As I looked at the boy’s gyrating head, I knew two things: that by digging him out, I forfeited one of three chances, and, that I would not be able to resist helping.

  I felt long fingers wrap around my wrist.

  “You would make the choice for him?” Edgar said.

  “Get your goddamn hands off him,” Tracy said, passing us both and strolling through the doorway, not without a You ain’t shit sneer, of course.

  “Hey, hey,” I said, easing myself toward the boy, but this spooked him, and he writhed, little hooks of finger catching the lip of Pink beneath his head, turning red and then white with pressure before slipping off again.

  I remembered how difficult pulling my own Pink apart had been and thought, How in the fuck is this kid ever going to make it in here?

  I pictured him fetally cuddling the television screen while the rummagers surrounded him in the dark, just out of eyeshot, then pictured him following Brenda’s way out of that darkness.

  There was the urge to help in the way my dad would a sick animal past the point of any relief of suffering save a mercy death. I speculated Edgar may have done just that were the rest not standing witness. It would be simple as balling my shirt and covering his airways.

  Tracy, color in her cheeks from the morphine tickle of warm, pink life, tore the first resistant V down the middle of the child’s prison. I joined her, feeling only a slight reprieve from my hopelessness with the balm of company.

  Doc clop-swished his limping mango body to us, huffed all his breath out through his nostrils as he kind of got to his knees in the careful sway of someone adjusting to a cold pool.

  His vigor abbreviated to a sustainable pawing, Doc helped us dig the boy out while Edgar watched from the doorway, alert, thin, apathetic.

  The squirming boy’s rolling eyes stilled as his wet arms pulled free, and then his torso. He did not speak, only made throat sounds like unoiled door hinges while he weakly assisted us.

  “That’s alright, Son,” Doc said, lowering his head to make eye contact. “Just take it slow and tug. It eventually gives.”

  The boy, who was older than I’d first realized, maybe ten, stilled his hands on either side of an eyelash-sized tear, blinking big brown eyes with rectangular fluorescent reflections for pupils.

  “Is this the Demon’s Dream?” the boy said.

  Doc sniffed a laugh. “’Spose you might call it that,” he said.

  “No.” From the doorway. The boy’s head snapped to look at Edgar. “This is the Tower of Black Eyed Angels. That Pink”—Edgar pointed—“is your only food and drink here, and if they dig you out of it twice more, the specters that spun it will leave you be. You must have watched The Black Tongue Tape and looked at something you knew you should not have, else you would not be here. Now we must ascend, Doc.” Edgar shot his gaze at Doc whose head sagged. Doc nodded to himself and moved to stand, joints popping.

  “Edgar’s right, Son,” Doc said. “I think it best if you dig yourself out rest of the way. If you wouldn’t mind, of course, there, Andy.”

  “You two are leaving?” I said.

  “No,” Doc said. “Just maybe let’s let him, the boy—I’m sorry, what’s your name, Son?”

  The boy looked from me to Doc, then pointed at his own face. “Me?”

  Doc nodded.

  “I’m Oscar.”

  We all introduced ourselves.

  He shook long, wet, brown hair from his eyes as he bent back over his work.

  “You from Jacksonville?” I said, glancing at his comfortingly human ears.

  He shook his head. “Never heard of it.” He looked at Tracy. “Looking for someone.”

  “Yeah? And who’s that?” Tracy said, hand on a hip like Oscar’s look had offended.

  Oscar shook a wet point of hair from the corner of an eye again, but did not answer, making slow progress at the Pink just past his groin where jean shorts showed themselves. He also wore a white shirt.

  “Where you from then?” I said, shifting my weight as my crouch made my left thigh fall asleep.

  “Filo,” Oscar said, raising his eyebrows at me. I adopted a clueless expression. “In the desert?” he said.

  “No idea,” I said. “That in Arizona?”

  Oscar widened his eyes like he couldn’t believe I was still talking.

  I smelled smoke.

  “Put it out,” I said, shooting a look at Tracy.

  “Make me, bitch,” she said.

  “Fuck’s sake, Tracy, he’s a kid,” I said, “go smoke in the hallway.”

  Tracy instead blew smoke in my face.

  “This is the worst fucking Demon’s Dream I’ve ever been in,” Oscar said.

  “You are in no dream,” Edgar said.

  Oscar grunted as he pulled his left leg free, then his right. He stood, shivering. I thought to wrap him in cardboard, but he wasn’t comfortable with us so I felt any help would seem somehow ulterior.

  “I like the smell,” Oscar said.

  Tracy smiled and folded her arms like See?

  “Have you seen a woman?” Oscar said, bending to look through a pile of Polaroids.

  “Just Tracy,” I said.

  Oscar raised his head and pulled a wet strand of hair behind his ear.

  “Different woman,” Oscar said, moving more Polaroids around with his feet.

  “We’re moving up,” Doc said, pointing. “Do you want to come with us, Oscar?”

  “How did you find me?” Oscar said.

  “That your first time in the Pink?” Doc said, using his chin to point to the Pink’s deteriorating carcass.

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  “I woke up and it was dark, like completely,” Oscar said, throwing a Polaroid to the side, standing and holding another up so we could all see. Edgar still stood in the door, and from the look on his face, I didn’t understand why he hadn’t left. “That’s her,” Oscar said. The woman in the picture had long, dark hair and was pale as paint.

  “That your mom or something?” Tracy said. Oscar shook his head and shoved the Polaroid in a pocket.

  “I’ll come with you,” Oscar said. “What’s wrong with your ears?” He walked to Edgar in the door and looked up at him, long hair falling and sticking dark and wet to his shirt.

  “Your head is overly large,” Edgar said, then turned to the hall where The Black Tongue Tape played.

  The buzzing, I noticed, had receded somewhere in the back, behind The Black Tongue Tape.

  Oscar laughed at Edgar and followed him. I looked to Doc who shrugged and limped after the others.

  It was then, as I held a hand out to gesture Tracy on, that I remembered her horn. We made brief eye contact that reached into the pit of me and traced lines there. It was kind of like diarrhea, that feeling, like diarrhea and having a piss at the same time. Her horn pointed somewhere just above my head.

  I’m not certain I could have maintained my composure had it faced me straight on.

  She left, and I was relieved we were no longer alone in a room. Something had changed in the pulverizing eye of that moon when I’d stroked the horn.

  Something had changed.

  The TV strewn hallway eventually opened out into a larger room with no televisions, though I could hear the phase-delayed audio of a Jorge/Norris scene where the two discussed John Locke and the tabula rasa philosophy.

  The only light sources were our entrance to the sparce room, and the door catty-cornered on the far end, creating an hourglass of fluttering light spreading the length of the room. I wondered if rummagers were trapped in the black bordering the path, or the

  Mothers, or both. Did the two types of creatures have some agreement with each other? Only one of us would be able to cross the middle at a time. It was a long stretch, at least twenty feet. Somehow the dark to either side of the thin pass was pitch.

  “This some fuckin bullshit,” Tracy said.

  “What is? It’s just a room,” Oscar said.

  Edgar nodded at that.

  “You know exactly what the fuck I mean,” Tracy said, throwing her arms at the doorway. “How do they even make it that dark? I saw this movie where some bitches put people in a place like this, but it was some kinda fucked up game show. Can’t wait to see reruns of me suckin that fuckin tit in the dark.”

  “This is no film,” Edgar said, taking a step forward. “And this is just a room.”

  Oscar followed Edgar.

  Doc sighed out his nose, his upper lip puffing out in a walrus’s frown. He raised his brows to me and Tracy in turn, then went in. His broken footfalls changed as he crossed the threshold. It was like when your ears finally pop on the airplane, that other realm of hearing you cross into—but there was no pop, and no painful pressure, only the succinct feeling of here and there.

  Tracy moved first. I touched her arm and shook my head. “Not yet,” I said.

  “Where else we gonna go?” she said, gesturing to the room which was the only outlet unless we wanted to go back.

  “Just wait,” I said. She kind of scowled at me, then jerked her hand away from my touch to fold her arms, but waited with me.

  “Gonna let that kid in there by himself,” she accused.

  “I think that kid might have a better handle on things than we do,” I said, pointing with my chin. “Look at him.”

  “He’s following the creepy one,” Tracy said. “Like, so maybe you don’t know what the fuck handle on things means.”

  “I mean he doesn’t seem scared,” I said, “and we’re not much better. We’ve been following the creepy one, too.”

  Edgar, approaching the slim middle of the fluorescent path, put his hands out, neither touching the bordering darkness. The others halted behind Edgar as he nudged a black something with his foot, bent to pick it up, study it, then place it back down in the same spot, his legs never moving, reminding me of a gymnast’s balance-beam poise.

  They walked on, and I worried for Doc as he neared the middle with his limping gait, but once there, he adopted a similar poise to Edgar, every hobble anticipated, and so integrated in a kind of gyrating stagger-step.

  Edgar made it across, then Oscar, and then finally Doc, who turned and wiped his brow, and I couldn’t see his face it was so far away, but I assumed his jump was his surprise at mine and Tracy’s absence.

  “You ready yet?” Tracy said, giving me the you ain’t shit look.

  I crossed the threshold, the mute of the room pressing in on my ears. I quickly turned back to look at the doorway, half-expecting it to have closed, or turned black or purple, becoming as visually other as it was audibly.

  But only fluorescent death was there, creating my only path across the room, my only path to Abby.

  The air smelled older in here. That black something that Edgar had picked up still sat on the gray carpet just before the path thinned.

  Tracy went ahead, stepping over the thing, lighting a cigarette as she started crossing, her elbow coming too close to the darkness for my conmfort.

  I bent and picked the thing up. Square, not black, but bordered in white. I held a Polaroid.

  Going still, I pulled the other Polaroid from my back pocket. The same strawberry-blonde curls, the same face that was too like Abby’s, but in this one, there was no smile in her eyes, and she was thin and sickly, and around her bicep was a belt, an empty needle hanging from the crook where a bead of blood was just starting its descent from an arm surrendered with slack.

  Her mouth hung open. On top of a Television/VCR combo sat a VHS marked Black Tongue Tape next to a picture of smiling me holding smiling Abby on my shoulders outside the Duncan Mansion.

  On the back of this new Polaroid was a small typewritten message:

  Abby. 2037

  Twelve years after that night with Tracy that I would never return from. Which would make Abby eighteen. I stood there long after I’d made up my mind, looking at the only two moments in which I could watch my daughter grow up.

  Then I dropped them both, pulled all the pill bottles from my pocket, letting them fall with their plops and rattles, and walked into one of the large, oppressive triangles of dark that bordered the hourglass path.

  The touch of hungry tusk was immediate, and Tracy’s screams for me sunk no hooks in my heart as the rummagers showed me my strung-out daughter on the north side of Jacksonville.

  Floor:

  North Side of Jacksonville, IL

  Tracy left the party.

  Inventory:

  0

  The End of Season One

  Blank Slate, as everyone knows. The idea that we’re blank at birth, and the world nurtures, or traumatizes us into all our little neuroses.

  “Se?or, but your parents. You never met them, but you drink just like them, you see? You see?” Jorge said.

  Norris frisbeed a rock at the wall outside the tower.

  “I drink because it feels good.”

  “Like your parents thought.”

  “Feels good to everyone.”

  “I know three humans who do not drink. It makes them puke, se?or, it’s true, it’s true!”

  “Feels good to most, then.”

  “What is your drink of choice, se?or?”

  “Scotch.”

  “When you can afford it, or is this your only drink?”

  “Both.”

  “This was your father’s drink.”

  “But even his genetic influence is like a nurturing force on the blank slate.”

  “Se?or,” Jorge said, tilting his head with a whirring that could have been made by a mouth it sounded so unreal and distantly out of time with the movement. “This renders the entire argument pointless, does it not? It makes me think these words are wasted, se?or.”

  “I’m saying all of these things inform the others,” Norris said.

  “You think they’ll let us in if we offer gifts, se?or?” Jorge said.

  Norris sat on his haunches. The wall was black. The red demon planet filled the sky like it would crash into the city at any moment. He held out both hands as if weighing.

  “The conversation isn’t pointless, though it may be to a generic, black and white mind,” Norris said.

  “My mind is grey, se?or,” Jorge said, tapping his metallic temple.

  “Think of reincarnation.” Norris waved his hands to imply wheel. “But not literally. Think of it generationally. As in, I am the reincarnation of my father, my son being my reincarnation, and so on. So then my father’s karma would play out through me, and I would have to then work through his, and then my own—which is really just ours, but let’s forget that for now—in order to be free of, say, a weakness for scotch.”

  “I am afraid I am not following, se?or. It is so, it is so,” Jorge said, hanging his head.

  Norris padded his chest. “Choices I make get passed down to my children. But we all start as blank slates. If you want to argue for nature, where did the initial genetic impulse come from in, say, the greatest, grandest grandfather?”

  Jorge shook his head in a slow way to indicate machine, not man.

  “I say something nurtured the first one,” Norris said, “then that one nurtured the others, passing on this initial trauma of like, a personality, sort of reincarnating, as the trauma.”

  “They are opening the gate, se?or.”