Frank: Chapter 3

The following morning, the sun crashed into Joshua's room through his lone window, piercing his eyelids, scrambling his brains. He groped at the stuff of his dream but already it was gone. It had been a nightmare. Black patches and haunting laughs. Groaning, he sat up in bed. There were a few drawings on the floor next to him. Each page was filled with a single, wide-open eye. They varied in shade, eyelash, and etcetera, but every one of them had a bright glint stretching across the iris. And every pupil was dilated.

He vaguely recalled drawing them, but thought it had been part of the bad dream. He started up the coffee maker and stared at Frank. Who? Joshua thought. Isn't that what you call him? And.... it was. And.... some coffee would be good. He never should have bought those beers. Alcohol was the downfall of most of the people Joshua had been close to throughout his life, himself included. It was just plain stupid. He couldn't even remember why he'd broken the vow to himself and tied one on. As he pondered this, he absent-mindedly began to thumbtack the eye drawings to the wall around the slightly damaged centerpiece.

A fugue. That's what Joshua decided had happened, which really didn't shed light upon last night's events, but made it romantic and, so, bearable. The coffee maker burbled at him and pulled him from these thoughts. He added milk and sugar before slurping in the warm elixir. It was delicious and hot. So, of course, he burnt his tongue. This is only worth noting because it was at that instant, as the scalding brew slid down his protesting esophagus, that he thought of the perfect ending to his story.

The revelation swooped in out of nowhere, as they are accustomed to, and he stepped to his typewriter with tears still swelling in his eyes from the hot coffee. Before now, he had been trying to end the story on an high note, trying to ultimately solve all of the problems in his terrible vision of the future. But now Joshua realized what was most awful about the place he wrote of: there was no ending. The worst trait a dystopia has is that there is no pulling out of the nosedive, that humanity is doomed to the gloom, that hope was abandoned long ago and control handed over with a bow.

Joshua, clearly pleased with himself, tapped out the last line of his story so he could use it as inspiration to finish its middle: It was the worst of times.

A way to sum up the whole tale and a tip of the hat to an English master at the same time. Joshua plucked the page from the typewriter and used a magnet to hang it on the fridge, where he could see it while writing. Already more plot elements were bubbling up within him, but, noticing the time displayed on the microwave in digital red, he chugged his cooled coffee. He hardly felt any hangover at all now. Joshua actually felt good. That is, until he noticed movement in the tiny shadow high up on the wall, the one cast by the ridge poking from a water damaged drawing, the one cast by Frank's nose.

Frank was shaking his head back in forth in the drawing with just his nose beyond the paper's plane, a sharp, gray shark fin cutting in unnatural directions. "You woke me up with that typing noise," Frank said and Joshua wondered how a dream ever became real. "It is kind of a mystery," Frank said, "but I figure water, like that from the upstairs leak, is the stuff of life and you, my friend, have one hell of a fertile imagination. You like that explanation?" Like a cliche, Joshua dropped his mug to shatter at his feet as he stared, agape, at surreal animation invading his reality. "Don't be so surprised," Frank added, "I can read your mind because I am you."

"No," Joshua barked. "You. Are. Not."

"Well," Frank said, pulling himself out into the real world so that he could raise both of his hands, palm out, in a placating gesture. "I suppose my claim isn't entirely true. I am a certain aspect of you that has been magnified, without distortion. From my vantage point, I've been purified. Still, I am you in many ways. When you made me, you gave me the haircut you've worn since high school. More importantly, haven't you noticed? I have your voice."

"You have my voice," Joshua said and, indeed, it seemed an echo.

"And," Frank said, "our DNA is identical, since your my only parent. Hell, we even have the same fingerprints."

"That's imposs-," Joshua began but realized the absurdity of the statement quickly. None of this was possible. Yet here he was, stone sober, talking to a creature that viewed him as creator and traitor simultaneously. Joshua bit his burnt tongue hard to make sure.

"Oh," Frank said, "This is no dream. Quite the opposite actually, but enough chit chat. It's time for you to take a shower and go to work. The worst part about not having a phone is not being able to call into to work. Am I right, Josh? You don't have to answer, but, when you get back, you're going to put '2095' away until that year comes and your going to draw. Your going to draw until your fingers are raw."

Frank: Chapter 2

When Joshua awoke, he didn't notice the mask hanging on the wall. At least, that's what it looked like now. A mask made out of gray paper-mache by a Cubist-influenced artist. Joshua walked right past it, skipping breakfast, as usual, and had a hot shower. He dressed in the attached closet and dashed out the door, running so he wouldn't be late again. Everyone that saw him running looked around, expecting to see the police, anxious and disappointed.

Ten hours later, when he got home, he immediately took off his uniform and hung it up, good for another wear or two yet. Still in his underwear, he plodded to the fridge for a soda. He stopped dead in his tracks. Finally, Joshua saw the progressive mutation of his picture. An involuntary curse hissed through his teeth. The eyes were still following him, now slightly convex and completely three-dimsensional. Joshua knew that was beyond natural phenomena, not a weird side-effect of water damage. This was physically impossible. The bust issuing from his wall was made of more than one sheet of paper. There was too much surface area. Then he blinked and, once again, the picture was correct, slightly warped, crinkled at two edges. Joshua remained motionless and managed not to scream.

During Joshua's childhood, his father had gone crazy on three seperate occassions. The schizophrenia had lain dormant until his father was well into his twenties before manifesting. Joshua had always feared that he carried the gene, that one day he would go off of the deep end and never find his way back. Now he wondered, as he collapsed into his chair in front of the typerwriter, if this was the beginning, if this was the initial disconnect.

He wasn't hungry anymore. He really wanted a drink. In fact, it was all that he could think about now that he'd considered it. Just tonight. Just one. After hastily dressing, he risked a walk down to the corner story and used a bit of his grocery money to buy two quarts of the cheapest swill to be found. He could steal some bread from the workplace tomorrow. The walk back wasn't long but he killed half a beer by the time he was back in his chair. The minute lag between thought and action felt good to him, a familiar distortion. By the time he was screwing the cap off of the second quart, he was itching to write on his story. He fed a fresh sheet into the Smith-Corona and punched out words rapidly without pause. He channelled Kerouac. He wrote so fast, the 'e' quit sticking.

Quickly coming to the end of the page, he urgently began to replace it. In the silent aftermath of the rat-tat-tating, Joshua heard a voice that had already been talking for a moment. "....no point in going on. Your characters are two-dimensional. Plus, you don't have an ending." Joshua looked up and to his right, to where the monochrome hulk hung. The imaginary man was jutting from the wall again, facing him, and the mouth was moving. "Were you even listening to me?" it said.

"Oh what the fuck!" Joshua screamed. "No! I can't lose it here, alone, in this neighborhood where no one will call for help!" He took deep breaths but couldn't stop crying. "This isn't real," he said. "I shouldn't have drank the beers." He kept repeating that last bit in a whisper.

"Sure, Joshua," the drawing said in a conversational tone, "your wife left you because of your drinking problem. And, yes, you lost a decent job due to your drinking problem. But, believe me, this, what your seeing right now, it was coming regardless of what else you did as long as you were still writing that damn story."

"Wh-wh-what?!?" Joshua sputtered, shrill laughter edging into the question. "What are you talking about?" Joshua looked down into his lap, shaking his head. "You're not even real." He exhaled slowly and looked up. The figure was still there, foggy eyes locked on him, into and through him.

"I am real," the head said, mouth working to show square blocks of white teeth. "You made me six months ago in the middle of one of your drawing jags, when you had really hit your stride with the brush. I've watched you ever since, watched you gradually shift over to writing more, drawing less. Two weeks now without a drawing!" It's gray face was ever calm, but the voice seethed with anger. After a brief, composing pause, it continued, "I am real. I am. My name, the one you gave me but have forgotten, is Frank."

Frank: Chapter 1

The part of town where hard-looking women walk the streets well past the witching hour. The part of town where everyone is used to the occasional staccato of gunfire at three in the afternoon. The part of town where you can buy fried foods and hard liquor at the same store. That's the part of town where rent is the cheapest. That's where you can find a one-room apartment, ten by fifteen feet, with an attached closet slash full bathroom for $300 a month plus utilities. That's the type of apartment Joshua had.

He had moved there after his divorce, which he had taken kind of hard. Soon after it happened, he lost his job with the Postal Service for drinking on the job. During that whole fiasco, with his savings becoming extinct, he had found the shithole that he now called home. He had managed to quit drinking altogether, mainly becaue he couldn't afford any alcohol, and got a job stocking at a grocery store within walking distance. He had a car but the tank was perpetually empty.

Joshua hadn't been able to salvage much after his fall from grace. He had a twin mattress and box spring, no frame, in one corner of the room. There was a microwave that his friend had given him on the counter. An ancient manual typewriter was perched on the "dining table" which was really just half a table with the legless end bolted to the wall. And that was it really. No DVD player. No TV even. No phone. Sure, there were other things, magnets on the provided fridge, a couple of lumpy pillows on the flopbed, but nothing else of material worth. Unless, that is, one takes into account Joshua's creative output.

He had wallpapered his cramped quarters, from floor to ceiling, with ink drawings and pages of words. It was hard to say which there were more of. He had liked to write and draw when he was a teenager, but he had fallen in love, gotten a drone job, kept up with the Joneses, and his childhood desires had fallen to the wayside. Still, Joshua had always done his best work when he felt like crap and life had been given him a lot of inspiration lately.

He went to work. He went home. He sat down at his dining table and made stuff up until he was too tired to continue. Then he went to sleep and got up to go to work. That was his schedule for a little under a year now. He pounded out mostly sci-fi on that Smith-Corona on which the 'e', of all letters, stuck. Or, he'd use a plastic, neon green, watercolor brush and solutions of India ink in various concentrations to make pictures. He'd paint on the same paper he used to type on. He hung them up when no more words would fit or after they dried. He created his own little world with his own little worlds.

One day, Joshua came home to find that his upstair neighbor's water bed had busted, causing water to run through the ceiling down one of his walls. Luckily, the water mostly avoided the carpet and puddled on the linoleum in front of the fridge. A large swath of his creations had been damaged in the process. Cursing, ignoring the puddle for the time being, he began to pull the multi-colored thumbtacks out of the wall. Delicately, he peeled the affected sheets off one by one. As he did, one of them in particular jumped out at him.

It was one of the ink drawings and it was a gloomy scene. In the background, the sky was a swirling mass of gray hues with thick black streaks veining throughout. The suggestion of shadowy hills and a lone, lifeless tree reaching up to the sky. In the foreground, visible from the chest up, a ghost-faced brute in his gray leather jacket with the collar flipped up, white undershirt visible beneath. An abstract badboy with hooked nose and a black flattop pushing up from a widow's peak. Thick lips set in the narrow range between smile and grimace. And empty eyes, unblinking, maybe half-blind, set below dark eyebrows, eyes that seemed to follow you, watching Joshua as he moved about the room.

Even though it had given him the heebie-jeebies for awhile when he first hung it, he was glad that it was relatively unscathed by the flood. Water had only run down it in one spot, a small streak which terminated at the nose. The hooked nose in the drawing now seemed to be slightly embossed from the water damage. Liking that effect, he put it aside, atop the fridge, and cleared away the rest of the wet pictures and prose. After mopping up, he stared at the newly created blank spot on the wall. It would certainly have to be filled. But, for now, he grabbed the picture from atop the fridge. With the water fast drying, the figure's nose looked even more three-dimensional, the paper buckling so that it stuck out nearly half an inch. He took that picture and put it in the middle of the void that had been created.

Afterwards, he microwaved himself dinner and sat at the typewriter, adding sentences to his short story between bites of salisbury steak. Well, it had started as a short story but was fast becoming something more. He was a full twenty pages in with no end in sight. It was called '2095', in homage to Orwell, and dealt with a dystopian future where the government was called The Love. And there was this drug called Bandy Z that was enlightening people through voluntary near-death experience. And there were these creatures called Mindhummers which explained schizophrenia. It was hard to explain because, really, Joshua didn't know exactly what it was yet. He just felt compelled to explore that world further and further.

He wrote for five hours straight, leaving half of his tv dinner forgotten and recongealing. He wrote ten pages and, from that, salvage two that he was really pleased with. Back aching from an extended period hunched over, he dropped to his bed and pushed the clothing from his body. Sleep crept over him quickly. As he drifted ever deeper into himself, slipping into the limbo between consciousness and dream, he thought he heard a whisper in his room, someone grumbling, "...draw..." every few seconds. But Joshua was exhausted past curiousity and well into oblivion.

During the night, a residual pocket of water seeped down the wall, soaking the image of the loner in his wasteland once again. The face ballooned out even more.