(Tentatively Chapter One)

Link to Prelude

The riddle-answer always faded before he woke up.

Merwin? Wasssss Some morwin?
I'mmM erwin?
And wet your cell fall up?
With ats opposedly meanssssum things?

Merwin melted to sleep.

Merwin had always been a dreamer. But the time of believing that dreams could actually come true was long past, and his dreams had gone dormant. He hadn't learned his lesson the hard way, through some humiliating failure. They had faded away much like the sleeping kind of dreams do, leaving no trace in memory. They weren't just forgotten. He didn't have the slightest clue that he had even had dreams, usually. It was, most of the time, as if they had never existed. But they were there, somewhere in that thick head of his, shrouded in the fog of years and years of being mediocre. And like the sleeping kind of dreams, they had the ability to pop back into memory if they were triggered by some kind of reminder.

Nowadays, his dreams were mostly the sleeping kind, not dreams in the sense of the ambitions he had lost. And they were often unpleasant. Many of his nights were spent in a restless, half-awake dream state; an incommunicable realm of consciousness in which he projected his fears through automatically repeating patterns of body movement that - to him, while in that state - seemed to be either the answer to some cosmic riddle, or the cosmic riddle itself, searching for its own answer. But the riddle-answer always faded before he woke up, like walking into another room to get something and forgetting what it was you were going to get.

But tonight wasn't the body dreams. Tonight, Merwin was on a road, driving; or maybe riding. It would have been hard to tell the difference, even if there had been enough consciousness within the dream to care enough to try.

He'd been down this road many times before. It was always the same. It winds through a dark, dense, colorless forest. The night is cool, the fog drifts along just in front, keeping what's ahead just out of view. He sees as if he's in the driver's seat of a car, but not through a window. He also sees from above - somehow knowing the road is in the shape of a figure eight. The car is exquisitely devoid of detail. It could be anything - a Corvette, a Ford Pinto, a Tesla, a magic carpet - it doesn't matter. Because, there's really nobody there for it to matter to. There's a sense of something, some kind of center, but not a full-blown self.

And there's this sense of having been on this loop forever. There is no future, no past, no memory of anything but the road, and no vision of a future off the road. There is no awareness of his waking self.

There is just an endlessly repeating now.

There's a bend in the road, and as he finally gets around it, as he has already done an infinite number of times, he's back where he started.

Merwin woke up.

“Where is that? I know that road,” he mumbled, or maybe thought to himself. Things were never very clear at 3 AM.
He staggered to the bathroom and took a leak. The familiar sound was comforting, like his very own portable mini-waterfall. Then he found himself in the kitchen, peeking inside the fridge to see if there was anything cold to drink.

I hate when my mouth gets like this. Tomato juice, ick. Guess I'll just drink some water.

He sat down, his head buzzing with 2 AM wakefulness.

2? I thought it was 3.
2? 3? There wasn't much difference at this time. They were almost the same shape, and even more so with vision blurred from sleepiness, staring through the dark at a digital display that seems like the sun as it tries to pry its way through squinted eyes. And shapes and numbers also seemed so much less real at this time of night, as did time itself.

What is that dream? It's like the road I grew up on, but it doesn't go anywhere.

But it did sometimes, actually. It was always the same, but sometimes different. Always doesn't always mean always, does it? On occasion the fog would break, along with the figure 8, and the road would open up to green pastures on a sunny day, and a beautiful lake speckled with small islands where rich people lived out their lives. And he'd be with some dream girl, a ghostly female form that exuded warm love; house hunting, Sunday driving, drifting along in ignorant bliss.

What does it mean? Ha. Maybe the double rainbow guy knows.

The double rainbow guy had been an internet meme a while back. Merwin had been fascinated with the sheer emotion that poured from someone who had simply seen a rainbow. Well, two rainbows together, possibly three. I mean, it was just a... they were just rainbows; just light waves bending. But it was awesome - in the original sense of the word - to someone who was open to feeling awe.

But Merwin rarely felt emotions that strong, even when the fog lifted on that figure 9 in his dream.

Why would he know? How could anyone know? He could hear the crickets chirping outside on this toss-and-turn-hot summer night. And part of him knew why the double rainbow guy would know, but he didn't know he knew. Well, the he that he thought he was didn't know he knew, anyway.

It's just a random piece of memory from my childhood that comes out in my dreams sometimes, isn't it? Why does everything have to have a meaning? Shut up and go back to sleep. Have to get up at 8... or 9?” He checked the alarm on his device. Right, 8. OK, time to get back on the road again, haha.

He turned off the lights and practiced ninja walking back to his bedroom, Willie Nelson looping around in his head. And after falling back to sleep without much struggle, he was on the road again, and the road opened up and allowed him a few hours of bliss in the warm sunshine. But this time, the person in the passenger's seat wasn't a mysterious dream woman, but a fatherly, older gentleman with misty grey hair and a smile that could wash away evil like a flood of joyous tears. He turned to Merwin, and spoke through his triumphantly gentle smile.

"I tell you what boy! It's a-comin'. Be ready and on your lookout, soldier! Exit 9 is only 1 mile after 8. Don't miss it! We canNOT turn around. Exit 10 is thee last exit, but there aren't any on-ramps if we get off there. Only way is to loop alllll the way back to exit 2 again, which I'm honestly gettin' a bit tired of t' tell you the truth. On, off, on, off, on, off. It gets a bit monotonous after a while, don't it? We need us some Va-Rye-A-Tee! And this is NOT an order, son! Ya hear me? This is your BIRTHright! I am your Captain, but YOU are the Commander. Comprende Amigo?"

"OK, Cap'n! I'm on it!" Merwin's dream-self replied.

He woke up to the sound of his iPhone alarm. Or, maybe it was an Android. It might not have even been a phone at all, or a brand you've never heard of, because this all happened back in the days leading up to The Convergence, at a time when time was beginning to lose its meaning, as past, present, and future were being compressed at an exponential rate into a single, undifferentiated point.

It was a time when the species we once were was just beginning to realize what might lie beyond that point, which it imagined to be in the future, not realizing it had already been in the midst of it for a long, long time.

So feel free, my inter-dimensional quantum-flesh kin, to disambiguate the details in any way you deem fit, to project onto the story the world as you reimagine it, before all of the worlds collapsed into one, and the only future was a choice between so many pasts. Visualize it as you think it might exist when you exit back into one of these infinite timelines that all meet here, shining out from and into The Convergence, the alpha and omega point of any possible universe.

Do that. Humor yourself for a bit, and pretend you haven't been there before. Get lost for a while in the adventures of Merwin, or Jack Valtrades, or whoever you want to play. Reimagine the worlds when space and where time seemed to exist, and you thought you had important things to do, places to be, and people to impress.

“Fuck!!! It's fucking 9!!! I'm late... god-fucking-dammit!!!”

Oh, by the way, when you check your alarm at night, make sure it's your alarm and not your calendar.

Sometimes, when you're tired, it can be hard to tell the difference.

*Thanks for reading this chapter from my work-in-progress, Merwin In The Multiverse. I'm writing this novel seemingly at random, and posting them on Steemit before trying to piece them together into a cohesive story on the website, tentatively known as [The Self-Published Self-Publisher's Guide To Self-Publishing].

If you liked this, check out more chapters and other musings at my Steemit blog @kendewitt.

If you're a fellow writer and would like to be part of this dream, please let me know in the comments. I'm looking for other writers who like the idea of a parallel novel, and can take a story that spans the multiverse in some of the different directions it could possibly go.