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Mon | September 18, 2006

le rêve

I was in my room, standing at my desk trying to decide what to do, lost in a haze as usual. Not a drug-induced haze— for those of you who don't know me, I have no fascination with drugs— but my mind plays tricks nonetheless. I was lost in the kind of thought that you don't know what you were thinking about when you startle out of it and realize you've lost a couple of hours. I suppose I was only sorting out all the things in my mind. Suddenly someone appeared behind me at the doorway. He was someone from high school whom I recognized, except that he was someone else. I think his name was Rob but he looked kind of like Porter or that guy Bob Doyle. Rob was dark, like South European, and Porter and Bob are light, like Anglos. Rob had a contraption in his hands.

"I have something to show you," he said, but he didn't say it, he teleported it into my brain. I heard the thought in my own head, rather than in the air. By the same method I understood it was a weapon for sex. I had been thinking about the denied sexuality of Asian males in mainstream media.

Henry came and stopped him. "What did he have?" I asked. I saw the contraption again. Something goes in, loops around, shoots something out. That something is intangible- it's your energy, or your libido, that fuels it.

I picked up my cell phone and text-messaged Alle: meeting tonight? I never text message her. To make it at 7:00 I would have to take the 2:30 train. No, that wasn't right. I rewound my thoughts to remember what they said about Tuesday. "If we don't call you we'll see you Tuesday." So there was no need to reconfirm. Still I wasn't sure.

Hours passed in a minute. I should have gone but I didn't. Then I thought I ought to call to explain what happened. The text message I had sent earlier didn't go through. When I hit reply, Alle's number had two letters added into it that messed it up. I saw them at the time, but had figured it must be right, since all I did was reply to a message she had sent me.

It was now midnight. "Don't go downstairs, he could still be there," I said. When Rob showed up it was day and I said no and he left. Immediately after it was night. I must have lost more time. Mom, Dad, and Henry were by my door now, and one by one they went downstairs. I imagined he might have escaped out the deck. I wondered if I should report him to the police.

"I haven't seen you in years and now you just pop up and want me to talk to you?" I said to him.

"Yeah, I know," he said.

The phone rang. "Excuse me," I said sharply and loudly, and picked it up. He left.

The thing that went in was an agar brick with sparkly stars. It was like a science experiment or something. Rob was a nice guy but I never knew him. But I remembered what he was like, so I could recognize him by his presence, even though he had changed in appearance. He was lighter, in hair color, and bigger, but not as big as Bob Doyle. There are these people in high school that you don't really know who they are. Some of them are really cute, like Rob, and yet they're not cool.

"I can't believe you didn't call the police," a friend said. So I picked up the phone and called. I am not sure who I was calling. The phone just kept ringing.

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