Cheese Serial

Jack is in that space somewhere between dreaming and awake. Oh, he knows he’s in bed. He can feel the heaviness of the quilt against his legs, and the unyielding lump of the pillow jammed into his neck. The pillow is in exactly the wrong place. It’s squashed between the headboard and his neck, pushing his head into an awkward angle. Still in that never land of almost sleep, or almost awake, Jack realizes that he’s getting a crick in his neck and his earlobe is throbbing. How can such a small thing as an earlobe make its discomfort so evident? Jack thinks that he should be able to just move his head slightly to get more comfortable, or even to lift his hand above his head to tweak the pillow just a bit, to give it a thump that will release his head from from being squashed against the headboard, and unfold his earlobe. But he can’t move. His legs are trapped by something – something heavy and soft, and his head is held in some kind of a vise.

It occurs to him that his legs might be in quicksand, but why would there be quicksand in a corridor? Jack cannot figure that out. He’s in a corridor.. He’s also in bed, in that never land of almost asleep, but he’s in a corridor in that never land of almost awake. The corridor isn’t the straightforward kind, wide and straight with doors on either side, neatly marked with apartment numbers, like the grubby corridor that smells ever so slightly of bug killer and other people’s dinners, in the apartment building where his friend Pat lives. It’s a fun house corridor, a Bugs Bunny cartoon corridor, where the doors leading off of it are strong colors that might have tipped out of a crayon box- lime green and strawberry pink, lemon yellow and sky blue. If he could hold his head at the proper angle, the doors might be proper rectangles. But they aren’t proper rectangles. The doors are askew with odd angles and uneven edges.

He wishes he could move his head.

Jack doesn’t like the corridor. He doesn’t know why. The colors are pretty and it doesn’t smell of cooked cabbage and curry, but it’s not a corridor that seems like it would lead to the home of a good friend, someone he’s known since grade eight, and lets, face it, if we’re going to be honest, and where else can you be honest but in a dream? - has had a bit of a crush on since grade nine. Not as big as the crush he’s had on Liz for the same amount of time, but if Pat wanted to switch roles from pal to buddy, he wouldn’t say “no.” No, this corridor reminds him of the ones in the haunted mansion exhibit at the amusement park. Soon, very soon, there will be a creaking and grinding of gears and the floor will buckle and spin. The doors will open and horrible things will leap out at him, cackling with laughter – evil clowns and walking dolls, drunks with grasping hands and bad breath - other, unmentionable frights.

Jack doesn’t want to be in the corridor, he doesn’t want to walk further down the corridor and further into danger, but his legs, traitors that they are, have somehow regained their ability to move, and they’re moving him forward.

“I’m on the wrong ride!” Jack screams out. “This isn’t the ride that I have a ticket for!

But his legs keep going,

“No, No!” Jack screams. And now things are getting worse. Somewhere, behind one of the doors, maybe the orange door, maybe the chartreuse one, there is banging. Banging and banging – construction work for more corridors and more scary things, and Jack doesn’t know what to do, and his ear hurts and his legs are going to sleep, and he sits straight up in bed and screams:

“Knock it off!”

He looks at the clock on his bedside table, yells louder:

“It’s three o’clock in the morning, I’m trying to sleep down here!”

And the noise stops. The people upstairs, the owners of the house from whom Jack rents a basement suite, keep strange hours, Jack has noticed. He doesn’t remember them doing it before, but now they’re constantly waking him up in the middle of the night, hammering on their floor, his ceiling with something that might be a broom handle. He’ll have to talk to them about. it.

Jack thumps his pillow into a soft and malleable shape and settles it behind his head. The quilt has managed to twist itself around his legs. He sits up again and untangles himself, then swallows – his throat dry and painful. He feels like he’s been shouting for hours, but how can he shout when he’s been asleep? It was a sound sleep, too, he thinks, a dreamless sleep, and his stupid landlord had to wake him up. Four hours before he has to get up and go to work, and then there’s the party at Pat’s. He can’t afford a sleepless night.

The room is dark. There is no light other than the faint glow given off by his bedside clock. Still, it’s enough to irritate. Jack buries his head into the covers. He’s not comfortable. He’s not relaxed and for some reason his earlobe now feels swollen and hot and full of pins and needles. And, oh great. He has to pee. He has to get up, out of his cocoon, take himself across the floor of his bedroom, into his own corridor, if you can call it that, the three feet of space that leads to his bathroom door and his kitchen door.

Into the corridor.

Why, for just a second, was there a prickle of dread along his spine? He gets very tense. Listening for something that isn’t there, looking for something that seems to be just outside of his range of vision. His heart thuds, his hands sweat. And it’s dark, so dark. Even the numbers on his clock radio seem dim. He feels panic rise in his chest as he scrambles to sit up and turn on the light before…

Before “they” whoever, whatever “they” are, get him.

Light floods the room, illuminating his poor student basement suite that is all he can afford even though he isn’t a poor student anymore. Now he’s a poor working stiff. A poor working stiff who has to get up in… he looks at the clock… three hours and forty seven minutes. But there is Pat’s party to look forward to. Lovely Pat. He hasn’t seen his friends all week – Josh and Liz and Pat. They’ve all been too busy. So now he’ll go, he’ll have a few drinks, some laughs. It’ll be the Four Musketeers again, just like in high school, when they spent most of their waking hours together.

Jack smiles, leans against his pillows, drowsy and content. Now what was he doing? Why is he awake at – he looks at the clock – 3:12? Oh yeah. He has to pee.

******

The alarm goes off. 7:00 AM, and he feels like he’s just dozed off after a hard night of waiting behind dry eyelids for sleep to come. At 7:25 he yawns, pulls himself out of bed, pulls on the clothes that are folded neatly on the chair beside the bed. White button up shirt, dark blue pants. It’s started to feel like a uniform. A prison uniform. Stumble to the sink, brush teeth, swipe of deodorant in the pits – no time for a shower, and what does it matter anyways?

Now shaving, bleary eyed. He’s going to be late for work, and he feels like he hasn’t slept at all. If he didn’t have to shave, that’d buy him three minutes, he figures. He wonders what he’d look like with a beard. Well, he’s finished half of his face, so maybe half a beard. If he stopped right now, right this second, he could got back to bed for a minute. His thoughts tumble around, but his razor just keeps stroking his face, his hand automatically performing the actions of shaving and dunking the razor under the tap to clear out the shaving foam and shaving again without his mind having anything to say about the matter.

Tying his tie. Another waste of time. And why, in his position, does he have to wear a tie? Jack knows the answer: Company policy. Whenever there isn’t a good answer for something, it’s “company policy.” How long does this little morning ritual take? Another half a minute, maybe. Can he bill the company for four minutes of his precious morning time, following their stupid directives? Add it to his time slip once a week maybe. 4 minutes a day, five days a week – that’s 20 minutes. It would add up. Jack sighs. He doesn’t want to be paid for it. He just wants to not do it anymore. He wants the sleep. Two hundred and ten seconds of sleep.

And now he’s out the door and on his way to the bus.

Out the door and on the way to the bus, as long as Rover is in his fenced in dog run. Rover is the only dog he’s ever met with the actual name “Rover.” Rover is the only dog he’s never liked. Jack looks nervously towards the dog run – and a hundred pounds of slathering, barking Doberman/Rottweiller cross springs out at him, running full tilt into the chain link fence.

Jack jumps. No matter that this happens every morning, Jack jumps.

“Down! Rover!” he yells.

Rover gives him what can only be described as a contemptuous look and saunters away from the fence, checks out his water dish, and squats to pee.

“Some macho dog. You’re supposed to lift your leg.” Jack mutters.

Rover snarls and Jack backs away. He can see the bus coming, and breaks into a trot. Behind him, if a Doberman/Rottweiller cross can laugh, Rover is.

****

Finally, the work day is done. Jack is on his way to Pat’s apartment with a bottle of tequila in a liquor store bag in one hand and a grocery bag filled with chips and pretzels in the other.

He reaches the vestibule door of Pat’s apartment, and dials her number. Sounds of a party come out at him, and he smiles. The first time he’s felt like smiling all day.

“About time you got here,” Pat says. “Come on up!”

She buzzes him in, and he’s still smiling as he rides the elevator up and gets off at her floor, making himself walk, not run to her door. Even the drab, dingy corridor makes him feel welcome, and the smells of other people’s dinners that waft up through the closed doors of the other apartments make him realize how hungry he is.

Then there is a feeling of light-headedness and a shimmer, and the corridor is suddenly a fun house corridor with doors that are the colors of crayons tipped right from the box, and they aren’t rectangular doors, regular doors, straightforward doors, but doors that are too tall or too short, and rise to an impossibly high ceiling in weird angles and uneven edges. Jack wants to stop, to go back, but his traitor legs propel him forward.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Jack shuts his eyes tight against the specter of the multi colored doors. He thinks he can hear strange sounds coming from behind them – rinky dink carnival midway music behind one, the whooshing sound of a windy day, or maybe of air being sucked into a vacuum, from behind another. The sounds don’t seem like they should be scary, except for the evil clown laughter behind the purple door.

Then there is another sound, the sound of someone making his voice reverberate like a television announcer from the days of black and white: “Lost in Space,” the voice says. “Jack is Lost in Space.”

It’s Josh. Jack knows it’s his friend Josh. No one else is cheesy enough to imitate the announcer’s voice from a long ago TV show that no one else even remembers existed. Next he’ll say…

Jack waits, relaxing now, but still not ready to open his eyes.

“Earth calling Jack, come in, Jack.”

A flood of relief courses through Jack’s veins. He opens his eyes to see Pat’s familiar grimy corridor, and realizes he has walked past Pat’s apartment. The door number next to him is 4C. Pat’s apartment is 3C. Jack hears two more voices from behind him, one making “dee dee dee,” sounds, the other making “doo doo doo” sounds in what is supposed to be the theme to The Twilight Zone. Jack smiles. Good old Pat and Liz. He wonders what color Liz’s hair will be today.

Before Jack turns around to face his friends, he reaches out to touch the tarnished metal plaque of 4C, needing some tactile proof that he is in Pat’s corridor, not in the fun house of his nightmare or hallucination, or whatever that is… was.

He lets his fingers run lightly over the rough dirty wooden door – and wishes he hasn’t as his fingers meet something unpleasantly slimy. Grease from a pizza box, he hopes, rubbing his fingers on the liquor store bag in his hand. He turns, prepares to make some smart comment to his friends about their knowledge of old TV shows.

Cranberry. Liz’ hair is the color of cranberries.

Josh holds a can of beer under his chin as if it were a microphone, adopts a Rod Serling voice.

“Jack Spratt, 22 years old, thought he knew where his friend Pat lived. Little did he know that her corridor lead to a wormhole of …The Twilight Zone!”

Jack’s relief dissolves. “How did you know?” he asks, panic welling up. It is bad enough that he is experiencing fun house corridors that aren’t there, but how would his friends know what’s in his mind? Are they in on it?

Jack’s voice is loud and shrill. “How did you know?” he asks again.

“Know what?” Josh asks, uneasily. “How did I know what?”

“Nothing.” Jack pauses. So this is what being paranoid feels like.

Josh waits for an answer.

“The twilight zone wormhole thing.” Jack says, attempting to laugh it off. To his own ears at least, his laugh has a hollow, whistling past the graveyard tone, and Josh is starting to look alarmed. “I’m just messing with you,” Jack says.

The door to 4C opens and a crabby old face peers out.

Pat notices, beckons at Jack to come into her apartment. “We have to be quiet,” she says. Then: “is there something wrong?”

Jack gives himself a shake, replies, “wrong?”

“You walked right past us.” Josh says, “Did you forget where Pat lives?”

Another shiver goes down Jack’s spine. For a second he thinks that maybe there is something seriously wrong with him – then he looks as his friends’ faces; Pat, being concerned, Liz, being beautiful, and Josh clowning, as usual, and shrugs it off – determined, this time to get past whatever this is.

“I’d never forget where Pat lives,” Jack says, and gallantly presents his gifts of tequila and chips to her, with a theatrical bow. “You might.”

A shimmer of cartoon colors blinks in front of Jack’s eyes. He shivers again.

“Me? Why would I forget Pat?” Josh asks. “You’re the one who doesn’t even remember where she lives!”

Pat looks into Jack’s bag. “What did you bring?” she asks, but Jack doesn’t answer. He’s staring, Josh’s words echoing in his head, Lost in Space again.

Liz touches his shoulder.

“Jack?” Liz asks. “You okay?”

“Not enough sleep, too much coffee,” Jack answers. Then, answering Pat’s question: “Tequila. Want some?”

“Forget it,” Liz answers, “Not after last time.”

They walk into Pat’s apartment. It’s as much a “poor student” apartment as Jack’s – except that Pat still is a poor student. She’s a poor medical student, which has some perks. A bottle of the alcohol the hospital uses in the lab is on the kitchen cabinet, together with a blender, ice, and packets of Kool-Aid. Liz loads the ingredients into the blender, starts it up.

“Last time was fun,” Jack says, almost shouting to be heard over the noise.

“In your dreams,” Liz says, laughing.

“If only you knew,” Jack says.

The door to 4C opens and Jack is relieved to see an ordinary man come out. A crabby, old ordinary man, dressed in baggy sweat pants and an over-sized sweater. He looks like he might live on delivery pizza. Jack stops worrying about what might be on his finger.

The man gives the group a sour look as he passes Pat’s open door, takes a pointed look at his watch.

“It’s only 8:00,” Pat tells him. “We’ll be gone soon.” She shuts her door.

“You’re going to get me kicked out,” she says to Liz. “Why are you so late, anyways, Jack?”

“Work,” Jack answers. “Some of us work.”

“Oh, stop bragging,” Liz says. She pours the drink from the blender into a plastic cup and hands it to Jack. It’s a bright color of a shade never seen in nature.

Jack sniffs it suspiciously. “What is this?”

“Punch,” Liz says. “Drink up.”

“It looks horrible. I don’t even know what color it is,” Jack says.

Liz gives it a stir. “Chartreuse, I think.”

“Can’t I have some tequila?” Jack asks. “I brought tequila.”

“No,” you have to drink that,” Liz says.

“Or a beer,” Jack says. “Josh has a beer.”

“Josh never drinks Liz and Pat’s punch.” Josh says, ” Josh is afraid of being poisoned.”

Jack sips the concoction. It’s sickly sweet and nasty bitter all at once. Jack goes to look at the alcohol bottle and the Kool-Aid packet beside the blender. “Alcohol and Kool-Aid? Where did you get the recipe, Jonestown?”

“That’s right,” Josh says. “Liz is Reverend Jim Jones in disguise, and we’re all suicidal cult members. She’s planning to take us out, one by one.”

A shiver goes down Jack’s spine. He takes another sip, covering up. “Do I have to drink it all?”

“Don’t drink it at all,” Josh says. “That’s my advice.”

“Just because you’re afraid of being poisoned,” Liz says.

“Can we stop?” Jack asks, his voice strident.

Liz, Josh and Pat look at each other. “Stop what?” Pat asks.

“All this talk of twilight zones and being poisoned and forgetting where Pat lives,” Jack says, his voice unnecessarily loud. “Can’t we just have some laughs?”

Liz, Josh and Pat look at each other again. They all think they are enjoying themselves.

“Yeah, we can do that,” Pat says. She takes Jack’s drink from him and swallows it down.

“See,” she says. “No poison. And you know where I live, so there’s no problem there. Josh is going to shut up about The Twilight Zone, but I can’t promise he won’t bring up Gilligan’s Island or Flintstones or some other mouldy oldie TV show.”

“And Pat will probably sing some mouldy oldie songs,” Josh warns.

“That’s OK,” Jack says. “I like the Flintstones and Pat’s old songs.”

From outside there is a shuffle of feet on the carpet, coming towards Pat’s place.

“Great, another noise complaint,” Pat says. “Let’s go.” She refills the cup with what’s left in the blender, hands it to Jack.

“Where?” Josh asks. “The Bar None?”

“Good enough,” Liz says.

Pat leads the way out of the apartment, the door almost hitting the neighbor and another man, the manager, who are poised to knock. The manager gives Jack and Josh a hard look, memorizing them for future reference. Jack and Josh shield their drinks, try to look harmless.

“This is a quiet building,” the neighbor calls after them. “A quiet building!” His voice is loud, louder than necessary. Doors pop open on both sides of the corridor as Josh, Jack, Liz and Pat make their way to the elevator. Each of the other tenants is old. Old and crabby, Jack thinks, until one of the women yells out:

“Enjoy yourselves! You young people should go enjoy yourselves!” then, to the original neighbor: “Quiet, you old coot! This is a quiet building!”

Another voice, in support of the coot, makes a reply from across the hall, and by the time the elevator doors close, , it sounds like the entire third floor is shouting about being quiet.

By the time they reach the lobby vestibule, Josh, Jack, Liz and Pat are laughing so hard they can hardly stand up. There are no shimmers of color for Jack, no fun house corridors, just the plain brown ordinariness of Pat’s apartment building and the nice feeling of being with friends, just like Jack had been looking forward to all week.

“Come on, young people,” Jack says, “The Bar None awaits!”

Jack takes Pat’s drink and swallows some of the obnoxious mixture. The taste hasn’t improved any, but the color isn’t upsetting him any more.

Pat sings: “Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine, when you gonna let me get sober,”

Jack joins in: “Leave me alone, let me go home, let me go home and start over…”

Josh takes the cup, sips, and gives it right back.

“Definitely not fruit of the vine,” he says. Fruit of the lab, maybe.”

Jack takes the cup back. “Kind of grows on you though.”

“Bar None, here we come!” he shouts into the street, and charges forward, leaving Pat and the others in his wake.

Liz and Josh run to catch up. It takes a second for them to realize Pat isn’t following. When they look back, Pat is standing straight, staring ahead.

Josh makes his voice do the TV announcer thing again. “Lost in Space…” he says.

Pat blinks at him, her face pale.

“I don’t like clowns,” she says. “Save me from the clowns.”

The shiver comes back to Jack’s spine. He doesn’t know what Pat’s talking about until Liz says: “It’s only a street carnival,” and he sees them. Dozens and dozens of clowns, all galloping towards them.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Jack watches the clowns. Without the big floppy shoes and wigs, dressed in jeans and t-shirts instead of costumes, and without all that makeup, they were probably pretty decent people. So why, he wondered, did they fill him with such unease. He looks to his friends. Pat is still frozen in fear; Liz is waiting up ahead, impatient to get to The Bar None; Josh is at Pat’s side, attempting to pull her along with him into the street. They are so still, they could be the subjects of a tableaux painting, frozen in time.

Then a clown, a girl clown, running to catch up with the others, trips over her big clown feet. She careens off Jack and goes sprawling on the sidewalk, tearing her baggy polka dot pants. Her red and green wig falls off her head and lands in a puddle in the gutter. Her shoes flip off her feet and cartwheel down the street, one going east, the other west. She wipes a splash of mud off her face and takes a smear of white greasepaint and red lipstick with it, showing fair, freckled skin and a rueful grin behind the painted red smirk.

“Jeepers. Just what I need!” she says. The clown scrambles after her wig and jams it over her own brown hair – caught up loosely in a pony tail. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?” she asks Jack.

Jack shakes his head. Who could be afraid of a clown? Even Pat is unfrozen now, coming over to ask the clown if she is all right, if she skinned her knee.

“I’m fine,” the clown says, now running after her left shoe. The other clowns are disappearing into a building with a marque reading “Clown Try-Outs Tonight Only”

“I’m going to be late!” She says, jamming the shoe on to her foot, going after the right one. “If I miss the audition, I won’t get a second chance.” She catches the shoe and tucks it under her arm, racing awkwardly to the building before the two large security clowns shut her out. “Wish me luck!”

“Good luck,” Pat says.

“See,” Jack says, too loudly to Pat, “nothing to be afraid of. Just a girl dressed as a clown.”

“Sure,” says Pat. “That one is a girl dressed up as a clown, but what if she were a clown dressed up as a girl?”

“And I thought I was nuts,” Jack says, drinking again from his Koolaid and alcohol.

“I will protect you against clowns,” Josh tells Pat, gallantly.

“No, you won’t,” Pat tells him. “You’ll try, but you won’t manage.”

“I will, I will,”Josh says. “When your hope is gone, when the clowns are breathing

down your neck with their fresh peppermint breath and you feel that there is no way out of the clown car of fate, I will save you.”

“No, you won’t, ” Pat says again. She sidles up to Jack, takes his drink from him and drains the cup. “Jack might.”

Before Jack can react, Pat twirls away from him in a pirouette, grabs Liz by the arm and skips off with her down the street – singing “Everybody Loves Saturday Night.”

Jack and Josh catch up.

“It’s Friday night,” Josh points out. Pat ignores him; urges Liz to sing.

“I don’t know the words,” Liz says.

“What’s to know?” Pat asks, breaking into song again. “Everybody loves Saturday night…”

Liz, laughing chimes in, then asks, “Is there no end to the old songs you know?” then: “there must be more than the one line. You can’t just keep singing “Everybody loves Saturday night.”

“I can so,” Pat says. “I’ve just survived a near-Clown experience.”

****

And then they’re at the door of The Bar None, and it’s all good, Jack thinks. He’s with his friends. They’re laughing. They’re singing. They’re nuts – or at least Pat is – just as nuts as he is. There are no shimmers of color, no unreal corridors, just this:

A dark street of car body shops, deserted alleyways, low rent offices, and grimy cafes. It’s the kind of area you wouldn’t want to be in in the daytime. You wouldn’t belong. You wouldn’t be caught dead in the cafes, with their industrial coffee pots and thick china mugs, formica tables and vinyl chairs like something out of a Norman Rockwell illustration; not an espresso machine or a bistro table in sight.

The one bright spot on the street is the big neon Bar None sign, over a small door of what used to be a warehouse. There is a line up of hopefuls snaking their way up to the entrance, well dressed college kids mostly, but some who look like they’re still in high school. The doorman opens the door to let in two people who look like they’re of age, and a burst of music comes out, thankfully drowning out Pat’s one line rendition of “Everybody Loves Saturday Night.”

The doorman turns to the girls at the head of the line.

“What year were you born?” he asks one, checking the ID in his hand. “Yeah? What month?”

He makes a buzzer noise. “Brrzzzt. Wrong answer.”

“Did I say November? I meant June,” the girl says.

“Nice try,” he goes. “Come back when you know what’s on your ID.”

The doorman opens the door, and the girls think he’s changed his mind. They rush the door. He puts an arm in front of it, blocking them. “Hey, Jack, where have you been?” he asks. “Didn’t think you guys would get here.”

He holds the door open for Pat, Liz, Josh and Jack, then closes it again. Jack can hear a volley of complaint from the people who’ve been waiting their turn to get in, and haven’t just been waved through. Yup, he thinks. It’s all good.

Inside, it takes a moment for their eyes to adjust to the darkness and the light show lasers, for them to get their bearings. The place is packed. The lineup outside isn’t just for show tonight, to make the club look more popular than it is. There are lineups inside too – a lineup for the bar, a mass of people standing at the entrance to the dance floor, lines of people standing around and between the tables, hoping for a vacant chair.

It’s a new DJ, Jack sees. He’s missed a few Fridays at Bar None with the gang. Some tall guy, down there in his little booth. Josh and Pat join the pack at the bar, all hollering for attention from the bartender. “Find us a table,” Pat mouths at Jack – yelling wouldn’t help, there’s no way he’d hear her. Good luck with that, he thinks, and he and Liz join the hopefuls slouching against the wall.

An unfamiliar song starts playing – unfamiliar to Jack, that is. Everyone else in the place seems to know it by heart, and they leave off waiting for their tables, leave the lineup at the bar and surge onto the dance floor.

“And Smokie…” the DJ says as a cheer goes up. “For twenty four years I’ve been living next door to Alice.”

Jack and Liz fall into two chairs that might be vacant – there are no jackets on them, no drinks in front of them and they aren’t warm with someone else’s body heat. They each grab another chair, for Josh and Pat, and watch the action on the dance floor.

The dancers swoop around in a big circle, all singing to the recording now:

“For twenty-four years I’ve been living next door to Alice.”

then, on their own own:

“Who the heck is Alice?” Except they don’t say “heck.”

“What the heck is that?” Jack asks. Only he doesn’t say “heck” either. Pat and Josh are down there, he sees, Pat right into it, Josh hanging back a bit, not singing.

“Bar None mating ritual,” Liz tells him. “Want to have a go?”

Jack doesn’t hear. Liz yells, louder, and louder again.

“No thanks,” Jack yells, just as the music suddenly dies. “I do my mating dance in private.”

There are hoots and hollers from all within hearing distance, and then his words are repeated in waves of “What did he says,” laughter always following. Jack wishes he could crawl under his seat.

“I’ve seen your mating dance,” Liz reminds him. “And that’s the last time I’ll drink tequila.” She smiles at Jack, taking some of the sting away. It wasn’t that bad was it? He can’t quite remember…

Josh and Pat make their way to the table, miraculously bearing beer. Jack drinks, hiding behind the glass.

“Lets see,” Liz says, Pat is afraid of clowns, Josh is afraid of being poisoned,”

“And dancing,” Pat says, digging Josh in the ribs,

“What are you afraid of,” Liz asks Jack.

Corridors, Jack thinks. “The way you make me feel,” he says, raising his beer glass to her in a toast, but it’s too late. His words echo in his own ears, and he’s back in the corridor with the fun house doors and the bright colors, the irrational fear.

One of the fun house doors slowly creaks open.. The blue door, he sees, and there is something in there. Something with a whiny little girl voice. “Jack,” it calls. “Jack!”

Jack can’t help himself. He feels as if he is being pulled towards the door by an invisible force. He peers in, and there is a doll sitting on the bed in there, a large doll with deadly white arms and staring blue eyes and blond synthetic hair, a wicked smile on her bright red lips. Jack blinks and the back of the doll’s head is to him. He can see the holes in the doll’s plastic scalp, the tufts of hair poking out to form perfect curls. He blinks again, and the doll’s head is turning towards him again, completing a 360 degree turn: those ice blue eyes, those red lips parting now to show dainty sharp teeth.

The doll beckons and Jack jumps.

“You okay, there, bud?” he hears. Josh’s voice. It’s Josh’s voice! Jack opens his eyes. He’s still hiding behind his beer. He drinks, swallows.

“Sure I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“The way you jumped just now?” Josh says. “I figured you were having a seizure.” He’s smiling, but there is a lack of surety about his words. “You’re not epileptic, are you? The lights aren’t getting to you?”

Jack laughs it off. Josh is training to be a paramedic. “Goose walked over my grave,” he says. And shivers.

Back in the corridor. The doll is beckoning. “Jack,” it says…

And then it floats off the bed and starts walking towards him with jerky little stiff-legged steps.

“You were afraid of a doll?” Liz asks, incredulity writ large on her face. “Pat’s afraid of clowns, and you’re afraid of a doll?”

“Well, it was a big doll,” Jack says, defensively. A big scary doll, he thinks, A big scary doll that moved even when it wasn’t being made to go by his sister. A doll that snuck up on him in the middle of the night…

On the dance floor, in front of him, the DJ is playing “Slow Dancing” at an appropriate volume. Couples are swaying to the music, and it looks inviting. Jack can almost feel Liz’ shoulder under his hand, smell her skin under his nose. Jack thinks he’ll ask her to dance, but then she says, again, “A doll!” and snickers.

Maybe he’ll ask Pat.

“What kind of a doll?” Pat asks.

Jack sighs. He might as well give up the idea of dancing, he thinks. At least he doesn’t have to shout now to be heard over the music.

“A walking doll,” he says. Pat and Liz nod. They both know what he means. Josh doesn’t. “It’s about yay tall,” Jack explains, holding his hand out about two feet from the floor. “My sister would stand behind it and move its arms and it would walk.”

“I had one,” Liz says. “There wasn’t anything scary about it .”

“Just because you’re scared of nothing,” Pat says.

“Sometimes it would move even if my sister wasn’t making it go,” Jack says, that shiver going down his spine. “I thought it was my sister, just messing around,” Jack says, to their “yeah, right” expressions, “but she snores.”

“Wait a minute,” Josh says, suddenly paying attention. “The doll snores?”

“My sister snores.” Jack says, realizing he has not made the situation clearer. “I was in her room, supposed to be sleeping and that doll moved, I swear. That thing was evil.”

His grandmother had been visiting, and when his grandmother visited, she stayed in his room. He didn’t know why. No one asked him for permission and it wasn’t like he had a vote, so he’d have to take his camping mat and sleeping bag into his sister’s room and sleep on her floor. There he was, five years old, trying to get comfortable on the sleeping mat in the sleeping bag, surrounded by frilly girl stuff, trying to block out all the noise his sister was making with her snoring, and there was the doll – on the foot of his sister’s bed. A blink and there wasn’t the doll – on the foot of his sister’s bed. There was the doll looming over him with it’s ice blue eyes and its…

Jack blinks. They’re staring at him again. He wonders if he made another seizure-like jump.

“You were sleeping with your sister?” Liz asks.

“My grandmother was visiting,” he says, defensively.

Josh makes a tent of his fingers and puts on a Sigmund Freud voice: “Evil dolls, and snoring sisters and now grandmothers! Your mental situation is getting worse.”

“Ah, smeg off.” Jack says. “That thing was evil,” he insists. “It followed me around until I got out my secret weapon.” He waits a beat. “My Winnie the Pooh night light.”

Gratifyingly, they laugh. He smiles, relaxes. Good old Jack. Just messing with them.

“Well you know what evil is backwards, don’t you?” Pat asks.

Jack shakes his head.

“Live,” she says, in an evil, Vincent Price voice.

Liz makes a Bwa haa haa sound, and what was left of Jack’s fear vanishes in laughter, as the four of them break into laughter.

The music volume goes up. “It’s Raining Men” comes on, and Pat grabs Liz to go dance, joining most of the other girls in the bar. Josh says something, but Jack can’t hear what. The room is filled with the rowdy laughter of girls dancing and of men watching – it’s all good again.

Josh taps Jack on the shoulder. “Winnie the Pooh night light?” he screams into Jack’s ear. “where do you come up with this stuff?”

Jack shrugs, grateful that it’s too loud to talk. He remembers rooting through his bedroom closet in the dark, trying not to wake his sleeping grandmother. He remembers finding the light and bringing it back into his sister’s room, where the doll, traitor that it was, was sitting pristinely on the bed, exactly where his sister had put it the night before. As he struggled to get the night light plugged in, the doll had turned her evil, live face to him, and her lips had parted to show dainty sharp teeth – and then the light was plugged in. Pooh and his honey pot sent a warm golden glow into the room, protecting Jack from the dark, and the doll was forced back into being what it didn’t want to be – an inanimate object. Jack fell asleep, confident that Winnie the Pooh would protect him, and didn’t even respond when his sister woke up to complain about the light and to say that he was too old for it.

The song is over. It’s stopped raining men, and the girls are making their way back to the table, laughing and exhilarated. A song Jack likes is just starting. He doesn’t know what it’s called, but it’s got his toes tapping and he’s ready to go. “When I get her in my sights – boom boom, out go the lights!” Josh has gone down to the bar for more beer and Jack now stands, ready to lead either of the girls, or both of them back onto the dance floor. He’s not fussy. He’s at that happy state of almost drunkenness where his inhibitions are lowered but he’s not sloppy or belligerent, and all thoughts of corridors and spooky dolls are gone from his head. Then Liz wrecks it. She looks around the table and says:

“Where’s Alice?”

The word echo in Jack’s ear, and he gets a glimpse of fun house corridor again. Pat is looking at Liz, wondering what she’s talking about. Jack sinks back into his seat as Josh, coming up to them with a hard fought pitcher of beer, asks:

“What was that?” Josh asks, pouring out the beer.

“Where’s Alice?’ Liz asks again, her voice growing uncertain.

They look at each other, questioning. None of them know an Alice, not even Liz knows an Alice.

“Who’s Alice?” Pat asks.

“I don’t know,” Liz says. “It just popped out of my mouth. Where is Alice?.” she gives a shaky laugh. “Who is Alice?”

Others around them hear her question and a chant goes up: “Who the heck is Alice?” and “Alice! Alice! Alice!” Soon it’s drowning out the song the DJ is playing, the song that Jack likes. The record comes flying off into the crowd, and the DJ says: “Annnd SMOKIE! For Twenty Four Years…” He holds his mic out to the crowd on the dance floor, and they holler back, as one: “I’ve been living next door to Alice!”

The crowd surges back onto the dance floor, then Pat drinks down her beer and pulls Josh up to go dance, and Liz and Jack come too, and soon they’re all swooping around in a circle shouting out words to the song:

I don’t know where she’s leaving

or where she’s gonna go

I guess she’s got her reasons

But I just don’t want to know

Cause for twenty four years

I’ve been living next door to Alice

And then the punch line:

Who the heck is Alice?

When they get back to their table, another group has taken it over, and it doesn’t look like they’ll give it up without a fight. The girls figure they’ve been at the club long enough anyways, so they gather their belongings and head out the door. They stumble out onto the street, dancing and singing, passing the people still waiting in line to get in, then Pat pulls up short.

There are clowns in the lineup.

Josh throws his arm around Pat’s shoulder, urges her along.

“I don’t want to go home by myself, ” Pat blurts out.

“Come home with me, ” Josh says. “I’ll protect you from the clowns.”

Pat walks with him a few steps, then checks back on the clowns. They haven’t noticed her. They aren’t following her. They’re still lined up to get into The Bar None.

Pat recovers from her fear, and giggles. She shrugs out of Josh’s clutches. “Yeah. Well who will protect me from you?”

She looks around. Jack puts his hand up, volunteering, but Liz says: “Come to my place. It’s closer than yours anyways.”

“We’ll walk you,” Jack says, but Liz shakes her head.

“Go home,” she says, “You’re drunk.”

Josh and Jack are left in the middle of the street, watching them go.

“That sucks,” Jack says.

“What do you expect?” Josh answers. “You’re never going to get anywhere with Liz. You’ve been trying since high school.”

“Yeah, and how long have you been trying with Pat?” Jack asks.

“Same amount of time,” Josh admits.

Jack and Josh head off in separate directions. Josh to walk to his place, Jack to catch the bus.

Jack wonders if his Winnie the Pooh night light is in the box of junk his mom made him take when she sold the house and moved to Florida.

**

Pat and Liz enter Liz’ apartment building. Liz hasn’t lived there long, and Pat has never been there. It’s a nicer place than Pat’s, a modern building with key card access to get into the lobby. Beside the entrance door is a panel with numbers and a speaker grille, but no directory.

“What’s your apartment number?” Pat asks.

“1213,” Liz says. “but you need to know my security code to call me.”

“What is it?” Pat asks. Liz swipes a key card to let them into the lobby.

“I don’t know,” Liz says. “I’ve only used it once, for the pizza guy, and I had to look it up.”

They go to the elevators, and Liz again uses her key card to access her floor.

“How do I get out, if you’re not with me?” Pat asks.

“You don’t need the key card to go down to the lobby. You just need it to stop at a floor.” Liz tells her.

Inside, Liz’ apartment is well furnished with furniture that could have come out of a hotel room. Pat almost expects there to be a coffee pot next to the television set, and a card propped up on the armoire, that says “This room was cleaned by ________. Enjoy your stay!” Liz hasn’t exactly personalized it with her own decoration scheme, but her stuff – clothes and candles, stuffed animals, and books, fills all the nooks and crannies of the room, making it hers.

Liz yawns hugely, and takes blankets and pillows out of the hall closet for Pat.

“I’m bushed,” she says. “You need anything else before I go to bed?”

“I’d like to know about you and Jack and the tequila,” Pat says.

Liz just shakes her head. “No you wouldn’t.” She starts taking the cushions off the couch to make up the bed. “Nothing happened. There was this moment, you know, where it seemed like it would, when Jack was looking good,” she makes a face. “And then he kissed me.” Liz pulls out the sofa bed…

“He doesn’t kiss well?” Pat asks, helping to put the sheets on the mattress.

“I didn’t find out,” Liz says. “I’ve known him since grade eight. I couldn’t kiss him. It would be like kissing a cousin, or even a brother.”

“Ewww!” they both say, and laugh.

“I could kiss Josh, though,” Liz says, after a moment, then: “I’m glad they can’t hear us.”

“Josh and not Jack? What’s wrong with Jack?” Pat asks. The bed is made. She’s putting the pillows into pillowcases, and yawning herself.

“Well for one thing, he’s scared of a doll!”

Pat shrugs. “Everyone has things that scared them when they were kids.”

“Not me,” Liz says.

“You didn’t have closet dragons or under the bed wolves?”

Liz shakes her head. She brings Pat a towel and a t-shirt to sleep in.

“You didn’t have toilet snakes or vindow vipers? No bathtub drains that sucked you into an alternate dimension?”

Liz shakes her head, again, laughs. “You’re making those up,” she says. “I was afraid of nothing.”

She leaves Pat to go to bed, and goes into the bedroom, leaving the door open between them. Before she goes to sleep, she asks, “Do you think Jack was just goofing around? Do you think he really likes me?”

Pat feels like she’s back in grade seven at a slumber party. “Jack has always liked you,” she says. She tries to get comfortable on the sofa bed. She wonders why she didn’t just go home – then remembers the clowns. She’ll wait to face them in the daytime.

Before she’s even close to being asleep, Liz is, and from the sounds she’s making, deep in the throes of a nightmare.

“No,” Liz is saying. “No…”

Pat pulls the pillow over her head and tries to block out the noise. She tosses and turns. Gets up and deliberately makes noise on her way to the bathroom. Nothing interrupts Liz’ nightmare. Pat walks into the room, looms over her. “Liz, wake up. You’re having a nightmare,” she says.

Liz surfaces out of her cotton batting world of sleep, the nothing world where there is no up or down or in or out, just space, just an abyss of nothingness. Wispy colorless space, neither dark nor light, that expands out for ever, leaving her in a state where there is no bottom to rest her feet, no top to aspire to – just nothing, where she is alone, all alone, and there is no one to knows that she exists.

Pat calls again, and Liz hears. The nothingness vanishes, leaving Liz grounded and tired, unaware of her fears, and more than a little annoyed.

“I’m trying to sleep here!” she says.

Pat goes back to the couch, thinking, “Afraid of nothing. Hah! Nothing doesn’t give you nightmares.” She checks her watch – almost 3:00 am, and settles down, but as soon as her head hits the pillow, Liz’ cries begin again.

After many minutes, and the realization that she’s never going to get any sleep. Pat decides to go home. Fuzzy-headed with sleepiness, she gets her things together – her purse, her keys with the key chain with her name on them, her jacket and shoes. She leaves the apartment, softly shutting the door behind her. She thinks she hears Liz’ voice again, saying “No,” and “Take Pat.” “Take Pat what,” Pat wonders. “Take Pat a present. Take Pat out for dinner?”

Down the deserted hallway Pat goes, then alone into the elevator. The lobby, too is deserted. Pat slips outside and hears the door click behind her. It is only then that she notices the clowns.

Clowns are coming down the street towards her, and she feels a moment of panic. But there have been clowns around her all night, she tells herself. Still she pulls on the door to the lobby – which won’t budge. She’d need Liz’ key card to get in. She looks at the keypad panel beside the door. She can’t phone Liz. She doesn’t know her security code. She feels her heart thumping in her chest, forces herself to take slow, even breaths

The clowns are passing, not even glancing her way She recognizes the girl clown with the ripped pants, and the green and red wig. “I thought I would flunk the audition,” the girl is saying to the clown she walks with. “Did you see me? In there late and all messed up?”

“You aced the audition,” the other clown says. “I wish I’d done as well.”

Pat breathes easier. They’re only people dressed up as clowns. It’s only a few blocks walk to her apartment. She can manage. She clutches her keys in her fist like a set of brass knuckles and sets off down the dark and rainy street. Nothing happens. There are no more clowns out. There are no more people out at all. She jumps at movement, but it’s only a raccoon, slipping through a fence, and she breathes easy. No one in their right mind would be walking alone at this time in the morning – which gives her a momentary worry about people not in their right minds, but it passes. There aren’t even any cars passing by. It’s actually kind of peaceful. The rain has washed away the city smells of cooking grease and car exhaust and … clowns… pops into Pat’s head, and she giggles, thinking of Josh promising to protect her from their peppermint breath. Still, when her apartment comes into view, she breaks into a run, like a horse bolting for the barn after a hard ride.

Just as she gets close to the door, she trips on a crack in the sidewalk. She puts out her hands to stop her fall, and her keys fall from her fingers and into the grate of a storm sewer.

“Oh, no,” Pat says. She pulls on the grate, but it won’t budge, of course it won’t budge. It’s a heavy metal cast iron grate. The sound of footsteps comes close and Pat looks over to see huge clown feet. She jumps, then smiles, another clown from the clown convention, or whatever it was, she thinks. Someone who will help her.

“I dropped my keys,” Pat says, not looking up at the clown. “I can’t get the grate up. Can you see if you can do it?”

The clown kneels. Pat notices the baggy, colorful pants, and the clown’s fat sausage fingers in white gloves as they reach to grab the grate.

“That’s a really good costume,” Pat says. “How’d you do in the audition?”

But something is wrong with those fat sausage fingers. They seem – plastic. They don’t seem real. They don’t seem like they can bend. And they’re not doing anything at all to lift the grate.

The clown doesn’t reply to Pat’s question. She looks up into his face, and it’s not a face at all, but a mask of red nose and grinning mouth, a fun house thing that makes her want to scream – and then he touches her, and there is no Pat at all. Just a shimmer of color, suspended above the grate, above the street, until the rain washes it away.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Jack’s nightmares are getting worse. Since the night at the Bar None, the fun house corridor has filled with noises and voices that Jack almost recognizes, but not quite. Sometimes, he thinks he hears Pat’s voice, calling for help from a long way off. Other times, other voices are calling for Alice, asking where she’s gone. There is always the sound of construction, of hammering and sawing, and the corridor is, in some freaky nightmare way, expanding. The doors are getting taller; the halls are getting wider. Sometimes banks of fog roll in out of nowhere, obscuring the bright colors and high ceilings, but not making them feel any more manageable. Jack feels himself getting lost in there, and is afraid that he won’t be able to find his way back out to his real world of dumpy basement suite, boring job, and Friday nights with his friends at the Bar None.

Jack wakes with his heart pounding in his chest, and quite often with his landlord pounding on his ceiling. “All right, All right!” Jack calls out, but he’s never sure why. He gets out of bed and has a drink of water and a pee, and always, by the time he’s got back into bed has forgotten his dream and is left with only a vague unease, a reluctance to go back to sleep, and a growing irritation with his landlord for making so much noise above his head. What’s the guy doing up there? Has he taken up tap-dancing?

The week passes, and it’s Friday again. Jack rolls out of bed, late, feeling like he hasn’t had any sleep at all. He combs his hair and sticks out his tongue in the mirror, expecting it to be covered in green fuzz, from the weight and the feel of it. Nope. It’s just his regular pink tongue. He gargles with mouthwash and brushes his teeth and gets into his white shirt and tie, and black pants – his stupid flunky uniform. He grabs his jacket and heads out the door, wondering if the dog is in its run. Rover is insane, he thinks. He’s been acting even more strangely than normal, barking as if at something behind Jack, instead of directly at Jack – or at least that’s how it seems to Jack. Darn dog.

Jack leaves his basement suite, locking the door behind him. He glances up at his landlord’s main floor kitchen window. His landlord and the landlord’s wife are watching him. They’re in their robes and look kind of grouchy. Jack waves. Neither of them wave back. Jack shrugs and cautiously approaches Rover’s dog run. The doberman/rottweiller cross is in there, all right, and the door is closed. Jack prepares for the dog to rush at him, barking like a maniac, hitting the chain link fence, and then bouncing off. It’s happened every day for months, except for the times Jack would prefer not to think about – the times when Rover wasn’t safely locked away in his run, and the landlord had to come out and call Rover off, while Jack stood stock still, afraid to move, while the dog sniffed at his crotch. It wouldn’t have been so bad, Jack thinks, if it hadn’t been for all the drool.

“Rover! It’s me, you idiot,” Jack says to the dog, hoping to forestall the barking and rushing. It’s never worked before. He doesn’t expect it to work now. But the dog, who has been prepared to rush him, stops mid-bark, mid-rush. It stands for a moment, then cowers before Jack, thumping his tail on the floor of his run in a “don’t hurt me,” kind of way. Rover rolls onto his back in a submissive gesture, exposes his belly. Jack and the dog look at each other. The dog whines. “You must be sick,” Jack says.

***

It’s after work, and Jack is on his way to the Bar None. He’s phoned Josh and Liz, but he hasn’t been able to get a hold of Pat. The last time he tried phoning, he got a “this number is not in service,” message, and there was something wrong with her email address, too. His last email was bounced back to him. He wonders if she forgot to pay her phone and internet bills. She’ll probably show up at the bar anyways, he thinks. She knows where to find them.

It’s early, and there is no lineup outside the bar when Jack gets there. Jack smiles. No clowns, he thinks. Pat will be relieved. He stands inside the door for a moment, looking for his friends. He can’t see Pat, but Liz and Josh are sitting at the same table they had last week. Josh sees him and waves an empty beer pitcher at Jack. Jack nods and goes to the bar to get more beer before going up to the table.

As he is taking his pitcher of beer from the bartender, someone comes up behind him and gooses him. He jumps, almost spilling his beer. He swings around, ready to smack whoever it was. A woman he’s never seen before smiles up at him and winks. She’s about his age, pretty enough in an anorexic Barbie kind of way, but definitely not his type. He wonders what she thinks she’s doing, goosing him. He’s going to ask, but she says:

“About time you got here.” Then, “Go on to the table. I’m going to get a glass of wine.”

He smiles weakly, wondering how much she’s had to drink, wondering why he attracts all the crazies, and goes up to the table. Jack pours out beer for Josh and Liz and sits down.

“No Pat?” he asks. “Have either of you heard from her?”

They just look at him. It’s as if they don’t know who he’s talking about. After a second, the light dawns but they both shake their heads..

“She stayed with you last Friday night,” he says to Liz. “Did anything happen?”

Liz tries to remember. It must have only been a week ago, but the memory of what she and Pat did is hazy and she feels like she’s dredging it up from the depths of her mind. She knows she knows Pat, but she can’t quite picture her face; she’s not entirely sure what Pat looks like, or even, silly as it sounds, who she is. Jack is waiting for an answer, so Liz makes the effort to recall what she was doing last Friday night. Someone was sleeping on her couch, she thinks. She remembers washing an extra set of sheets and pillowcases and putting them back in her hall closet when she did laundry on Sunday. Someone must have used them.

“We went to sleep pretty soon after we got back,” Liz says, thinking it sounds about right, “but no one was there when I woke up the next morning.”

“Have you spoken to her since?” Jack asks.

The girl who goosed Jack is coming up to the table, a glass of wine in her hand. She plunks herself down in the chair next to Jack and makes herself at home. Liz and Josh look curiously at her. The girl smiles at them in a friendly way and remarks that it’s been a long week. She tastes her wine.

Jack edges his chair away from her, wishes she would go away. Liz and Josh don’t seem to recognize her either, but they don’t seem to mind having her sit with them.

“Have you spoken to her since?” Jack asks Liz, again.

Liz blinks. Her memory of Pat is no longer hazy. It has completely vanished.

“Spoken to who?” Liz asks.

“Pat!” Jack says.

“Who’s Pat?” the girl next to Jack asks.

“Who are you?” is what Jack starts to ask, but he’s interrupted when Liz blinks at Alice and suddenly reacts to her as if to a long time friend.

“Alice!” Liz says. “About time you got here!”

“It took me forever to get away,” Alice says.

Josh and Jack look at each other. Jack can see that Josh doesn’t recognize the girl either, but as she and Liz talk, Josh’s expression changes from someone who’s been confronted by a stranger to someone who is waiting to welcome a friend.

“Alice!” Josh says, when there is a break in the conversation between her and Liz, “Did you do something to your hair? I didn’t recognize you.”

“You noticed my hair?” Alice asks. “I’m impressed!”

The three of them laugh and talk. Jack concentrates on his beer. When he can’t stand it anymore, he says: “What about Pat?”

Alice, Josh, and Liz look up at him.

“Who the heck is Pat?” Alice asks. Josh and Liz want to know too.

“Oh, come on,” Jack says. “We were here with Pat last week. He looks to Josh and Liz. “The three of us were sitting right at this table.”

“I was here last week,” Alice says.

“I have never seen you before in my life,” Jack says.

“What are you talking about? Of course you know me. ” Alice says. “I was here last week. We were dancing and drinking. You were telling some lame story about your Winnie the Pooh night light, and your grandmother and some doll and your sister who snores…”

“Very funny,” Jack says. “I don’t know who you are or how they put you up to this, but enough is enough. I’m going to go find Pat.”

He leaves the table without waiting to check their reactions. The DJ is getting ready to start his show and The Bar None is filling up with other customers. Jack elbows his way out. As he leaves, he hears Alice say: “What the heck is his problem?”

***

Jack stands outside Pat’s apartment building. It looks the same, but Pat’s name isn’t on the directory beside the intercom. Where there should be typed card saying: “Apartment 3B - Pat Sprite,” there is a hand-written card that says “Apartment 3B – H. Finklestein.” The card is faded and fly-spotted. It looks like its been there since before Jack was born.

Jack buzzes the intercom anyways, and a quavering, elderly voice answers: “Who is this?”

“I’m looking for Pat Sprite,” Jack says.

“There’s no Pat Sprite here,” the voice says. “Who is this?”

“Sure there is! Jack insists.”Pat Sprite, Apartment 3B!” He is shouting and can’t seem to make himself stop. “Let me speak to Pat Sprite! This isn’t funny!”

There is the sound of an old lady in distress on the other end of the intercom, then silence.

Jack presses again and again on the buzzer but no one answers his call. After a moment, the door opens and the apartment manager comes out. Jack recognizes him from the previous week when Pat’s neighbor complained about the noise.

“Is there a problem?” the manager asks.

“I’m trying to find Pat Sprite,” Jack says. To his embarrassment, he is near tears. “I know she lives here. I just saw her last week.”

“There’s no Pat Sprite here,” the manager says, “and you’re scaring Mrs. Finklestein.”

The manager leads Jack away from the door. “This Pat Sprite. Where did you see her last?” he asks.

“At The Bar None,” Jack says. “It’s a club.”

They’ve walked a few yards from the door of the apartment building. Jack looks up. A curtain twitches in what should be Pat’s window, and an elderly, fearful face peers out at him.

The manager nods. “Look son, sometimes when a girl doesn’t want a fellow to bug her, she gives him a phony phone number and address, sometimes even a phony name.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Jack says. “I know her!”

The manager shrugs, skeptical.

“I know her,” Jack insists.

“Be that as it may,” the manager says. “there’s no Pat Sprite here, and you have to leave Mrs. Finklestein alone.”

He waits for Jack to nod in agreement, then pats him on the back. “There are other girls,” he says, going back to the apartment building.

“Not Pat,” Josh thinks. “There aren’t any other girls like Pat.” He considers Alice and makes a face. “No other girls at all,” he says, out loud.

The manager shoots him a warning look. Jack turns to go home, stepping over an iron grate. If he’d looked down, he would have seen keys on a chain lying at the bottom, the name “Pat” barely visible in the reflection of the streetlight.

***

Back at home, Jack pulls an old box out of the bottom of his closet: the box that his mom made him take when she moved to Florida. Jack opens the lid and piles the stuff on the bed. There’s a bunch of sports medals and trophies – a couple that he’s proud of, the others of the self-esteem promoting variety that everyone got. He puts those ones in his garbage can. Under the medals is his high school year book. In the back of it, there should be a photo of him and Josh, Liz and Pat all dressed up for their high school graduation. He starts to leaf through the annual, then stops after he looks at his own dorky photo and reads the bio of his high school accomplishments and dreams for his future. The next picture on the page is Alice’s. “Best Buddies,” he reads: “Josh and Liz and Jack.” Feeling sick, Jack slams the annual shut and puts it on the bed. He’s scared now, to look at the photo of him with Liz and Josh and Pat, afraid that Alice will be in it instead.

Next in the box is a container of Legos. He puts those aside. Never know when you’re going to need Legos; then a bag full of Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures. Never know when you’re going to need those, either, he thinks. Then there are some comic books. He yawns. He’ll go through them later, although he doesn’t know why he thought it necessary to save all of the Archie Digests. Right in the bottom of the box, tucked under a flap so he almost misses it, is a little box that used to have chocolate covered peanuts in it. In the box is his Winnie the Pooh night light – a small thing of Winnie, with a little smile on his face, holding his honey pot, sitting under a rainbow.

Jack sits with the night light in his hand. He’s so tired, and he’s so afraid to go to sleep. He thinks of his sister, telling him that he was too old for a night light all those years ago. Well, he’s definitely too old for it now, but he plugs it in anyways, and then barely makes it back to the bed before collapsing in exhaustion. He falls asleep where he lies, the high school annual and the Ninja Turtles and the Transformers and the Legos scattered under and around him, the sports medals digging into his arms and neck. He falls into a abyss of deep, untroubled sleep, safe from corridors and walking dolls and clowns and missing friends.

In the electrical outlet, the rainbow above Winnie the Pooh casts a warm friendly glow around the room. On Winnie’s face, though is an expression of concentration that wasn’t there before.

“Oh bother,” Winne says. “I’m too old for this.”

TO BE CONTINUED!

It’s Tuesday night and the four of them have gone out for dinner. Only Jack knows that they are the wrong four – that Alice has usurped Pat’s place, but he’s given up on trying to convince Josh and Liz of that. Now he’s sitting, waiting for the waiter to finish telling them what the specials are, and go get them some drinks. This is Alice’s treat, so Jack is planning on ordering a steak. If it was Pat’s treat, he’d find the cheapest thing on the menu and order that, but Alice, whoever she is, can pay for his steak. He figures she owes him, just for being there, in Pat’s place.

He doesn’t know why he’s there, at the restaurant with them – specifically with her. She’d phoned and asked him if he wanted to come out – told him that she was celebrating her promotion, but he doesn’t know why he agreed. He doesn’t know what position she was promoted to, doesn’t care what position she was promoted from, either. He has no idea where she works or what she does. No skin off his nose.

“And can I bring you a drink?” the waiter asks. “It’s Tequila Tuesday, and our specials are either a Margarita or a Tequila Sunset for $4.95.”

“I’ll have a Margarita,” Jack says, then to Liz: “What about you? Are you having one?”

Liz looks puzzled. “Oh, Jack,” she says. “If there’s one thing you know about me it’s that I never drink hard liquor.”

Jack thinks back to the tequila night that Liz won’t talk about, and to the night Pat disappeared, when they were all drinking grain alcohol and koolaid, to all of the drinking the original four have done since they were of legal age, and if he wanted to be honest, before that too.

If there is one thing he knows about Liz, it’s that she drinks like a fish. Beer, wine, hard liquor, doesn’t matter. If it’s liquid and contains alcohol, she’ll drink it. Josh, on the other hand, wouldn’t drink the grain alcohol, rarely drinks hard liquor, and would probably be just as happy to drink nothing alcoholic at all. If they need a designated driver, he always volunteers.

“I’ll have one,” Alice says. Then Josh orders a pop, and Liz orders a wine spritzer. At least Josh is ordering a pop, Jack thinks. Something in his world is still making sense.

They all start talking. At first Jack feels like the odd one out, but gradually, after a couple of drinks, and a pretty good steak, great actually, after all the hamburger and macaroni he’s been eating, he loosens up. Josh and Liz are being themselves, the friends he’s known since high school, and even if Alice isn’t Pat, she’s nice enough, he supposes. She even asked him if he’d found his friend, while Liz and Josh didn’t even seem to care that Pat was gone. Jack didn’t know what to say to that, so he just let it go, and the conversation went on to other things.

The only disturbing thing is the way that Josh and Liz seem to be holding hands under the table. They’ve all joked around, all four originals, flirting with each other and whatnot, but holding hands under the table? That just doesn’t seem like something Liz and Josh would do. When it’s time for dessert, they order one piece of pie and two forks. That doesn’t seem like something they’d do either. What they’d do, is that Liz would order pie, and Josh would sneak bites of it with his coffee spoon when Liz wasn’t looking. Jack doesn’t order dessert. He figured he’d sneak bites of Liz’s too, but he can hardly do that when they’ve ordered one piece of pie with two forks. Alice offers him some of hers, but he doesn’t like what she ordered. There he is, odd man out again, not eating dessert like everyone else because he felt bad about ordering the expensive steak when Alice was paying for it, watching Liz finger Josh’s watchband, as if she owned it.

“New watch?” Jack asks.

“Old one,” Josh says. “My parents are moving to Florida and cleaning out the house. Mom found this one in the back of a closet and gave it to me. It’s from Expo 86.”

“Your’s too, huh?” Jack asks. “What’s it with parents and Florida?

Josh shows Jack the watch. It has a logo on the face of it, with “86″ in big numbers.

“What’s Expo 86?” Alice asks.

None of them know. Just something that happened a long time ago, they figure, like Superbowl XXI.

A band is setting up on a small stage in the back of the restaurant. The waiter comes over with the bill. They all offer to pay their share, but Alice slips her credit card to the waiter, before they can even see how much the bill is, and that’s that. Jack starts to like her more.

“There’s a cover charge if you want to stay for the show,” the waiter says, but they all have to work in the morning. They make it an early night. As they’re leaving, the band is doing a sound check. They play “Stagger Lee” and play it well. Jack and Alice linger to listen. Josh and Liz go off singing the words, arms casually slug around each other’s shoulders.

“Go Stagger Lee, Go Stagger Lee…”.

“Cheerful song,” Alice says, and they start walking down the street.

“At least in the beginning of it,” Jack says. “The song. It ends up nasty.”

“I guess I don’t know all the words,” Alice tells him.

They pass a downscale bar, and a drunk comes stumbling out.

“Stagger Lee, himself,” Jack says, and Alice laughs. Up ahead, the drunk gets too close to Josh and Liz. Jack and Alice can see him saying something to Josh, see Josh backing away.

“Poor Josh,” Jack says. “If a drunk is out, he’ll find him. Same as Pat and clowns. Clowns don’t bother me, drunks don’t bother me, but they leave be alone.” As soon as the words are out of his mouth, he wishes he hadn’t said them – hadn’t said anything about Pat. He hopes Alice won’t ask about her again, and she doesn’t.

There’s silence after that. The silence goes on too long, and Jack breaks it, saying: “Josh and Liz seemed kind of cozy.”

“Cozy?” Alice asks.

“Yeah,” Jack says. “Like they’re an old married couple or something all of a sudden.”

Alice stops and looks up at Jack, a concerned expression on her face. “Are you all right?” she asks, then tries to lighten up by saying: “you haven’t bumped your head or anything?”

Jack shakes his head.

“Liz and Josh are an old married couple,” Alice tells him. “Or as good as. They’ve been going together since grade ten.”

Jack feels reality shift under his feet again, and has to stop himself from grabbing on to the nearest wall for support.

***

Liz and Josh make their way to Liz’ apartment, still humming the song, filling in the occasional line:

“Stagger Lee killed Billy, he killed that poor boy so bad…”

Until they fall into bed, mess around for awhile, and slip into sleep.

Josh sleeps like a log – at least at first. He wakes when Liz flails out her arm and hits him across the bridge of the nose.

“Ow! Why’d you do that?” Josh asks, sitting up.

Liz isn’t awake though, and isn’t about to wake up, no matter how much noise Josh makes. She’s in her nothing world of a nightmare again, in some void in time or space where she’s all alone and can’t see anything or feel anything and doesn’t know where she is. She hears voices though, voices calling her from a far way off, voices she doesn’t want to answer.

Josh lightly touches Liz’ shoulder, then, when that doesn’t wake her up, he pats her shoulder. Sill no response. He turns the bed side lamp on, but she just rolls over and scoots under the covers, still asleep. She’s moaning now, making strange fearful cries. It must be some nightmare, Josh thinks. And Liz says she never has them. He tries to wake her one more time, but she responds to his touch by lashing out at him. She’s already hurt his nose. He doesn’t want bruises. He gets out of bed.

Josh pulls his clothes on. He has to get home, get some sleep before it’s time to go to work in the morning.

He gives her a careful kiss on the cheek - and tiptoes away.

“Josh,” she says. He smiles, wonders if he should come back to bed, but he sees that she’s talking in her sleep. “Take Josh,” she says.

***

Josh walks home. He and Liz have talked about moving in together, saving on rent, but on a night like this it’s nice to have his own place to go to. If he’d lived with Liz, he’d have had to sleep on the couch. It’s not far to his place, and the night is nice. It’s still pretty early, just after 11:00, so there are people on the sidewalk, coming out of the bars and restaurants.

The drunk staggers toward him. The same drunk that accosted them when they came out of the restaurant earlier. Josh hates drunks. They scare him. They’re noisy and smelly and unpredictable, and this one is bad. He’s a real end of the road rummy. He’s got a big wet patch down the front of his pants, where Josh really hopes he’s spilled a beer, and his jacket is done up wrong. He has a loopy smile on his face, and he’s holding out a bottle.

“Come an have a drink!” the drunk calls out, slurring his words.

Josh pretends he doesn’t hear him. He walks faster.

“Come on, be sociable,” the drunk calls again. He staggers in front of Josh, giggling to himself.

“No, thanks,” Josh says. The bottle the drunk is holding has a poison label, he sees.

The drunk takes a swig from the bottle, and swipes his mouth with a filthy hand. “That’s a nice watch you got there,” he says.

Josh runs. The drunk runs after him, quick on his feet for a drunk. Before Josh knows what’s happening, the drunk has him in a headlock, is tilting his head back and plugging his nose, and then the vile stuff in the bottle in dripping down Jack’s throat, burning and gagging him. The drunk has Josh’s nose pinched off. All he can do is swallow.

“You afraid of being poisoned?” the drunk asks, and laughs. But by then Josh can’t hear him anymore, let alone answer.

The drunk strips Josh’s watch off his wrist, sees that it’s just a cheap thing – nothing but an old souvenir. He flips the watch into the gutter and walks on.

Where Josh was is nothing – nothing but a shimmer of light that dissipates and disappears.

TO BE CONTINUED!

It’s Wednesday morning and Jack doesn’t feel so good. He got home early enough from the restaurant, so he can’t blame staying out late with Liz and Josh and Alice as an excuse for feeling crummy. His head hurts and his sinuses are full of gunk, he’s kind of dizzy and he wants his mom to be here bringing him tea and orange juice and toast, instead of being in Florida, sunbathing. More immediately, there’s a light hurting his eyes, a rainbow of color. He painfully turns his head to see the Winnie the Pooh night light shining cheerfully at him. He doesn’t remember plugging it in last night, but he must have.

It takes way too much effort to heave himself up so he can reach over and unplug Winnie, but he manages. Before he does, he thinks he hears Winnie say: “You’re going to be late for work.”

“Great,” he thinks. “Now I’m hallucinating.” He looks at the clock. His hallucination, or Winnie, was right. He is going to be late for work. He swings his feet over the side of the bed, then grabs the wall for support as the floor comes rushing up at him. His pants are lying in a puddle of cloth by the side of his bed. He leans over and fumbles in the pocket to find his cell phone. Looking at the number display hurts. Everything hurts. He scrolls down to “work” and hits the call button.

“I won’t be in, ” he tells the receptionist, his voice coming out in a croak so bad he doesn’t even have to try to make it sound worse. “Good,” she says. “Keep your germs to yourself.”

Jack falls back to sleep in a feverish fog, and spends the next two days in bed, rousing himself only to find cold tablets and juice, to make tea and eat toast. The only bright spot is that he is either too sick to hear his landlord tap dancing on his ceiling, or the landlord has given up his new hobby. Whenever he wakes, though, it is to the bright rainbow of color from the night light, and although he remembers unplugging it when the light irritates him, he never remembers plugging it back in. Friday morning dawns with the realization that he’s starving hungry and that he can breath through his nose and that his cell phone is ringing, and probably has been ringing for quite some time. “Hello?” His voice sounds perky even to him.

It’s the receptionist. “Oh good, you’re better,” she says. “I thought I’d have to phone for a temp.” Jack gets to his feet, wishing he’d had the forethought to sound sick, and pulls on his work clothes. They’re crumpled from spending two days on the floor, but he can’t make himself care. When he tosses the empty cold tablet bottle into the garbage, he sees that the expiry date was several months ago. Oops.

Jack checks the mirror before heading out the door. He looks pretty presentable, despite his shirt and pants being rumpled, and he looks like he has been sick. His nose is chafed and his eyes are bloodshot. Jack nods at his reflection in satisfaction. He’s learned that it doesn’t do to look too healthy after being off sick. He works with suspicious people. He walks out of his apartment with a spring in his step, greets the dog in a good natured way, and heads to the bus, surprised by the dog’s reaction. Rover didn’t bark or anything, just wagged his tail in an ingratiating manner.

The landlord, watching from above, calls to his wife: “You’re right. There is something wrong with the dog.” She comes out to look. “There’s something wrong with that Jack,” she says. “He makes me nervous. You’ll talk to him, won’t you?” “Tonight,” says the landlord. “When he gets home from work.”

At work, Jack clocks in and makes his way to the mail room. He pulls on his smock and sorts through the mail, arranging it for delivery, floor by floor.

“Nice break?” his boss says, coming in, then has a look at Jack’s face and back-pedals. “You’re not still contagious are you?”

“Hope not,” Jack tells him. “I wouldn’t wish this on…” he’s going to say “you,” then back-pedals himself to say “…my worst enemy.” An unfamiliar name in the mail catches his eye. “Peter Andrews?” he asks.

“Fourth floor,” his boss says, not even pausing to think.

“New guy?” Jack asks. The boss gives him a quizzical look. “No,” the boss says. “been here awhile.”

On the fourth floor, Jack steers his mail cart through the cubicles, dropping off and picking up, making excuses for his absence, enduring the attitudes of the least of the junior executives and clerical staff towards himself – the mail boy. Soon the only mail still to be delivered is that addressed to Peter Andrews. He comes through the cubicle corridor, and there is an office that wasn’t there before, a niche with solid walls built into the corner of the previously open floor plan, taking up the windows. An unfamiliar man in an expensive
suit, a guy about his age, comes out to meet him. He’s got a huge smile on his face, and Jack thinks, “who is this chimp?”

“Jack!” the person says. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” Jack says. “Mr. Andrews?”

“Mr. Andrews? What’s wrong with you?” the guy says, holding his hand out for the mail. Jack hands it over and turns to go. “Hey,” the guy – Peter or whoever- continues, “you guys off to the Bar None tonight?”

“Us guys?” Jack asks.

“You and Alice and Liz.” Not Josh, Jack notes, and his heart sinks. “I’m free tonight!” the guy says, “so I can come with you!” Jack gives him a sickly smile. The guy doesn’t seem to notice, just keeps yapping in an excited way as if Jack should be thrilled to hear what he has to say. “Brenda’s off on some wild ladies night, so I get to go play!” Finally he notices Jack’s lack of response, and manages to misinterpret it, entirely. “I’m just kidding,” he says. “Can you imagine Brenda stuffing money into some guy’s jock strap? No she’s going out for dinner with her parents and grandparents, and told me I didn’t have to come.” Jack just wants to get out of there. He steers his mail cart away. “I get you,” Peter says. “Work is work and play is play. So, I’ll see you there tonight, right?”

Jack isn’t sure if he nods or not. When he gets safely down to the mail room, his boss takes one look at him and tells him to go back home, before everyone else gets whatever it is he has, and not to come back until his doctor clears him to come to work.

That night, Jack makes his way to the Bar None. He can’t not go, even though he doesn’t think he wants to know who will be there. He sees Peter sitting at their table and resignedly makes his way over. He can’t see Liz, which worries him, and he’s almost glad to see Alice, which worries him even more.

Then Liz comes from the bar, holding a large frothy drink in one hand and his favorite beer in the other. She’s back to being the Liz who drinks, he sees, and he can’t stop the huge grin from taking over his face. She grins back, plunks down his beer and shows him her arm. There’s a red mark on it that will probably turn into a bruise. “Next time you get the drinks,” she says. “Look at my arm!”

“Did someone hit you?” Jack asks, ready to kick some butt.

“Just jostled me,” Liz says. “An accident. But I banged into the bar.”

Liz puts her drink down, then pops herself onto Jack’s lap. “You could offer to kiss it better,” she says. Jack likes this Liz, he thinks, making a show of kissing her arm.

Alice asks Peter where Brenda is, and the conversation starts revolving around Peter, and Brenda, and wedding plans for Peter and Brenda. Jack drinks his beer, left out of this new dynamic again, not knowing what they know, his good mood evaporating. Liz moves over to sit in her own chair, and Jack hears himself asking: “Do you know my friend Josh?”

They all look at him, faces blank. Even Liz.

“No, who’s that?”

“Buddy from high school,” Jack says.

“Right,” Peter says, laughing. “If he was a buddy from high school, don’t you think we’d know him? What, you had other friends besides us?”

Liz and Alice join in the laugh, and Jack just feels sick. Liz’ laughter dies down faster than that of the others. He sees the concern on her face as she says: “You don’t look so hot.”
Touched, he makes an effort to smile. “No, I’ve got a cold. I think I’m going to head home,” he tells her. “Call me,” she says.

Later, Jack ponders her words. Call her? She’s never said: “call me,” like that. What does she mean? He makes his bed properly with clean sheets and gets rid of all the snoggy kleenexes scattered around the floor. He finds a last cold tablet under his water glass and takes it even though it’s probably expired too. He plugs in the night light, and is not rewarded with any kind of rainbow glow. The bulb is burned out. He pulls the night light from the wall, and then, even though he knows he’ll see Peter’s photo in the high school annual instead of
Josh’s, he checks it out. Peter’s there, all right, looking a smarmy eighteen year old version of himself, and there’s no Josh in evidence at all. Jack wants to cry.

Jack turns off his bedside light and stares at the ceiling until he drifts off into that fun house corridor of a dream, with clowns and walking dolls hiding behind closed doors, the voices of Pat and Josh crying out for help; the construction sounds that make him unhappily aware that the corridor is getting bigger all the time. The hammering gets louder and louder until Jack awakens. The sound is coming from his door. He is startled to his feet and he stumbles to the door. He lurches it open and there stands his landlord;

“For Pete’s sake,” his landlord says, “what the hell is going on down here?”

“I’m sleeping,” Jack says, confused.

“Then what is making all the noise, all the screaming and laughing and thumping?” the landlord asks, his voice rising with every word: “Night after night, then we get a break for a few days, and now it’s worse than ever. I can’t sleep, my wife can’t sleep, and the dog is hiding in the closet, probably peeing on my shoes, terrified. What the hell are you doing down here?”

“I’m sleeping,” Jack says, again. The landlord looks past Jack into the room. It all seems peaceful and quiet.

“Maybe you’re having a nightmare,” Jack suggests.

“Enough is enough. I want you out,” the landlord tells him. He stumbles back to his own door, where his wife waits, looking frightened. He puts his arm around her shoulders and they go inside.

“Crazy people,” Jack says. He gets back in bed, but knows he won’t sleep. He remembers Liz saying: “call me.” She probably didn’t mean at 2:43 in the morning, but Jack gets out his cell phone and finds her number in the directory and pushes the call button anyway.

Meanwhile, Liz, at her apartment, is having her own nightmare. Locked in that nothing world, she struggles against unknowable terror, hearing the voices of Pat and Josh, voices she should recognize, but somehow doesn’t. Another voice is calling her, the same voice that’s called her before, and all she can think is: “Jack! Take Jack!”

TO BE CONTINUED!

It is Liz’s turn to be woken out of a deep sleep, wondering what that ungodly noise is. Oh. The telephone. She looks at the clock. 2:43? What kind of moron is calling her at 2:43? Maybe she’ll ignore it and go back to sleep. But…

But somehow the idea of sleep isn’t restful. An odd notion, that, that sleep will not be restful, but there it is. It sits on her chest like some unwanted burden, like a child’s misunderstanding of the song: sixteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Liz’s eyelids drift shut. There’s something wrong. She doesn’t want to be here, where ever “here” is – the nothing world of that place where she finds herself when she succumbs to sleep. She doesn’t want to be here, and she doesn’t know how to not be – and then the phone rings again and she grabs it and clings to it as if it were a life raft. “Hello?”

Silence. There is silence on the other end of the phone, and Liz is far enough away from that other reality, that dream scape, that all she knows is that she’s annoyed. “Hello! Who is this?” Liz says sharply. She can hear breathing, but she’s not sure if it’s just breathing or if it’s the kind of breathing you get from an obscene phone call. She’s never had an obscene phone call.

“Hello!” she says again, then, warning: “I have call display.” She realizes that she actually does have call display. What a goof! She looks at the phone cradle. “Jack?” she says. “Why are you calling me at 2:43 in the morning?” Jack doesn’t know what to say. He hasn’t planned this out at all. He can’t say that he phoned her because his Winnie the Pooh night light
burned out and now he’s scared to go to sleep because the walking doll behind the big scary door in the fun house corridor will get him. “Jack?” Liz says again. “Are you all right?”

“Liz?” Jack asks, his voice at least two octaves above where it should be. He didn’t think he knew how to make his voice go that high. His voice probably hasn’t done that since before it broke. He tries again: “Liz? Is that you? I thought I phoned the pizza place.” His words sound false to his hears, and he winces, almost hangs up, but Liz … is laughing.

“Pizza? At 2:43 in the morning?”

“Yeah,” he hears himself say. “I had a craving. Do you want to share?” Well, that was dumb, but again, he is surprised.

“Why not?” Liz says. “I’m awake now. But you’ll have to come here. I’m not getting dressed and going out at this ungodly hour.” Liz isn’t getting dressed? That sounds promising.

“I’ll be right there,” Jack says.

Jack puts the Winnie the Pooh night light in his pocket. He phones the all night pizza place near Liz’s and sets off into the night. The streets are quiet. He doesn’t know what he expected – evil clowns and drunks, maybe, but there is nothing but stillness. A low fog is moving in, and maybe at another time it would have been spooky, but now it gives an otherworldly aspect to the night. It almost feels cozy.

The pizza place and the 24 hour drugstore beside it are the only signs of life on the street. There are no other people out walking, no cars or other vehicles on the road. Jack goes into the pizza place.

“I phoned,” he says.

The pizza guy looks in the oven. “Give it another five minutes,” he says, so Jack goes into the drug store and comes out with a small purchase in a bag, and a magazine to read while he waits. There’s no need, though. The pizza is on the counter, in an insulated bag. “Had to run out” a note says, “bring the bag back in the AM” Jack picks up the pizza and heads over to see Liz. As he walks away, the lights in the pizza place and the drugstore go off, and he has a momentary feeling of nothingness – of being alone in the universe.

It’s not an unpleasant feeling, he thinks, but he’s never been scared of being alone. He’s never been scared of evil clowns, for that matter, or drunks.

Up in her apartment tower, Liz looks out the window for Jack. The fog doesn’t seem cozy to her, and the absence of lights or vehicles on the streets seems sinister. She shivers and pulls her robe around her closer. She’s forgotten to tell him about the near impossibility of gaining access to her building without the code for her apartment and doesn’t know if he’ll have brought his cell phone. Most people would, but most people aren’t Jack. She watches to buzz him in. She’s still watching when there’s a knock at her door.

Liz looks through the peephole. Jack is there, chatting to some guy. Liz looks down at her self. She’s wearing more than she’d wear on the beach – a full length robe and fuzzy slippers. All that is exposed is her hands and her face, but she still feels kind of naked. She pulls the robe belt tighter and opens the door. “Hey, Jack,” she says, “come in.”

The other guy smiles in a friendly way and keeps walking. “Nice building you have,” Jack says. “That guy let me in, but came up with me and said he’d call the cops if I didn’t really know you. Must make you feel safe.”

It might have, Liz thinks, if she had any idea who the other guy was. Maybe he was some kind of stalker who found out which girls didn’t live with their boyfriends.

“He’s the night maintenance supervisor,” Jack says. “But why are we talking about him, when I brought pizza?”

He steps into the apartment. It all looks pretty much the same as last time he was there, helping her move in. The apartment came furnished, but Liz had still had two trucks worth of bags and boxes of stuff. Girls, go figure. All of Jack’s stuff would fit in a back pack with room to spare.

Now that he has the pizza, and he’s in her apartment, and she’s standing in front of him completely encased, but in a robe nonetheless, that hints of intimacy, Jack has no idea what to do next. This Liz seems friendlier and more interested in him than the Liz he remembers from high school, and the Liz who had apparently been going out with Josh since high school, but it doesn’t mean this Liz wants him to…

Liz steps forward and puts the pizza box on the table. She enters his personal space and wraps his arms around her. Then she kisses him. It’s not a buddy kiss, either.

“I’m glad you came over,” she says. “I wasn’t sleeping too well.”

“You must have been having a nightmare,” Jack says.

“I don’t get them,” says Liz. And she kisses him again.

“What about the pizza?” Jack asks, stupidly.

“What about the pizza?” Liz asks. “It’s too late for pizza.”

The next thing Jack knows, they’re on the couch and Liz isn’t wearing her robe anymore. He’s sure he’d remember doing … what they’re doing … if he’d done it before, but Liz sure seems familiar with him. She even knows about that tickley place on his back… He could do this forever. Hold her and kiss her, drift off to sleep with her in his arms…

“Wait a minute,” Jack says.

He get off the couch and finds the package from the drugstore. She watches him, curiously. He pulls open the bag and takes out a miniature light bulb.

She laughs. “That’s not what I thought you were getting,” she says.

Jack takes the Winnie the Pooh night light out of his jacket pocket and screws in the new light bulb. He plugs it into the wall, and Liz really laughs.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Making sure I have protection,” Jack says.

She waits for an explanation and doesn’t get one. When he comes back to the couch, though, she fends him off. “I can’t do it with Winnie the Pooh watching!” she says.

Jack pulls something soft and silky out of the couch cushions. He throws it over to the wall, where it slides down and snags on the night light.

“Oh bother,” says Po