Deja Vu

His breath was turning into vapour as soon as it left his mouth. Ethan didn’t mind the mid-October chill on his face, but he did mind the unsettling feeling of his winter jacket clumsily chucked over his ever so slightly tight work uniform rubbing on his forearms as he was walking down Rose Street. Another day another dolla’ he concluded, reminding himself that the persistent smell of alcohol vapour in his nostrils and the sticky soles of his cheap leather shoes were merely means to an end.

It was unusual for Edinburgh to be empty of foot traffic, even at 2am, but Ethan only subconsciously acknowledged the lack of merry students and tourists floundering and singing on the way from one pub to another. He did not think it strange that only an hour ago or so people had still been spilling out onto the streets from The Black Rose before he could mop up the floor and leave. He did not mind the silence and the eeriness; he was more comfortable alone at this time of night. He was looking at the ground and was lost in his thoughts while the fingers of his right hand in his pocket were trying to identify the origins of a mysterious soggy-to-touch bundle of what he was hoping for was paper. Maybe and old receipt.

A piercingly blue hue at the left corner of his peripheral vision reminded him that he needed some cash; he was going to purchase a second-hand power drill for one of his projects from a Marketplace seller in Leith tomorrow. He never quite understood what the connection between the neon blue light and the Free Cash Withdrawal ATMs was. He intuitively inserted his purple HSBC bank card into the cash machine and punched in 1-9-6-9, the year of the first moon landing. This is how Ethan was able to remember long strings of information at school when he was younger – he would attribute the information received to something meaningful and tangible.

He selected the Withdraw Cash option and his finger was already hovering over the part of the touch screen where the £20 option would appear once the screen loaded the next page.

His breath was suddenly cut short and he was experiencing tunnel vision, focusing exclusively on the Available Balance at the top of the screen. $20, 000 it said in bold with no further explanation following. He momentarily ran out of air and then suddenly felt the primordial feeling of shivers running down his spine. It felt like somebody had poured ice-cold water onto the back of his neck and as the liquid was flowing down towards his tailbone, the hair on his back would rise, following the flow of the stream, participating in a sort of anatomical Mexican wave.

The moment felt much longer than the time on the screen would suggest and Ethan breathed in after what felt like 5 minutes of cosmical stillness. The newly obtained oxygen sent his brain synapses into overdrive. Where is this money from? Is this my bank account? Who gave me this and why? I don’t understand, there shouldn’t be more than a few hundred quid left this month!

Then he became paranoid. Is this criminal? What have I done? Am I being framed for something here? He wearily turned his head over his right shoulder, feeling the three-day-old stubble getting caught in the zip and pricking his chin as he did so. He still could not see anybody on the street, but there was a white Volkswagen Transit van with Morningside Painting and Decorating written in orange livery on the side, parked about 20m behind him. Ethan could not remember seeing the van there before, nor he could recall hearing anyone pulling over when he had been facing the cash machine. It didn’t appear to him that there was anyone inside the van and the engine was switched off. Ethan’s anxiety was going through the roof now; he could hear his staccato breathing and his heart felt like it immigrated towards his Adam’s apple. He just could not make sense of it all – the money, the empty streets, the suspicious van…

There was an ominous force in the air, something intangible, something immaterial that could not be grasped nor rationalised, which is what was making Ethan agitated. He had always been good at maths and physics – all known forces and phenomena can be explained as a chain of undeniable truths. He did not believe in ghosts, paranormal activity or the afterlife. He was not religious – he found comfort in logic. An ominous force was not logical.

Ethan’s pulse accelerated and he was getting overwhelmed with the feeling that was telling him something wasn’t right. He turned back towards the cash machine and without even looking, he became aware of someone’s presence on his left. Ethan glanced in that direction and noticed a black polyester rain coat donned over a man roughly his size standing still and well within his personal space. He hurriedly stepped a few steps backward and bumped into another solid, flat-chested figure with his back. He hastily turned around and saw a man about three inches taller than him. He was also wearing a cheap black polyester raincoat with the collar turned up, a crew cut haircut and a pair of narrow-framed sunglasses that revealed nothing about the man and a lot about Ethan, who could see his terrified face in the reflection of the lenses. If Ethan had time to guess, he would say the man was a secret agent.

Ethan momentarily forgot about the first raincoat and its owner, until the man stepped around him and joined his partner shoulder to shoulder. He was uncannily similar to the taller agent, with the exception of being slightly shorter and having a bald head. The pair was not saying anything, but Ethan just noticed they were both holding white badges on black lanyards in their right hands. The badges only had NCA written in bold blue on it – Ethan presumed it stood for National Crime Agency, but he couldn’t be sure. This must be a mistake, he though.

He opened his eyes with a sharp intake of breath. He felt light headed and he couldn’t quite conclude with certainty whether he was lying on his back and facing the ceiling, or on his front. It took him a few seconds before he started recognising the familiar shapes of the wardrobe to his right, the window to his left and the heavy, hot and drenched with sweat duvet pressing down on his belly and his chest. There was a hint of sunrise coming through the gap between the beige-brown curtains and Ethan concluded it must have been around 8am.

He instinctively looked for the light switch, tapping around with his right hand over the bedside cabinet, feeling the familiar bulge on the wire and pressing the button. He squirmed his eyes and was not quite ready to get up, but a routine is a routine and it must be followed duly to be called so, he thought to himself. He robotically went through the motions of grabbing the small A5 notebook with black leather covers that he would leave on his bedside cabinet every evening. The top of a red pencil was poking from the notebook, marking the last used page. Ethan could still feel his heart pounding in his throat and his hands were shaking a bit when he grabbed for the notebook.

Before opening the black notebook, he ran his right index finger over the front cover, where The Dream Diary was engraved in golden Times New Roman font. Running his fingers over the grooves in the leather calmed Ethan down somewhat. The diary was a gift from Jennifer, his ex-girlfriend who had given him the notebook for his graduation last summer and then left Ethan for their Psychology tutor two months later. The diary was a reference to his fourth-year dissertation topic on Freudian dream analysis and it was meant as a joke, but Ethan took some solace in using it as an actual dream diary.

Jennifer didn’t know this about him, but Ethan had actually been keeping a dream diary since he was 13. He watched Vanilla Sky around that time and got obsessed with the idea of lucid dreams; he started keeping a diary in pursuit of a dream where he would realise he is dreaming without waking up. Ethan had long ago abandoned the childish pursuit, but keeping a dream diary first thing after waking up became a routine, a habit he could not easily get rid of. Besides, what was the harm.

He noted down the date and time at the top of the page and began outlining the last night’s plot, focusing on the giveaway details that would help him recognise dreams from reality in future nights. Of course he knew he had been dreaming the moment he woke up; he even felt somewhat silly for not realising it was a dream still during the nightmare, but he also acknowledged there was something irrationally powerful about the way the dreams convinced the owner of their plausible reality. However, Ethan had had plenty of practice by now and he was disappointed with himself for believing he was $20, 000 richer for a moment.

Empty Rose Street, he wrote as the first sign. I have never seen the street so deserted after finishing work.

A purple HSBC card, what an idiot, he thought to himself first, but then admitted that even for him, the colour was a minor detail, easily overlooked.

He really did not think he would get fooled with $20, 000 on his UK bank account that could only accept Pound Sterling. For a moment he regretted not withdrawing any money just to see if it would come out in distinctive green and grey USD or purple GBP £20 notes.

The van was a bit odd, but not impossible, he concluded and forgave himself for missing that hint.

There was nothing too unusual about the men in raincoats, he thought at first, but giving it a second though, both of them did look like something that had escaped from the Matrix – the movie Ethan hated with passion. Too many holes in the plot.

The badges, he thought, I have never seen a National Crime Agency badge, but I bet it says more than just NCA in bold blue on it. He wrote that down and realised he was getting hungry.

Still with the notebook in his left hand – he wasn’t sure if he wanted to add anything more to it later over coffee – he walked to the bedroom window and opened the curtains.

His face frowned as he was trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

Beneath his second-floor bedroom window, just a bit further down the street, there was a white Volkswagen Transit van parked at the kerbside. On the side of the van, Morningside Painting and Decorating was written in orange. Ethan did not remember ever noticing the van parked on his street before. He tried to rationalise it and calm himself down, when suddenly, a thought occurred to him in horror.

He ran to the side of the bed and grabbed his smartphone. He unlocked it with his right index fingerprint and opened the HSBC online banking app. He punched in 1-9-6-9. The screen took a second to load and Ethan’s eyes were focusing intently on the buffer circle in the middle of the screen. Finally, current account.

The world stopped. A second could last a minute or an hour and nobody would know.

He dropped the dream diary on the ground; the red pencil bounced back up from the floor in slow motion, before landing on Ethan’s left foot.

He could feel the Mexican wave running down from his neck to the tailbone, leaving no back hair behind.

There was a loud and determined knock on the door…