I. Adagio sostenuto
Sam was watching a commercial and the commercial was there with him. The commercial showed a man growing agitated in his attempts at sleep, while beyond him and barely sketched a woman’s silhouette dozed on.
Quiltō, said a toasted female voice.
“Quiltō,” Sam intoned, sipping his beer. He acted like he was interested in what TV said, just to humor it.
Is now Quiltō+. An extended release sleeping aid with two layers.
“Layers?”
The man had stopped thrashing under his blanket. His eyes were closed and his smile pinned on. The woman—the wife—from over a shoulder observed his contentment, the utter stillness of which had woken her.
I. Adagio sostenuto
Sam was watching a commercial and the commercial was there with him. The commercial showed a man growing agitated in his attempts at sleep, while beyond him and barely sketched a woman’s silhouette dozed on.
Quiltō, said a toasted female voice.
“Quiltō,” Sam intoned, sipping his beer. He acted like he was interested in what TV said, just to humor it.
Is now Quiltō+. An extended release sleeping aid with two layers.
“Layers?”
The man had stopped thrashing under his blanket. His eyes were closed and his smile pinned on. The woman—the wife—from over a shoulder observed his contentment, the utter stillness of which had woken her.
The pill’s first layer puts you to sleep. The second layer keeps you asleep: No more waking up before you’re ready.
What an ominous thing to promise, Sam thought—better steer clear. He looked at his beer and found it to be an empty bottle of Quiltō+.
Doesn’t mean I took them all, he reasoned. Or any.
It was late; he was ready for the last beer of the twelve-pack he’d bought to help himself pass out. He walked to the fridge and opened it. His reflection did likewise in the full-length mirror on the far side of the living room. Only his reflection was slower, and the fridge light filled its face like the lurid glow of treasure in an old pirate movie.
There were two beers in there, double the expected inventory. Sam took the one sitting further back. He returned to the living room, where the bottle opener was. The TV was saying people who take Quiltō+ occasionally experience positive side effects.
“Positive?” said Sam, popping the beer. The piano music in the commercial swelled; he plucked the remote from the mess on his coffee table and held down the left half of the VOL -/+ button. Nothing happened. He pressed the left of VOL -/+ more seriously, then whacked the remote and pressed the button with calm firmness. Scoffing for effect, Sam got up to press the TV set’s VOL - button (separately articulated from the VOL +). The music, meanwhile, stayed loud, because it was coming from his stereo.
He’d also left the fridge open: disappointing behavior. So a commercial had slipped into his frame, real graceful—no excuse to waste electricity. Approaching the cold fluorescence in the kitchen, a link in his chain of reasoning snapped, and it was remotely deduced that his proximity to the open fridge meant the time had come to open the last beer. At that moment Sam was just two sips into the surprise extra beer now warming on his coffee table, which in being forgotten and not serving its purpose had been erased from a couple layers of existence.
But the stereo. You could see how the grilles of the speakers blurred as each lucid chord touched down. Sam ran his hand over the vibrations and looked at the beer bottle in his hand. His dad’s brand, dark as dark chocolate, pines and a modest Northeastern peak on the label. Someone’s lazy idea of where beer comes from.
Ask your doctor about Quiltō+, said the toasted female voice, and the screen imposed a purple over-starry sky above the dreaming insomniac. In its center hung the benevolent yellow drug like the moon after plastic surgery.
“What doctor,” Sam said, on his knees, searching the disaster of the coffee table for his bottle opener and thereby knocking over the opened, half-existing beer he’d forgotten. He sprang forward to save it; everything else on the table slid off in a sheet.
A full beer in each hand, he let his face drop carefully onto the cleared surface, a nice enough fact even if the mound of ash and broken ceramic and census forms alongside it was not. This commercial, he sensed, was going on forever, or repeating itself, or almost over. “Don’t wait another minute for a good night’s sleep,” it said.
Oh god, Sam thought, face soaking up the table’s cool wood as a wave of stars twinkled to life along his narrow band of vision. Got to remember what I was going to do. What I’m doing. He picked his head up and took a long swallow of the open beer after trying to swig from the closed one. He pulled his legs out of their compressed kneel and stretched them under the coffee table. They touched the mess on the far side. His head lolled back onto the couch, and a loathing crystallized in Sam—because what had he been doing, watching a commercial when he could have fastforwarded.
II. Allegretto
One balmy Tuesday in the Late Cretaceous, a triceratops awoke with a start, shook off her advanced dreams (triangles, endless triangles) and ambled over to some shrubs for a midnight snack. The search for high-density leaf coverage led her away from the slumbering herd, toward plants on the fringe of the area they’d methodically stripped that day.
A groggy hundred yards later, at the edge of a rushing stream, the triceratops found what she was looking for. Four-five good mouthfuls of leaves left on this shrub, she estimated. No feast, but a respectable late-night nibble. She clamped onto the lowest-hanging leaves with her powerful beak and set to chewing. As she savored the waxy treat, her upper horns jostled the skeletal shrub to a gentle rhythm established by the lock-tempo churn of her jaw.
Suddenly there was a hot breath on the triceratops, and she looked around in alarm for whatever had breathed on her. She looked in every direction and back at the bush. The heat was still there, on the peak of her back. She waited a beat and did something for the very first time: she looked straight up.
Had she tried it any other time, she would have been unimpressed with up, up being the meaningless pattern of inedibility she’d always assumed. But in the center of up’s untouchables was a sun pulsing red and hot. Though it hurt to have her bony frill pressed against her back like that, she kept her sight trained upward. The sun was growing, though it did not light the land, and the hot breath sensation began to feel like a burn. When she could stand it no longer the triceratops galloped into the cooler dark.
A sound like hissing geysers built around her. She turned to see a giant egg-shaped stone sitting right where she’d stood a moment ago. She crept back toward it, taking cover behind another barren shrub, vexed at her failure to catch its scent.
The stone cracked near its base, and through the crack a straight dark leg extended. For a while nothing more happened; the stone showed no sign of activity, and the triceratops had laid eggs like this, ones that get halfway through hatching and then give up and wait for their mother to help.
At last there was a glimmer at the crack. It traveled like an upright beam of water along the extended leg. Another followed. When they reached where the leg met high grass along the stream, the triceratops came to see that these were living beings, silver and shaped like thin saplings. Mesmerized, she drew closer. They were speaking to one another in calls too quiet and muddled to understand.
“Why are we meeting him here?” she didn’t hear one of them say.
“Don’t ask me his business,” she missed the other replying. “You’ll go far in this organization if you stop asking the incriminating questions.”
The first silver sapling, the inquisitive one, scratched the left set of its branches with the right set. It stepped away from the second sapling, toward the stream, and cautiously dipped a lower extremity. The second sapling reached behind the dark leg they’d walked down together and produced a black tube that glowed red-hot at the tip. It aimed this tube at the inquisitive sapling’s crown of branches and approached.
“Well this place is a dump,” the inquisitive sapling said.
“Say something good,” the sapling with the weapon said. “Last thing that toy under your skin records.”
The inquisitive sapling spun to face its killer and froze in thickening red light. Its branches withered and turned to ash that dropped in a hazy cone around its still-upright trunk. The trunk went papery and hollow. The living sapling tossed its weapon aside and kicked the husk of its partner into the stream, where it flaked apart and became yet more shine on the hurried water.
The triceratops resisted valiantly, but in the end a full-octave burp escaped her. The lone silver sapling—already halfway up the dark leg to its stone—paused and cocked its branches. It glided back down to the grass, strode over to the shrub the triceratops was hiding behind (as if it knew all along she was spying) and spoke directly through the bramble at her.
There was no point in being impolite, so the doe-eyed triceratops came around the shrub to engage the silver sapling, which tracked her movement with an air of infinite patience. Once out in the open, she snorted and stomped a triceratops greeting customary in those parts, but the poor sapling was too dumb to understand. It merely clicked in soft laughter at her display and went up the leg to the crack in its stone, the stone then withdrawing the leg and sealing the crack and twanging up beyond the planet’s hold.
III. Presto agitato
At dawn they were going to round us up and do the massacre right, so an obvious question loomed: where would we throw our very last party? We were semi-hungover from the previous night’s revelry, and it was late into Saturday’s drizzle when we got around to asking. Even before settling the matter, we gathered our accessories—among them a battery-powered record player, a wooden coffee table with glued-on ashtray, a leather beanbag, a moody Rothko liberated from its frame—and swooped down on the city like drunken angels.
For an hour we bullshitted each other about acid jazz in the middle of Riverside Drive, cabs swerving wetly around our humble cluster of furniture and guests. As the rain broke Ryan brightly informed us of a gathering some blocks south, on the Staten Island ferry. Eliza said if we were schlepping all the way down there, we may as well stop by the party on the 1 train and pay our respects, so we trooped into the dank intestinal subway, hopped the Seventh Avenue Local and took turns doing goofy pole dances as we hurtled sideways through space-time, with Logan pompously translating the Morse code of tunnel lights that flickered by.
Alas, as with most 1 train parties, it wasn’t long before a crasher arrived and tried to hijack the ambiance with his acoustic guitar. Not wanting to make a big fuss, we bade a French goodbye and hit the ferry affair a tad early. It was just as well, seeing as parties were often catatonic until we came along to resuscitate them, full of solitary people doing solitary things like reading novels or playing handheld videogames or adjusting fat earphones. We took the coffee table and beanbag and a mattress we’d found in the gutter en route and stacked them on an unoccupied bench toward the prow, then played King of the Mountain until Quentin twisted her ankle in a flirtatious war of attrition with Jules. For a dagger of a moment we feared our fun was finished, and Jules went the color of mayonnaise. But Quentin declared that nothing would spoil our evening and asked for some ice, of which we naturally had a bucket, as Gregory took his Chivas on the rocks. It was the relief of our short lives.
After a cocktail intermission we found ourselves back on the southern tip of Manhattan: fortuitous, as a Chinatown party was on the point of existence. There was a terrifying round of Manhunt that made use of the cramped and alley-like streets, Chase ATM lobbies serving as jails until Foster escorted a captive Logan to one and found Melissa and Nikolai—warden and ward—lewdly tangled. While they buttoned and smoothed their clothes, others of us congregated on the curb serving as territory line to signal that the game was up; head by head we collected our ranks until only Ryan was missing. Quentin texted him. Gregory said to forget it, that he’d obviously run into some other crew.
The faces of these rival playboys and playgirls ricocheting around in our skulls, we walked toward an idea of sunrise and caught the 6 train well after its gala had fizzled, empty save a few evaporating puddles. We disembarked when Eliza reported a whiff of afterparty emanating from the corner of 75th and Madison—a dubious scent, we concurred, given its Upper East Side origins, but no one offered an alternative. Soon enough we encountered the jutting tiers of The Whitney and began to exchange troubled glances. The sky was a pinkish gray. This place was dead. We started slowly, uncertainly north. Then Melissa stopped walking, and we all stopped with her.
“I don’t know why I stopped just now,” Melissa said when she saw we were waiting.
A police car slid past us and parked at the corner. Two cops got out and walked toward us. The one who’d been driving was sipping from a huge Yankees thermos, and the one who spoke first had a discolored dent in his forehead.
“What’d you, forget?” he asked us with his hands on his belt.
“Hey,” said the one with the thermos. “They won’t all fit.”
“We can fit four,” his partner told him. “All we need. You, you, you. You.”
The four of us chosen were handcuffed together in same-sex pairs while the rest watched with historic expressions.
“Ladies get dropped first,” the cop with the thermos explained as we crammed into the backseat of the squad car. “They get processed at a separate facility.”
Our friends blew meaningful kisses and waved tiredly as we swung east around the corner of 76th street. They’d scatter across the boroughs to doze away their mistakes in private. I hoped there would be no need for the siren; exotic flowers of pain had opened behind my eyes. The cop driving slurped from his thermos while the other slapped his knees. “Had your fun then, did you?” one of them asked. We turned south on Park Avenue and had the next light, and green lights all the way out.
Miles Klee (b. 1985) lives in Manhattan. He is a contributor to The Awl, The New York Observer and The Indypendent. His short fiction has appeared in Storychord, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Contrary, elimae, Polluto, Brain Harvest, Uncle Magazine, The Big Jewel, A cappella Zoo, Abjective and elsewhere. He is the author behind hatethefuture.com.