Distractions: Fever Dream

In sixth grade English class we had a workbook unlike any workbook I had ever had before. This one was actually interesting. It had not only had mostly interesting exercises but also some short stories, and if I was ever bored in class I would read parts of it underneath my desk. The book itself was all yellow, and the cover was a photograph of a patch of woods all in gradients of yellow and yellow-gray. I actually liked looking through it. Maybe it was because it was the opposite color of the usual institutional teal I was used to.



One of the stories in it was Ray Bradbury's Fever Dream. I was always a paranoid child, fearful of various unlikely events like tsunamis (of which I've had recurring nightmares), aliens (thanks to Unsolved Mysteries), and attacks of nerve gas (I'm not sure when I heard of the Tokyo ricin attack). The story tapped so deeply into my overactive and paranoic imagination that it's never really dislodged itself.

The story is of a boy who falls ill and has to stay home from school. But he's wracked with a terrible fever dream, which consists of a slow defection of his body from his mind. Each one of his limbs flashes sickly colors and then ceases to be his anymore. A feeling of mecurial heavyness creeps from each claimed limb. Everyone ignores his pleas for help, saying that it was all just a fever dream, and nightly he loses more of his body. It was deeply frightening to me in a way that only a few works have ever been.

In the peculiar episode, "Sundown", the "infection" that lives within Sayid has nearly taken him over. He doesn't really seem to know what's going on. There's a sadness and an automaton-like quality to his actions, even when he fights Dogen, as if can only just understand that he's going through the motions. The saddest moment was when Ben goes to retrieve Sayid so that he can make his escape with Illana, Lepidus and crew. He's sitting at the spring, the polluted source of his borrowed life, and Ben says, "come on, there's still time to get out of here", and he looks up at him and says "not for me." This was the last little bit of Sayid that was left. He had spent the last day of his life watching his body and mind shift into darkness, unable to stop the inevitable transformation from deeply flawed man into a puppet for the Monster that has no name.