Free A Man Overboard by Shawn Hopkins

ludicrous scene the infamous Sandman could have lined up for him next. He double-checked the address on the mailbox just to make sure he had broken into the right house.
    An insatiable need to find Joseph exploded in his chest, filling him with a suffocating panic he had no way of repelling.

13
     
    As twilight handed the sky over to night, Jack sat behind the wheel, two hands handling it so as to keep the car between the solid white lines—though barely conscious of the effort it took to do so. His mind was elsewhere, the nonsensical puzzle pieces of the last few days arguing on behalf of more eccentric theories that might, perhaps, better explain the recent changes in his life.
    One of them was the “dream theory.” Dream Theory insisted he was still asleep, either still on the cruise ship with Stacey naked beside him or even so far back as the night before they left for Miami, everything about the trip a dream. The problem with that theory, however, was that it disappeared into a sea of subjectivity so unsteady that there was no real way to tell how much of his past could be part of the dream. Maybe his whole marriage had been a concoction mixed by REM sleep. Maybe he was still in college, and this Stacey girl didn’t even exist outside of his imagination…a drug-induced coma after an accident he couldn’t remember, or a head injury from a falling air-conditioning unit sustained during his walk to work. Maybe his entire life was a dream, and like so many science-fiction stories, he was actually hooked up to machines that were filling his mind with a false reality while harvesting his natural energy for the psychic aliens now ruling earth. Or maybe Mr. Sandman had grown bored of bestowing pleasant dreams on children and had ventured into a new market of darkness that now exploited adults. For Hans Christian Anderson’s 1841 portrayal of the folk tale—Ole-Luk-Oie sprinkling magic dust on children’s eyes to either give them pleasant dreams for good behavior or no dreams for bad behavior—was a far cry from this torment. Though E.T.A. Hoffman’s darker, 1816 portrayal of the Sandman might be worth consideration.
    And yet it was Ole-Luk-Oie—who actually turned out to be Morpheus, the Greek dream god—that helped transition from the “dream theory” to another one, a piece of text stepping forth from one of memory’s forgotten cells.
I will show you my brother. He is also called Ole-Luk-Oie but he never visits anyone but once, and when he does come, he takes him away on his horse, and tells him stories as they ride along. He knows only two stories.
     
One of these is so wonderfully beautiful, that no one in the world can imagine anything at all like it; but the other is just as ugly and frightful, so that it would be impossible to describe it…
     
There now, you can see my brother, the other Ole-Luk-Oie; he is also called Death.
     
    That Jack could reel any of the words out from the sediment lying at the bottom of whatever lost brain lake they’d settled in gave him pause. It didn’t seem plausible that that should have happened, and it made him pause at theory number two—the theory that Sandman’s brother was suggesting. The one lobbing his mind back and forth like it was a birdie fluttering over the net of truth. The one that proclaimed he had never been rescued from the ocean. That no hand ever did reach down into the dark waters to grasp his hand at the last possible second.
    That he was dead.
    But (as he surely couldn’t be in heaven) the concept of this being some kind of in-between, a testing ground for his soul or some sort of readiness exercise meant to prepare him for passage through the Pearly Gates, was also a theory with no practical use. If this was a supernal experience only, then the Joseph he was looking for didn’t exist and neither did the wife he was mourning. Nothing was real at all. And if this wasn’t real, if this wasn’t a physical reality taking place on an objective