The hell within

   Ariana had been eating exactly the same, nothing different. She may have been trying a new trail mix, a different cereal and had a little more water in her diet but nothing else was different. Her doctor assured her it wasn’t a nutritional thing. Nevertheless, something had triggered nightmares in her sleep. Every single night she would have a different one and it was not getting better. She had been spending many nights with no sleep and that had started to affect her work.

 She was a model. Her agent would book her for several runways gigs in department stores or for any kind of brand. She would also model for artistic photographers and for several advertisement campaigns involving anything from sunglasses to miniskirts. Ariana had made a name for herself in the fashion world but that was beginning to change, as the nightmares got worse.

 When she had them, she would normally sleep for too long. One would think fear would awaken her but that didn’t happen. She just stayed there, sweating and moaning in physical pain. Then, when she finally woke up, she would normally be late for some appointment so they would hire another girl. The situation got so much worse; she lost half of her jobs in a month. Her agent, a woman called Susan, tried everything. They went to a doctor, a herbalist, a nutritionist, to the gynecologist and even to one of those crooks than cleanses people’s auras.

 Nothing worked. So they finally tried with a psychiatrist. Ariana was not very enthusiastic about it but went with Susan. She’d rather go there that keep losing work and money. The doctor asked her several questions about her family and her personal life but also about the dreams themselves. It was funny, but Ariana couldn’t really remember anything about them. She only recalled parts, feeling, maybe some images but that was it. The doctor said this was normal and asked her if she would accept to do an experiment with him. She agreed.

 The psychologist had two different plans. The first one, the easiest one, was for her to stay in a hospital, under care, so they could monitor their sleep. The doctor and his assistant would check on her sleep rhythm and maybe that way they could guess what was wrong with her. She thought it was a good idea and shook the doctor’s hand, hopeful he would find whatever was causing all of this.

 As the days went by, waiting for the experiment to be done, Ariana kept working. She had mostly photo-shoots, which were never scheduled too early and were kind of relaxing to her. The only thing was that the makeup girl had to put a second layer of everything to make her look presentable. She would hope it wouldn’t be obvious on the pictures but did her job anyway, faking smiles and poses. The truth was she didn’t want to do anything anymore. She felt worried and sick but also exhausted and in need of real calm sleep.

 The following weekend she went into the hospital and greeted Doctor Pike. He and his assistant would stay in one room as she slept in the one next door. They would monitor her with electrodes on her head and the rest of her body and also with video cameras on the bedroom. Ariana was very tired but even so it took her a while to fall asleep. Something in her brain told her it wasn’t a good idea to submit herself to the horrors of the nightmares, once again. But she didn’t want a life like that anymore. She wanted to sleep like a normal person. So, after a few hours, she finally closed her eyes and got to sleep.

 The doctor watched closely as she fell asleep and once she was indeed sleeping, they started to detect something odd. There was a part of her brain that was very active. To be precise, it had activated when she had fallen asleep. And it was sending messages all over the body. The nightmare began as Ariana began moving a lot on the bed. She would moan and pant and sweat profusely. Her brain waves were off the charts at some point but then would calm and come up again after a few minutes. Doctor Pike thought it was amazing that her body was not awaking her. Her body had no answer to the pain the nightmare was causing.

 They watched Ariana for hours until, finally, she woke up. They told her they had wanted to wake her up but they decided that wouldn’t have been a very good idea. Ariana was not looking good at all: her skin was kind of green, her lips had lost all color and she seemed dizzy, not quite there. They decided to give her a nice breakfast for her to recuperate some strength and then they send her home to relax. In her home, Susan made her some soup and left her alone to be more at ease.

 Ariana, of course did not sleep. She decided to distract herself with her computer or with magazines but she realized she couldn’t really read or pay attention to anything. Her body was numb, exhausted and deprived of energy. She had some soup and loved it, as it gave her some warmth. It felt just right, as she wanted to feel when sleeping. She wanted to go back to sleep, her body craving for it but she fought against it. She didn’t want the dreams to come back to her; she didn’t want to die from this. What if she fell asleep and it drained all of her energy? She would become a zombie, a shadow of what Ariana had once been.

 She fought the need to sleep bravely but ultimately, she passed out on the floor. She hit her head hard against the hardwood floor and was found by Susan that night, as she came to check on her. Ariana was rushed to the hospital. Doctor Pike came by too and asked the doctors treating her to tell him about her state. They told him they had too realized something was wrong with her brain. The blow to her head had rendered it erratic so they decided to induce her into coma. The doctor told them about her nightmare problems but they assured him nothing was going on with her besides the brain trauma. She was not dreaming, only in deep sleep.

 Doctor Pike realized this was true when he visited her with Susan, who told her that Ariana’s parents lived in another country and were trying to get there fast but plane tickets where difficult to find. As the doctors had said, Ariana was calm. She wasn’t moving nor sweating. She was sleeping like any normal person would. The doctor then told them that they had detected a brain tumor growing slowly. Apparently, it had begun affecting many parts of the brain that are not normally active. So now they understood the reason for the nightmares.

 Doctor Pike recalled the time she had told him about the feelings she remembered: changes in temperature, the sensation of being watched, and the presence of at least another human or creature. Was that all a product of the tumor? To doctor Pike, it was all a great mystery because he had never seen anything like it. The images she recalled were also confusing. She had assured him something like the devil, the typical depiction, had been lurking around her dreams. Also some other deformed being and a strange weather, where cold and hot coexisted.

 Ariana was in a coma for a whole month. They extracted the brain tumor with great care and when her parents finally arrived, she woke up. They were all there: her family, her doctors, Pike and Susan. But it wasn’t the happy moment they were expecting. The first thing Ariana did when waking up was yelling and crying profusely. Some nurses tried to calm her down but she wouldn’t. She would push them, jumping off the bed and crying, asking for them to step away. Everyone was very scared. Her parents tried to lure her towards them but she didn’t seem to recognize them.

 Ariana ran out of her room, up and down corridors. Some male nurses tried to catch her but she would bite and kick very hard. They chased her all over until they reached the top floor. She ran up some stairs and got out to the terrace of the building. As the hospital was in the middle of the city, they had built a nice garden for the patients there. It was doctor Pike who caught up with her first and he decided to talk to her from a distance. She looked mad, worried and in state of shock. The doctor told her to tell him what was happening.

-       I saw them! They’re all over. They want to kill us.

-       Who wants to kill us, Ariana?

-       The demons. They are planning to kill us all!

 The doctor walked towards her but she moved back, towards the railing. Then, all other arrived, ready to catch her. No one ever understood why the railing had no protective net. Ariana just climb it and jumped, in front of her parents and everyone who had followed her there. She had jumped from the top of a twelve-story building.

 In her funeral, doctor Pike didn’t talk to anyone else. He was troubled. By what Ariana had said before dying and by the doctor’s final analysis of her brain: a region that normally is not active in humans was active in her brain. They told Pike this region was adjacent to the region responsible of communications. Pike was in deeper inner turmoil than ever before in all his years as a psychiatrist.

Out of focus

   Gong was simply the best in her dancing class. She did every routine perfectly, able to combine different kinds of disciplines and styles with modern music. She thought classical music was out of the game now and that dance needed something else to make it more interesting. She was also a gymnast, which made her even better to the eyes of her teacher and more annoying to the eyes of every single one of her classmates. They all knew she actually thought she was a better person only because of her achievements and knowledge and they didn’t try to make her feel welcome.

 The girl didn’t care. She was only fourteen but knew very well how to treat people and how to behave by herself. She had to think she was the best to be the best every single time, in every competition and every class. It got very tiring and pretending something that she wasn’t sure was true was very exhausting. She did not do it in daily life, preferring to relate more to her sister and her parents. But only her father because her mother was all too obsessed with her practicing and winning and it had gotten to be unbearable to be in the same room with her, always criticizing and thinking she was being encouraging but wasn’t.

 Her father wanted all that for her too, but he didn’t as much. He always reminded Gong to have fun and never forget that dance and sports were not about destroying oneself on a mat but about making the art bigger and better. She listened to this and though of it always before any of her presentations. To be honest, the days of fear had passed because she had learned not to care about anyone but her, especially when performing. She just put the world out of focus and did what she had to do.

 Gong loved to use rock songs for her performances. Hip-hop was the kind of music everyone used to seem different and classical with any change was too dull for her. She had won a tournament by performing, all five of her events, with songs by Metallica. It was her who designed every single movement, not needing or asking for any kind of help. She used to have a trainer but she left him as soon as she realized he only pressured her to be the one to gain all the recognition.

 She got rid of him and decided to be dedicated and train everyday at least an hour by herself. Her parents were very supportive and it was all unnoticeable for the media or the judges of the next big event after that. She was praised so much; no one even realized she had no trainer but only her loving parents and her sister. After that particular time, she was asked to be photograph for many famous magazines because she had won a slot on the Olympics, which were going to be celebrated in Rio de Janeiro.

 Practice was intensified. She practiced every morning, from sunrise to lunch. She only had a slight breakfast on a very short break and then kept on going. Her diet had not been consulted with a doctor but her parents read all about them to make every meal appropriate for her. It was dreadful, she knew, especially for them because they had decided to do the diets as well and that proved to be a tough decision as her meals were not really full of flavors and variety.

 It was funny at first when her dad was caught by her mother, eating a cheeseburger in the car. Gong didn’t blame him and told them that she could keep doing it all by herself but they refused and her father apologized to her, although she didn’t really understand why. She just kept focused on her practice and on designing the best possible routines for every single event she was going to be performing in on the Olympic arena.

 The girls was exceedingly happy when her parents came in one morning to her room, after practice, and told her they had bought the tickets and all the hotel arrangements had already being settled. She was going to be staying with the rest of the athletes but they would be close by to check on her and join her on every event. According to the rules, they couldn’t have meals with her on the days she was to be busy but they could go out and get to know the city on the days nothing was happening.

 But Gong noticed something she didn’t like and which made her loose her focus from practicing. Her little sister Zhang, had begun to shut her out. It was very often that she could talk to her and play but now, when she tried, Gong was refused entrance to her room and on dinner Zhang wouldn’t even look at her, preferring to eat fast or at least fake she ate and leave early for her room. Zhang was eleven and had always been Gong’s best friend. She had been very supportive when some of the girls in the dance school or in the gymnastics practice were mean to her but now she was absent.

 And when the date of the trip to Brazil came nearer, she realized the whole time there she was going to think of her sister, trying to see her up there in the seats with her parents. And she didn’t now if she could stand that, not being in right terms with the one person that had always supported her and from which she felt no pressure at all. It was the morning before leaving that her parents told her Zhang was not coming with them. They had decided to leave her with aunt Myrna, who wasn’t really their aunt but her uncle’s wife, who had three kids and a big home.

 Gong was destroyed by the news and, for the first time in all of her life, she refused to practice, to dance, to do any of the things she normally did. She cried and begged Zhang to come out of her room and talk to her. But Zhang was not there. She had left the day before for Myrna’s house and she, the bad sister that she felt, had not even noticed. Her parents almost had to force her to eat, put on her clothes and hop in the car for the ride to the airport. Her trip there was awful and the one on the plane to Brazil was even worse, always thinking of Zhang and feeling worse by the minute.

 When the plane finally landed. Gong insisted on calling her sister. She dialed the number herself and once she her aunt Myrna’s voice, she was relieved to know that Zhang was being very normal and even pleasant around her children. She asked Myrna to pass the phone to Zhang but then Myrna fell silent and it took her a bit to tell Gong that her sister had asked not to be interrupted while playing, especially not by them. She didn’t want to speak to any member of her family and Myrna didn’t want to make her feel worse.

 Almost in a whisper, she told Gong that Zhang was feeling very bad because of the entire trip thing and that she thought her parents had failed by letting her out of everything, clearly putting Gong first and her second. Aunt Myrna asked Gong not to blame them or her sister for anything and just to focus on her events and comeback soon to get things sorted out. She then wished her good luck in Rio. Gong thanked her for her good wishes and her advice and hung up.

 It got a bit better when she met the rest of the group and, the next day, when they did the big parade of nations. She was mesmerized by the thousands of people in the stadium and hoped her sister understood how much she wanted her there right now. The night of the parade, everyone went to bed early because the first week was always the most intense one. Gong had the following three days for practice and then it was time for the first event. Regrettably, time flew by and the moment came for her first performance.

 She did great. With the sound of pop music roaring all over, she focused only on her moves and sharpness and she was surprised to take the first spot among her group. The following day, she was able to move on the semifinals groups and then on the grand finals. All the girls were very talented and she had seen their every move for the last few days. Some of them seemed even stricter with their dancing, almost looking mad every single moment. It was as if they had nothing else on their minds.

 But she did. The final day, somehow, the thought of her sister took over everything and she didn’t even have a proper breakfast because of it. Suddenly she became worried because there was a feeling on her chest, a weird sensation that something felt wrong. Before leaving for the arena, she asked her parents to call her aunt and ask for Zhang. She thought only asking for here would be enough, not to be too pushy. She would have time to talk to her when they got back.

 Her parents went to their seats and she went on to perform beautifully. She had only a few points of advantage over her nearest competitor but it was enough to win the gold medal. She was thrilled when receiving the flowers, the medal and a stuffed mascot. Everyone was taking her picture and she was simply the happiest girl in the world. She would go back home and show the medal to her sister and everything would be ok.

 But it wasn’t. Her parents were nowhere to be found and when she did, she realized something awful had happened. Right enough, Myrna had told them that Zhang had committed suicide overnight. She had taken her to the hospital but here was nothing the doctors could do. When Gong heard this, she just collapsed. Her only friend in the world was gone, on the happiest day of her life.  

Flights

   The flight had not been awful but my body was just sore from being seated for so many hours. Somehow, those airplane exercises did not do the trick for me. Besides getting in the way of some people, they didn’t accomplish anything. When we finally landed, I felt my legs weakened by the journey. And to think I still had six more hours to go. But at least I had twenty hours to refresh and relax before hopping into another aircraft.

 I went through customs quite fast, and then headed straight for the airport hotel. I had my only bag with me and was certainly happy to be able to sleep in a proper bed for at least a few hours.

 The lady at the counter of the hotel seemed a bit distracted by something and kept looking towards a TV located in a small meeting area besides her post. I asked her if there was something wrong and she said something about a hurricane that was battering some islands in the south. It was feared that the storm could come this way. But, at the moment, her words seemed not all that important to me. As a matter of fact, the moment she gave me my bedroom keys, I had only the bed on my mind.

 The walk from the front desk to my room felt short and, seconds after I closed the door, I had stripped to my underwear and was making my way into the cozy queen sized bed. I fell asleep fast didn’t even remember to put an alarm in case I slept longer than I expected.

 I had a dreamless sleep, very nice and cozy. When I woke up, I saw the sun through the curtain, which could only mean that the day was coming to an end. I grabbed my cellphone and realized I had slept seven hours straight, which was perfect for a guy that had to make another six-hour flight the following morning.

 I stayed in bed a few minutes until I realized I could have a nice hot shower and change my clothes, which I did. I even sang through my entire time in the bathroom. For some reason, a hotel made me feel special, more so when my company was the one that had to pay and not me. After changing clothes to a less constricting combo of shirt and jeans, I decided to head down to the restaurant.

 When I got there, I noticed there was no self-service but one could order anything from one of the waiters, which I did: a big cheeseburger with fries and onion rings. Yeah, I was starving after my sleep. The television screens were still broadcasting images from the storm in the tropics and warned people in the city were I was that they should be mindful of the storm for the next few days.

 When my burger came I ate it so fast, I surprised myself, and the waiter, who kindly asked if I needed something else. I told him to bring me lemonade and to put it all on my tab, as I had no money to pay and even If had had any money I wouldn’t. After a week of hard work, I had earned all the nice treatment.

 There were only a couple more tables occupied and some people on the bar. I looked at those people, the kind that have their first drink of the day at four o’clock. It was nice to be that careless with one’s decisions, although maybe they had interesting jobs or just lives that required that extra kick. As I drank my beverage, I saw them all one by one and realized I knew one of those men: he had worked with me years ago but he had left, probably fired but I did not know for a fact.

 He noticed I was looking at him and stared back and, clearly, he realized who I was. He waved, a whisky glass in one hand, and came walking towards my table, smiling like an idiot. I had just remembered I did not like him very much when he took a seat just besides me.

 He acted all surprised and shocked and happy to see me but somehow I know it was all a lie. I normally knew when people were being deceitful to me and guy just didn’t seem quite honest to me. He smiled a lot and I had always mistrusted that and he had stopped drinking, which was clearly a bad sign.

 The man started talking about his new job, where he traveled a lot and met many famous people. He was something like and insurance guy for the wealthy or something like that. To be honest, I did not pay much attention to anything he said and, from time to time, I would look towards the screens still showing what was happening in another part of the world.

 He obviously noticed me doing do because he started giving me he’s opinion of the matter, as if an opinion was able to change the path of an incoming storm. Yeah, I clearly remember I hated that guy. He was always trying to be visible, attracting everyone to his stupid life and just trying to be funny and just coming out pathetic. He was the kind of person that was desperate for attention and I had never cared for any of that.

 Without any warning, I told him I had some affairs to attend in my room and shook hands with him. As I walked away he told me to email him some time and I nodded but I clearly had no intention to do so. I decided to get around the airport, which was huge, and walk around until my flight became available on the screens all around the place.

 The airport had three terminals and each one was simply huge and well connected, so walking was just a pleasure, looking at people come and go, the pilots and flight attendants and all the colors their uniforms sported. Besides, I had always liked airplanes so my favorite thing to do was buying some candy and then seating by a large window and stare and the planes moving all over the tarmac. It was like watching ants work on giants or something. Maybe that’s what was attractive to me…

 After getting bored and running out of candy, I decided to shop for some souvenirs. They weren’t for me but for my friends and family, all of whom loved to receive t-shirts and fridge magnets after I had traveled around the world. My mother had a collection of those and I had already bought her some in my earlier destination. I found a store that sold several of those, shaped as animals and fruits so I bought a whole bag.

 My sister’s gift was a bit trickier as she loved clothing but I always seemed to forget what size she wore and which colors she was into right now. They changed quite often and it was hard to keep up with it. So I just bought her a black sweater with a funny image on it thinking it went with everything and even if I got the wrong sixe I could tell her I thought she could use at nights or something.

 For my friends I bought boxes and boxes of chocolate and candy. That was what they liked, besides booze, which I couldn’t buy because I had always been scared a bottle would break and then of my underwear would smell of vodka or something. Some of the candy I bought were filled with rum and gin so that would cover me with them.

 I went back to my room, realizing my flight was only three hours away. I got everything I had bought into my suitcase but I couldn’t make the chocolate boxes fit in so I took that on their bad and hoped for security officers not to annoy me about it. I took all my things; check the room twice for things I may have left around and then left the room. In the front desk, the receptionist was busy on the phone, speaking occasionally. She hung up and attended me quickly to go away rather hastily.

 Not thinking twice about it, I walked straight to customs again, then to my gate were I sat down to wait for the boarding procedure. As I checked my emails on my phone, an airline worker dressed in light blue and with jet black hair walked to the counter and spoke on the microphone.

-       Ladies and gentlemen, Air Jet has to announce the cancellation of this flight due to a serious event that has taken place. We will take care of accommodations and will help you get into a later flight to get to your destinations.

 People started to quarrel with her and, not talking to a microphone, visibly tired and fed up by passenger’s attitude, she said:

-       A man committed suicide. He, somehow, got to the building above this gate and  jumped. He landed… he landed on the plane.

 Everyone was now silent and the some of them where walking towards the window. Although far to have a good look, I was sure I had seen correctly. The man that killed himself had been talking to me some hours earlier