Current Floor:

  Z

  The Dilemma:

  The last thing Andy remembered was going to bed drunk with an opoid-dependant woman named Tracy. Since his wife died, Andy hadn’t had too much joy aside from raising his daughter, Abby, and the occasional night out. The babysitter offered to keep Abby overnight, so Andy thought what the hell, he deserved it. But when Andy woke up the next morning, he found himself on the ground floor of a windowless building with Tracy, who was withdrawaling from opiates, and only Polaroid pictures serving as clues to their escape.

  Inventory:

  Andy:

  A wicked hangover.

  Shame.

  Nicotine withdrawal.

  What’s that fucking smell?

  Tracy:

  Withdrawal from benzodiazepines and opiates.

  Fucking rage.

  Waking up, and the bed was gone. Sparks trickled from cut-angle fluorescents half-bolted to the ceiling. Their flashes hammered into my hangover. I gagged as I took in the rancid stench of mothballs.

  “Tracy?” I called out. That was her name. I’d followed her from The Depot downtown to some house on the north side of Jacksonville. She was white with blonde cornrows. Had it really smelled this bad? I felt like I would have remembered. I coughed, sitting up and covering my mouth. “Tracy! Oh, Jesus fuck.”

  My hand came away bloody, but it wasn’t the cough. A crimson web of broken glass sat beneath me. I tried to stand and fell into a pile of empty boxes. There were what looked like coffee stains on the floor.

  The light flashed.

  My head pounded.

  “Jesus fuck,” I said again as I clutched my head and stumbled toward the door.

  But I stopped. My left hand, the bloody one, had soldiered through the pain of traversing my pants pocket lip to where my Lucky Strikes should have been. My left hand knew well that we were not leaving this room without cigarette tucked into corner of mouth.

  The fear was like a tonic for my hangover, sharp clarity shooting from stomach to brain. I spun, kicking boxes, rechecking pockets, crawling on hands and knees, the rectangular image firm in my mind: red, black, white, Lucky Strike.

  I growled and kicked at a box.

  “She stole them,” I said, two fingers to my lips. “She stole my cigarettes, and … the bed.” I turned and pointed to the glass mess. But why would she fill the room with boxes? And I didn’t remember the fluorescents.

  I was wasted when Tracy took me to bed, but I remembered what the room looked like—it was just after that I couldn’t quite put together.

  I lifted my shirt, running my hand along my lower back to check for all the cut lines you see in the movies, or those train track scars that mark you as ‘harvested’.

  I undressed, redressed, swept the room again for smokes, then my eyes landed on the door. Just open. Left open. I could feel the tight grip of nicotine withdrawal coupled with a sudden cold fear gridlocking my chest.

  I was not at home. I was not in the room Tracy had taken me to. I was not in the house Tracy had taken me to—somehow I knew this to be true.

  I regretted shouting Tracy’s name for a full minute. And then the laughter came.

  “You fucking idiot,” I said, thumb and pointer finger pressed into eyes. “You were drunk. You could be in the back room of the fucking Bowl Inn.”

  I’d come to in stranger milieu, God only knew, so, like, the only thing I had to fear was the owner opening up shop and calling the cops, and a cold walk to the Circle K on North Main for some smokes.

  I inched the door open, peering through the crack. Not a hallway I recognized—more of the same collapsing boxes, stained floors and blinking fluorescents with plenty of shadow between. I stepped out, keeping my back to a wall as I went. There were no windows.

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  “Andy?! The fuck you take me, you bitch ass?!”

  There was the sound of puking, pounding and stomping and banging on walls, and maybe some of the same box-tossing I’d done back in my own room.

  I came to the door. There was a little unicorn sticker on the knob, the kind my daughter Abby used to give my wife when she got home from chemo.

  I jumped back as something hit the other side of the door, pushing it open toward me.

  A box spilling Polaroids was the culprit, and further into the room were the deeply mascara’d eyes and tight yellow cornrows of Tracy.

  She hunched like a rodent, breath inflating and deflating her thin form.

  “The fuck are you doing here?” I said, scanning the length of her. Tight white shirt, jean booty shorts and red Chuck Taylors.

  She bent down to pick up a piece of broken glass and hurled it at me, missing.

  “Where the fuck are my Newports, bitch?” she said.

  “What? No, no, no, you took my cigarettes, bitch. Jesus, you look like—“

  “More than Newports in there, and you know it. That’s why you ain’t givin em back”—she was doing that finger thing that white girls on the north side did, where they, like, kind of point at you from every possible angle and jerk their heads around like a snake or a chicken or both—“but if you don’t give em, and soon, motherfucker, I’m gonna fuck you up, hell yeah, fuck you up, send you back to wifey with claw marks. Hey! The fuck you think you goin?”

  I left her there, trying the other doors across the hall, each with their own sticker, one with a giraffe, another with a tadpole, a genie on the last. I bent down to pick up a Polaroid from a box just inside. The picture side was an old oil lamp. I flipped it over and found a typewritten message:

  Subject Genie has started to show signs of early development. Will not remain this creature long. The moon nears.

  There was no one in the room.

  “—fuckin bitch ass motherfuck, I said—“

  “Tracy, you are so hot, but your teeth are very big, and they, like, really show, if you will, when you do that fucking pointing thing,” I said as I turned on her, clutching my head. She’d found her way out of her room and stood just behind me in the hall. “I … shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry. I need a fucking cigarette,” I said. “They’re gone. Here.” I pushed the Polaroid to her. She burrowed into me with those raccoon eyes. “Look at this,” I went on, “I don’t think we’re at the Bowl Inn.”

  “The fuck is the Bowl Inn?”

  “Bowing alley.”

  “I don’t—“

  “I know—you don’t bowl, Tracy. Just read the back.”

  “This some college bro bullshit,” she said, whipping the Polaroid at me. It bit into my chest with a corner and fell to the floor. “You one of them fuckin Jeffrey Dahmers, got me fucked up in some building you own cause you some slick fuck washing your skin off every mornin in some, like, fuckin glass palace shower, like, windows and shit so you can see skyscrapers or some shit?”

  “That’s a movie, not Jeffrey Dahmer,” I said.

  “Shit … you do have a fuckin overbite. Just like that Jeffrey Dahmer fuck.”

  I picked up the Polaroid, stepped out of the room and spread my arms wide to the cold of the sprawling hallway. “I’m lost as you,” I said. “Last thing I remember, you were pushing me onto the bed. We were drunk … wait.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, wait.”

  “You never drank.”

  Tracy shifted her feet, itching at bare arms.

  “I took you to my buddy’s,” I went on, “I was drunk.”

  “Why you college bros always callin your friends buddies is beyond me. Sounds faggy as shit. ‘I was at my buddy’s. Me and my buddy were takin a piss in the cold and we pissed on our hands to keep warm. Me and my buddy were fuckin this chick.’ Like, are your dicks piled, or are they, like, fuckin side by side?”

  She laughed, which turned into a cough, then five sneezes which she punctuated with a “Motherfuckin shit.”

  “And I bought you a dub,” I said as Tracy bent double and puked. She nearly stumbled into shadows just outside the nearest fluorescent’s glow, but corrected herself, jumping back into the full light and crouching down. “Then you went to the bathroom, and Henry said you better not be fixing in there, and I said, ‘We’re just partying.’” I turned, clutching my chin, drunk memories sliding all over each other as I tried to grab them. “But you weren’t just partying,” I said as Tracy wretched again. “You were getting fixed. That’s what’s in your Newport pack, I’ll bet.”

  “Yeah, bitch,” said a croaky Tracy, wiping her mouth. “Now where the fuck is it?” She shivered. “And my points. This shit ain’t funny no more.”

  “I didn’t take your shit,” I said. “How long’s that last, like three days?” I waved a hand at her.

  She scowled. “Dunno. Ain’t never been sick.”

  The implication made me feel a bit sick and a bit sorry.

  I walked back over to Tracy’s room, checking the doorknob again, just to be sure.

  “Unicorn,” I muttered.

  “What?” she said. I waved her off. She wretched again. I bent down to look at some of the Polaroids spilling from the box Tracy had thrown in the doorway. There were various pictures of what looked like a hospital room, and though the two beds were vacant, they were stained as if with sweat or piss. A unicorn was on the wall. A unicorn and a horse.

  I looked around, suddenly very afraid.

  Tracy’s six pace distance from me was too far.

  “Come on,” I said.

  She shook her head, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand. “I need a fuckin minute.”

  I considered a different path, decided there wasn’t one, and decided it was better to just go in all the way, like a cold pool. I rushed in and my skin turned to goose flesh. I rifled through boxes until I found a Polaroid of a trumpet with writing on the back:

  Subject requires benzodiazepines and opioids to function. When Subject Unicorn wakes, she will need medicine from level Y or withdrawal may prove fatal. Will remain this creature for the foreseeable future. The moon is far.

  Light shot from the corner of the room as if the flashing fluorescent bulb had found new life, or Tracy had found a switch and flicked it. A thick hum pulsed in my ears like mounting pressure on an airplane. The smell of dead mothballs intensified. I looked up, dropped the Polaroid, and screamed.

  There, where wall and ceiling met, was a pale-glowing orb the size of a basketball, its pocked surface resembling a face that followed me as I tripped over boxes trying to escape.

  Wub-wub-wub, it hummed

  "What the fuck?" I said in falsetto, scrambling to my feet, eyes never leaving the face in the moon. It had black eyes, ears too big, a full, feminine mouth, and … tusks.

  Wub-wub-wub.

  "What the fuck is this place! Where the fuck am I!"

  The moon shut off as quick as it came, and I ran from the room, finding Tracy on the floor in a rectangle of flashing fluorescent light and hoisting her over my shoulders.

  She drooled sick on my shirt and she reeked of stomach. I didn’t care, because the only thing more terrifying than that moon following and watching and humming from some remote corner was the thought of being this creature, in this place, alone.