. Prologue .
sixth sense n.
a power of perception seemingly independent of and additional to the five
senses.
(Saturday, 7:32 a.m.)
There’s something about this: of waking up on the heels of a memory; of opening my eyes and blinking because there’s sunlight in them, and not the fevered glow of some recurring nightmare. Nevertheless my heart races. It feels like a nightmare, until consciousness settles and I realize that here and now the light is different from the one I just left behind. Last night the curtains had been closed just so – there is something meaningful in that little chink of window still left so ominously exposed. That long, thin pillar of sunshine falls onto me, and I squint and tremble to greet the new morning. Today, just like so many other days, something feels wrong, dreadfully wrong, and I can’t place what it is.
I turn over, and the ray of light scores over my back like sandpaper only to rake across the bed.
Remy’s hand lies on the pillow between us, illuminated in that golden streak of brightness. Long, thin, sensitive; each finger is a wonder of expression to me, a pattern yet to be matched. But it is his face that catches me now. I suddenly realize that I have been dreaming of his face, a face bathed in light as the sun bathes it now.
No other countenance but his can so completely disown all previous conceptions of its wearer. Why is it that his face can be so open in sleep as it is closed in wakefulness? I often watch him sleeping – I climb the contours of his face, and the journey is bold, illicit. What intrigues me about him is this – that in touching his silent cheek I feel connected to a part of him that no one has ever seen before, this solitary, mysterious, haunted man. So often I have lain here, wishing to be like Jean, to be able to probe into his unguarded mind, to see who Remy LeBeau really is.
So much of his past is a mystery. But so much of his future could be unfurled to me, if only I could control this unwanted, stolen power inside.
This is why I am troubled. The sun chills me, and I find no solace in the morning, just as I do not in the night. My dreams keep telling me half-truths that the day cannot resolve. Instead, with the sunrise comes the certain notion that all my dreams will be woven into waking reality; and that I am the dreamweaver, the vision made flesh.
I cannot reach out and touch his face. I fear that my touch will transform him into the thing he has become in my dreams. A light, like the other six of us. A light, like the other seven of them.
Lights to both save and destroy the world.
I am shaking. All my little madnesses bleed into the day, trickling into every facet of my life, with a deliberation I cannot stem. I slip out of bed like every morning before, feeling fated. Two months now we have shared this space; and suddenly I regret. Every day seems less coherent, every moment less real. I cover my eyes.
Only the dreams seem real.
Only this godforsaken light.