George Oliver

hinterland

Iga steps outside of herself. Upright rather than supine, she moves to the side of her sleeping body, then tiptoes away from the bed and towards the door, being careful not to wake her duplicate self. Fortunately, she’s a heavy sleeper.

Iga has never been one to wake in the night. She has never been one to miss, even snooze an alarm. To her, sleep is an efficient deal struck by a board of expert negotiators. Since about 15, she has known exactly what she needs: 6.5 hours. Not 7. Not 6. The amount’s enough to function well, but also raises a bar slightly above her, which her days always need. She’s at her most professionally, socially, and emotionally productive when her executed actions are slightly behind the next person’s. She thrives when she has regular reasons to be slightly disappointed in herself, without major detriment. She’s most herself when her day is a conveyor belt of opportunities to improve — to the small extent that she feels better but these improvements go unnoticed by the strangers and friends around her.

Iga closes the bedroom door behind her, quietly. She doesn’t know what would happen if she made enough noise that it woke her. Would the unconscious version of her become conscious, and she then fade into the air? Would she return to supine, from wherever she stands? Would the responsibility to put things back into place fall on someone or something else, so she simply turns off and shuts down?

Iga decides that the best course of action is a cup of coffee and a bite to eat. She won’t be able to get anything done until she raises her energy levels. The premise of the hybrid, real/dream version of her small townhouse unnerves her, so she seeks breakfast outside. Maybe she would prepare the coffee and the cup disintegrate in her fingers. Maybe she would pour the coffee into her mouth but nothing go down her throat. Or maybe the props in the hybrid house are as unreal and dreamed as her, so they would all function with a consistent internal logic — working, because she’s living, inexplicably.

But the threat of waking herself remains. Iga decides to test the potential of the dreamscape beyond these four walls.

*

Iga’s time outside is brief. The space is a vessel, transporting her to a new interior: a small café closer to the city centre.

The café is a hive of consumer activity. Eyes scan the menu and compare item values. Other people know their orders and stride up to the counter, so confident in the knowledge of what the card reader will instruct them to pay that they don’t look at it, their eyes on their phone screens. Some add snacks and pastries to their drinks order, throwing extra donations at an unseen force as if the gesture signals free market agency or actual power.

Everyone’s moving. Inside the café, but also outside, because Iga can see the city streets from her window seat as she warms her hands around a steaming cup of flat white. She wonders if this perpetual motion is a condition of the dreamscape. No-one stands still or sits still. People seem unable to. She’s the only exception.

Iga experiments with this rule. As a barista takes a pair of used cups from a nearby table back to the counter, Iga asks her to stop for a moment. Iga asks her to literally stop moving for a moment. She looks sideways at Iga, confused but used to a disposably strange encounter with a member of the general public. The look suggests that Iga’s request is tame compared to some of the things she’s been asked while working in this busy metropolitan hospitality venue.

‘No, please, I’m serious. Can you stand still for a second? Prove to me that you can.’

‘I’ll be right with you,’ the barista offers.

Five minutes later, the manager comes over. The manager’s an overzealous middle-aged man who seems to have worked at the café for too long to still transparently enjoy it this much. He’s the kind to treat a weekday rush hour like a military operation, a customer question like an existential enquiry.

But he brushes off Iga’s question too. It’s probably cause it’s weird. Harmlessly so. It’s not the kind of weird question to warrant ejection from the café — an action this manager would also relish taking seriously, Iga suspects — but the kind it’s convenient to pretend he’s too busy to respond to. He imagines that something has caught his eye to justify speeding off in a different direction. Then he invents instructions to give the shift’s second and third baristas when he’s back at the counter. Then he pushes through the metallic silver door taking him to the staff back room.

For the rest of her time at the café, the baristas avoid Iga’s eye. She doesn’t see the manager again.

An hour after asking them to stop moving, Iga leaves.

She clears her croissant crumbs and throws away her cup on the way out.

Back outside, she tries asking a few passersby to stop moving.

They look at Iga like she’s grown a second head.

She has witnessed rehearsals of this scenario herself, many times.

People will always look at a lone woman in a busy city asking questions, seeking answers to alleviate her confusions, as if she’s crazy.

It’s too real to be a dream.

*

Iga wonders if there has been a malfunction, if she’s dreaming on the wrong side. She entertains, then believes in, the possibility that the framework for her unconscious state is askew. She disappears down the rabbit hole of dreamer accidentally stuck in reality. She buys into the idea that she’s the only one dreaming and has no intention of returning or re-selling the belief. She comes to terms with the idea that she’s the anomaly.

Iga’s belief is disrupted by the constant motion thing, though. There are further problems on public transport, which she uses to test her theory. What happens when the things are moving — are people?

Iga takes a northbound underground train across the city. Everyone’s still moving. She wants to ask strangers to try and stop but they wouldn’t hear her over the competing engines, traction motors, brakes, and wheels rolling on the rails. Roughness and irregularity on the wheel and rail surfaces ensure that Iga cannot be heard. She’s silenced by the city.

Iga can only watch as people in the carriage around her pace, hop on one or two legs, twirl their bodies as they grip handrails, tap their legs in time with their private music, or shuffle their feet to avoid being stepped on by the crowds of individuals they don’t know going to different destinations for unknown purposes.

It doesn’t help that Iga unwittingly selected the underground line that doesn’t have seats, to accommodate a larger carriage capacity. Standing still is more unrealistic than sitting still.

*

Iga’s daughter is somewhere. Somewhere in her original reality, which she expects to return to when she wakes, awaits her four-year-old daughter. Iga’s the only one responsible for the child, because the child’s father left four years ago. The child is the only one responsible for Iga, because Iga’s father died five years ago and her mother died eight years ago.

*

Iga notices a development when she’s back outside, after the unsuccessful train test.

Iga realises that the sky is moving, like everyone, except her, unless she chooses to. The sky is slowly moving downward and closer to the ground, as if a theatre curtain is coming down in stages. This must not be reality.

Iga learns this because she stops to focus on the sky for several minutes. The sky moves down gradually, but the movements accumulate and create a significant new position after enough staring.

Iga learns more from exteriors than interiors here — wherever and whatever here is. Here, the outside world proves more trustworthy: the inverse of her life on the other side, where she and her daughter maximise the happiness of a private, sheltered life by staying indoors and playing, laughing, and daydreaming the hours away together.

In that alternative here, Iga tells her daughter that no-one can touch them. Here, she often thinks but keeps to herself, the father she will never tell her daughter about cannot touch them.

Iga and her daughter have a designated safe place to escape outside to. They call it ‘The Garden’… but really it’s a small patch of grass attached to their home’s private patio —11 square feet, to be exact. Iga escapes here to breathe when she needs a moment to herself, sneaking a quick cigarette and a lungful of air while her daughter plays. Her daughter escapes here to extend the boundaries of her play — using green turf and blue sky to justify new worldbuilding. The outdoor space has fences taller than her daughter on three sides, so Iga lets her daughter roam free, granting her opportunities for solitude because she suspects that even a four-year-old needs them.

For her daughter, The Garden unlocks new possibilities. Her fantasies can take flight, without the limits of a roof. Her solitary games with her toys can write their own rules, without the obstacle of narrative logic. On the 11 square feet of grass, she can be anyone. She can do anything. She doesn’t need to share these particular someones and somethings with her mother. These stories remain hers. Her mother keeps a longer, more complex story to herself — unlike her daughter, she’ll have to share this, one day.

The idea of returning to the hybrid house fills Iga with dread. She doesn’t know what steps she must take back at the gateway, if it even is one, to get home.

George Oliver is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. He has a PhD in contemporary transatlantic literature and is the author of Hybrid Novels: Post-postmodernism, Sincerity, and Race at the Turn of the 21st Century (Routledge, forthcoming). His short stories have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Brussels Review, Freshwater Literary Journal, grist, and Reverie, and he was shortlisted for Ouen Press' 2019 Short Story Competition.

George wrote the following about his story:

'Hinterland' didn't come to me in a dream. I was overcaffeinated, procrastinating, and clock-watching at my day job. It ends a trilogy-of-sorts with two similar length stories I wrote: 'Decentred' and 'The Peel.' I'm not a big fan of labels, mainly because I often don't understand them, but I suppose these three would fall under ‘speculative fiction’. Away from the imagined, supernatural, or futuristic... all of my favourite fiction is speculating, though. I think it's all we can do at the moment, rather than pretend we have anything figured out