Oliver Woods’ Virtual Reality

20K GRAND PRIZE!

VIRTUAL REALITY OBSTACLE COURSE

TRY YOUR LUCK IN THE GAUNTLET!

*

Oliver Woods stood looking up at a two-story, lime green farmhouse. His feet were one step off the sidewalk in the unmowed grass. The front door stood at the end of a walkway made of red and brown rectangular stones.

Vaguely familiar, those rectangles.

t He glanced at the window to the right of the door. A fence extended into a field. To the left of the door the yard sloped downward. Oliver, a 35 year old man, was surprised by an image of himself rolling down the grassy hill.

He looked back up at the house with narrowed eyes.

“Where’s the obstacle course?”

*

He stepped up the walkway, hesitantly. He had a blurry recollection of the circular window at the top of the door. He remembered it being further away. Higher up.

He pressed the handle and found it unlocked, as if it were telling him this was where he was supposed to be.

He resisted the urge to call out and announce his presence. One part of his brain told him he’d been here before. Another part warned him not to remember.

The door opened all the way to a flight of stairs. To the side he could see the kitchen. He went by the stairs, brushed his hand against the railing as he passed.

Turning into the kitchen, he saw a small boy at the stove, maybe six years old, standing on a stool. He was stirring a large metal pot with a wooden spoon.

Oliver stood transfixed, watching the boy. He was about to say something to him, had in fact opened his mouth to speak when both the boy and the stool dissolved into the air.

A mockingbird sang out, scaring Oliver. He jumped. Looking toward the sound, he was struck by a feeling of déjà vu. The clock continued to chirp, and he stared at it.

He looked back at the stove. At the fridge. He smelled macaroni and cheese, could feel the warmth under his nose as if he were stirring the pot himself. He closed his eyes. He was stirring. A large pot of macaroni, blending it into the cheese sauce with a wooden spoon longer than his arm, his legs extended to the floor by a metal stool.

He opened his eyes. There was no pot on the stove. But the burner was red hot. He reached for the dial and turned it until it clicked off.

He could still smell the macaroni, the secret ingredient his grandmother always added: paprika. He remembered the fun they’d had saying it back and forth to one another. “Puh-pre-kuh.”

He looked back at the clock, now silent. There were 12 birds. One for each hour. Oliver closed his eyes and he was standing on that same stool, his grandmother beside him, naming each of the birds.

Bluebird

Blackbird

Oriole

Raven

Finch

Blue Jay

What was number seven? He heard his grandmother’s voice half-singing the names of the birds.

And then, he wasn’t imagining anymore. He could hear voices. They were muffled. Coming from upstairs.

Careful not to make a sound, Oliver rounded the bannister and put his foot on the first step of the stairs. With every new level of height Oliver felt more and more like a scared little boy.

The voices were coming from behind a door at the end of the hall.

He didn’t have to get very close to hear two distinct voices. One male, dominant and domineering. The other, female, sobbing.

A pain struck Oliver in his heart. The voices were elderly. He recognized them. He tried to turn, go back down the stairs. But his feet carried him to the end of the hall. He pressed his ear up against the door.

The man was cursing. Fuming. Oliver felt the house shaking from the footsteps beyond the door. He is pacing. Oliver was sure he would have heard those footsteps downstairs, if they were real.

It’s a memory, he reminded himself. The gauntlet.

He exhaled. It was barely audible, but the door pulled open immediately.

Any notion that this was not reality fled Oliver’s mind. He stood there, hunched over. Bright green eyes bore through him from out of the bald, wrinkled head of an old skinny man wearing apparently nothing but overalls.

Oliver looked from the man, who held a lead pipe, to the elderly woman, who lay curled up on the floor beside the bed. Then he looked back at the man.

“I told you to stay in your room.” The man took a step toward Oliver. Oliver was frozen.

“You’re just like your father, you filthy scoundrel.” He took another step.

The woman cried out. She looked as if she were trying to get up. Like she could save me from this maniac, Oliver thought.

It was all he had time to register. The man, resuming his repertoire of profanity, charged at Oliver, pipe raised over his head like a tomahawk.

Oliver spun on his heels, bunching up the rug and stumbling over himself before tumbling down the stairs and into a room off of the kitchen. He didn’t know how he’d known to go there. It was a small room. There was a stack of boxes in a corner, a table with a lamp, and a bed. Oliver dove under the bed. As he slid, he was sure his head wouldn’t clear the bottom of the frame. But it did, just barely.

Thumb in his mouth, Oliver didn’t know what to do, and for a moment didn’t have any care on the matter.

I’m safe here.

But she was up there with that monster.

He couldn’t stay there under the bed sucking his thumb, knowing what that man was capable of. Oliver knew he had to save her. He wasn’t some little kid, for chrissakes. He was a grown man.

Oliver pulled himself out from under the bed. Stared at the inside of the closed door. Momentarily considered diving back under the bed, curled up, thumb in mouth.

Grabbed a knife on his way through the kitchen, slid it from the block. A nice big one. Stomped up the stairs. Down the hall. The gauntlet. Kicked open the door.

The man had the pipe raised high over the woman. There in the spot of sunlight on the floor, she was bracing for a fatal blow. The anger in the man’s eyes said it all.

Oliver moved in, charging with divine conviction, his arms outstretched. He made a terrible sound as he ran, and caught the old loon off guard. The pipe came swinging, but too late, and Oliver dove sideways.

Getting to his feet, Oliver felt the follow up coming on fast. No sooner than he felt the breeze against the back of his arms through the open window did he side-step his oncoming attacker. Silently the old man disappeared out into the daylight.

Oliver lifted the woman from the floor and carried her easily down the stairs.

He used a free thumb to open the door, and the sunlight consumed them.

*

He flinched at the brightness, then recovered.

A man and two women sat at a long table, facing him.

They were in a large grey room. Oliver no longer had the woman in his arms. She was nowhere to be seen.

“Oliver Woods,” one of the women said. “Congratulations on completing the obstacle course.”

Nonplussed, Oliver scratched his head.

“You’ve conquered your fear,” said the other woman.

“Fear is the biggest obstacle of all,” said the first woman. The man said nothing.

Oliver remembered. The gauntlet.

“I- I won?”

“Yes,” said the second woman. “And here is your prize.”

The first woman rose, came around the side of the table, and went to Oliver in the middle of the empty room.

She handed him a small folded piece of paper.

He unfolded it. It was a check, for $20,000.

He looked up, and the woman was gone. The remaining woman and the man were staring at him.

“Thank you,” Oliver said. “Where do I go now?”

“You must receive all of your prize,” said the woman, and rose. She, too, came to Oliver, and she held out a little black notebook. Seeing it as his only option, he took it.

Moleskin. He recognized it. He’d written in a notebook just like it, a long, long time ago.

He stared down at it, hard.

“Have a seat,” the woman said.

Oliver realized there was a large black leather couch directly behind him. He did as he was told.

“Open it,” she commanded.

Oliver opened the book.

“Read it.” Her voice was kind but firm. He began to read:

“When I was seven years old my Grandmother was killed by my Grandfather. I was living with them at the time, and I watched it happen. I ran and hid under my bed. I wanted to help her, but I couldn’t.”

When Oliver looked up, the desk was gone. The second woman was gone. The man sat, staring intently.

“We’ve made a lot of progress,” the man said.

Oliver said nothing.

“Can you keep reading?”

Oliver looked back down.

He continued. “In the middle of the night, I called the police. Before they came I used the stove to set fire to the kitchen. I couldn’t lift my Grandmother’s body, so I left her with my Grandfather. I just pretended she was sleeping like he was. They took me away in a police car as the firefighters arrived, but by then the fire was raging so intensely they couldn’t even go inside.”

“You’ve done incredibly well, Oliver.” The man removed his glasses. “We’re getting to the root of your behavior. Soon we’ll be ready for your appeal. Do you think you could read that in front of a group?”

Oliver stared at the man. He noticed a door directly behind him that he hadn’t before.

The man frowned and stood up.

“Anyway, you’ve done very well. We’ll be ready soon, Oliver.” He turned and waved his hand at the door.

It opened, and a large man in a blue guard’s uniform came in brandishing a shiny pair of handcuffs. The man with the glasses in his hand put them back on, sat back in the chair and wrote something down. As he did he continued talking.

“Hang in there, Oliver. Keep recording your memories, and your thoughts. I’ll see you on Monday.”

Oliver looked at the notebook in his hands. The guard gently slid it from his fingers and put it in his own pocket. Then he snapped the handcuffs sympathetically around Oliver’s wrists and led him through the door and down the hall. Oliver did not feel the handcuffs. His mind was shackled to his memory.

The guard led Oliver into a hallway with many doors. He could feel a distant recognition of those rectangles. Vaguely familiar.

As they approached the front door of the building, Oliver noticed a van waiting through the window. One woman stood smoking a cigarette outside the door of the van, which was slid open. Another woman sat behind the wheel. The women from the grey room. Somehow he knew the van was going to take him to where he stayed, and though he didn’t know where that was, somehow he knew he didn’t want to stay there.

Through the window of the building he tilted his eyes at the van that would take him, back. Perched on the mirror of the van was a cardinal.

The seven o’clock bird, Oliver thought.

As they pushed through the door Oliver saw a piece of colorful poster paper thumbtacked to a community board:

20K GRAND PRIZE!

VIRTUAL REALITY OBSTACLE COURSE

TRY YOUR LUCK IN THE GAUNTLET!

“I told them to stop posting these damn things,” the guard said, and tore it off the wall.

the end