It was the worst night of my life, in almost every way, but at least my outfit was cool. I was wearing a shearling coat, cut off at mid-thigh, with knee-high boots made of white leather that shined like polished glass. My hair was in a bouffant, which took a long time to get perfect, but it was time well spent, because it helped me channel another side of myself: a more carefree and uninhibited side of my personality which I suppressed when I moved to the suburbs. It had been two years since I left Seattle, and I needed to return, because the city was full of strangers who didn’t care who I was, what I did, or where I lived. It was a place where I could stay out late and get lost in unknown places.

I was walking down Pike Street with Jeff, a guy I met in college, while holding a bunch of acorns in my hand, tossing them into the street, and watching them bounce over the asphalt like skipped rocks. This must have been what people did for fun, I thought, before they invented social media.

“Martha, I have to tell you something. Because, if I don’t, it’s going to drive me insane,” said Jeff while running his hands through his hair—it looked more like a nervous tic than a grooming gesture. And his suit enhanced his nervous body language, because it was built for a smaller man. The shoulders were too narrow, the quarters too high, and the sleeves too short, exposing too much of the cuffs beneath.

“When I invited you out last night, I told you I wanted to ‘catch up,’ but that wasn’t the reason I wanted to see you,” he said.

“Then what was the reason?”

He didn’t respond immediately; to fill the silence, I said, “Did you want to confess that you’re secretly in love with me?” Then I batted my eyelashes in a sarcastic way, because I thought that making fun of the romantic tension between us would make it dissipate. Jeff was cute, but I wasn’t there to find love; I was there because I wanted to escape the suburbs, and Jeff’s invitation provided a convenient excuse.

Jeff stopped walking at the corner, and stood in a dark spot next to a factory undergoing renovation into luxury condominiums. He gave me a serious look, and said, “I keep thinking of you, during odd moments, while I’m meditating.” He coughed and looked around, like he was about to say something naughty. “When I’m trying to quiet my mind, you often appear to me—always in a state of distress—as if you’re very sad. I take these moments very seriously, Martha. I think they might indicate that we’re entangled, somehow, on a quantum level, and that entangled part of you is reaching out to me, calling me for help.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. And when I laughed, he withdrew, casting his eyes to the ground in embarrassment.

“I’m sorry for laughing,” I said. “I really do appreciate your concern, but I’m not distressed—far from it.” This wasn’t fully true, but it sounded carefree and uninhibited. I could tell he wasn’t convinced, so I gestured toward Mount Rainier, which loomed over Seattle like a sleeping yeti, covered in powder and threatening to explode. I lived in a town called Enumclaw, just beneath the mountain, and Jeff was the only one of my college friends who knew it. “How could I be distressed when I live around such beauty?”

“Are you sure you’re ok?”

I didn’t like the way Jeff was looking at me. There was concern in his look, but there was pity in it as well, and I didn’t want him to pity me. I wanted to be strong, self-possessed, and worldly.

“I’m sure,” I said, and hoped he’d infer that I didn’t want to discuss the issue anymore. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but it wasn’t real.”

Jeff nodded. Then he walked away and motioned for me to follow. While I walked behind him, the tension fell out of his shoulders, and he stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Maybe I misjudged your situation, but I had to tell you what’s been happening,” he said. “The image that I keep seeing might not be real, but it feels real to me.”

I pretended like I wasn’t interested, but I knew exactly what he meant. I was distressed and had been for a while, because of a recurring nightmare I’d been having all winter long. And the nightmare felt extremely real, in a way I can’t explain. The nightmare always began the same:

I would stand in front of an abandoned house with cypress trees blocking the entrance, then push through the gate, step through the door, walk into the foyer, and enter the parlor, where I would see a police officer pointing a gun at a bald man strapped to a wooden chair. A few seconds later, the police officer would shoot the man, and I’d wake up with this terrible feeling in my heart—a feeling of extreme guilt, as if I’d caused the bald man to die, even though it wasn’t me who pulled the trigger.

It felt so real, every time, in a way that dreams seldom do. This feeling of realness, coupled with this feeling of guilt, caused me to attach a mystical significance to the dream, as if it was something I was meant to see, though I didn’t understand why. I tried interpreting every symbol, every detail, every feeling, and asked myself questions like: Why does this dream make me feel guilty? Who is the policeman? Who is the bald man? And why is he wearing Nike Dunks?

Eventually I gave up trying to interpret the dream, because none of it made sense, but I could never ignore the feeling that this dream mattered. And I suspected that Jeff was describing the same feeling when he talked about seeing me during his meditations.

Jeff and I walked in silence, and I was eager to lighten the mood, so I pointed at an ice cream place, one we visited in college, and demanded a scoop. I wasn’t hungry, but ice cream isn’t filling, and I thought ice cream would inject some energy into this somber evening. Ice cream is one of the most energizing foods there is, especially the ice cream at this place, which was called “The Milkmaid,” and featured a cartoon sign of a mermaid holding an ice cream out front. The place was known for developing intentionally unappetizing flavors as a form of “earned media” advertising, and whenever they launched a new flavor, the alt weekly always covered it. Among the familiar classics, they sold flavors like celery peanut butter, chocolate barbecue, rosemary blue cheese, bacon sriracha, avocado marshmallow, and other abominations.

Jeff shrugged and said, “Why not,” with a slight smirk.

The Milkmaid’s interior was small, over-lit, and dominated by bright yellow tiles offset by stainless-steel accents. The clientele was divided between hipsters, fentanyl addicts, and hipsters who dressed like fentanyl addicts. The fentanyl addicts were mostly harmless, but not completely, especially during winter, when they split their energy between fighting to score and fighting to survive hypothermia, which made them prone to violent outbursts. My greatest fear is being murdered, so these people made me nervous. I mentioned this to Jeff, and he told me not to worry. Then he flexed his arm and said, “I’ll protect you from those scary men.” But he said it in a mocking tone, as if my fear was unjustified.

Jeff ordered a flavor called “Burnt Ends with Us,” and I ordered one called “I Dream of Sashimi.” While Jeff ordered the ice cream, I stole a glance out the window, and saw a policeman standing beside the store, scrolling on his phone. It was almost funny, in an ironic way, to see a heavily armed policeman, with a bulletproof vest and assault rifle slung over his chest, ignoring the obvious criminals inside the shop. But it wasn’t just the shop that was filled with fentanyl addicts. So were the streets. Yet the police did nothing about it, as if they benefitted from the conditions they existed to prevent.

“Seventeen thirty-four,” I heard myself say under my breath, as I looked out the window.

“Wow, you nailed it,” said the cashier behind the register, “Seventeen thirty-four is your exact total—before tip, of course.”

Jeff handed the cashier his credit card, then gave me a confused look.

“How’d you do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t even paying attention.”

A man standing in line chimed in, deadpan: “Quantum entanglement strikes again.”

The man was short, round-bodied, and heavy-set, with messy brown hair under an orange beanie. He had a patchy beard, and wore a grey t-shirt even though it was winter.

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“Quantum entanglement?” He reached under his hat, and scratched his head. “It’s a theory that borrows from physics and geometry to explain why—when future events congeal into statistical certainties—some people perceive events before they happen. It’s not precognition, exactly. It’s more like pattern recognition, and it usually happens during moments when your attention is most distracted, like yours was a moment ago, while your friend was ordering ice cream and you were staring into space.”

At this point, I think Jeff felt threatened by the attention I was giving the man in the orange hat. With our ice cream cones in hand, Jeff inserted himself between us, looked at me, and said, “There’s an open table in the back.” Then he turned to the man in the orange hat, puffed out his chest, and said, “Pardon me,” before walking off.

“Did you hear what he said about quantum—what was it?”

“Entanglement,” Jeff said. “I heard him.”

“Didn’t you say something about that earlier? You said we were entangled, on a ‘quantum’ level.” I brushed my hair out of my face, and rolled it around my left shoulder. “What did you mean by that?”

“I meant that we’re connected, somehow, in a way that goes deeper than sharing mutual friends. It’s very mysterious, you know… the way some people enter your life, and haunt it for years after, even though you weren’t particularly close.” He licked his ice cream. “It’s almost as if, somewhere, in the web of possible futures, you and I are more than just… friends.”

As he said these things, a crowd of disheveled people moved around behind him, and the hideous fluorescents glowed above his head, deepening his wrinkles, accentuating his acne scars. Yet Jeff looked more beautiful in that moment than I’d ever seen him look before. Even though he’d never said it, I sensed this was a kind of date, but I hadn’t considered the possibility that it might end in anything more than a warm embrace between friends or a hangover.

“This ice cream is less disgusting than I thought it would be,” I said before tossing my cone into a trash bin, and watching it flip end-over-end before joining its brothers in ice cream hell.

“Our next destination will be far less disgusting, I promise,” Jeff said. “And who knows, you might see a familiar face.”

I didn’t want to see a familiar face. I’d cut off most of our friends from college, because my design career wasn’t taking off the way I thought it would. I was the top designer in our class—anointed as a “generational talent” by the department head—yet my career had gone nowhere, and I was too proud to blame the economy. I was ashamed to admit that I worked for a novelty clothing brand, designing t-shirts with slogans like, “I’m not a gynecologist, but I’ll take a look.” It was soul-killing work, pushing pixels for a company that sold shirts to boardwalk degenerates, but it was the only job I could find, and I was scared that I’d be stuck there for the rest of my life.

I asked Jeff where he was taking me, and he said it was a surprise, but I demanded a clue.

“We’ve been there before,” he told me.

This put me at ease. I didn’t spend much time with Jeff in college. I could only remember a handful of places we’d been together, and none of them were bustling hubs of social activity.

Jeff called an Uber, and the car drove south, past brick buildings shining red under the neon signs endemic to Pike Street. The road was black and covered in beads of moisture which reflected the headlights, imitating the stars, which were visible through clouds that cloaked the firmament. When we turned off Pike, we drove through a neighborhood filled with Victorian houses, where factory owners and logging industrialists once laid their heads. During the intervening years, all these homes had been abandoned because renovations cost more than the houses themselves, forcing the owners to let them rot until they successfully convinced the city to permit multi-family development in the neighborhood.

In every other area, the police were omnipresent, but not here. In this neighborhood, they were conspicuously missing, which created an opportunity for enterprising criminals who needed a place to squat. Drug dealers, crust punks, tweakers, pimps: every strain of below-board culture found a home in this neighborhood, despite its close proximity to the city’s busiest nightlife corridor.

When I was in college I was fascinated by this place, because it was a place of juxtaposed extremes—glamour and decay, old and new, life and death. These juxtapositions lit my imagination on fire. I wondered what kinds of lives were hidden behind these houses’ rotting facades, and what kinds of moral frameworks they used to guide their behavior. Were they kind to animals? Did they have families? Did they have ambitions?

While I asked myself these questions anew, I saw something familiar. It was an Italian cypress tree, untrimmed and crowned with drooping branches covered in wilted scales. Where had I seen that tree before, I thought, and why does it scare me?

While the tree receded behind us, I tried to look at the house beyond the tree, to see if I recognized it, but I couldn’t get a clear view, because of the darkness and the foliage surrounding it. The seatbelt cut into my chest as I strained against it, pressing my face as close to the window as I possibly could. Finally, I solved the puzzle. The house looked familiar because I’d seen it in my nightmare.

I told Jeff I needed to get out of the car, and he smiled at me, as if I was joking, which made sense; the neighborhood was dangerous. Then I told him I was serious—I told him I thought these houses were beautiful, and I wanted to photograph the street for design inspiration, which I thought he’d appreciate, given his knowledge of my design practice. But this wasn’t true. The truth was I wanted to go inside the house to make sure it was the same house from my dream, and to confirm what I’d seen in my dream didn’t actually happen, that there was no dead man inside, that the whole situation was just some fantasy conjured by my fear of getting murdered, and not a whiff of some future event. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have the guts to do something like this. But this was not an ordinary night. And I was not my ordinary self.

Jeff wouldn’t indulge my impulse. He said it was too dangerous to stop, and he didn’t want to waste the Uber driver’s time. I didn’t argue, but couldn’t hide my disappointment. I was pretty sure I’d find nothing there, but I still felt pulled to that house, because our earlier discussion about quantum entanglement left me feeling like the connection between my dream and this house was worth investigating. The man in the orange hat said future events are most perceptible when a person is distracted. And when is a person most distracted? While they sleep.

It took twenty minutes for us to arrive at our destination in SoDo, at a converted warehouse where Jeff and I used to go as college students. At some point, I’d forgotten this place existed. But when we drove past, the memories came flooding back.

When Jeff and I were in college, the bar was run by an Irishman, and it boasted the largest collection of whiskey in the city—four hundred bottles from all over the world, stacked on a shelf so high the bartender used a library ladder to reach the top. But the passage of time had changed the place. The Irish-themed façade had been replaced with a spotless expanse of plaster, painted hot pink, which made the building resemble a pink cube, like Barbieland's very own Kaaba. Above the door was a sign made of blue neon. It announced the bar’s name, which was called, “Voltwerk.” I liked the name, because it sounded like the kind of place that would attract the urbane and liberated.

The customers outside looked terrible. The women wore clingwrap dresses in bright colors; the men wore polyester suits and gaudy jewelry. Even from down the block I could tell that this was an out-of-town crowd performing their idea of urban glamor, and I hated them for that, because that description matched me exactly, and I hated seeing my own suppressed impulse reflected back at me. But I was still glad to be there. Because I wanted to have a perilous and unpredictable time, and these people looked like they wanted the same.

As we entered the club, Jeff seemed really excited, and I shared his excitement. The music was better than expected—electro from the Baltics—and the bar’s interior was enormous, acting as a central hub for three separate ballrooms.

Jeff went to get drinks, which wasn’t an easy task. I watched him shove his way through a crowd of people thirty layers deep to make his way to the bar, which was a shadow of its former self. Behind the bar, where the whiskey shelf once loomed, stood an array of LED pixels displaying shapes bouncing in time to music. While Jeff was busy getting drinks, I went to coat check, and the line was crowded with fidgeting clubgoers. In front of me stood two Russian men in their twenties who spoke too quietly for me to eavesdrop on their conversation, but I could tell they were arguing.

As they approached the front of the line, the Russian men clenched their jaws with anticipation; they exchanged nervous glances, and I heard one of them shout the word “Mulholland” into the other one's ear. I’d never heard the word “Mulholland” before, but I thought it was beautiful, because the syllables seemed to have a phonetic symmetry.

When the Russian men reached the front of the line, one of them withdrew cash from his pocket, and gave it to the bald guy working the coat check. Then the bald guy walked into a hidden area, lingered, and emerged with a small, brown, paper envelope in his hand, which he handed to the Russian men. Then the Russian men exchanged wide-eyed glances, like children who’d gotten away with something. That look was all it took for me to understand they were buying drugs—most likely cocaine.

And then I got excited.

It wasn’t the drugs that excited me. I’d had enough experiences with cocaine to know it led me into embarrassing situations; it turned me into a loudmouth who told boring stories. The secrecy was the exciting part. I felt like I’d just learned a hidden code which unlocked an exclusive dimension available only to insiders. It opened a door to a game that I didn’t know I could play, one suffused with danger and mystery, exactly the type of game a carefree bohemian would enjoy.

As I approached the front of the line, my chest tightened and my stomach twisted. My hands quivered as I reached into my bag and thumbed through my wallet, counting the money I thought I would need to initiate a transaction, because I was just guessing—I didn’t know how much cocaine was going for, so I removed five tens and hoped that would be enough. It had been so long since I’d done anything illegal, but I didn’t want to look like an amateur. So I did my best impression of a coke-hardened socialite, and leaned on the counter with all the elegance and poise that I could manage. But my heart sank when the man behind the counter looked up. I recognized him. It was the bald guy from my dream, the victim, the one who took a bullet to his head.

By that point, I’d seen him dozens of times. I’d studied every pore on his crooked nose, memorized the color of his deep-set eyes, learned the shape of his protruding brow. His head shined blue under the blacklight fixed in the ceiling, and I saw the familiar birthmark, on his cheek, which looked like a drop of ink. I knew it was him, but I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to be certain, so I willfully denied my certainty, convincing myself it was someone else. And it worked. Until I looked over the counter, and saw his pair of Nike Dunks.

“What’s the name?” he asked me.

I didn’t speak. I was too scared. I felt like I’d witnessed the most intimate moment of this man’s life, and I wanted to tell him, but what could I say? That I’d seen him die?

“What’s the name?” he repeated, this time with a prompting look, as if he wanted me to say the correct word.

“Mulholland,” I said.

My hands were shaking when I handed him the money, but he didn’t seem to notice. He took my coat, then counted the money, then disappeared into the coat check room. He walked with a bow-legged gait, affecting an awkward swagger that didn’t suit him. When he left, I felt an urge to jump over the counter, grab him by his hoodie, and tell him to find another way to make money, one less dangerous. It was strange. I felt an almost maternal connection to this person, even though I didn’t know his name.

I wanted to calm down, to guard myself against unnecessary panic. When the bald man emerged from the coat check’s hidden niche, I told myself we must have met in college, and his face somehow imprinted itself on my memory. I convinced myself that my recurring dream had nothing to do with the man: that my imagination had created a random scene which dramatized my deepest fear—being murdered—and recast the victim as someone distant enough from myself to help me process my anxiety without drowning me in existential terror.

The bald man handed me a small envelope. The envelope had a number on it written in Sharpie, signifying the number I’d use to retrieve my coat. I could tell, even by looking at the envelope, that it contained more than a ticket for the coat check. When I reached for the envelope, my fingers brushed against the bald man’s palm, and I felt an odd sensation, like a transfer of electricity—a small tingle that spread up my arm and through my body. I shivered, and slipped the envelope into my pocket before retreating to the bar.

I didn’t want Jeff to know that I’d bought drugs. In college, he always seemed proud of his sobriety, and affected disdain for anyone who indulged too frequently. I didn’t want to give him a reason to think less of me, so I ducked into the bathrooms. The bathrooms were comically cocaine friendly. The stalls were completely enclosed, providing maximum secrecy, and each one contained its own sink. The top of my sink was covered with mirror glass, a convenient surface for arranging lines of powder.

I opened the envelope onto the sink, and a plastic bag of powder came out, stamped with the Gucci logo. I emptied the bag onto the sink, and inspected the white powder. It looked unusual. The powder was mostly white, but contained a few clumps that glowed under the blacklights overhead. The glowing particles looked strange, but I didn’t think about it much, because I didn’t know whether or not that was normal. Without much deliberation, I reached into my purse, pulled out a pen, unscrewed the ink cartridge, and used the pen’s hollowed-out barrel as a snorting implement. Then I used my driver’s license to form the powder into neat lines.

The feeling was immediate. The ecstasy, the clarity, the quickening sensation—they shot through me like lightning through a flagpole. But there was something off, some additional sensation I didn’t recognize. There was this grey, stuttering feeling around the edges, like a cold heaviness wrapping itself around my body, slowly constricting: an invisible python spooling itself around me, gradually tightening its grip with every breath I took. While I washed my hands, I felt the water in high definition, and its viscosity made me sick, like I wasn’t washing my hands with water, but with slime.

When I left the bathroom, I felt mentally elated, physically numb, and my vision was distorted, like someone bumped up the saturation. I didn’t feel like myself—I needed a few minutes to get used to my new emotional state before I saw Jeff again. Rather than rejoin him at the bar, I snuck into one of the ballrooms and focused my attention on the music. The DJ was playing this dreamy, pop-infused trance beat which harmonized with my state so completely that I thought, for a moment, that the odd sensations I was experiencing were a byproduct of the music and not the drugs. This thought put me at ease, and I soon felt comfortable enough to dance.

I started slowly at first, and then quickly. While I danced, my heartbeat felt far away and muffled, as if my heart was wrapped in cotton. Then a warm sensation ran through my chest, a slow and syrupy wave, followed by a creeping detachment that didn’t belong to cocaine. After that, my legs went numb, and my heart felt like it couldn’t decide whether to race or stand still.

As my vision narrowed to a tunnel, the sound of the music slowed; the trance beat sounded like it was submerged in water. And I felt a sense of dissociation, like I was having thoughts, but couldn’t catch them, like I was hearing voices talking too fast for me to understand. I felt my breathing slow, as if someone was sitting on my chest. Then I tried to inhale, and my lungs didn’t respond.

Then I was back at the house again. Back in my recurring nightmare. But this time it was different. I began on the front lawn, behind the cypress trees, then I walked onto the house’s front porch. The paint on the lintel was peeling, and the door was ajar. There was an offensive smell in the air, like sulfur mixed with hot metal. I pushed my way through the door. One of the hinges was loose, and the door scraped across the floor as it opened. I stepped quickly through the foyer and into the parlor, where I saw the bald man’s body, strapped to the wooden chair beneath nineteenth-century portraits hung between broken windows that let in shafts of light. One of the light shafts illuminated the bald man, who was leaning his head back and dripping blood onto the carpet from an opening in his head.

I woke up in the hospital with an IV stuck in my arm.

It was an old hospital with blue wallpaper and woodgrain cabinets, which felt out of place in a medical environment. I was in a daze. When I looked to my left, I was surprised to see, sleeping in the chair next to me, an unexpected presence. It was Jeff, leaning back with his mouth open, filling the air with his breath.

When I called his name, Jeff awoke. His cheeks were puffy, and his eyes were bloodshot. I asked him what happened, and he said:

"You passed out on the dance floor."

He looked at me as if he expected a reaction, but I still wasn't fully present, wasn't fully conscious, didn't fully understand the significance of what he was saying.

"Anyway," he said as he wiped sweat from his forehead. "After you passed out, a group of people ran into the bar. One of them grabbed me, because they saw me come in with you, but when I came over, you weren't breathing. Someone had Narcan in their bag, and sprayed it up your nose, but you didn't regain consciousness, so I called nine-one-one. Then an ambulance showed up, along with the police—it was a whole scene—yet the police acted like it was a normal situation. They were too calm about it. They didn't even think to question the club's involvement, even after I raised the possibility. And that made me see red, because everyone knows what that club is doing. Everyone knows the place is a coke den, including the police, and the degree to which they tolerate it is crazy, almost like they're part of the enterprise." He shrugged and looked at the ground. "Seattle's a tough city. People have to make money—I get it. But our police can't allow this place to sell dirty coke to random civilians. That's worse than immoral; it's homicidal."

My mind was still cloudy, but I had enough of my wits about me to feel incredibly ashamed. Everyone knew this was a bad time to buy cocaine in Seattle—even I knew that. In my excitement, I must have forgotten all the news I’d seen about normal, functional, working people dropping dead after ingesting cocaine laced with fentanyl. And that lapse of judgment was completely misaligned with the cosmopolitan I knew I was, or could be, if I still lived in the city. Part of me was bursting with gratitude for Jeff’s heroism, but another part of me was mortified.

“I think I need to be alone.”

Jeff adjusted his posture and gave me a concerned look.

“I’m sorry for laying this on you so suddenly,” he said. Then he stood up, and collected his coat. “Just so you know, I think I know who sold you the blow. I’ve seen him around town; he works at the club. When I described him to the cops, they said they’d collect the surveillance footage and investigate, but we both know that’s not going to happen.” He walked toward the door, placed his hand on the doorknob, and turned around. “He’s lucky our hopelessly corrupt police department is looking for him, and not me. If I ever see that guy again, he won’t walk away in one piece.”

“It’s not his fault,” I said. “I bought the coke, and I took too much, ok? I overdosed—it happens. That doesn’t mean the guy who sold it deserves to die.”

“I didn’t say he does.”

Silence filled the room, broken by a timid beep from the electro-cardiogram attached to my arm. Jeff’s pants were rumpled, his hair was a mess, and his shirt was unbuttoned so low I could see his undershirt peeking out.

I told him he should go, and the force of my demand sucked all the energy out of the room. He was a saint for looking after me, but he didn’t understand the deeper level of the situation, one in which I bore a serious responsibility. I didn’t have to buy the coke. And because I did, I knew, on a level I couldn’t explain—maybe a ‘quantum’ level—that something terrible was going to happen.

After he left, I checked myself out of the hospital and walked back to my car. I didn’t want to leave the city. Even after it almost killed me, because I still loved it, and wished I could stay there forever, living out the bohemian fantasy that I’d dreamed about since college, the one that’s seared into the mind of every design student: living alone in a fashionable neighborhood, feeding off the energy of the city, indulging in wild nights and drinking strong coffee from a sterile café.

On the way home, I found myself back in the derelict neighborhood that Jeff and I drove through on our way to Voltwerk. In the daytime, the neighborhood was no less frightening. Sunlight exposed boarded windows, overgrown lawns, demolition signs attached to rotting fences. I used to like urban decay. I used to find it romantic.

Not anymore.

As I passed the cypress trees in front of the house from my dream, I couldn’t stop myself from going inside, even though I knew it was a bad idea, because the uninhibited side of my personality was fearless.

I stepped out in front of the house and walked through the entrance, just as I had in my dream, with my stomach roiling and sweat dripping down my forehead. Above the front door was a stained-glass window shining a colorful beam of light through the foyer. The sight was faintly comforting, because there was no stained-glass window in my dream. If the foyer was different, I thought, maybe the parlor was different as well.

Carefully I stepped through the foyer and entered the hallway, where I saw a broken lightbulb flickering in the ceiling where the hallway intersected with the parlor. It stuttered incandescent flashes through the space, and when I saw it, the hair on my arms stood erect, as if my body was wrapped in static. It isn’t too late to go back, I thought. I wanted nothing more than to go home, to pretend I’d never seen this house. But the willful, self-possessed version of me wouldn’t allow it.

Carefully I stepped into the parlor. And then I saw something, but I couldn’t tell what it was, not at first. The lightbulb was flashing too rapidly, strobing incredibly fast, overloading my vision. Then I squinted. I willed my eyes to adjust until the image became clear, and I saw what I feared I would see. It was the bald man from my nightmare—only he looked different this time.

When I saw him, I stumbled back, and my back slammed against the wall behind me. I screamed, even though I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It was hard to know, even then, whether I could trust what I saw. Because it wasn’t just the light that was flickering. The bald man was flickering as well.

When the light was on, the bald man was there, with his arms bent into unnatural positions and his neck bent so far back that it appeared to be broken. He was strapped to a wooden chair, which stood on a bloodstain that covered the whole floor, as if all the blood in his body had escaped through the top of his head and dried into a scabrous crust. When the light was off, the man was gone, and so was the bloodstain. It seemed as if the bald man was being projected through some broken equipment, shining out of a warped filmstrip with random frames missing, causing the man to flick in and out of existence in time with the stuttering light from the bare lightbulb. What made the sight even stranger was the undulating, rippling, and wobbling texture of the image, like the bald man’s body was made of tiny particles moving and sliding around at random. The strangeness of the image made me wonder whether I was witnessing an intrusion from some other point in time, or if I was just experiencing a paranoid fantasy concocted by my post-hospital imagination.

My heart was pounding. Breath fluttered through my chest, as I cautiously stepped forward, and the bald man flashed in and out of view, like a warped television signal. As I leaned closer to the man, I saw that it wasn’t his whole body that was undulating; it was just his skin.

I reached out my hand to touch his kneecap, which was poking through a hole in his jeans. And when I reached out, the light was off, so his body was no longer visible; I waved my hand through the space where his kneecap once was. When the light flicked on, his kneecap reappeared, and I felt his skin rippling under my finger. I pressed against the skin, just to make sure I was actually touching something—just to make sure I could trust my own senses. I leaned my weight against my fingertip, pushing my fingernail into his flesh, and when I did, I saw why his skin was moving. A maggot crawled onto my finger. What I’d thought was his skin was a writhing swarm.

I opened my mouth to scream, but before I drew a breath, the lightbulb went out, and the body disappeared. I stumbled forward into the space where the body once was, before scrambling back to the hallway, and running out of the house. I didn’t think to be cautious; I didn’t care what the neighbors might see, or what forces might connect me to whatever happened in the house, because I knew that, in a few minutes’ time, I’d be home, in the suburbs, and the city would trail behind me, with no one there who knew my name.

As I drove home, I saw a text on my phone. It was from Jeff. He asked if I made it home safe, but I was in no mood to answer, because I was roiling with guilt. I continued to feel, in a deep way, that I’d done something wrong. By allowing this other version of me to take over—the version without inhibitions, without boundaries, without fear—I’d walked down a path that nearly killed me, and may have killed someone else. I thought that expressing this other version of me would bring some kind of relief. I thought that getting a small taste of the bohemian life would satisfy my cravings and relieve some of the misery I felt in the suburbs. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the cravings grew stronger.

After I returned to suburban life, the cravings were paralyzing. I continued to feel trapped in a life that didn’t suit me. I felt as if the other version of me was more desperate to come out than ever. But I couldn’t let the other version come out again, because I couldn’t bear the consequences of what happened in Seattle. After my overdose, I promised myself I wouldn’t go back to the city, because it almost killed me, and the other version of me didn’t care; it wanted to go back. It wanted to come out again, and next time, it wanted to seek more danger, more intensity, no matter the cost. I knew if I let it out, it would make me do something I couldn’t take back.

So I had to starve it.

To do this, I started carrying a pushpin in my pocket. And now, every time I catch myself thinking about the city, I press my thumb against the pushpin, hoping the pain will distract me from fantasizing about wild nights. I’ve cleared my apartment of everything that reminds me of the city, and deleted every image of the city from my social media, so that nothing can remind me of the life I want. These things keep me safe. But they don’t make me happy.

Sometimes I think about calling Jeff. I think about inviting him out for a second date, because it’s the least I can do, especially after he saved my life. But every time I think of calling him, my hand instinctively reaches into my pocket, and I squeeze the pushpin.