Category: #BestRevenge

11. Paparazzi

Men clustered impatient just outside the door; the way men wait, knocking against each other’s shoulders and pretending to consult their watches. Corso saw me and tried ridding himself of G-Rad and Zane. “Out, out, damned spots. I’ve got places to go and people” — heavy emphasis, actually leering at me – “ to see.” They scuttled away, the scuttlefish. Uh oh. I should have waited for the girl-pack.

Corso pinned me to the wall with his big shoulder, saying, “I think we have something to discuss. No?” He played his game of smiling at me so intensely I would blush. But somehow I felt past it now. Is it official? What quid pro quo-less universe did I visit to make me so brave?

“You’ve got my scarf,” I said. “And I want it back.”
“Of course.” He played with a lock of my hair. “It’s at my place.”

I knew it wasn’t but I couldn’t tell him that. The thought of revisiting the master’s hellhole made my heart sink lower than my stilettos. I felt his mind boring into me, like the Bo we’d just talked about, like Bex, recognizing my resistance, trying to master me, countering my objections.

He looked down at me sleepily, eyelids drooping, as if it was naptime, as if he had hypnotized himself. “I love it when your nostrils flare.”

At that precious, precious moment the men’s locker room opened and Chase, who should have been long-gone, emerged. Maybe the word should be “sashayed”. He timed it perfectly.
“No can do,” said Chase, inserting himself gracefully between us and prying me out of my corner, “We’re late already.” He locked his arm around me so we stood together.

“I advising my advisee on her dream-sickness problem,” said Corso. “And you need to leave the premises before I call security.”

”Call insecurity for all we care,” said Chase. “We’re outta here. Jazz needs my help in chemistry, She has a chemical imbalance.”

“Chemistry is not one of Miss Suzino’s classes,” said Mr. Know-It- All; but I interrupted, “Marketing. Chase is helping me with my marketing class. The chemical imbalance is that I’m starving. We’re getting lunch.”

“Mr. Quinn knows nothing about marketing,” Corso blathered. “If you wish to know about effective presentation and artful design you should come to me.” Impotently he snapped his jaws. It was as good as giving up.

“Marketing’s just about representing, right?” queried Chase, pulling me smoothly away. Bemused, I allowed myself to relax into him. Even when he’s all over the place it’s so much fun watching him fight my battles for me. “And imposture. I rule at that.”

Arm in arm, Koo and Soliz crashed into Corso as they stepped out of the ladies’, embroiling him in their discussion about the impossibility of boyfriends. But if looks could kill.

We left Corso staring over their heads, after us, as if he could send his thoughts outside his body. I shivered.

But we were hardly to the stairs before I boiled over from the effort of trying to keep our universes straight. “Marketing is not about imposture,” I snapped.

“And your dream-sickness problem,” he challenged, but still pulling me down the stairs. Away from danger. “What’s that about?”

Both our boilers blew. “You know an awful lot about lying,” I accused. “You lied about Nurse Howk.”

Outside the icy drizzle continued; sparkling sleet sharpened to points when struck by light. I welcomed the sting on skin. This is real. In soul travel you step between the sleet. It doesn’t sting.
We sheltered temporarily under the portico, mistrustful but yearning, trying to come together. He was looking at me with a funny expression.

“How would you know?” “Because I was there.”

His eyes pulled down with sadness and he pushed his face so close I thought he might kiss me again. “Was it really you? You know when you’re dying your wishes become so powerful…you heard what Corso said about the oxygen-starved brain.”

“I was there. You chose me. You took my hand and said, “We’ve got to get out of here.” Why did you tell Corso that lie? Why choose me?” What I really wanted to know was, who kidnapped who?
Chase backed away again. Somehow I was losing him. I saw him consider bluffing his way out.

“You can’t ever tell Corso the truth because he’ll mind-trick. Hit’s like you’re a mountain and he’s climbing you, if you tell him the truth you’re giving him footholds. Handholds. Lying’s a vital life skill. I’ll teach you if you’re willing to learn.“

“I’m not willing to learn,” I said huffily, unwilling to accept the imposture of his player self, unwilling to let him go. I was holding both his hands so tightly my fingers twined around the leather band. Worked free the snap. Gasped when I saw what I’d exposed.

“There’s a sore under here! It’s bad.” I felt he knew something I didn’t; that the game was much more dangerous. Didn’t the swamis cultivate sores so they could tell the difference between spirit and flesh?

He tried pulling his hands away. “It’s to keep me awake. To remind me of all my bad choices.”
To punish him, more like. I saw my turn to rescue him. “We’re getting antibiotic cream on this right now.” I pushed the leather strap into my peacoat pocket and dragged him towards the student health center. He didn’t resist.

“At least now it’s clear,” he said. “You’re kidnapping me.”

I know I didn’t say my kidnapping thing out loud. Coincidence? A psychic moment? Or…and this is the answer I wanted to believe, once we had been inside each other’s minds we could do it again. I nudged him excitedly. “Corso’s experiment worked. We were really there! Don’t you remember?”
He tried stopping me in our flight. I saw him want to kiss me then decide against it. “Don’t you have to have a soul to soul travel?” he asked me.

Out here on the quad I felt Bex’s eyes everywhere. I couldn’t tell whether I was psychic or paranoid but I was not free of Bex. I knew Bex was determined to make me feel that way; well, he was succeeding.

“Do you remember the basement?” I hissed at Chase as we lumped along, unable to catch the rhythm we’d mastered in soul travel, “At the foot of the stairs I fell over a body. I think it was the psychology building. We need to go look and see if it’ s there.”

“That wasn’t the psychology building,” he said. He did remember. “Well then, where were we?”
He shrugged. “Some between world. The place where the soul-less grab the incoming souls.”
My map calls that “purgatory”.

We had arrived at the student health center. Braced myself for running into Howk. I hadn’t believed her when she said “a mañana”. Who was psychic there? But guess what? Not only was her door closed, it was padlocked.

“That’s different,” I said out loud. Staring.A short, round-faced black woman in the colorful smock bustled into the hall and followed the direction of my gaze.

“Oh, that’s common procedure when we lose a key. We have a locksmith on call for Monday.” She looked us up and down with ripe and somewhat prurient contempt, like couples are the worst. God knows what she thought we wanted. “Now what can I do for the two of you?”
“Where’s Miss Howk?” asked Chase.

Her face got worse, if anything. Hardened. “That’s what everyone wants to know,” she spat. “She’s AWOL. Missed two shifts and can consider her ass fired. How come you need to see her specially?” Her shoulder badge identified her as M. Jolonda, RN and she was gazing at us as if Howk was our drug dealer. I thought it politic to backtrack.

“It just that…um…we’re in Dr. Corso’s research project and we were told to ask for her. Billing, or something.”

Jolonda snorted as if watching a particularly unlikely movie.

“I can’t help you with that. She took all her files.”
Corso’s very name was like an evil incantation. Better start at the beginning. “We’re only looking for antibiotic cream.” I offered up Chase’s wrist.

Jolonda seemed like someone with an innate distaste for flesh, which was certainly not Howk’s problem. It was a disgusting sore, but I would expect a nurse to keep some cool. I could feel Chase’s urgency to get out of there so I helped Jolonda bandage it to hustle her along.
“If you see Nurse Howk, tell her to get in touch,” Jolonda hollered after us. “Remind her; we’ve got something of hers and she’s got something of ours.”

Isn’t that always true? It’s like the basis of every bad relationship, a sort of blackmail. But what could I possibly have that was Bex’s? What could I give back to make him go? Feeling my mind close to him, on the steps of the health center, Chase eyed me speculatively.

At that exact moment Bex stepped out from behind a tree and snapped our picture.

Except now it was worse. It felt like a forcing house. Yet still I somehow clutched at Chase’s hand; fearing I dislocated his arm while rocketing through space. I opened my eyes to see him leaning over me where I lay on the padded floor, trying to get his arm beneath so he could lift me up.
In his ear I hissed, “I’ve seen the face of evil.”Chase, the arguer, didn’t argue. “Me, too,” he said.For a non-couple, we had so much in common it was eerie.

“You fell,” Corso accused from his lofty height. The exit sign reflected red off his cats’ eyes. “Miss Suzino, You’ve given yourself a bloody nose.”
“Well, I died,” I said. “I forgot the safe word.”

“There is no safe word,” he said. “You must choose one for yourself. Silly girl.”
But when I sat up I was streaming blood, even Chase was getting it on him; it was everywhere. Too late for safe words now. Poetry warns us there are no safe words, anyway. What possible incantation would have changed what just happened? And would I want it changed? Chase had singled me out. Those unforgettable kisses were doors to another universe.
But when I tried to stand I fell back. Corso says everything we fear has already happened and my head sure felt like it. Out of body hangovers are the worst.

“It’s a gusher,” proclaimed G-Rad, lobbing me a paper towel roll.
Chase helped me up to my launching pad. Corso tossed us water bottles.
“So,” he said, “Did anybody fly?”

I tried figuring out how to explain what had just happened to me but first I had to figure out what was real. I’d been embarrassed before by assuming my visions were something common. If I confessed my brain turned inside out, check, that I had achieved lift-off, check – then wouldn’t I also have to admit to Corso: I saw through you? I couldn’t do it without
Chase yet didn’t have the right to speak his part and – here’s what really hurt – it could all be imagination anyway. Especially tough since Chase was withdrawing from me now, climbing atop his own tomb to stretch out like a fallen soldier. Pulling away from me the center of his strength.
I needed to get him alone to find out what he knew, thought, felt. Had I dragged him into my dreams or had he dragged me into his? Would he think I was attempting a takeover his mind and body, now my own were compromised? It’s more than mere embarrassment; call it the problem of belief. Or is it the problem of blame and the problem of forgiveness? I feared we were already too far ahead of ourselves in our mysterious non- relationship ever to catch up.
But Chase, the starfish rescuer, rescued me. Again.

“I flew,” said Chase.
Corso shook his head with a tight little smile. “Oh, Mr. Quinn,” he murmured, quite unpleased, “You are so predictable.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” said Chase.
“I don’t want you to give me what I want, I want the truth,” said Corso and Chase rejoined, “That’ll be the day.”

Someone else was moaning. Thankful it was not me, I felt a twinge of shame for her, whoever she was, because it was a low, animal moan; a sow about to deliver. Then I heard Koo’s voice say, “I’m going to throw up” and Corso said, “Here’s a pail, Sleeping Beauty.” Retching sounds. I kept moping my face and closed my eyes.

“Any more foreheads require mopping?” asked Dr. Corso, handing out more water bottles. “I’m rather enjoying this Florence Nightingale routine. I’m often complimented on my bedside manner. I think I have the temperament for it. Only here to help, as they say.”

“You didn’t tell us we were going to get sick,” said Koo accusingly.
Corso remained imperturbably cheerful. I guess from his point of view it was a successful experiment if none of us was dead.

“Nobody knew what would happen, Miss Loflin,” he told her. “You didn’t nauseate in Nurse Howk’s office. This is an experiment. Your nausea has been duly noted. Nothing a good dinner won’t fix — though that, I realize, would mark a break from your usual routine.”

Corso turned the lights up all the way and we blinked at each other. That moment was really horrible. We looked like people who don’t know when they’ve had enough; bloated and queasy, people who stuff and stuff. threatening projectile vomiting. I could only hope our mutual humiliation would bond us in silence forever like victims of a particularly bad party where none of the guests has the sense to go home.

Judging only by the gray skins and the baggy eyelids of the others, I could imagine how appalling I must look in my caked, streaked and bloodied makeup; a corpse unearthed. In some weird way, although our chain of hands had been severed we still felt joined; dizzy spirits who’d collided–hard—in an untried world of freedom. Could Bosch the monster-builder have grasped it all and reflected back his unwelcome knowledge? Art can be poetry too.

We were good subjects; it was like hell’s waiting room after some air disaster or freeway collision. Excuse me, isn’t that my arm you’re holding? Gee, miss your exit and wake to find yourself stuck for eternity to the very people you never want to see again. I looked up at the “black disco ball” staring impassively back at me. What had it seen? Whatever I had done failed utterly to impress it. Yet somewhere there was a record. That was what Chase and I should steal.
“Anyone need a potty break?” asked our facilitator.“I’d better,” said Koo, staggering a little as she picked up her basin.

“At least you can walk,” I thought enviously. Maybe I said it out loud, because Corso came over and gazed at me with almost prurient interest, the way scientists study the set of the guinea pig’s electrodes. A hands-free headphone clipped to one ear gave him the look of a space alien in constant concourse with the mother ship. An alien rubbernecker.

“You had the farthest distance to travel, Miss Suzino,” announced Corso in his stagy way. “We are all dying to hear what non-dreamers dream.” Chase reared up as if to block him. Corso said, “Down, Mr. Quinn. Back to your corner.”

But I had figured out a way to answer. Slowly I managed to sit up. My throat was so dry it actually hurt. I drank from the water bottle and said aloud, ”That settles one question anyway. I want to die all at once, in a cataclysm. No stages of increasing horror for me. No thank you.”

“So, death,” Corso pooh-poohed. “Unconsciousness. Is that your safe word? Miss Suzino, we are interested in freedom. We are interested in eternity.”
Horrible retching sounds from the ladies’ room. Corso padded over and cracked the door. “Hmm,” he murmured. “At least she made it to the stall.”

“You don’t look so bad,” I accused Chase when Corso’s back was turned.
He grinned a lopsided lip-lift revealing one gold tooth. I thought, I kissed that tooth. “I come from very tough stock,” Chase said smugly. “My people survived for generations on nothing but whisky-soaked potatoes packed in snow.”

“Potatoes are vodka,” said Zane, weaving past us like a disoriented boxer. Definitely the guys recovered faster. Why weren’t we medicated proportionate to weight? Poor Koo got a double dose.
“It was whisky,” corrected Chase, who could never let Zane be right about anything. “Potatoes are grown in manure. You have to disinfect them somehow.”
“Eeeew,” said Soliz. “Are you trying to make us throw up?”

“All right, then,” Corso announced to the room in general. “We have one self-announced flier, anyway. I warn you his reliability track record is not good. Miss D’Accosta, how are you feeling?” Out of the corner of his mouth, so that only I could hear, Chase sang, “Annie are you OK? Are you OK, Annie?”

“Horrible, thank you,” said Soliz. “No one would do this except for money .”
“Surprising how tastes can change,” laughed Corso.
G-Rad spoke up. “I don’t feel very rested,” he said, working his jaw with his hand as if it had been dislocated.

“So sorry that redressing your deficits couldn’t be the focus of this experiment,” Corso said mildly. “Tell me, did you fly? Perchance to dream?”
“I think I’m dreaming now,” said Soliz, yawning widely. “I dreamed I took part in a research experiment.”

“How deep,” remarked Corso but with that edge of sarcasm he brought to everything he said, as if he actually believed the opposite. ”The Kalahari Bushmen thought their waking life was the dream and their dreams were the reality.”

“That would be awful,” said Zane. More than the rest of us, he adored actual existence. It had been so kind to him. “If life was only a dream, nothing would matter.”

“Only a dream?” Our professor demanded rhetorically, striding about the room, waving his arms as if orchestrating the hounds he had released. “What is a dream? Hallucination? Vision? Perhaps a tear in the fabric of memory or a prophecy of future events? Might I modestly suggest a dream is the work of art by your subconscious? Visions credited to the dying seem to promise after worlds. Is that the last resort of the oxygen- starved brain or a check we can cash? These raptures are achievable without going to the trouble of actually dying. Autoerotic asphyxiation makes time-space adventurers of us all. When choosing between two evils, always select the one you haven’t tried.”
“I said I flew,” repeated Chase impatiently.“We’ll get to you, Mr. Ringer,” said Corso, “Mr. Pettigrew is trying to speak. Surely a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

“I think I was trying to fly,” said Zane, unaware that Corso was making fun of him. “But I couldn’t get up. I was, like, being dragged down by something. So instead I just took off running. Running and running. Then I realized, something was chasing me.”
“Flight creates pursuit,” posited Corso. Another mind trick. That can’t be true.

Zane massaged his legs. “My abductor muscles are killing me.”
“Abductors…such a charming name. The Greeks had such a sense of humor. Perhaps language creates boogeymen as flight tempts pursuit.”

Corso’s pupils glittered as he swept his lashless eyes across our guinea pig sports hero. Curiosity caught the cat. “Running where? And how much of this was visual? Or was all of it sensory?”
Zane rubbed his forehead as if chasing a headache. ““I’m trying to remember. Part of it was like a movie I was forced to watch, you know, like that guy who had his eyelids propped open. A movie with really bad sound.”

“Mine was like that too,” volunteered Soliz.“You were watching yourself?” Corso queried alertly. “Yes. I was both inside and outside of me.”

That was a fair description of my sensations before Chase showed up. But as I’ve said before, I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut. If you can’t handle the heat, you’ve got to keep out of the spotlight. Corso raised his eyebrows while Zane – accustomed to quarterbacking without much help — struggled on. “I could hear my footfalls making a slapping noise, banging, echoing away like they do on concrete. I think I was in a tunnel.”

“A tunnel?” Corso barked sharply. “Don’t make things up.”
Zane flushed at the insult but refused to drop the ball. You’ve got to hand it to team sports. They make the brave guys brave and the rest of us persistent. We learn to ignore coaches like Corso who dismiss and deflect.

“A concrete ribbed tunnel with rain – water anyway – dripping down the sides. Kind of like being in a tin can” He considered. “I think it was a walkway into a creepy pair of abandoned buildings.”
Corso yawned widely as if this was all quite uninteresting.

“Birth metaphor!” G-Rad crowed, like an aggressive contestant punching a buzzer.
Zane’s face crumpled, taking on a vulnerable, wounded look. Heroism gone. G-Rad had the intuitive button-finding quality. This whole experiment was a birth metaphor, if you ask me, and Zane looked as confused and disoriented as the recently born.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen! No interpretations of each other’s experiences,” Corso admonished repressively but I could see his chest expand with relief over the clash. He enjoyed negative energy more than hearing our experiences. “Don’t force me to debrief each of you privately. That would be an enormous waste of everyone’s time. Also, no interruptions. Anything else, Mr. Pettigrew? Any view of your attacker?”

First I heard of an attacker. But negative energy had succeeded. Zane shook his head in bewilderment. “It’s all gone, now.”

“Oh, well,” said Corso plummily, “So difficult to separate what we really remember from what we think we remember, what other people remember, what other people want us to remember and what we want to remember. Isn’t it?”

“I’ll say,” said Zane, confused by a pro. De-briefing with the emphasis on dis-information. Corso was dissing us.

Corso confronted the rest of wearing the same facial expression my sister had when she tried bossing me into giving her a better bedtime story. “Why couldn’t Cinderella win American Idol?” She had me there. Why settle for Prince Charming when you can have everybody?
“Fear of flying!” Corso grumped. “Dismissed! Who’s next?” “Me, me me!” Chase waved his entire arm like a five year old.

Corso sighed exasperatedly, and poured his angry ooze upon the moment. “I suppose I must allow you, Mr. Quinn, but I am warning you do not conduct one of your capers. You pollute the fount from which we drink. And let me remind everyone – this was in the relevant documents, but it certainly bears repeating – everything said in this room is to be kept absolutely confidential. It will not leave this room. There are no exceptions. Just like a jury, you are not even allowed to discuss it outside this room, not even among yourselves. I warn you, I am a jealous God. If I find out this rule has been broken, steps will be taken resulting in banishment and regret.” He glared at each of us in turn.

“What happens in Dream Group stays in Dream Group,” joked G- Rad. He subsided when Corso peered at him threateningly.
I don’t know what it is about Chase that makes me feel so brave. These threats didn’t bother me at all. But Corso couldn’t see inside me. He seemed satisfied. “Word to the wise. All right, Mr. Quinn. Go for it.”

“That hot nurse – Miss Howk, I think she’s called — and I broke into your apartment and made out on your bed. Best sex I ever had.”

This I was not expecting. My face burned, burned. Fortunately no one was looking at me. Rage poured off Corso like smoke off his magnet thingy. He was a jealous – and a terrible – god.
“My bed?” gasped Corso. Chase had achieved something I considered impossible. He had floored Mr. Know-It-All.

“Yup,” said Chase. “The place was a mess, too. Melted candles everywhere. And the smell! Pee-yew!”

I think if we hadn’t been watching, Corso would have slugged him. You could see the itch travel from his red face right down his arm. Was Corso blushing? No, no, it can’t be. Purely a rage reaction. Pity there’s only one color most of us can turn.

Chase had to be lying of course. Could we have had different experiences? I pushed away Corso’s insidious little “People remember what they want to remember” mind-worm. Chase’s complete refusal to look at me made me think our experience had been shared. Because previously he had performed for me, and taken close note of my reactions. My headache lightened. I began to feel a lot better.

With a visible effort Corso mastered himself and began applauding loudly. Sarcasm again. Note to self: Don’t. Ever. Makes you look weak.

“Cleverly done, Mr. Quinn! You’ve achieved the highly desirable trifecta of Freud, Oedipus and Jung with this tasteless story. Took an out- of-body jaunt to my apartment, did you?”
“Hey, it wasn’t my choice,” said Chase. “I had plenty of other places I wanted to go.” He shook his head. “I think it was something about you. Something you wanted me to see. What did you say before about dreaming other people’s dreams?”

“Well, if it was a true out-of-body experience,” Corso asserted silkily, “You would have seen things you could not otherwise know. Something you didn’t see while moving me into my apartment for example. “ He sat down as if he didn’t trust himself to stand and the collapse to our level marked an astonishing shift of power, like a cobra sinking back in its hood.

“Well, let’s see,” said Chase. “I don’t like telling you all about it but I guess I have to, what with the public debriefing and all. It sure seemed real. Nurse Howk had a piercing in her hoo-ha. You know, where the sun don’t shine. Is that the kind of detail you are looking for?”
All I can say is, Chase looked a lot closer at the TV than I did. Zane whistled appreciatively.

Corso’s eyes bugged and he ground his teeth, but he kept his temper. “That hardly links you to my room. Describe the room. Tell me something you couldn’t have seen the day we moved in.”
“Hmm,” said Chase, making a show of recollecting. “Well, your bed had black sheets. None too clean. You had a cute picture of Jazz in a leopardskin bra. That was new.” Chase winked at me.

“And I seem to recall that on your desk I saw a lot of papers about bankruptcy and divorce .” He thought while Corso tried to close his outraged mouth. “Oh, yeah, and a restraining order.”
Corso launched to his feet, bubbling with rage. “I warned you about your antics, Mr. Quinn! Why on earth would you go through my private papers?”

“You know why,” said Chase. “I didn’t find them either. Sloppy. I was forced to go commando.”
“You are fired again,” shouted Corso angrily. “Terminated with extreme prejudice. Please leave now. Class, Mr. Quinn is obviously lying. He broke into my apartment on some earlier occasion simply to construct this little prank. You are outrageous, Mr. Quinn, and you are unforgiven. Your grade is F. Your alternate will assume your position next week.”

I wanted to say we hadn’t broken in but I couldn’t give myself away. I looked studiously down so as not to send signals that Corso’s bat senses might pick up.

Chase rose up slowly and unzipped his suit. The tattoo on his chest showed a tangled crown of thorns. “Gee,” he said, “I thought we were going to be so free. What’s with all these rules?”
“There always laws, Mr. Quinn!”

“Gee, that’s right,” agreed Chase. “Laws. Justice. Cops. I had forgotten all about it.”
“To the locker room with you!” barked Corso. Muttering under his breath, “I knew he was a mistake.” He glanced pointedly at his watch. “We’re out of time. Now where were we?’ Chase wandered unwillingly towards the men’s room.

“I tried to fly,” Soliz volunteered, as if embarrassed, “But I fell.”

Corso studied her with a total lack of interest. Soliz stumbled on earnestly, trying to earn her pay, “It was one of those naked dreams. I had no clothes on.” Corso drummed his fingers on his clipboard, but G-Rad, more than willing to take over, said, “Humptious! Loves me my nudie dreams.”

Corso sighed and looked at the clock. I was kind of surprised naked dreams were not a bigger hit with him.

Soliz continued, “I stepped out of the elevator at Hadleigh on the top floor and I realized I didn’t have any clothes on. I couldn’t get back in the elevator – the doors had closed – and people were staring at me so – I jumped out of the window.” She shuddered. “I fell all the way. I felt myself die.” Pinpoints of sweat glistened on her face. “It must have been a dream. It couldn’t have been an out of body experience. But I really felt myself in the air.”

“You flew, you looked down and then you tumbled,” said Corso. “Shame. That’s a shame dream. Loss of confidence as personified by the myth of Icarus. Miss D’Accosta felt diminished by revealing her essential self.”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to interpret each other’s dreams,” I said before I could stop myself. “Besides, our naked self isn’t our essential self.”

Corso swiveled his laser beams in my direction. Uh Oh. I braced myself. When would I ever learn? I had always had this problem. Never argue with bullies. Am I going to lose my freakin’ scholarship?

“The rules obviously don’t apply to me,” said Corso suavely. “Please explain your thought.”
I swallowed. Now all of them were looking at me. I wear makeup – choose my clothes – wear my hair – to disguise me. But Chase had been so brave. I couldn’t let him down.

“Well, nakedness is just bodies. Everyone has one. I mean, nakedness makes people ordinary. Choice – makes people special because it’s individual. Your choices are your essential self.”
“You mean like fashion?” asked Koo.

Thank God for that girl! “Sure, if it’s a choice,” I said, “And not something that’s forced on you.”
“Like a uniform or like designer clothes everybody has to wear,” agreed Soliz. You go, sister!
“That would be true if everyone looked the same naked,” chortled Zane. “They don’t. Some people should be ashamed.”

My patience for Zane came to a screeching halt.
“We weren’t all put on this earth to thrill you,” snapped Soliz.

“People should work out. And watch what they eat. Just for health,” Zane finished smugly.
Corso’s eyes were changeable as water, just like my mother’s old mood ring. I had seen them sheet over like ice; now they glowed. How he adored our disagreements!

“Perhaps Miss Suzino will become a fashion major after all,” he sneered dismissively. “I admit I had hoped for better things from you. Tell us about your experience this morning, please, and cut the crap. This is not one of your feel-good-everyone-participates-and-gets-an-A seminars.”

“I didn’t know we got a grade for this,” said G-Rad nervously and Soliz reassured him, “We don’t.”
“I want to go next,” said Koo. “It was…terrible. I need to get rid of it so I can forget. I think I was working in a, like, mortuary.” Her voice slurred and slowed as if the drug still held her. She pressed her water bottle to her eyes. Catching the light, it shot shimmery reflections against the ceiling, plunging us underwater. Once again I felt our linkage so strongly. Could it have been the others crashing into me as I crouched, frightened and blindfolded, on the basement stairs?

“These body bags were coming at me down a runway belt and I had to unzip them and take the bodies out. I was unzipping, zipping and unzipping, but the bodies were so smashed I couldn’t look at them. I like threw up on them instead.” She choked at the memory. “Wrecked bodies beyond help. Nothing I could do. Then I found…” She gulped painfully. “In one bag and found my boyfriend Bo. He was all smashed up with his guts hanging out but somehow his eyes were open and he was staring at me like I did it. Like I was responsible, like I had destroyed all these people.” She broke down and began to cry. I gave her my paper towels and tried to pat her on the back, but Corso pushed me away and stood between us. He stared down at Koo as if she was a specimen fixed between glass slides.

Koo literally pulled on Corso’s shirttails for attention. “I couldn’t help them and they blamed me.”
Obviously he wasn’t going to comfort her, so I slid around him to give Koo a hug.
“Class dismissed?” Koo asked hopefully.

“See what happens when you break the mood?” Corso snapped at me. “Now Miss Loflin has forgotten what she was going to say. We will arrange all this very differently next week.” He patted Koo’s shoulder, but dismissively, like a sports coach who suspects malingering. “Toughen up, Miss Loflin. 80% of dream material is negative emotion. ”

“Now he tells us,” said Soliz aloud to no one in particular.
“Now I do tell you,” repeated the professor. “Is that it, Miss Loflin?”

“I was looking forward to flying,” sniffed Koo, obviously used to people making a bigger fuss over her. “To be light like that. Weighing nothing. I could have used the sleep, too. As it is, all I can say is thank God it’s over.”

Any lighter and Koo Loflin would actually be a bird, I thought.“At this stage I would settle for lucid dreaming,” said Corso. “Were you aware of being in an altered state?”

“It was like a movie. Watching myself.”

“Perfect description of lucid dreaming. Success! So you’re not ready to pass off to an alternate?” coaxed Corso.

“Not hardly,” said Koo. “That Visa bill won’t pay itself.”“Now that was just a nightmare, plain and simple,” said G-Rad sounding almost relieved. “I’m glad nothing like that happened to me.” “What did happen?” asked Corso with his eery smile.

G-Rad shook his shoulders, as if fending us all off. “Nothing happened. I don’t remember. I got nothing.” He gulped noisily. I didn’t believe him for a minute. Visibly he braced himself. “It’s OK if you want to fire me and bring in an alternate.”
“Do you want to be fired?” asked Corso.

“No.” G-Rad shook his head. “Please no. I just guess I don’t –“
“I don’t want people making things up for my gratification,” Corso told him, almost tenderly. “That’s what Mr. Quinn didn’t understand.”

“There’s just one person we’re forgetting.” Corso rapped me flirtatiously with his clipboard. “Miss Suzino? I believe you had something to say? Or did you once again fail to dream?”
Darn, darn darn! I almost got away clean, too. I didn’t dare tell a lie. I’m a horrible liar.
“I started out blindfolded,” I said unwillingly. “I could feel but I couldn’t see.”

“Ah, Miss Suzino, you interest me so extremely. Just when I had given up on you. Blindfold games.” He relished the words, rolling them on his tongue. “Who among us hasn’t played them?”
On this command, we all chattered at once.

“At Quinceanera we played Pin the tail on the donkey,” said Soliz. “And in high school we had to spend an entire day pretending we were blind for a diversity exercise.”
“Blind Man’s Bluff,” said G-Rad. “It’s Buff, dude,” said Zane.

“Well, well, Jazz,” said Corso indulgently. Did he sound relieved? Had I scared him a little with my psychic moment about Emily Fortunatus- Falcones, our benefactor? I’d love to think I had that kind of power. Corso pattered on smoothly, “Next time we’ll have to see what we can do to open your eyes.”

I shouldn’t have worried! He didn’t even care what I had to say! What any of us had to say, really. Koo alone wanted to know, “So what happened?”

I could safely give a little more. “ I felt people were rushing past me. I was in a basement. Then at the bottom of the steps… I fell over a body.”

“We have a Halloween funhouse every year that’s just like that,” said Soliz. Was there no death in her world? “One year the stairs turned into a slide.”

Obviously I shouldn’t feel annoyed. Did I want to relive that part? Maybe. Because of the kiss …“It was a real body,” I insisted. Maybe Koo’s gory tale derailed them into a world of safe thrills. Predictable unreality. “With real blood.”

“It tastes good and it’s so good for you!” said G-Rad in his network announcer voice. He capped it with a ghoulish laugh, “Bre-augh-ha-ha-ha! That’s because it’s ketchup and corn syrup. Protein, vegetables and dessert. At our Halloween funfair we couldn’t stop eating it.” Then he yawned, as if tired of his own subject.

“No protein in ketchup, bro,” said Zane. “Or corn syrup either. I’m just saying.”
“Yeah, but it attracts bugs…” G-Rad smacked his lips voraciously while we all wailed, “Eeeewww!”
Corso slammed his notebook shut. “Checks will be in your mailboxes the first of the week! See you all next Saturday!”

“I’m so glad I’m not fired,” G-Rad sighed.“Certainly not,” said Dr. Corso, suddenly all hale and friendly. “You were very cooperative, Mr. Bliven. That’s all we can ask.” “It’s Borden,” said G-Rad. “Maybe next time-““I’ll get it right on the check,” Corso assured him. Stampede for the locker room.

The door swinging shut behind us, Koo announced, “Well, my relationship is as good as over.”
“Why’s that?” I asked. God I was so happy to get out of that disgusting suit. The crotch was way too invasive. One size does NOT fit all.

Koo throbbed visibly like tiny animal in big, big headlights. “I can’t tell Bo about this! I’m going to have to lie to him!”

“So lie to him,” said Soliz, bored and irritated at the same time. “I bet he doesn’t tell you everything.”

I had a suggestion too. Don’t we all love other people’s problems? “Remember the confidentiality rules? The forms we had to sign? Tell him you can’t talk. It’s true, after all.”

“Like that would work,” sighed Koo. “He’d get it out of me. He hates it when he thinks I’m hiding something.” I actually remembered what that was like; not taking no for an answer. Uncomfortable Bex flashbacks made me shiver and turn away, but Koo nattered on as if we were besties, “I need to think up a good lie.” She looked at us hopefully. In Koo’s life, sisterhood solidarity apparently meant, take responsibility for thinking up a whopper my boyfriend will believe. “I can’t do it,” she admitted in her complainy “here’s another thing” voice. Koo was her own worst enemy. “My brain is fried. Dr. Corso fried my brain.”

“He fried all our brains,” I said. “And now it’s time to get out of the fryer.” I was not going to spend my Saturday hanging around dream lab spit-balling lies Koo’s sometime-boyfriend might believe. As I dressed I swear I greeted every article of clothing like an old, old friend or a member of my family. For sheer “me”-ness. Beloved body armor.

Underpants (they’re marked Wednesday: you can’t tell time using my underpants), my skinny, skinny tight black pants that fit me like I was born in them, my soft-soft black sweater, my glittery Christmas present short kimono, my lucky dragon pin. I was beginning to feel like myself again after my otherworld flirtation. Woolly navy-blue big-flapped peacoat, that navy that looks so dark it might as well be black. Ninjawear. So dark people might not see me at first because Absence is just as powerful as Presence, my art teacher used to say.

Absence…something was certainly missing. I still felt tense and worried and yet my biggest weekly challenge was certainly over. Outside the long dark winter was settling in early. Where was the lucky Christmas scarf Annika knitted me, to prove to the world that I was loved? That bastard Corso stole it for his sick voodoo practices. Was that why I still felt so vulnerable? I’d have to get it back.
“You don’t owe Bo your dreams,” Soliz was lecturing. “They’re thoughts, not events. You can’t cheat in your thoughts.”

“Who said anything about cheating?” panicked Koo, her heart beating visibly out of her chest.
“Nobody,” I comforted, trying to give Soliz the “don’t scare the children” stink-eye.

But Soliz had to be right. She was one of those; more in tune with her own psychic abilities than most. Takes one to know one. Whereas Koo was afraid of her own thoughts, trying to keep them rigidly unimaginative, for Bo’s sake. Soliz, worthy adversary, continued to argue. “All I’m saying is cheating’s the only thing he can get upset about, not anything that went on in dream-lab.”
“What he should do and what he does do might be two different things,” I tried warning her. Me, the Bex-scarred.

Koo perked up about being fought over; instructed and defended. “Yeah,” she said, looking at me now. “That’s why I need a good lie.” Anguish rippled across her face. “He won’t even believe the things that are true. Paid to sleep! See, that’s a lie right there. I’m exhausted.”
“You should dump him,” concluded Soliz. “Way too controlling.”

Koo burst into tears. Soliz patted her shoulder and Koo fell into her arms. Instead of telling her to take her advice and shove it. If I said anything more I’d be interrupting their beautiful dance; Koo the lost, Soliz the finder. In her own weird way Koo had bonded with both of us. And I was – out of there.

“Bye ladies.” I blew out bravely as I knew how through the swing door.
“See you next week,” called Soliz. Barring a miracle.

9. Lust

I slammed the transom shut against that voice, bumped along the ceiling, refusing to look down. I would never go back. My energy powered me up, and up, and up.

I’d escaped! As if rejecting such a dangerous thought the ceiling became the floor; spinning round to right me; crouching on the splintery wood. I was a little disappointed that my “free” spirit looked so much like me. Was I the constant with everything else in flux? I’d secretly hoped “out of body” meant “new identity”, a sort of spiritual witness protection program where none would recognize me. But I guess we’re always us; molded to some grand design. At least I felt lighter. And there was the challenge of the puzzle. I have always liked puzzles. Like: where was I?

I was feeling my way down a corridor in pitch-darkness. Was it some kind of a game? It sounded like a funhouse. I wasn’t alone. Temporarily blinded, I echolocated, like a bat. Bodies bumped against me, caroming off while distant voices shrieked and screamed hysterically.

Why blind? I touched fingers to my face. A blindfold. Take it off, I coached myself, take it all off — the way you talk to characters in movies, but my dream – self refused to access her eyes. What’s the sense in gaining one sense if you lose another? I pitied her. Maybe she felt safer this way, as in what you can’t see can’t hurt you. She crept along until I lost patience with her and gave her a shove. So some of me still floated outside. Was this an out of body experience? It had to be. But instead of freedom it just felt like a new game with a whole bunch of different rules I needed to master. Seems there’s no escape from trial and error.

Voices I failed to recognize shouted things like “Hey!” “Don’t touch me!” and “Look out!” I placed both her hands upon the railing. I knew Corso would jest at my timidity; Look at Jazz, needing something to cling to. I had to hope I was beyond his vision.

Steps — I felt them with my foot — going down. Down, down. Then a breath of cold air. To avoid the pounding crush of people I entered myself and flattened against the wall. Stay alive is the first rule. If I didn’t commit myself fully to her what would she become? Last-one-through-the- door in the slasher flick allows those careless others to line up as prey. By the time we came along the “thing” ‘s hunger might be slaked. These head chats give the socially shy our last laugh, even if we laugh alone. Even as we’re being eaten. But just as self congratulates self, someone with helicopter arms sweeps past and knocks me down. Heavy boots stomp against my upper leg. No one told me out of body experiences could hurt like hell.

Now I was rolling down the stairs, knocking others over, gathering speed like a runaway sled. Curse a propensity for relaxing too early; it’s a sure jinx, a presage of disaster. If you think you’ve played all the angles, says my inner Coach, you’re not playing hard enough.
When I hit bottom I was alone – the party had moved on without me. But I had a disgusting soft landing on what felt just like a corpse. Could tell from the way it squished beneath me. Breath goes out, and didn’t go back in.

Why do we scream when there’s no one to scream to? I felt superior but they escaped; the story of my life as cautionary tale! Here I am locked in embrace with a dead person and I’m too badly injured to stand up. Now that I’m in real trouble it’s an empty universe. There were no scenarios like these in Dr. Cadwallader’s book. Out-of-body experiences are supposed to be elevated. Freeing. My kiss to God’s ear. On the other hand, I’m nineteen years old; I have spent my whole life learning new stuff. I should be good at it by now. It’s all about asking the right questions. But what do you ask a dead person? The silence was deafening.

First question: who? Female. An older lady with a squashy middle and a furrowed face. The maid, supposedly on leave? She should have been a trampoline. Mea culpa, granny. She was nobody I knew, I felt sure, but I groped her just in case. Stiff, curly hair that came away in my hand. Wig. Wispy, dried-feeling stalks underneath, her real hair dying in darkness like plants wintering in a basement. The back of her head a revolting squishy mass. Shudder.

Someone touched my hand. The bitten nails, the too-tight leather cincture. Oh, I knew that hand! I grasped it willingly. Chase’s voice in my ear: “We’re getting out of here.”
I confessed, “But I’m afraid.”

He said, “Open your eyes.”
I argued, “But this lady is dead.” Isn’t it better not to know things for certain? Because then there’s no avoiding them.

“Well, we can’t help her then.” He hauled me to my feet. I felt the heat of his body so close and I was glad that, although maybe we had wandered away from our bodies, he’d brought the heat-seeking missile of his personhood along. I valued him as I could not value Self. Said,
“My legs don’t work. They’re probably broken. Maybe I am paralyzed.”

I felt his lips brush my face, kiss my blindfold eyes.

“You’re right to be scared,” he whispered in a get-real voice. Like, I might be pathetic, but that lady is dead.. “I’ve been here before. Let me help you. “

The blindfold loosened and I saw his face, light edging the cheekbones like a waxing moon. He kissed me hard; delicious kiss. My eyes flew open–the opposite of what usually happens. But this was opposite land. Never wanted it to end, but like all good things, it had to. Because we’re trapped in time, I guess. I didn’t want to leave without explanations. I clung to the railing and gestured with my free hand.

“I didn’t kill her. She was dead when I landed on her.”
“I know that,” said Chase. I looked down at her body and wasn’t destroyed by the sight. She was nothing but a collapsed heap of clothes.

“Shouldn’t we get help?” To my own ears my voice sounded weak and undeserving. My words echoed through the darkness, mangled forever into “Hell…hell…hell.”

“It’s too late,” said Chase. “Come with me. Follow the light.” A tiny pinhole at the corridor’s end.
We stepped over the dead body. I wanted to prove I was a good person by replacing her wig; or at the very least apologizing for feeling her up like a predatory frat boy, but Chase’s arms were there to give me strength. He lifted me right over the uncomplaining corpse.

“What about the others?” I panted. I could see now we were in a basement; earth floor, clanking pipes overhead, wooden steps twisting away upward. Metal railing.

“There’s a door over there,” said Chase. “Don’t you know the legend of the starfish?”
I didn’t know the legend of the starfish.“Just because you can’t save all the starfish doesn’t mean you
shouldn’t save any starfish.”

I pondered this immensity as we stepped into a brick stairwell open to a starry sky. I recognized those planets. A few stone steps upward and we were free. If anyone can be free when there’s corpses littering the beach like starfish. I grabbed Chase’s sleeve.

“I think I know who that lady was,” I insisted.
“What lady?”

“The dead lady. The corpse we stepped over. It was Emily Fortunatus-Falcones.”
“That’s impossible! She died years ago – like, before we were born. That wasn’t a body. What would a body be doing in the basement of the psychology building? That was nothing but a pile of clothes.”

So Chase didn’t know everything. I had landed on her; I knew what she was… and wasn’t. Here I’d been thinking Chase so brave when he didn’t see what I saw. My face must have appeared mistrustful because Chase said,
“Want to go back and check?”

“No, no, no.” Maybe we were each a single orb on a pair of binoculars; without cooperating action we would both be blind.

In the quad, night had fallen. I tried reckoning up my missing hours but all was the emptiness of the blackout drunk. We stood at the back of the psychology building. A few figures paused in streetlamp pools of light; turning to stare at us as tentatively we emerged. I allowed myself to melt into Chase as he hurried me down the alley.
“Where are we going?” I hissed.

“We’re breaking into Corso’s apartment,” said Chase. “It’s the only time we can be certain he’s not there.”
Here’s a different kind of date!

“I heard he lived way out of town on a – like – farm,” I objected. I knew this because Aleksa made it her business to collect facts about the powerful.

“He and his wife are getting divorced,” said Chase. “He took an apartment in town.”
“You’ve met her?” My curiosity got the better of me as I raced to keep up with him.
“I’ve only met her twice. The first time she seemed like an ordinary nice lady. The second time she acted crazy. Backed me up against a wall yelling about how Teflon is killing songbirds. They had to pull her off me.”

“Sounds like heavy Corso poisoning to me.” We were getting into each other’s rhythm.
Outside the massive iron gates of the college a series of deep- porched, crenellated, ginger-breaded, turreted houses paraded down Main Street, looking like a movie set since not one of those houses is still the single-family home of yesteryear. Once showplace residences of the well to do, now they are used by the college for offices and to house visitors; human flotsam and jetsam to lubricate the system and keep it flush. In early evening, the streets were deserted.

“Do they know something we don’t?” I asked Chase as I clung to his arm, trying to express a strange emotion of feeling like we were headed back into a burning building.
“This is a street people get away from the first minute they can,” said Chase.
I said, “But it’s the real world, right? Are we in a dream?”

“Not a dream,” said Chase. “But every possibility creates a parallel universe.”
I noticed we wore our old clothes; without jackets; not Corso’s silly starship spacesuits. But when had we dressed? I had no recollection.
Realizing we must be cold made me shiver; Chase put a shielding arm around me, saying, “Don’t look down.”

We are flying; we are disembodied, so which one of us is keeping us earthbound? Chase wants to invade Corso’s privacy and I want to identify that dead woman. Why should I trust this man? Because we walked so perfectly in step, a feat Bex and I had never equaled? In my gut I knew if the game had changed then Corso could change too; how could we be so sure he’d not turn up? “Courage”, my brave voice told the frightened one. There are no substitutes for courage or trust. Even in the upside down world they are still our only weapons. I put a hand over Chase’s hand along my arm – so familiar now – and he locked it in place with his other hand.
We wheeled up the steps of Number 137. Chase opened the etched glass door with all the confidence of a tenant, and ushered me inside.

The entry way was a wood-paneled atrium lit by a stained glass skylight; beneath this architectural heaven the ranks of shabby, closed, wooden doors appeared rejecting and cold. An old-fashioned slotted postal desk gave a list of tenants, one name per slot. Chase grinned at me as he grabbed a fistful of papers from the slot designated “Corso” in a familiar calligraphy.
“See? We’re just taking him his mail,” he said. Patting my hand. “Courage.”
I trusted him because he spoke my mantra.

“Up, up, up,” directed Chase. “He calls it the penthouse, you’ll call it the nosebleed section.”
As we climbed the stairs one by one, one by one the house’s nasty little secrets were revealed. All the money had been spent on the outside and on the entrance hall; the higher we went, the more the fabric split. Compound future problems oozed through gaps and holes. Chase cautioned me not to trip; good call, because I refused to watch my stiletto heels. I’ve never wanted to miss the world coming at me; I’d rather trip.

A sour smell emanated from the stair carpet. Peeling wallpaper fluttered finger-like to catch us passing by. A plant on a dusty windowsill was so dead you couldn’t even tell what it used to be. And still we climbed. “Facilis descensus averno,” said Chase. He crossed himself.
So Chase had a mantra too. Hasn’t everyone? I whispered, “What’s that mean?”
“Easy enough going down. Very hard going up. It’s Virgil.”It could have meant, “No spitting on the sidewalks” for all I knew.

Latin had always been closed to me. I had been authoritatively informed that it was not for the likes of I, and because I was so eager to escape from the fake world of high school into a world I assumed was realer, I hadn’t argued. “You studied Latin?” I wanted to know him past and forward, inside and out.

“When I was a kid, I attended a prestigious choir school. Big emphasis on languages. You know, so we could sing the universal songbook.”

The universal songbook! I want to read the universal everything. But I was unsuccessful at picturing him as a sweet little choirboy. “So you performed? On stage?” Stage fright!
“All around the world. The heathen wept at my angelic soprano.”
I laughed. “You’ll have to sing for me sometime.”

“Too late,” he shook his head. “My voice changed and then everyone hated me. Here we are. The dark at the top of the stairs.” Chase rapped sharply.

“Dr. Corso!” he crooned. “Allez, allez in free! Come out, come out wherever you are!” Winked at me.

Like abracadabra, a magic charm. Sensing we needed all the magic we could get I felt emboldened. “We’ve brought your ma-il!” I sang. Our voices – his raw with cigarettes and the disappointed heathen, mine throaty, shy, unused – joined, echoed tantalizingly and died away.
We elbowed each other to go first through a shabby door mystically outfitted with set after set of gleaming new locks. No cakewalk here. At least we were unobserved. There’s a school of thought that says, if nobody saw it, it didn’t happen.

“Here’s my lock pick set,” said Chase, pulling out his wallet. “Yet another problem solved by access to credit. Which would you suggest, Watson? Diner’s Club? I bet you have a good instinct for this sort of thing.”

Instead I turned the knob and pushed open the door. I surprised myself.
“Wow,” said Chase. “That’s the first time that’s happened. You have the magic touch. After you.”
Had I unlocked it with the power of determination? A mineshaft canary, I stepped first over the sill.
“Professor!” shouted Chase, while whispering conspiratorially out of the side of his mouth, “Our story is we found it open.”

How convenient that our story happened to be true. You know how rarely that happens.
“So you break in here often?” I asked, looking around.
“I helped him move in,” said Chase.

As the quiet room swelled out to draw me in I felt something that might have been an addictive thrill of malfeasance, or might have been just a “getting even” satisfaction. So far Corso had always been ahead of us, up top, psyching out the competition and racing to the finish line. How pleasant to exist outside his boundary of control.

“So why are we here?” I asked. “Remind me?”Chase went straight to a messy roll-top desk, put the mail on the. chair and began pawing through the papers.

“Do you believe that crap about the research experiment he’s been feeding us? He’s making it up. Trust me, there’s no official record of it. So what’s he really up to?”

A disturbance fragmented our previously perfect understanding. I was alone again. Chase was mired in private obsessions I did not know and could not share.
“Wouldn’t things like that be in his office?” I suggested.
“I looked there already,” said Chase. How could he have? I thought of the bicycle locks. Diner’s Club wouldn’t cut it.

Might as well take in my surroundings and memorize the icons distinguishing this corner of multiverse into which I’d been thrown. We were in the turret at the top of the house. The rejected husband’s temporary living quarters were two big rooms of equal size. A central chamber, where a wicker screen failed to conceal a bed pushed into the tower’s bay window, and an ornately tiled bath big enough for hosing down several mad people at once.

This room was crowded by overstuffed armchairs, a plank table loaded with books and propped up on chests of drawers, a standing rack of hanging clothes, a Bowflex machine, a computer desk, the antique roll-top desk and a big flat screen TV . Atop the towers of books carelessly lit candles had once dripped wax; this seemed the main attempt at ambiance. Scattered clothes and half-empty coffee mugs created an air of déshabille and disrepute. A musky male smell quivered through the dust motes.

The room might be messy but photos posted on the walls offered Dr. Corso at his best; shining, well groomed, well dressed. No pictures of wifey. I recalled his statement at the college fair – didn’t he say he stopped being a priest because he fell in love? If so, where was any emblem of the hard- fought triumph of the wedding day? Had it been erased by the bitterness of divorce? I’ve heard that can happen.

Instead we were treated to outdated pinnacles sporting and academic. I gave him an A Plus for costume design. He seemed to covet every robe and hat, cape and beanie. Our Corso lettered in the shot-put, and the javelin. A hero of Extreme Academe.

I shared my discoveries, to bring us back together. “Look at this,” I crowed, “His first Mass. 1978! I can’t believe it’s really him. His nose seems so big and he has lots of extra teeth. I think he’s had work done.”

“I’ll say,” said Chase. “He sold his soul to the Devil,”

Corso is one of those men who looks better bald. The toothy lad with the buzz cut and the black-rimmed glasses hardly recalled the man I knew, but something about his shoulders…chest … the way he held himself – was unmistakable.

“And here he is with Emily Fortunatus-Falcones.” She was quite an old lady at the time of the photograph; I wouldn’t have recognized her from her portrait except that the framed page of newsprint identified them both.

But he said he’d known her, right? So this is what a “chair endowment” looks like: a ladies’ tea where all the men wear black.

“There isn’t a single picture of his wife,” I complained, my curiosity unslaked. “He said he left the priesthood just to marry her.”

“Well that’s a lie for a start,” Chase snorted. “That’s not why they kicked him out at all. You know there is a picture of you, though.” Slyly. Distancing us further. I could see the one he meant. Bettie Page and Bex were both stalking me.

“Don’t you start. I don’t even own a leopard skin bra,” I said all above and aloof. But I didn’t plan to stop picking Chase’s brain. I have a lock pick set of my own.
“So they don’t have any kids?”

“She was a nice old lady when he married her. They’ve only been married a few years.” Chase gave up on the desk and began looting dresser drawers.

So Corso had a “thing” for old ladies. Because that’s where the money is? Decidedly odd, what with the heat he threw off at young girls. What had he said…polymorphous? Polyamorous? Didn’t that mean into everything? I wanted to find out exactly why the priest business “kicked him out” but my guilty eyes met a webcam perched atop the computer.

Hadn’t Corso said we’re always being filmed? As I tossed a shirt over it I must have jiggled the television because the picture came back on. Corso and Howk. Doing the nasty. Pretty much what I’d figured.

“Ugh,” I said, but when I reached to turn it off I saw my hands were covered with blood. Chase stopped pawing through the papers to gaze balefully at the TV . “I wonder if that’s enough to get him fired.”

“Look at me!” I cried hysterically, “That body in the basement was covered with blood!”
Chase touched the shirt I’d thrown. Showed me the stains. “No,” he said, “It was this shirt. The blood was on this shirt.”

I didn’t care where it was from; I wanted it off me. The white-tiled bath accused me with a wall of mirrors that dismembered me to body parts. But I had to risk it to scrub up at the sink. Behind me Chase’s questing gaze and my white face were thrown together into a fly’s eye hologram of fearful
repetition. Chase enveloped me with a heavy hot towel from the heated towel rail and kissed me, wiping away the memory of blood. The roomdarkened as if raging against our nerve: what god had we pissed off? We fell against each other like free-falling parachutists, as if clinging tight delayed the inevitable dizzying plunge. Blood rushed to my head; were we upside down again? Or were Chase’s kisses turning us inside out?

“What’s happening?” I cried. Must resist the force yanking us apart.

“Too late,” sighed Chase, and how could I argue? It’s the time of year – and maybe of my life — when the universe darkens early without warning. Can’t we don masks and bang on drums to summon back the light?

“Don’t go,” I gasped, as we fell locked together in a sickening spin. Refusing to part only made the thing angrier; I could tell it wanted more than bodies, it craved souls. I thought I got a glimpse of the monster as we flushed through a wind tunnel and out into the stars, spiraling closely embraced through a gantlet of shocks. It was the thing that escaped from the manhole cover … That thing I saw when Corso hypnotized me, that thing I ran away from. Did that mean I was responsible for this? Had I released this force somehow? Second thoughts and doubt must have weakened me; because it smashed my face with one stroke of its clawed paw. That woke me up. In the dream lab.

8. Deceit

Well, there went Chase’s credibility. We piled up at the inner door like fire victims outside a mislabeled “Exit”. I could feel what the others were thinking. They suspected Chase of holding the sides of the doorway to prevent them from escaping; I knew he was clinging for dear life; to keep himself vertical. I would be willing to bet that he had never, in fact, seen the insides of this room before. Maybe he told the truth about being fired. For a ringer he seemed strangely not in on the joke. Corso doubtless played his cards close to his chest. Had he cleverly secured a helper the rest of us distrusted, one with no actual idea what was going on?

“Where are the sensors?” asked Chase.

I thought he meant, “censors” and I looked around for people. But Corso, ignoring his assistant teased the rest of us. “Too late now,” he bellowed hollowly in mock movie-villain-tones. “Enter. Consider yourselves committed.”

We undulated shyly into the inner sanctum and nervously appraised our surroundings.. Dr. Corso was in his element; his polished head and magnificent hooked nose glittered like beetle’s armor beneath the Battlestar Galactica lights. Had this room originally been a planetarium? I get headaches when I attempt to recognize constellations. Safer to assume we’d broached a brand new universe.

Over his shoulder Corso shot me a secretive glance of exaggerated surprise; surprised by my surprise. Of course everything he did was exaggerated, but I felt he singled me out too obviously to be his teacher’s pet. I shivered away from this undeserved, undesired acclaim, hoping the others were too dazzled by our brave new world to cotton to it. Projecting
at the same time power, calm and ill-suppressed glee, Corso bellowed out a deep, low laugh as he dumped his books upon the table.

“Center yourselves, children. Time’s a-wasting.” His professorial self he brusquely knuckle-thumped the volumes. “I have assembled quite a classical dream library for my little oneironauts,” he told us. “Aristotle, Freud, Jung, Artemidorous, the Atharva Veda. Feel free to avail yourselves at any time. Just don’t keep them forever.”

Not what we’d imagined, it did not resemble a lab of any kind. Six armless padded recliners – more futon than daybed – were arranged in a circle like petals ofa flower, about a foot offthe floor occupied the center of the room. At their heads – in the center of the circle – was a smoky blue glass chalice on a metal tripod. The floor was padded in the same blue vinyl.
“A padded cell,” said G-Rad. “My parents always warned me this was where I’d end up.”

“It was either that or strap you in,” said Corso. “God forbid you should fall in the throes of a dream, hurt yourselves and sue the collective asses offthe institution that gave your intellects birth. People are so litigious nowadays. And I admit I did not feel that bound subjects would respond with the freedom that I require. That’s something that makes me different from all your previous pedagogues. They prefer their novices in harness.”

Zane’s comment was, “What’s with the disco ball?”
Chase repeated, “Sensors. Where?”

Corso raised up his hands as if fending us off. “Such demanding guinea pigs! One at a time,” unwound his tattersall scarf and draped his Burberry over the back of an executive chair that sat before a starship control panel.

He responded first to Chase. “The suits themselves are wired. State- of the art I assure you, and delightfully non-invasive in my opinion. Everything will be filmed to maintain a perfect record.” He gestured at the black glass bulging semicircle above us from the ceiling. That was Zane’s “disco ball”. “Behold the eye of history.”

Yet another abyss looking back at us – into us? I joined the shrieking “guinea pigs” with my own question, “Is there anybody watching?”

Corso’s eyes crinkled with a stifled giggle. I could feel him playing the “Chase game” with me; trying to get the others to question our relationship. Damn his eyes.

“In the multiverse?” he teased. “There are those to whom an empty universe is abhorrent and there are others who absolutely require one in order to feel of any personal importance. Will the nobodies ever become somebodies? Let that be a question for another time and another class.

Don’t be paranoid, Miss Suzino. If it’s being filmed that bothers you, please remember that most of modern life nowadays is recorded. You gave permission, not that I needed it. We are usually rambling from the purview of one camera into that of another. I think myself that it is very good advice to live one’s life as if watched by a thousand eyes. Iwishyouto concentrate on mine as the most important eyes. Time to suit up, dream team. Let the oneirotherapy begin.”
Sorry I spoke.

“Suits?” echoed Koo and Soliz together, joined for once in an equivalent distaste.

Corso gestured over his shoulder. “Fashion was the last muse to be consulted. Sorry, children. We are simple beginners. We must dream before we can fly! At the edge of the room you see a boys’ locker room and girls’ locker room. Nothing fancy. But do get going. We all have packed and demanding schedules. I personally am always required to be in at least two places at once. Chop chop.”

Making no further effort to direct us, he plugged in an electric kettle, punched in another keycode, flipped switches and checked light levels. The starship was ready to depart. With me or without me.
I drifted towards the door marked “Women.”

As soon as the door closed behind us we three girls fell into fits of nervous giggling.
“I think we bit off more than we can chew,” said Soliz.
“There’s a disgusting metaphor,” I choked.

“Oh, My God,” moaned Koo, “Look at these horrible things! One size does NOT fit all! And I think they’re spandex.” She panted in distress like an animal. “I am going to get so sick.”
The suits were purple with little spiral silver designs. Even I blanched, and I once worked for a restaurant that dressed me up as a squid.

“Four alternates,” hissed determined Soliz, whose determined ancestors had probably stormed castles, armed only with scythes.

I had to respond to the challenge, so, not for the first time, my body did one thing while my brain did something else. Does getting sick cancel out the pretty? I wondered. Then I gritted my teeth and slid the damn thing on.
“Why purple?” I moaned, why couldn’t he choose camouflage? Maybe then I’d sneak unnoticed out of here .

“Would basic black make it any better?” asked Koo.
Soliz, standing stark before us, confidently revealed unpruned nethers and barbed wire tats. “Come on. We all knew this was too juicy a gig. It was bound to turn nasty at some point. Bait and switch is like the fourth law of thermodynamics.”

“Thank God for daydreaming,” sighed Koo. “When you’ve absolutely got to be anywhere else but here.”

My soul rebelled at the fourth law. Not to mention the fifth law, which says “One size fits all” means baggy on Koo, tight on Soliz and “just right” on yours truly, Baby Bear. What fresh hell? Was this why Corso picked me, like I’m a “perfect sample size?” Never have been before.
His voice ringing through my head answered, too late, like Poe’s damn bird. Suck it up and walk it off. Whether I liked it or not I was a silver and purple starship warrior. All for lack of a bit of scratch. I sighed noisily.

Koo, overwhelmed by purple, mimed the robot dance until we all cracked up. Bondage exercise, indeed. She pulled extra fabric way out in front. Pregnant robot. “Just when I got to be a size zero, too,” she said.

“A size zero?” barked Soliz. “How can there be such a thing?” Poor innocent. I didn’t tell her there are negative sizes, enticing us to be “less than” from birth.

“ Why not club your feet into a perfect lotus?” Once again we faced off as strangers. Just when we were getting along so well, too!

“Let’s not fight,” I suggested. “Stay together in case we have to mutiny.”
“Aye, aye,” said Koo. “Let’s force Corso to wear this thing –” “And make him walk the plank,” said Soliz.

We erupted into such hilarity we had to hold each other up. I was starting to like Koo. She’s not so bad. She’s like those scrappy little dogs that come with a designer purse. I mean, it’s not their fault they look like vermin. And I would like Soliz too – if she wasn’t so prickly-smart. And if I weren’t so scared of her.

“Omigod,” hissed Koo, trying to pull herself together, “You think we’re on camera now?”
“He was watching us before,” said Soliz. “It’s a safe bet he’s always watching us.”

Was Hadleigh rigged with cameras? Corso and Bex should get together, then they’d possess all of me. “There’s a law that says you can’t film dressing rooms.” I asserted weakly. “At least there was at the mall where I worked.”

“We’re guinea pigs now,” said Soliz glumly. “All bets are off.”
“Ladies, we are waiting.” Corso’s cross voice outside the door.

We walked out together, arm in arm, buoyed by our chance of mutiny if things got scurvy.
Things scurvied almost immediately. The men were in silver, huddled close as they dared to the men’s room door in case it turned out Corso was only pranking us. They looked at us clearly relieved to see they weren’t the only idiots.

“Silver’s better,” I protested. ”No fair.”
“Danger, Will Robinson,” joked Zane, but without much energy, while G-Rad said, “You ladies are looking humptious!”

“See? No big deal,” said Corso. “You can rely on me to take care of you. Ready to fly? Let’s organize ourselves male-female-male-female, thusly.”
“Like a revolution or a dinner party?” asked Chase.

“A party, of course,” Corso responded smoothly. He had no intention of walking the plank. “Why not? Surely you believe in the principle of sacred geometry, Mr. Quinn? The mysteries of gender are the twin pillars bearing up the universe. I say we need all the energy we can get.”
Chase chose a recliner on my right side.

At our heads the blue chalice, lit mysteriously from within, poured out a white fog that curled over its edges, drifted into the room and slowly dispersed.

“What the hell is that?” demanded G-Rad.“Isn’t it cool?” Said Corso. “It’s a magnet. It’s a well-known fact that magnetic energy promotes restful sleep.”

“But…that fog. What is that stuff?” G-Rad cast a nervous glance toward the exit sign. Too late, G-Rad.

“Mere water vapor. Produced by ultrasonic waves. I’m a sucker for atmospherics. In a moment you’ll smell the incense. Before you ask, it’s sandalwood. ”

Corso poured water into mugs from a steaming electric kettle and shook in powder from glassine envelopes. “A nice relaxing drink and offto dreamland,” he purred.
“That doesn’t look like the stuff the nurse gave us,” said Zane nervously. “Seriously I’m in training. Not supposed to have drugs.”

“It’s dopamine,” Chase hissed to me out of the corner of his mouth, like a gangster. “For dopes.”
“Don’t make me regret re-hiring you, Mr. Quinn,” threatened Corso. “I have minimal sympathy for rabble-rousers. I was one, briefly, at your age, but then I learned to focus my energies. For your information, this is a strictly natural concoction.” He passed out mugs. Working at the mall had made me cynical about “natural” concoctions. Everyone’s favorite claim, but natural is anything that exists.

Chase continued conversing with me privately. “Herbaceuticals”. I smiled with the pleasure of being singled out for confidence. He could have picked Soliz, who was on his other side. I favored Chase with my special smile.

“Nothing mind-bending here, I can assure you,” Corso droned on soothingly. “Check your suspicious twenty-first century minds at the door. None of you experienced negative consequences at your initial exam. It’s strictly to relax you. I’m relying on the raveled edge of teenage exhaustion to push you all the rest of the way.”

“But what are the ingredients?” Chase chivvied, peering into the green depths of his mug. He was a button pusher and Corso’s buttons were pushed. Now Corso seemed really annoyed.

“Really, Mr. Quinn. You are an exceedingly obnoxious guinea pig. Please allow me some trade secrets. What would you do with the knowledge? Google it? Bring in everything that’s ever been said about it so we could all engage in spirited debate? Wouldn’t that be quite beside the point of this very expensive and time sensitive experiment?” He projected his angry voice ceiling wards expanding his threat to the alien stars. “You should know by now – none better – that I don’t cosset the obstreperous. You will function appropriately or you will function elsewhere. I warn you I will pull in alternates. Understood?”

So the “alternates” at least were not an urban legend.
“Aye, aye cap’n,” sighed Chase, moving his shoulders from side to side as if comfort was elusive on his particular Procrustean bed.

Corso smiled into my eyes as he handed me my mug. Classic vampire moment: accept or reject? But I accepted. I had to. And I drank. It had a bitter, bark-like taste with rotting-leaf under notes and a strong metallic finish. Not as bad as the Kool-Aid Howk dispensed, but you did have to gag itdown. Itriedthinkingofthesassafrasrootsdugupandgnawedin childhood. Why did we do that? Just because forbidden? Corso’s voice thrummed its panoply of strings.

“Consider me your facilitator, enhancing the potency of our group experience,” said the greedy vampire. “Here’s an opportunity for democratic involvement. Music or no music?”
“Anything, so long as it’s classical,” said Chase.

“Anything so long as it’s not classical,” said Zane.
Corso chuckled as he settled at his board. “The bulls do clash. I’ll take that as a request for “ocean sounds”. Drink up, little dreamers. I’ll be coming around to collect the mugs so I’ll know who’s been naughty or nice.”

As he played at his control panel the lights went down. I tried memorizing the night sky of this host planet but the stars began to spin.

The fog fleeing the bowl seemed to leach into our brains. A nameless ocean whispered innocuously along some anonymous shore. Sandalwood and patchouli smoked the air. I was really feeling it now. A hand touched mine and a shock of self-consciousness ran through me. A foot away were Chase’s blue, blue eyes. Were they trying to tell me something? Or should I try deciphering the code pressed into my fingers? My brain tripped over itself and fell prone. Time to close my soggy-lidded eyes. Corso’s voice bounced around the room disembodied, like a playful spirit.

“Welcome to cosmic dreaming,” he boomed. “You will dream at such a depth the mind bursts the bonds of selfhood and merges freely with the universe. Free from trammels of time, from body, from identity itself, we uncover time’s great secret; we are one. Think on it. Think what it means to be untied from debt, obligation, relationship, guilt, regret or loss. There are no mistakes. Freedom from identity frees us from suffering. Everything you have ever wanted will be achieved now, effortlessly, and in abundance. Desires and longing are the fuel that rocket us to the stratosphere of rarest air. One in the great Oneness, we will all of us dream together.

Controlling our dreams, joined together in generous embrace we access a power precluding separation. Surrender to the ultimate in luxury: the infinite sleep that has always been your birthright. It is time to claim your entitlement.”

His words made sense individually, but linked together they seemed a cacophonous jumble. Valuing words as I do, I had to dismiss them. This noise was like the fake waves that pretend-crashed on a stage set shore.

Instead of joining anybody, my usually bicameral mind split further, into thirds. There were the two childhood voices; the scared one and the reassuring one. This third voice must be Corso; words implanted during lost hypnosis time, saying things like everything new is scary and I’m not alone but chosen. If we concentrated just on safety, who would achieve anything? And freedom must be earned, not given.

But I didn’t care for this invasion. Ideas for me are catch-and-release consider before you take them in. If threatened I have learned to disappear, and now that I was bodiless, it seemed easier. The only thing holding me was Chase’s hand; I could leave my hand with him. I fled the voices, Corso’s and my mother’s, tossed them back to earth; powered up and soared away. Far behind and earthbound Bex’s angry voice accused me of never knowing what I want and called me stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. If it wasn’t Bex then it was the ghost of my own body; a weighted corpse resenting my effortless dance above the fray while it was forced to roil in blood and bile below.

Corso’s drone burrowed after me like a worm, like a dangerous download bearing a virus you’ll never get rid of. “Surrender comes on little cat feet,” Corso cooed into my ear, not realizing I was no longer there but watched him from above. Why work so hard on me? Where was everyone else? Or was that Corso’s ultimate trick, making us think his magic was reserved for each of us alone?

“The garden door is closing and you’ll be left behind…” His voice oozed. “See, the stars are out. The world inside and the world outside long to merge… only the pictures in your head prevent them.

Doesn’t it feel good to let it all go? It’s all beneath you now. Flesh itself is gone. When you open your eyes, you will be gazing down at your lost and unperfected self.

Nowtheroomitselfisvanishing,your connection to earth is someone else’s problem now. You have released your fears. Look how tiny they seem, disappearing over the horizon. ”

My fear was flushed in a rushing sound. Must be my spirit gushing through the transom, right on schedule. I was sure ofit. My old body, cherished and abused, collapsed before my eyes like a deflating balloon, skin falling to folds predicting of old age — if I ever chose to grow up. But why should I bother? The real me was airborne; a pale, and lightened spiral of myself. Pure energy. Why had I ever feared this pleasure? Inside we all know how it feels to fly. A shock of recognition.

Still Corso sang below. He’s keeping them there, I thought resentfully. If he won’t let them go I’ll have no one to play with. Freedom is fake if confined to one room. I hesitated at the transom, reaching through for the lost hand.

“Pure oxygen is pouring in; surging around you, supporting you. Welcome it. As the ocean once was, this is your element now. You need neither gills nor lungs, you can exist anywhere. You float weightless in the richly pregnant darkness. Ecstasy lies just over that horizon, rising in the night like a sun. It offers everything you need for your journey. Feel the power of its penetrating heat through the shimmer of ectoplasm that is all that remains of your spirit. You will enter it now.

It will sting at first; it scorches only for a moment. Consider it a blessing. Now surrender to the enchantment of selflessness, in union with the universal power that has been calling you from the beginning of eternity. Time has no meaning here.

With a last rustle you let go of the final pictures in your head, the faces, the memories, the constraints tethering you to the purposeless quotidian, dragging you down and holding you back. Herd animals will pull the load; you were born for better things. My voice is the last bond to disappear as language itself loses meaning and becomes a hum, abyss of sound and soundlessness in which you vibrate endlessly in polymorphous pleasure.”

7. Avarice

We six students sat looking at each other in a small, windowless room whose moisture and heat ratio was visibly rising. Steam poured off our clothes like smoke and “makeup melt” was becoming a distinct and worrisome possibility. Outside drizzled the global warming version of
winter; a cold and sooty rain. It was the first day of the research project and I had dressed as carefully as for all “first days. ” Some people say it’s the only chance you ever get to make a positive impression. I know when picture somebody I usually see them wearing the first clothes I ever saw them in.

To my usual all black pants and sweater (no skirt ever again – not around Corso) I added a red and gold Chinese kimono closed with my lucky dragon pin. Dragons are my power animals because transformation has to be my religion. I thought I looked like a nicely wrapped Christmas gift. A gift to myself.

But there’s always at least one thing wrong – don’t you find?– the Persian rug makers put one in on purpose — and now I was regretting my sweater. I imagined myself melting in slo-mo, horribly and all-too- publicly, evolving into a floor-puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West. I have to say in my own defense, if my makeup was rushed it was not my fault; Aleksa has been acting so weird lately I have to dress in the bathroom and the lighting there are hardly optimal. She talks to herself about her new boyfriend – somebody masochistically hopeless – and I don’t want to know. In recovery as I am over Bex, I can recognize all the stages of Rationalization and Settling, and it’s just too painful. Long story short, in the mornings I can’t get out of there fast enough.

You can study in the library but you can’t dress there. So here I was, on a day critical to my future success as a college student, feeling decidedly off my game.

Needing distraction in order to stop worrying about myself, I focused on my cage-mates. Comparing other people’s outsides to my insides — isn’t that the game? Fortunately we born observers (Virgo – sees all, learns all) can always rely on someone else to muscle their way to center stage. Always. It’s just a question of patience.

The wrestler — I could tell his sport just by his body build and the way he held himself — was first to bat the molecules in motion. He was stocky, none too tall, and seemed permanently angry. Shoulders curved forward as if poised for attack, his gaunt face had the dark-stained, cavernous eyes of the sleepless. He even blackened them for emphasis but it must have been makeup because there was no reflecting light in here.

Hair too was colored black through some inferior substance – say, tar or possibly shoe polish; causing it to stand up like a hayfield startled by electricity. Reddish, furry caterpillar brows suggested his real hair color. He had the trembly, nicotine-stained fingers of the smoker. He also looked familiar, like we had met before. Definitely not one of the happy teen models depicted in the life’s a fairytale brochures.

“God,” he said, knitting those spectacular brows, “I’m a senior in the program and I don’t know anybody here.”

He was worth a second glance and then a third, surreptitious beneath my carefully applied lashes. Consider, for example, this transparent effort to push his storm cloud of electricity onto us. He jiggled his knee, he ran his hands through his hair, he flicked his thumb over the haphazard soul patch ornamenting his pugnacious jaw. His worn jeans seemed like a second skin; probably he slept in them. I thought I recognized a fellow insomniac who superstitiously no longer dresses specially for bed. We’re hoping sleep is playing hard to get and if ignored, will resentfully assault.
An Aquascutum barn jacket and Timberland boots suggested somebody had once had money; of course, everybody in the universe had more money than I did. On the other hand the leather band he wore around his wrist was tied too tight, so either he suffered from guilt or just enjoyed the pain. He caught me looking and riveted me with an astonishing pair of lupine blue eyes.

A full-body shiver unearthed my earliest memory; Little Boy in the Sandbox. Up to the moment I saw him – I was maybe five years old? – I had thought myself alone in the universe, or more accurately, that everyone was part of me; but in the second that little blue-eyed boy looked at me I suddenly realized the world was filled with other spirits, other souls; probably all feeling exactly the same as I did. Thinking, Observing, Remembering; all of us on our way to someplace. I experienced this fellowship epiphany so joyously I recall throwing sand at the kid. Then I sang him a song and made him a sand-cake.

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” I blurted. Stupid, stupid, stupid! This is why it’s so critical to keep one’s mouth shut. One rash blurt cancels hours of careful staging.
But he smiled at me. Even unfurrowed his thorny brows.

“I’m Chase,” said Barn Jacket. “I guess I just assumed we’d all be psych majors.” That smile alleviated the voiced complaint about mixing with inferiors. The moment was further soothed by the black guy with the bouquet of dreads exploding from the top of his head.

“I’m G-Rad,” he said to Chase. “I think I’ve seen you around, too.” He and the wrestler fist-bumped while I subsided gratefully into the background. My antenna pegged G-Rad as the kind of “sensitive” male who plays games like a girl. With a full knowledge of subtext.

“G-Rad!” questioned the anorexic blonde, “What kind of a name is that?” Her subtext was “cheerleader”. She was the kind of tiny, peaky-faced girl quarterbacks love to pick up and run with. I thought she’d look like a little old woman – a little old woman doll – in just a few years. Miaow.
“My parents named me Grady. Get a brother killed on the street! G- Rad’s the same but keeping it real. You feel me? Real is what I’m all about.”

And all about talking too much, too nervously. Just like a girl. I was happy to let him do it. The “Semper Die” t-shirt he was wearing would get him killed on the streets where I come from.
“I’ve definitely seen you at the top of the pyramid,” said Chase to the blonde.

She smiled a practiced Facebook smile. “I’m Koo.” Like that was a normal name. She was obviously flattered to be recognized as a human shuttlecock batted publicly back and forth, then ending up a partridge atop the cheerleading Christmas tree. Was she the type to ever consider what a long way it was to fall, especially for an ornament chosen for fragility?

Zane said to Koo. “Haven’t I seen you running around with that quarterback?” Enviously?
“My boyfriend’s Bo Boyd,” she responded smugly. See! Psychic Jazz! “If you know him.” Evidently they did. Everyone tittered.

“Humptious,” said G-Rad, then leaned towards me and hissed behind his hand, “Juicer.” He pegged me for the gossipy one.

“Steroids? Aren’t they illegal?” “Everything’s illegal.” G-Rad shrugged.

“I’m Soliz and I’m a psych major,” said the dark ethnic-looking girl in a defensive, “you- want-to-make-something-of-it” way. Obviously — amazingly — no one had ever told her she was beautiful. I hoped for her sake she would not find it out too late. She was hardly built like a runway model; her hips were broad but she had the generous breasts that go with that, lots of gorgeous dark hair and a great pair of smoky eyes.

Chase had the grace to apologize. “Sorry,” he said. “Senior year is a haze.”
That gave me the bravery – or the cover – to announce, “I’m undeclared. But so far my favorite class is marketing.”

“Psychology is marketing,” said G-Rad. “It’s when you can’t tell what they’re selling that you should be really scared.” He addressed his comment to the so-far-silent jock in the varsity jacket; giving him a sidelong look that was considerably more intense than anything he’d yet offered to the ladies.
Soliz ignored him, swiveling those soulful dark orbs toward me.

“I know who you are,” she said in her hostile, challenging way, “You’re the Emily Fortunatus-Falcones scholar.”

This room was too small; was that deliberate? We were so up against each other; in each other’s faces. It would be just like Dr. Corso to crowd the rats a little. I pictured him glued to a monitor somewhere; breath sucked in as he gleefully waited for us to tear each other apart.
Chase bailed me out by reacting to Soliz’ previous remark.

“Oh all right, all right,” he said grumpily. “If you guys insist on coming in late to the back of every classroom you can’t be surprised if nobody knows who the hell you are.”
He was the type to sit up front, the better to lock eyes angrily with Authority.

“I’m undeclared too,” whined Koo, fluttering sticky eyelashes. “I started out as a communications major but then I dropped it and now they’re punishing me.”
Chase made a snorting noise so she turned to him and squealed,

“I had to! They gave me a really bad internship.” Priding herself on flirting, she pried a smile out of him. She wouldn’t care that it came on the cusp of a sneer. I guess that makes me the demanding type, who examines and questions everything I get. At this particular moment I experienced a flicker of what would have been jealousy if anyone else had felt it. I don’t allow myself to get jealous.
The tall jock finally said, “I’m Zane,” and extended his hand to me, because I was closest. We shook in a broadly exaggerated, slightly embarrassed up-and-down motion. We were the first to touch so intimately and it jacked up the temperature of the room. His hand felt cold and callused. Clammy.

“Senior year is great for business majors,” he said in a “no haze for me” rebuke to our angry class wrestler. “It’s like we’ve already graduated. All real-world and independent study.”

Insinuating, possibly, that psychology was the opposite. Possibly even a waste of time? Zane continued, “It’s like being on a reality show to get paid for participation in a research project. Do you guys know how lucky we are? If you read Dr. Cadwallader’s book he said one of the potential applications of out-of–body-experiences is “remote viewing”. To see a place without actually going there. Corporations will be standing in line to shower that with cash! Hey, someday we could wage war in our heads!”

And what fun that will be! Zane was the kind of tall, broad- shouldered, arm-swinging gum-chewer so comfortable in his own skin he just assumes he’ll be taking charge. I can admit to a little jealousy of people who can assume they’re already as good as they possibly be.

Chase probably felt the same way as me, because he took against Zane right away, saying smolderingly, “If it works. If that’s even what the experiment is about. You know they don’t always tell the truth about the experiment because they don’t want us to know what they’re really testing. Sometimes all the action is in the waiting room,” he continued, which is just what I had been thinking. “Remember all those papers you signed? You basically said Dr. Corso can do anything he wants to you. He doesn’t even have to tell us the truth about what the experiment is.”

“How can that be ethical?” I protested feebly. “When we don’t know what we are agreeing to.” Innocent freshman. Ignored by everyone. It’s the freshman fate.

G-Rad elegantly re-interpreted. “Why angst your boxers into a twist? For pay Dr. Corso really can do anything to me. I mean how bad can it be? Once I signed up to test a diarrhea cure. For the test to work, first they had to give me horrendous diarrhea. I’m telling you it was horrendous.”

“So, did the cure work?” asked Soliz in an interested way.
“No,” said G-Rad. “But that drug that gives you the diarrhea? They’ve sure got that one figured out. College is a bitch. Well, you gotta do what you gotta do.”

“I don’t think Dr. Corso would lie to us,” said Zane the Jock. Confidently. That invited a new challenge from Chase, persistant in his determination to shake things up.

“Maybe that’s because you’re the ringer.”See how powerful mere words can be? There was a moment’s consternation while we severally dismantled this one.
“You mean like a pro?” inquired Zane, confused.

“One of us is probably a fake,” said Chase. “Somebody who’s in on the experiment. It’s usually the one who says the least.” He backed up my maybe-psychic vision by saying, “Corso’s probably observing us right now.”

“It makes more sense if it’s the person who talks the most,” said Soliz dangerously. “Trying to direct things.”

G-Rad got up and began peering at the walls, standing on chairs and studying the sprinkler system.
“That’s a sprinkler, dog,” said Zane.

Koo shrank from all the activity, saying, “I get claustrophobia in small spaces.”
How can that be? I wondered. When you are a small space? She’s probably just allergic to interpersonal struggle. If people always lift you to the top of the barrel and you never have to struggle to get there, will you ever truly experience claustrophobia?

“Maybe I’m the camera!” G-Rad bounced up and down with excess energy, throwing open his bomber jacket like a magician producing a plethora of doves.

“Great experiment so far,” I muttered. Sarcasm, the tool of the weak, had become my second language. I blame Bex because he was so immune. “Let’s give ourselves A’s.” Gratified by Chase’s cocked eyebrow.

Soliz regarded the dematerializing Koo with the open contempt I had been so careful to conceal. “Let’s not fail “waiting room”, OK? I need this job. Have hysterics after Corso gets here.”
Zane tried the door to the inner sanctum. We all knew it would be locked; you could see a keypad sunk into the wall right next to the knob.

I didn’t care for the suggestion that we didn’t even know what we were doing here. I had already had two cool dreams just thinking about this program and I’d taken it for granted that what Corso told me had to be the truth.

Hadn’t I learned anything from Bex? Maybe it was the power of the wish; I’m a person needing maps, plans and histories to orient myself in the universe. I don’t care for that disgusting seasick feeling of not knowing what to expect. I didn’t like surrendering to the untrustworthy vibe Corso and Howk dished out. How much more would it take for me to join Koo in hysteria?
“I hope the experiment is really about out of body experiences,” I suggested. “I mean, don’t you wish it could work?”

They looked at me like I was the ringer.

“You can’t content yourself with surface muck,” said Chase. Was this good advice or was he saying he no longer my special buddy? “You’ve always got to dig down to the real muck underneath.”
“What if you’re allergic to muck?” I whispered. “Then God help you,” said Chase.“And you know this how?” sneered Soliz.

Chase told her, “Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intelligence. The optimism keeps you digging, the pessimism tells you what’s down there.” I thought that was the most interesting thing anybody said.

“Keeping hopeful’s Basic Darwin,” said Zane. “You ever look down, you’re gone.”
“Why don’t we try some bonding exercises?” suggested Soliz. Here we had yet another leader wrestling for control of the group. “We need to learn to operate as a team, folks. I’ve gotta this job till spring. There are four alternates, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Koo, retracting further into her chair. Soon she would be nothing but a small, wet stain. “I need this job too. You should see my Visa bill. I was planning on doing all my sleeping here.”

“Paid to sleep,” said Zane excitedly, “What’s not to like?”
“I bet the whole “alternates” thing is another myth,” said Chase, regarding Soliz in a dissatisfied yet challenging way. “Corso’s just priming us.” He wouldn’t give up control of the group without a struggle. “What kind of bonding exercises did you have in mind?”

“I thought she said bondage exercises,” joked Zane. G-Rad laughed and laughter ran around the room in a rippling wave. Heat crushed me in its vise. I surrendered to the inevitable and took off my kimono.

I don’t know about bonding exercises. But I know all about changing subjects; because I want to talk about what I want to talk about. Pressured speech. It can be a bad habit, like biting your nails. “You know what I hate about falling asleep?” I asked finally. “That feeling of falling. I hate falling, period.”

“That’s just the myoclonic jerk,” said Chase.G-Rad teased, “Who are you calling a myoclonic jerk?” More laughter. We were bonding.“I can dream while I’m awake,” said Koo. “Daydreaming,” spurned Soliz. “Everyone does that.”

Chase said, “Yeah. Do you lose touch with your surroundings?”

“Well, obviously,” said Koo, impatiently. “You don’t daydream unless you wish you were somewhere else.” Seeing the faces of the others she shrank back into her seat. “Not like I’m a weirdo.”
“It’s so hot in here,” Soliz said. She stood up and took off her jacket; her blouse was very thin underneath. I could clearly see the outlines of her underwire bra; the better to push you up, my dear. The boys ogled her like judges at wet t-shirt contest. She ignored them. “You guys remember the experiment where they put the frog in hot water and turn up the heat so gradually it never gets out and it boils to death? Maybe that’s what Corso’s doing.”

“Poor frog,” sighed Koo, pouty-lipped.

“Urban legend,” said G-Rad. “Nobody ever ran that experiment.”

“Nasty little boys probably did,” said Soliz. “They do all kinds of nasty things.” Maybe she hadn’t ignored them after all. “Can’t help it. It’s hormonal.”
“What year are you?” Chase asked her, like a dare. The air crackled with tension. Fight brewing. Fight! Fight! Fight!

“Sophomore,” she answered, “But I’m a transfer. Spent my first two years at community college. One year’s worth is all this hole will give me credit for.”

“I’m a transfer, too,” said G-Rad, amazed. “I applied to this place right out of high school but I didn’t get in. Not even waiting list.” The two “minority” students looked at each other.
“Is this a snob factory or what?” asked Soliz.

“You had to wait for the freshmen burnouts,” joked Koo. “On a clear day you can see a meat wagon scraping corpses off the Hadleigh quad.”
I reacted visibly before I could stop myself. They noticed.

“Don’t tell me you live in Hadleigh,” said Chase, and so I said, “OK, I won’t tell you.”
“You live in the skyscraper?” Even Koo, who had previously not deigned to notice my existence, was interested.

“I heard all the freshmen live there.” Defensive.

“Unless you get sick,” said Koo. “I swear that place has got sick building syndrome. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I think I had a cold for six months.”

“You know that building is haunted,” said Zane. “Years ago they really had a jumper.”
They looked at me as if I had … What’s the opposite of status? Dis- status?

“So that’s why the windows don’t open,” I said.“The windows don’t open,” repeated Koo, “So it has sick building syndrome.”Soliz tried to bring us back to earth, objecting, “Nobody died
recently. Right?”

And this room suffered from “old building syndrome” which is to say, no ventilation at all. Chase filled that death-conversation awkward silence by repeating the names he knew, starting with himself. “Chase, G-Rad, Zane, Koo, Soliz.” His finger stopped at me. Almost accusingly, as if I’d traveled deliberately beneath the radar.

“Jazz,” I said.

As if at the magic word the outside door opened and Dr. Corso blew in, swathed in Burberry, twill, leather and tweed and carrying a pile of books. He balanced them on one hip to punch in the security code and, as he did, he glanced around slyly.
“Greetings, dream team,” he said, “I think that’s enough bonding for now.”

Did I blush again at being right? Fortunately no one looked at me. Most importantly, not Chase, who regarded our professor with bared teeth. Corso looked at back at us, not him.
“I can see you’ve met my teaching assistant, Mr. Quinn,“ said Corso.
“You fired me,” said Chase.

“Well, I’m re-hiring you,” said Corso.

“Ringer! RINGER!” Zane hissed like an attacking rattlesnake.

“Of course he’s “ein ringer”, Corso told us calmly. “And a very good one, too. “Ringer “ only means “wrestler”. In German.”

6. Microsleeping

The “student health center” turned out to be a once-charming Victorian house surmounted by a widow’s walk and a cupola, a building whose whimsical architecture failed to destigmatize its obvious purpose. It sat alone like a spider at the center of a web of ramps and walkways, so if you were headed down that hill, everybody knew where you were going. Birth control? STD’s? Alcohol poisoning or an incipient nervous breakdown? They could take their pick. I could almost hear the thoughts of the other students as I shuffled shamingly past, weakly hoping Miss Howk had stepped out to lunch.

But Miss Howk was there, all right and Miss Howk had plenty of time for me. No doubt about it, Miss Howk was a piece of work. So unbusy was she that she had her feet up on her desk while she perused a fashion magazine, revealing to anyone who cared to look that she kept up her sheer white nurse’s stockings with a lacey garter belt.

Once she’d read Corso’s note, she looked at me like I was a prize heifer and she was a 4H judge. Something about her slanted glance and set jaw told me she seriously rued being on the wrong side of thirty. I hoped she wouldn’t be the type to take it out on those of us still at play her in Eden. I mean, it’s not our fault when our birth dice came up snake-eyes.

She didn’t need to slam her private door behind us, announcing to the universe that I was now her prisoner, but I got the impression she enjoyed an audience for everything she did. She put her face right up against mine, under the light, as if searching for blackheads. Wise men have said that when the abyss is looking into you, at least you are in a prime position to look back. Did she want me to try to read the strange Arabic inscriptions tattooed around her eyes? Who reads Arabic in New Jersey? Anyone? But Miss Howk was all business. Mine was neither to look back nor apparently even to reason why. She shone a light into each of my eyes until I was effectively blinded.

“You remind me of somebody,” she said.

Not that damn Bettie Page thing again. Or for Miss Howk would it be Katy Perry? Blinking, seeing stars, I refused to help her out.“I’ve been told I’m a recognized archetype,” I said stiffly.
Beneath her sedate nurse’s cap Miss Howk had long chestnut hair with frosted highlights. She wore a nose stud and a collection of different earrings in each ear; a silver moon in one and an onyx star in the other and piercings all the way up each lobe. Could she hear better or worse with all that hardware? I couldn’t help asking myself, is this what she wore to her job interview? And what did Corso think? Do ears like Swiss cheese turn men on or do you have to be something of a predator to start with?

I asked myself if Miss Howk and Dr. Corso were having a “thing”. That’s the problem with being “psychic”; I can’t tell whether there’s really a rabbit at the foot of every hole I dig for myself and then trip over. While prodded, poked and documented for Miss How’s secret file, my “reptilian brain” found time to wonder what Dr. Corso made of this fashion in permanent cosmetics and transitory relationships. It’s right up his alley I’m guessing; he struck me as a collector, and collectors love people to obligingly sort themselves into “types”. Wouldn’t want to make the mistake of collecting the same one twice.

So what if they were having “a thing”, what did I care? Consider it “preventative medicine”! Out here it’s every girl for herself. Nurse Howk keeping him busy might keep him off the rest of us.
Satisfied with her research into the back of my head, she ripped open a sterilized kit and said, “You have to pee in front of me. No faking.”

“You mean I can’t use that stuff I got out of the vending machine?” I said. “Darn. Good stipend money wasted.”

“A humorist,” said Miss Howk. “Har har. You’ll need that where you’re going, soldier.”

Jesus, I thought, what people – specifically, unfortunately, me — will do for money. She watched with crossed arms while I managed to leak out a few drops, but only because I’d just had Imperial Gunpowder on top of eleven cups of coffee. The scent of caffeine filled the room.

“That should do it.” Miss Howk swirled my product around and held it up to the light like a fine wine.

“Cape May, New Jersey, 1993,” I quipped. “A very good year.”

Miss Howk sealed the cup and wrote upon the label. “Subtle, yet unassuming,” she announced, “But with a ricochet that bites you in the ass.” She smiled at me. “You and me could get along.”
But I didn’t want to get along. Not with Miss Howk, anyway. Frankly, I was praying I’d never have to see her again. Let Corso have her. I looked pointedly at my watch, like a person with a class to go to. I did have a class. Like subway cars, there is always another one coming up soon.

Maybe Miss Howk was psychic too. She got the message. She sighed loudly. “I hate paperwork. Guessing you will too.” And handed me a clipboard.

Mostly it was things like swearing never to tell and promising not to sue if I grew another head. What can I tell you? I signed. I was used to promising to be responsible for myself and not haranguing grownups for treats and favors. Self-determination; isn’t that what being an adult is all about? I settled down with my documents while Miss Howk stepped into the hall to make a series of short, angry calls on her cellphone. Maybe

that’s just her phone voice, but I got the impression Ms. Howk had been promised big things in her lifetime and somebody had stiffed her on the deal. Miss Howk was canceling any self-determination pre-arrangement; it was time for somebody to step up to the plate, like now.

I tried not to eavesdrop but maybe this was all part of the stage show; to distract me from reading, or to hurry me into signing, or something. I’m telling you, psychology is not my thing. Leave me alone to get on with the creation of weird but spectral beauty. The kind that makes the people say “huh?”

Miss Howk slammed the door again, rolled up my sleeve and said, “Look the other way.”
“Deposit or withdrawal?” I asked faintly. I didn’t want her taking out her annoyance at Mr. Anonymous on my poor corpus.

“Withdrawal,” she said. “You won’t miss it. You’ve got plenty.”

Is it really hygienic to hold the syringe between your teeth while you prepare the client’s arm? Or maybe I was just turning into my mother, who thinks the worst of everyone. She blames my early daycare contretemps for her paranoia, but more like my dad running out on her had something to do with it. The most depressing thing about her suspicions is how often they are right.

“Is that it?” I unwisely inquired.

“Not hardly,” said Miss Howk. “No X-Ray, no strip search, no safe word. Just one more thing. Drink this.”

I felt like Alice crashing through the mirror. Drink this. It looked syrupy and grape-colored, like that nasty cough medicine given to unwary children who have the bad timing to get sick at school. I didn’t want to taste it so I tossed it down.

It fizzed. “What the heck was that?”

“Gives you a nice buzz,” said Miss Howk. “Why should both of us be miserable?”

God, I thought, now it’s official. I’m a mindless research guinea pig, who will do anything for money, on par with those people who accept pills in parking lots from total strangers. “Let Jazz try it, she’ll take anything.”

According to my marketing professor people will always accept “one more thing”, whereas if you told them everything you wanted at the beginning they would just say “no”. And even after going through all this humiliation, I was mindful that Corso could theoretically still reject me from the program. And I was counting on my research pay to round out my tiny, tiny stipend! I might want to occasionally view the city. Or buy something. I’ve got aspirations, dammit.

I’m going to have to learn to ask the right questions, I thought as I lay uncomfortably on the cold examining table, waiting for God knows what. My natural inclination is to rush through any unpleasantness, but here was a forced opportunity to reflect. If I only knew what the right questions were. Maybe I was dreaming already. I felt I’d stumbled into a pre-language world where concepts float namelessly past before you can tag them. Worry? Anguish? Dread? Maybe that’s what adulthood really is; still having the amorphous sensations but at least being able to name them. Miss Howk dimmed the lights.

“Music requests?” she inquired. “Mars Volta or Harry Connick Jr?” And I had her pegged for Florence and the Machine.“Thanks anyway,” I said. “I’m fine with silence.”“You’re the only one,” she told me. “No one else wants to listen to their own head. Now, if you’ll just stay put for a moment, I’m going to run a test. Relax for just a sec and you’re all done.”

I stretched out my legs. I’d had a nap – even if unwillingly, so how come I was still exhausted? “Change”, those therapists used to say.Change is the most tiring thing, and maybe they were right. Heck, a broken clock tells time correctly twice a day.

“I warn you,” I yawned, “I may fall asleep.”“Feel free,” Miss Howk called over her shoulder. “Ah, the bliss of unconsciousness. That’s what we’re all about.”

Not something health professionals routinely say, I remember thinking. Then I heard a mechanical noise and I was inside a foosball game, where every other player was part of the machine except me. But I was attached to the mechanical arms and I couldn’t get away.

I scrabbled wildly at the ball with my feet as it rocketed past. Was it my imagination the little metal men were sneering at me? “What are you looking at!” I snapped as the buzzers rang, the bells gonged and the floor beneath me tilted maniacally.

When the lights were snapped back on, I woke up on my stomach, still arguing with weird half-memories and trying to get the ball. Was that echoed laughter in my head or my own brain tumor banging off my skull?

“Ow,” I said, holding my temples against pain. Sadistically, Miss Howk made it worse by ruthlessly ripping open blinds.

“A tummy sleeper,” she said, out of the side of her mouth. “Aww. Cute.”

“Am I finished?” I winced.

Miss Howk, she of the Hippocratic oath, had given me the mother of all headaches.

“Finished as you’ll ever be,” smirked Howk. “What’s a little microsleep between friends?”

She certainly had Corso’s lingo down; weird and unsettling, as if she was his female clone. In spite ofwhat I’d said previously, I was still amazed at actually nodding off. Unconsciousness was highly prized at this wretched university. Who falls asleep on an examining table? And after eleven cups of real coffee, too. (I’m afraid of decaf because it’s soaked in carcinogen.) But what could I say? If this is an institution of learning how come my brain’s all scrambled? No, that can’t be it. What are the questions? If only I knew.

“What the hell was in that syrup?” I asked, patting myself down. Arms, legs, tatas, check. But still, an uncanny sensation that I was missing some vital part of me.

“Tolerance test,” said Howk. “There’s a sedative administered as part of the research, since, duh, you have to sleep on cue. Let me know if you get a bad reaction. You seem “fine’ to me.”

She put it in air quotes, giving me a good look at the Chinese writing along her underarm. Isn’t it kind of creepy to take a tattoo artist’s word for how he’s designating you for life? I can’t imagine being so trusting.

Bt what am I saying? Maybe Miss Howk speaks Arabic and Chinese. Everything she said was at least a triple entendre. I was actually afraid to think about what she might really mean – and I also think that’s the way. she wanted me to feel. So I said, “Bad reactions? Like what? What should I look for? Convulsions? Hallucinations? Foaming at the mouth?”

Miss Howk leaned against the wall watching me dress like an idler at a peep show. “Nothing. I’m telling you.”

I wanted to get out of there but still I fumbled. The questionless will be sacrificed. “So what happens next?”

Howk shrugged, yawned and turned away. I wasn’t fun or interesting any more. She had plumbed my depths. “Richard will send you an email.”

Richard. OMG. Guess I should be glad she didn’t name him “Doctor Dick.“

“Then, ‘bye.” I had to squeeze past her to get out the door. Howk gave me one last look from beneath her kohl-laden lids.

“A mañana,” she threatened.

5. Limbo

Everyone was strangely uncooperative. Aleksa refused the sheet I wanted to hang in our window and promised to order curtains that matched the bedspreads; while campus security gave me a card with a series of phone numbers to call in case Bex threatened me. Seeing him hanging around was not enough. They also let me know they did not consider picture-taking threatening, and they said he could get a visitor’s pass to the library so quite possibly he was entitled to be there, even to take pictures from the roof. If he was hacking into other people’s emails those people needed to be contacted so they could “alert the proper authorities”. Because maybe Annika gave Bex permission to use her email! Of course I didn’t want to complain to my little sister about my ex boyfriend! I just sent her a cryptic message telling her I’d gotten spam that made me think she should change her password. Pretty frustrating.

I was stomping with rage as I hustled through the late September monsoon to Dr. Corso’s fairytale castle. Late as usual. It bothered me that Bex could make me think about him, which of course is just what he wanted. I’m superstitious about being late for a first appointment, because then it’s like you can never catch up. So I was running in stilettos, which is so not me.
The groaning and sighing of the ancient wooden stairs beneath my weight suggested fairytale castles might be deficient in some ways. Such as fire safety. And plumbing. Was this really one of academia’s desirable footholds or had Dr. Corso been banished to academic Siberia? And ifso, why?

He had asked me to meet him at the top of the stairs outside his office; “Under the portrait.” I almost ran into him. He was standing there looking at his watch just as I arrived.

“Obsessive,” said Dr. Corso, admiring, I guess, my punctuality. “I can work with that. In psychology we have a saying; if you’re late you’re resistant and if you’re early you’re neurotic. Obsessive is on time. On the whole, I prefer obsessive.” He wore a crisp red and white striped shirt with his khakis, a shirt with a blindingly white collar and cuffs. I envisioned the mysterious Mrs. Corso toiling slavishly over hissing machines, freeing him to strut upon this stage.

The portrait above us was a beauty, even if the woman it depicted was not. It was also big, big, big. If it ever fell off its crumbling wall, it could probably take care of the future problems of several people at once. In gray, black and silvertone it depicted a squashy-faced middle-aged lady whose shapeless figure, festooned with diamonds and sapphires and encased in a long, dark dress, posed rigidly beside a curtained window. Outside, in the far distance I saw a depressed looking lake, a weeping willow, and an unattainable mountain shrouded by mist. Her eyes seemed to plead with me: “Get me out of here.”

Those eyes were the realest things in the picture, in opposition to, say, her hands, lying wasted and useless across a musty tome far too heavy for her fingers to lift. “Help me, help me,” her eyes begged so nakedly that I had to look away.

Out loud I said, “She looks sad.”

“A tad psychic, are we?” asked Corso, eyeing me shrewdly. “I can most definitely work with that. I like to think I’m a tad psychic myself. As for the late Lady Emily, she had her demons, but I pride myself in thinking I was instrumental in teaching her how to battle them. Tell me, Miss Suzino, how often have you experienced these “psychic” moments?”

I could feel my cheeks firing up beneath my hopeful dusting of Chinese white. Anyone else would have missed my reaction to the portrait, anyone but Corso. It’s like I only blushed around him! Maybe because other people looked at me (or through me). Dr. Corso looked inside me. Deep inside. My insides shivered as if plucked like harp strings.

“I’m not sure,” was all I could say. “I think everyone’s psychic really but it gets blocked. You only find out you were psychic in retrospect.”

“Well!” he exclaimed. “I see we have quite an interesting conversation ahead of us! “ He turned to head back up the stairs. “I only wanted you to take a look at the benefactor who endowed my chair and your scholarship.” At the top of the stairs he took my arm and gestured at the painting I feared to confront. “Consider yourself a wraith she summoned from the future,” he declaimed grandly. “You must become the woman she wanted to be.”

I must, must I? “Oh…Bosch,” I said, holding my metaphorical nose in the fetid aroma of his style. Would he guess I spelled my “Bosch” with a “c”? Aleksa’s poster had inspired me, suggesting as it did the potential monstrousness of everyday life. Or maybe I’m impressionable. Dr. Corso leaned over me, murmuring as he unlocked his office door, “So…this psychic tendency you’ve been plagued with. Tell me about it.”

Six locks to unlock his office door! I had just a moment to wonder why he would bother to lock it up so thoroughly just to await me six feet away along the stairs! But what I should have been thinking about was how to dress up my “little problem” to greet the company.
“In school I got a reputation for seeing the answer,” I said unwillingly. “I had to leave. They thought I was cheating.” It was worse than that, of course. Whole paragraphs used to just come to me that really belonged to other people. I was lucky I wasn’t officially expelled. I learned to be wary of “good” ideas arriving from nowhere. Just say No to inspiration.

“How very, very interesting,” said Dr. Corso. “Tea?”

Dr. Corso’s office had a fire sale quality about it that astonished me. His person was fussily immaculate, but this place looked as ransacked by hooligans. The space was loaded and overloaded with musty, ancient books, shelved and unshelved; old medical engravings of distorted, naked bodies, and scary-looking ethnic masks. Papers scattered everywhere.

“The old curiosity shop,” I said out loud.

“Is that a kind of tea?” asked Dr. Corso. “If so, I don’t have it. Will Imperial Gunpowder do?”

I nodded, afraid to upset the precarious balance in the atmosphere by speaking. Something might fall on me. Even the filing cabinets, piled threateningly atop one other, seemed to bare teeth that on second glance revealed themselves as bicycle locks twisted through the handles to maintain confidentiality. I don’t know about you but as soon as anyone tells me I can’t find something out that’s just the moment I decide I’ve just got to know the truth. There was also a Freudian leather sofa. Stretched out upon that I would feel like a corpse at a viewing. Fortunately, if I moved a chunk of Greek statue – just the torso, mind you – I could sit down in a high-backed leather wing chair.
On Corso’s littered desk was a scrimshaw inkpot, a glass jar of colored crystals, hand weights, postal scales and a scuba knife in a pen tray. No photographs. No framed degrees. Nothing really personal. I instinctively knew he would not be knowable through the items assembled here.
“You’re not like your office,” I said. Making conversation, the way my Mom taught me. He handed me a scalding mug. Imperial Gunpowder is very green.

“I’m so flattered by your interest,” said Dr. Corso, seating himself in his desk chair and waving his own mug back and forth. “The maid is out on leave. Or are you accusing me of imposture?”
Hmmm. I said, “I just expected modern. Chrome and glass. You know–” to distract him from the truth, which was that I’d hoped to see a picture of his wife. I feared this man could pick my brain like a lock. In my experience you never know a husband until you meet his Other Half. It can be pretty scary at times, as if Dorian Gray had been forced to take his picture along when he went out for a stroll.

Dr. Corso steepled his fingers, regarding me with furrowed brow. “I will admit to being surrounded by the detritus of past experiments,” he agreed. “Call this my staging area. I believe it was Edison who said every success is built upon a thousand failures. The failures are of course most interesting. But I might be getting ready to move on.”

He made it sound like an indecent proposal. I sipped hot tea nervously. Innocent comments can be Pandora’s boxes when Corso gets hold of them. In self-defense, I flat-footedly changed the subject.
“I looked at the books you gave me,” I said. “I thought the OBE one was especially interesting.”
He toyed with his scuba knife. “Sound like anything you’d care to try?”

“I’m game,” I said.

He winced a little as if I’d been too gauche.

“How about your college experience so far? Your schedule? How’s that going? Any complaints?” he asked.

Would he stab me if there were? I certain didn’t want to complain about Bex, or say that so far it sure beat Fluffernutter’s. Dr. Corso would never be my “chum”. “Well, I’ve never had a roommate,” I offered. “Its hard enough to share a room, and those Hadleigh rooms are cubicles.”

“Hadleigh is a rite of passage, I’m afraid,” He laughed. “Trust me, your freshman year will pass so fast you’ll think you dreamed it. Maybe we can do something about that roommate. I’ll see if I can dream something up. ” He drummed his fingers in a musical incantation. “Oh, excuse me, “ leaning forward with a sharky smile. ”You don’t dream. I forgot. How’s that tea? Would you prefer sugar?”

The tea had a strange taste sugar might have covered up. I was still trying to get used to it. I like knowing what I’m up against. “I hope it’s not real gunpowder,” I joked.

“Anything is explosive in knowing hands,” he teased. “Allow me to explain what you can expect you first year of college.”

He began to drone on and on about classes. Exams. First Level and second level. Syllabi and study circles. Independent study. Travel. (He himself was leading a group to Amsterdam.) If he’d spoken this boringly at the college fair, I’m sure I wouldn’t have found myself sitting here. Plus the tea was making me sleepy.

My attention wandered irresistibly to the window behind him. He sat gloom-shrouded and it was the sole focal point of light. A round – rose window. A stained-glass insert in its upper sash depicted some sort of intriguing flower. What could it be? Thistle? Tulip? Lily? Hanging just in front a crystal teardrop prism shot the occasional ray right into my eyes just when I thought I could finally focus on the flower behind it. The rainbow feelers quivering toward my brain were not unpleasant. Sort of like a brain massage. I did wish, however, the room weren’t so unbearably hot.

A clanking, banging, hissing radiator steamed the dust into the ruptured air. The maid’s on leave… With anyone but Corso I would have taken off my jacket. As it was I determined to suck it up and suffer.

How could Corso remain so fresh in this hothouse? Maybe it was this mysterious tea…don’t they drink it in the tropics? Lack of sleep caught up to me; I felt my eyelids flutter and it seemed so rude to prop them open with my fingers so I consented to shutter them for the merest pause.
Instantly I found myself standing alone on a wide, level plain. Not a tree, not a cloud or star; an empty world. If I tried glancing toward the tilting horizon my perspective rocked dizzyingly, as if the world itself bobbed at sea. Looking down, at my feet was a manhole cover. It was the only thing in that eternity; the only item in a cracked, starved and sun- baked universe. Asking myself what circle of hell I had happened upon I pried the cover off with my fingers, breaking in the process a couple of perfectly good nails.

I was instantly enveloped by such a hideous stink I reeled back. That smell assumed a life of its own, an ugly putrid paugh reaching out to steal my air and crush my lungs. But I couldn’t seem to get the darn manhole cover back in place; either it had swollen unaccountably or something blocked its way. A gnarled claw appeared, reptilian, first the nail and then the whole three-toed monstrosity reached up to scrape its way toward light. I banged on it hard with my heavy iron shield and the thing began to shriek…

The shriek became an overlooked teakettle while I struggled back to consciousness; finding myself stretched full length on the Freudian sofa, miniskirt riding hip-ward and Dr. Corso busying himself with tea caddies and tongs. Or were those forceps? Thank God for Spanx tights. I vaulted up and, unable to resist, checked my nails. Full set. Did I struggle with dragons only in my sleep?
“Care to try something different?’ he inquired, looming over. “Oolong enhances concentration. Raspberry is for cramps.”

I was having my period, damn his eyes. “Oh, my God,” I said, almost plunging from the slick leather surface to the Aubusson below, “Was I sleeping?” I was even more frightened by the panic in my own voice. I did not plan to discuss my menstrual cycle with my advisor. The only cramps I had were induced by him; in my brain. I thrashed as if still struggling with the monster. Sleeping? Dreaming? Now my lungs were cramped as I gasped over my lost time.

“Don’t let your reptile brain run away with you,” said Corso. “That’s the part of us that turns hat-racks into monsters while we sleep. Remember why you’re here, my darling. Sleep is allowed and dreaming is encouraged. I’m flattered you can be so comfortable with me. Even monsters can be manageable once you figure out what they want. Sometimes I think the greatest gift I give to freshmen is teaching them to relax. They’re so fearful of missing the least little thing. But don’t be concerned. We will meet anon; many times, I hope. This has been a most successful meeting. I learned – and I trust you learned – that under the right circumstances you sleep beautifully. Possibly even dream. Forgotten dreams are anteretrograde amnesia. I assess you a better subject than I could have possibly have expected.” He chuckled. “Almost as ifI dreamed you up. More tea?”

“No, no, no,” I gibbered, sitting up nervously with pressed-together legs. Last time I would wear a miniskirt around this particular monster. And how the hell had I gotten over here? I never sleep so deeply the merest touch won’t wake me up. Plus middle of the day and all…A thought occurred. ”Did you just hypnotize me?” I demanded.

“Why fear hypnosis?” asked Corso. “Hypnosis is but de- programming. It frees us from all these restrictive parts we think we have to play; male-female, old-young, professor-student. In this circular multiverse you must face the fact that everything you fear has already happened. We emerge stronger at the broken places, coming out the other side. At any rate, no one can be hypnotized against his or her will. Permit me, as your mentor, to know more about your will than you possibly can.”

He reached out to touch me, a fingertip touch that stung like a wasp’s tail. “Why not just trust that your elders have the experience to know better than you what you need? Next time choose a safe word.”

What word would serve in this uncertain world? And there wasn’t going to be a next time. I launched myself to my feet. “Got to be going,” I said.

“I don’t comprehend your panic,” he said, coming closer.

“Everything within these walls is confidential.” He gazed at me as if I were just the most fascinating specimen. “Don’t you think you might be overreacting because of that spot of bother when you were little?”

I felt the hairs rise along the back of my neck. How the hell did he know about that? Would it show up on my medical records? Are they that detailed? I racked my brain. Unfair that the embittered whines of therapists, their health and sanity ruined by years of pounding round pegs into square holes should take precedence over anything I had to say. Or – even more chilling thought – maybe Corso didn’t bother with records – maybe he had romped through my mind like a toddler through daisies.

Inelegant, but determined, I changed the subject. That’s what’s gotten me this far. “I’m worried about the exam,” I asserted. And it had the benefit of being true. “I hate exams.“ Multiple choice requires guessing and you know about my problems with that.

“Oh, it’s a physical exam. Nothing to do with book learning or even intelligence,” said Corso smoothly. “Interestingly, neither has dreaming. Opossums have the most REM sleep, dolphins hardly any.” He sat down at his desk to scrawl upon a pad, stuffing the sheet into my palm.

“Take this to Miss Howk at the clinic and get it over with. She’s there right now. ” He leaned across the desk to stage whisper, “Anything we find out?” He zipped his lip and tossed an imaginary key. “Confidential, I assure you. “ Fine by me. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

“Uh, thanks,” I said awkwardly. I stepped over a note thrust beneath the door – not even folded – so I could not miss the stuck-on newsprint letters: I’LL SLEEP WHEN YOU’RE DEAD. I stepped right back as if doing the hokey-pokey. Had the monster had escaped after all?

“My stalker,” said Corso, palming it smoothly. “Be still my heart! The disappointed play these little games. If you knew how valuable these research positions are, Miss Suzino, perhaps you would value yours more.” He flipped his hand dismissively as I scurried away.

4. Telephoto

Those days were busy, settling in. Dr. Corso had left me a lot of reading about psychology in general and out-of-body travel in particular. I had an “advisor” appointment with him and was supposed to make another for an “exam”. I didn’t like any of the psychology books – they utterly failed to hold my interest. Seems like the opposite of retail – in psychology the customer is always wrong – but out-of-body experiences – (OBE’s as author Cadwallader called them) – turned out to actually be quite exciting. I especially liked the pictures.

Cadwallader’s book had illustrations of swamis floating high above admiring crowds and astral projections evanescing up from operating tables and flying out the window unobserved. Sounds like fun if you could skip the needing an operating table part. Because what if you just lay there like a log while they cut into you?

I’ve been trapped like that before. When I was forced into “therapy” as a child I felt considerable pressure to make stuff up, which I stalwartly resisted. I hope I have a good imagination but I wasn’t going to use it to entertain the frowsty pack of losers called upon by Mom to “heal” me.

That’s when I thought I gave up dreaming. But I was willing to entertain Dr. Corso’s idea that we’re dreaming all along and just don’t know it. I obviously had the equivalent of a three-volume novel going in my brain if I could access it. But what if this research project instead of being fun and free association turned out to be more like those unimaginative psycho-cops trying to hijack my brain. I’d resist, of course, because that’s me. Could I lose my scholarship if I wouldn’t “perform”?

Dr. Corso seemed so helpful. But maybe he just likes Bettie Page, like the Fluffernutter dads. I tried not to worry about it. Mom says “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” which turns out to be mean worry about today, because you’ll have plenty of time to worry about tomorrow when it finally gets here.

She also says if you’re good for nothing else you can always serve as a bad example, so maybe I could be the “control”. The psychology books told me all about that. You know, the one in the experiment to whom things don’t happen. The only problem with that is, I wanted to fly. I mean, doesn’t everybody?

Then there was Bex, who had never before, as far as I could recall, evinced so much purpose and forcefulness in his slacker existence. Bex was not backing off either voicemail or email. Delete and ignore, delete and ignore. But when I got an email from Annika, with lots of pictures, I clicked on it eagerly. Annika takes the funniest pictures, all proportion skewed.

She definitely should be some kind of artist when she grows up. I hope she doesn’t have to lose her imaginative charm just to make a living. She finds her oddness embarrassing, but to me it’s endearing. What a terrible world it would be if Annika ever achieved her most sincere ambition and became exactly like everybody else.

But those pictures were too strange. And they couldn’t be from Annika, since they were all of me. They had to be from Bex. Bex had hacked effortlessly into her account; not hard to do since she wears her password all over notebooks and backpacks! Curse you “Mrs. Justin Bieber!”
The pictures were of me here. On campus. Me coming out of the library, greeting Dr. Corso on the Quad, me walking to the dining hall with Aleksa. Was Bex, forgetter of birthdays, denier of Christmas, finally giving meagift? Bexhadtohavebeenhere.Andhowdidhegetpicturesofme and Aleksa, standing at the uncurtained window of our eighth floor room? Telephoto lens?

He must have been standing on the roof of the library; it’s the only building close enough in height. I know people can get up there; it’s a favorite smoking spot. But wouldn’t he have to score a library card? Look legit? Or something? I had a horrible feeling Bex wanted me to see him as superman, an “eye in the sky” always watching me. I had to put a stop to it even if it took a visit to campus security.

3. STALKER

Fairytales are for kids. I thought I already knew that but it seems I could use a refresher course. The buildings depicted on the Cadensis brochure did exist but I would not be resident in any of them. Instead I was introduced to an ugly eight-story concrete box where I was assigned a room on the top floor. I was relieved to see two elevators –they couldn’t both be broken at the same time. One of them was a freight elevator which I didn’t require for my move-in because I didn’t have any stuff; a fact that had its good side as the reason my mother and sister allowed me to come up alone on the train. Goodbyes all behind me, I wheeled my black case into the Hadleigh Hall elevator looking – with my black hair and black coat – like a burial plot salesperson. Sprinkle Garden, anyone?
That must be why Aleksa, my new roommate, seemed so taken aback by my appearance. She was all about color. I‘m talking pinks and purples; she had grown up in the Fluffernutter tradition. So astonished in fact at the sight of me that she almost choked on the pushpins sprouting from her mouth.

“Here, let me help you.” I rushed forward to center the poster she was affixing to what could only be my side of the room. My side, because her wall was already a-frenzy with music and TV stars. Oh, goody. Now I could try to sleep under the gaze of a thousand googly eyes. .

“Interior design major?” I asked and could have bit my tongue right off. There went my New Person Resolutions! I’d vowed to do everything differently – be a finer, nobler, more get-along kind of human being and my ruthless fount of inner sarcasm was blowing it already. Especially since I actually kind of liked this poster. The one on my side of the room.

“Business major, actually,” she said. No harm, no foul. “I’m Aleksa. My dad sells cars so I had to take either accounting or business. And I hate math.”

“That must be why they put the two of us together,” I offered. “I hate math too.” I have to keep reminding myself other people have it rough too. Can’t judge their insides by their outsides. Look at this poor girl forced to be a Daddy clone. Consider the pity party permanently cancelled. “I’m Jazz.”

Aleksa stepped down from the rickety desk chair. She seemed honestly concerned. “Do you know your bangs are uneven?”

Poof! There goes a lot of goodwill right there! However I made a massive effort not to pretend surprise. Instead I said, “Yeah, but this poster is perfectly straight. Kudos!”

She waved her hands around my head. “I think I see what you’re going for, but then shouldn’t the hair on the right side of your head be longer than the other side?”

“Nah. Because that would be symmetrical. And I only wanted to break the rules this one little way.” Because I’m a coward. Face it. I want to draw just a tiny little bit of attention to myself and then run out the door. That’s all.

“Yeah,” said Aleksa. “I so get that. I hate rules, too! Plus nobody’s eyebrows like, match. Right? Like, really!”

Aleksa had tried to solve this eternal problem by drawing hers on. Freehand. Distracting attention from her strangely buggy eyes. I tried so hard not to stare. I was already in serious danger of failing Roommate 101. Let’s concentrate on something we could agree about.

“This is such a cool poster,” I said. Not, repeat NOT the old me who usually looks the gift horse in the mouth and demands an orthodonture upgrade.

“I’m glad you like it,” said Aleksa “I got it in Italy. It’s supposed to be all the circles of hell from Danté. You know, The Inferno.”

Poetry! I did know. Was that why they put us together?

The poster showed Hieronymus Bosch-type, grab-bag, do-it-yourself monsters sprinkled through a brick maze leading down from a gaily pennanted fortress into a dark dungeon of grasping roots and hungry serpents. So much detail. You could look for hours and still find new stuff; just the kind of thing I adore. I cocked my head to read the writing along the side. See me so ready for instruction? I have always treasured maps and guidebooks. Comes from always wanting to be elsewhere.

“Limbo,” I said, reading the first circle. “That’s where all the unbaptized babies go.”
“You’re not a Catholic, are you?” Aleksa asked nervously. Like I would try to convert her.
“Not hardly,” I said. “But I did go to a Catholic high school.”

Didn’t say it was because I was kicked out of the public one! After limbo, the circles were listed as lust, avarice, gluttony, heresy, deceit, rage and violence. According to Dante, lust, the sin high schools make such a big deal about, is practically nothing, just a mite bit more serious than being an unbaptized baby, while the worst sin is treachery. Makes a lot of sense to me! In fact, it’s just like high school. In high school the teachers all want you focusing on your faults, not theirs. Isn’t “treachery” pretending to be someone’s buddy, then delivering them over to disaster? Sound familiar?

“Danger,” I quoted, “Here be dragons.”

I could have used some psychic powers at that moment, but like a lot of fair-weather friends they’re never around when you need them. Intuition is like oxygen – it goes in and out – and you really miss it when it’s not there. That’s when everything goes wrong.

Aleksa was still looking at me like I might sprinkle holy water on her in her sleep. We all have our prejudices. Me, I was terrified Aleksa would sell me a used car.

“I’d love to go to Italy,” I said. See? Seizing and building. It was true enough. It’s my Mom, really, who’s the ultimate tourist. She just wants to stare at everything. I want to actually become what I’m looking at, like a chameleon. Aleksa helped me heave my suitcase up to my bed.

“We were only there a week and everyone was drunk,” said Aleksa matter of factly. “They give kids wine in Italy. I bought this at the airport for my Dad and he didn’t like it at all.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I thought it was cute.” No accounting for tastes! She asked me politely, “How about you? Do you have a major?”

“Undeclared.”

“Really? Then how come Dr. Corso is your advisor?” She sounded envious. When I looked questioning she gestured to the pile on my desk. Books and packets! Homework already!
“He dropped that off for you,” she said. “He’s the only professor I’ve seen at this place who’s hot.”
I was revolted. “Eeeew. He’s old and married and bald.“ “Bald like a gladiator,” she sighed.

“Everyone old and hot is married. By the way, your boyfriend called.”

Suddenly winded, I collapsed on the bed with a plop. Seems like my old life was not going to let me go so easily.

“I don’t have a boyfriend!” I insisted. “I did have, but I broke up with him to come here! Did you talk to him?”

“I was rushing to orientation. But he sure sounded like he didn’t get the message.”

She bugged her buggy eyes at me and tossed artfully ironed blonde hair. “I have a boyfriend at home but I didn’t break up with him to come here.” She shook her finger in my face. “Insurance. You know?” Then, at my expression – treachery, remember, is the lowest of the low – “Oh, he’s probably doing the same thing. My Dad says playing the field is how you find your position – you don’t stay stuck in the first corner they give you! What people don’t know won’t hurt them.”
In my opinion it’s just what people don’t know that hurts them the very worst – I mean they would avoid the gaping sinkhole if they knew it was there. However, agree to disagree. Roommate 201. It’s pass-fail. I was determined to pass.

“My ex lives hours away,” I said hopefully. I had given up my cell phone – partly because it was so expensive, partly because the school gives you a landline with automatic voicemail, and partly because I hoped to distance myself from Bex’s frenzy. But when I checked my email I felt no better. Because there he always was.

“A stalker!” She seemed respectful, as if this increased my status. “What’s he look like?” She propped herself up onto one elbow and regarded me speculatively, as if casting us all in Movie-of-the-Week. She even sounded envious.

“Big and tall. Dark. Lots of dark messy hair and a three-day beard. Full sleeve tattoos. Usually wears a black leather jacket with silver studs.”

Aleksa shivered visibly with pleasure. “I’ll take him!”

“I wouldn’t wish him on my worst enemy,” I insisted. And of course a roommate could never be that. Roommate 301. I comforted myself as best I could – thinking of money. “I think he’s too cheap to actually do anything. He just doesn’t like losing an argument.”
But the niggling worry was, how much doesn’t he like it?