Part 3
On my bed, dressed in something that was nothing but added up to everything, was a beautiful woman whose floor-length hair changed colors every few seconds. I couldn't think of anything clever to say or to mess up trying to say, so I just stuttered, “H-H-Hello B-B-B-Baby,” I said, trying to impress her with my Big Bopper Impression.
“That’s all you got to say?” She ratcheted at me.
My answer would have been stupid, even if I was talking to myself, especially saying it for the second time in the same night. “I’m me.”
"Of course you are, but you could have lied and let me down easy." Then she laughed, which had the effect of an uppercut to the jaw. I fell to the floor and looked up at her as she leaned over the bed's edge, her hair covering most of my face. “Would you mind telling me what the hell I’m doing in you’re bed? This is your bed?”
I wanted to lie, hoping it would get me out of trouble, but macho pride wanted the credit, and so I confirmed her suspicion, even though the sheets looked too clean. "Yes, that is my bed," I spit out along with a few feet of hair.
"Okay, that proves I'm stupid. Now to prove that I'm a complete moron with less taste than a maternity strip club, why am I in your bed?"
I didn't have an answer that made sense, so I went with the wildest one I could think of. "Because you find me attractive."
I thought she was going to spit up her feet, but she caught herself in time to stuff her inside-out legs back down her mouth. Suddenly she quieted, then looked up at me and said softly, "Hmm, I seem to remember having strange taste in men. Okay, hop in, and let's start up where we left off, wherever that was." Before she could finish her remarkable speech, I was in the air on the way down to the best landing strip I've ever seen. I might have hurt myself, but luckily, my fall was broken by two large mounds that softened my landing, although they did prompt my landing gear to come down a little too early. This is foolish, sophomoric, and shallow, but I was in love. Yes, love. Okay, maybe my euphoria was causing me to use the wrong four-letter word, but I'll claim a poetic license or, more appropriately, a learning permit.
Just as we were about to get down to the business of things that are typically none of anyone's business, the door crashed open. The two thugs, who had been beating their war drums with each other and me, followed by everyone inside, charged forward and filled my bedroom. This time I was the angry one; I screamed, "Why now!"
The beautiful woman beneath me broke my heart. "Okay, guys, one at a time."
Although I could tell every man wanted to line up, none of them did. At first, I thought maybe this was my dream, but then two other thoughts scratched their way out, what if it wasn't my dream and she was infested with a plethora of venereal diseases, or might it be possible that I picked her up at the internet share your disease club. Finally, before I could roll my last obsession into a deadly epidemic of venereal glaucoma, the one who was the biggest of the two presently said, "Sorry to disturb you, but we beat the hell out of each other, and none of us woke up. So we don't know whose dream we're trapped in?"
"Don't look at me; if this was my dream, I have some hunk on top of me instead of this chunk of poorly designed protoplasm," she said as she kicked me off of her with such force that she made me think I had a sex change without anesthesia. After the pain stopped, I didn't feel rejected, at least not as much as I would have if I were indeed the man of my own dreams. But here we were, thirty or forty people stuck in someone else's dream with no way out.
The new, bigger thug spoke up. "We tried all the doors and windows; they're locked from the outside. So we're stuck in here."
“There’s got to be some way out.” I clichéd back at him.
“We tried everything,” out clichéing me.
“Maybe no one here is dreaming? Maybe we're just players in someone else's dream," I said, which provoked the next question.
"If that's true and the person who's dreaming wakes up, then we'd all disappear," the guy who first broke into the apartment worried out loud.
"Then we should be quiet," I whispered back.
"There's still a chance one of us can be the guy who's dreaming, and maybe that person took a sleeping pill and won't wake up," one of the thugs continued.
"Maybe the person overdosed and never will wake up!" The woman in my bed chimed in happily.
"What if the person dies? We'll all probably die," I flung back at her. But, unfortunately, that statement didn't win me any new friends.
“So, what do we do?” a guy in the crowd asked.
"We make the best of it. Who wants to go first?" my former soul mate swung with. I was about to swear off women for good, or at least this dream, when…
Suddenly (my limited vocabulary caused me to suddenly overuse the word suddenly), an alarm went off, then another and another and another -- forty or more alarms jabbing at our ears. I grabbed the alarm next to my bed and tried to shut it, but it kept sticking its ring in my brain. Finally, I smashed the clock on the floor and, for good measure, jumped on it several times. While I was jumping up and down, alarms were starting to silence. One by one, people were disappearing, the thinner ones first; two dieting women struggling to watch their reflection in the mirror vanished.
The ring from my clock grew weaker as more people evaporated. Finally, realizing their fate, many waved goodbye, some stopping to wipe their feet off on the mat. The two thugs disappeared together, the same size for the first time, although one was eating a ham sandwich. Despite the variance in their weights, my early intruders were the last to go, well, almost the last. Next to me, the beautiful woman smiled, blew me the finger, and disappeared, a ghost without form, an invisible wisp of nothing, only the mist of her final rejection clung to the air.
I found myself being pulled down towards the head of a strange man who looked like your average run-of-the-mill dry cleaner. He had just slapped down his alarm but wasn't quite awake yet. I could feel myself shrinking while I was being sucked into his male pattern baldness. Then he fell asleep, snoring loudly, his lips pounding together with the force of a cannibal trying to eat himself. And I was free, no longer being pulled toward him; instead, I was floating, alone without any prospects of a date, passing from bedroom to bedroom of sleeping men and women (all still alive, which is out of my league). I hovered over king-size beds, bunk beds, hospital beds, air mattresses, men and women in comas, unconscious men with bullet holes, stab wounds, shark bites, and several with helicopter blades sticking out of them, trying to find comfortable sleeping positions.