Dreams Really Do Come True

The clock on the wall ticked too slowly. I was sure that it wound backwards each time I blinked, but my eyes went dry whenever I tried to catch it doing so. An odd thing to keep in a waiting room.

It *was* a waiting room, I'm sure of it. I think it was, anyway. There were chairs arranged around the perimeter, and a toneless beige paint on the wall, which qualified it well enough in my books. If only I could recall what I was waiting for.

"Mr. Murphy," he said, coming around the corner, "if you're ready."

I supposed I was ready enough, given how long I'd waited. How long had I waited? I wouldn't let on that I was thoroughly befuddled, not to this newcomer anyway. He stood there in the doorway, looking at me expectantly. Badly balding, dark rimmed glasses, short, and holding a clipboard, he couldn't have looked more like the most generic office functionary if he'd tried. I nodded and stood, and the slight man bade me follow him into the hall beyond.

Stepping into the corridor outside the waiting room, I looked about, determined to locate myself in some place familiar. Doors dotted the length of the hall, with other concourses branching off at random. The lights flickered and hummed annoyingly. Of course they did.

"Well, go on then" the little man instructed, gesturing vaguely around with his clipboard. I was clearly meant to lead him on from here. I couldn't let on that I didn't know where to go, so I picked a door nearby at random and made for it.

"Sure," he said sarcastically, "why not that one."

"Look man," I began, ready to tell him off.

"No, no, that's fine. It makes very little difference in the end." He pulled a pencil out of his shirt pocket and erased something on the clipboard as we came before doorway.

"Number fourteen" I read aloud, finding a brass tag affixed to the front of the door.

"Well, fourteen" he corrected.

"What?"

"It's just fourteen, not number fourteen" he said with a wave of his pencil, as though explaining to a toddler that the sky was blue.

"Does it matter?" I asked, thoroughly tired of the man's pedantic airs.

"I suppose that's up to you in the end" he retorted with a wry chuckle.

I grew tired of trying to puzzle out what he meant, and opened the door wide.

A living room, modestly furnished, lay beyond. It was unremarkable, and no more familiar to me than the rest of my surroundings, but for the woman on the couch; my 10th grade girlfriend.

"Jenny Browning?" I exclaimed. She sat there, idly flipping through the channels on her TV, seemingly oblivious to my presence at her door. I looked to my companion, who was busy stifling a yawn.

"Mmm? Oh, sorry," he mumbled, "yes fourteen for Ms. Browning." Another mark on the clipboard.

"Can she see us?" I asked.

"What do you think?" he replied, reaching past me to pull the door shut. I opened my mouth to protest.

"We don't have all day," he insisted, cutting me off, "we've many more to get through."

The next door, bearing the number two, opened into the back of a rattling mail truck as it drove down the road. The old redhead who did the parcel deliveries in my building wrangled with the wandering wheel before her as she bumped along. Again, the little man pulled the door shut after only moments.

The next door, fifty four. A small storage closet where a woman all too familiar to me rummaged among some boxes, wearing the green apron synonymous with a popular coffee chain.

"Becky," I said in shock as she pushed boxes aside in search of something, "we dated for like a year."

"Fascinating" the man said sarcastically, cataloguing whatever it was he needed to.

"Hey now hang on," I insisted as he pulled this door closed too, "what's the big idea here, huh? What's going on? I don't know where the hell I am, who you are, what these people have to do with any of..."

"Look," he stopped me cold with an upraised hand, "I just have to make sure you get through these, okay? Open the door, take a look, move on. I don't make the rules, alright?"

"This is a dream" I said, not seriously. It was never a dream.

"This is *obviously* a dream" he replied, pushing another door open. Nineteen. My mom's friend Tara sat in the waiting room of a car dealership, flipping through a magazine and kicking her flip flop back and fourth.

We carried on. Five, the front desk girl at work. Seven, a woman I'd done a group project with in college. One, a lady who'd dropped off my Door Dash order two weeks ago. Forty seven, my college roommate Kevin, typing away at a laptop in a home office. One hundred and ten, my cousin Jeremy's girlfriend scrolled through Instagram in a cafeteria. It went on like this for a while, mostly women, a few men, all seemingly unaware as I peered in on them at work or in their homes. I knew or recognized them all, if somewhat vaguely in some cases.

"How many are there?" I asked after maybe two dozen doors. The little man checked his clipboard.

"Two more" he replied dryly. We turned a corner.

"Hang on there's three doors here" I said. The little man shrugged.

"That second one is new, by the looks of it."

"What do you mean, 'new'? I just asked you like two seconds ago!"

He smiled, quite pleased with himself.

"We're very quick, you know. We don't miss much."

Disregarding him, I opened the closest one, electing to leave the 'new' one another minute. Fourteen, again. My American Lit professor from college hunched over a stack of papers, red pen scanning one before her. For a woman twice my age, or more, there was something unbelievably alluring about her. I'd had the biggest crush on her.

"Dr. White" I mused to myself as we moved on. I had so far resisted the urge to work out what the numbers meant, or who the people had been in relation to them. This was, by my partner's admission, a dream; there was no use arguing with the unknowable logic of fancy. We approached the 'new' door. The brass tag read "1", lacking the aged patina of some of the others.

A slight woman, about my age, lay in repose on her bed, cotton underwear around her ankles, shirt still on, with an industrial looking wand pressed into her unkempt bush. Her brow was furrowed furiously, eyes screwed shut in concentration. Curiously, the little man didn't close the door immediately. Feeling guilty at looking in on this most private of moments, I peered around the room at anything other than the woman on the bed. I'd seen enough to recognize her as the girl who'd just moved in across the hall.

"This feels a little personal man, I don't think we need to hang around," I said to her ceiling as she began to emit stifled whimpers.

"Well we might as well wait a second. Save us a trip back, you know?" Surely he knew that I did not.

She pressed the wand hard into herself with both hands, seemingly pleading with herself to cross the finish line with what remained of the breath she held fast to.

"ComeOnComeOnComeOnPleasePleasePlease," she muttered with trailing desperation, "JustOneMorePlease." Her perseverance paid off, and she began to shudder happily in her success. The man stared at the door expectantly, pencil hovering above his record.

"Aaaaand..." he droned, faking some anticipation, "two. There we go." He punctuated some measure on his sheet. The girl on the bed flipped her toy off and let her arm fall to the bed next to her, exhaling contentedly.

"Wait just a fucking minute!" I yelled as he pulled the door shut on her room, "Is that what this is? Is that what the numbers are?"

"It's looking an awful lot like it is, isn't it?" he explained in his dry, bored tone. God, I hated him.

I stomped past him, staring daggers at, and through, his beady little eyes. Looking forward to ending his sick little game, I prepared to open door the last of these cursed doors, number...

One thousand three hundred and sixty seven.

No matter how hard I blinked, squinted, and focused on it, the number refused to be believed. My diminutive little guide caught up to me and chuckled, whistling softly at the digits on the door.

"Now that's gotta be some kind of record. I haven't seen something like this all week. You gotta watch those ones when you wake up; they can be trouble".

"I don't even think I want to know at this point," I said, near whispering in my disbelief, thinking back to the number on my old roommates door. We'd shared a shower. He used my towels.

"Well," he said, almost sympathetically, "you know just as well as I do that this doesn't quite work like that." He leaned over and pushed the door open for me this time.

"What the hell..."

I'd never seen her in my life.

___

I awoke, as you might expect, with a shuddering, gasping start.

7:29am, as far as my alarm clock was concerned. Saturday morning.

Somehow expecting my room to look or feel differently, I was awash with relief to realize that I was awake, truly. None of the sluggish unreality that often outed your dreams as falsehood were present. The angles of the room all made enough sense to assure me that I had, blessedly, awoken to the realest of worlds.

Accepting that the combination of YouTube rabbit holes, late night munchies, and flagrant self abuse that had become habitual before bed again might have all combined to manifest the debauched little accountant and his backrooms of perversity, I did my level best to get on with my morning and forget the entire ordeal.

In direct defiance of the usual laws of such things, I realized halfway through scrubbing down in the shower that the images refused to fade from my mind. I never remembered dreams at all really, and yet I could still picture every detail of the rooms I'd looked in on, and the stale carpet smell of the halls, and the wet sniffling of the little clerical creep who'd accompanied me.

Brushing my teeth, I resolved to remember who all I had seen in those rooms. There were some obvious standouts; I was confident that all the women I'd ever dated for more than a few weeks were in there. Obviously, there was the matter of Kevin. I admired my half-heartedly maintained physique with pride as I recalled Professor White and the fourteen compliments she'd apparently paid me in her private time.

Some, I mused while dressing, were more enigmatic. The guy at the convenience store on the corner and his eighteen measures of appreciation confused me; he was such a grump whenever I was in there. Maybe that was part of it for him; refuse to give me the right change and then go home to fondly remember the interaction. The front desk girl from work, too, surprised me; I don't think she'd ever so much as made eye contact with me outside of telling me to stop forgetting my key card. The appearance of no less than four of my mom's friends was...something.

I'd almost, as I slugged my bag across my back and reached for my housekeys, succeeded in ignoring the most obvious outlier of the bunch. Someone, some unknowable, mysterious, shadowy figure had rubbed it out nearly 1400 times to me. For me. While thinking about me? At any rate, the exact qualifying conditions mattered little. The number was genuinely, unquestionably, absurd. Obscene even.

I made my way to the elevator, grinning knowingly as I passed the door of apartment 503, sure that the occupant might well still be lying there in the fading bliss of her morning glory. I wondered if it worked like that, in real time. I mean, if it worked at all. Surely it didn't, right? Dreams don't come true. Do they?

Sure they do, I decided. After all, why not? I was a good looking guy, funny, tall, hard working. Why wouldn't people think about me while they jerked and rubbed themselves? Still, I thought as the city bus bumped me along downtown, thirteen and a half hundred times had to be unhealthy. Even assuming that I was the only person she thought about, she'd have to have cum every single day for the last three and a half years while thinking about me.

Who, I wondered as I got off the bus, in their right mind would commit to that sort of thing? I had no obvious stalkers, and hadn't recognized her at all besides. I mean, she was gorgeous enough; I'd definitely have remembered a face like hers. Dark hair in loose curls fell about a tan face that framed warm eyes and and a wide smile, just the sort that always spun me out into hopeless daydreams. Not slim by any means, her figure had seared itself into my memory with every mouthwatering curve. The skirt she'd worn in the snapshot I'd been stretched enticingly over wide, soft hips that I'd have happily died to put my hands on. The modest cut of her top had shown just the barest promise of what was sure to be the most astounding cleavage. The glimpse I'd gotten was of her in a breakroom of some sort, picking away at some sort of breakfast, scrolling absentmindedly through her phone. There were no clues that offered any meaningful solutions as to her identity, and certainly none to suggest her prolific deviancy. She looked, for all the world, like any other woman you'd fall for. Well, any woman that I'd fall for anyway.

I beat a hasty track up the steps of the building I worked in. I won't bore you with the details of my profession; suffice it to say I spend a lot of time looking at spreadsheets and working weekends. At least coming in on Saturday meant I could forgo the need for a tie and jacket; it was unlikely there would be more than a few people upstairs. I let myself feel a moment of disappointment that the front desk girl didn't work weekends. I'm not sure what I would have done if she'd been there though. I'm certain that making eye contact would have been the most I could have managed.

I settled in at my cubicle, sprawling the contents of my bag out messily across my desk. It was audit season, and I had a mountain of data to pull before the independent review team showed up on Monday. It was an enormous pain in the ass, but it had to happen, and no amount of putting it off would change that. Headphones on, laptop open, I dove in.

The work went well, if somewhat slowly, and by mid morning I was beginning to suspect I might perish of boredom. I hit the 'compile' button that would dominate the resources of my terminal for several minutes, and stretched back in my chair, yawning.

"Sleeping on the job again dick nuts?" shouted Jeeter from a few rows over, thoroughly terrifying me.

"How long have you been over there?" I hollered back, having not registered his arrival.

"Just got in," he replied, approaching to lean on the flimsy wall of my vocational prison cell, chewing his gum like he was allergic to keeping his mouth closed, "you?"

"Yeah I don't know, I think I got here around 9:00 this morning."

"Yeah, nice," he said, not listening as he peered conspiratorially around the office, "Hey you got that audit thing starting Monday, right?"

"You work on my team dipshit, you know it starts Monday." Jeeter was a lot of things, but bright was not frequently among them.

"Sure, yeah. Hey did you hear?" he continued, still glancing around suspiciously.

"I heard your mum's affections can be rented by the hour."

"Fuck off, asshole" he laughed. "They sent the auditors in early. One of 'em's already in the boardroom. Shit's everywhere."

"Explains why you're here then I'd imagine" I teased, knowing he was nowhere near ready to contribute his data.

"First, fuck you. Second, I'd have been here before the fucking sun came up if I knew who they'd sent."

I asked him to clarify.

"Bro," he whispered, eyes flickering furtively toward the boardroom, "I don't know what the fuck a woman like that is doing in accounting. It's fucking criminal."

I still didn't catch his drift.

"It's like," he clarified, drawing the outline of an hourglass in the air with his hands as he whistled, "you know? Unreal body on her. Forget spreadsheets, I wanna spread..."

"I'm sure you do, tiger," I laughed, craning my neck to try to spot her through the glass wall of windows surrounding the conference room, "but maybe you should work on being useful for a change and get your numbers pulled before she fucks you out of a job."

He pulled a face, but conceded the point and slunk away to get his work done.

Another hour passed in productive silence, only broken occasionally by Jeeter cursing at his computer. Shortly before lunch, my phone dinged with a text message. Jeeter. I was sure it would be some shitty meme.

+ My guy, did you see her yet?

I replied that I hadn't, that I wanted this done so I could get home.

+ You're a whole ass clown dude

+ Hang on

+ like always, gotta do your dirty work for you...

I observed with a grin as I watched Jeeter stand at his desk, run his fingers ineffectively through his disastrous haircut, and walk too slowly past the bank of glass panes that served as the north wall of the room, before circling back around to his desk. A moment later, my phone dinged again.

+ [Attachment: 1 Photo]

It was blurry, and the angle was atrocious, but there was no doubt to be had; my heart forced itself violently into my throat and my chest tightened as I recognized, with the most painful clarity, Ms. 1367.

I think I set a land speed record as I packed my bag ran out of there.

___

The next day was torture. Knowing that I'd be facing her first thing on Monday morning almost destroyed me. I stared at the photo Jeeter had taken of her obsessively, willing it to be anyone else, trying to spot some detail that

would prove her to be someone she wasn't. The proof wasn't there, though; it was definitely her.

I hardly slept all weekend, and certainly not more than an hour or two Sunday night. Despite my earnest pleading to God above, I was not hit by a bus, car, meteorite, or lightning bolt on my way in to work. I looked a wreck as I slunk through the lobby, not even brave enough to check for the receptionist's glance as I drifted by. Choking back my terror, I pushed through the last set of doors to the department.

The place was abustle with activity, which meant I might skate by unseen or unnoticed. Maybe I'd luck out and have a fatal heart attack at my desk before I had to present my report to her team. I decided to lend some aid to the prospective explosion of my arteries by fixing myself a coffee from the kitchen.

The machine made some heinous sludge that couldn't legally or morally be called coffee, but I needed it to overcome the sleepless agony of the weekend. I bullied myself into steeling some resolved while I stood there waiting, knock-off Keurig screeching and slurping along angrily; she couldn't possible know what I knew about her. Surely I could keep it together long enough to run through my slides, hand her my report, and leave the room without vomiting on myself. There was no reason at all to let on that I suspected her to be the worlds most prolific masturbator, or to indicate that I was aware of my role in her private sex life. There was certainly no cause for me to give any impression at all that I'd spent the last 48 hours alternating between wondering where she knew me from and what she looked like naked.

"That thing sounds awful" said a woman from behind me, genuine concern in her voice.

"Yeah, well," I replied, back turned to the source, "Bertha's got just what I need this morning." I was pleased at the chance to practice keeping a level, casual tone. She laughed cheerfully.

"You call it Bertha? I guess it fits; she sounds like a Bertha alright."

Of course it was called Bertha. It had been called that for years. Not as a slight to Berthas universally, but because it sounded like it's namesake, the CEOs wife, tossing her cookies in the bathroom at a Christmas party several years ago. I chuckled as I turned to address her.

"You must be new here..."

You'd be correct in guessing who stood there, mere feet away, in that tiny kitchenette with me.

"Oh fuck" I said.