“What the hell was that all about?!” Xeno yelled, closing in on Zoom beneath a desolate freeway overpass. “Did you drop that lipstick in Trianne's bag?!”

“I did.” Zoom slumped against a concrete column, gasping for air. “I guess I don't handle rejection well.”

“You couldn't wait 'til after the audition to get down Trianne's pants?!” Xeno shoved Zoom up against the concrete column.

“I'm sorry man! Things just got out of hand!” Zoom coughed up more bloody phlegm into his fingers. “Maybe we should find Lew and start another club?”

“You're falling apart. Maybe we should get you to a clinic?”

“Let's head back to the Ultramango.” Zoom stumbled away from Xeno, into the shadows. “I just need a good stiff drink.”

“I don't think that's a good—” Xeno stopped short, almost losing his balance behind Zoom.

“Maybe we can get some company? I know these two chicks—” Zoom turned to see Xeno wobbling in the brush, several yards away. “Is that your brain implant acting up, again?”

“I'm telling you, Zoom, something's not right with my head, and it's not the Black Magic.” Xeno plopped down on the ground, trying to focus on Zoom and his slippery slope grin, melting into a frown, getting blurrier, and blurrier, the ceiling of the overpass rotating a quarter circle, then resetting itself again, and again, and again, charcoal circles expanding on Zoom's fur coat, fireworks blowing out his rib cage, jaw spewing flame like a brief dragon, torch exhaust from the eye sockets, a series of shapes looking like gold fish belching sparks underwater, the dull flicker, reflecting off Xeno's cheeks like a trash can fire, the final miasma teetering, falling forward in slow steam, cinders fading like ashen newspaper . . .

“The idea of the figment,” Zoom's voice continued, transmitting like a radio with poor reception, “is a figment of the idea.”

“Zoom?” Xeno found himself inside what appeared to be a motel lobby. Outside the glass doors it was dark—no guests coming or going through the underlit tropical plants. “Are we playing hide and seek?”

No response.

He ventured further into the hotel, passing between two synthetic man-sized Moai heads, silent in the torch light, entering an artificial cave inlaid with mirrored panels, catching his reflection—he was back in his vacation clothes, the shorts the floral print shirt. He passed beneath a woodcut sign, hanging in a bamboo entry:

WELCOME TO

THE TIKI TOCKI MOTEL

BAR & GRILL

“Zoom? You there?” He gazed through the intaglio screens of annexed booths, looking for a head and shoulders, movement in the shadows.

“I'm not sure, Xeno.” Zoom's voice drifted through the empty restaurant. “It's outside of human perception. All I know is that I exist on some occult bandwidth, and it's very difficult for me to tune my voice to your auditory nerve.”

“Are you in The Nth Dimension?”

“Are you kidding? On this crappy frequency? The quality of consciousness is too degraded. How they keep me barely alive in this capacity, I can't say.”

“They? Who are 'they'?”

“I don't know. I can't see them. They don't speak to me. I'm not even sure if they like me. I can only sense them. It's almost worse than being dead. I wish I had burned to death.”

“Is that what happened to you just now under the overpass?”

“I would really like to answer your question, but they control what I say . . . or can't say . . . they . . . ”

“Zoom, stay with me. Tell me what's going on.”

“Over here, by the bar. Something else has got their attention. Hurry! We can chat!” In the shimmer of shelved bottles and glasses, Zoom's apparition appeared behind the circular bar, his face and torso glowing with syntax, circulating like conscious software on an animated wire frame. “Everyone in your dream is played by you.”

“So, am I really speaking to you?” Xeno took a seat at the bar. “Or, am I just talking to myself in a Zoom suit?”

“Could be your implant acting up.” Zoom's apparition lifted an animated wire frame bottle and poured a glass of swirling syntax into an animated wire frame shot glass, then pushed the potion towards Xeno.

“So, you believe me about my implant?”

“How can you read thoughts or predict the future, if you can't discern between what is real and what is hallucination in your own mind?”

“And if I drink this? What changes? Do I get to go backstage, behind The Nth Dimension?”

“Aaaaagh!” Zoom's apparition gagged, as if strangled by a clutch of invisible fingers around his throat. “They're back! Controlling what I say! This frequency is awful!” He struggled to get more words out, finally disintegrating into specks of light behind the bar.

The animated shot glass of glowing syntax still remained.

Xeno edged his fingers towards the potion of occult code—he was startled by a the sound of breaking glass, coming from the rear of the restaurant. He let the drink alone, and crept through the dining area, down the corridor leading to the kitchen. He stopped at the swinging steel doors, and peered through one of the portholes to see if anyone was around. The stainless steel stove tops and hanging utensils appeared unused, as if delivered from a factory showroom and installed moments ago.

He entered the kitchen, took a look around. On the edge of a cutting table, someone had left a fresh orange on a paper plate. The peel surface was punctured with a pencil-sized hole, as if something had been sucking the juice with a large straw or mutant proboscis. An acrid stench drew Xeno's attention down to the floor—a puddle of discolored grease. Something crunched under the sole of his thong.

He bent down, lifted a fragment from the muck with his fingers, and held it up to the ceiling light. He recognized the bronze mirrored surface to be a piece of Drinama's mask. The backside had a carbon coating, with a strange yolk that glistened like the nacre of an oyster shell. At the edge of the grease puddle, a trail of filthy footprints led towards the kitchen exit, looking as if she had fled into the parking lot after slipping and cracking her face. If he caught up to her, he thought, he could see who was in there . . .

A pair of headlights emerged under the overpass, the high beams locking onto Zoom's corpse. A Cadillac Eldorado, deluged with peeling maroon paint, came to a crunching halt in the gravel. The moon-colored man in trench coat and dark glasses, who had given Trianne the creeps back at the Galaxia Mall, stepped out of the car and went to the trunk. He opened the hood and removed a body bag. He crouched in the soil and rolled Zoom's charred corpse inside, his mauve lips remaining flat and grim as he tucked in the dead limbs and zippered up the corpse. He swooped up the body with muscular arms, dumped it in the trunk, and slammed down the hood.

He got back in the Cadillac, drove a few yards, and parked in front of Xeno, still lying unconscious on the ground. He got out of the car with a syringe cradled in his stony fingers, pulled off the safety cap, pumped out the air bubbles with a stream of after-spurt in the air, then bent down and rolled back Xeno's sleeve to expose a vein. He shot him up with a full dose of Sunlite. The designer drug glowed with an effervescent orange hue as it flowed into Xeno's arm.

“Number Three?” A gruff voice sounded off on the man's black box transceiver. “Do you copy?”

“Yes, Garry. I'm here,” Number Three replied, his voice marbled and cryptic. He withdrew the syringe needle, then folded Xeno's arm at the elbow to halt the blood flow from the injection.

“How are the subjects?” Garry asked.

“Xeno will pull through . . . Zoom wasn't so lucky.”

“How bad?”

“Full blown ignition, sir.”

“Bring Zoom to headquarters.”

“And Xeno?”

“Put him in a cab. Send him home for the evening.”

“Do you want me to wipe his memory?” Number Three removed a small hand-held device from his coat pocket. He unfolded the wing-shaped sensor over Xeno's forehead.

“No! Not with those cheap scanners.” Garry snapped. “They erase the wrong memories, and then you have to keep erasing, and erasing, and erasing, and it just becomes a big pain in the ass. Just send him back to the Ultramango.”

“What if he remembers the incident?”

“Who cares? No one will believe him.”

“Yes sir.”

Xeno woke in the back seat of a moving cab, the ceiling coming into focus, a fast food commercial blaring down at him. Klownsy, the Klownburger mascot with ghost-white flesh and wild neon green hair, chomped on a hamburger from above, announcing in Hinglish from an atmospheric telepane covering the whole roof interior. Burgelina, the homecoming queen in sequinned dress and crowned hamburger bun head, hung on Klownsy's arm, trying to get a bite for herself. With a tipsy wave of his wand, Fizzard, the drunken robed wizard, added a soft drink and fries that magically danced in the air. The wand backfired with a wad of sparks, causing a grease fire in the surrounding claustrophobic cartoon forest. The Burgerbrains, midgets with burger-shaped heads resembling gray brain matter, appeared in shiny red fireman uniforms, putting out the flames with milkshake hoses in seconds. With fast food order restored, The Purpler, a fuzzy violet character with the physique of an obese bowling pin, entered the frame offering chocolate smothered deserts from a tray, looking on with goofy cartoon eyes and a dopey smile.

“Whatchya trippin' on dude?” The cabbie asked, glancing back through the wire screen, a coffee toned man with a mane of dreadlocks flowing from a Kufi hat.

“Trippin' on?” Xeno massaged his eye sockets. “The Purpler. He's the only Klownburger character that gets to walk around naked in public.”

“Yeah, the Purpler. No wonder kids have nightmares about fast food.” The cabbie flashed a smile of teeth inlaid with diamonds. “You were goin' on about the grout in the kitchen, or some shit like that.” He changed the ceiling footage to a montage of curvy young girls, pole dancing to pop muzak on a neon lit stage.

“Grout? In the kitchen?”

“Sounded like you were having a bad dream. Arguing with Andrea.”

“Arguing with my telepane? How did I get here?”

“The same way we all did.” The cabbie sipped from a bottle of scotch, stop-starting his cab through the morning fumes of ailing commercial vehicles and rickety bicycle traffic. “Two people meet, have kids, and . . . my name's Redge.”

“Xeno—and on top of being a cab driver who openly drinks behind the wheel, you're a comedian.”

“Everyone in Metropa is. You look like one of those designer drug zombies that hung around the Shoki Pao, before it burned down.”

“I still am, and doing a damn fine job. I used to tend bar there, among other questionable things.”

“Ha, yeah. You know Lew?”

“Who doesn't?”

“Well, if you see him, I got more footage.”

“Footage?”

“Dancing girls.” Redge jerked his thumb up towards footage of pole-dancing girls, now playing on the ceiling telepane. “I used to send Lew footage of girls who were actually pretty, and if he hired them, he'd float me a couple of nukes, or some Black Magic.”

“Any girls I know?”

“You know Holly?”

“Hollymonde?”

“Yeah, that Holly.” Redge snickered.

“Yeah, I know that Holly. She could sue you for calling her 'Holly' in public. Or so she tells herself.”

“Yeah, well I knew her when she was just Holly, broke-loser-Holly, looking for work as a pole dancer, and I sent the footage to Lew. That's how she got that gig at the Shoki Pao, and what thanks do I get?”

“With Holly you typically get none. You ever audition a dancer named Trianne?”

“Trianne? No, never auditioned her. Was she hot?”

“She still is.”

“I used to chauffeur Lew around some, too. You know, for—”

“Yeah, for a few nukes and some Black Magic.”

“The last chick he was with? I wanted to thank her surgeon—way too perfect to be human.”

“Synthetic?”

“I didn't ask for receipts. Just my own aesthetic opinion. Where you want to be dropped?”

“The Ultramango.”

“That's a ritzy joint. You a dealer?”

“No, I'm house sitting for Blouse Demise.”

“How'd you get on top of that?”

“She liked Lew's Black Magic. I was her favorite delivery boy.”

“I thought her show—if you can call it that—was canceled.”

“She fled to some retreat sponsored by Red Curtain Media, left me the keys to the castle and a list of chores. I haven't heard from her since . . . She hasn't returned to kick me out.”

“Enough of that. Let's go to the beach.” Redge switched the ceiling telepane footage to a deserted aquamarine shoreline with leafy palms waving in the sunlight. He activated the lift jets beneath his cab and drifted his rig off the asphalt, ascending past the fern-infested balconies of The Ultramango, a fruit-pink senior high-rise, full of frail human shapes shuffling behind sliding glass doors with drawn curtains. A gramophone recording of Irving Berlin's “Let's Face the Music and Dance” wandered through the air from a distant suite:

There may be trouble ahead

But while there's music and moonlight

and love and romance

Let's face the music and dance

Before the fiddlers have fled

Before they ask us to pay the bill and

while we still have the chance

Let's face the music and dance

Redge hung his head out the driver window, piloting the airborne cab over the terrace wall of the penthouse floor. He hovered forward a few yards and landed on a blanket of artificial lawn, rippling the still water of the swimming pool with a wake of exhaust.

Xeno got out of the cab and paid Redge the fare indicated on the meter.

“If you want hook up and get somethin' started,” Redge handed Xeno his card:

REDGE EDIT

FOOTAGIER

redgedit@gogo.box

“Thanks.” Xeno put the card in his breast pocket. “If I ever open a club and need a go go dancer—”

“You know what to do.”

Xeno stepped back a safe distance from the cab.

Redge activated the lift jets, hovered the cab in the air, swung the butt around, then floated over the edge of the high-rise trailing exhaust.

The engine whine dwindled from Xeno's ears, until there was nothing left but the barren gazebo, dead leaves strewn on the cushions of the furniture, the murky sheen of the swimming pool, the geometric facade of Blouse's glass-paneled penthouse, dark and dormant.