K. meets me late, in Brooklyn, off the Bedford Ave. L stop. She doesn’t drink, so we sit in chairs on the sidewalk. We’re outside of an apartment building that has an iron fence around the stoop. It’s adjacent to a sex shop. I put my feet up on the fence. I look through the windows of the first-floor apartment and see Nate from high school, lumbering, pacing back and forth. The room is filled with ominous red light. K. tells me I should take up sewing.
We’re walking down the street to my apartment. But it’s not my apartment; it’s my childhood home. I had smoked some weed before seeing her and now I’m high but don’t yet realize it. I go inside the house and leave her outside. I nap and wake up and realize I left her outside. I open the front door. It’s dark and the air is cool and the big lawn sprawls out from the porch. She’s running away into the night and her purse is swinging on her arm. I shout her name and apologize. She comes back.
I’m in the basement of the house. But it’s not the basement of the house; it’s the basement of a church. I’m there with K. and three other people. I recognize them. Two of them are a couple and the other is a girl. She’s blonde. I keep wanting to pull her back into the conversation because I sense she feels left out. She’s walking around the table where we’re sitting. She sometimes stops and just looks down blankly at the planks of wood that make up the table. It seems to be a picnic table. The boy of the couple points out that there’s a miniature pipe organ in the corner of the basement. I go over, excited to play. “No one told me about this,” I say. “Someone get me Bach’s C minor prelude.” They say it won’t turn on and they doubt me when I say I’ll be able to get it working. As I run my hand along the edge, feeling for the button, the material it’s made out of reminds me of a toilet. Then I find the switch. It’s on the underside. I switch it on. The organ roars to life with a humming sound and I play a dissonant chord that I had planned out before I turned it on. It was something like G-B-D#. The fifth was definitely D#.
It’s daytime and we’re in the main worship hall. It reminds me of the church where I was baptized, in Boston. Red carpets and white pews with oak armrests. Seemingly dozens of pulpits soar toward the ceiling. It’s a beautiful bright spring day outside. Uncommonly bright. I never did play the Bach prelude. Everyone I’m with is shocked at how beautiful the light is. I feel I’m supposed to not do something. The choir is about to sing Handel’s Messiah, or something called The Tempest. Everyone felt like it would be the most glorious performance ever. Then I see, on a ladder, by the front corner of the worship hall, beside a huge window, my college choir director. He has his white choir robe on. We shout his nickname but he doesn’t answer.
I start to think I’m dreaming. But I’m not realizing that it’s actually a dream within a dream. So I’m expecting to fully wake up when I wake up. I start shouting at everyone in the congregation. I say, “You’re all old and white!” I call them assholes. I turn to the people I came here with and see that they’ve turned old. I say to them that even I’m old.
I’m back in the church basement. But it’s not the church basement; it’s the basement of my childhood home. I’m still high. I go upstairs to my bedroom and take a nap. When I wake up, I realize I’ve been sleeping for probably hours. I begin to change my clothes. But there are so many clothes on the floor that I can’t find the right ones to wear. So I pick a tight black jumpsuit that has suspenders and I put over it my pinkish Cisco Brewers shirt and go downstairs. I apologize for being gone so long. They say I was gone for close to three hours. K. isn’t in the room. I ask where she went. They say she left because I was gone for so long. I feel ashamed. Then I begin to worry about my profession reputation.
“What did I do?” I ask. The other girl echoes my question to the group. “I don’t think I did anything,” I say. Brandon from high school is here. And Shane Gillis.
Someone suggests we go get a drink. I worry because I might be too high to go out.
Shane grabs me by the shoulders.
“You’re a man. I’m a man. We’re men,” he tells me.
K. won’t ever talk to me again, I think.
I ask everyone if my outfit is okay. I lift up my shirt to reveal my suspenders and I say, “It’s very Bushwick.” They tell me to change but then I say, “Fuck it.”
We go outside through the garage into the dark. The night sky faintly glows and illuminates the black pavement of my driveway.
The neighbor’s boat is on a trailer in my driveway. Infrared lights flicker under it, and I surmise that they’re cleaning the hull.
“Is there always a fire under the boat?” I ask.
And then a big bang. It seems to come from the sky. Its source is invisible. Shane Gillis is not longer Shane Gillis but a guy who looks like Shane Gillis and he looks scared. We walk tentatively back into the garage. There, I tie my shoes.
Someone says that aliens are coming.