Expiration Date

Then I finally pushed myself to a sitting position, across from Meghan.

“I’m sorry about what happened last night,” I said. “I didn’t meant to scare you like that.”

“So what happened?”

“I was kind of hoping you could tell me.”

“You don’t remember?”

I remembered a lot of things, but I wasn’t exactly sure they were real. The last thing I wanted was to make this conversation even more awkward. So I lied.

“Last thing I remember,” I said, “I was in bed with you. Wait…that sounds wrong. I was on the couch with you. I nodded off, and what was it. What did I miss?”

Meghan looked at me.

“You were mumbling in your sleep. Saying something like, you can’t hear me, you can’t see me. Then you said something about all of this being a dream.”

“How did I get to the hospital?”

“A little before seven you started convulsing, which really freaked me out. I tried waking you up. You wouldn’t. Then you started screaming with your eyes shut, so I called 911. They asked me if you were on any drugs, but I told them I didn’t know.”

As she spoke, I replayed last night’s dream in my head. While Meghan had been watching me convulse, I’d probably been throwing my shoulder against an imaginary door, trying to break it down. I screamed when my imaginary fingers fell off.

Meghan took me by the shoulders now. Stared hard into my eyes.

“Mickey, I know you’re between jobs and everything, but if you need to see somebody, I can help you out.”

“I don’t need help. I’m just a little tired.”

“Nobody drinks a six-pack then lapses into a near-coma, Mickey. It just doesn’t make sense. You always seem broke…”

“Wait, wait—you think I’m on drugs?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m not here to judge. Jesus, I sound like a therapist…look, I dated a guy in college with a serious problem, and we all got him some help. It took awhile, but he’s doing okay now.”

“Meghan, I swear to you, it’s not drugs. I’m too broke to afford drugs. I had those Yuengling and a couple of aspirin. That was it. You were here with me the whole time, remember?”

“Aspirin, huh?”

“From my grandfather’s medicine cabinet. Unless you think he was doing drugs and stashing them in the Tylenol bottle.”

Meghan touched my face as if she could read minds with her fingertips. I was angry, but part of me softened at her touch.

“Okay, Mickey. Maybe you just need some rest.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

She stood up and started looking through her purse for her keys. As much as I wanted her to stay, I also wanted time to sort through what I’d just dreamed about. All of it was so damn real, so detailed.

“Let me walk you.”

“I’m fine—I’m parked right downstairs. You act like this is Beirut or something.”

“Yeah, I know it’s not Beirut. Beirut has more buildings left standing.”

Meghan leaned down and brushed her lips against my forehead. I reached up and touched her arm, as if my touch could make her linger. But she pulled away quickly and walked to the door. She smiled, told me she’d check on me later.

I pushed myself up off the floor and went to the bathroom for more Tylenol. The two I’d taken before hadn’t done a damn thing—

Wait a minute.

V

The Clockwise Witness

Using a butter knife, I chopped a single pill into quarters, doing the math in my head. Last night, I’d popped four pills, 250 milligrams each. I had weird-ass dreams about cars and women in polka-dot dresses and fat, sweaty doctors that lasted pretty much all night long.

This evening I’d taken two pills, and the weird-ass dream thing lasted three, maybe four hours.

So a quarter of a single pill would be what…a half hour?

Okay, worst case, I’d swallow it and it wouldn’t do a thing. Then I’d know it was something else making me dream about February 1972. But if it had been the pills, it would start to explain a lot. Namely, that all of these crazy dreams weren’t coming out of nowhere.

I opened a grape Vitamin Water that Meghan had brought and swallowed the quarter pill. Then I laid back down on the floor, next to the couch, and closed my eyes.

There was no warning, no herald. The pill worked that fast.

Within seconds I was on the floor of the dark, empty office. Two fingers, still missing. El rumbling outside.

This time, however, I stayed put in the office that would someday become my Grandpop’s apartment. As Blaise Pascal once wrote: “All of man’s trouble stems from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Instead, I peeled back some of the cardboard, looked out of the front windows and watched the soft rain land on the early 1970s cars moving down Frankford Avenue. I listened to wet tires against asphalt, a soothing sound broken up every few minutes by the thunder of the arriving El that always, without fail, jolted me, whipping shadows across my face.

There were also murmured voices somewhere in the apartment building. A woman’s. Then an angry kid, saying he didn’t understand, he was being quiet. And then the woman’s voice again, saying something about being done, that’s it, she couldn’t take it anymore. Ah, another quiet night in Frankford circa 1972.

Right? This was 1972?

But I didn’t want to go outside and check. I just wanted to sit on that weird stiff psychiatrist’s sofa and take