Fragile Dreams Read online

  Fragile Dreams

  By

  Philip Fracassi

  JournalStone

  Copyright © 2016 Philip Fracassi

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting: JournalStone

  www.journalstone.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-945373-34-3 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-945373-35-0 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957964

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: November 18, 2016

  Cover Art & Design: Chuck Killorin

  Edited by: Aaron J. French

  Fragile Dreams

  Chapter 1

  What’s important right now, he thought, straining to study himself in the warped bronze plating of the elevator walls, is that you remember to breathe.

  He pinched the knot of his grandfather’s favorite tie, tugged down his newly dry cleaned dark blue suit coat, tightened his grip on the handle of his attaché, and lifted a hand to smooth his gel-slicked hair.

  He thought again of whether to lose the handkerchief in his suit pocket. He touched the top of the square fold Diane had worked so hard on. “It’s sexy,” she said, but he thought it might be too much. He leaned closer to the wall, looked at each of his bright blue eyes. He didn’t see circles, at least not obvious ones. He hadn’t been sleeping well. Diane was restless, money was becoming an issue, the school loans a burden with no foreseeable relief. Without a job...

  He stopped the train of negative thoughts before it could build steam. He stepped back to the middle of the elevator, turned away from his reflection to face the doors.

  “Fuck it,” he said, allowing himself to smile. A warming lump of confidence expanded outward from his belly. He exhaled, there was a distant ding, and the polished metal doors slid open.

  The firm’s address was listed as a suite, but despite the line of doors to his left indicating other businesses—accountants and legal offices primarily—Baskin and Associates took up a majority of the entire fourth, and top, floor of the downtown Burbank building.

  As he exited the elevator, his polished black Oxfords sunk into a rich green carpet, soft music was heard from invisible speakers, and a gold-and-glass reception desk the size of his Prius loomed off to his right, pulling at him like a magnet. He stepped up to the desk and the slim brunette sitting behind it, her expensively framed eyeglasses tilting up to him, her wide dark eyes sending a quiver though his spine.

  They must use a modeling agency, he thought, and almost smiled again. He rested the tips of his fingers lightly on the spotless glass ridge of the crescent-shaped desk, gently cleared his throat.

  “Matthew Calvert. I’m here for an interview,” he managed, then did smile, albeit apologetically. “With Mr. Baskin,” he added perfunctorily, leaving her eyes to scan the surface contents of her desk, as if an appointment ledger or sign-in book awaited his mark.

  The receptionist had sucked-in bronze cheeks bookending glossy lips that made Matthew think of two fat babies lying back to back, red as blood. She tapped something into her keyboard, her languid eyes searching a hidden screen.

  When she flicked her head back to Matthew, he flushed, realizing too late he’d been caught staring. She smiled, though, and he relaxed.

  “You’re early,” she said, and Matthew wondered if there was a degree of flirt in those pretty hazel eyes.

  “Yes, well, traffic wasn’t too bad,” he said, trying to sound casual but failing, and knowing he was failing. “The 101 was wide open for some reason, so...”

  She held his eyes another beat, as if considering, then swapped one smile with another. This one more officious. “It’ll be a few minutes. Would you like water or coffee while you wait?”

  Matthew was about to reply that a bottled water would be lovely when he felt a vibration thrum through the plush green carpeting, a vibration strong enough to tickle the pads of his feet through the thick soles of the shoes. The receptionist’s smile didn’t falter, nor did her eyes leave his. He looked at the floor, then back at her.

  “Did you...”

  His thought was truncated by a loud, bottomless rumbling, as if God were clearing his mighty hallowed throat. This time the floor beneath Matthew shifted and he was forced to take an unsteady step.

  The receptionist felt this one, springing up from her desk and stepping backward, her tight skirt and high heels making it an inelegant movement. She eyed her desk in horror, as if the glass monstrosity had bared crystallized gold teeth and snapped at her.

  She looked at Matthew, almost accusingly. Things grew quiet. Matthew spotted other movement around the office, saw heads bobbing behind eye-level glass office windows set within clean white walls. A young lawyer emerged, minus his suit coat, from a nearby copy room, looking up and down a distant hallway, seeking assurance, desperate to share his fear. Somewhere deep within Baskin and Associates, something heavy fell with a thump. From another unseen area, a husky-voiced woman yelled an obscenity as if she’d been badly hurt.

  Matthew and the receptionist faced each other, the desk between them an abandoned lifeboat, the ink-green carpet beneath their feet a calming sea after an eruption of storm. Matthew smiled at her reassuringly, almost amused by the affect the earthquake had on his anxiety. Perspective, he thought impulsively.

  “That was a big one,” he said calmly, his nerves iron now, testosterone and the realities of the world’s true dangers steadying him.

  The receptionist was not smiling and still looked off-balance. Her pinned hair had come disheveled; one sweeping dark arc lay forlornly along the side of her face. She opened her mouth to speak—Matthew had just enough time to notice how very white her teeth were—when the building was slapped hard enough to knock people to the ground. The world beneath him began shaking with a mad, volcanic violence, as if they were stuck inside a snow globe being throttled by a malicious child.

  Matthew stumbled, dropping his attaché and holding his arms out for balance. He looked to the walls surrounding him and watched in disbelief as jagged, lightning-shaped cracks coursed through them, spreading rapidly in webs of thick black veins. He jerked his head back in time to see the monitor on the glass desk topple and spark, the receptionist fall to the carpet, drowning in her fear. He wanted to run to her, help her, but the shaking was so violent, and the noise so ear-shattering, he could barely keep his own feet. He took a step toward her, saw her frantic eyes, her wide-open mouth an O of shock. Was she screaming? Calling for him? If she was, he could not hear her, not over the otherworldly noise of the building being ripped apart, the terrible growl of the rioting earth.

  He watched, helplessly, as the ceiling burst open and a long rectangular tube of metal venting crashed on top of her, a plume of bright pink insulation dangling like a monstrous tongue from the shattered mouth of the broken foam rectangular panels. A cloud of drywall dust hovered low over the scene like a fallen cloud. He couldn’t see clearly, couldn’t hear anything over the tumult. Massive, desk-sized pieces of ceiling were smashing down everywhere, filling the
air with more dust and debris. His eyes darted around the office. He saw people under their desks, lying on the ground, running, falling. They were all screaming now.

  Matthew saw a conference room table through a floor-to-ceiling glass wall at the far end of the office. Beyond the table were large blue-tinted panes of glass that shielded the conference room from the hot summer day. As Matthew watched, the blue-tinted panes split, then shattered, then fell away. Sunlight invaded the office like a spotlight exposing a rat’s den.

  The receptionist had found her feet. She climbed over the fallen vent awkwardly and stumbled toward Matthew. She steadied herself momentarily against the edge of her familiar desk. Matthew was able to get a good look at her. The side of her face had been torn open, gashed from ear to chin, and blood was slithering down her neck in pulsing ropes of red. Her terrified eyes, smaller without her glasses, found Matthew, her yearning for assurance naked and desperate. He started to say something, and then, to his disbelief, parts of Baskin and Associates began to simply... disappear. He caught her eye and frantically motioned for her to look behind her. She turned.

  They watched in a frozen daze as the conference table dropped away from view, as if the floor, and the construct of the floor beneath it, had been erased from existence.

  Next to the conference room, a well-dressed Asian man in a dark suit was gripping a large copier, hanging on as the floor tilted toward the crumbling exterior of the building. The man leapt atop the copier, as if the elevation of a few feet would save him. The machine slid, bumped and almost tipped, before spinning out into the expanse. Matthew had caught the man’s expression as he prepared to die and would have sworn he had been smiling like a demon. Matthew thought of the moment in Dr. Strangelove when Slim Pickens had Yahooed while riding the bomb as it fell to the earth.

  The remaining walls along the far side of the office bent away, folding in half before flying into the open air, the people behind them long since gone.

  Matthew backed toward the elevator, caught in a nightmare that did not have a panic button. A nightmare he would not wake from. There was a jolt and the building seemed to buckle and snap. His view outside the building tilted and he fell hard to the ground, his hand sinking into the sea-green carpet, so soft and solid. He looked up from his sitting position and heard the receptionist shriek, loudly enough that it pierced the rising, rumbling sounds of destruction; the kind of scream that was created from way deep down, in the abyss of absolute terror that opened with the knowledge that your life was about to end. There was a rising beneath Matthew as the building itself, or what remained of it, lifted off the ground, as if it were elevating into the air. A split-second later it crashed down so hard Matthew bit off the end of his tongue. He felt blood rush into his mouth, his eyes watering from the stab of sharp pain and the blast of stinging white dust clogging his eyes, nose and mouth. He had no time to think of anything other than God help me before the carpet beneath him disappeared, pulled away as if by a magician, and he dropped into empty space.

  The building gave in to the earth’s desires, and graceless as a dying giant, it collapsed in an implosion of glass and concrete and iron, heaping itself atop the bodies within, burying everything inside of it in a tangled black mass of clumsy, angry death.

  Chapter 2

  Diane kissed his ear, but Matthew continued to feign sleep. He could feel her smile hovering inches from his neck. He waited, wanting her to kiss him again.

  She did. Longer this time. Her soft lips were warm on his ear, then his temple, and then, as she gently rolled him, on his forehead. He kept his eyes closed, but his mouth betrayed him with a smile of his own.

  She was face-to-face with him, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath on his cheek. When she spoke, he caught the sweet minty smell of whatever toothpaste she had found in his shared bathroom.

  “Matthew...” she whispered.

  He groaned, not wanting to wake. He wanted to stay in this in-between time, with the sensations of his body peaked by his half-dream state. It was a bit like being on ecstasy, he thought, walking the padded corridor of consciousness that separated sleeping and waking, dream and reality.

  He opened one eye, saw the soft curve of her cheek. You are so beautiful. Her black hair was mussed, her green eyes darted playfully from one side of his face to the other, as if she were memorizing him, a rushed portrait painted in her mind. The sunlight coming through the far window gave her a soft halo, her skin luminous.

  “Morning,” he said, his throat dry, his mouth pasty. She slid a hand over his forehead, smoothed it over his clumpy hair in a way that made him want to close his eyes again and just feel a few moments more...

  “You have class in twenty minutes, tiger,” she whispered.

  The dream state evaporated, and Matthew woke fully with a rush of thoughts about school, grades, career, money. He groaned again, meaning it this time.

  “Right,” he said, twisting over in his tiny bed to gaze blurrily at the digital clock, the green illuminated digits mocking him with their vibrancy. “Right,” he repeated, falling back to look at her again.

  She was still naked and tangled in the sheets he’d brought with him from home, the same ones he’d slept in as a teenager. And how awesome was that? he thought happily. The same material that covered his sexually-frustrated fifteen-year-old body was now tangled sweetly between the thighs of a gorgeous coed who he’d spent, well, the entire night having insanely great sex with. Fifteen-year-old Matthew would be proud.

  “What?” she purred, sensing his amusement.

  “Nothing. You’re just hot is all,” he said, kissing her. She responded, her hand running across his chest, then down it. He felt his body calling him to action, like a general screaming to rally the troops before battle... but then he remembered his Ethics class, and the thought of Professor Bruker’s monotone lecture voice was like a pail of ice water dumped pitilessly on his young lust. He clutched her hand in his, set it down on the bed.

  “Don’t start,” he said.

  She laughed at his mock seriousness, and in that moment he loved that they were doing that thing couples did in the movies, or on TV, the beautiful actors delivering their lines while lolling around, naked and perfect, the morning sun rich and hazy through their bedroom window.

  The realization that he loved her came quietly, fitting into him like a puzzle piece.

  “I have to go,” he said. He sat up, kissed her mouth, and rolled off the mattress, planting his feet down onto the scratchy, thin brown carpet of his dorm room floor.

  “If you must...” she teased, lounging gracefully in his tiny bed, letting the sheets fall to her waist as she extended a seemingly nonchalant arm. “I’ll just be here, waiting for someone to have sex with.”

  “Well,” he teased, “Robbie will be back any minute, so I’m sure all your wishes will be fulfilled.”

  Robbie, Matthew’s roommate and best friend, was a dashingly handsome guy who, besides being tall, intelligent and athletic, had known since middle school that he was, as he had put it to Matthew one day when they were kids, “without-a-doubt” gay. Robbie carried the confidence and inner peace that came with vast quantities self-assurance and the unflagging love and support of family and friends. Matthew always envied him for having parents that were there for him, who cared and nurtured him. Something Matthew never had. Quite the opposite.

  “Hmm,” Diane murmured thoughtfully, “that may be an uphill climb.”

  “Don’t know until you try,” he tossed back at her as he disappeared into the small, manila-lit bathroom he and Robbie shared with their dorm-neighbors, and closed the door.

  * * *

  When Matthew came back into the bedroom—clean, naked and towel-wrapped—he found Robbie at his desk and Diane gone.

  “What’d you do, scare off my girl?”

  “She made a pass at me,” Robbie replied, not bothering to turn around from whatever heavy textbook he was busting though.

  “Right,” Ma
tthew said, and dug into a laundry basket at the foot of his bed for a t-shirt and jeans. “Fuck I’m late,” he murmured.

  “Better you than her...” Robbie said, tick-tocking a finger over his shoulder, his eyes never leaving the textbook.

  Matthew continued dressing, said nothing, letting his non-reply dangle. When he glanced Robbie’s way again, his friend was turned around, giving Matthew his full attention, his dark eyes staring punctuated expletives.

  “Don’t say it...”

  Matthew smiled, but shook his head. “Nah,” he said, then gave an embarrassed smile. “But I honestly wouldn’t mind... I mean, obvious practicalities aside.”

  Robbie frowned and turned back around. “There’s plenty of time, Matthew.”

  “I know,” he said. Then... oddly... forgot what he was doing. Going to class, he thought, but his blood ran cold.

  “I...” he started, glancing around the dorm room, confusion coursing through his brain. “Robbie...”

  “There’s plenty of time, Matthew,” he said again, his voice now muffled and slurring.

  Matthew started to ask why he was repeating himself, when Robbie turned. But it wasn’t Robbie. Or, it was, but this Robbie had no face. It was just... blood. A face of blood. The large naked teeth were slicked with it, the bulging eyes piercingly white and roving.

  “Robbie,” Matthew said, eerily calm. “Your face.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Robbie replied, the words gurgling. He wiped at it lazily, smearing blood on his hands, then his pants as he rubbed his sticky hands against them. “You too,” he said calmly.

  Matthew touched his own face with his fingertips, feeling spongy wet tissue and tight, pulsing threads of muscle, the hard round edges of bone. He ran into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, stared at his face which was no longer his face, the flesh torn away, the pulped tissue seeping droplets into the yellowed porcelain of the sink.