BOOK OF DAYS by Jeff Somers

SATURDAY l. Tracing the Rot

It's Saturday night at Chets house, Chet in his sandals and sunglasses, a pain in the ass just to look at. The place is packed with people, mellowing people warily approaching their thirties in tight, torn jeans and records they bought eight years ago. Chet making his way through the crowd cheerfully, collecting empties and maintaining a truly amazing amount of ash on the end of his cigarette as it dangled off his bottom lip; he's almost inspiring.

My name is Wayne Conklin, and I used to be an Assistant Manager in data processing. These days what I do is smoke cigarettes. What the fuck. They aren't going to kill me, I don't think.

Im sitting at the kitchen table in my white oxford and blue sports coat, my own tight jeans, boat shoes. It's what I always wore. Im predictable, these days. I have a yellow glass ashtray in front of me, piled high with crushed-out cigarettes, an open beer next to it. The tables a wreck, scratched to hell and covered in beer-soaked potato chips, and you have to wonder just how stunted Chets development is, he has to keep throwing these parties in his beat-up rented house with his beat-up well-used furniture leftover from college.

I blow smoke into the room. I guess I don't give a fuck. No one does, after a while. It's just a matter of time.

Sitting at the table with me are Erin and Marvin, Marvelous Marve, black as a cup of coffee and growing quite a respectable afro these days. Erin was his eerie opposite, a girl so white you saw through her. Grease on paper. Blonde, thin, pale, she was one chromosome from albino. Marve was in advertising, and he was sucking you off the moment you said hello, it was ingrained in him. He was wearing a black leather jacket, just like every other guy in the place. Black leather jackets. Jeans. Walking shoes. Erin is mocking herself with a breezy white blouse that hinted at all sorts of things, but who could fuck Erin? She took off her clothes you turned off the light and she would glow, dimly, like moss.

They are having some sort of intellectual conversation about how the commercials were better than the TV shows these days, how it used to be different. As if this were some sort of a shock. As if any conversation about commercials was defensible, as a use of your time. I sneer at them, light a new cigarette with the old. Stub it out. They used to be my friends. I never managed to sleep with Erin, but I'd been naked with Marvin once. It was a long story.

The kitchen moans and sways with internal heat. Outside it's cold and damp, steam on the windows from so many people flirting, drinking, sweating, dancing. Theyre crowded into the kitchen with insane enthusiasm, everyone in tight jeans, with red plastic cups and little white cigarettes, burning like candles.

They swirl around me, in slow motion. I am the only person in the room who is not sweating.

Chet makes his way to the table, interrupts Erin and Marve in their ridiculous conversation, and massages Erins shoulders, standing there grinning. The Host.

Chet says, "You kids having a good time?"

Marve answers, absolutely. Erin and I don't say anything. She has this grin on her face that looks automatic and plastic and I'd guess it was the grin she wore when she was so unhappy she didn't want to show it. Having Chets hands on her shoulder probably just reminds her that she looks young and girlish, and that the last thing she wants is Chets hands on her shoulders.

I sit calmly, burning my cigarette, and stare at Chet until he walks off, throwing his grin around the room as if it had physical force. Which it almost does, almost.



Here was Erin, in a nutshell:

When we'd still been good friends, oh, way back, right after school had been over for us both, we'd driven to Chicago together. We both had a reason to go there, and we figured we'd split gas and drive shifts and get there easier together. We left at six in the morning on a Saturday, both of us cranky and hungover from the night before. We got a fast food breakfast and a pack of cigarettes each and hit the highway with the radio blasting.

It took us twenty hours to get to Chicago. We could have made it in fifteen or sixteen, except we stopped for a nap at a rest stop in Ohio. The first half of the trip, we had one of those conversations where you start with your life story, and she really listens, and then you get her life story, and you really listen, and then you start in on your fears and hopes and discover that they don't think youre a complete freak by the end of it. And then you get a lull in the conversation, and you sit there, not looking at the other person, and wonder if you just fell in love.

At the rest stop, I didn't sleep. Erin wrapped herself in my coat and slept with her head on my shoulder and I just stared out the window and smoked and smelled her hair and wondered what it would be like to be her boyfriend. I thought I suddenly knew her pretty well. I liked the thought of it.

The second half of the trip was exuberant. We didn't get as deep, we joked and sang along to the radio and got another drive-thru meal for dinner, me eating tacos with one hand, steering with the other, trying not to spit it all out onto the dashboard, laughing so hard.

Pulling into Chicago on a Sunday afternoon, burnt and tired and with no more cigarettes, twenty coffin nails in twenty hours, she kissed me on the cheek, told me we had to have a drink when we were both back home, and I watched her walk away with her duffel bag, faded jeans tight, and I was already thinking ahead to seeing her again.

I didn't see her for three months. I called a couple of times. She didn't return my calls, was cheerful when we ran into each other, didn't seem to have suddenly decided she disliked me, she just didn't seem to be the same girl who had kissed me on the cheek in Chicago. The Pod People had found her. Shed become a Pod Person. That was Erin in a nutshell: a Pod Person. Things youd expect to affect her deeply rolled off, ignored. She barely changed from one day to the next, unaffected by the incomprehensible wave of existence washing over her. She would ruin you, and never understand how, or why.



Theres a chink in Chets armor of cheer, The Host is darkening a little. Someone ordered twenty-five pizzas and left the delivery guy at the door with a vague physical description of Chet. The pizzas had disappeared, consumed, boxes and all, by the voracious crowd. The voracious crowd was a bunch of people, of course, who had steady day jobs and drove nice cars they were almost done paying for, and were relatively successful people. Still drinking cheap beer on a Saturday night, still playing dumb pranks on one of their own. The Crowd thought it was a grand joke, an adventure, Chet having to pay $200 for a pizza hed neither wanted nor allowe'd. They guffawe'd silently behind his back, mimes slapping knees and bending over, suddenly sober when he whirled to catch them at it.

Slowly, it's been dawning on me that Marvelous Marvin is trying to get laid, right there at the kitchen table with me smoking cigarettes not two feet from him. He's known Erin as long as I have, I suppose. He's laying the charm on as thick as he can, here, making her laugh, telling her she looks pretty, letting her know he's got some pretty decent weed if she's interested, if she still gets high.

That gets her. She wants to know if he's insinuating she's gotten old, that maybe she doesn't party as much as she used to. I roll my eyes, snort out smoke in irritation. You don't get to realize how dumb people are until you just sit and listen to their conversation.

I wonder if that applied to me. Decide I don't care. If it did at one time, it sure didn't any more.

Erin is making a cute little speech about how she's just as wild and crazy as she ever was, how she goes out drinking with her pals from work two or three nights a week, gets trashed. Marves appeasing her now; he's got her riled up, hooked, so he's backing off. Doesn't want to go too far and actually piss her off. It's a fine line, with women. Nanoseconds separating amused and fucking pluck-your-eyes-out pissed off. What Marvin didn't know, of course, is that Erin is a Pod Person. His charm rolls off her. She's charm-proof.

I look at her as she prattles on about how wild and crazy she still is. I'd never noticed her nails, perfectly manicured, painted light pink. Perfect little caps on her fingers. Her hair, tied back in one of those casual knots that take an hour to perfect. Her blouse, undone in a calculated way. Her lip gloss pristine. I'd never noticed how much of a girl she is.



Marve was one of my roommates in school. My freshman year, I roomed with this kid I'd known for a while; we thought it would be great fun. Me and Ralph, roommates. We figured we'd cut through all the tedious bullshit of adjusting to some stranger and just get on with enjoying ourselves. We quickly discovered how dumb that was, since we very quickly hated each other. Ralph got weird, too, quiet and dark and dramatic, like he suspected someone was making a movie about him and wanted to cut a very brooding, dramatic figure. On the last day of school he packed his shit up, dropped out of school, and was never heard from again, the puky little bastard. I felt free.

The next year, I was assigned a roommate just like everyone else. I kicked open the door to our ratty little room in the leaky, drafty, mold-infested firetrap called Hershiser Dorms and there way this tall, half-naked black man. Back then Marved had some really huge hair, I mean huge. He liked to wear mirrored glasses and a dark jacket and cultivated a fucking Black Panther theme.

So I admit it, my first thought was, holy shit, he's going to murder me. But Marves a good guy, and we hit it off. After a few weeks we'd call each other racial epithets all the time, just joking; it was fun to walk up to Marve and shout "Hey, porchmonkey, where you been?" He never minded. Still doesn't. Calls all the white kids Crackers or White Devils, Honkies when he's feeling frisky. Tells them all that white is an adjective, and its definition ain't pretty. So, we got along pretty well, and we roomed together one more year before we split along racial lines and moved into crappy apartments a few blocks apart. We still insulted each other terribly when we passed in the street, and still partied a little.

My most memorable conversation with Marve concerned the fact that he was only interested in dating white girls, although he expected to eventually marry a black woman. At the time it had been very amusing.

"Youre average white girl," he said salaciously, sipping what I remember was his 334th SoCo in Coke, "is a) curious about a black man it's still kind of taboo, you know? so even before you open your mouth, she's curious, she's already thinking about it, and b) she's heard all the rumors, right? She's sitting there, thinking, if I can just get this guys pants off, Ill know the truth. So she's already getting sexy, right?"

I swear to god, he said that. I remember laughing. Then I said "So you like white girls because you think theyre easy?"

"Sure." He paused here to contemplate his drink. I could almost hear the theme from Shaft. "I mean, maybe they aren't for you, baby, but then you ain't got my cultural mojo on your side."

We laughed at that, too, a little maliciously. It had been a cigars-and-mixed-drinks night. Decadent. Grown-up.

"But I don't want to have kids with a white woman, man. Don't want to put them through that."

I swear to god, thats what he said.



So I sit and watch Marve layer on the cultural mojo, and Erin has that vacant smile, that fatuous enthusiasm I hate. Erin gets into a blank rhythm of smiling, nodding, and going uh-huh while she's shopping in her head, or cataloging her shoes, or staring intently at the hairs growing our of your nose, wondering how you can bear to be you. I watch Marve hitting on Erin and I smoke cigarettes next to them until I can't take it anymore, and grab the pack and my Zippo and make my way through the greasy kitchen crowd.

The living room offers the voracious crowd, tightly packed, dancing, or doing whatever they considered dancing. On other nights their antics would have been amusing. On the couches, people who actually think they can get away with leather pants sit and watch, bored on purpose, on guard against interest or concern or losing their reputation as The Most Jaded Person in The Room.

It isn't bragging to say Ive got them all beat, the duffers. Im the most jaded one in the room. I move through the sweating swaying bodies like an icy wind, and sweat crystallizes on them and they shatter, and melt, and reconstitute behind me.

And Im in the den, where the Philosophers sit, and debate over bong hits. People who spend their workdays sitting in front of stock tickers and computer screens, who write code all day, who author memos, tackle all the issues of the day in the den at Chets house. I spy an empty plush leather seat on the couch next to this skinny white guy with a ridiculous nickname he insists we all use, but whose real name is Damien. He demands that we call him Trim. Theres no explanation. He's dressed all in black and arguing that all men are really homosexuals, we just don't know it.

"Think about it, it makes perfect sense; thats why were always fleeing relationships, and always hanging out with the "boys" watching sports: suppressed homosexuality. Were all faking it."

The other philosophers were three sheets to the wind, including a tall girl named Jessica, who was wearing leather pants and no bra, and Pitr Mags, whose last name was unpronounceable without a cultural immersion program so everyone just called him Mags. I watched Jessica struggle to form thoughts.

"So youre saying," she blurted out in her suburban omigod accent, honed through years of cafeteria conversation in Caucasian school lunchrooms, "that all the guys who grab my ass and call me honey where I waitress, theyre what, compensating?"

I rolled my eyes. Some girls liked to remind everyone that they were pretty, or thought they were. They didn't just come out and say it, that level of arrogance being unseemly. Instead, they quoted applicable anecdotes wherein their inherent attractiveness factored. It was annoying. I stared at Jess. She was pretty, that was right. But she looked like the sort of self-conscious girl who was pretty but no good in bed. Awkward. Worried. Uptight. Leather pants or not.

Trim looked like his smile was an involuntary muscle twitch.

"Or maybe instilled behavior. Were raised a certain way. It's imprinted on our brains. It's almost like society was designed to boot camp our denial." Trim announced excitedly. He was one of those people who didn't seem as drunk as they really were. He shrugged triumphantly. "It explains a lot, I think."

He was the star of the room, and began telling a story about some big crime spree he and some friends embarked on a few years before. I was getting bored, but everyone else seemed amused by him. Pitr Mags, who was drinking an extremely large vodka tonic, kept laughing, and watching Jessicas breasts jiggle whenever he thought no one was looking. I was looking, but I guessed I didn't count.

Mags was rich, we all knew that, mainly because he wouldn't let you forget it. He was mad with conspicuous consumption, and assumed he could have anything he wanted. It was stock options. Hed been a Comp Sci major in school; I remembered how he was never able to come out. Stayed in his room for days, studying, or debugging code, or something just as unsexy. out of grad school hed skipped his Ph.D. program to join one a startup, took his salary in stock options, worked night and day for two years, and woke up one IPO-kissed day a millionaire, several times over.

Oh, we hated Mags then. Hed always been a slight object of fun. We all knew he was brilliant, we all knew he understood concepts that made us pant and wheeze, mentally. But he was awkward, he was dull, and when younger hed been the uncool one. The nerd. A nerd we respected, but deep down inside we all looked down on Mags because while we were out getting laid and getting drunk and lying in fields at night staring up at the stars and having deep, life-evolving conversations, Mags was locked up in his room, tapping at a keyboard. Wasting his time. So, we looked down on him.

After months of freewheeling stock prices, the SEC finally allowe'd the initial stock holders to sell, and to everyones surprise Mags cashed out. Resigned, sold it all off, hired a financial guy, and began an epic run of make-up partying. For four years now, hed been Mags, millionaire-at-large. He drank a lot, he bought and consumed an awful lot of extremely expensive drugs. he hired whores, drove recklessly, probably had any number of degenerative diseases, and hadnt known what day, month, or year it was in a very, very long time.

We were now all in prurient awe of Mags. Going out with him was a careful balance of excitement, disgust, and the uneasy desire to not be the person who would have to call 911 on Mags later on.

I was tired. I wondered why I was there. The best reason I could think of was, I couldn't seem to be anywhere else on Saturday night, these days.

I drifted out of the den, floating by everyone I used to know. Chet the Host is in the living room trying to dance, because he's wasted and because he thinks he's amusing Denise Cartys younger sister, who is seventeen and not impressed by anything, except herself. That Chet seems to consider the possibility of fucking a seventeen-year-old girl a genuinely constructive use of his time is not nearly as disturbing as his dancing.

I drift by, unconcerned.

In the dark hallway that smells like mold, people are packed, standing with their backs to walls, talking. The buzz of conversation is thick and insulating and not deep at all. I skim through. I realize Im looking for a friendly face, Im looking for Candace. Me and Candace used to always have a party tradition of hiding away somewhere and having deep, meaningful conversations during parties. People always gossiped about us, but all we ever did was sit and smoke and tell each other we were geniuses, and I realized sadly that I hadnt talked with Candace for a while. We certainly hadnt done any antisocializing at parties with her for a while.

I asked people as I drifted by if they'd seen Candace. No one had, or no one cared to tell me. And Im upstairs.

It's stuffy up there, it's close and crowded especially by the one bathroom, where desperate people stand and plot revenge fantasies. The second floor had its own climate, with steam rising up off the people, alcoholic and pungent, forming cloud cover, nicotine-tinged, yellowe'd, up around the fixtures. The floor was a mighty river, a huge swampland, feeding tributaries that would, in time, rot the house down to its foundations. Chet, through no wisdom of his own, would no doubt be out of it long before they could trace the rot back to him.

I offer up a quick prayer to whatever higher being might be paying attention, thanking them because I don't have to go to the bathroom just yet. The quick glimpses offered up when people open the door and slip in or out are chilling. It looks like a team of monkeys has been penned in there for some time. Then I light another cigarette and lean against the attic door for a few moments, feeling lonely, watching people, wondering if anyone is going to notice me and think I look mysterious, and sad, and come over to say hello, strike up a conversation. Some girl at the head of the bathroom line starts looking around the line. "Whose smoking?" she asks. "Im dying for a cigarette!"

Everyone dying for a cigarette never has any of their own, Ive noticed. Girls are the worst. I steel myself for when she notices me standing there looking sad and mysterious, but before she can find me, the bathroom door opens and she pushes in past some delirious guy, pulling her friend in there with her. Girls are forever pissing together. It doesn't seem to bother them, and theres something vaguely erotic about it that I can't put my finger on, and Im not sure I should try.

I get moving before she can track me down and wheedle cigarettes from me. There are three other rooms on the second floor; I push off from the bannister and cross the hall, push open the nearest door, and step into the room, leaning back against the door to shut it. It's cool and dark in there, and it takes me a moment to realize that Im not alone. I drag on my cigarette and stay very still, because I don't think they noticed me entering the room. I don't recognize the one I can see. The other one has her face buried in hair. I used to know everyone Chet knew, if only by faces. They are crying hysterically, holding each other.

They cry quietly. It's weird, it's so quiet. I stand there and watch them, smoking. Theyre young, younger than me, but I guess soon everyone will be. They both have dark hair, and theyre both pale, and theyre beautiful in that way all women are beautiful in grief. Theyre just sitting on the floor, holding each other. Two half empty bottles of beer sit on the floor near them. They aren't saying anything, so I don't know what theyre crying about. I don't think I want to know; right now as I watch them, my cigarette and the moonlight our only illumination, their grief is ancient, and heavy, dignified, and mysterious.

I'd hate to find out it was all because some guy was mean to them, or because someones Dad was a son of a bitch, or because they were just weepy, annoying people. So I don't say anything. I just watch them, and I almost jump out of my skin when I realize that one of them is Candace.

Im paralyzed by the knowledge. She's weeping, she's just miserable, and I have no idea why, and I can't move. I just stand there.

Don't cry, I say. Whats wrong?

She ignores me, and thats creepy. I wrack my brain for what I did, because Candace would never treat me like that, and we have told each other everything, almost. The sort of conversations you have in college dorm rooms over cigarettes and candles and that you are vaguely embarrassed about the next day, and for the rest of your life.

I definitely don't know the other girl. I squint at her carefully, a little freaked out. But Im sure, she isn't anyone I know. Which is weird. Chets an introducer. he drags you around to everyone he knows and introduces you. When he's very drunk he starts introducing people who have known each other since The Flood.

Please, I say, don't cry. Tell me whats wrong.

Im thinking, this girl doesn't know you the way I do, but youll tell her whats wrong?

"God," Candace whispers, snuffling. "It never stops."

I say, What doesn't?

The other girl strokes her hair. "Ssssh," she says. "It will. Give it time."

I can't believe this. I turn and walk out of the room. Neither of them look up.

In the hall, a riot has broken out. The toilet has overflowe'd. People are fleeing the scene and the girls on line are hatching desperate plans while the guys just saunter outside to piss against the house like when they were nineteen. It's a grand adventure for them. I lean against the door and smoke, my heart pounding. I feel like Ive just been kicked in the stomach.

Someone is dispatched to summon Chet, as the owner of the toilet in question, though if theyre expecting him to accomplish anything, they don't know Chet very well. Im feeling warm and nasty and decide, right then and there, to get real drunk and piss everyone off, throw my weight around. It's either that or crawl away and cry and my crying days are over.

2. Forgiving Suicide

It's two in the morning and I find myself sitting on Chets dilapidated front porch with The Host himself, a penny-loafer motherfucker named Henry Speakman, and Henrys pal from his office, Mark. Henry and Mark are cheerful little dolts, and I hate them with such fierce, drunken energy Im surprised I don't burst into flames.

Were passing a bottle of Jamesons around, like friends.

Behind us, The Crowd is making some noise, the last gasp of people who aren't kids any more but don't like the knowledge rubbed in their faces. It's a weary sound, a desperate sound, it's people who don't want to go home and crawl into bed, wake up in the morning with The New York Times and a cup of coffee and two or three aspirins for their hangovers which never used to be this bad. It's the sound of couples who are deferring fights until the next day, when he's sober and can atone for his sins properly, or when she's sober and can resent what he's done. It's the sound of people who can't believe that they just went to a party and spent the evening talking about 401k plans, we'ddings, and politics.

We sat on the porch and drank good Irish whiskey and listened to it behind us, like waves breaking on the beach. White noise. Vaguely troubling, but distant, and therefore sort of peaceful.

Chet is a little stunned at the mess he's going to have to clean up the next day. He's sitting on a rusty lawn chair next to me, looking like he's warding off demons with the booze. Henry and Mark are Pod People. Theyre financial analysts, which basically tells you everything about them that you need to know: boring fucks who can tolerate inhuman levels of dullness and bullshit in exchange for a big salary and casual Fridays. They seemed to respond to everything in tag lines and commercial jingles, tag lines and jingles that never actually got used, that only the Pod People and their shadowy brethren had ever seen, committed to memory, practiced. Chanted in solemn, respectful tones. Oral traditions. Chet and Henry knew each other as far back as high school, and have dumb nicknames for each other they insist on using all the time. I know Henry through Chet, for years now. No one knows Mark. Except Henry.

Henry and Mark are both wearing tan chinos, I note in disgust.

"Those goddamn Knicks aren't going anywhere this year." Henry says, handing the bottle to Chet.

Chet has no use for sports.

"Uh-huh." he manages, trying to be polite.

Henry remains pleasant, though; he's a pro at Remaining Pleasant, it's probably what he gets paid for. Chief Executive Officer of Remaining Pleasant in the Face of Withering Disinterest. "Right, Chief, I forgot you don't dig the baseboards. What was that you used to say? It's like watching a fucking riot with the sound off, people running back and forth, throwing things, sometimes breaking glass." Henry laughed, slapping his knee in what must have been a carefully rehearsed gesture. "Thats fucking funny."

Chet pauses with the bottle of Jamesons. You can hear gears turning, little men in overalls in his head shouting Full reverse! Put some back into it, lads! But it's just a matter of time before: "I never said that."

Henrys laugh cuts off unnaturally. "You sure?"

Chet shrugs, taking a swig. "I'd never say something like that."

Henrys face brightens. "Right! It was that guy, who was that, who used to say that? Always had smartassed stuff like that to say."

Im sitting there and waiting for the bottle and holding my tongue because, goddamit, it was me, I said that. Stupid cocksucker is going to get killed someday, shivved, like in prison.

Henrys up, agitated. "Who the fuck was that guy? I can fucking see him, man. You know who Im talking about, Chester, man - skinny guy, always wore a fucking sports jacket, like he was fifty years old or something. He always talked like that, endless sentences, man. But that one thing he said about basketball stuck in my head for some reason." He punched his thigh. "Christ, what was his name?"

I look at Chet, and Im amused. Chet is just staring straight ahead. He knows how awkward this is, and he looks kind of upset. But Chet always did have a habit of getting emotional when he drank too much.

"Jesus, what was that mothers name?"

"Wayne." Chet says softly. "Wayne Conklin."

I look up at Henry, and savor the look of embarrassment on his blank little face. "Oh, man, Im sorry."

Don't worry about it, I say easily. You can't help being an asshole.

After a discomfited moment, Henry and Mark go back inside. I let Chet hog the bottle because he played it exactly right, and made Henry feel like shit. It might make me a small man to enjoy that, and so be it.

But I look at Chet and he doesn't seem to be enjoying the moment, and after a bit I get up and leave him there, the depressed fuck.

Things have thinned out inside. People have jobs to go to, sitters to get back to, lives they have to be moderately alert for. Only the very drunk or the immature are left, and I don't know which one I am but then I never did. I sit in the living room, where no one is dancing now, thank goodness, light a cigarette, and try to pin down this weird feeling I have, this disassociated feeling. Disconnected.

Something about my denser gravity pulls people into the room. Bleary from the hour and the drinks, they come blinking into the living room and they all seem to sit near me. I try to take up space. I try to blow smoke at them, to exhale attitude, but they come anyway. I seemed powerless to drive them away and I sat there glowering and thinking, go home, go home. Go home and rest up, theres work yet for you to do.

They don't go, so I stand up to go, and then I don't because Candace has walked into the room, and my heart breaks.

Heres Candace, in a nutshell: some years ago I'd thought I was in love with her. I fell in love a lot back then, and with all the rejection coating me, all the tragedy and heartache, youd think I would have saved everyone some amount of trouble and just suicided some time in my junior year. At any rate, Candace has always been one of those sweet-hearted girls who tolerates crushes like that, the sort of pretty girl who has been inspiring crushes since she was thirteen, and the sort of nice girl who wouldn't stomp you over it, which of course just meant that you suffered endlessly, over years, instead of being forced to get over yourself in a matter of weeks.

It encouraged drama.

So I went to a party one night, feeling strangely good and balanced about all the tragedy I was carrying around with me, which of course should always be your first warning sign that horrible terrible tragedy is about to descend upon you, that feeling of balance. That balanced feeling is generally the last thing you smell before breaking through the guardrail and sailing peacefully down into chaos.

I drank an awful lot, emphasis on awful, and I was a chipper, fuming success all the way home, where I found Candace and some others having a cheerful cocktail with my room-mates. I was in that mood where youve been harboring a torch for someone for so long, and quite suddenly you think youre past it and over them and oh-so grown-up, and you just want to stick it to your former obsession. You just want to really rub it in to them that they no longer have a chance with you. It's a mean, nasty mood, but I was and remain a mean and nasty person. So I floated into the living room on fumes, threw myself onto a couch and proceeded to be mean and nasty to Candace, who had just the sort of gauzy, delicate charm it was easy to be mean and nasty to.

I didn't get too far. Before I had even gotten her attention, the room began to spin, and by the time I figured out that I was going to be having one of the worst nights of my life, everyone in the room was staring at me in horror and asking a variation on the question "Man, are you all right?"

I wasn't, and lord knows how I barely made it to the bathroom before heaving up the remnants of several ill-advised cocktails. Everyone sprang into action; by that time in our college careers rescuing each other from alcohol poisoning had become second nature. I was removed from the bathroom and ensconced in my own bed. Water was provided, and everyone stood around me asking how I was doing, and making lame jokes at my expense. I just lay there sweating and moaning and trying to take down the names for future revenge.

At some point, I opened my eyes and only Candace was left, sitting next to my bed, holding my hand, stroking my hair, back-lit by my desk lamp.

"Hey," she said with her sad little smile, "how are you, Dummy?"

I confessed everything.

Unbroken by pauses or implied punctuation or anything more than Bare Minimum Breathing, I told her every bd thing I'd ever done, every stupid thing I'd ever done. I told her I loved her, that I'd been mean to her even if she hadn't noticed. I begged her to forgive me for things I hadn't remembered to confess. If I could accurately recall any of the details of that terrible evening with the booze oozing out of my pores and Candace holding my limp, sweaty hand, it would no doubt be the most embarrassing time of my life. As it was, I was generally glad to forget it.

Faced with this level of pathetic bullshit, however, Candace just squeezed my hand until I passed out, mercifully, and never spoke of it ever again, bless her heart.

That was Candace. She didn't expect you to not be an asshole.



She's got that cried-out look about her, now, wan and washed out, exhausted. No one had ever explained to me why women look so gorgeous when they're miserable. My own theory centered on male brutishness and how making people miserable was what really made us all happy, but nothing cleared a room out like one of my theories.

I stood up, smoothed my hair, shrugged my jacket on. Tried, pathetically, to look my best after too long in this horrible steam house. I straightened my tie and walked over to her, opened my mouth, searched for something witty and warm to say.

She hugged herself tightly and walked away.

I stared at her back Then turned around to find Pitr Mags. I needed to get terribly drunk, and just sitting next to the mad Indian could inebriate most people. Besides, he usually had pretty amazing drugs. I felt like incurring some birth defects, and fast.

I turned to look at everyone in the living room, zombies with flat saucer eyes, panting after an evening of excess.

What the hell is wrong with her? I ask them.

They stare back at me, silently.

I change tack. "What the hell is wrong with everybody?"

They don't say anything. I coast past them and stare at the walls.

You can't rely on anyone, I tell Pitr Mags. It's against our natures, I guess. I'm not excluding myself. I've let down plenty of people.

We're sitting out on the roof outside Chet's room, drinking bottled beer. I'm not entirely sure how much Pitr is paying attention. He seems to be vibrating slightly, when you look at him it's as if something hot is right in front of him. He wiggles and bends.

"Hey, Wayne, what the hell are you doing here?" he says dreamily. "I thought you were gone for good, man." He shakes his head. At least Pitr Mags thinks it' sad if I'm not around. I tell him I was never gone, that I've always been here, and he laughs a little.

"Man, you were gone. Don't fuck with me. But hey, man, you're here now, right? It's good to have you back."

He's staring up at the stars like they were very slowly moving together to form words, a personal message to Pitr Mags. I studied his amazed face, and could almost picture the weakening artery in his brain that was going to burst soon and send him off. He'd probably be so fucked up at the time he wouldn't even notice. Then I think, with a shiver, that it isn't such a bad way to go. Better than some.

"You got that right." Mags mutters.

He fumbles for cigarettes. I should stop him. He doesn't have red blood cells to spare for nicotine, and one cigarette could kill him. But then he offers me one, and I forgive his suicide.

We sit and smoke, and the breeze moves over us, and the beer bottles sweat.

Pitr Mags starts giggling.

What the fuck are you laughing at? I demand.

"That you're here, man, and you could be doing sooo many things, but you're up here with me." His giggles get the best of him, but he surfaces long enough to add "That's amazing."

And after a moment, I start laughing too.

What the hell is wrong with everybody else? I ask him. You're completely fucked up and you're the most reasonable person in this house tonight.

His laughter gets hysterical. "Not as...fucked up...as you were..." he pants.

I drift up and away, leaving him there to laugh, a Lost Boy. He'd stopped being very interesting, he was moving into irritating, and I left him on the roof, and I didn't care if he rolled off and died.

Everywhere, people are saying their polite, grown-up goodbyes. Chet is working harder than ever, trying to hustle around and wish everyone a safe ride home, accept their thanks for having them, ask them one last time to stay over for gods sake, it's late. But everyone wants to sleep in their own bed that night, wake up and have sex with their boyfriends, with their girlfriends, make some of their favorite coffee, read the paper in peace. Chets slim offerings don't really stand a chance.

I wander through the emptying house. In the den, Jessica with the leather pants is completely over served, struggling with two tired-looking women who are either trying to get her out of the house or mugging her, it's hard to tell. She's combative, senseless, unbalanced, and kind of sad. I drift up to the second floor, which is empty, and a mess, drinks spilt, toilet paper here and there, cigarette butts turning everything yellow-brown. I let myself sink into the basement, where two empty kegs, a vague scent of sweat, and Candace are waiting for me.

She's just sitting on one of the damp, ugly couches Chet has set up down there, staring at the whitewashed brick wall and smoking a final cigarette. I sit down quietly on the other end of the couch, one cushion between us, and ask her why she's avoiding me.

"Why can't you leave me alone?" she whispers.

I start to explain that I need an explanation, but she interrupts:

"I feel like even though youre gone, youre not really gone. Ive been trying to get used to not having you around, but I always feel like if I turn around, there youll be."

I sat very still, and felt like if I moved I'd shatter. No polite goodbyes for us. I wonder again what Ive done to her. I can't remember so much...it's confusing. I hope whatever it was, it was horrible.

"God," she snuffles, dragging on her cigarette, "I feel like you can hear me. I feel like youre sitting right here with me."

She's talking to me, but she's staring at the wall. And it's just like realizing youve forgotten your keys, or glancing down and seeing that youve put on two differently colored socks. In a rush, I remember what I always forget, and put it all together, and relax.

I lean back and close my eyes, because I remember that Im dead.

SUNDAY l. Nausea, reprisal, and regret

All I know is, Im hungover like a kicked dog, because it's Sunday, and I am always hungover on Sunday. I feel like Ive been inside someones show all day and night. Im old shoe leather, cracked. Im flat, stale beer sitting in plastic cups on the kitchen table. Im cigarette butts, mashed into concrete. I can feel my molecules trying to fall apart every time I move, little nuclear reactions inside of me. And Im dead, I remind myself, sitting up and leaning over to stare at the floor.

Im in Chets room, somehow. I don't remember how. I used to end up in peoples rooms all the time; I'd get drunk, and when I get drunk I pass through a long-winded sentimental stage, in love with everyone I know simply because I know them. I had a romantic memory of sleep overs when I was a kid, the excitement of having friends over, or of being in your pajamas in a strange place, exploring someone elses things. So I was famous for inserting myself into peoples rooms, drunk, and bunking cheerfully on the floor or in bed with them, male or female. It was charming.

I looked over at the bed. Chet had company; there were two extra limbs visible and a mass of brown hair. I considered the slim pickings I'd witnessed the night before and wondered whod been passed out in a closet for him to find.

I climbed up onto a laundry-laden chair, found my sad-looking pack of cigarettes, and started to fill the room with smoke. The sun made me squint through it as I mentally tested myself for hangover damage, probing myself with a careful mental tongue. It was typical. I needed nicotine, coffee, and a toilet, pretty much in that order. I knew that with hard work, discipline, and proper chemicals I would be normal again soon enough.

I glanced over at Chet again, a sweaty mass of sheets, flatulence, and the looming cloud of an awkward morning, making the room overcast despite the sun. I decided I didn't want to be there when the storm of nausea, reprisal, and regret began, so I got up onto my creaking, ill-used legs and tiptoed out into the hallway, where the floor is sticky. It's dimmer in the hall, and the faint murmur of voices drifts up from downstairs, like old women at an auction. Hands in pockets, I crept downstairs, stepping over half-full plastic cups, impromptu ashtrays, and the odd pair of shoes.

In the kitchen, Candace, Pitr, and Marve are having coffee in sweatpants and T-shirts, smoking cigarettes and chatting in hoarse, ill-used voices. I grab a mug from the cabinet, fill it with coffee, and have a seat across from Candace, who doesn't look at me.

Pitr has the shakes, and spills coffee everywhere when he tries to take a sip. He curses and snarls when he does. Then he flashes his red eyes around the room and forces a smile for our benefit, though lord knows we don't buy it for a moment. He mumbles something about needing sleep, and we just avert our eyes. Smoke cigarettes. Drink coffee. Feel healthier in spite of it, because of Pitrs ruined visage winking at us. It's like having breakfast with a corpse.

"Look at this place," Candace sighs with a delicately curled lip. "It's a disaster. People are animals."

I nod in silent, hurt agreement and Marve laughs a little.

"It was a party, babe. What do you expect?"

She gives him a flat look, and then shrugs. "At least it isn't my problem. Chet wants to throw keggers, he can clean up after the kids."

"Where is out gracious host?" Marve asks.

She makes her cute frowny-face. "Upstairs with as-yet-unidentified skank-behind-door-number-three." She shook her head. "Probably still in the incubation period, but I'd like to be out of here before they both emerge communicable."

Marve snorted. "Jessica Munroe." he said with evil in his eyes.

Candace let her mouth hang open in comical shock, her eyes suddenly merry. "No!"

Pitr Mags freaked everyone out at this point with a cackling laugh, the coughing mirth of a ruined man. We all ignored him, manfully, even Candace.

Marve put his hands up. "Im not spreading rumors. Im just saying it like I saw it. I crawled out of my room last night, suffering, you know, regretful and struggling for maturity, dig, and there was our man Chester helping her out of those ree-diculous pants, right there in the hall outside the bathroom." He winked. "As best I can reconstruct the chain of events, he must have intercepted her after a beneficial and practiced upchuck."

Candace made a gagging gesture. "Yuck, yuck, yuck."

"Don't be jealous." Chet sang out, sailing into the kitchen a pasty-faced vision of chicken legs, grey unshaven cheeks, and crusty khaki shorts in desperate need of a laundry. "As soon as you come to appreciate Chester, hell be there for you, too."

Candace groaned and Marve broke into braying, limb-waving laughter. Chet dashed coffee into a mug and sat down so fast I had to move quickly to avoid the rude motherfucker. He sipped coffee and grinned around at us cheerfully.

He threw his arms out. "Why can't two consenting adults comfort each other during a lonely night?" He waggled a finger at Candace. "You need to let go of your preconceived prejudices. Sex is a beautiful thing." We sat waiting for the punch line, and got it as he looked up from under his eyebrows, which were thick and monobrowe'd, and said, "Of course, after all this time, I can see how you might have forgotten..."

Marve and I burst out laughing, and Candace grinned slyly as she threw a whole slice of toast at Chet, who dodged it with surprising, heavy agility. Pitr started gasping with a disturbing approximation of laughter.

"Was she conscious?" Marve leered.

Chet rubbed his chin, appearing to consider. "Honestly, I don't remember."

Another slice of toast, another dodge by Chet, and coffee all over the table. Curses, giggling, and Candace sits there in hungover glory, looking prim with her hair everywhere, every which way.

"Fuck toast." Chet said with a back-popping stretch. "It's a sunny hungover Sunday, kids. Lets get some eggs, some pancakes. Lets get some cholesterol."

A low-level cheer rose up. Chets the Host again, and The Crowd, much thinned, is roaring, happy to be entertained.



No one invites Jessica. We walk to Pirellis on Route 3, about twenty minutes of breezy walk. We share Chets Charity pack, which is a Marlboro Reds box filled with cigarettes hed begged off people the night before. Camels, Parliaments, Lights, Luckies. One crushed and bent Virginia Slims, offered to Candace with tender deference. She calls us all pigs and takes a lucky.

Gladys is working Pirellis and we shout out her name as we walk in, and she wags a finger at us and waves us into a booth with cracked red vinyl, full ashtrays overflowing with dead butts, and the menus pasted down on the table, listing seven thousand things no one had ever ordered. The kitchen worked overtime preparing the basic food groups: coffee, pie, eggs, pancakes. The occasional and vaguely communist French Toast. The suspicious but legally required tea, served grumpily, a cup of tepid water and a store-bought teabag, a sneer.

I end up on the end of one side, seated next to Pitr Mags, who has shared far too much of my company lately. He smells pretty bad. He's leering around at everyone as if following some phantom conversation only he can hear.

Gladys comes by, heavy makeup and cigarette, dyed hair, comfortable canvas sneakers, smiling at us, happy to have her kids here. She's already got coffees for us, knows what we all like. She doesn't bring me any, but I forgive her.

"What can I get yall, sweethearts?"

The vaguest southern accent, a lilt, a grace note.

"Bring me," Chester announced with alarming clarity, "your finest meats and cheeses."

It's an old joke, and we all moaned. Gladys is delighted and cackles, coughs, doubles over, returns to us red-faced and hacking.

"You kids," she said, shaking her head, pen poised.

Eggs, scrambled, sunny side, omelettes. Home fries, nice and greasy. Toast, for gods sake. Butter. Jelly. Orange Juice, lots of it. The table filled, until we didn't have any room for our elbows. In the center, the ashtray, a fire hazard, generations of cigarettes and ours burning on top of them. Im amazed, briefly, at the sheer amount of raw materials we have sitting on our table.

Pitr Mags, who has eaten every scrap of food on his plate, is looking a little hypertensive. He's smiling, though, and works his mouth a few times, attempting to speak.

"I had a dream about Wayne last night." He says, waving in my direction. Everyone looks at me, at each other, and back at Pitr.

He swallowe'd again. "I was lying on the roof, you know, above the living room? I was lying there. And Wayne same out of the window. Sat down next to me."

That wasn't a dream, you fucked up Trustafarian, I said.

"That isn't fucking funny, Mags." Chester said, nasty, unlike him. Serious. He flicked his cigarette and turned away, disgusted.

Candace is quiet. "What did he say, Pitr?"

Mags hunched a little, worked his mouth. Convulsed. And just before upchucking the entire breakfast hed just eaten in one amazing, continuous, disgusting wave, he looked around at us and smiled a twitchy little smile.

I was reminded, suddenly and forcefully, of an old joke my sodden bastard of a father passed on to me, concerning two farmers who wanted to win the prize pig award at the State Fair but have only a skinny little piglet between them. One of them comes up with the idea of plugging up the pigs asshole so it can't shit. Sure enough, the pig gets bigger and bigger (and more and more agitated) as time goes by, and eventually wins the prize. But then the farmers are faced with the prospect of removing the plug, a potentially dangerous task considering how long the pig has been saving up shit. So the bright farmer comes up with another great plan: theyll train a chimp to run up a ladder and pull the plug, and then the farmers can watch from a safe distance. So for a week they train a chimp to run up a ladder and pull a similar plug, and finally they place the huge, bloated, and suffering pig up on a platform and flee to hide behind a nearby tree, watching the monkey run up the ladder.

After the explosion, the police are interviewing the shit-covered farmers, who tell their tale.

"The last thing I remember," says the first Farmer, "is the chimp pulling the plug out of the pigs ass."

"The last thing I remember," says the second Farmer, "is the chimp trying to put the plug back in."

Ba-dum-dum.



Chet displayed another moment of unguessed agility, doing something akin to a back flip out of the booth, landing awkwardly but safely out of range. Candace was directly in the path of the storm and weathered it with tight-lipped horror, diving down in the seat to avoid the worst of it. Marve, sitting right next to Pitr, just watched in fascinated horror, safe despite his proximity. Im out of harms way and I just smoke and shake my head a little.

The rest of the diner has stopped doing everything to stare. Giggle. Gasp. Shake their own heads. Be happy theyre not one of us.

Pitr finally runs out of partially digested breakfast and soured alcohol, whatever else was growing in his stomach. He lets his head sink to the table with a gurgling noise, goes limp. For a few seconds, there was an amazed silence, a glorious quiet except for the dim ruckus coming from the kitchen.

Chet, breathing hard: "Wow."

Candace surfaced, vomit in her hair. She's shaking a little. I couldn't tell if it's from anger or terror or disgust or some new emotion distilled from all of them. She sat shivering with the power of it for a moment, and then she bolted from the table, headed at a dead run for the bathrooms.

There was another silence, uncomfortable this time. "Jesus," Marve wondered aloud, surveying the damage, "what the fuck do you tip for that?"

I sat on the fender and wondered why I never run out of cigarettes any more: it's one of those weird things you suddenly notice, like magic has returned from the days of yore. Why the Druids or whoever wanted me to have cigarettes I couldn't say, but I never seemed to run out these days. I sat with Marve. Pitr was lolling painfully and loudly in the back seat, moaning that he's dying of some internal rupture. I was burning with jealousy because it's Chet in the diner with Candace, helping her clean up, coaxing a smile out of her on this crappy morning. Im sitting on the warm hood of a car with Marve. The unfairness burned on the way down.

I didn't know whose car it was; I imagined that Marve had just found one with the door open and poured Pitr in.

"Mothers gonna feel like a cracked brick later." Marve said, sounding like he wasn't talking to anyone in particular. "One of these days Mothers gonna wake up formatted. Blank."

I agreed silently. Or dead, I added after a moment. Marve didn't say anything.

Chet emerged, Candace under one arm like a broken wing. I briefly considered turning cannibal, cooking Chet in the bathtub and eating his liver. Figured it must be tasty, full of flavorful fat, marinated in booze. Marve and Chet hauled Pitr out of the car and slung him over a shoulder each. We walked home slowly, all the cheer sucked out of our day. I walked next to Candace, smoking, hands in my pockets. I tried to keep my eyes straight ahead, but stole glances at her. Wished she would talk to me, even polite bullshit. She kept hugging herself, as if she were cold.

2. Six feet and bumps me gently

The house is empty when we return, but there is a napkin, folded twice and taped to the back door, with the name CHESTER on it in big red letters. Lipstick. Chet is slow to grab it, gives us ample opportunity to steal it from him and make it's contents known. Seems disappointed when we don't bother, bored by his sleazy pride.

The living room is filthy, spilt beer and cigarette ash and unidentifiable stuff, but we stream into it, put the TV on, lie down on couches still damp from the suspended sweat of revelers. Digesting, ridding ourselves of poisons, struggling to breathe.

I sit and watch everyone else sleep. Im restless. Bored. My magic pack of cigarettes still has eleven coffin nails in it.

Across the room, Candace is beautiful, peaceful, sleeping hard with steady, untroubled breaths. I watch her for a while, feeling guilty and vaguely creepy. Or not so vaguely. Her nipples are hard and I feel bad for noticing, but then I feel like I haven't had sex or anything even close to it in years. I stare at Candaces breasts and try to remember when I'd had sex last. I sit, and stare, and think.

I sit and think. I smoke a cigarette. I still have eleven left.

I not only can't remember anything about sex, I can't remember anything at all. Slightly before breakfast...greyness...then nothing. I slide off the couch and cross the room, carefully climb up onto the couch armrest, sit cross-legged and watch her sleep. Her smooth brow furrows, she starts to toss and turn. I try to remember anything.

"No..." she murmurs, a hand coming up as if to push me away, then dropping back down.

I know Candace...Ive known her for years...

She sits up suddenly, her nose is half an inch away from mine. Her eyes pop open. She screams, rather piercingly. Around us the living room erupts into Chet and Marve.

"Holy shit!" Marve shouts. "Are you okay?"

Candace is panting, looking right through me. "Yeah...yeah. Nightmare."

I imagine she is looking at me.

"I dreamed about Wayne." she says, pushing her hair back from her face as if it hurt. "I thought...for a moment...it was like he was here."

And I remember again.

Marve gives Candace a ride home, Pitr in the back seat, sleeping like a baby, his sports car still parked crazily in Chets driveway.

Chet makes iced tea and we sit on the porch in the sun and drink it with lots of sugar, and he reads the note from Jessica, which begins with the word asshole and ends with the words fuck you underlined three times. I can't help but feel that I know more about it than I should, so I take my glass and walk to the other end of the porch, and watch the sleepy little town walk their dogs, wash their cars, carry groceries. It's Sunday, and were all resting.

I look over at Chet. He's balled the note up and tossed it into the front yard, which is all yellow crabgrass and bare dirt.

"You can be a real asshole." I say, clearly, on purpose.

He nods. "I can be a real asshole."

I should know, I thought. I knew Chester. I'd known him for years.

Here was Chet in a nutshell:

Four months ago and a few days in change, and he calls me at ten oclock on a Saturday saying he wants to go down to Atlantic City, gamble a little bit, get some salt air in his lungs. Won't take no for an answer. Im sitting at home in my underwear, watching baseball on TV, no will of my own. I take a shower, I get dressed in a passable suit, I finish dressing just as Chet pulls up in his black Chevy Malibu, beautiful car.

For a while Im enthusiastic, then. Chet has the radio up loud, and were cruising down the Turnpike with the wind whipping through the car, and Im feeling classy and cool in my jacket and tie, a good decision. I run the numbers in my head, how much I can afford to lose, not much, and I always lose.

Halfway there, I begin to form the creeping suspicion that Chet is, in a word, crocked. He's driving crazily, singing too loud, off key. I start to feel like Im in a ride at Great Adventure, and I want the safety cage. I keep my arms and legs inside the car anyway, hoping that nothing bad will happen. Chet produces a flask from his jacket, tells me were having a Rat Pack night. Offers me a snort of whiskey.

Terrified for my life at this point, I gamely accepted and start drinking. I figured if I got into the bag with Chet, I won't be so afraid for my life. I start crawling in.

Naturally, we get lost, and were worming our way along some dark, single-lane, unlit road and weve been on this road for an hour too long and even Chet has stopped playing the Sinatra. Were both trashed, and Chet is driving by dumb luck at this point. And we both need to take a piss something fierce, but Chet is sullen and pissed that his night has gotten fucked up and he's refusing to pull over so we can take a leak until he figures out where we are.

Finally even he can't take my whining any more, so he pulls over on the shoulder of this deserted road overlooking a valley of rocks, crabgrass, and trash. It looks about two hundred feet down, all of it jagged rock, broken glass. I turn my back on his headlights, my shadow stretching out huge, the car in drive as Chet waits impatiently for me, as he gets bored watching my back as I piss off the edge of this cliff, as he starts fumbling for a cigarette, as his foot slips off the brake, as the Chevy rolls forward six feet and bumps me gently, and I go sailing into the evening with my dick in my hand.

That was Chet. He just fucking killed you.

3. The Monsters

My apartment has changed. I sit in the old living room on new furniture and wonder how these people live. Theyve changed everything, and I don't like it. The couch is leather now and it sticks to me. I sit in the dark and look around at the outlines of things, the new stereo, the huge TV. Not a fucking book in the place. Lots of movies, lots of albums. No books. Ive got nothing to read, for the first time I can remember. I sit in the kitchen sometimes and read cereal boxes, desperate.

Gary and Diana. He's white, a broker, I think. She's Asian of some sort. Pretty. A lawyer. Hard-assed, barks at Gary like he worked for her. I think Im starting to hate them. I don't know them, but they don't read anything and theyre always yelling at each other in quiet, polite voices.

I sit in the dark. Listen to them moving around in the bedroom. Hope they don't come back out, turning on the lights, making their ugly Euro-trashy furniture hard to ignore.

I can pretty easily picture the way the place used to be, before The Monsters moved in, before they'd ruined everything. I close my eyes and I can see the bookshelves, the desk, the ancient lamp I'd inherited from my brother, the creaking old stereo that still had a turntable attached to it, that required a dime and some patience to get the tape deck to play. The smell of coffee, the mysterious stains in the cheap carpet. The Monsters had better stuff, but it sucked more.

I still have eleven cigarettes. I light one and watch the coal move around the dark. I watch until the bedroom light goes off, disappearing from under the door. I watch until the dust they kick up during the day has settled back down, until the deep dark has inked it's way into the room.

MONDAY l. Straight World Nightmare

Just a blink and I open my eyes and it's Monday, without warning, and I am sitting at my desk. Or some desk. It could be any desk. They all look alike. Im wearing a white shirt, my pair of comfortable, spacious corduroy pants, brown. I think of them as my comfort pants. As I get older Im wearing them more and more. They look ridiculous, but they feel good. More and more, I choose the latter over the former.

I blink and stretch. It's 9:36AM. Im holding coffee in my hand. It smells wonderful.

Heres my job in a nutshell:

Theres a stack of paper in my inbox, left there be gnomes or elves or Marilee from Production, who knows? Articles, two sets of each, original manuscript, typeset proof. I take out each version, lay them side by side, sharpen a blue pencil, and proofread.

Misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, factual inconsistencies, whatever mistakes people can manage to introduce into a written work, it's my job then to do something about it. I scratch out, pigtail, I circle and margin-note. Page after page. Not endlessly. Just continuously.

When Im done, Im tempted to say that I pass them on to someone else who then does the same thing, but unfortunately it isn't even that grandiose. It doesn't even qualify as Kafkaesque. When Im done I just initial it, take credit for the eventual blame coming my way, and thats it. My job is then done, and I get to go home, happy in my work. At least if my job were truly Kafkaesque, I'd have the implied comfort of futility, the security of knowing that my shoddy work was being checked over and over by more qualified drones in the Big Machine. In my present situation, it was all up to me, and when my laziness, lack of focus, and brutal-style hangovers caused my work to suffer, I am the only person who got to deal with it.

My office is an uptight one; were run by a seventy-six year-old man whos been our CEO for almost forty years and does whatever he wants; when he sold the company twelve years before, part of his deal had been that he got to run the company with impunity as long as he felt like it. He was crusty, and humorless, and thought that Casual Fridays was a plague upon the world of good American business, and I found myself thinking in Capital Letters when I sought to describe the old fuck.

That was my job. Stiff, dull, and the best I could do. Would ever do.

Maryann comes around, wanting to know if people want to go out to lunch. She's twenty-three and still thinks that life is a grand adventure and the next person she meets might be her Prince, or at least someone interesting. Everyones up for Mexican. No one asks me my opinion. We meet out at the elevators, standing around making vacuous smalltalk. In the elevator, going down tightly packed in giggling prurience, we gossip about each other. Six people who wouldn't care to say a word to each other if we didn't work at the same company. I suck in my cheeks and force myself not to point this out to everyone. I don't want to be a killjoy.

In the street it's raining, and were unprepared; everyone brought cigarettes, no one brought raingear. We raise our jackets up over our heads like capes, run half a block laughing before someone asks where exactly were going, and we all stop and get wet, amused at our panic.

Dinahs been to a Tex/Mex place only two blocks away and recommends the burritos; Carl, who sits in the cube next to me today says screw the burritos, do you recommend the margaritas, and she laughs and says yes she does, so we decide that her suggestion is as good as any.

The margaritas, though, are small and comprised mostly of ice, and lunch turns desultory. We gamely slog through chips and salsa, soggy tacos and microwaved refried beans, and then wander back to the office in the damp, quiet, hands in pockets, cigarettes out mixing smoke into our white breaths. Off the elevators, we wave meek goodbyes and slink back to our desks. Someone is sitting at mine, someone I don't recognize. Probably a freelancer; they do that sometimes, just stick people at vacant desks. I grab a cup of bad coffee and sit in our little kitchen area, where cafeteria-type tables have been set out for our use.

Sun has poked through the clouds, and I sit drinking coffee and humming softly to myself. Now and again someone comes into the kitchen and sits down, but they leave quickly, looking around. I wonder if they smell something that I don't.



Staring at identical text is a numbing, maddening task. It's what I do, every day. Finding an error is exciting, it lets me break out the blue pencil and make a correction, it's something to do besides turn the pages and shift in your seat. I could hear the ambient noise of the office clearly: squeaking chair springs, clicking computer peripherals, cleared throats, murmuring voices, ringing phones. Dust hitting the floor. Skin flaking off. Hair growing. Time rushing by in a roar, angry and monotonous, hungry.

And without warning, it's five oclock.

I blink at the little clock radio on my desk. I don't remember buying the little clock, but there it is, and it says that it's five-oh-three in the afternoon. I can't recall what the hell I did all afternoon, but turn off my computer, shut off the lamp, toss all the paper into the inbox, or the outbox, whichever.

And Im outside. It's raining again.

Scurrying, people rush home through the rain, carefully moving amidst the drippings, trying to maintain their dignity. I stand in the pour and watch everyone, at a loss as to where to go. I can feel the collective pull of familiar people; Chet and Candace and others meet for drinks after work at a place called Rues Morgue and I figured instead of going...home...I'd see if tonight was one of the nights, see if I would get lucky, if maybe someone would put me up for the evening.

Bad luck: it's just Candace and some guy Ive never seen before, and whom I naturally detested on sight. I was greeted by stagnant quiet and the slight shifting of people who don't want you there but don't want to offend you. Candace hugged herself, complained she was cold. I lit one of my eleven remaining cigarettes and ordered a beer, crossed my legs and scanned the room, tried to be cool. I'd never been cool in my whole life. Thought I'd give it a try.

The guy is a straight world nightmare, one of those men who gets his hair cut every two weeks because it actually matters to him that he handle the hair situation in his life. Dark blue suit, not too stuffy but presentable. Suspenders, which I immediately assume he calls braces in some ridiculously pretentious stab at expertise. He looks genetically engineered to finish off every night of his existence watching ESPN SportsCenter. I hate him.

Candace doesn't seem to much like him either. I gather from snatches of conversation that they were now the sad remains of a larger group of people. She drinks her martini fast and they talk about dumb things, news, their jobs. Bullshit. I want Braces Man to leave so I can have a real conversation with Candace, and when the ass calls her Candy with a devilish smile, I figure my time has come. No one ever called Candace "Candy". She wasn't the type.

"No one ever calls me that." she says.

I realize with a deep sense of wrongness that she doesn't dislike this guy nearly as much as I thought. She lets him order her another martini and she drinks that one fast too, and now she's drunk in her brown business suit with the long skirt that goes down to her ankles, and Braces Man is subtly working into the conversation his salary battles, his condo, his BMW. Candace doesn't seem impressed, but then she doesn't seem totally disgusted either.

I order more beers, smoke more cigarettes, watch in horror as Candace proceeds to get fall-off-her-seat drunk and agrees to let Braces Man walk her home. She runs to the bathroom and he settles the check with manly indifference and I sit there with him and watch him look around the crowded bar with smug satisfaction and a half erection in his pants. I decide Im not going to let this motherfucker maul Candace, my Candace, just because she's drunk and obviously not herself.

I reach for my pack of cigarettes and knock over a pint of stale beer. He jumps up to avoid the splash, starts cursing because his leather shoes have been hit, a very palpable hit. I can't help but laugh. When Candace weaves back from the bathroom, though, he's all smiles again, and tells her theyre only shoes. I laugh again.

On the way to her place, I walk behind them in grim sullen awkwardness. I follow them through the front door, and Candace doesn't say anything, which I take as a good sign. I get in the elevator with them, and she says nothing. I follow them into her small, tidy apartment that always looked like she sanded the place down before leaving. It had a dry, clean feel to it I'd always loved. She stumbles in trying to hook her keys on the little Winnie the Pooh keyholder glued next to the door, Braces Man bravely steadies her by wrapping his arm around her waist, and suddenly I am staring at them kissing. Making out. My gut freezes and I fade away, shaking and nervous and feeling like Im thirteen again, awkward, unsure, rejected.

Theyre blocking the door. I don't know what to do, I back away, turn and walk to her bathroom. It's blue and pink and amazingly small, shower stall, toilet, sink in-between, and I dash some water on my face and look up at myself in the mirror...and remember.

Blood. Ankles on his shoulders. Caked all over my face, from the flap of skin torn from my forehead. The silver anklet shimmering in the lamplight. One eye, the other AWOL, a pulpy pink mass where it ought to have been. Her eyes tightly shut, her mouth open wide, her hands clenched on his back. My shirt is pink and scabby with blood, one side slightly caved in, a few missing ribs. Red burns on her back from the rough couch upholstery. One sleeve of my jacket was so torn it was hanging off by some threads, revealing a badly broken arm that bent weirdly, bone poking out of the skin. She shuddered beneath him, but didn't look at him. I dripped chunky yellowish blood into the sink.

I was dead, and looked like I had been for some time.

2. You not here

Coffee at another faceless diner with the Beatles playing very low on one of the little personal jukeboxes they had at every booth. Someone, a big fan, playing "We Can Work it Out" over and over again, a hundred quarters, or else it was broken. Try to see it my way. Life is very short. And theres no time.

I reached for my cigarettes, knock over my coffee, and the ceramic cup goes crashing into a million little coffee-flavored pieces.

"Thats just our ghost."

I turn to look back at the waitress, but she isn't talking to me, she's talking to two big guys with matching ZZ Top beards whore eating pancakes at ten oclock at night. She's refilling their coffee and gesturing in my direction.

"Every night, things break, we don't know why."

"Me."

He's worse off than me. Young guy, younger than me, skinny, tan skin and Asian features. Staring at me with squinted, burning dark eyes. He hates me. I can feel it. I brace myself. It feels like he's holding himself back from going for my throat by sheer force of will. Then he says something in a thick, thick accent and I can't make out a word of it.

We stare at each other for a moment. The waitress starts picking up pieces of coffee cup. I watch her, and my new friend pounds the table forcefully, and I jump and look back at him. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the waitress jump and glance up, then shake her head and chuckle.

"Working here too much, Gracie." she mutters.

The Asian fellow leans forward. I can feel him like heat against my face. He points a scabbed finger that juts at an unnatural angle from his hand.

"You not here." is what he's saying. I imagine having a conversation in English with him would give me nosebleeds.

"Okay." I say, putting up my hands. "I think I get it. Im not wanted here. Okay."

My new admirer scowls a little more, and pounds the table with his ruined hand, for emphasis. The saucer, along with it's man-made lake of coffee, milk, and sugar, skitters off the edge and crashes next to our waitress, who jumps back and lands on her ass, gasping.

"Christ," she mutters, getting back onto her knees to clean up the mess. "Little fuckers never been this active." She laughs a little. "This is what the eight-to-midnight shift gets me. I believe in ghosts now. Great."

I stand up slowly and gather my cigarettes, all eleven of them. "Okay, pal." I say, softly. "Im going. Don't throw any more tantrums. Don't scare the poor thing any more, okay?"

He just scowls at me, trying to make fists with his broken hands.

I coast through the diner, greasy little place but nice enough by way of diners. I was a ghost. I was haunting my own life. I didn't know why. I walk carefully through the place. I don't want to accidentally knock anything over, give the poor woman a heart attack or something like that. Out on the sidewalk, I stop to light a smoke and consider my options, which are either limitless or nonexistent, depending on your world view. I wonder, suddenly, how come no one notices when I open a door.

Nothing comes to me out of nowhere, so I start walking. Which is what I would have done anyway, so I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense. It feels good just to move. I know the neighborhood, and as I think about it I realize Ive been in that diner before, most probably why I went there.



I get home, and the Monsters are having a party.

Weird people I don't ever want to know are standing shitfaced in what used to be my living room, before I died. A wine crowd, too young for real booze. Thinks theyre too old for old fashioned beer like in high school. Still shitfaced, all the same. I seethe in a corner and smoke my cigarettes and eavesdrop on lame conversations, but then I guess all conversations are lame if youre not involved in them. Or maybe all conversations are just lame, but your own involvement made them intrinsically interesting. Or maybe all conversations were just lame, period.

In the kitchen, bright young white people and bright young tan people and bright young black people were discussing their investments. I sat between a tiny blonde girl so smashed on white wine she could no longer form consonants and a towering Asian fellow who weighed about ninety pounds. I was the only person in the room smoking. I think I was the only person at the party smoking. I blew smoke into peoples faces, amazed that this was what passed as a party here, eleven percent alcohol by volume and fucking portfolio angst. Soft laughter, careful sips, catalog clothes.

In the living room, more shiny people were discussing what they considered to be the genius advertising campaigns of late, with inebriated gravity, discussing nuances and references. Graceful soliloquies which almost had me believing that the commercial was a form of short film, and not a lethal exercise in flim flam that it was, designed to make you feel shitty about all the shit you didn't have. I sat and listened, and after a while I sat and didn't listen. I commandeered a bottle of whiskey and locked myself in the bathroom, and sat down on the toilet to think.

A polite knock on the door, which I ignored.

I took a long pull at the bottle -not bad stuff, all said, although I doubted that the Monsters knew it. I sat amidst their fucking Utne Readers and scented soaps and felt sorry for myself, floating around like a soap bubble, waiting to burst. Living with monsters.

Another knock, an insistent jiggling of the door handle. I sneer at the shut door. if there are any people in the world who don't deserve the basic human right to piss, it's the Monsters and their brood out there. I grin at the doorhandle...and now the jiggling is really insistent, and theres pounding, and voices. I guess they think someones passed out in here. I grin fadingly at the handle, listening to them having a conference about me. Then theres an ominous silence out there, and I know that someone is going to break the door in, expecting to find one of the bulimic underwear models collapsed and puking.

I grin at the handle, still and waiting.

The door smashed in with a disappointing lack of drama, a single shard of wood from the frame and flimsy thing just bounced off the wall and snapped shut again, revealing a crowd of partiers for a split second. I leaped to my feet.

The door slowly slid inward again. The guy Monster stood there, eyeing the tiny bathroom as if he suspected gnomes were hidden amidst his girlfriends birth control devices.

"I could have sworn someone was in there." someone says.

I realize Im standing ready for a fight, fists half up, on the balls of my feet. I feel foolish; I haven't been in a fight since grade school.

"Well," Mr. Monster says mildly. "It looks clear now." He turns to his audience. "All right, everyone, nothing happened. Lets go and let Ashley have some privacy. Who needs a refill?"

His voice mild, deep, irritatingly pleasant.

The smashed blond girl from the kitchen shuts the door behind her and spends some time drunkenly ensuring that the door will stay shut. It's swelled a bit over the years and so it does. She turns back to me and I realize, horrified, that she's going to go to the bathroom, and I barely dive out of the way as she staggers towards the toilet.

"Fuck me." I moan softly.

She pauses and looks around, hugging herself. Encouraged, I take a step forward.

"Get out." I whisper.

Ashley jumps a little, bends to peer under the sink.

"Get out." I repeat, a little louder. Ashley backs up until she bumps into the toilet.

"Get out!" I yell suddenly.

Ashley lets out a little yelp and dashes past me, tearing open the door and running, hysterical, into the kitchen. I laid even odds on whether or not shed pissed herself. I started to laugh, doubling over, hugging myself.

I got it: I was a ghost.

3. Dim, in the background

The Monsters leave the bathroom light on all night, after all their guests have gone. I pick up the phone, dial Candaces number, to apologize, to say Im sorry I spied on her, to say Im sorry in general.

"Hello?" He voice, sleepy. Someone else, dim, in the background.

I can't put it into words. Im speechless.

"I someone there?"

TUESDAY l. Like mist, like fog

A quick mental calculation: It's Tuesday, suddenly, and Im sitting at my desk. Im sitting with my hands on my keyboard, as if I'd been typing. On the computer screen, a single sentence glowe'd:

Stop masturbating in the restroom, Michael.

I stared at it dumbly for a few seconds. I couldn't remember if masturbation was spelled correctly. I pulled my hands off the keyboard a little guiltily. I needed coffee. Something to snap myself out of the weird, sleepy funk I was in. I feel like Im moving through melted cheese; I can't breathe, and I can't make my limbs move fast enough to swim. So, I sink. My lungs burning, my eyes shut tightly, my nose clogged.

Downstairs, I get my coffee tall and black, piping hot, and I stand with all the Smokers, who have been herded from the carefully air-conditioned offices above out onto the street. None of us look healthy. The men are fat, flushed, ready to explode. The women wear too much makeup, their clothes are too tight. All around us, coughing, people bringing up clumps of their lungs to add to the decor.

It was amazing what people said while I was standing right there.

An older woman, hard blonde out of a bottle with too much red lipstick on, the lipstick smeared all over the filter of her cigarette, to an obese woman, brunette hair cut very short, blouse so big it might as well have been a dress over her pants: "If that little shit thinks he's too fucking good to fuck me, Im going to fire him."

A flushed man in a worn grey suit, cheap white shirt painfully white, smoking unfiltered cigarettes until they burnt his fingers, to a man I took as an identical twin until closer inspections: "You just put it in your bag and walk out. They never check. Five thousand, easy. Sometimes more, if you know someone."

A younger man, in jeans that were torn and leather shoes that cost five hundred dollars, a faded old concert T-shirt, and a gold watch that could fund a small island country for a day, to a washed-out looking woman in a short skirt and white stockings: "I get good coke. These days, no one knows where to get good stuff, so get shit thats so stepped on you have to practically pretend youre high. But I always have good stuff. You should come over some time, well get high."

I glanced at myself in the reflection of the revolving doors, curious as to why everyone seemed so willing to tell me their business. The smoke was leaking out of my neck, my cheek, sifting up from my ruined shirt like mist, like fog. I'd forgotten, I was dead.

I took a walk around the block, wondering about this. I drank my coffee until it was cold and then I tossed it into the gutter. I had eleven cigarettes left, and I sat on the curb by my pool of stagnant former-coffee and smoke one of them, the city cool and humid around me at the same time, implied weight.

After a while, I go back up to the office, to see what Im haunting. In my cubicle, I find Mike OLeary and Fran from Human Resources speaking in low, controlled voices. They don't notice me. But I have no place to sit. I wandered the halls until I found an empty cube, someone on vacation. I sat and put my feet up. I stared at the computer screen, until I blinked and realize it's been turned on, and a phrase has been typed onto the screen:

No one really loves you, Helen.

I glanced at my watch. It had been almost two hours. It's time for lunch.

On Tuesdays I had a Boys Lunch, every week. At full attendance it was Pitr Mags, slumming with the wage earners, Chet, Marve, myself, and on extreme occasions Henry Speakman, presented with weak enthusiasm by Chet and welcomed passively by the rest of us. The Boys Lunch had taken on the smell and smooth feel of tradition. We rotated three taverns, so everyone got an easy walk at least once every three weeks. This week it was my turn to have it easy, and I was there before the rest of them. Before I could get the waitress attention, Chet and Henry walked in, closely followe'd by Pitr Mags, who walked as if his sunglasses were too heavy for him. he wasn't wearing any shoes, which he groggily explained by saying "I was in a rush."

Marve was standing behind Chet, then, motioning for us to stay quiet. Chet felt something, and turned with a curse, sending Marve laughing into the one remaining seat.

Chet stared at me for a moment. "Fuck, thats creepy." he said.

Everyone else looked elsewhere. The waitress came and saved us: everyone ordered beers, except Pitr, who ordered a double vodka on the rocks, sounding grim.

"No more talk like that, OK, man? Let it go." Marve complained.

Chet just stared down at his shoes.

So they talked. They talked about their jobs, about cocksucking bosses and increasingly unapproachable interns and the inches of ceiling of dust on their shoulders every evening. Pitr sucked vodka and laughed in all the right places, and offered up a story about hiring a personal assistant in which he sought to hire a hot chick who would sleep with him, the humor of the story centering on how, exactly, you find out if shell sleep with you without encouraging a lawsuit. The mood lightened with this offering, and Pitr kept giggling for a while afterward, and I got the feeling that this anecdote may have happened yesterday or months ago.

They all laughed, though. I watched Chet. If you didn't listen, he looked like he was choking.

They talked about being single, about how great it was. How they would never want to be chained down, like so many of their friends were doing. And Marve says, I hear Candace has started seeing some guy.

"Yeah," Chet replied, finishing off his beer. "He's a fucking broker. Can you believe that? Candy with some goddamn wall-streeter?"

Candy. It irritated me. She didn't let anyone call her that.

They talked about her, then. The consensus is that she's hot, but a little too controlled, too neat. They can't believe shed be fucking the Straight World Nightmare. They talked about what it would be like to screw Candace, idle talk, nothing serious. All the same, I reached over, knocked Chets beer into his lap.

"Don't fucking talk about her like that."

Chet was up, cursing and dancing away, wiping himself down. Then he stops and looks around. Everyone is quiet, and theyre all looking at me.

"No no no." Chet was saying, drying off his seat with some napkins. "No fucking way. No one even say it."

"No ones gonna say it, man." Pitr rumbled as if from a deep and insulated place. "I think Wayne said it pretty fucking clear."

And he laughed, even though no one else did.

2. a blank, soulless expression of dread



If I listen closely, I can hear the air hissing out of the room, smothering us. Kay Mack, who is our Director, is informing us of the companys policy concerning harassment and privacy, and some new policies regarding passwords on the computers. I stare at one of the potted plants, watching it for sudden moves. It's more interesting than Mr. Mack, who drones on with polished oratory burnt into him at some prestigious business school, where he was trained to make more money than the rest of us, the poor sucker.

Kay Mack says, it is inexcusable to tamper with a fellow employees cube or it's contents.

The room as a whole sits and contemplates Kay Mack with a blank, soulless expression of dread. No one responds in any way to his words. Not a head is nodded, not a sound is made. Lulled. Defeated.

Kay Mack says, playing pranks on fellow employees is certainly not a behavior that is going to be tolerated.

I don't need to be here, and I rise up out of my broken chair, hovering just a few feet off the floor, moving slowly and majestically past everyone. I don't have to be here, and the realization is exhilarating. I pass very close to Mr. Mack on my way to the door.

Kay Mack says, we take these complaints very seriously.

I pass through the door and leave the droning meeting behind. From out here it sounds like a man talking to himself, just Kay Macks thin voice and a room full of nothing. The nothing is pushing me along, and I float down the halls, out the doors, towards the elevators, and then down one of the shafts, past grease and cables and mysterious spray-painted codes left behind by more capable men than me.

And Im on the street. And still moving.

3. A wading pool of dirty underwear

Moving through his house, I can't quite figure out what Im looking for. I trace my fingers along appliances in the kitchen, fluff the pillows, dig through dresser drawers. Nothing seems to fit, nothing makes the buzzing in my head pause.

Chets house without Chet is a run-down place without personality, the sort of place the landlords lower the rent on every year, feeling vaguely ashamed of themselves. He doesn't take care of it, either, lending his own benign neglect to it's sheen of decay, a thin scum of Chets ignorance and shallowness. Dirty plates piled in the sink. Stale bags of chips on the couch, spilled over. Empty beer bottles here and there. A light scum of bodily secretions in the bathroom, fuzzy and disturbing. Newspapers from years back, piled high, yellowe'd, forgotten, probably never read.

A wading pool of dirty underwear, greyed sheets piled on the bed, filled with sweat, hair, skin. Dust like a pelt.

Each room was a little like Chet, largely unexamined, allowe'd to fall in on itself, blithely unaware. I drifted through them purposelessly. There would be nothing. Chet was not the sort to leave behind any evidence of his existence, any droppings or cave paintings. nothing. he passed frictionlessly through life, and so far I was the only sign that hed been here, the only mark he was leaving behind.

He got home around five-thirty, sweaty in a sportscoat too heavy for the weather, flush-faced and disheveled. He dropped his unread mail in the kitchen, looked around and I thought for a moment he knew I was there, because he stared at me for a while. Then he went to the fridge and got out a beer, sighing contentedly when he sipped it, cold. I just studied him as he dragged an arm across his forehead.

Then he crossed back into the living room, turned on the television, and sat on the couch. Put his feet up on the coffee table. Fondled the remote control. Sat there sipping beer and surfing channels, his face a blank moon shining back the television.

I sat next to him, noticed the couch didn't seem to register my weight. Sat there staring at him, and even as he became absorbed in a movie about a stripper with a heart of gold who was trying to save her son from his deadbeat father, he fidgeted and glanced around, nervous.

I was curious, so I reached out and pushed his beer bottle out of his hand.

It crashed to the floor, shattering into beer and glass and white foam, and Chet was up and tripping over his own feet, getting away from the couch. He stood there, panting, and I imagined we were staring at each other. I half expected him to say something to me.

Instead, he shook his head suddenly and laughed, then crossed to the kitchen. For an irrational moment I thought maybe he was going to clean up the mess, but instead he plucked up the phone and dialed. I watched him from the living room, and put my hands in my pockets because I didn't know what else to do with them.

"Hey."

Wiping spare beer onto his white shirt.

"Nothing. Just...a little freaked out, I guess."

Hand in pocket, safe for now.

"I don't know. Something just...I don't know."

Uncomfortable laugh. Hand comes out of the pocket, and twirls the phone cord.

"Maybe. I just...listen, this is going to sound stupid, but...I don't want to be alone tonight. Maybe youd have a drink with me?"

I am suddenly psychic, and burning with hatred. I clench my fists.

"Or, we could just hang here. I'd make margaritas. Come on, what do you say?"

I stomp over to the television, intending to put my foot through it. I kick, savagely, but the TV just shuts off.

"Uh...Thanks, sweetheart. I uh...appreciate it. See you then." Shifts his package, like the idiot jerkoff he is.

4. This isn't a date

She's wearing pink, and pulls it off because she's beautiful, and graceful, and unconcerned with opinion. She's damp from the night, and cheeringly irritated. Chet greets her at the door with newly minted margaritas in each hand, grinning.

Candace pauses, flicks her lashes towards the drinks then up at his pasty little face.

"Chester, this isn't a date, is it?"

he laughs. I light one of my remaining cigarettes and shake my head in disbelief. His laugh is like finding a bug in your food. He pushes a margarita at her until she takes it.

"Thanks for coming, Candy."

He turns away, and I laugh when she rolls her eyes.

"Don't call me that, okay, Chet? How many times do I have to -"

He shocks us both by turning, his face serious. "Im sorry. I take it back, okay?"

Candace frowns. "Are you okay, Chet?"

He looks around, and again for a second I feel like he could almost see me, and then he shrugs. "I don't know. I feel weird. The past few days...look, come in. Sit down. I just appreciate having you here."

She softens. You can see it happen, you can see the lines of her face fading away. You can see her eyes widen just a little. You can see her lean forward just a little. She looks down at the floor for a second. "Okay. Can I bum a smoke?"

Chet shakes his head. "I don't have any. Charity Packs all gone."

She smells the air. "I could have sworn...anyway, lets go sit. My drink is dripping."

I follow them into the living room. Candace selects a clean-looking spot on the sofa and sits down, sips her drink politely and experimentally, and sets it down on the laden coffee table without comment. I lean against the doorway and watch them. Chet swallowe'd a big gulp of his drink and then suddenly leaned forward.

"I feel like something terrible is going to happen to me."

This in a rush, fast, as if he was ashamed to speak the words and had to do it fast, like ripping off a bandage. I shift a little to stare at him. It was getting interesting, finally.

Candace struggles with her innate goodness, but finally smiles a little and says "Chester, thats ridiculous. Are you telling me youre psychic?"

"Ridiculous?" He doesn't like her reaction. Lord only knows what Chet thinks of himself, but it surely demanded a more respectful response than ridiculous. "Candace, Im telling you that I feel this overwhelming sense of foreboding, every day, from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. And you make fun of me? Thanks a lot."

Candace tries to sober up a little. She doesn't like anyone to think ill of her, even Chet. "Im sorry. It just...I wasn't expecting you to say that."

"Jeez, I hope not." Chet sounds mollified, and takes another huge gulp of his drink. "Look, just listen to me, okay? Then if you want to tell me Im crazy, go ahead, but let me explain, okay?"

Candace studies him. My eyes flick between them. I think I can speculate on what she's thinking, she's trying to decide what Chets up to. She's willing to give him some slack, if only to find out what his game is, this time. "Okay," she says finally, "go ahead."

Chet leans forward with a laughably earnest look on his face. "For the whole week...I wake up, sweating. I don't know what the hell Im dreaming, but it's got me waking up making fists and shivering. I walk around, and I have to resist looking over my shoulder, because Im positive someones following me, or watching me." He looked down at his feet, the drink hanging limp in his hands. "Everywhere I go, things break." She snorted, and he looked up sharply. "Im fucking serious, Candy! I mean it. I sit down at a restaurant, and my goddamn drink slides into my lap. I go to a bar, it's like glasses appear out of nowhere to smash at my feet. All week, I mean. Every time."

Candace was very obviously holding in laughter with pursed lips, but he wasn't looking at her.

"And then today," he said heavily, "I get back from lunch, where yet another glass found me irresistible, and someone had been at my computer."

I straighten a little, a sudden memory popping up.

"They had typed onto the screen the words Something bad is going to happen to you."

I blinked. That was half true, I suddenly realized. I had added a second line telling him that he wouldn't get away with it for long.

Candace stared at him for a few seconds. "Im sorry? Someone snuck into your office and wrote on your computer? A prank, Chet. Probably one of your penny-loafer frat alums."

Score one for Candace, I thought.

Chet shook his head. "You don't get it, Candy-" 

"I asked you to call me Candace."

Chet settled himself with obvious struggle. "Sorry. Im trying to explain this feeling of foreboding, and I guess Im not doing a very good job of it."

"I guess not."

"I thought youd be," Chet looked down at his shoes again, "more sympathetic. At least more nice."

More nice. The crapper couldn't even speak interesting.

Candace sighed. "Look, Chet, Im not sure what you want from me. Youre feeling weird, okay, but come on -what am I supposed to say? Why do you think you feel this way?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe...do you think Mags really saw Waynes ghost? Remember, the other night?"

Candace leaned back into the couch and crossed her arms in front of her. "I remember."

"Well? Do you think?"

"I don't know. Why? Chet, are you going to tell me you think that Wayne is watching you?"

She looked upset, she looked dangerous. She looked primed to spring.

Chet shook his head and took a deep breath. "No...no...listen, I was just feeling weird, and Im glad you came over. Lets just change the subject and finish our drinks. We could order some dinner, rent a movie."

"I don't know, Chet. Ive got things to do. When you called...it sounded like a crisis, you know? Now it's just you feeling lonely. I see way too much of you as it is, you know."

It was meant with affection. Chet just played with a pilled thread on the couch cushion. "Uh-huh. Couldn't you stay a little while? Maybe you could sleep over."

Her eyes narrowe'd, but he didn't see. I was fighting the urge to break one of the margarita glasses over his head.

"Youre fucking fine, Chet. Thanks for the drink." She says, standing up. To my surprise, he was up just as quickly, hands out, placating.

"Please, wait, come on." She stopped in front of him, with a sigh and a tart glance over his shoulder before settling back on him.

"Im sorry."

"For?"

"Hitting on you. It's a habit." A shrug, then, and a smile. Good old goofy Chet.

She bit her lip a little. "Im still leaving, Chester."

He nodded. "Hey, thanks for coming by, though. It wasn't bull, I swear, and I feel better."

I walk with them to the door, where Candace ignores him a little more and is walking down his steps before he can even say good night. I stand behind him as he shuts the door, and then leans his forehead against it for a moment.

"Christ," he says dismally, "this fucking weeks been a bitch."

He turns away and starts walking back into the house, shaking his head. Shaking his head like he can't understand why a good guy like him is getting so much grief. I stick my foot out and he goes over, landing badly and cracking his head on the stairs. He sits on the hall floor moaning and rubbing his forehead, where a trickle of blood appears.

"Christ," he murmurs again, getting up slowly.

5. The music seemed to be exactly the same

Three in the morning and the city is a patchwork of quiet and chaos and I floated down thirteenth street suddenly, with my hands in my pockets and a cigarette stuck to my lower lip, burning sedately in the still, cool air. My tie was undone. My shoes were chafing my heels. My underwear felt like it was full of sand.

It was late.

The street was empty except for two huge men in black, standing ominously outside of a gated storefront. As I got closer, the music started to seep up from somewhere, just a heavy beat, blank and driving.

The two guys were standing to either side of a plain green metal door next to the security gate. One was round and bald, the other tall and lanky, tattooed up and down both arms. They ignored me, and stood monolithically. The music was coming from behind the door, which opened suddenly, two figures spilling out in a dense cloud of smoke, sudden noise, and half-glimpsed people. The bald guy stepped forward and slammed the green door shut again.

"You assholes ain't supposed to exit out this door, goddammit." he spat.

One of the people, who turned out to be Marve, looked up laughing from where hed fallen on the sidewalk. "Sorry, baby, but this man needed to get out of there. Life or death."

"Life or death, huh?" the bald one said, looking dubious.

Marve struggled into a sitting position, still laughing. "Man, look at him if you don't believe me."

We all looked. I blinked, surprised again, because the other one was Pitr Mags. He was lying on his stomach with his head dangling over the curb, being loudly sick into the street. His clothes looked expensive.

Pitr finished puking and rolled over onto his back. A thin line of puke stretched from his chin to the street. He stared up at the night sky as if seeing god out of the corner of his eyes. Then he sat up a little, propping himself up on his elbows, and looked at me.

"Hey, Wayne," he said, smiling, his expression elastic and his voice rusted shut. He sounded like he hadnt spoken in years.

"You Wayne?" Baldy asked Marvin.

"No, man, I ain't no fucking Wayne." Marve replied, getting to his feet and brushing himself off. "Yo! Pitr! Who you talking to?"

Pitr lolled on the ground happily. "Wayne." he said, still smiling at me, an anaesthetized cherub.

"Aw, man, Waynes not here." Marve said, walking over to Pitr and trying to pull him to his feet. "Youre just fucked up, you crazy Indian mother." He gave up trying to raise him up. "Fuck, and heavy. Fucked up and heavy."

"You guys can't stay there." Baldy said.

Marve looked over his shoulder at him. "Lighten up, Cue Ball, can't you see the mans been overserved? He just spent your salary in there, so cut the man some slack, huh?"

Baldy put his hands up to indicate slack.

"Pitr!" Marve bellowe'd into Pitrs ear. "Come on, Pitr! We can't stay on the street. Give me something to work with, huh, Pitr!"

Pitr was laughing, soft little giggles. He was still looking at me.

"Ah, fuck it." Marve finally said, letting Pitr drop back onto the sidewalk, damp and flabby, glowing with an unhealthy heat.

Marve started walking away. "Find your own way home, goddamn fucked up Indian."

"Hey!" Baldy shouted, pointing. "You can't leave him there!"

Marve waved his middle finger at them. "What, you gonna arrest me or something, tough guy? He ain't my property. You don't like him puking on your sidewalk, you move him." Marve walked a few more feet before turning around and walking backwards. "Be careful with the motherfucker, though. He's rich." Not satisfied that he was understood, he threw out his hands. "Good lawyers!"

Baldy and the other one watched Marve walking away, then took in Pitrs amiably supine form. Then they looked at each other. Action didn't seem very palatable to them. I considered their probable cardiovascular situations and didn't blame them. I shook out my pack of cigarettes, eleven left. Lighting one, I walked over to Pitr and stood over him.

"Look what youre doing to yourself, I said."

He struggled, and finally focused his eyes on me. "Ah, what ya gonna do?" he slurred, closing his eyes.

I sat down on the curb with him.

"Want a smoke?"

"Sure."

He didn't sound very sure of it. I shook one out for him and lit it, which was hard, since he was lying on the ground.

"Why do you drink like this, Pitr? Youre young. Youre rich. Why do this?"

"Ah, man, why do anything?" He complained, staring up at the streetlights and power lines. "Why are you haunting us, man? You died a long time ago."

I jumped a little, but it was less and less shocking each time, I realized. "Because he killed me, man."

"Oh yeah?" Pitr seemed surprised at this announcement.

We smoked a little. The bouncers were watching us for sudden moves, mad rushes at the door. The music seemed to be exactly the same. It mustve been playing for twenty minutes, that song, but it continued on doggedly.

"You need to be fucked up to like music like that." I said, gesturing at the door.

"Sure, sure." Pitr agreed amiably. "So what you gonna do? About him, I mean." he added, rolling over a little to spit something green into the gutter.

"I don't know."

"How you know you got time to consider?"

"What?"

Pitr stretched luxuriously. He might have been lying at him in his expensive bed, covered in satin sheets. "Man, how you know you got time?" He snorted. "For all this bullshit, I mean."

He pronounced it bool-shit, like two distinct words. I considered my cigarette. "I just assumed I would. Why else am I here?" It sure wasn't for the conversation.

"Yeah, you thought you had time before, too. Then POW, youre a fucking ghost."

Pow, I thought.

WE'DNESDAY l. I just wait for them to come back

Matter means nothing any more, apparen'tly; I move through it and around it without even trying, arriving at obscure destinations. I am sitting at my desk again. I glance down at my hands. Theyre poised on the keyboard. I look up at the screen.

We all know about the pornography, Michael.

I blinked at the words, black on white. I didn't remember writing them. I pulled my hands away and leaned back in the chair. I didn't even know who Michael was, I didn't think. I stood up in the cubical and stared around me. I was dead. And I didn't know why I was there, at work, of all places. Why work? Anywhere but work, I thought. Anywhere but work.

I took my mild nicotine hangover and started out of the cube, into the hallway, passing through people like vapor. Through the kitchen, through the mail room, out the back door, into the lobby. Down an elevator shaft, into the downstairs lobby. Into the street, moving through people. I was a man of action.

And then Im on the train, underground, the vague smell of metal in the air and a light crowd now that rush hours over, there are even seats. I don't sit, though. I never sit. Usually the train is crowded, a mess of pushing people, and the effort involved in getting that seat is so ludicrous, so out of proportion with it's inherent comfort level or status, that I nodded off in exhaustion just thinking about it, woke up in strange places, subway stops no one used any more, ancient, abandoned areas of the city, prowled by wild animals, ruled by magic.

A short, disheveled man clutching the broken remnants of what was once a nice leather briefcase is staring at me.

I know the difference between the casual coincidental glance and actual perception, finally. I knew when Pitr looked at me that he saw me, or thought he did, whatever difference that made - unless I was just one of Pitrs hallucinations, given life by a brief, swollen energy. Temporary and in for one fuck of a surprise. But the short man with the torn clothes and mashed briefcase was really looking at me, seeing me. I looked him over carefully. He was older than me, maybe forty, maybe not. He was balding. He was wearing what remained of a grey suit, blackened, torn, bloodied. His hair, what there was of it, was curly and dark. There was what appeared to be a grease stain all the way down one side of him, darkening the ruined material.

I watched him watch me for a while, then I watched him pull away from the wall of the car and walk over to me. He stopped right in front of me, scanning me from head to toe.

"What happened to you?" he asked.

I made a little piss-contest show of scanning him from head to toe. "I got pushed off a cliff by a close personal friend of mine." I answered, truthfully enough.

He raised an eyebrow. "So you know the fucker, did this to you?"

I nodded. "Sure."

"You do it yet?"

"Do what?"

He frowned at my answer. "Your revenge, man. Have you had it yet?" He rolled his eyes. "Why do you think were here, anyway?"

I just looked at him. He rolled his eyes again.

"Youre lucky, man." he said in apparen't sincerity. "I don't know who it was that pushed me. I just remember their face. I just wait, I just wait for them to come back."

2. Puke guy

Outside Chets office, I stop to lean against a signpost and smoke a cigarette. Im contemplating murder, after all. So I pause and smoke and take a moment to notice all the dead people.

Puke Guy has gravitated towards me, a middle-aged man in a decent suit, covered in bloody puke. He stands next to me, reeking in the still air, for a moment, and then asks to bum a cigarette from me. I decide it can't hurt to be friendly to my fellow dead people, so I shake out one of my remaining eleven butts and light it for him. The smoke just makes the smell of puke worse.

He sucks in smoke and savors it. "Christ, thats good." He says. "My biggest regret, not punching out with a goddamn pack of nails in one single pocket. Of all the luck."

I nodded vapidly. This didn't satisfy him.

"Poison." He says, holding out a gummy hand. "You?"

Reluctantly, I shake his hand, resisting wiping it off on my bloody jacket. "Pushed."

He nods. "I see her every day, that goddamn cowardly bitch. Im going to push her into traffic, I swear I will.

I don't look at him, but I say "Why haven't you?"

Theres a moment of silence. Then, "I don't know. I see her every day, I follow her around. But...I don't know."

I didn't either.

There are lots of dead people, I realize. I just hadnt noticed before. Just in front of Chets building, in addition to Puke Guy, there are three others. Were all just standing around. I briefly considered asking one of them if Chet had killed them too.

Cigarette into the gutter, button my ruined sportsjacket, slick back my matted hair. Through the revolving doors with practiced skill and determined pace, into the frigid air of the over-air conditioned lobby. Up the crowded elevator, standing polite with evil thoughts and hands at my sides. Down the beige hallway shaded to drain your soul of the pus, the shadowe'd monochromatic desolation enough to drain the blood from your brain and leave you walking, dead, like me.

Chet is working, looking diligent.

I sit next to him on his desk and watch him, my hands folded on my knee. Chets kind of a failure, if you look at it the right way: he was that Guy in school who got away with things. He skipped classes and got fired from jobs and crashed other peoples cars and never got in trouble for it, always slid by. That kind of moss-covered charm made him a minor rock star when he was 20, a kegger legend. Everyone kind of expected him to flame out in a big way: jail, drugs, something. Instead Chet quietly graduated a year after all his friends, and now worked for a financial company writing reports, an endless succession of reports, in Power Point. Slides. Static images.

Seeing him in his little cube, tapping at his computer, I almost felt sorry for him. The little bastard was so beaten. But, I reminded myself, the little bastard had also gone back to his squalid little life with no obvious remorse, no torture, nothing aside from a vaguely uneasy feeling which he most likely ascribed to bad drugs. Chet was empty space walking around. Empty space that had killed me.

I experimented making fists, but I couldn't get angry. I looked down at his bald spot, and I just couldn't summon enough anger to try and kill him, even assuming that I could. It was dispiriting, just the tapping of Chets keys and the squeak of his chair as he shifted. I wondered, as I sat there feeling absolutely no kinetic energy whatsoever, if just watching Chet grow old and die would count as revenge to the Cosmos, or if I'd find myself reborn along with him, to repeat as necessary until I got irritated enough to finally kill him.

After a while, Chet stood up, stretched, and began to wander seemingly randomly around the office. He got a cup of free coffee in the kitchen, and made his way from one cube to another, standing in the openings and chatting as he sipped his coffee. I followe'd him, slouched, defeated, dead. No one seemed particularly enthusiastic about Chets appearance in their airspace, but no one refused to talk to him. He seemed to be operating from a script, starting with "Hey, hows it going?" and ending with "Well, I gotta go earn my coffee beans." In-between, Chet rehashed news events and sports scores, in the same order, with the same inflections. After about an hour of this blatant goofing off, Chet was back at his desk, as if he had never moved an inch.

Chet collected fin dust on his shoulders until five oclock, when he turned off his computer, stood up, stretched, and walked out of his cube. I was stunned at the sudden shift. I sat there in his cube for a moment, thinking back to own working days, and I recalled dimly that even I'd had to collect some possessions before leaving. Knick-knacks. Spare change.

By the time I thought to follow, Chet had made it all the way down to the lobby, where he was pushing rudely past people. I stopped, and watched him push through, out onto the street. Chet was an asshole. Why in hell was I following him?

3. Singing, maybe

Candace and Jessica are having a girls night in, drinking Tom Collins and smoking extra-long cigarettes and listening to quiet songs about love and heartache as if they were the only two possible positions available in life. I found myself in the living room, amidst smoke and the scent of limes, and two giggling girls who were sitting on the white shag rug with photographs spread all around them.

Jessica was wearing a bra this night, and the leather pants had been replaced with jeans. She and Candace were feeling anti-man and pro-woman, and were having one of those exorcize-the-demons evenings that women were inspired to have when they felt Burned By Men. They usually got the idea from movies, where it was supposed to be cathartic. Candaces Straight World Nightmare had turned out to be a lousy lay in a nice suit, and while she didn't think shed had any difficulty washing him out of her hair, shed found herself crying every night, lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling with a heartbreaking look of grief on her face. Just lying there, beautiful, anguished, sometimes talking directly to me as if she knew I was there. Telling me things. I would reach down and touch her cheek, and then she would calm, and sleep, and I would burn my endless cigarettes all night.

Jessica had been a source of fun for days now after Chet had left her to the wolves after his party. Embarrassed, hungover, and pissed off, shed tried to call him several times just to tell him he was an asshole, and when shed gone over to his place to try and out him from his asshole closet, she found Candace there too, for practically the same reason, if a little different. And thus a night of female bonding was born.

I blinked and looked down at them. Free of the party-attitude, Jessica was prettier. Nice wide eyes that looked innocent if you didn't know her very well. She and Candace were deep into their cups, and were giggling over ancient photos of people they both knew, those sad, frozen-in-time moments that must have been hilarious or genius or at least unusual when you snapped the pictures. Now, you couldn't remember exactly what you were doing, or who you were with, and when it was. Everything got jumbled together. Everything got a little lost. People started to pair off and stay together just so you would have a Rosetta Stone for your life: whenever it was, wherever you were, you must have been with this person, because you were always with that person.

Candace just pulls pictures from the pile, glances at them, bursts into laughter and then passes them to Jessica without comment. Jessica is red-faced, gasping for breath. Their ridiculous lives is just too funny for her. I hunker down next to them on the floor and smell their perfume, bask in their brightly glowing beauty, women getting more beautiful when they gather.

I recall, suddenly and forcibly, that Candace had disliked Jessica from their first meeting and had once referred to her as a "walking blow-job".

Candace picks up a photo and stops, her laughter dying and her face looking stricken. I lean over and see myself. Out of focus. In a bar. By the jukebox, mouth open, beer extended towards the camera. Singing, maybe.

Candace touches the picture with her other hand. "Oh, god, Wayne."

She's crying, and Jessica leans over and puts an arm awkwardly around her. "Hey, come on, come on, it's okay."

Candace is bawling. She's really crying, and I just sit, amazed. Someone is grieving for me, and I am still there. She clutches Jessica, the photo bending in her hand. "I know it's been months, I know," she babbles, "But I can still feel him, I swear. It's like he's here."

I flinch back from the word. It sounds like a curse. I turn away; I'd never considered the possibility that Candace wouldn't want me around. Might not be overjoyed to be haunted.

Jessica strokes her back a little, cooing to her, and rocking her. They stay like that for a few minutes, and then she says

"You still have that Ouija board, don't you?"

I feel like the whole room freezes. I stop and stare. Candace, I can see, is trembling.

"Yes, I do." she says in a small, small voice.

Jessica pulls away to look Candace in the face. "Sweetie, I believe in those things. Lets get it and see."

Candace wipes tears from her cheeks, sniffles, but looks more awake than Ive seen her in a long time. "See what?"

Jessica laughs a sad laugh, and I suddenly like her, tremendously, hugely. "Sweetie, see if he's is here. Wayne."

Yes, I say to Candace, yes. Do it. Please.

It's buried under the winter coats and sweaters, dusty and wrinkled, smelling of last year. Bought in a drunken frenzy and used once at a scandalous slumber party some years ago, she can't explain why she's kept it, why she's moved it with all her other crap every move when she could have just bought a new one if she wanted. They unfold the board in the living room, on the floor, and Candace picks up the pointer and toys with it.

"I don't know." she says heavily.

"Afraid?" Jessica asks, just the slightest hint of mischief in her voice. Then she softens. "Hey, I think it might be good for you, you know? Exorcize some demons."

"Maybe."

"Here, Ill start, okay?"

Jessica takes the pointer gently from Candace and places it on the board. She puts her fingers on it lightly.

"See? Easy. Come on, give it a try."

Candace takes a breath and then puts her own fingers on the pointer. Nothing happens.

Jessica laughs a nervous little snorty laugh. "I think we have to ask a question."

I kneel down next to them, and study the board. How in the hell can I say anything with this?

Candace licks her lips and closes her eyes. "I don't know what to ask."

Jessica bites her pink tongue. "Maybe you should ask him if he's here, right? No point otherwise." She waits, but Candace doesn't say anything, so she looks around. "Wayne? Wayne Conklin, are you here? With us? Right now?"

I am momentarily surprised that Jessica knows my last name. Then I look down at the board. YES and NO are clearly displayed, so I lean in and gently place my fingers on the pointer, careful not to touch either hand. Holding my hand, I pushed.

At first, it's heavy, impossible, like pushing a piano through mud, like lifting a building. And then it moves, it moves easy, and it moves exactly where I wanted it: pointing at YES.

The girls stare down at it for a moment, and then look up to stare at each other. Then they both scream and jump up, ending up on opposite sides of the room, both stock still. Candace stares down at the board wide-eyed with a hand clasped over her mouth. Jessica just keeps pointing at it as if it had bitten her.

I sit and wait.

Jessica starts laughing, an explosion of guffaws that sounds desperate.

"Holy shit that was wild!" She stutters through her giggles.

"That wasn't funny." Candace growls, still staring at the board.

Jessica gets serious. "Hey, I didn't do it, I swear. I swear, Candace, I swear I wouldn't fuck with you like that. That really happened, I swear."

Candace nods silently. She kneels back down by the board, studies it a moment longer, then looks up at Jessica.

"Come on, Jess, lets try again."

Now Jessica hesitates. "You sure, Candace?" Hoping, you could tell, that she wasn't. Candace nods, and Jessica slowly kneels down by the board with her. They place their hands on the pointer again, settling themselves, and Candace closes her eyes.

"Why are you here?" she breathes. I imagine she was speaking to me, directly. I imagine I was really there, in front of her.

I force myself to look down at the board. I lean down and put my fingers near theirs on the pointer. I don't know what to say, so I just push, looking at her.

"C," Jessica gasped. "H."

"E" Candace says, opening her eyes, knowing, I was sure, what was happening.

"T" Jessica echoed.

"Chet?" Candace says softly, looking at Jessica, eyes glistening. "What in the world does Chet have to do with it? With Wayne?"

"I don't know." Jessica says thoughtfully. "We should ask Wayne, while he's with us." She looks up. "Wayne? What about Chet? Why are you here for him?"

For him? I scowl down at the board. For him my ass. I consider what my response should be, how to communicate the whole situation when I could barely spell out the words in agonizing slowness.

Thinking the best way to explain what the motherfucker did to me was to just begin and hope for the best, I stab out for the pointer.

The girls scream, because the pointer goes flying, tumbling across the carpet and hitting the far wall. They each do a little backwards crawl away from the board, panicked. Then we all sit there for a moment and pant.

Jessica says "Why don't you -"

Candace is shaking her head. "No. No way. Lets have a drink. You want a drink? Of course you do."

I sit and scowl. I need a drink too. Be she doesn't offer me one.

She goes into the kitchen and retrieves a bottle of bourbon and two jelly glasses that look like they have never ever been run under water, much less cleaned. Candace was one of those rare Bourbon Girls, the sort of bluejeaned chick who drank whiskey instead of white wine or lite beer, a gem, a foul-mouthed beauty who got drunk, slapped first and called you an asshole later.

Wild Turkey in jelly glasses, two good looking girls on the rug, dim lighting.

"Do you believe in that stuff?" Candace asks after she's had a sip.

Jessica grins suddenly, drains her glass with a cough, and nods. "I do now."

THURSDAY l. Some of it, anyway

Of course, just like that it's Thursday and the weekend begins just like that. You can't wait for Friday, for Gods sake, life is short. You show up at work with your evening plans already made, or at least, at the very least for Gods sake a few calls in on the subject.

On the computer screen:

I have poisoned the non-dairy creamer. Some of it, anyway.

I glance down at my hands on the keyboard and blink dully, stupid. It's ten-oh-five in the morning, and I am drooling steadily onto the desk, not my desk, someone elses desk, and I wonder, dimly, as if through severe head trauma that is even now spreading like a purpling bruise through my brain what in great hell I do with my evening, these days.

Wiping a hand across my mouth, I collect a sizable amount of brownish, clotty drool onto my jacket sleeve and lean back into the chair. And I am immediately, forcibly tired.

I am shaking, and the office is moving, rising up around me, but it isn't moving at all, it's me, sinking, the chair pushing up through me in brutal, slow waves. Im sinking into the floor, into the dull brown carpet. Im disappearing.

For a moment, I watch it happening.

Like trying to breathe water, I push myself up. Cement on my chest wet sand in my shoes, jello bubbling up in my throat, and trying to grab onto anything...it was all quicksilver in my hands.

Everything narrows down to a point of flourescent light, and I hold onto that, refusing to look away. Inch by inch, I start to rise back up. Moment by moment...I thought of Chet. I tell myself, forget everything, forget it all. Forget everything, forget it all. Forget everything, except that Chet killed you.

Chet killed me.

Inch by inch, I rise up. I struggle up from the chair, from the sucking mud-like ether that was pulling me back. The point of light started to grow, herky-jerky, fitfully. When I could see again, I was standing in the cube, panting, feeling like I'd sweated through my shirt, and too exhausted to wonder whether that was a trick of my own mind or a law of metaphysics.

Standing, I start to walk.

Each step feels like it is about to sink right through to the lower floor. I resist the urge to grab my legs with my hands and pull them up, struggling to keep moving. Each step the ground seems to get firmer, my vision steadier, and by the time I make it out to the elevators, everything feels normal again. Stopping near the fire alarm, I reach out and touch the wall, which felt as firm and real as it ever had, as far as I could tell.

I pause to trace the oft-painted texture of the wall, thinking: Chet killed me.

With a sigh, I smiled, a surge of sudden, irrepressible joy going through me. I gathered myself, made a fist, and smashed it into the fire alarm.

With the stale water cascading around me, with the honking noise filling the hallway, I laughed. I was alive again.

2. Wasp and Haband

With murder in my heart, I floated back out into the sunshine to plot a little bit, and covet ice cream, which two teenagers were eating right outside the building. Time seemed to be shifting for me; sometimes I seemed to know everything that was happening, or would happen. Sometimes everything came as a surprise, a shock. It was a beautiful day, anyway, and I wasn't sure what to do, for a moment. I hovered on the sidewalk, picking out the ghosts from the living, trying to remember what the sun felt like on your back, baking your clothes.

Hands in pockets, I started to walk. It was just after nine oclock, so the streets were not nearly as crowded as I seemed to remember them, fuzzy, indistinct memories. I remembered looking at the ground, mostly, watching my shoes move up and down. It was disappointing. So, as I moved around, thinking of ways I could kill Chet and have my revenge, I tried to pay attention. I tried to take notes.

The subway was a pleasure, empty and lush with seating, and I stretch out over several seats like a king, arms out, legs spread, surveying my holdings arrogantly. The rhythmic thumping of the track beneath lulls me a little bit and I drift, feeling sleepy, getting jolted from my nap when two dead guys and Crazy Radio Guy enter the car.

Crazy Radio Guy is a comforting sight, actually: for a period of three months or so one year hed been on just about every subway I rode home. He just sort of hung out on the subway, wearing the same clothes and enveloped in the same vaguely disturbing smell, with the same ancient and very broken transistor radio pasted against his ear. One hand always held that radio, and even though it had last received a signal around the time that fire had been discovered, the CRG steadfastly reported the news to his fellow passengers, and sometimes sang snatches of the hit songs from Crazy Radio Guy Land. After a while his appearances became less frequent, but the sight of him cheered me.

The two dead guys were sad-looking fellows, more of the surprisingly large club of The Subway Pushed. One was a tall, waspy-looking guy in a tattered Hugo Boss suit, the lid to his briefcase still clutched in one hand. He wasn't wearing any shoes. The other was an older man, wearing what had to be Haband Specials, all pastels and synthetic fabrics. One of his arms hung off of him in a way that I didn't like to look at.

"I got pushed off a cliff." I said before they could ask. They were eyeing me in an unfriendly way. I wondered, briefly, if I resembled their pusher - they had to have been done together; from what I had learned so far of our rough existence, we were loners, mostly.

"Many can't fly." Crazy Radio Guy said cheerfully, looking around what was, really, an empty subway car. "Push a man off a cliff, hell fall hard. Man can't fly." he added for emphasis, as if this point were open for debate. I stared at him.

"Yeah, he hears us." The older man in the cheap threads grumbled. "It ain't real useful, of course."

I looked Laurel and Hardy over again. "How long you been stuck here?"

Wasp grimaced. "Fucking four months now. Didn't you see us in the papers?"

"We were numbers five and six. Boom boom, while that mother was walking down the platform." Haband said gruffly.

"Random." Wasp spat.

I closed my eyes and hoped they'd go away. I had never read the papers. Just bullshit. Crap happening a millions miles away, crap that would never happen to me a few blocks away.

Wasp and Haband werent going to let me be. "You got pushed off a cliff, why are you here?" Wasp demanded. I decided his accent was sort of Boston.

I didn't open my eyes. "The puke who pushed me lives around here."

"You know who it is?"

Their surprise was enough to open my eyes again. I blinked at them. "Yeah. He used to be a good friend of mine."

Before I could react, they had moved across the aisle to sit on either side of me.

"What the hell are you waiting for, man?" Haband demanded.

"If I could find the shit who pushed me, I'd be done with this long ago." Wasp hissed.

Crazy Radio Guy was a gnarled old black man, with skin like tree bark, wrinkles that deep and hard-looking. His hair grew in wild, reckless spurts, which were tied off randomly with rubber bands. His face was kind, though, I'd swear. He always looked on the verge of a smile. He moved closer, as if to hear us better, and announced to no one in particular

"Subway pusher doesn't live here, man, subway pushers live in Jersey. Always have."

This with an amazed inflection, most probably due to our apparen't ignorance of this admittedly vital fact. Conversation paused in respect for Crazy Radio Guy, and then my two new friends, whom I didn't like very much, returned their attention to me.

"So whats the delay?" Wasp asks.

"What do you mean?"

Haband leans forward. "How long you been dead?"

I stare at him. "I don't know." I admit. "Weeks...months, maybe. Ive kind of lost track." I didn't know I was dead for some of that time, and then kept forgetting.

I added a pathetic shrug.

Wasp and Haband are disgusted with me. "Jesus, months, and you know who the fucker is. Piece of shit wouldn't still be alive if I were you."

"Damn right." Wasp nodded.

They were crazy, that was for sure. "What happens then?"

They stared at me. "When?" Wasp finally managed.

I thought about my spell at the office, the clinging, sucking feeling of...of...I didn't know. I hadnt like it much. I looked Haband and Wasp over carefully. I'd never seen them before, but in a way I had, because they were just like any number of other men I'd had the misfortune to have conversations with: dulled, unimaginative, quick to turn on you like a dim rat boxed in to a corner. The hearty bastards would never understand, so I just shook my head and stood up.

"Sorry, kids, this is my stop."

I walked over to the subway doo