Free The Experiment of Dreams by Brandon Zenner Page A

home after his first visit to the lab with two thousand dollars, and three additional sessions scheduled—each at one thousand dollars. In a little over a month, Ben took home five thousand dollars, with the promise of more sessions to come. With that kind of income, Ben was able to tell the bar manager that he wasn’t available to fill in any shifts that week.
    He bought the Samsung on a whim after a drunken night of staring at the old Hitachi, gathering dust in the corner. That night, like many before, his gaze absentmindedly switched to his wife’s painting on the wall. It was a pattern he’d grown familiar with over the years.
    Thinking about the past was an obsession. Images swam through his mind, overwhelmed by Emily and his old house: she with paint on her cheek and forehead, standing before a canvas in the room with the large windows; he at the doorway looking in. He recalled the small bar they owned. He remembered the look of genuine joy and total fear on Emily’s face as they signed the last of the papers, received the keys, and opened the door as bar owners for the very first time. That bar was their dream, their future. It was a place for their children to work and to learn the ropes of the business as they grew up. He imagined arguing with his kids as they grew from children to adults, they insisting the interior was outdated and drab and the menu in need of urgent updating.
    He saw himself and Emily in their senior years—aged and stubborn—refusing to make changes to the decor or food, despite their children probably being right. Then, when they reached those final years—when it was time to view the world from rocking chairs on the front porch with thick blankets draping their legs as they sipped glasses of red wine—they would let their children run the place. Their children would hand the business down to their grandchildren, and one day to their great-grandchildren, and they would stay on that front porch for as many years as their bodies would allow, hand in hand, watching the sun set and rise.
    Ben’s mind created these warped thoughts and images, these events that would now never happen, as he stared at the painting of the cabin in the woods. He sipped from his glass of whiskey, taking slugs straight from the bottle between sips from the glass.
    He saw his wife as she died, the shock and horror on the patrons’ faces, the monsters pinned face down on the ground as the police tightened cuffs around their wrists. The blood, all the blood. Ben’s own tears falling into the pools of that blood. The look in her eyes, the look in the eyes of the monsters on the ground craning their neck to see what was going on, the knife laying there in a puddle of warm blood, the hands of the medics ripping her away from him—swarming around her with respirators, gauze, needles, a neck brace.
    They let him stay by her side holding her hand because he wouldn’t let go—he would tear his own arm off before letting go. He stayed by her side in utter shock and solace for hours that felt like days. When he finally let go—had to let go—a huge amount of him died along with her.
    He has tried his best to leave that world behind.
    Then there was the painting of the cabin in the woods. Just glancing at it made everything come rushing back.
    After these drunk and tormenting nights, he would wake up in the morning with his head on fire and his mouth stale and dry. Sometimes he would awake with the painting of the cabin locked in his clenched fingers like a vice. Other times it was thrown in the corner of the room—nearly destroyed in a rage of drunken delirium. However, the painting always made it back on the wall.
    There was an odd and perverse sense of pleasure in his self-torment, an unwillingness to forget the past and erase Emily from his life and memory. There was pleasure in the pain, a pleasure in remembering Emily: her touch, her scent of jasmine, her warm embrace, her smile, her words, her skin, the way she