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11:56pm 11/02/2005
  Roger is upside down, spinning somewhere in space. His eyes swim with mysterious tears, vision a soft cloud above his head. His legs, he's noticed, are weightless, lolling and bouncing like gentle, lazy waves.

The music filters in to him, radiating pulses of warmth, in through the tips of his fingers, trickling down to his toes. It is like being drunk, he realizes, like being super drunk and possibly stoned and--the icing on the cake--getting paid for it.

This makes him laugh and when he laughs, the water in his eyes sloshes, spilling over the lip of the sockets and down the length of his cheek. It flows backwards into the shell of his ear, pooling there, cool and still, and he feels it as though he can see it.

The music moves in and out, and suddenly Roger can't tell whether or not its coming from his head or from somewhere else, somewhere out in the vast universe far beyond his reach. He is just figuring it out--or perhaps he has just started, he can't quite be sure--when a voice hovers above him, attatched to a blur of whiteness.

"How do your eyes feel?" it asks.

Roger blinks, watching the crystals of ice fall away, pushing into a fresh sheet of diffusion.

"Okay," he says.

"Just okay?"

"Fuzzy," he adds.

It sounds as though he is speaking through a fog, a blanket of sound-steam. He reaches out his hand to touch it but finds that his arm won't move.

The blur is moving.

"I'm going to check your vitals," it says, "just a blood pressure and a temperature and a couple of reflex response tests, okay? Nothing that will hurt."

Roger nods, yet cannot.

"Okay," he says.

He is Roger Warshowski, age 24. Caucasian male, 6'2", 190 pounds, single, non-smoker. Albuterol for athsma, Buspirone for anxiety as directed. Allergic to strawberries and Ovaltine Malted Milk Mix. Prone to sleeplessness, loss of appetite, headaches, earaches, eyeaches, backaches, constipation and coughing. Average output of urine: 3 litres per 6-hour interval. Longest period without food: 5 days. Cholesterol 136. Countless lipid panels, urine dips, sugar checks, chem panels, biopsies, Graham stains, TB tests and MRIs, scattered thoughout thick manilla folders. He imagines taking them up to a balcony, making them into paper airplanes, flying them off into the city below him. Watching as they fall to earth, each containing the random statistics of his life. The only proof, it seems, that he is alive at all.

He is number A-372, Patient 990, Varient 5, 78, 12, 147 and 20 respectively. The little white boxes are all in a row. No side effects from Clustosin, the new wonder-cure for athsmatics. Distinct lack of disfunction due to a prolonged IV drip of an as-yet-unnamed, REM-inducing solution. On placebo for three different panic studies, the results of which were twice blind, cross-checked and stored deep in the data banks of a city university hospital.

They say he is good at it, giving him the highest praise, claps on the back as he exits the rooms reserved for the studies, dressed in street clothes. His jeans feel funny after the weeks in hospital-issue jammies--scrubs if he's lucky--and the doctors in their coats appear sharper, their edges well-defined. They smile and shake his hand, nurses and students clustering at their sides, everyone thankful for his help. "You're the only one who didn't vomit," they tell him, looking on admiringly as he bends to tie his shoe or pulls on his jacket, more than the others had been able to do. And Roger has seen them, too, staggering off towards the bathrooms, pink rears showing through the split in their gowns. Dribbling various fluids all across the hospital floor.

But not him.

He is the king.

And it has its perks. Trays of Jello. Warm, endless, sterilizing showers. Enough time to sit and read, even while hooked up to seventeen thousand brain wave monitors, a perfect excuse to catch up on his television viewing.

And 20,000 dollars in his pocket.		  
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01:55am 11/02/2005
  Somewhere in the night, Lily is dreaming.

She is rushing through water, a blue tunnel that parts just for her in a way she can remember almost as truth. It washes over her back as she slides ever forward, a hello-goodbye , a perfect curl of a wave cresting in front of her. In moments, she is standing, gliding up top on the surface, looking down into a world of fish and sand and shells. The board is smooth beneath her feet, carving through the water like a knife.

She coasts forever, feeding out from the sea, and then ducks under, watches the wave crash above her head in a tumble of green and foam. Treading water, slick and still at the bottom, the chaos cascades over her, rushing down towards the shore. Weight balanced, she remains, clutching gritty sand in the palms of her hands.

Under it, under everything, she is safe.		  
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01:54am 11/02/2005
  The hour is ungodly when Luden approaches the elderly gentleman, a man who sports only half of a very bushy mustache. He looks like a lopsided walrus, his upper lip adorned with a lining of char. The front of his sport coat is covered in ash, lapels singed to a thin, crispy line. His pants are in a pile at the foot of the gurney, legs sticking out from spade-patterend boxer shorts. The legs are lumpy and dotted with hair; they remind Luden of potatoes.

Luden is tired and can feel it in the muscles of his neck, in the moisture that has gathered under his arms. He has been on call for what feels like days, mostly taking vitals. That's what he seems to do most of. Throat swabs, blood draws, butt wipes, ear checks. Pressing gloved hands against the flabby stomachs of possible apendectomies. Pulling gum out of toddlers' ears. Feeling for the faint throb of an old ladies pulse. Over and over, til he can do it in his sleep because, if he gets right down to it, that is what he is doing.

The sweat oozes onto the fabric of his scrubs, staining them there. He is beyond caring and ignores it, thinking of the prospect of a shower.

The hospital is hot, hot and quiet.

The man with the half moustache says nothing. His face radiates pain, whether physical or spiritual, Luden cannot tell, but the distress is there and suddenly Ludens' own sorrow runs deep. He can almost feel it pass right through his shirt it is so familiar, this recognition, how it hones in with such strength. It is always someone, some anonymous lump swaddled in standard-issue blankets that grabs him out of his professionalism, taking him far away, a glance, a manner, a movement. But it cannot be this man, he reasons, cannot be the very fact of him, the look of him, for he sports the classic symptoms of woe and despair that come with the territory... Everything repeated exponentially in the stream upon stream of ailing strangers.

Then Luden sees it, if just for a moment, too fast for him to fully catch. The man has turned in his direction, clutching the remnants of his jacket, expression in disarray, all the confusion of the world in his watery brown eyes. They lock gazes a moment and something passes between them, a funny bridge from iris to iris. And then it is gone, just as he knew it would. Luden walks to him, opens his mouth, watching the man watch him.		  
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01:53am 11/02/2005
  It is at one-thirty am on a Saturday morning that Elken Otts, stuck with nervous sweat to the floor of his best friends bathroom, swears he will give up drinking. He reeks of vodka and vomit and cheese, though none of these are, thankfully, in sight. The front of his forehead rests against the base of the toilet, condensation cool on his cheek, bare stomach exposed to the smoothness of the tiles.

He remembers bits and pieces of the night in slow motion, a scattered blur of images accompanied by a muffled soundtrack of inaudible words. The drive from Imogen's house, that nervous flicker in his stomach as he flew through the intersection, save in the belly of his off-roader. Passing the porn shop to pick up Robes, jetting out onto the boardwalk bridge with the bass bumping through the subwoofers stacked in the back. He remembers crashing back on Matto's couch, the smell of the girls as they walked past, a young smell, a smell he wish he understood. A smell mixing with Imogen's smell, two things both alien and intertwined.

And before that there is his mother, sagging face askew, pink lipstick making her mouth an angry shell, bellowing at him about the groceries. How there is a sting in his heart that sets him racing because he is almost out the door, out the door and towards promise. He remembers Luden sliding towards the car, just under Penny's radar, the slash-and-burn sounds of the Playstation as Lilian hammered her way through a death warpath. He remembers his mother's mouth moving but not her words, the cleanliness, the sharpness and spaciousness of the road ahead. Remembers all of it leaving as soon as he feels the car coast up and over the hill.

He remembers things with Imogen he dares not tell anyone.		  
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TIME   
01:51am 11/02/2005
  It is eleven pm on a Friday night when Penny Otts, Parliment in hand, decides to quit smoking. She is looking at the faded spot on her finger where, just three years ago, her wedding ring sat and wonders why it hasn't tanned over. Her thumb strokes a pattern there, the way it did when the fat lump of gold bumped up against her knuckle and suddenly realizes that she is getting old. It hits her like a ton of bricks and, instinctively, she reaches a hand to her cheek, touching the soft skin there, feeling for new crevices. She does this ten, sometimes twenty times a day but, in her stubbornness, she refuses to equate it with anything other than what it is--a search for wrinkles.

The air is clear and she tastes the ash from her cigarette and it begins to fill her entire mouth, smoke heating her tongue. Below the waist of her pants, a small pouch of stomach-fat sags, the last of what her fast-acting diet pills won't liquidate, and she tugs at it pensively. By degrees, it rushes back to her, all her regrets forming solid alliances with ungainly freckles on her arm, the mole on her shoulder, the flab on her buttocks. The three deadbeat boyfriends are equal to a stretch mark, the botched estate sale to a crows foot. All the times the kids have fucked up in school to one more yellowed toenail, a toenail that she paints over with a garish red that is, truth be told, ten years too young for her.

Without ceremony, Penny flicks that last filter over the buckled railing of the porch, imagining its flight over the snowdrifts, its projected landing between the chasims. Squinting, she can just make out the detail of the beach, streetlight catching the bend in the road around it. The ice glints dully at her, unmoving, solid.

Beyond that, she sees nothing.		  
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