the boogeyman

I
“You’ll never have sex again. We guarantee it.”
Rodian glimmers at the man. “I told you. I’m not here for your…services. I just want the location of this boy.” Rodian shows the man the framed picture of Thomas’s son again.
“I’m afraid that you’ll have to participate with the contract you signed upon arriving,” the man says, smiling affably.
Rodian had resorted to a slovenly, debauched red-light district company in search of the son. The basement he was in resembled a harlot’s body. The company, “incorporated,” didn’t have a name aside from its street name. Rodian figured whatever it offered was illegal; what better a place than to find a teenager. A basement beneath a sleazy sex-addict club. Something about curing those with voracious sex drives by preventing them from ever having sex again.
“Look. I don’t have time for this mumbo-jumbo. I’m just here to ask you, big shot, proprietor of this joint, if you’ve seen this kid around.”
The man, a human butcher wearing a greased apron, gets up, his belly jovially menacing. He’s got more burns than visible skin. “I’m afraid that if you do not cooperate—”
“You best stay afraid if you don’t answer my question, dad.”
The man, no longer smiling, sighs. His face contorts into a baleful grimace, prickling with hatred. “It’s a twelve-step program. That’s all, chief. Twelve simple steps. And all you’ve got to do is not have sex.”
“Alright, say I entertain you, seeing how I don’t have sex anyway and I’m curious as to what grudge you hold against it. What’s the first step.”
The man sits back down; his swivel chair squeals. It’s almost an illusion that he can even manage to sit on it. “I’m glad you’ve come around.” He folds his hands together, content. “Our procedure has a three-percent chance relapse rate.” Rodian leans back at his chair, staring up at the garbled ceiling. “It’s basically a twist on aversion therapy. You know, Pavlov and his dogs, some of that thrown in.” The man grunts. “I’m not psychology major.” While the man rambles Rodian scans the man’s mind as to what he’s most afraid of: loss of control. Obvious enough.
“Third encroachment, we break one of your legs. Fair enough?” Rodian nods. “The fourth—” A crisp snapping sound followed by the man toppling onto the floor. Another acute cracking sound as Rodian breaks the other man’s leg. He walks over to the man, squirming impotently on the floor; he punts his face in the direction of the picture of the boy. Two of the man’s teeth slobber out of his mouth. The man shakes his head. Crack. The man tries to scream but Rodian has already severed his vocal chords. The man shakes his head again. Rodian hangs his head in dismay and stultification, sighing.
“Rodian,” a stern high-pitched, cross-armed voice comes from the stairwell. Titalia. Rodian sighs again.
“Must you follow me wherever I go?”
“Do I look like I want to?” She flares up, stomping onto the basement’s creaking, sewage festered tile work. She looks down at her shoes, squeezing her legs together in disgust. “Do you really think a fifteen-sixteen-seventeen-whatever-the-year-old boy would be hanging out in a letch pit?”
Shaking his head, Rodian gets up, glancing back at the writhing man. Where else would a fifteen-sixteen-seventeen-whatever-the-year-old boy romance of.
“Why is that man not screaming?” Titalia, garbed in green felt and black jeans, tiptoes over to him, waving her arms as if trying to keep balance. “Rodian?”
He flushes with irritation. “Titalia, I’m the boogeyman. You should be happy that I left him alive.”
“Happy that you left him alive?! He’s better off dead!”
“Do you really think so? Because I’ll gladly—” Before he can finish his sentence, the man is sitting back in the chair, bewildered, ogling at the room around him.
“Can we leave now?” She stares at him, slightly shivering and concealing her repugnance of the perverted freak show upstairs.
“Your job is to scare people, not mend them. Not to get scared.” He starts walking up the stairs; broods through the bar, onto the street. It’s pouring. He stands in the rain, watching the caffeinated world race by.
“And you can’t locate some fifteen-six-whatever-the-year-old kid. Great boogeyman you are.” She vanishes, snapping into the wind. He chuckles, reminiscent of Diana. He looks at his hands. There’s only so many places to arrive late, isn’t there? She’s right. I’m no boogeyman. Never wanted to be. He mopes to the jeering of the squalor behind him; back in the bar, down, down the flight of stairs, in front of the man in the basement. The real stuff of nightmares.
He looks back, woebegone, then whisks himself away.

Dangling his legs off of one of the meteor’s slopes, in the Lunacy Fringe. Titalia is slurping on… puke in a Starbucks cup. The royal purple, absorption nebula mires his thoughts. The nearly suffocating aromatic mist that accompanies it doesn’t help. He’s been stealing painkillers and SSRI’s from random pharmacies. The most plausible reason that he’s having such difficulty tracking down this boy is because he…doesn’t want to scare him. In fact, he doesn’t know what the hell he wants with him. There must be some connection with the boy and his own past, no? At least enough to infiltrate it and resurrect his best friend.
Titalia tilts her head, glaring at him musingly. She’s developed somewhat of a crush on him; looking over him, cleaning up his tracks; his mediator—the one between him and himself. She saunters over to him, self-conscious, staring at the ground as if once again trying to keep her balance.
“Watcha thinkin’?” He ignores her. She retreats, slurping insecurely on her puke in a Starbucks cup.
“Why do you ask me that if you know what I’m going to say every time.” He mumbles glumly.
“Because ‘nothing’ can mean lots of things!” She blushes, skittering back to his side. He smacks his forehead. Internally pleading for some means to pass the time. “I know, I know…you don’t want me around. I get it.”
He giggles at her theatrics. “Ever tried opiates before.”
“Opiates. You know, painkillers, heroin, whatever.”
“I…uh, no. Why would I do that?”
“You should,” he says, popping a Dialudid. He begins to laugh, almost instantly feeling calid and balmy.
“Um…isn’t that stuff. You know, fatal.”
“You’re a wanna-be boogeywoman. You’re a big girl.”
“Oh shut up.” She crosses her arm, slurping on—she throws it over the edge of the Lunacy Fringe; the ice scatters as the top flies off.
“You know that feeling when you love a T.V. show, a character, usually of the opposite sex, and then you go on the internet and find nude pictures of them in another movie, and it completely kills the character of the T.V. show you were previously watching because they wouldn’t do something like that.”
“What, people aren’t allowed to expose themselves?”
“That character…wouldn’t. Y’know?” He swats her off. “Never mind.”
“Rodian, I don’t watch T.V.”
“…” He looks the other way, distracting her momentarily, then smothers Dialudid into her mouth.

“We’re in…someone’s closet,” she whispers into his ear, grabbing his arm frantically.
He looks at her patronizingly, dead-eyed. “We are…boogie-people.”
“And I feel…so…so sleepy.” She giggles. “Wonderfully mellow though.”
“One second ago you were frantically grasping onto my arm and now you’re ‘wonderfully mellow’.”
“You were the one that shoved those…pills down my mouth.”
Rodian peers up and inspects the closet. Cluttered in perfunctory disarray. Teenage girl.
“So…why are we here? Aside from our obligations as boogey-people.” She wobbles; nearly toppling over. Rodian catches her by the small of her back.
“We are going to…watch T.V.” He smiles at her charmingly. She eyes her shoes again. “Would you stop doing that.”
“It’s just that my shoes—they feel so tight all of a sudden.”
“Right,” Rodian rolls his eyes. Titalia blushes.
“Meh at you. Go be scary or—hey!” He opens the closet, dragging her behind him. The girl is under the covers, on her cell-phone.
“I…I’ll call you back. I think I just heard my parents.”

“Have you ever watched T.V. before?”
“Television? Of course…back when I; before I reached the Lunacy Fringe,” her eyes droop. I’ve always been a bad liar.
“A bit euphemistic.”
“Oh just get on with it already.” She crosses her arms, picking apart her deprived childhood. “Impress me.”
“Well, with that attitude,” he turns on the T.V.; quickly scans the family’s DVD collection. House! “Haha. Good stuff.” He gets up, tiptoeing over to the shelf, pulling every season down.
“Rodian, that’s stealing!”
“You’re on drugs. It’s OK.”
“So just because I’m on drugs that gives me the right to do whatever the fuck I want?” She begins to laugh, nodding off.
“I guess so,” he smirks, glancing over his shoulder at her strung-out smile.
“But what if you wake up her—”
“Elizabeth?” A man’s voice can be heard calling suspiciously from upstairs. Titalia smacks Rodian.
“You told me so, I know.” He packs all the House seasons into his backpack. The man fumbles down the stairs, crowbar in hand.
“Look, I don’t want no trouble. I’m giving you ten seconds to put whatever you stole back and get the fuck out of here.” The lights flicker on. The man raises his eyebrow at Titalia. She sure is dressed…eccentrically.
“I just took the House DVD’s.” Rodian swears an oath, acting solemnly.
“Well, well you just put them back now,” the man stutters.
“The cake fancies you strange,” Titalia giggles. Rodian and the man both glance at her cagily. They look at each other.
“Hey buddy; do you know who I am? I’m the boogeyman.” The man scratches his head, shaking it incredulously, then raises his crowbar.
“I don’t give a hoot who you are, son. You’re a crazy son of a bitch, that I know. So how about you just put those DVD’s back and we won’t have no trouble y’hear.”
Rodian bites his lip, gazing around the room, his eyes feigning innocuousness. Titalia giggles again, her eyes fluttering. “Sir, when I said I was the boogeyman…”
“I don’t give a fuck if you’re the goddamn Jersey Devil you bangin’ out hooligan. Put them back before I call the cops and then beat your sorry lit up asses.”
“You wouldn’t hit a woman, would you?”
“By my definition she’s no longer a woman if she intrudes on my house in the m—”
“Harold!” his wife shouts out to him. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah it’s just fine Anne you get back in bed.”
“What is it, Harold.”
“It’s nothing. Now you get back to bed.”
“Harold I hear voices other than yours down there. Are you smokin’ dope again?” He rolls his eyes.
“Would you just shut up and go to bed!”
Rodian snickers. “Way to treat your wife.”
“Why you…”
“And I’m the junkie? Been ‘smokin’ dope?’ lately Harold?” Rodian crosses his arms, cocking his to the right, tapping his foot.
Harold advances.
“Tsk tsk! I told you Harold…I am the boogeyman.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Titalia slurs.
Harold rushes at Rodian, who teleports behind him. He grabs Titalia, lurching into the nearest closet. Harold catches a glimpse of the two. He approaches the closet, wielding his crowbar like a bat. Thoroughly spooked, he swings open the closet door.
“What the…” He searches the closet meticulously, half-deranged. Nothing.

II

“Don’t you EVER—and I mean EVER—drug me again. Do you understand me you—”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it,” Rodian grins, snacking on diet-cokes and fiddling with a Rubik’s cube.
“I—”
“I, I, I. Haha. Don’t you ever have any fun? You sound like me. Morose, always wistful…except that I’m not a control freak.”
Titalia raises her shoulders like a cat arching its back with its hair on end. She storms off, flustered. Rodian leans back in his vibrating chair, flicking House back on. It’s the only thing that seems to get his mind off of the boy. He’s becoming listless; he barely remembers what Diana’s face looks like. Time heals pain by eroding memory, he muses. Go figure. But what kind of time? The time you spend asleep, bed-ridden for weeks; or the time you spend, say, in a vibrating chair, hermetic, watching T.V.
His sole responsibility is to scare people. It’s been awhile, and coming off of Valium isn’t exactly pleasant. Maybe he’ll pay Harold a return visit.
Or maybe….
He grins, albeit the least bit wickedly.

Harold’s daughter, apparently named Elizabeth, doesn’t sleep much. In fact one might assume that she’s a teenager simply by to what extent she lavishes in her insomnia. Rodian peeks out of the closet door; clandestinely he peers out. Once again, the girl is on her cell-phone, the light emitting from beneath the sheets over her head.
Being…alone? Rodian brushes the hair from his forehead. Heh. As if a teenage girl would know anything about solitude. He creeps towards her, blending with the shadows. A dull odium bubbles in his stomach; he had lived the majority of his life a recluse, in his room, playing computer games, reading literature. But he knows that’s not her fault.
He tears off the bed sheet she’s beneath. His confidence is instantly sapped; she must be merely seventeen. He smiles warily, cognizant of his own appearance. The boogeyman. Sure don’t look like him. But little girl I’m going to take you places you’ve never been before. His smile becomes toothy; it widens into a nightmare, the inverted frown of a forlorn wretch. The girl closes her eyes and screams. She screams and screams, and screams, and screams and screams and screams and he can’t stop her from screaming he can’t stop himself from causing her to scream and—
He snaps out of it.
“Hey. Be quiet, would you. I’m the boogeyman. I’m not going to kill you. Just play along and maybe I’ll let you live.”
The girl, terrified, wets her pants. Her eyes are convulsing in their sockets.
Suddenly she sees a white wall; fluorescent. She sees another to the right of her, another to the left over her shoulder, there’s another behind her; a ceiling clamps down. Rodian voice funnels through the chandelier. Whatever he’s trying to say is unintelligible to her, garbled in echoes. He’s looking down upon her, chewing on a bar of Xanax. He watches her desperately feel the walls for some kind of escape, unenthused.
“You’re just having a nightmare,” he mutters. He swivels around, his hand picking his chin. “No. No, you’ll. You’ll never escape. You’re stuck in there, forever. This is real. Obviously.
“It’s completely fucking tangible.” The girl ignores him, panicked and near-wailing. She curls up into a corner, hyperventilating, eyes fluttering indicating that she’s about to faint. “Could you not?
“Just get back in bed. See? The white, ornate, duvet-snuffed bed I’ve laid out for you?
“Why won’t you just get back in bed? Stop moaning. There’s nothing you can do.” He slumps his shoulders. “I should just leave you here for acting so plebian.”
“No!” The girl screams.
“So you can hear me now, hm? It’s about time.”
The girl veils her eyes; he notices dried ketchup beneath her fingernails. She’s picking at her forehead?
“Just get into bed, would you? You’re just having a nightmare. Aren’t you scared now? All alone. No one to save you, a recluse, abandoned, stranded, misunderstood, etc.
“Aren’t you scared?” He scrutinizes her cell; effervescent white heaven. Would it really be so bad to…
“Yes,” the girl whimpers, meekly.
“You weren’t supposed to respond.”
The girl forfeits, weeping mawkishly, bawling onto her hands and knees.
“…It’s not so bad, you know. Being alone. You’re so afraid of it and yet…you’ve never been alone. Fear of the unknown! Fear of change? You’re not very susceptible to change, are you.” Rodian glances side-ways at the girl.
“ElizA…beth.” He coos. “Just go to bed. You’re helpless. You’re alone. Alone! There’s no one but us; you and I, and I’m not technically a legitimate person.”
“Then who are you,” she squeals. Frustrated with his Rubik’s cube, he puts his hands on the railing he overlooks the girl, head on his arm, sighing.
“I’m just a bad dream. A nightmare, per say. Maybe even a night terror; I don’t know your medical history well enough to judge.” He reconsiders. “Either way, you can’t wake up unless you’re asleep.”
The girl, hysterically perplexed, sobs for a while longer, then slowly crawls into bed, having trouble raising her leg over the side of the mattress.

III

Thomas’s son, Damian, preferably Dam, has been hanging out in the train yard with the local junkies since he ran away from his, unbeknownst to him, now dead father. His pseudo-girlfriend took off in the middle of the first night. Unfortunately, his plan to run away, hop on a train, bus, and ride off into the sunset over the middle of no where failed—he’s broke. He forgot to take his father’s wallet. Therefore, not deeming himself the proper sex to support a habit such as heroin, he stares at the junkies more so than hangs out with them.
In reality, there are no junkies. He’d watched Trainspotters and expected the local train yard to be littered with local junkies. As it turns out, not all train yards are littered with junkies. But if there was anyone around, at least after this episode in his life, he’d be sure to include the part about how he had rollicked with them. There’s nothing tragic or self-destructive he can inflict on him and therefore he sits, day in, day out (though he’s only been sitting for three days), famished. Drugs may be less expensive than food, but they cost money just the same.
Go back home? To what? His alcoholic father and botched education? Every day’s a new day. Yeah, sure, for alcoholics.
He reluctantly pushes himself off the ground.
“Rodian! Rodian I found him!” Dam looks up and sees a young woman in the most absurd outfit he’s ever seen, which at his age is saying something. He puts a finger to his lips to try and shut her up but she’s calling someone. Rodian? Rodian. As he ponders over why the name rings a bell the young woman persists on calling him out. She finally gives in, drooping in…depressive nonplus? He hasn’t learned to read women yet, let alone books.
“Um…can I help you? My name is Dam.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Damian. My friend…he’s been looking for you.”
“Why?”
“He doesn’t know,” Titalia raises her eyebrow. “But that’s besides the point. If I find you, that’ll piss him off, which will make me happy, and he’ll also stop brooding about finding you, like he always does oh God he’s such a brooder I wish I could just take a sledgehammer and—”
“…Excuse me?”
She hopelessly looks in the direction she’d imagine Rodian would come from.
“C’mon kiddo. I’ll take you to get something to eat. And no…don’t worry, I’m not going to return you to your father or turn you in to the cops.”
“How do I know you’re not lying?”
Titalia gulps like a nurse trainee. “Because your dad’s dead.”

“Someone…um, killed him. In his sleep.”
“How?” The boy isn’t crying. Why isn’t he crying?
“They…shot him up with an overdose of drugs and alcohol. He…he died painfully.” Is this really the best thing to do? Rodian’s bound to tell him—
“But…why?”
“I…I don’t know. “ Dam fiddles with his food the same way Rodian fiddles with his Rubik’s cube. She smiles.
“Did they catch they guy?”
“I’m…afraid…they did. They did and I’m sure he’ll be sentenced to death. Killing a detective—that’s just not something you can get away with, y’know?”
The boy, numb with the inability to compute his father’s death; Titalia reaches out to hold his hand but he acridly recoils.
“He deserved it anyway.” Dam, seemingly bamboozled by his food, pokes it with his fork. He tries to lift it to his mouth but that doesn’t seem to compute either. Eating must seem pointless to him, she infers.
“There’s something I…need to…nevermind.”
“What,” he mutters, residually poking at a specific shrimp in his scampi. “What is it.”
For some reason she has some gaudy beautiful-people-get-tortured-then-butchered horror flick on her mind. What was it called? Took place in Brazil…God. I could use a drink just as much as someone underage. Him. He is…rather handsome, especially for his age. She wonders if it’s him that’s gotten him in trouble as much as it was the girls.
“Would you like to go for…a drink?” She asks, whimsically, regretting it immediately.
“I’d rather…not.” He continues to poke his shrimp. Why that shrimp? There are so many other shrimp on that plate but he is so fixated on that one, inconspicuous, harmless shrimp. Come to think of it—she would make a good vegetarian. “I’d actually like to…rather…go home.”
He has…no home. His father’s, but—they’ve surely got tabs on it if he returns. The…Lunacy Fringe? But he cannot weave dreams let alone comprehend the concept of there being boogey-people. Every time that term crosses her mind she bridles. Images of the movie keep flashing through her mind. Bats…underwater caves…some conspiracy. They’d watched it together last night. Two actresses that’d he’d once been infatuated with, he told her. Rodian…someone in the movie kept saying my secret place.
My secret place…
“Who are you, anyway,” Dam inquires, disinterested. “And who was that guy…that guy you were referring to earlier. Rod-something.”
“Um…just a friend. Said he knew you. Been looking you ever since you ran away.”
“How did you know I—”
“I…uh…the girl! She told a lot of people that’d you’d run off, from your father, after he’d—”
Dam reaches across the table and snatches at her necklace, tugging on it until her lips are so close to his that she can’t tell if he’s trying to—
“Who the fuck are you.”

Rodian, besotted, staggers out of an ostentatious, upper-class bar on the upper-east side of Manhattan. He’d stolen a meager amount of Harold’s money before checking out; toll for letting his daughter live. It was just a nightmare, after all. He staggers to the nearest alleyway he can find, which ironic at first (it is the upper-east side, after all), is not so nearby. He pops two or three Xanax bars, then crushes one up in his hand and huffs it from both hands covering his nose and mouth maniacally.
He scrounges for another bar and sucks on it, the bitter taste further assuaging his insatiability. From the alleyway he watches a genial young girl accompanied by two guys; she uncannily resembles Diana. He sluggardly attempts to get up. Cognizant that if he wasn’t so hopped up on drugs and booze he probably wouldn’t be doing this, he follows them. Inertial, he staggers behind them, nearly limping. His vision is rewinding; soporifically blending into noiseless forms. The threesome that he was trailing glance behind them; Rodian stumbles, rapidly losing consciousness, trying to keep balance between the hoods of two cars.

He wakes up beneath a shoddy fluorescent light on a dilapidated and jaundiced linoleum floor. He rolls his head to the left and…blurry vision doesn’t hamper the sight of bars—at least the metallic kind. He props himself up on his elbows. Barred window; plexiglass, fulvous. The cell is brewed with coffee stains. He flops back onto the floor, gazing up at the light. The officer standing on duty…there is no officer standing on duty. Convenient.
In a minute or so he gets up, paces towards the window, his eyes thinking. Feverishly hung-over; squeezes his forehead. He walks towards the bars, well, through them. He waves at one of the policemen as he walks out.
What a sunny day. Yep, another great day to spend indoors. He rummages through his pockets for drugs; stripped naked. The sight of the nearby Starbucks fills him with the sickly colors of his former cell. His new cell, however, although much more bright and lively, worsens his headache even more so.
He hops into the daydream of the next man that passes by him, which not surprisingly, not only alleviates his headache.

IV

“I can explain I—please don’t rape me.” Dam has walked Titalia out of the restaurant, knife at her waistline.
“Why would I rape you? You freak.” He winces.
“I—” He doesn’t even have the desire to rape me? How ugly am I…
“You know something. In fact, you know a little too much. And by too much I don’t mean what I know, because you know more than I know.” He spits on the floor, tryingly, but it ends up stringing into drool.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she whispers.
“I won’t believe you if you don’t tell me either,” he says threateningly, though with the slightest bit of compassion, which she picks up on.
“Well, for starters, it’s probably best if you take the knife…from my waist; not that it’s…really anywhere near my waist as much as your hand is pressing against it—” He blushes, repressing it immediately. “People, might suspect, and all.”
“Alright. Say I, put the knife away. “
“It’s not the knife I’m afraid of…it’s you getting caught with it.”
“Stop pussyfooting,” he barks, abashed.
“Your father…he overdosed. No one killed him. They couldn’t tell if it was a suicide or not.” Dam steps back, apprehensive, unsure of what to feel or what he’s feeling, if anything. She expects him to react by displacing his disbelief on her, or worse, denial. Wait, no, the other way around. But he doesn’t react; stands rigidly, doesn’t move. The moment is so still that she can hear his heart beat.
“I don’t care. About my father. What I care about is that you know about my father. For all I know he’s not even dead.” But he’s nearly stuttering and no longer looking at her. He clicks his knife into its handle. “In fact, you know what. I don’t care. I don’t even care. I’m—ah.” He bumbles off, an emotional android. Titalia leans against the restaurant—diner—window; someone inside knocks on the other side of it, shooing her away. She begins to walk after him, slowly, then stops herself. She turns around and stares into the diner window, not admiring her reflection.

V

Conserving happiness. Something I bought. Cartoons. I bought the three and only seasons of Avatar. Three seasons I can’t watch because I’ll run out of that conserved…happiness. Rodian grimaces in the lounge chair. He orders another movie on-demand. One he doesn’t so much as watch as play like running water; an ambience to settle his mind so that he can do what he actually wants to do.
Except there’s nothing he wants to do except have something to do.
He pulls out a twenty-four ounce of Coors from his spray-painted mini-fridge. A slurred sign of the Zodiac is sprayed on its door. He sulks towards his closet, drearily stepping in, enervated. As he passes the bathroom he smells his unplugged toilet, which is beginning to reek throughout the entire castle. He wipes away the smell with his hands.
He hops into the daydreams of a business man taking a dump; mounds of cocaine, pole-dancers. It’s…nauseating (the size of the mounds), yet he could use a fix. He jumps into a pile, powdering his entire body. A mere whiff sends him sprawling onto the floor, prostrate. He walks into the dreams of the man in the stall next to the cocaine-dreaming man. The second man, obviously a sadist, is whipping a woman, most likely his wife, with a bike chain. Wriggling himself out of the man’s dreams through his ear-canal, he plops out onto the stall floor and punches him in the face, nearly breaking his nose. The man that was once dreaming of cocaine looks beneath the stall, but Rodian has already exited the lavatory.
Executives and secretaries zoom all around him, except he can’t tell who’s who. He looks out the window and peers down at a homeless man who happens to be dreaming about an existentialistic utopia. Rodian finds it strikingly similar to life on Earth and frees himself at once, weaving himself from dream to dream of everyone on the sidewalk. To his dismay, nearly everyone dreams of the same things, especially when in proximity of each other. It’s difficult to find a good dreamer these days.
Soon enough, night falls, and he’s in some suburban town in New Jersey. He doesn’t smoke cigarettes and there isn’t remotely anything to do—he notices a playground not far off. He approaches it; a set of swings, slides, playhouse. He sits down on one of the swings and starts swinging beneath a canopy of trees.
That’s when he senses it—the total lack thereof of fear, nearby. Someone who’s afraid of nothing?! He swiftly heads to the source; a mundane, ordinary house in poor condition. Something that would be nostalgic to someone who lived there as a child. Intrigued, he eyes the house cautiously, taking one step at a time and constantly glancing over his shoulder. It…appears to stand out from all the mundane, ordinary houses, the closer he walks towards it. By the time he reaches the front door he’s ready to lash out at the nothing that moves.

Strangers comfort Dam. He surrounds themselves with them, in them. He’s at a sleazy club; the bouncer was heavy on drugs, delirious. The women around him, which look more like zebra offspring, drip by him, ignoring him; it’s as if he’s watching everything around him coerced by hallucinogens. Blurs into one; the flashing of tawdry colors, the too individualistic outfits, the allusion of promiscuity.
Everyone is clearly trying to be exactly who they are. The problem isn’t that they’re trying to be each other; it’s that they already are, and none of them have any clue who they are, nor the desire to find out.
Titalia has stealthily followed him, desperately trying to get in touch with Rodian. She admires his jaded complexion; there’s something…soothing about it, her own being so self-conscious. She recalls when she was his age, disoriented in a living, intricate world, that not only she was alive. In some sense, that was her demarcation from child to adult. She was deprived of much of the abjection he feels the proclivity to expose himself to. A desultory, gluttonous proclivity. She doesn’t quite understand it but…she wants to infiltrate his dreams, reveal his romancing inclinations and dispositions; the reasons behind the displacement of himself into this prodigal mire.
She walks out of the club, staring up, upwards, into the sky, the stars, the constellations, one-tearfully sentimental.

VI

There’s nothing extraordinary about the inside of the house. Cobwebbed; a grated fire’s cackling, entertaining two white sofas and a garnet chair. Garnet, his favorite color…the chair, wooden legs, is composed of some kind of silky fabric. Rodian overcome with think-static inside the house; his thoughts, clouded, memories of him being here before. There’s a rickety spiral staircase leading up to the upper floors, but he wanders off to check out the kitchen first. The refrigerator is turned off. Aside from that, everything else looks perfunctorily in order.
But he already knew that. Just like he knew there’d be a modest fire lit in the living room. Did he live here once? No, he’s never moved, never had any childhood friends—
Then it hits him. Of course. This is Diana’s house. How did he—not recognize it.
No, it’s not Diana’s house. It’s just another house, like any other. And someone’s here. They must’ve heard him enter and yet…they haven’t impeded him or made any sign of reprehension.
The kitchen has no food in it. It’s been used more as an…attic, which gets him thinking what could be in the actual attic. The kitchen, with further inspection, is not in perfunctory order; quite the opposite, it’s dusty and smattered with brooms, baseball caps, vestigial anas.
Suddenly the coffee pot starts brewing. No, it starts crackling. The sound of an espresso addict’s brew. He notices a bowl of cat food with what could be, just might be, cat tranquilizers beside it. This is unfortunately probably not the case. Come to think of it, he could use a cup of Joe, or two or three. The house is clearly responding to his velleities He pulls out his Rubik’s cube: a test; he never wants to solve the puzzle, at least not by memorization.
And he solves it, albeit he can’t remember how he did so, thirty minutes later. Meanwhile, the kitchen lights have sparked on. The coffee maker shrieks. He walks over, opens one of the cubbies and wipes a mug, pours himself some PG-cocaine. Wait—
Diana? He turns around. No. Only velleities. Actual cocaine in the cat bowl instead of cat food. He waves a quick thanks to the coffee maker, snapping his fingers. He abruptly stiffens passing by the bowl of cocaine and smiles.

Strolling out of the kitchen with a little twitch in his step, he skids over to the spiral staircase; the first step creaks, snickering at him, slanted. He flightily sprints up the twisted, gradually slanting steeper and steeper stairwell; he realizes he’s been sprinting upwards much longer than one flight of stairs. Looking down, he sees the house miles below; he’s been running into the sky. The stairwell has disappeared. Whirling around, he teleports himself into the closet of the house—there is no closet in the house— to the next except none of the houses on this block has any closets which is impossible—
“Oh Rodian.” Diana…he whirls around again; he’s in an exquisitely resplendent bedroom: four-poster bed, mahogany framed mirrors, the glass so thin it’s almost as if…he could reach right through it. Lying on the bed amorously, one leg crossed over the other, foot dangling in the air. Diana. But…how? Skeptical, he—she seems to be levitating, in a golden white nightgown, glowing….glowing. Skeptical, he remains motionless, guilt slowly threading itself throughout him like the sand of an hourglass. Every sensual innuendo she emits seems to twinkle, tantalizingly; makes him want to die. He hangs his head.
When he opens his eyes the floor is antiquated, rachitic; the entire floor could be passed off as the latch to a trapdoor. He looks up and sees a disheveled woman asleep on a bed that he can tell wasn’t made before she fell asleep on it. She is the source of…the intrepidness he felt earlier. He cannot penetrate her dreams. Or she’s…dreamless.

VII

“Who are you,” the woman asks.
“The boogeyman,” he says pleasantly.
The woman snickers, rubbing the grogginess from her eyes. “What do you want. Sex? Money? I have none. Drugs? Feel free; you’d have to kill me though, I’ve used them all.” Rodian reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bottle of hydromorphone, tossing it to her; she tries to catch it but misses.
“Eh…drugstore dope. The good stuff.” She pauses. “Why are you giving me this.”
“Not in the mood to kill you.”
“I see,” the woman nods incredulously, albeit gratified. Perplexed, she continues to nod. “So…that means you’re here for sex.”
“Nope.”
“Would you…” she inquires, now intrigued, “like me to call the cops? You got munch houses or whatever it is?”
“No. In fact, I should get going. Enjoy the pills.” He notices her tattered clothes; what’s left of them. She’s not made-up because she wants others to believe she’s serious, rather, she doesn’t care. Or, she just got out of bed. Either way, she’s not Diana. Rodian turns to leave.
“Oh, and Rodian, before you go—” Turning around, he catches the woman deviously grinning.
“How…how did you know my name.”
“Tsk tsk,” the woman whispers, “it looks like you still have much to learn.”
“What do you mean?”
“About being the boogeyman, fool!” The woman flings her arms into the air. She flings them again and again. “Have you ever; just felt, felt nothing at all, anything—and you didn’t want to; where you couldn’t feel anything, and you don’t want to, either.”
“Every day,” he sits by the bedside. The woman has propped herself up against the wall with deflowered (literally) pillows.
“You…you don’t think they keep tabs? To let us, to let us know; to let us know our predecessors.”
Rodian, expressionless, runs his hand through his hair. He didn’t have a clue that ex-boogiemen and women were still alive other than Elliot. “So that’s why you’re not afraid.
“You were infiltrating my own dreams.”
“That I was,” the woman confirms, grinning naughtily, without the least bit of remorse. Why should she feel remorse? “Come downstairs with me,” she growls, having difficulty getting up. “However you managed to lure yourself here, I might as well share what advice I can before you become a prodigal megalomaniac and ruin your entitlement.” He trails her outside of her bedroom and down the spiral staircase; a cocoa-colored cat prances scurries by his legs into the kitchen. The woman lies back on one of the sofas, propping up her legs on the coffee table. “My stint as the ‘boogeyman’ was pretty stereotypical: I became corrupted and overwhelmed by my own omnipotence and lost my mind. Hit the wall. I didn’t last long. I was pretty much the interlude for Elliot when he went on hiatus. That bull’s got brass balls.”
“He’s a rhinoceros.”
“Whatever. He was just as ruthless as I was, except he didn’t let it get to his head. He separated his personal life and vocation quite well: he never let one influence the other. I don’t think he ever slept ruing the day he murdered an innocent child.” Her voice eerily cracks at the end of each sentence. “I think when he chose me he knew I wouldn’t last long and saw me as an expendable substitute. Nonetheless, I reeked of havoc; as you probably already know our vocation tends to drive those of us…quite batty.”
Rodian mulls this over, gnawing on his lip. He can comprehend that the solitude aspect of such a vocation could eventually internalize guilt or sloth into a self-deleterious boomerang. And yet, he is not drawn or stymied by the scope of his external multipotence. In fact, he has barely any desire at all to abuse his power, or let it usurp him. Frankly, having the power to teleport and scare people, ostracized from society, isn’t all that…influential to his personality. Yeah, he went through a phase of vengeance, but it wasn’t long before Titalia mitigated his rage. Essentially he’s still the same Rodian as he was before he was the boogeyman; maybe a little more jaded, maybe a little more unaffected; either way, he can’t see himself losing all touch with reality.
And yet he can’t seem to ever initiate himself to do the things that would fulfill his self-ideal, insofar as brushing his teeth, or reading for longer than spurts of thirty seconds. He rummages through his pockets for six Valiums. Ten milligrams each. Forty-five minutes of respite. The woman humphs, shaking her head.
“Already,” she mutters.
“No,” Rodian replies, firmly.
“No? You just popped enough of that junk to knock out a normal human being for twelve hours.”
“Not everyone self-medicates for the same reasons.” The woman shakes her head again.
“Have you taken a child yet?” she asks, eyeing him dubiously.
“No.”
“I never did, either. I know it’s one of the designating traits of the boogeyman but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t think many of us can, or could.” She chuckles at the terminology. “Go figure; they still insist on referring to us as boogey-people. The boogeyman!” She makes a face, parodying a vampire,, her hands swiping through the air like claws.
“So that’s it? That’s all you have to inoculate me with?”
“Heh.” She smiles forebodingly. “I just thought you should know…there are others of us out there and even though they’re retired…they’ve gone stag, and they’re not in it for another chance at a pension.”
“Well, thank you,” Rodian says, squeezing his fists as he comes off of the cocaine. “I’d best be going.” He spasms.
“Don’t you even want to know my name?”
“Why would I?” Rodian snaps at her. “I’m sure I’ll run into you again, and I just got off work, if you know what I mean.”
This time he can almost contort compassion out of her smile. He nods in gratitude and barges out of the house, terrified of car headlights as they pass by him. He zaps himself back to the Lunacy Fringe, popping two hundred milligrams of Valium and flicking on House.
“My name is Amelia,” a voice whispers in his ear. He bolts upright in shock, even though he knows there’s no one really there.

VIII

Dam wakes up lying in between the rails of a derelict railroad track. He imagines a ghost train chugging towards him and running him over. Titalia is spying on him; has been all night. She feels it’s her duty to protect him from…himself? Rodian? What would Rodian do, if he were to find him? He’s sure to find me, she sighs; meaning I can’t look after Dam.
With the sound of a whiplash, causing Dam to look towards the direction from where the sound came from, she teleports back to the Lunacy Fringe. She passes by Rodian’s room; peeks in: sound asleep. She searches for Elliot throughout the paper mache castle, tinfoil painted yellow stars hanging down from art supply wire, yet he’s nowhere to be found. Akimbo, worried, she stands on the swerving stairs leading up to the castle.

Meanwhile Dam is washing his clothes in rainwater streaming into a drain. The train yard reminds him of some kind of barren freight cemetery. He wants to go home but knowing his father his dead means that the woman was probably right; they’d be keeping tabs on him; they’d send him away. He wishes that woman would return; despite his immature display of machismo, he enjoyed her company. Plus, she was kind of cute. Really cute.
Had he killed his father, smashing the bottle over his head? He can feel the anxiety prickling up his veins like mutated arachnidan slugs; dilatory and excruciating. Wait a second, he—looks down, and sees something worming up his arm, beneath his skin. He touches it and the slug that he’d been imagining bursts out of his arm; he screams in horror; he feels them all over, crawling up his back, his legs, towards his—
“Finally,” Rodian sighs. Dam is shrieking, the slugs rupturing through his skin, loosely dropping onto the floor and creeping back up his legs. Just when one of them is about to burst out of his forehead they disappear; his body unscathed.
“Who the fuck are you?! The boogeyman or some shit?” Rodian shifts his eyes to the left; has he really become this predictable?
“Just a friend of your father’s.”
“Oh God not another. Can’t you people, just, leave me alone, whoever you are.” Dam stumbles backwards, falling on his elbows.
“Wait—what do you mean, people.”
“The woman, she…she must be in the same league as you, popping out of nowhere behind people.”
“What did she look like?” Rodian snarls.
“I don’t know? A fucking freak?” Rodian looks away, pensive. Why wouldn’t she…tell him? Doesn’t make any sense; couldn’t have been her.
“Are you sure she looked like a freak? Like I mean, a real freak?”
“Yeah. Like a Christmas elf, or something.” Dam looks up at Rodian reluctantly, shying away, crawling backwards on the ground. That’s Titalia, alright.
“Nevermind her.” Rodian says, staring off into his thoughts. “You. I need you.”
“What are you, a faggot?” Dam grimaces.

He’s too young, what am I thinking? Titalia pinches her knees together. She’s making espresso in a coffee pot; the beep indicating it’s brewed is going off. She can’t bring herself to get up. The outcome would be inevitable; he’s far too young, for one, and…human. But he’s…enchanting. Beautiful gray-blue eyes, lean body but not too skinny. She continues to dwell on how there must be something wrong with her for having a crush on someone so much younger than her, ignoring the incessant whining of the coffee pot.

“You remember your father, don’t you?” Rodian says, not so much expecting an answer as a rise out of the kid.
“What, did he die again?”
“Then you remember him when he was still alive.”
Dam, glares up at Rodian; confused, yet…almost empathetic.
“Seeing how I never really got to know him when he was dead, I—”
“I want you to think about you old man. When he was still alive. Not too long ago; while the rhinoceros freak accident was still tabloid fodder.”
“Haha, oh yea—”

Rodian bubbles into the boy’s dream memory; he sifts and weaves ebulliently from one to the next until he comes across a time-period when Thomas is walking home from an appointment with Rob Wonderland, flask in his hand, unscrewed. The surface of the dream’s surreal quality ripples like a glass window made of water, young boys skimming stones across it. His vision inside the dream flitters and spots like an old movie, fogged by a boy that lives in the past.
Thomas walks into a trash can, knocking it over into a startled flock of litter. He seems to consider whether he too should tip over, into the vagrant’s grand feast. Rodian follows him as he swaggers home, then swiftly glides over to Diana’s house. He can hear her talking to her parents through the window; they’re…arguing. About him.
He walks right through the front door, unlocking it from the inside. Diana walks right past him, stomping up the stairs. He nimbly chases after her, making sure her parents are out of hearing range; he grabs her elbow from behind and whirls her around.

IX

Titalia, distraught, wanders throughout the castle. Everything seems to be sagging, hanging, spiraling downwards. Except that it is. The entire castle is swirling around her into the pit of a jawed maelstrom. She looks down on the ledge she’s standing on and sees membranous, bulbous bruises on the creature’s throat. It’s swallowing…the Lunacy Fringe. This is not a dream.
Fuck.
Titalia rushes out of the castle, down the winding tan granite staircase, onto the pathway, meteors blowing past her like the severed wings of a crashing airplanes. The creature belches, blowing Titalia forward and onto the gravel of the pathway. Knees bleeding, she scrambles for cover. The staircase begins to crumble, it too dissolving into dust and vacuumed up by the maelstrom. Sheltered under a stolen statue of FDR, planted solely for the purpose of décor, she whiplashes to the train yard, worrying about the whereabouts and welfare of Elliot. Looking up beneath one of the freights she sees Dam, his eyes blanched and rolled back into his head. Panic-stricken, she slips into his ear,
She falls on all fours into the dream that Rodian did; the street that Thomas was walking home from Rob Wonderland’s appointment. She looks around, surveys the area, then swears under her breath; there’s no way she’s going to find Rodian without bread crumbs. She spots the knocked over garbage can and sits down under a tree nearby it, thinking about how she knows better then to jump into things.

“…Rodian?”
“No time to explain. Just follow me.”
“But my parents are—“
“Do you want to live or not?” She glances at him quizzically.
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“I’m not.” He grabs her wrist and yanks her behind him, chasing himself out of the house and, kissing her, runs down the block, watches the passengers inside of a bus stare at him like a man dragging a woman somewhere she’s probably not coming back from. In this case, they were right. Making sure that no one’s around, he bashes open a locked in Duane Reade glass door, shards sprinkling onto his shirt, and pulls her through into the

Lunacy Fringe where they hang by the teeth of the maw of the creature, trying not to be sucked into its hideous, undulating throat.
“This is your idea of saving my life?!” Diana screams out to him, losing grip of one of the monster’s teeth by one arm, looking into its wind-hole and wincing, quickly grabbing back into its tooth.
“I didn’t…” the intensity of the air and debris funneling into the creature’s mouth cuts off the rest of what she hears. With one final deep breath, the creatures suctions Rodian, Diana, and the rest of the Lunacy Fringe into its verrucose stomach.


X

“So this is your idea of saving me?”
“Unless you want to die again, yes.” They’re both huddled against one of the inner walls of the creature’s stomach, sitting on a cracked piece of meteorite floating on a sea of digested yoke.
“Could you please explain to me what’s going on? Rhinoceroses barging out of TV screens is one thing but—”
“Ballooning through intergalactic dimensions is a whole ‘nother story.”
“Rodian?” Diana looks at him with the dreary, sheet-white earnest eyes that she used to with when she was still…alive, in the former world as he knew it.
“I guess we have time for me to explain everything. I don’t think,” he dips his hand into the yoke, drawing up a rope of gurgling digestive string. Whatever it’s connected to, it appears to still be very alive. “we’re going anywhere anytime soon.”
Diana nuzzles against his shoulder.
“Rodian.”
“Yes.”
“What the hell is that.”
“It’s a bubble.” They both stare at the deformed mutant bubble.
“It doesn’t look like a normal bubble, Rodian,” Diana whispers, so close to his ear that he flinches.
“I’m sure it’s just some anomaly in this thing’s digestive tract.”
Diana glances at him incredulously, inflaming his restrained amour. “Alright
“So here’s the précis.” Diana gives him an unenthused drum roll. “I’m the boogeyman.”
Diana stops drumming. She looks at him with integrity and maternal concern. He admires her breasts.
“Stop looking at my breasts.”
“OK.”
“Where were we.
“Oh yeah! We got zapped off into another dimension and swallowed by a gigantic monster his stomach acids will eventually erode our skin down to the bone and we’ll tip over as skeletons into the pungent aroma of the former dimension.”
“I’m the boogeyman.”
She looks at him again with increasingly maternal concern. “Are you okay? Did you hit your head on the way down or something?”
“Look: I killed you. Reality: I killed you. The world that I just stole you from doesn’t exist. It’s the dream of a boy who lives in the past. I infiltrated his dream to find you and return you to reality.”
She throws a tiny piece of meteorite at a passing bubble. It pops and ooze splats all over both of them. She giggles until they both start to giggle hysterically.
“I’ll prove it to you.”
She scoffs, chuckling and shaking her head.
“What are you most afraid of,” he asks, combing his hand through her blond streaked hair. It reminds him of corn stalks for some reason. Maybe there are children in it.
“All the things that I want to do that I can’t bring myself to do,” eyes closed.
“What do you want to do?”
“You know, like, when you want to do something so bad? Go to college, or get a job, or finish some work of art…but you can’t. You just can’t and you don’t know why,” she looks upwards.
“I’ve missed you so much,” he says, holding back tears.
“Just cry silly. You’re on the fringe!” She giggles. “Anyway, I just saw you yesterday. What the hell do you miss me for? I’m right here.” She reconsiders, making compassionate gestures with her hands. “I’m right here.”

They’ve floated farther down the creature’s digestive tract, nearing the waterfall that pours down into a pink whirlpool. They’re both afraid, Diana near hysterical, trying to recount her entire life so she can remember it before she dies; Rodian calm.
“You know, back when I said I was the boogeyman—“
“I used to know this kid that would roll dice every day he woke up. He said whatever number he got, that the dice landed, would predict the rest of his day. He said no matter what they were always right. He said no matter what, even if threw them again until he got what he wanted, the dice were right, the dice were right. Every time.”
“—well, it’s a good thing I am, because otherwise—“
“I also knew this kid with ADHD who could count cards. I met him in an institution; I forget his name, started with a ‘D’. Anyway, the kid was a genius, except that every now and then he’d lock himself in the closet and start screaming ‘sugar!’ or something like that. In that institution there was also this boy with down syndrome that cut out pictures of Hillary Duff from magazines and stacked them in this ten-foot-tall pile in his room. It was—”
“Is that I can get us out of here.” Diana looks up from talking to her hands.
“How?”
Rodian stands up, steadying himself on the shard of meteorite., then taps into the creature’s thoughts; its dreams.
“I was drinking from a diet-coke can that I’d just put in the fridge but I couldn’t wait any longer to drink it. I always wanted to be that photographer; that girl that got into FIT that took those, wishy-washy, ambiguous pictures of beautiful people.”
The creature is tired, hungry again. It is near asleep. It’s dreaming of some kind of phantasmal amphetamine, to quell the hunger. A place where it no longer has to feed, is never tired, doesn’t have to ruin lives. It’s most afraid of—
“RODIAN!”

…to be continued.