Chapter 10 

Even if all the stupid snuggling and cuddling distracted me from the movie for the first ten minutes, making me oblivious to a very important grainy black-and-white scene, I caught up quickly with the events. Suddenly I found myself immersed in the story unrolling in front of my eyes—and not on the one sideways. I found myself fascinated by the colorful flight into Paris’s Opera Populaire, with its pulsing crowd of performers, chorus girls, set decorators, well-dressed audiences and most of all, the mysterious Phantom haunting the depths of the Opera, who molded the voice of an orphan chorus girl into a pure-as-crystal soprano , transforming her into the next Opera’s big star.

Of course, there had to be romance involved, or else Buffy wouldn’t have wanted to watch it, even if the music was terrific. But instead of being usually cheesy and silly, it had a heartbreaking depth I would’ve never expected. The phantom with the teeny mask, who’s a man hiding more than a mild skin problem, was in love with the rising star, but she didn’t return his feelings. She loved another man, her handsome, perfect-skinned childhood sweetheart. The despair and loneliness the phantom exhibited because of it undid me, tearing some threads that embroidered my heart, and leaving part of the sheer shell vulnerable to emotion. But when the phantom put into play a mechanical music box with a cymbal-clapping monkey, the only good remembrance of his ill-treated and dark childhood, in the cold loneliness of the cellars, I couldn’t stop the tears sliding down my cheeks, thick with sadness and compassion. The way he was looking at that music box, as if he’d never known happiness in his life and the clapping monkey was the only thing that filled him with a spark of joy, made me wish with all my heart that I could be there next to him, to comfort him and shelter him.

And strangely enough, in that same heartbeat, all my surroundings started to blur, to smudge, as if everything was being rubbed in linear motions, distorting all the angular and circular shapes in the living room to a baffling hazy mixture. The only thing that remained unchanged was that tear-jerking image of the phantom in my mind, clear and vivid as a flesh and bone image. The reality of it was striking, hypnotizing.

Like some bizarre dream, I felt a vaporous tunnel forming in the back of my head, pulling me to its unfathomable depth as if with a mysterious magnetic force. Though my eyes weren’t closed, I was suddenly in the darkness behind them, its intensity deepening every second. In some corner of my mind, I knew this wasn’t normal, that my eyelids needed to be pressed together to find this black veil. Even some ghosts of light should’ve been dancing across this puzzling night. But I didn’t have enough time to ponder it. Misty twines, filmy and soft as a whisper, floated from behind and coiled around my arms and legs, infusing their touch with a spellbinding melody through my pores, singing to my heart a melancholic call. I realized it was the same lullaby of the music box, only it had a gentle-as-a-breeze symphony of voices echoing in the background.

If angels could sing, that would’ve been their anthem.

Gradually, I let myself be drawn back in a trance by those whispery twines. I was about to reach the gates of the vaporous tunnel, the moisture in the air getting denser, when I remembered the tears tickling and cooling my cheeks. Somehow, I knew that my skin was far away, that it wasn’t part of me in that moment—a wrapping that I couldn’t feel anymore, dwelling in another existence. I felt light. And that’s when understanding fell on me as heavy and thick as an elephant.

I'm literally in the back of my head, I realized.

Suup. A strange force suddenly sucked me as if with a vacuum, back again into the living room. The same image of the cymbal-clapping monkey and the phantom staring at it showed on the TV. I blinked once. Twice. My eyelashes sticky with tears. The image changed and the movie kept rolling. I felt a pucker forming between my eyebrows. Hadn’t time kept going while I was on that odd daze? It looked as if the movie had frozen—or was I imagining everything? Maybe it was still part of this reverie I’d seemed to fall into.

No. It wasn’t. I could feel my body, my skin, the heaviness of my being in this shadowy room where random bursts of light coming from the television touched our faces. I was here, not far away. Then, why? Had I experienced a short trip to space, travelling to a parallel dimension where time ran a lot slower than on Earth, say, an alien minute equaling a terrestrial microsecond? That vaporous tunnel could’ve been a wormhole leading to a remote galaxy.

Whoa, I frowned in disapproval, and I’d criticized that Star Wars bookworm out in school when I was a latent Star Trek freak.

I shook my head softly. It’d been only a daydream, a vision, a hallucination—or whatever it was called. The tunnel and the whispery twines had just…just, um…a reeling sensation stroked my head. What was I talking about? The pucker on the top of my nose deepened, as if trying to wriggle out the train of thought that had escaped my grasp in a blast. Oh, yeah, the tunnel and the…the…dammit, the reeling sensation worsened. What was I trying to remember? The images were slipping away, leaving the thread of my mind. If I could’ve only remembered what those sneaky images were. The trace of them, though faint, still lingered in the sea of my thoughts, but its outline was too weak, too badly sketched to figure it out.

My head hurt, throbbing at the temples from the exertion. I pinched the bridge of my nose. What was happening to me? Was I becoming mad, imagining things and words that hadn’t touched my lips? I bet Freud would’ve loved psychoanalyzing me, and I would’ve loved to see its result because until now everything pointed out to one thing: nutcase. Huge nutcase with Star Trek paranoia, though why Star Trek, I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember.

I brushed my cheek with the back of my hand to wipe away the soggy trails of my tears and turned my head aside. Buffy was flying in Dreamland, deep into its unfathomable, beautiful territory. By the way she was smiling in her sleep, however, beautiful wasn’t the right way to put it. Her uptilted lips made it seem as if a halo of bliss surrounded her, and it made me wonder if it was because of the pristine fantasy her mind seemed to be indulging in, or if it was because of the strong arms that cuddled her sleeping body. Maybe it was a brew of both.

I pulled my eyes up and found Ian’s deep eyes. He was watching me, not the artistic images running one after another on the flat screen, or at Buffy’s peaceful damsel-face resting on his chest. His eyes were fixed on mine, and they had that studious air he always had whenever those emerald irises found me—usually while I wasn’t looking his way. But I was far from being unaware of his thoughtful stare. Every time he aimed it on me, even if I wasn’t watching him, it fell down on my body with bone-cracking strength, its weight as heavy and resonant as a grand piano. I hadn’t felt it this time because of the rainstorm of confusion that had been thundering inside my head before, but I was certainly seeing it and feeling it now. It was because of this sparkle of awareness shining in me that the sudden wave of kindness, thin as a single strand of hair, stroking his face didn’t escape my notice. I knew that tender feeling wasn’t supposed to be obvious, that it was meant to be buried deep down, but my eyes were hawk-sharp and didn’t lose anything in that moment.