The hallway washes past periphery and into focus. Vulgar fluorescents undulate on fraying periwinkle carpet. A knee-high grove of plastic ferns claws at sickly cream wallpaper.
I tried to flash-card-find the place within hollowing synapses. Landed on a coat hanger and shoestring mobile made of 1970's Star Wars figures, as seen from a reclining patent leather chair. Chewie spins faster than the others, missing a leg. Milked over eyes decipher hidden contours in the black divots of ceiling tile, my solitary game of Rorschach cloud gazing to pass the time.
Groping past gauzed hallucinations courtesy of the "Mickey Mouse Nose" whispering its nitrous oxide secrets, I recognized my childhood dentist's office. Cavities. Light Rock 98.9 spewing in amorphous tongues, sassafras choruses swirling inside the distant whir of lilliputian drills. Music for adults then, and when I grew up, music for no one in particular.
Then, as if waking, I'm greeted again by the Absence. Hello back. Swaddled in her resplendent cathode emptiness, a VCR stuck looping the moments directly after the FBI warning fades. And then -
That dog that bit me once is biting me now. Our school bus bellows behind the autumnal oak skeletons separating my neighborhood from yours. Was it a boxer? Wasn't his name Bosco? Slow-motion spittle stretching from my bloodied arm reminded me of spider webs shining with gobs of rain - vicarious memory by way of National Geographic. Nothing I ever really saw.
Tangents always delivered me back into the arms of sweet Auntie Absence. Held by nothing, surrounded in nothing.
Thumping.
Now its after midnight, stare fixed deep on the subway tunnel for the first threadbare sliver of headlight, tricking myself into seeing it, then hearing it. Ghost train. Folked-up tunnel troubadour refuses to get his untied boot in step with his banjo, jew harp, and yowling tenor. A million collective stink-eyes later and the city still beats its goddamn drum like we're going to buy something. A girl takes off fingerless mittens to applaud. I hate her. I should have pitied her, in retrospect.
Meanwhere back in the Absence, everything is retrospect. Bass lines from a hundred better songs goose-step with me through the void, schizophrenic film score for more misfired (and increasingly mundane) associative memories. Crockle and his team were in for a surprise when their number came up. All of us expected, at least in the beginning, for SOMNI to gravitate towards my greatest hits - the best head I ever got, our heroic stock-market debut, or maybe my brother's failed toast at my first wedding. Instead the feedback architecture seemed to get off on things that stuck to the ribs for no reason at all.
As if in sympathy, the Absence offered up something more appropriate.
"Andy," Crockle jeers over a tumbler of Czech Absinth, "We deserve more than this. There should be twelve parades, fucking Mardi Gras. I feel like God's gift to everything tonight. No shit, I feel like God his-self."
I tip a more sensibly sized glass of honey bourbon at him like I'm Humphrey Bogart. I felt like Bogie, back then - the broadening folds of my age lending a certain dignity, an acceptance of fact. "I seem to remember reading somewhere that 'SOMNI is for those of us who don't get to go to Heaven…'"
"'…for one reason or another!'" he finishes with a laugh and a swig. The infamous quote was mine, recited to a pack of starving microphones on the steps of Tonkers Corp HQ in Atlanta following Project SOMNI's unveiling. It was our tactful response to some early leaks that had spun up a maelstrom of bad press (and bad reporters) looking to crucify Tonkers, and by extension me, for inevitable crimes against humanity. Of course, one of my PR genies actually wrote the quip for me, but I could have come up with it. If I was born during the the halcyon days of clever T-shirt slogans, I would have still wound up a rich man. Luckily I was born in a different time with other, more useful talents.
"I feel like I'm saving the world with SOMNI," he goes on, thumbing the edge of his glass. "I bet you feel that way all the time with your swollen fucking head." Crockle was our resident quantum software savant, and like all good savants, was terrible company.
"Me and my huge head are happy enough. But all three of us will just have to wait. They'll throw your parades when it's finished." I knew what I was inviting, but I never could stand any horse stretched higher than my own.
"Sure. Now we just wait for you to die. Let's feel that pulse…" Crockle grabs my wrist and throws exaggerated glances at a watch he isn't wearing. "Nothing. Its like your heart took off with all your money. Might as well hook you up tonight."
"When the doctors say I've only got a few weeks, I'm all yours." I drop back enough to make my cheeks clench. "Not before."
"It's a date," he says. "Cold of you to make the rest of us wait. What about the little girl that dies just a few days too late? Or war vets who deserve to go out easy?"
"What if its not a paradise? Someone needs to be first, to be sure nothing goes wrong,” I say.
"You bit shit. Now you're putting it on," he says, topping himself off.
“How many years, give or take, does SOMNI simulate?” I ask.
“C'mon, Andy,” he shakes out. “You know.”
“Do you? You designed it. Thousands, right? For every day here?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“That's a long time,” I say.
“Sure is,” he says.
"You take that number for granted," I say. “I don't.”
"No need to grease me up. We're not at one of your press orgies," he says. "Besides, what difference does it make if its you or somebody else that goes first?"
"There's a difference." I'm all bourbon now, glass empty. I gnaw on ice.
In those days Crockle was rubbing his paws together for me to set sail so he could pretend SOMNI was his baby from the outset. Getting his name in the credits first, big and bolded, played to the balsamic in his blood. We had been real friends, once, and his salivating for my death did not bother me. Of all the carrion on Earth I deserved premiere vultures, and I knew no one who could pick my bones cleaner than Crockle. He could have the whole carefully patented, trillion-dollar afterlife industry all to himself once I was gone. It was all the same to me, as long as I was first.
I was born too late to be the first man on the moon; I had to buy my right to be the first man in Heaven.
"Your call, Moneybags,” Crockle yammers on. “If it were up to me, I'd roll out the red carpet tonight, right now. Go pluck some lucky fucks straight outta St. Joseph's. Start with the burn victims, the terminally ill. The kids, Andy! Christ almighty."
"If it were up to you, you'd tell perfectly healthy people to get in line right behind. Why wait?"
"Fucker," he slurs back, pouring Absinth into my glass.
I got real drunk that night. As I chased sleep, I was haunted by an adage printed in the margins of an antique Farmer's Almanac I once bought at charity auction:
Stake your Claim where no-one knows the Corn will Grow; onward Lads and Westward ho!