“What do I want?” she replied curtly and with a touch more indignation than she had expected.

“No more worries, no more sharing houses or flats, no more ringless finger, and certainly no more university. You and Harry can take off in a yacht into the sunset and never have to think about home again. Millions in the bank, perhaps even billions, and perhaps a business or some sort of fame to top it all off. It can be yours, Mia.” Desi’s eyes sharpened and the anxiety in her voice dissipated as it took a sharper tone. No longer the carrier of a great pain, Desi was now the very model of a saleswoman and this was her greatest pitch. “Just help me to change reality.”

* * *

The next morning, Mia awoke with her mission at the front of her mind. Nothing was going to get in the way of her millions or her engagement to Harry. If she had to pretend that Fleur was just an overgrown infant then, as much as Mia wanted to gag a little, she would play the part.

Pulling a baggy t-shirt over her head and putting her soft leather sandals on, Mia headed downstairs to greet the proud mother-and-baby duo she once considered her closest friends. A lot could happen in a night, it seemed.

Thankfully for Mia and Desi, the curtains were still drawn and nobody could get a peek into the living room to witness the newest incongruity with reality. In the centre of the living room was a playpen that took up the entire floorspace between the sofa and the television and, in the middle of the playpen, Fleur splayed out with her nappy-clad bum in the air. Mia saw her from behind, but as soon as she stepped across the threshold, Fleur flopped over onto her bum and lazily chucked down the teddy bear she was previously bouncing. Scooting around, Mia got a full look at her former housemate. She looked up at Mia but did not regard her: her mind was not quite capable enough for that anymore. Fleur’s hair was up in high pigtails and a bright green dummy was planted between her lips, bobbing up and down as she sucked on it vigorously. She seemed almost excited to see Mia, though the latter presumed for no more personal reason than she was a new, vaguely mummy-shaped figure stepping into her line of sight.

“Hello, err, Fleur. How are you this lovely morning?” she tried in her best sing-song voice.

Fleur spat her dummy out and gurgled back, shuffling on her bum towards the edge of the playpen and reaching a grasping hand upwards. Mia came forward and reached her hand out to gently stroke Fleur’s, who then bounced back onto her behind and gurgled loudly with her arms flapping. The noise clearly caught the attention of Mia’s other housemate, who floated out of the kitchen with a pastel blue apron on and her hair in curlers.

“Oh, good morning, sleepyhead!” Sophie called out. “I made pancakes!”