Lunch or Something Like It

I did not sleep for the remainder of the night. I had an excruciating headache. I wasn't troubled, to be fair. I often woke up from pain, my head throbbing me into lucidity. I took some of my special pain medicine. It took the sharpness, the pique, away from it, so it was dulled throbbing as opposed to knitting needles being jammed into the softer parts of my skull. More manageable, that. At about four that morning, I had breakfast. It worked. I'm a fairly dab hand at cooking. No Gordon Ramsay, but I get by, living alone.

I needed to zone out. I needed to focus on something else, something mindless. Cartoons are usually a good choice, I've found. There's nothing important in them. Dragon Ball Z. Quite mindless indeed.

I didn't have lectures to attend today. It was my free day. I wasn't employed. I didn't have to be. That's the beauty of the Montgomery G.I. Bill. I was the professional student indeed. My gaze faltered from Goku charging a Spirit Bomb to the wall clock, Roman numerals adorning it. I have always found that the platitudes about the perception of the passing of time, as in “A watched pot never boils”, to be completely untrue. When you're awake, and perfectly conscious, time has meaning. Time is one of the only things that has a consistent feel to it, like mass, like distance.

I needed to find a way to pass the time more efficiently.

I did.

I'm not going to talk about it.

It isn't important.

The Alumnus Club was an inconspicuous brick building located about a block off of campus. Opened in 1899, it was a restaurant and “hang out” for alumni of my university, mainly big-shot lawyers and other highly-paid assholes who can take two hour martini lunches. I had never eaten there, despite the fact that I was, in point of fact, an alumnus of my university. It wasn't really my speed. It had a dress code, for Christ's sake. So, another day in business wear. More khakis, brown patent leather shoes, blue blazer. I looked like someone who wasn't me. As I looked in the bathroom mirror, the dark circle on my eyes stood out like craters on the Moon. I was skilled in their detection and their temporary erasure. Ice cubes are the way to go.

I lived on the first floor of a townhouse. It was quite cozy. Small yard out back, three steps leading up to the front door. And at a reasonable price as well. I'd be traveling on foot. It was preferred mode of transit. I didn't own a car, but the walking kept me healthy. As I started down my street, an unseasonable gust of wind threatened my foot, blowing debris past me. A fragment of newspaper clung to my leg like a lost child. I detached it from myself. Curiously, I turned it over.

WE ARE BEHIND YOU, it said.

IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE

It was a madman's scrawl. It made the hairs on my neck stand at attention like the hackles of a dog. I did not enjoy this feeling. I still don't. I glanced over my shoulder. Nothing was behind me. I started walking again, throwing away the piece of paper in the nearest bin.

The rest of my walk was without incident. It doesn't bear description.

The door to the Alumnus Club was heavy, rich oak. The finery started before you even entered it. Upon entry, my sunglasses came off, and my eyes adjusted to the low light of the foyer. A hostess, less than my age, was standing at a podium. Her eyes lit up in recognition.

“Wolf?!” she asked incredulously, her voice rising in pitch over the course of my rather short name.

“Yeah. The one and only. What's up, Jill?” Jill Sanders had been a student in one of my TA classes. Pretty, not that bright, but with a certain sort of dim charm. I didn't wholeheartedly dislike her. But I couldn't bring myself to enjoy her company. She blathered on at warp speed about what she'd been up to since last semester, before realizing she'd been holding me up.

“Do you, like, have a reservation?”

“Oh, uh...yeah. I've got an appointment to meet with Dr. Johnson at 1:30. Is he here?” She extended a pointer finger, looking down at the lectern and scanning something with her eyes, biting her lower lip.

“He sure is! He's in the main dining room. Through the first arch on the left.”

“Alright. Good to see you,” I said. She responded something of the same sort, her eyes following me as I walked past her. The sharp pain in my head was returning slowly, throbbing with every step. I found the arch, and stepped through. The motion made many heads turn, including the head of Dr. Johnson, reflecting the sunlight off of it. He smiled, waving me over, rising to meet me.

“Wolf, my dear boy, so good to see you!” He shook my hand, smiling amicably. A thin smile blossomed on my face. He invited me to sit down across from him, my heavy shoes inadvertently stomping on the hardwood floor of the dining room. The room at a stuffy, 19^th Century air to it. I didn't like it. Perhaps it was because of present company.

Dr. Johnson was dressed in a beige suit that didn't quite match his skin tone. It was ugly. He had no sense of style, that much was certain. However, sitting across from him in a fancy restaurant, my stomach wasn't roiling like it was yesterday.

“Please, have a look at the menu. Have you been here before, Wolf?” I shook my head, opening the leather-bound menu, goldleaf on the front proclaiming that this was the Alumnus Club. I leafed through the menu as a tall, straight-laced looking waiter trundled over to us.

“Something to drink, sir?” I ordered Glenfidditch. Neat. It seemed to be the kind of thing to order at the Alumnus Club. The man nodded, his rail-thin form scooting away. I leafed through the menu some more.

“Have they got a special today?” I asked Johnson. He nodded.

“Offal,” he replied matter-of-factly. I raised an eyebrow.

“That sounds...awful.” Johnson broke out in a big grin.

“They never told me you were funny. You are. You're a funny kind of guy, Wolf.” I was bemused, smirking at this.

“Who's they, and why are they talking about me?” I asked quizzically, half-joking, half-not.

“Oh, you know. People talk, Wolf. Including us. Let's talk, shall we?”

You know the details already. I don't need to reiterate. Johnson nodded at the appropriate points, deeply interested at first, shocked at my description of the thing in the gas mask, horrified as I told him of Chicago being depopulated before my eyes. As I spoke, my headache returned in full force, like tiny salad forks piercing my gray matter. If you don't have migraines, you may not understand. If you do, we may be kindred spirits.

I highly fucking doubt it, though.

I had ordered the lamb chops. Dr. Johnson recommended them to me. They came out shortly before my story was told. I had backtracked as per Johnson's request, detailing my methods, the settings of the electrodes, observation, EEG readings. The technical bits rather than the impressionistic, non-objective parts. However, he seemed less interested in this than he was about my hallucinations, my “vision quest”, as it were.

We toasted. “To knowledge,” we both said quietly.

For several minutes, we ate in silence.

“Your experience is very interesting Wolf, I have to say. If only you hadn't jumped the gun on implementing human testing, you may have been on to something,” he announced without pomp after a particularly sumptuous forkful of beef medallion.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Wolf, after the hearing yesterday, I looked over some of the work an acquaintance of mine had done several years ago. He was a psychologist as well, but not into experimentation. Theoretical psychology. He loved Jung, in particular. The collective consciousness, archetypes, you know.” I nodded appreciatively. I was, after all, a psychology student.

“However, his interests are...darker, shall we say?” I nodded, and my headache surged to heights I hadn't experienced in a very long time. I nodded, rubbing my temples, while Johnson plodded on.

“He undertook a research project, vast in scope, comparing the folklore and mythology of many cultures the world over, cross referencing data, compiling information. It was quite the project, if I do say so, myself. Do you know what he was researching?” I shook my head wordlessly.

“Our fears as a race, Wolf. Archetypal fear doesn't vary all that much, and it has evolved with us as we have shaken off the superstitions of yesteryear and embraced the fears of tomorrow.”

Embrace...what an odd term to use. I say odd, because it caused my stomach to lurch, and not from the lamb. From him, the revulsion I previously felt had returned in force. Very strong force. Apparently, Johnson did not seem to notice my obvious discomfort, and plodded on.

“He determined that the archetypes we have revolve around the most common fears. Not necessarily somatic fears, vis-a-vis flying, spiders, et cetera. It was our emotional fears that intrigued him particularly. Our fear of the unknown, of commitment, of death. Fear, he postulated, was absolute. Eternal. Do you know why I bring this up?” Again, a shaking of the head as my subconscious screamed for me to abandon ship, to get myself out of this antique parlor of a room and never see this man ever again.

“Because, Wolf. What you described to me, what you saw during the experiment...it matched several of the archetypal fears he identified.” My mind boiled at the thought, at the prospect that I had somehow tapped into the collective unconscious, the communal emotional experience of mankind. That, and the intensifying headache, were joining together in brutal congress, and I couldn't help but bow my head and close my eyes tight for a moment, trying to straighten out my perceptions and my feelings.

When my eyes opened, everything was different. Ringed in sepia, like some old-timey photo. I was looking at my plate. It was chipped. Dirty. And full of maggots. I felt my stomach lurch in horror. My glass, previously filled with top-shelf scotch, was filled with thick, congealed brown liquid. The tablecloth was a faded yellow from age. I lifted my gaze, glancing about the room, the environment dragging slowly through my view, time having dilated for me alone. No heads were up, no respectable alumni enjoying a late lunch. They were all slumped against their tables, some heads in bowls, reddish-brown ichorous residue staining everything it touched. I looked out the window. It was as if death had descended on the suburbs. People were lying dead in the streets, cars were abandoned, rusty, disheveled. I turned to look at Johnson.

He was not slumped over. But he was not alive, either.

He was intensely emaciated, his flesh having taken a waxy texture. His lips with shriveled, exposing rotten, broken teeth. His hair was white, clinging greasily to his liver-spotted head. A symbol, like two side-by-side hourglasses, was stamped on the handkerchief folded into its breast pocket. The eyes were what shocked me the most. They were black, from some sort of virulent necrosis, caked with dried, flecked fluid. It was repulsive.

And then it reached its hand out to touch mine.

“Caught a fright, Wolf?” it rasped, its voice dry and reedy, hoarse with atrophy. The smell of death, sickly and rank with corruption, was heavy on its breath. Its words echoed through the room, because there were no other sounds to be heard. Not even my own heavy inhalation and exhalation of breath. I couldn't help but fumble with my words.

“W-what?” I breathed finally, squinting my eyes shut tight.

“I said are you alright?” a voice said, as if repeating itself, health and vigor present in it once more. I opened my eyes.

Everything was as it had been. I shook my head, standing up, chair scraping across the floor, legs bumping the table quite audibly.

“I...need to go. Not feeling well. Will do this again,” I said, my voice shaking as I extracted bills from my wallet and flung them onto the table. I turned tail, walking quickly yet unsteadily through the dining room, ignoring Jill as she told me to have a good day. The light outside hurt my eyes, but while extracting my sunglasses from my pocket, I dropped them. They landed lenses down, cracking noticeably. I didn't care. I left them where they had fallen. And, as I started walking briskly, breaking into a jog, my peripheral vision detected a tall man in a neat suit. Impossibly tall. Impossibly still.

I broke out into a run.

I did not look back.