GIRL IN THE EMPTY APARTMENT by Jack Skillingstead

The present story is loosely connected to a group of tales the author has been writing about the consciousness evolution of the human race. He tells us, “I think of these as ‘Harbinger’ stories, and a couple of them have appeared in Asimov’s already. Like those others, ‘Girl in the Empty Apartment’ is a ‘true’ story—truth being that borderland between experience and hallucination.”

Someone was going to die.

My name is Joe Skadan. These were the days of phantom invaders, unexplained disappearances, and Homeland insecurities. I stood in the back of the Context Theater on Capital Hill, Seattle, nursing a few insecurities of my own; the bottle of crappy Zinfandel hung loosely in my left fist, demolished over the duration of the third act. Me and the bottle. Free tickets guaranteed there were only two empty seats in the house. Mine and the one my girlfriend was supposed to have occupied. Cheryl hadn’t come, though, and I couldn’t take sitting next to that empty chair.

The third act ended with the monologist (my cranky alter-ego) putting his hand over the gun on his desk while the lights adjusted, turning him into a dark cipher. Artsy as hell. The prop gun was actually my own .38, minus the ammo clip and none in the chamber. Kind of a family heirloom, stepfather-to-son. The question is left hanging: Who’s he going to use that gun on? This character’s interior darkness had become a filter that warped the entire world.

A beat of silence followed the final lighting adjustment. It was hot and stuffy in the theater. Programs rustled. Somebody coughed. Then the applause started, thank God. There were even a few appreciative whistles. The lights came up and the cast took their bows.

I slumped against the wall and breathed out. The Only Important Philosophical Question, my first fully staged play, had successfully concluded its maiden performance in front of a live audience. I was twenty-six years old.

Fifty or so sweaty audience members shuffled past me. The Context had been a transmission shop in a former incarnation, and not a particularly well ventilated one. I hopped onstage and grabbed my gun, put it in a paper bag, then wandered outside for a smoke. In those days I smoked like crazy—the days after the advent of the Harbingers. Or, as I preferred to think of them: the mass hallucination. One morning the world woke up with a headache. Dreams became strange, disturbing, inhabited by “Harbingers,” which the dreamers occasionally described as conscious trees, or something. Rumors abounded. The juiciest being that large numbers of people had disappeared without a trace.

Some of the audience lingered in front of the theater, talking about the play. Mostly they seemed impressed by all that stage blood in the second act fantasy. It was weird to hear strangers discussing my work. I didn’t much like it, and wished I could stuff the play back inside my head, where it had festered in its lonely way for years.

As the last of the audience wandered off, I noticed a girl sitting on a patch of grass looking at the moon. Tear tracks shone on her cheeks like little snail trails. She was only about eighteen. Cheryl’s failure to show had cut deep, and my instinct was to slink off and lick the wound. Instead I asked this girl if she was all right.

“Oh, yes. It’s just so beautiful.”

I flicked ash, adjusted my glasses, followed her gaze. “The moon?”

“Sure. I’ve been staying in the Arctic Circle up there.”

“Doesn’t that get cold?”

“It’s not that kind of Arctic Circle.”

She wiped the tears off her cheeks with the heel of her hand and stood up—rather gracefully, considering the dress she wore. A tarnished gold fabric, intricately pleated, that wound around her like flowing water, or the ridged skin of some exotic tree. She had a generous mouth and kindly eyes.

“You’re Joe Skadan,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“You wrote the play.”

I nodded. “How did you know me?”

“You’re famous on the moon.”

“All right.”

“Can I walk with you, Joe?”

“If you want.”

“I’m Nichole.”

In my mind I depersonalized her with a character tag: MOON GIRL. I did this sort of thing more and more frequently, estranging myself from the world. The part of me that resisted this estrangement grew weaker by the day. Like the child I’d once been, locked in the closet, weeping from belt lashes, subdued and enfeebled by darkness, listening to the sound of Charlie, my stepdad, stomping off to work on Mom next. Before things turned bad she used to swoon about Charlie’s blue eyes, “Just like Paul Newman’s!” Charlie liked to fold that belt over and snap it together with a whip-crack sound, to let me know he was coming. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, he used to say, accusing me endlessly of transgressions I hadn’t even considered.

MOON GIRL and I walked along. It was one of those pellucid Seattle evenings, the royal sky inviting stars to join the moon. Mechanically, I asked, “What did you think of the show?”

“It was different. Did Kafka really say that, about the only important philosophical question being whether or not you should kill yourself ?”

“I think so, but I never could verify the quote. Maybe I made it up. Who cares? I thought about calling it, What’s So Grand About Guignol? but that seemed too jokey, though it fit with the bloody stuff.”

“It’s Woody Allen meets Taxi Driver,” she said.

I looked at her. That description, same wording, was scribbled in a notebook back in my apartment. Coincidences made me uncomfortable.

“Maybe I’m your secret muse,” MOON GIRL said, as if she knew what I was thinking.

“You don’t even know me.”

“Or I do, just a little.”

“That dress is strange,” I said, to change the subject.

“Does it seem familiar?”

“I don’t know.”

The dress almost shimmered, exuding energy. Or maybe I’d had too much wine, or I was a poor judge of energy exudations. Who knows?

“You’ve had dreams,” she said.

“Everybody dreams.”

I thought of my mother’s birch, a little tree she’d claimed as her own even though it just happened to be growing in the backyard of the cruddy duplex we’d rented. I’d been dreaming about it for weeks now. The tree had been a private thing between my mother and me, excluding Charlie. While he was at work we sat under it for “Elvis picnics,” which meant peanut butter sandwiches and bananas and Cokes. I still remember the checkered pattern of the blanket and the way the leaf shade swayed over us; a portion of my secret landscape. Another was the piece of sky I could see from my bedroom. Sometimes I’d put my comic down and stare at the night of moon and stars, and it was like a promise of freedom.

Arctic Circle. Not the polar regions but a seventies vintage burger franchise Mom used to work in when she was a teenager. My real dad, another swoony teen, would come in and “make eyes” at her. The way I pictured it was like a scene from Happy Days. Safe and innocent as a chocolate malt. I have only a vague memory of him, and I may even have made that up. Mom had been a romantic all right. The freeway accident that killed my dad took a lot of that out of her, though. And Charlie took the rest. Arctic Circle. I really hated coincidences.

“It’s a Neodandi,” MOON GIRL said, referring to her dress. “The designer had dreams, too. Now you’re kind of having the same dream. The world is changing, Joe. What do you think of the Harbingers?”

“I don’t think of them.”

We had arrived at the corner of Broadway and East Thomas. A man I’d tagged HOMELESS VET sat on the sidewalk in his usual spot, like a deflated thing. His beard grew almost to his muddy eyes. He thrust an old Starbucks cup at us, and a few coins rattled in the bottom.

“I served my country,” he said, his standard line.

Nichole dropped in a quarter.

“Anyway, see you around,” I said to her. I didn’t want her following me all the way home.

“Good night, Joe.”

“Yeah, good night.”

I snapped the remainder of my cigarette to the sidewalk. HOMELESS VET reached for it, pinched the lit end between thumb and forefinger. My mind began to deconstruct him: nails like cracked chips of yellow-stained plastic, wiry hair and beard, moist eyes nested in wrinkles—separate labeled parts, not a man at all. I halted the process by an act of will. Once you take the homeless guy apart it’s easy to keep going.

The girl was halfway down the block in her crazy energy dress. Nichole. Unaccountably her name stuck, the objectifying MOON GIRL tag dropping away like a dead leaf.

Cheryl London called. I was sitting in the kitchen drinking a beer and watching a girl in the window of the building across the street. This girl, whom I’d tagged THE EXHIBITIONIST, liked to keep her blinds open while she dressed and undressed. Sometimes she lay topless on her bed reading magazines. Her performances lacked real carnality, though. The thing about THE EXHIBITIONIST was that she may not have existed. My mind played tricks on me all the time. Only they weren’t good tricks like which cup is the pea under. I seemed to know too much about THE EXHIBITIONIST. Her window was probably thirty yards from my kitchen. Yet I could see details, some of which weren’t even in my line of sight. I knew, for instance, that she had a Donnie Darko movie poster on the wall. Sometimes, lying in bed thinking about her, I wondered if she was a dream I was telling myself. I never had a girl in high school, though there was always one out of reach whose sweetness I longed for. I imagined the safe harbor of relationships, and denied them to myself almost pathologically. Nichole looked like the kind of girl I used to moon about. MOONGIRL. So did THE EXHIBITIONIST.

Anyway, when I picked up the phone and heard Cheryl’s voice I averted my gaze.

“Are you busy?” she asked.

“No. What’s going on, where have you been?”

“I’m at Six Arms. Meet me?”

I walked downstairs with an unlit cigarette in the corner of my mouth. The building manager came out of his apartment and reminded me The Dublin was a non-smoking building.

“It’s not lit,” I said.

THE MANAGER was a balding Swede with a thick gut. In the summer he wore wife-beater shirts that showed off his hairy shoulders. Occasionally I was late with the rent, and we were both cranky about it. He was the crankiest, though. I think he would have loved to evict me.

“I smell smoke up there sometimes,” he said.

“Not mine,” I said and pushed through the door.

She was sitting in a booth by the window, her hair like bleached silk in the bar light. Cheryl was my first and only girlfriend. We had met at the University. She had taken Introduction To Twentieth Century Theater as an elective, aced it, and returned her full attention to more serious matters. I barely pulled a C, then dropped out before the next semester. Cheryl now had a government job that required a secret clearance. Since the Harbinger Event it demanded more and more of her time. I sat across from her and lit a cigarette.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said, the wrong way.

“Let’s try to be grownups. Please?”

“Are you dumping me?”

“Joe.”

“You’re dumping me.”

She looked out the window at East Pine Street.

My heart lugged like something too tired to continue. The sounds of the restaurant grated on my nerves, the music, voices barking, clatter of dishes from the kitchen. I looked through the reflection of Cheryl’s face in the window.

“We don’t work,” she said. “We’re too different.”

“When did you figure this out?”

“I guess I’ve always known it.”

My stomach clenched.

“Cheryl—”

Finally she looked at me.

“Sometimes we don’t even seem to live on the same planet,” she said. “You don’t have any friends. You stay up all night. I don’t understand you anymore and I don’t think I ever really did. It’s like you’re slipping away.”

“I’m right here.”

“I’m sorry, Joe. But there’s something so wrong. I mean with you. I don’t blame you for it. It’s not your fault, I know that. But it is your fault if you don’t do anything about it. You won’t even see a therapist. And it could be even bigger than you think. Gerry says—”

“Mr. Homeland.”

She had been mentioning some guy from a special division of Homeland Security. She seemed to think he was a fascinating son of a bitch.

“This is too upsetting,” Cheryl said. “I have to go.”

She stood up.

“Hey, wait a minute.”

I grabbed her wrist and started to rise from my chair. She pulled away.

“Don’t,” she said. “It’s hard enough.”

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. Then she was gone, walking out of the bar and my life. She was the only one I’d ever told about Charlie. I even showed her the scars like white worms on my body. Now I wished I hadn’t. I sat back down. My hands were shaking. For hours I remained in that booth, smoking, drinking pints of Nitro Stout. The clatter and clamor of the bar jagged through me. The voices of people were like the barking and grunts of animals. I tried to fight this vision, but now I was fighting alone.

I had three days off and I spent them in my apartment. Charlie’s .38 sat on the kitchen counter, a chrome plated object of meditation. Chekhov said if you display a gun in the first act it had better go off by the third. My first act started right after Charlie’s third concluded. I had curled fetally in the closet where he’d thrown me after the latest beating. There was the usual shouting and screaming, then the first shot, followed by ringing silence. The coats and sweaters hanging over me were like animal pelts in the dark. Charlie was a hunter and I’d once watched him clumsily skin out a doe. When I vomited he grabbed me by the back of the neck, furious, and pushed my face into the reeking pelt. That blood stench. Charlie’s smell.

After the first shot he walked right up to the closet door in his heavy steel-toed factory boots. His breath was ragged. I waited, my knees drawn up, my chest aching. After a while he retreated back down the hall to the bedroom. A minute later there was a second discharge. I would have starved in that closet if a neighbor hadn’t heard the shots and called the police. When they finally broke into our half of the duplex I wouldn’t come out. They had to drag me from the closet. I was nine. In a way I never did come out.

There had been a note, in Charlie’s crooked scrawl: No choice. I’d spent the rest of my life pretending there were choices. Just to show him. But maybe there weren’t after all. Maybe the self-determined life was as illusory as THE EXHIBITIONIST.

Sunday night I drank the last Red Hook in my refrigerator, plugged a cigarette in my mouth, grabbed a lighter, and headed out for a smoke. I didn’t even know what time it was.

I was on the second floor at the end of the hall, next to a door that led to the open back stairs above the trash dumpsters. The apartment across the hall was empty and in the early stages of renovation. THE MANAGER was doing the work himself. Slowly. I suspected him of dragging out the job so he would have an excuse to hang around my floor.

The door to the empty apartment opened, but it wasn’t THE MANAGER. The weird girl I’d met the night of my play’s opening stepped out. She had changed to Levi’s and a white blouse, and she had a plastic trash bag in her right hand. I stared at her as I would a horned Cyclops.

“Hi, Joe.”

I took the unlit cigarette out of my mouth.

“It’s Nichole, right?”

“Right. I’m always surprising you, aren’t I.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well this should really surprise you. We’re neighbors!”

Behind her I could see the vacant apartment. THE MANAGER had been doing some drywall work. Powdery white dust lay in a drift across the hardwood floor. Nichole pulled the door shut. The rational world shifted under my feet. I mean it shifted more.

She followed me outside with her little trash bag. Was it a prop? From the landing, the moon was big and white among carbon paper clouds. Pretty in a Hallmark way. The landing and stairs were liberally spattered with pigeon shit, however. I lit up, inhaled, blew smoke out the side of my mouth.

“It’s nice here,” Nichole said.

“Delightful. Don’t you miss the moon?”

“It’s right up there.” She smiled. “Come over some time, neighbor. We’ll have an ice cream cone and chat.”

“That apartment’s empty.”

“Only if you think it is,” she said, and winked.

I watched her go down the stairs, drop her trash in the dumpster and proceed into the night. MOON GIRL. Nichole. I finished my cigarette.

I worked part time in a warehouse belonging to the Boeing Company. The Homeland boys picked me up in the parking lot. Two men in dark suits with those American flag lapel pins stepped toward me, one on each side.

“Joseph Skadan?”

“Yeah.”

“Federal Agents.” They flashed their credentials. “We have to ask you to come with us.”

“You’re asking?”

The one who had spoken smiled without parting his lips.

“No choice, I’m afraid.”

First it was like a job interview. I sat across from a woman of middle years. She wore a pearl-gray suit, glasses with red frames, and what looked like a lacquered chopstick stabbed through the hair bun at the back of her head. In between questions and answers I entertained a fantasy about grabbing that chopstick and busting out of the Federal Building, Matt Damon-Bourne style.

Her questions turned strange and personal, and I knew I was being given a psych evaluation. I began to guard my responses. Which was pointless. Those tests anticipate and integrate prevarication. She asked about dreams. I made one up about a three-legged dog but kept the recurring one about my mother’s birch to myself.

Finally CHOPSTICK LADY (keep objectifying everyone and pretty soon it will be safe to start shooting) put her pad down and folded her hands over it.

“Mr. Skadan, I’d like you to sign an authorization paper. You aren’t obligated to sign it, of course. You are not under arrest or accused of a crime. But it is in your best interests to sign—and, I might add, the best interests of the United States, and perhaps the world community.”

“If I’m not under arrest, why did I have to come here?”

“You’re being detained.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A matter of degree and duration.”

She removed a document from her briefcase and pushed it across the table.

“This authorizes us to subject you to a technique called borderlanding.”

“I need a cigarette.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“What’s borderlanding?”

“A variation on sleep deprivation methods used to extract information from enemy combatants. Of course, for borderlanding purposes it’s been modified. The object is to produce a state of borderland consciousness without the use of drugs.”

While she spoke I scanned the document.

“But I don’t have any information,” I said.

“Borderlanding isn’t to extract information, Mr. Skadan; its purpose is to draw out the Harbinger we suspect may be hiding in your unconscious mind.”

“Come on.”

“I am perfectly serious.”

“What if I don’t sign?”

“After a couple of days of close observation you will be free to go. But under provisions of the Modified Patriot Act the proper government agency will keep you under surveillance for an indefinite period of time. And, of course, your employer will be notified.”

I signed.

They kept me in a room with a table and a couple of hard chairs. My head was rigged with a Medusa’s tangle of wires. The wires ran into a junction box that fed data to a lab monitor somewhere. The light was bright and never went off. If I started to drift, loud music blasted into the room, or somebody came and pestered me.

“How are we doing, Joe?” A baldish guy with a corporate look asked me. His security badge identified him as Gerry Holdstock. Gerry.

“I’d like a cigarette is all.”

“It’s a non-smoking building, sorry. I want you to know we appreciate your cooperation. Borderlanding is the most promising method we’ve yet devised for isolating these anomalies. I do understand it’s uncomfortable for you.”

“I don’t believe in Harbingers,” I said, rubbing my eyes. I’d been awake for two days.

Gerry smiled.

“Which is part of the problem with outing them,” he said.

“How many have you outed so far?”

“That’s classified. Joe, let me ask you a question.” He leaned over me, one hand flat on the table and the other on the back of my chair. His breath smelled like wintergreen. “Do you have any idea how many people have disappeared without a trace since the Harbinger Event?”

“How many?”

“I can’t tell you. But it’s more than you think.”

“Well, I haven’t disappeared.”

“Not yet. But you’ve been identified as a potential mp. We’ve discerned a pattern in these disappearances. The first to go are marginal types on society’s fringes, the mentally ill, disaffected artists, failed writers. One will vanish from the face of the earth, followed by mass vanishings of normal people. We have a computer model. And consider this. If you do disappear, you might be missed by friends and relatives” (his tone indicated that he doubted it), “but your absence would be absorbable without ripples of any consequence. Now imagine if someone important disappeared. Imagine if the President of the United States disappeared.”

“A disaster,” I said. “By the way, who identified me as a potential?”

“I’m afraid that’s privileged information.

“Whatever.”

Gerry patted my shoulder

“Hang in there.”

I didn’t know about Harbingers, but if they wanted a zombie they wouldn’t have long to wait. My head dropped. Audioslave blasted on the speakers. It didn’t matter; I felt myself slipping away. Then the music stopped. Sensing someone present, I managed to raise my head. The door remained shut, but Nichole was standing in front of it.

“Hello, Joe. Want to go for a walk with me?”

“Too tired.”

“You’re not tired at all.”

She was right. There was a moment when I felt like I was supposed to be tired, exhausted to the point of collapse. It was almost a guilty feeling, like I was getting away with something. Nichole crossed the room and stood beside me, offering her hand.

“Ready?”

The corridor was deserted. We entered an elevator. There were only two buttons, both unmarked. Up and Down? Nichole pushed the bottom one.

“Where are we going?”

“Someplace safer to talk,” she said.

After a moment the doors slid open. Beyond was a parking lot and a burger joint, an Arctic Circle, with the big red, white, and blue sign and the chicken or whatever it was, the corporate mascot. I recognized it because I’d seen a run-down version of it once on a road trip to Spokane. My mother had pointed it out. It was just like the one she used to work in. “Better than MacDonald’s and the best soft ice cream!”

“What is this?” I said.

“A safer place. Come on.”

Nichole pulled me across the parking lot, my shoes scuffing the asphalt. It was night. A few cars of sixties and seventies vintage gleamed under bright moonlight. Too bright, really. The moon was at least twice its normal size, bone white, so close I could discern topographical detail. India ink shadows poured over crater rims. There was a pinhead of color in the Sea of Tranquility. I looked back but the elevator, not to mention the Federal Building, was gone. We entered the shiny quiet of the empty restaurant and sat in a booth.

“Who are you?” I said.

“A girl named Nichole.”

“How do you pull off all these tricks?”

I reflexively patted my breast pocket, knowing there were no cigarettes there. But I felt a pack, pulled it out, and looked at it. Camel Filters, half empty, with a book of matches tucked into the cellophane sleeve.

“You did that one,” Nichole said.

“What one?”

“The cigarettes are one of your tricks. I don’t smoke.”

I twisored one out and lit up.

“This place is one of your ‘tricks,’ too. You’ve never had a safe place, Joe, so you borrowed one of your mother’s. I’ve been borrowing it, too, to help me understand you better. We haven’t much time, so I’m going to give you the Reader’s Digest version of what’s going on.”

I held hot smoke in my lungs, then released it slowly.

“Go ahead.”

“Okay. They got it wrong. Earth is the center of the Universe. At least the self-aware consciousness that has evolved there informs the emerging pan-universal consciousness. Now think of an egg timer.”

She picked one up that may or may not have been sitting next to the napkin dispenser a moment before. She cranked it slightly and set it down ticking.

“Transphysical ego-consciousness is the egg,” she said.

I regarded my Camel. My mind felt uncharacteristically sharp, lucid, but I knew it was unraveling in delusion.

Nichole said, “The timer started when the first inklings of self-awareness appeared. And at a certain moment—”

The timer went ding!

“—the tipping point of human evolutionary consciousness arrives. A handful of individuals are on the leading edge. I’m one. You’re another. It’s pretty random as far as I can tell.”

There was a sound in the kitchen, like someone moving around. We both looked toward the service window behind the counter, but it was dark back there, and quiet again.

“So,” I said, “who are the Harbingers supposed to be then? Not that I believe in them, or you, or any of this.”

She smiled.

“They’re definitely not alien invaders. In fact they might be us, some unconscious projection of our desire toward growth and freedom. Or maybe they are a transdimensional race with a vested interest in seeing us successfully evolve forward. It isn’t a foregone conclusion that we make it, you know.”

“Isn’t it.”

“Are you okay, Joe?”

I looked at her through a veil of blue smoke. Past my personal tipping point, likely.

“If we fail to advance,” she said, “so does the conscious universe. Everything stagnates and begins a long devolution into separate numbered worlds of barbarism. The long decline.”

In the kitchen, a utensil clattered to the floor. Nichole said, “Uh-oh.”

I started to stand but she shook her head.

“What?” I said. “I thought you said this place was safe.”

“Safe—er.”

I rubbed my eyes.

“You’re on the brink,” she said, “but if you let your fears and neuroses and paranoia dominate, you could create a Dark World that will pull in weaker egos. That’s why this is so important.”

I made a sketchy pass with my cigarette. “Draw them into the great sucking pit of my neuroses.”

“It’s happened so many times already, Joe. We only need a handful to swing the balance toward positive evolution.”

“How many have you got so far?”

“One, counting me.”

I laughed. She did, too. We were down the rabbit hole together, if she even existed.

“Would it be so bad to believe me, Joe? To believe in me? At least consider the possibility. Thousands have disappeared into the Dark Worlds of a few. I need you to help me counterbalance things. You’re lucky. It’s a choice you get to make.”

“Order up!” somebody yelled. That voice.

I stood up facing the kitchen. Suddenly I was cold. Fluorescent lights began to flicker and a scarecrow shape stuttered into view.

“Sorry, Joe,” Nichole said, and she pushed hard at the base of my skull, a sharp locus of pain. I faltered, reached back, and found myself sitting on a hard chair in the interrogation room. I blinked, my head still aching. The door opened and Gerry walked through with a lab tech in blue scrubs.

“Was I asleep?” I said, my voice a toad’s croak.

“Just drifting, Joe.”

The tech delicately removed the skull patches. I looked at Gerry. “I’m done?”

“Three days. It’s as far as we can go under the current charter.”

“What’d you find?”

“Nada.”

I slouched up Broadway in hazy sunlight, exhausted. Back in the numbered world. My eyes felt grainy and my head pounded. As I attempted to go around HOMELESS VET he grabbed my ankle.

“I served my country!”

“I’m broke,” I said.

“Come on, Joey. The End is near, give me some change.”

His voice had altered, and the bones of his face under the beard.

Paul Newman eyes.

I fled.

My apartment was dark. I racked up the shades. Daylight penetrated feebly through the dusty pane. I picked up the phone, dialed Cheryl’s number. Because she was the only person who knew me and I was afraid. The only real person. It rang three times before I hung up. I couldn’t reach out to her, not through the fog of betrayal. I just couldn’t.

The light grew dimmer. Perhaps a cloud had passed before the sun. I contemplated the cheap automatic, a big change hurtling toward me. It wasn’t about wanting it or not wanting it. Perhaps it spun forth from my own spider-gut psyche.

I removed my shoes and socks and lay down on my bed. Time passed but I didn’t sleep. The room darkened into night. There was a rustling sound. I opened my eyes. Mom’s birch stood at the foot of the bed, 2001 obelisk style. I clicked on the lamp and sat up, then knelt on the mattress and reached out. Okay, a dream. My fingers touched the white skin. My thumbnail dug in, making an oozing green crescent. I pulled a ribbon of bark away, and my mind flooded with a child’s innocent expectations. I crushed them before they could hurt me.

Sirens wailed on Broadway. I grabbed the pack of cigarettes off the bedside table and lit up. Go away, I said to the tree. It didn’t. I swung off the mattress and went around to the foot of the bed. The roots were like long bony fingers melded into the floor. The only important philosophical question is whether or not to lose your mind.

THE EXHIBITIONIST sat on her bed with her head between her knees, hair straggling down. It looked like an orange prescription bottle on the mattress beside her, but it was so far away I couldn’t be certain. I was seeing her with normal vision now; she had emerged into objective reality, or objective reality had warped and enclosed us both.

The .38 was in my hand before I was aware of reaching for it. The only important philosophical question is what took you so long. In my bedroom Mom’s tree wilted. The leaves drooped, some had gone brown and crisp around the edges.

I left my apartment. The door across the hall stood open a crack. You always get a choice, even at the end of things. To give him belated credit, Charlie had chosen not to shoot into the closet. I pushed the door inward on the empty apartment. A peculiar cold light shone out of the kitchen, glaring on a drift of dust.

I heard a sound and looked to my left. THE MANAGER stood at the end of the hall, frozen, with a fistful of keys. Probably it was the gun that froze him. I should have put it down before coming out.

“You better leave,” I said, frightened for him.

“I don’t think so, kid.”

When did the keys turn into a belt? The buckle gleamed dully. “You aren’t there,” I said, and crossed into the empty apartment. The light drew me to the kitchen. My feet were bare. The dust was hot and had the texture of talcum powder. The dust and the peculiar light came from the open refrigerator, which was empty and deep, a Narnia passage to a brilliant desert landscape under a black sky.

I sat on a kitchen chair to finish my cigarette. Heavy boot treads approached out in the hall. The leather belt whip-cracked. Okay, Charlie. I gripped the gun tighter. But who knew what would come through the door? A figment, a neurotic fear, a fat apartment manager in the wrong place at the wrong time. I smell smoke, my stepfather’s voice said outside the empty apartment or inside my head. And where there’s smoke there’s fire.

The cigarette dropped from my lips. I raised the gun. But as he came through the door, a shifting thing, I turned away from him and lurched into the Narnia passage. It was narrow as a closet. At first the way was clear. But as I hunched forward my progress became impeded by hanging pelts thick with the stench of old blood. I shoved through them now, crying, and at last came into the open.

The Earth was a big blue and white bowling ball, just like all the astronauts used to say. I strolled barefoot in the hot regolith and dropped the gun, which was no longer heavy. She was waiting for me at the Arctic Circle, just a girl named Nichole. Delusions are like mosaics assembled from the buckle-shattered pieces of your mind. A tree, a restaurant, a dreaming sky, the pretty girl you never knew.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m here.”

Nichole smiled. “Good. We have a lot of work to do.”

She was right about that.

Copyright © 2006 Jack Skillingstead

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