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Still nothing.

“John, you can either come with me to the hospital, or I’m calling an ambulance. But what I’m not going to do is-“

“THE DOOR!! GO!!!”

John hurdled the sofa, then ran and threw himself through the open door. I stood watching as he tumbled onto the carpet and then smoothly unfolded into a dead run down the hall outside. I faintly heard him thump through the stairwell doors, shouting victoriously.

I sighed and looked around his apartment. I found and pocketed his keys, then poked around some more and found his jacket on his bed. I grabbed for it, then yanked my hand back in pain. Something jabbed my finger, left a dot of blood on it. I reached into the jacket’s front pocket...

A syringe.

It was one of those cheap disposable ones they sell to diabetics. There was residue inside and it was fucking black. Like used motor oil. I broke off the needle in the trash and stuck the rest of the syringe in my pants pocket. I had never done this before and I didn’t know if a doctor would need it or not, to examine the contents. If not, I was going to shove it up John’s ass.

I rooted around in his pockets for vials or pipes or anything else that would indicate what he had in his system. All I found was an empty pack of Chesterfields and a wadded-up FedEx receipt for something he sent to a Nevada address.

I stopped myself before I drifted into the area of what could be called “snooping” and locked up the apartment behind me. I went down and found John pacing back and forth in the parking lot, rain pelting him, fists clenched, ready for the dark god Cthulu himself to come flopping out of the first level doors. I tossed him his jacket, told him to get in my car. He opened the door, and froze in fear.

“What?” I barked. “What is it now?”

John was staring at Molly like she was the fluffy devil incarnate.

“John?”

“Uh...  nothing. When did the dog find you?”

“You know this dog? It’s been following me around like a lost, uh, dog.”

“I dunno. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go, before... something follows us.” He glanced up at the apartment building.

I ducked into the car but didn’t start it.

John glanced up at the building once more, said, “Just tell me you could see it. At least that.”

“I didn’t see it. Tell me what this is.”

I held up the syringe. John rubbed his eyes, a man exhausted.

“You don’t wanna touch that. What time is it?”

“Just past five in the morning.”

“What day?”

“Friday night. I mean, Saturday morning. It feels like Friday night because I’ve barely slept yet. And we got work today, remember?”

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

“You called me. You begged me.” John leaned back, closed his eyes. For a second I thought he had dozed off. Finally, he mumbled:

“I did? When?”

“Tell me what this stuff is, John. They’re gonna ask me, first thing. Tell me before you fall asleep.”

“I remember now. Calling you. It’s hard, everything’s running together. I called and called and called. Like a shotgun, firing in every direction hoping to hit somethin’. I bet I called you twenty times.”

“Twice.  You called me twice. John, answer my question.”

“Really?  You kept getting weird on me. You know what I think? I think you’ll be getting calls from me for the next eight or nine years. All from tonight. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t get oriented. Kept slipping out of the time... you’ve got a voice mail message three years from now that’s freaking hilarious.”

I jammed the syringe back into my pocket and started the car. John reached over, grabbed my wrist. His eyes were open and alarmed.

“Wait.  Where are we gonna go? Where are we gonna be safe from this thing?”

“Emergency room, John. I’m not playing this game with you. I don’t know what else to do and I don’t know how we’re gonna pay for it. You’re on a bad trip, or whatever they call it. Maybe it’s a big deal, maybe it’s not. Maybe you can just sleep shit like this off, I don’t know because I’m not a junkie and I’m not a doctor.”

“No.  The hospital’s no good. We’ll go to your place, or somewhere. Anywhere but here.”

I can’t make myself recount the rest of this conversation. I’m too ashamed of it. The long and the short of it is that I let John talk me out of taking him to get treatment, that I worried more about him liking me than about whether or not he lived or died, that on that night, at that moment, I was the lowest, most selfish, worthless coward who ever lived.

So where was there to go? We were both scared, for different reasons. He needed safety and I needed some kind of familiar comfort.

I’m not sure how we decided on Denny’s but that’s where we wound up. Well-lit, familiar, full of people. We sat in a booth and downed cup after cup of coffee in silence, John smoking his cigarettes and sneaking furtive glances out the window, me counting the seconds that went by without any psychotic ravings. I convinced myself with every passing peaceful moment that things were getting better, that the worst was over. In that, I was pants-shittingly wrong.

“Well?” I asked. “How are you doin’? Any better?”

“Do you remember Barbara?”

“Tattoo girl? Wiccan, right?”

“Yeah.  There were all those rumors about her in school, that she could do spells. I dated her for six months waiting to see if she could do some magick or something. I was always tryin’ to provoke her, see if I could get her to cast a spell on me and she never did. But this stuff that’s happened tonight, this feels like witchcraft, Dave. I saw things...”

He trailed off, sucked on his cigarette instead.

“Okay,” I said. “Back up. You don’t know the name of the drug?”

“Robert called it ‘Soy Sauce.’ But I’m thinking now that was just a nickname and that it wasn’t, you know, actual Soy Sauce.”

Robert? Oh, of course. Robert the Fake Magical Jamaican, from the party. I would be finding Robert, I decided. I would be having a word with him.

“Robert?” I asked. “What’s his last name?”

“Marley.”

Of course.

“That’s the only name he gave you?”

“Yeah.  I didn’t want to pry.”

“And he gave you the-“

My cell phone chirped. I ignored it. Who could possibly be calling at this hour? Tina, crying, wanting to get back together a sixth time because she’s at home and lonely? Jennifer Lopez, deciding she was wrong to have brushed me off at the party and wanting to play a game of Hide the Cocktail Wiener?

“-Yes.  He did,” answered John. “We were drunk, in the One Ball parking lot. We were passing around a joint, Head and Nate Wilkes crushed up some kind of pills between spoons and snorted it. There was... other stuff. Anyway. We drank some more.”

BeepbeepbeepBEEP-BEEP...

“And then the Jamaican guy pulls out the sauce. ‘It be openin’ doors to other worlds, mon,’ he says. We made him do it first, saw that he didn’t die. It seemed to make him pretty happy and then—Dave, the guy, I know I didn’t really see this, but the guy shrunk himself, made himself three feet tall. We all laughed our asses off, then he was back normal again.”

“And you still tried that shit?”

“Are you kidding? How could I not?”

The phone sang its electronic ditty again.

“Did anybody else do it?”

“Are you gonna get that?”

“You avoid my question one more time and I will come over this table and punch you in the face. Look into my eyes. You know I mean it. I’m tired of your-“

“-It’s not that easy, Dave. Everything’s mixed up, like if somebody made you watch ten movies at once and then quizzed you a year later on what happened in one of ‘em. That stuff... Dave, I’m remembering things that haven’t happened ye- I mean, that didn’t happen. Even right now, all that stuff from Vegas. Did we go to Las Vegas? You and me?”

The phone chirped a third time. Or fourth, I lost count.

“No, John. We’ve never been in our lives, either one of us. My adopted parents, they went to Atlantic City once but they never took me. Are you the only one who took the sauce?”

“I don’t know, that’s what I’m tryin’ to say. We went to Robert’s place, but Head and the guys didn’t come. I think they got nervous when they saw a needle come out. There were some kids around, the party kind of landed there, at Robert’s trailer. Now please, please, please get your phone or turn it off. That damned song you got in there is driving me up a wall.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You took something that scared Head? The guy who did the stuff that killed River Phoenix just to prove he was the better man?”

“Dave...”

“All right, all right.”

I pulled it out the phone, flipped it open, slapped it to my head.

“Yeah.”

“David?  It’s me.”

Ah, that feeling again. That chill of unreality, my belly full of coffee turning to liquid nitrogen.

The voice was John’s.

No question. The man who was sitting across from me, smoking quietly without a phone anywhere near his head, had called me.

I glanced at John, said into the phone, “Is this a recording?”

“What?  No. I don’t know if we’ve talked tonight, but we don’t have much time. I think I called you and told you to come here. If so, don’t do it. If I haven’t called, then obviously you should still stay away regardless.”

“Who is this?”

John, in the booth there with me, gave me a look. On the phone:

“It’s John. Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you and I can see you,” I said, a tremble in my voice. “You’re sitting right here next to me.”

“Well, just talk to me in person, then. Oh, wait. Do I look like I’m injured in any way?”

“What?”

“Sorry, I gotta go. Say hello to me.”

Click. He was gone.

I sat there, the phone still pressed to my ear, suddenly very, very tired.

If I had been sitting with anyone else I would have assumed I was being set up for some drunken practical joke. But I knew this wasn’t some elaborate prank of John’s for two reasons. One, John knows how I get when I’m pissed off and wouldn’t intentionally do it and two, it wasn’t funny.

I was scared. Truly scared, maybe for the first time since I was a little kid. I looked at John, he looked pale and half dead. My feet were wet and cold, my contact lenses were itching, my brain aching from sleep deprivation. I wanted to burn that cell phone, go home and lock my doors and curl up under a blanket in the closet. This is the breaking point in a human life, right here. This is waking up on an operating table to find aliens peering down at you, this is hearing the audible voice of God telling you the date the world will end. This is seeing a family of bigfoots in the forest and being without a camera.

Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a website soon.

There is Normal Society and then there is the Abnormal Freaks Who Deserve Our Public Pity and Private Ridicule Society. The first is the world of good jobs and Christmas shopping and marriages and vacations and the scent of new cars. And then there is that other world, the world of the glazed eye, of people who chant at the moon and spout conspiracy theories and get sexually aroused by furry animal costumes. Some dress all in black to carry out vampire rituals and others collect cats until they’re a furry shoulder-to-shoulder flood on every floor of the house. The Abnormal travel among the Normal and leave behind them a trail of sickeningly awkward conversations and stifled laughter, of hidden smirks and rolled eyes. And worst of all, pity. On that night, beginning with my encounter with the Jamaican and ending with that phone call, I had been kidnapped out of Normal Society and imprisoned in Freak Society forever and ever. It was like dying.

“Was that me?” asked John, seeming to already know the answer. “That was me, wasn’t it?”

I looked down at my coffee, considered flinging it into John’s face.

“I’m sorry, Dave. I really am. For messin’ up your sleep cycle and for everything that’s about to happen, the people that are going to, uh, explode.”

I was already up, walking out. I guess John paid at the counter behind me, I don’t know. I pushed my way out the glass door, dug out my keys. I opened the driver’s door and Molly the Dog immediately flung herself out onto the pavement, barking her head off, looking right at me. John walked up behind me as Molly trotted off across the empty lot, turned and barked some more, then trotted a few steps further and barked again. John had this odd look on his face as he watched the dog, the look of a man who is hearing a fascinating story over dinner.

“I think she wants us to follow her,” he said.

She scampered off down the sidewalk, glancing back at us to make sure we were coming. I slid into the car.

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