I feel something brush against my leg, and I stiffen, though some primal part of me tells me this is the worst possible thing to do. Something slick and strong creeps up my thigh, and I'm reminded of dark nights, clouded by synthesized alcohol, dimmed by time, and I smell the oil of the boy's hair, the sweat and smoke lingering in the touch, and this tug, this pull, is just as hurried, just as sloppy, and just as rough. I kick at the thing, and it grips my leg with unholy strength. I fight, and I feel the thing grasp and begin to pull me under. Water closes in over my neck, my cheeks, my mouth, and then my nose. I taste the salt as I waste breath trying to scream.

I kick again, harder, my feet coming in contact with something rubbery and slick. Looking down, I see the tentacles wrapped about my legs, sucking little red O's onto my body. I lash out again at the murky darkness, trying to hit the source of the tentacles. I connect with nothing.

Then I see it, rising out of the dim green… A white figure, dress billowing out like an angel's drowned wings. Her face is lean, her smile, kind, forgiving. I reach out for her, screaming—"Mother!" She's come to save me… Then I see it is her, holding the tentacles, controlling them, pulling me under. I feel my lungs explode in a cry of anguish and confusion…

I wake, clawing at my mattress, a strangled scream escaping my mouth as I tumble to the floor, collapsing into a heap of aching muscles and twisted bed sheets. I lay there for a minute, cool floor against my face, blessedly solid, and I pant as the image of my mother, of water, of death gripping tentacles begins to fade.

I push myself up and stumble to the bathroom, shedding bedclothes all the way. I try to remember putting them on, but all that is there is a dull ache where my memories should be. I turn on the shower, turn up the heat as high as I can get it, and step in.

Steam fills my tiny shower, blurring the edges of the room, spreading the light from my overhead globe from a small ball of light to a diffuse mist. The water turns my skin a mottled red, and I imagine it washing not only the filth from me, but also the dream, the imagined salt I can still almost smell, steeped into my skin. The half bath becomes my glowing cathedral, and the shower my confessional, where I admit going out into the world and letting the sins of it touch me, leaving their fingerprints over my body, seeping in through my close, filthying my clothes, tarnishing my soul… I ask for absolution, from this god of the of the water, of the heat, of the mornings, and for a moment, receive my wish. I feel pure again…

Stepping out, I towel myself off, the moment of religious fervor fading already. I'm like that sometimes… I get moments of spirituality that never seem to stick with me very long. I miss them, and I wish I had them more often. I like being filled with light…

I think about the night before as I hit the walkways, mulling over the time lost. There's a few things I can do… Go to Roddy's—no, Carnal Capers—and ask what happened to me. I can get a hold of Damien, or Amy… Charlie's sure to have their numbers… I can ask them if they're having black outs as well…

But something in my stomach lurches when I think about the bar, and I find my feet taking me up, not down. The doctor, the doctor will know. He should know… It's his damn experiement… I suddenly feel very sorry for guinea pigs…

I don't want to see him, either though… I imagine him giving me that disappointed, contrite look, papers and an enormous fake oak desk separating us. I hear the jowls flap as he tells me it didn't work…

I stop at a display of vid screens, all flashing the same news feed… I watch the reports, only half absorbing them. A decrease in police funding, in spite of a rise in crime… A stabbing and fight in the lower sectors… Tests from the outside come back negative again… No end to the nuclear winter… A group of students rallying to be let out as a part of an excursion team. I lose fifteen minutes of my life in front of those screens…

But I couldn't put off seeing the doctor any more. As I moved up the walkways to the gilded office, my mind churned the ridiculous things fear inspires. I saw them injecting the disease back in my body, clucking their tongues with a mockery of pity. I saw the nurses, swarming, forks in hand, knives stabbing into me, mouths full of the succulent body they had lent me… I see them calmly informing me, like another doctor, in another sector, had done that day, that I was going to die… As if death was nothing more than a slight inconvenience. Once again, I think of the after-life. Do I get one? Have I earned one? Perhaps this body was only Fate's fickle preview… If we don't have bodies in the afterworld, why shouldn't our memory of them be perfect? My nails bite into my flesh as I turn the corner and enter the pristine leather and tapestry casket of the doctors. They won't take it away… They can't take my body away! Can they…?

The receptionist, an indifferent girl of maybe twenty, glances up when I enter, and her brow furrows. Different girl today, not that the one from a few days before would have bothered to remember me. "Can I help you?" she asks nasally, and I consider, briefly, the joy it would bring me to smash her surgically altered nose across the pristine wallpaper behind her… I even feel my fist begin to clench, and my stance grow limber and ready… I shake myself, a chill running rampant through me, and I exchange bloody thoughts for taking up the pen and adding myself to a short list of those waiting.

"I'm a client of Doctor…" I stop. What the hell was his name?! "The doc's," I continue, affecting a casual tilt of the head, and even the slightest hint of a sneer. "I need a check-up… I'm on the schedule for a few weeks from now…"

She snaps her fingers with a sigh, and I pass her my ID card. She swipes it though her reader and clicks the screen, scrolling left and right. With a hint of a glare, she does indeed find Cherry Dormi to be a patient, and that this same Cherry Dormi has an appointment scheduled on the fifteenth.

"That doesn't get you in today," she sighs, returning to her magazine. "The Doctor is a busy guy, you know. He can't be pulled out of surgery just because you're peeing funny, or something."

I grit my teeth, and the pen I had been about to set down snaps in my hand. She makes an indignant noise, her languid bones snapping to like a child's toy…one of the five and dime ones, where the giraffe, limp on the ground, at the touch of a button, springs to attention. One of those.

"I'm having black-outs," I say as calmly as I can manage. "Every day… Extended periods… And I know I'm not just passing out. I end up at home, in bed…. And I want to see someone about it, right now."

The receptionist sighs, waving past me, at a small brown door where the cannibal nurses lay in wait. "Go talk to Emma. She'll figure out if the Doctor needs to see you or not."

On shaking legs that don't feel like they are quite mine, I stumble into the back room, stomach sliding around my midsection like a handful of slugs, slithering and mixing and heavy… The nurses look at me in my pathetic greenness, and I sit at the table where I had filled out the forms before.

"I'm looking for Emma," I say, shaking, and as no one responds, I add, "The nurse," as if they were about to procure Emma the vaudeville showgirl. A thick waisted redhead, probably not natural, steps forward, and I note that she has strangely pretty skin… soft, just the kind you love to spend an hour picking out the right tints for, the kind that glows in photographs. It's the one bright spot about her… The rest is worn down, stuffed into a shell of barely pent up malice and aching bones. I wonder if she knows how pretty her skin is…

"What seems to be the problem?" she asks me, her voice tired, but also strangely gentle.

"I'm—I'm having black outs," I quake, looking down. I wonder if she'll accuse me of hitting the painkillers still, or finding more illicit means of escape. She doesn't though. She simply flips my ID card out of my front pocket and runs it through her scanner.

She studies my record for all of a half minute, then hands the ID back to me. "How many black outs?" she asks mechanically, waving a nurse over to take my vitals.

"Two… One last night, and one the night before." A nurse is at my elbow, strapping something on my arm and pumping it full of air. I try to remember what those damn things are called.

Nurse Emma makes a note. "And approximately what was their duration?"

"I don't know… I fell asleep at the end of them." I shift in my seat as the pressure builds, then sigh with relief as the reading is taken and the nurse moves on to taking my pulse.

Nurse Emma makes another note, head bobbing on her neck. She returns to a larger terminal, uploading my data and waiting, padded foot tapping silently. A print out pops out, and she eagle eyes it, lips pursed.

"It's a normal side effect," she says primly, "Temporary, until your body adjusts to the changes. Make notes of when it happens, and tell the Doctor on your next visit."

I gape at her as she powers down her tablet, dismissing my record into ones and zeros again. "A side effect? I'm loosing hours of my day! I'd call that a fucking effect, really!"

She sniffs, and any paper thin sympathy she had is gone now, blasted by her chill wind of indifference. "Then have a friend accompany you, or stay inside until the condition passes." In her eyes, I see her tacking on an acidic ingrate to every sentence.

"So, I'm not seeing the doctor," I say, shoving my ID back in my pocket. She shakes her head. I shake under my haphazard clothes, and suddenly, I want a beer, very badly. Without saying a word… actually, I don't think I could talk if I wanted to, right now… I rise and slam my way out of the nurses' station, out of the waiting room, and I begin to run.

How many levels do I go down? I don't know. I ram my way down steps, hopping up onto hand rails, rising above the masses, ignoring their shouts and stares. I shimmy down support columns, tears blinding me. Something about last night… I think of the body guard, and I think of Amy, and Damien, and Charlie… Most of all, Charlie. I think of all the friends I've lost in the past two days, and I wonder about the dark men in the corner.

I jump onto the platform, lights buzzing above me, and I stare at the yellow tape covering the entrance to Carnal Capers, and the tape outlines I can see inside. My knees, ever faithful before now, give out.