Mr. Boubles’ Supposition Written by David E. Puretz Illustrations by Joshua Patterson To try to make the birthing process a lot less strenuous on the poor girl, her doctor insisted on the fact that she follow his suggestion of using the immersed method. He placed her in a tub full of warm water, arched her back against the rear of the tub, placed her legs upon the top of the tub on the other end-- in order to allow little Toby and little Obelie to descend from the netting of Kasha’s body. Though the doctor insisted on the fact that without drugs to numb her, this was the least-painful method, she still felt more pain than anything she had ever experienced when she began to give birth. She wanted the drugs so badly-- even before her water broke she continuously asked herself how she would get through it without the aid of desensitization. But Mr. Boubles insisted that it would affect the outcome of his cherished progeny and he couldn’t have anything interfere with a flawless upbringing.

But flawless to Mr. Boubles was different than the average person’s connotation of the word. What the average man considered flawless in their offspring was inconsequential to Mr. Boubles. This is because the average cares selflessly for their child’s well-being, while Mr. Boubles had other hypotheses—selfish, exploratory visions, for he was the creator of identical twins—two beings unfalteringly analogous to one and other, from the exact threads of hair on their heads to the succinct rhythms of their beating hearts— combining to become a perfect archetype of which Mr. Boubles could practice some of his theories.

Kasha was not the final forbearer of these two babies; no: she had lost consciousness from the pain of birthing for oh so many hours. Obelie and Toby were resilient and latched onto each other and to the inner lining of their mother—not because it was bitter cold air out there, for they were immersed in warm water, about the same temperature of their mother’s uterus; they declined from exiting because of a constantly-lingering premonition that the world they would be entering into was going to be dreary and drudging as it would be in the hands of their ultimate creator, their father. This presentiment in their un-nurtured brains blossomed because of a faintly-inherited evil that their father passed down upon them—and they knew, without even knowing that they knew it, that they would be entering into his world, one full of impious and wicked things –things so ingrained in his father’s life-system that it loitered through his DNA and fastened on to Obelie and Toby like leaches. It was their better halves that told them to hang on with a fearful steadfast grip to each other and to their mother’s lining but it was to no avail.

The doctor performed a c-section long after Kasha had fallen fast asleep per the livid orders of sleep-deprived Mr. Boubles (the doctor finally gave in to doing the operation when a knife, operated by Mr. Boubles, licked the doctors arm and subsequently perched upon the doctor’s neck) and as the two children were removed out of the dark red liquid by their father, the last gasp of air departed from their mother’s lips.

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Mr. Boubles had always been a fond believer in experimentation. As a psychoanalyst, he had mostly dealt with people with abnormally strange beliefs and tendencies. He was so fascinated with what the brain could compute while unconscious, unawake, out of commission. He thought that what one experienced in dreams he or she had to play out in their waking life out of some sort of strange needed fantasy, out of intuition. Not that waking life influenced dreams, but that dreams influenced waking life. He felt that dreams were the key to understanding not only ourselves but to understanding others, the world, the universe, the meaning. He felt that if he could find where and how these uninfluenced, uninitiated dreams formed and took shape, than he could find… the meaning. Freud and Jung were his predecessors in his mind; what they did only seemed like dabbling in dream science in comparison to his work he liked to tell himself. He looked at himself as a fine psychiatric therapist, but his only clients were those just as or sicker than himself. And for this reason, especially because of what he had done with Obelie and Toby, the few that knew him from a neutral standpoint viewed him as a mad scientist, a chronically ill specimen.

As the children grew into their own, their time was not only was spent together during their waking lives, but in their unconscious lives as well. They had developed stunning telekinetic, extrasensory abilities. And it stemmed from their dreams—an ability of theirs which Mr. Boubles was somewhat aware of and proud of them for, yet he didn’t know the full extent of their divine capabilities.

Sometimes they would both wake in the night dripping with sweaty terror after experiencing similar frightening scenarios in their unconscious oblivions. Other times in their dreams, they would become superhuman creatures, go on majestic adventures where they could cause mayhem and mischief—a grand relief from their usually uneventful wakeful existence.

No matter how their dreams played out—whether they were small insignificant bland dreams or extraordinarily psychedelic, they would both usually be involved in the same dilemma, where they could correspond with each other in the dream and after waking, they wouldn’t have to actually say a word to one and other to be able to know what they had done, where they had gone, what they had experienced together in this ulterior existence of theirs. After waking, they wouldn’t discuss what happened in their dream because there was no need to discuss it—they had both experienced something of similar satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and why waste breath, why waste time in structuring these nighttime events into real words to speak to each other about, when they were both there to experience the same deliriously hallucinogenic experience. People use words to tell stories about their experiences, experiences in dreams and in reality, to try to get others to experience them as well, except on a smaller scale, like hearing a descending marching band. But for the twins, they both had front row seats for the same marching band, often times were members of the band itself, thus there was no need for explanation.

Their marching bands only played different hymns—i.e. their dreams only differed from one and others—when on those very rare occasions they wouldn’t be close to each other, possibly asleep in different rooms of the house or asleep at different moments in time—and when there was a difference, it was only a slight variance—usually too minute for them to realize that something had occurred in one’s dream which didn’t occur in the other’s.

So their mouths were usually closed, their voices rarely heard, and they accepted the fact that they knew each other and would always know each other way too well.

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After realizing that Kasha was going to be giving birth to identical twins, Mr. Boubles developed the idea of using them as gunea-pigs, lab rats—for some of his new dream theories. Kasha was originally a patient of Mr. Boubles who had come to him from a juvenile detention center claiming that ghosts invaded her dreams and that she simply wanted to find an end to her agonizing long-lasting night terrors. Mr. Boubles had the capacity to heal her, for he was a wizard in dream magic, and forced the ghosts out of her unconscious life with the use of hypnosis and bright lights. But their doctor-patient relationship soon broke those borders and they had become lovers. He impregnated the poor girl, and soon enough, his love for his studies overrode his love for Kasha, which eventually led to her demise. With Obelie and Toby, Mr. Boubles wanted to orchestrate the ultimate test: to see if dreams could lead these two minds together after being pulled apart. He let the twins do as they pleased during their childhood, not out of negligence, well partly out of negligence, but also to allow them to become so close, that they could finish each other’s sentences. When they were 14 and a half years old, he began to think that their dream language was almost as ripe as it could get, which was when he began to devise his plan.

And finally the time came a year later for the experiment to begin. Mr. Boubles had two of his drooling counterparts, Harold and Salvatore—two old clients that were under his spell, two of his many puppets—sneak into Obelie and Toby’s room while they were immersed in one of their dream escapades and bag their heads, cuff their arms and legs and impede all of their movement. Harold placed Toby in the trunk of one car, while Salvatore placed Obelie in the trunk of another and they took off, pulled them from each other and were to travel to undisclosed locations, in opposite directions.

The farther they got from each other, the more painful their heads felt. They thumped and turned and twisted within the trunks in agony and despair and wanted nothing more than to be with one and other.

They managed to stay awake in the darkness of the trunks longer than their father would have suspected. They both remained conscious for thirteen hours and twenty three minutes and though they were hours apart from one and other, they both simultaneously drifted out of waking consciousness and were together once again:

In their dream, they found themselves standing at opposite ends of a room, with wood paneling surrounding them and there was a fresh pine scent in the air. Sitting amongst them was their father, looking as if he were lost in thought, sitting dazedly upon his leather chair. Obelie and Toby felt paralyzed, unable to alter their stances, bend their knees or their back, or turn their heads. The mystic medium was their father, as if he had them locked in his brain and until he decided to defocus, they were trapped in his tractor beam of hypnotic supremacy. But forcefully, as if cracking out of shells, they slowly contorted their bodies painstakingly and shifted towards each other. Mr. Boubles gripped his cane with extra emphasis and Obelie and Toby were frozen in their tracks once again.

Through a dual-thought-amalgam, they devised a plan in this incoherent dream state—a state of nonsense yet familiar to them in its peculiarity—to overcome this vice, surmount his power.

Toby stopped putting all his effort into being able to reclaim his body and went limp, completely under his father’s hex. While Obelie struggled against it with all of his might—this forced Mr. Boubles to defocus on Toby and put more brain-sway on Obelie to control his movement. While Obelie and his father were dueling, the weight upon Toby had lifted. Once free from the strain of his father, Toby morphed his body into a cyborg of incredible magnitude and strength with a force field protecting him from the unbearable brainwaves of his maker. At this point, his father dropped his control on Obelie to try to take back power on Toby, only to fail. As the strain on him released, Obelie morphed into another dynamic creature, a metallic anaconda with laths of metal encapsulating his body--also with a force field protecting him from the overriding brainwaves of his maker. As the dream was nearing its end, Mr. Boubles lost total control of his children and they muscle out of the wooden house rejuvenated, full of anger and rage, revived and recharged, ready to conquer.

Half awake, half asleep, somewhere lost in between the two realms, with the image of their tyrant father still drifting through their thoughts, they concomitantly burst open the trunk doors because of their newly found strength as cyborg wildebeest transformers, and crash upon the highway.

Obelie’s plunge to the scorching hot concrete at first made his body feel numb as if made of jellow, but as his brain fully entered back into consciousness, it picked up on the severe damage his body had sustained and abruptly relentless pain struck him like a bolt of lightning. Obelie started into weepy yelps trying forcefully to breathe air in and out of his lungs and the pain he had endured, upon his right arm and back in particular, had sunk in and throbbed meticulously almost in unison to his hindered breathing pattern—in and out, in and out, in and out—the ache came and went second by second. Cars were approaching upon the highway and although he was suffering, he still had the strength to maneuver his cuffed body to the breakdown lane with a systematic roll.

Salvatore had pulled over approximately 90 yards further up the highway after seeing in his rearview mirror that his trunk was open. He forced his gears in reverse and backtracked with squealing tires to the blood covered boy, leaped out of the car with a blanket from the back seat and flung it over him hoping that the few drivers who had passed didn’t see the bloody boy with cuffs upon his arms and legs. With his signature loud hisses—the result of his lifelong cigarette-smoking habits--Salvatore softly wrapped Obelie in the blanket like a mother would her baby and placed him back in the trunk of the car, closed it shut, checked the stability of the fastened latch by pulling upon the trunk door, returned to the drivers seat and continued the journey that Mr. Boubles had so maniacally planned out, hoping that this little event wouldn’t falter any of Mr. Boubles explicit plans.

Toby’s collapse to the sidewalk had produced a different outcome. He never fully entered back into consciousness. He was in utero when raging out of the trunk, half asleep, half awake, and his fall upon the pavement left him in an altogether different state. Toby had landed on the backside of his head, knocking him out cold. His brain was not able to function—it was unable to process a thought—he was dead to the world except for a faintly beating heart. When Toby descended from the trunk Harold was lost in his own thought-bubble and continued along his path—his eyes were twirling in circles, simply focusing on the yellow lines in front of him, still under the spellbinding primacy of Mr. Boubles and the orders he had prearranged for him. The trunk miraculously lowered again after Toby had bashed out of it—it wasn’t fully latched closed but far enough down that when Harold was to glance back in his rear view mirror, he wouldn’t see anything alarming—everything would seem as if it was going according to plan.

After being in a state of cold hibernation for nine hours—a state where no thoughts were running through his unconscious mind, Toby suddenly awoke due a pring, pring, pring sound going off in his eardrum—a sound similar to that of a muffled telephone ringing and found himself in a white room with an IV in his arm, his cuffs removed from his arms and legs. Apparently, a lonely woman who was driving west to visit her parents for the weekend saw the motionless boy in the middle of the highway and stopped her car in front of his body and put on her flashers so other drivers along the same route wouldn’t run him over. She had called an ambulance which had arrived minutes later and took the broken boy to the nearest hospital.

The pringing sound that had pulled him out of this minor coma was the telepathic screams coming from Obelie, hundreds of miles away—praying for him to wake:

For nine hours, while still locked in the trunk, Obelie had tried to clairvoyantly speak with Toby, but couldn’t get a response. Obelie knew that something was amiss for he wasn’t getting any sort of psychic rejoinder from his dear brother. He started into his weeps again, yet these weeps turned into howling cries, which eventually turned into screams for Toby. There was still no sort of cryptogram from Toby’s response system which on any other day would have immediately picked up on Obelie.

Obelie was on the verge of giving up hope, quitting, calling an end to the possibility of seeing his dear brother again. He got quiet and started to massage his scalp while tears ran down his face. He tried to put the different pieces of the puzzle together. He recognized Salvatore, he saw his face for an instant when he got out of the car to cover him with the blanket—and when it clicked in his mind that Salvatore was a client of his fathers, sheer anger began to set in when realizing that his father was behind all of this madness. With this motivating factor, Obelie started into internal screams, louder than any other brain scream he had ever attempted—something which would have normally caused Toby to drip blood from his ears—they were hypnotic life bolts as if Obelie’s kinetic shrieks served the same purpose as a doctor’s defibrillator used to revive a patient. This brought Toby to life again, a power stronger than any other medium which could have been used to bring Toby out of his minor coma.

Doctors saw that Toby was awake and entered the room to try to communicate with him. But Toby was unresponsive to the questions and the bobbing heads in his vision’s pathway. The doctor snapped his fingers in front of Toby’s face to try to get any sort of reaction. There was no observable discerning reaction—Toby didn’t blink or physically respond but they saw that his heart rate had sped up slightly through the heart-monitor. This gave them slight relief, basic proof that his mind was functioning again. They left the room and continued their efforts to try to find out who this mysterious boy was, for he had no identification on his body.

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Relief set in for Obelie after getting an extrasensory response from his brother. Toby finally responded to the calls of his brother and a new found hope settled in for both of them that they would be able to reunite.

The car had come to a stop and bright light from the sun blinded Obelie for a few seconds until his eyes got adjusted. His head was re-bagged and he was taken out of the trunk, carried approximately ninety yards. He heard the sounds of the ocean, crashing waves, seagulls and feet upon sand. He subsequently heard footsteps on wood paneling, a dock of some sort he considered. That sound soon ceased and finally he was set down upon a cushion. He was still outside, he felt the wind running through his clothes and echoing through the bag over his head. An engine reared up and before he knew it, wind was blowing faster and harder than before, rolling through him—he was propelling to a new destination, a place one couldn’t get to by car. He assumed he was on a boat, possibly a yacht and judging from the impact of the wind upon his body, he figured they were soaring at incredible speeds.
Obelie was given food to eat under his bagged head—Toby was nourished with food from the hospital staff and both of them throughout that day, although so far from each other, carried out pretty much the same activity: to sit and attempt to converse with each other. It was a form of meditation, spiritual communiqué. Though there wasn’t much dialog at all, they could still slightly correspond with each other, preparing each other for a much needed reunion which they hoped would come later that night in their unconscious lives.

Nighttime had approached and the two fell into sleep, Toby upon the hospital bed and Obelie upon the cushion he was placed upon at the beginning of that day. And they both entered into dissimilar dream states at different locations—their dreams began in their own individual dreamscapes.

Toby found himself tied down to the hospital bed by wires and tubes feeding into his body. He methodically ripped them out—out of his arms, legs, chest, belly, and neck— enough to enable him to be able to release himself from the bed. There was still a strange breathing mat over his mouth attached to a wire going through his nose, another tube departing from his chin, and a plated inhalation apparatus attached above his nose, in between his eyes—all of which still dangled freely. He slid his weak body out of the bed and walked to the window. Over ten feet up, he looked down upon an ocean of blue water—the hospital building was somehow grounded atop the water. He opened the window and leaned his body outwards and toppled himself out of the window. His weak body slowly descended towards the water at a sluggish dawdling speed, as if gravity had been hindered and the air condensed with helium.

The ticking of time had slowed and motion was mired.

Obelie found himself on the yacht in the same place where he had fallen asleep--except the bag that covered his face was now an oddly shaped oxygen mask perfectly contorted to the shape of his head and scalp. He looked to his left and saw a building stationed atop the water—the same building Toby was descending from. The water below him slowly rolled like an endless sea of melted wax.

Obelie peered upwards and saw Toby falling towards the water-- Toby looked down and saw Obelie looking at him and just like that—their differing dreams morphed into one in the same—and they both became involved in the same scenario.

Toby’s body eventually made impact with water and he slowly began to sink towards the ocean’s basin. It was obvious that he was having trouble swimming upwards to catch air—he continued to sink farther and farther down into nothingness. Obelie noticed this and jumped out of the yacht into the water and propelled his body towards Toby, caught him under his arms and brought him back to sea-level.

They float out of the water and find themselves back upon the yacht. They were able to reunite and for the rest of their dual-dream, they relished every second of being together. They sat with each and discussed their father—his image drifting through the clouds and his shadowy figure reflecting itself upon the dark blue water. They felt an overwhelming sadness in their souls—a sadness which evolved even before their separation. A sadness which was eating them whole, killing their inspiration and contentment slowly each day. And they only found solace by placing blame upon one source—the man who was responsible for their livelihood. The dream slowed down, they stopped talking with each and simply sat and took in each other’s warmth. It felt like they were upon that yacht together for hours, days even, enjoying each other’s companionship.

Finally, like being sucked out of a vacuum, their dream was beginning to fade; they began to drift from each other and traveled through a clockwork-like alien membrane of watery moving parts with gears and odd components marking their transition from their nighttime delusion back to their wakeful worlds. They both sloshed through the anomalous device and suddenly, before they knew it, they were back to where they were that following night—Obelie curled up in a ball upon the cushion of the yacht and Toby lying comfortably upon the hospital bed. As they entered into consciousness, they had each other fresh on their minds. It was now a bit more clear to each of them where the other was situated. This gave them strength, more than any drug a doctor could prescribe. It gave Toby the muscle to rise from his hospital bed early that morning and walk out without being seen, as if vanishing without a trace. It gave them strength, more than any courage a motivational speaker could provide.

It gave Obelie the bravery to quietly remove the bag on his head, quietly scuttle past sleeping Salvatore to the life preserver behind him, contort his body into the floating device slowly without making a sound and flop his body into the water. He began a strange form of the doggy paddle--strange because of the cuffs on his legs and arms--he was traversing, slowly but surely, further and further away from his captor.

As the two continued on their solemn journey--Obelie through ocean, Toby across land—their dream from the previous night, though slowly evaporating, still danced through their thoughts and their subconscious-discussion with each other still retained. A core principle from the dream was most evident; it was a revelation of sorts: they realized that they were nothing more than mere variables in their father’s equation. That they were nothing more than one self-contained experiment. They had a newly found goal in their current situation, in their current temperament, more than just to be with one and other again, but to get their revenge.

And when they do eventually reunite to get their retribution, Mr. Boubles will die a happy man.