“Erna, sometimes I wonder if it was a mistake to let you have an apartment here.”
“Admit it. You love having me around.”
“Not when I have work to do.”
Okay, whatever was going on here, it was none of my business, and I should get the hell out. I took a few cautious steps toward the desk.
“Hey, yeah,” I said. “Look—Mitchell? Erna? I’m really sorry, guys. I don’t know what happened, but I’ll show myself out, okay?”
They didn’t seem to hear me.
They didn’t react to me at all.
“Come on, Mitchell, don’t be a square your whole life,” Erna said. “Just one old-fashioned at Brady’s. Or maybe a beer. It’s quitting time. I want to have a little fuuuuuun.”
“It’s Tuesday night,” Mitchell said, “and you should be going home to bed.”
“You always say that. And you never join me.”
“Stop it. You should really check on your boy.”
I was beginning to get a little freaked out so I started waving my arms.
“Uh…Yo! Over here. Can you people really not see me, or are you just screwing around?”
“Stop worrying about the boy,” Erna said. “You’re always telling me what to do with him. You act like he’s yours sometimes.”
“No, I don’t. I’m not good with kids.”
“I’m not asking you to be. Which is why he’s downstairs and I’m asking you out for a drink.”
Erna took a final drag from her cigarette, then blew the smoke out long and slow before mashing the butt in a glass ashtray on Mitchell’s desk. I noticed a black nameplate on a brass holder: DR. MITCHELL DEMEO. Doctor, huh? I checked the rest of the room. There were two filing cabinets shoved up against one wall.
Then I realized this wasn’t an apartment; this was an office. How the hell did I end up in a doctor’s office?
Erna turned and walked past me, the rough fabric of her dress brushing against my bare arm. She sat back down on the couch, which was more of a high-backed lounge chair, all dark wood and maroon cushions. Her polka-dot dress flowed around her. She turned her feet inward and stared off into nothing. She was pouting.
“You never want to do anything fun,” she said.
With nothing else to do, I sat down next to her. Maybe one of these two crackheads would notice me then. My limbs felt impossibly heavy, as if invisible weights had been strapped to my wrists and ankles. I needed a minute to think. I turned to Erna and drilled my eyes into the side of her head.
“So, just to be clear,” I said, “you can’t hear a thing I’m saying, can you?”
Erna said nothing.
“Not one thing.”
Erna said nothing.
“Like I’m not even here.”
Still nothing.
“I’ve got this rash on my testicles that, I swear, is brighter than those red dots on your dress.”
Still nothing.
“Okay then. Just wanted to have it straight.”
I might have been invisible to her, but I could smell her perfume, which was sweet and pungent. Her lips were open slightly, like she wanted to say something but was holding back. Outside, the El train cars rumbled down their tracks, vibrating the floorboards beneath our feet. I could hear them screech to a halt, the doors thump open, and after a short while, close again. This all felt real. I felt real. Why couldn’t these people see me?
“Come on, Mitchell, don’t be an asshole. I’m not asking you to abandon your work. I’m just asking for one little drink.”
“Erna, please. Not tonight.”
She sighed, stood up, then padded softly across the room until she was standing next to Mitchell. Then she dropped to her knees. Mitchell pretended not to notice, but he was a bad actor. His eyes flicked to the left. On the floor, Erna tugged at his belt. It wouldn’t come loose. She tugged again.
“Erna. You don’t have to do this…”
“Ah, there we go. You’re too tense. You need to relax.”
There was the soft metal purr of a zipper, and then Erna’s head disappeared behind the desk. Mitchell let his oversized head fall back, mouth open in a fat O, and all of a sudden I really didn’t want to be here.
I darted across the room, averting my eyes, wishing I could turn off my ears so I wouldn’t hear the slurping.
Now that I was seeing it up close, the door also had a piece of cardboard taped over one panel of pebbled glass. I reached for the knob. It was slippery. I tried to turn it quietly, but I couldn’t seem to maintain a hold on the bastard.
There was more slurping, more moaning.
I forgot about being stealthy. I grabbed the knob hard, like I wanted to crush it, and gave it a cruel twist to the right. Behind me a moan turned into an oh that’s right momma that’s right. The door latch clicked. The door opened with a creak.
“Wh-whoa…what was that?”
“Nothing, Mitchell. Just relax.”
The door went clack behind me. I looked down the hallway, which was dark but clean. The walls were gray and peeling. The threadbare carpet was gray, too, with faded pink floral designs blended into the fabric. Which was weird, because when I moved in earlier today the walls were painted off-white and the bare floor was covered in grime and dust. This was not the hallway I’d walked through earlier today. None of this made any sense whatsoever.
On the second-floor landing there were three doors leading to other apartments. As I walked by, the door to 2-C opened a crack. A sleepy-eyed boy of about twelve, with a shock of unruly red hair and wearing oddly old-fashioned footie pajamas, peeked out at me.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m nobody,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
“Did you come from the doctor’s office? Is my mom up there?”
Oh God. His mother was Erna. I didn’t want to be the one to tell him that yeah, his mother was upstairs, but she was a little busy at the moment. Then I realized something.
“Wait,” I said. “You can see me, can’t you?”
The kid narrowed his eyes skeptically.
“Are you one of the doc’s patients?”
“No. I just moved in.”
“Moved in where?”
“Upstairs.”
“Nobody lives upstairs. Nobody except the doctor. And he doesn’t even live there. That’s his office. Who are you?”
“What I am is really confused and lost and I’m starting to think this is one long, weird-ass dream. What do you think? Do you think we’re both dreaming right now?”
His eyes went wide. He quickly slammed the door shut.
Okay. So to recap: I wasn’t totally invisible. I was in the correct apartment building.
Only, I wasn’t.
I needed some fresh air. Maybe that would wake me up. Maybe I could walk downstairs to that beer bodega and have a nice cold one while I waited for consciousness to return. That would be a nice way to pass the rest of a dream, right?
I stepped outside the front door, expecting a sticky wave of early June humidity. Instead, a gust of icy air sliced through my body. Jesus Christ, did the temperature just drop sixty degrees?
Then I looked down Frankford Avenue. It took my brain a few seconds to register what I was seeing.
Cars.
Very, very old cars.
Frankford Avenue was lined with them Buicks, Cadillacs, Dodges, Fords, Pontiacs. All of them vintage autos you don’t see outside of 1970s crime flicks. Giant slabs of American-made steel. It was as if someone had moved all of the normal cars off the street in preparation for a 1970s muscle car show. Which didn’t make sense. If you were throwing a vintage auto show, you weren’t going to throw it under the El.
Another cannon blast of freezing air cut through my body so hard my eyes teared up. I’d never had a dream this vivid before.
This was still Frankford Avenue—sort of. The El was still up above me, but the framework was the old green metal one they tore down in the late 1980s. The store windows were naked
—not a single metal security shutter in sight. And the stores were all different. Candy shops and children’s clothing emporiums and nonchain drugstores, with hand-painted paper sale signs advertising new products and sale prices taped to the windows.
More jarring was the fact that my grandpop’s block was no longer a broken smile. All eight buildings were there, constituting a full block. There was a diner. A lingerie shop. The old original El station, with the pizza stand on the ground floor. The bodega on the ground floor was gone; instead, it was an old-fashioned delicatessen.
This was a dream, then. I was dreaming about the Frankford I knew as a kid.
But these weren’t hazy, sunbaked Polaroid childhood memories. This was Frankford after dark, and when I was a kid I was never allowed out on the streets of Frankford this late at night.
I thought about going back inside, finding some dream clothes in an imaginary closet somewhere and coming back out to explore. But even though I was shivering, I couldn’t resist the urge to go exploring right now.
I walked around in a daze. Frankford Avenue looked more cramped then I remembered, the El not quite as high above me. There were no empty storefronts. There was very little graffiti. This was like a movie set Frankford, built to approximate what it must have looked like in happier times. Was I remembering all of this with any degree of accuracy? Or was I making all of this shit up?
Somewhere around Church Street, about ten blocks away, I felt something whip around my leg—a sheet of newspaper. My eyes were drawn to the headlines first, but the headlines made no sense:
SAIGON ENDORSES NIXON’S VISIT TO CHINA
I glanced at the old-timey font on the top of the paper, expecting it to read The Philadelphia Inquirer.
But instead it was The Evening Bulletin, a newspaper that had been shuttered for close to thirty years now. In the right-hand corner, a black box told me I was holding the four-star sports edition. The cover price was twenty-five cents.
The date: February 22, 1972.
Which happened to be the day I was born.
The night sky turned a shade brighter, as if God suddenly remembered shit, yeah, morning, better flick the dimmer switch up a little. A dizziness washed over me like I’d been mainlining tequila.
There were more people out now, rushing past me, and they couldn’t see me—the shivering guy in T-shirt and gym shorts on a freezing morning in late February 1972. They were working-class Frankford people, in coveralls and slacks and dresses, making their way from their rowhomes and apartments to the El station for their daily commute. I wondered what downtown Philly looked like now, in this dream 1972. Maybe I should follow the crowd, hop on the El with them, check the city out. Look at the skyline in the time before they broke the City Hall height barrier.
But then another head rush hit me. My skin started to itch and burn. I decided to skip my trip down to dream Center City and go back to the apartment…the office…whatever. Maybe Erna was done blowing Mitchell by now. Maybe I could lay down on that stiff-looking sofa and then wake up back in bed with Meghan. I could question the mechanics later.
My skin was really burning now. I started to worry a little. I didn’t want to dream about burning to death on Frankford Avenue only to wake up with a space heater knocked over on top of me and discover, wow, I’ve actually burned to death. Cue Rod Serling.
I raced down the avenue, weaving in and around people who couldn’t see me. Only one dude, pushing a broom in front of his corner drugstore, seemed to follow me with his eyes.
By the time I reached the third floor of Grandpop Henry’s building I was having serious head rushes. Usually one head rush was enough to make you slow down, but these kept coming. I needed to lie down. Or wake up. Or something. I reached for the doorknob.
It was locked.
I tugged at it, then remembered. It had self-locked when I’d left.
Wait, what was I talking about? This was a goddamned dream, so it shouldn’t matter if it self-locked. I yanked on it even harder, kicked the door, screamed at it. Come on, dream door. Open. Up. Now. Erna? You in there? You mind removing yourself from Mitchell’s lap long enough to answer the door, maybe?
The early-morning sun found the east-facing window. Light prismed all the hell over the place. My skin felt unreasonably hot, Hiroshima-afterblast hot, ready to melt at the slightest touch.
I threw a shoulder at the door, hoping the dream construction crews who dealt with 1972 used cheap flakeboard. But the door held firm.
I slammed my shoulder into it, then again, and again, throwing an increasing amount of body weight with every blow.
Still nothing.
The sun was blazing through the window at the end of the hall in earnest now. I raised my left hand to shield my eyes and immediately felt a searing pain, like I’d grabbed the wrong end of a hot curling iron. I glanced up through watery eyes just in time to watch a beam of light burn away two of my fingers.
First the ring finger.
Then the pinky.
A scream forced its way out of my mouth, and then I jerked my hand away from the light. Pressed my back up against the door. Did a beam of sunlight really just slice through my fingers like it was a light saber?
I forced myself to look down. My ring and pinky fingers were on the floor, at my feet.
They weren’t severed. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. There was no blood, no ripped flesh or exposed bone. They were Play-Doh fingers, detached from a Play-Doh hand.
After a few seconds they begin to fade away and disappear completely.
III
The Thing with Three Fingers
I woke up on a hospital gurney with a skull-crushing headache and a raw throat. People in blue smocks brushed against my bed, which was jammed up against a wall in a busy hallway. Every time the bed jolted it sent another sledgehammer tap on the spike slowly inching its way to the center of my brain. My mouth tasted like dirty pennies. I wanted to throw up.
After a while I rolled over and used the metal rails to pull myself up to a sitting position. I ran my fingertips across my five-day stubble, patted my chest, my belly. All there. I was still wearing my nylon shorts and T-shirt. The ring and pinky fingers were still attached to my left hand.
But both were dead numb, like I’d fallen asleep on them. They wouldn’t bend either. Not unless I cheated and used my other hand, which I noticed was now hooked up with an IV needle. Good Christ, what had happened last night?
Somebody blew past my gurney, flipping through papers on a clipboard.
“Hey,” I called out, and the guy stopped midstride.
“Yeah?”
“Where am I?”
“Frankford Hospital, man. You O.D.’d.”
“I what? How did I get here?”
“Girlfriend brought you in. She was pretty freaked out. I were you, I’d think about help. But I can’t be the first person to tell you that.”
And then he continued on down the hall. O.D.’d?
I needed to get out of here. I grabbed the IV needle with the three good fingers of my left hand, yanked it out, sat up. Some blood shot out, so I pulled up the tape and recovered the puncture. I hated needles.
So this was Frankford Hospital. I hadn’t been inside this place in years—and that had been the old building, which had been razed and replaced by this one.
My grandpop was here somewhere, on one of these floors. For a moment I thought about stopping up to see him, just to get the obligation out of the way. I could kill two birds with one stone—recover from overdose, check; visit grandfather, check. But then I remembered I was shoeless, hungover and confused. I needed a shower and a nap. A nap to last at least a week.
And I needed to make sure Meghan was okay, and that she didn’t think I was a complete dick.
Once I was reasonably sure I wasn’t going to puke, I swung my legs over the side of the gurney then slid off. My first few steps were wobbly, but okay. I walked out of the hospital. Nobody tried to stop me. And why would they? I wa
s just a junkie in nylon shorts and a threadbare T-shirt. Hell, I was doing them a favor.
I made the four-block walk back to the apartment, carefully avoiding beads of glass on the sidewalk. One old woman, wrapped in a dirty gray shawl and a badly stained and ripped dress, stared at me from the doorway of a long-closed delicatessen. There was shock and anger in her eyes.
“It’s you! You finally showing your face around here?”
Welcome home, Mickey Wade.
“You son of a bitch!”
I kept walking.
Meghan had locked the door. But she’d also thought to put the key under the doormat, bless her soul. I could only imagine what I’d put her through last night. No wonder she hadn’t stuck around.
Inside the apartment the sofa bed was still pulled out, covers mussed, pillows twisted up and askew. Boxes had been pushed out of the way. I must have blacked out in bed. She panicked, called 911.
I pressed my face against the pillow that had been hers. It smelled like her—vanilla and the sweetest slice of fruit you can imagine. So at least that part hadn’t been a dream. Meghan had really been here last night.
And somehow I’d managed to O.D. on beer and Tylenol.
There was nothing in Grandpop Henry’s microscopic fridge except two Yuenglings from the night before. I didn’t feel like walking back downstairs to buy something sensible for breakfast, like a Diet Coke or bottle of Yoo-Hoo. So I twisted open a beer. Maybe a beer would outsmart my headache. And if the headache wasn’t fooled, the cold would at least soothe my throat. Besides, isn’t this what unemployed writers are supposed to do? Drink a cold beer at eight in the morning?
I opened my laptop to search the job boards. There wasn’t much to search—not for unemployed journalists, anyway. In years past, an out-of-work journalist could fall back on teaching or public relations. But now actual teachers and public relations flacks were duking it out, death match–style, for the same jobs. Journos didn’t stand a chance.
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