The Rave of your Dreams
The lights in the elevator car went out and Michael stood there glowing softly as if reflecting a hidden moon, now in a black satin robe trimmed in silver, like a priest of an unknown religion. Before Gradie could say anything about it, the doors opened and he didn’t give a shit about him anymore.
“Welcome to the Allclub,” Michael said.
There were people everywhere, wreathed in stars, wrapped in nebulae, flying through the darkness and dancing upside down on the countless, glittering honeycombed ceilings that stepped towards the pulsing sky.
The music was insane. The beat hit all the time with an energy the best club anthems only reach in moments. Running through it all, like a current, was the feeling that he had been trying to get here all his life.
Before he realized what he was doing, he was out in the middle of it, dancing with the most beautiful women he had ever seen, brushing his hands across every piece of flesh or scrap of light that caught his eye. Time dropped out behind him and felt impossible ahead of him. He could have been in the elevator a year ago or a moment before. Three women moved in and purred at him.
“Aw, a baby!”
“What’s this outfit? Going to work baby?”
“It’s his first day! Look at those eyes!”
“It’s just a dream. Be as dirty as you want to be.”
He touched them all over, and they pressed themselves against him. Suddenly his hand caught nothing but air as they backed up in three different directions.
“Catch us if you can baby.”
They scattered like hourglass missiles and he couldn’t decide which one to keep his eyes on. The last one twirled in front of him and her clothes vanished in a burst of neon glitter. He watched her ass bounce into the crowd and disappear.
“They’re fucking with you,” Michael said, suddenly next to him, like a bad smell breaking into a wet dream.
“We’ll see.” Gradie flew up in the air and scanned the crowd for any signs of them. The world rolled like an ocean around him, stretching out towards a black horizon between two planes of glittering chaos. Gravity betrayed him and he lost any sense of direction.
“If you want to get fucked, there are plenty of places to do it here without having to indulge the ego of some glowgirl.” Michael was next to him again, standing as if on an invisible floor. Gradie didn’t answer. He remembered one of the girls had green hair.
Someone tossed a bob of neon green over a pale shoulder at a pink-lit bar across the massive open space. She hung upside down talking to someone. He flew in her direction and dodged other flying dancers, mermaids, beams and orbs of light that looked solid as stone, and rolled in flight to align his up and down with hers.
“Found you.” He landed behind her. She was facing the bar, a shifting wall of shelves that stretched backwards into infinity like a mirror facing its twin. Bottles flew freely off the wall and sailed in every direction. One stopped and tipped above the man next to her. He held his glass up to catch the quicksilver stream and smiled as if Gradie had just mispronounced a very simple word.
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She took the drink from him and turned her head to Gradie.
“You found me! Now what are you going to do?”
“Let’s go somewhere private.” Gradie leaned in and stroked her chin, imagining that the touch would be electrifying for her. She gasped softly as his thumb traced a curve under her lips. In half a bass beat, she had her smile back.
“See them?” She pointed with her hand next to her face and rolled her big eyes up, the whites flashing in the dark. He followed her gaze reluctantly.
It was a man and two women, completely nude, floating by at a comically slow speed, fucking like animals. One girl was licking a neon liquid off the other. It was clear from their reactions that whatever it was had a wonderful taste and felt incredible on the skin. It took a few seconds for Gradie to realize the man had four arms.
“Private places are for talking, baby. We fuck all around.” Gradie looked down and something in her smile made the music sour. He tried to push past it.
“All right.” He reached up to touch her again. The man next to her leaned towards him.
“Let me give you some advice, cause we were all new once; If she wanted you, you would have already fucked her by now. That’s how it works—”
Gradie interrupted him by drawing the two pistols and aiming them at his eyes. He was ready to prove to himself that this was a dream, and killing this guy then fucking this girl would probably do it. The woman, the man, and a few other people around all laughed. Bitter, grating laughs. They cut through the music and broke the beauty of the melody into brittle fragments. Gradie pulled the triggers.
Nothing happened. The man reached out with a smile on his face and tapped one of the guns. It disappeared with a pop like a bubble bursting in a cartoon. The woman giggled and Gradie realized he hated her. He hated all of them. If they were here, it either wasn’t his dream, or it was a nightmare.
The man stood up.
“All right. Now fuck off.”
The tips of his fingers glowed as he flicked Gradie in the chest. It didn’t hurt, but the bar and the woman dropped away to nothing, and he was a mile in the air before he was able to stop himself. The strange world glittered below him, an entire hemisphere of writhing night and pulsing lights. A dance club that stretched out to every horizon.
Miles away, something massive popped into existence above the glowing curve at the edge of the planet. Woven sunlight, the hue of a summer evening, wrapped around a pillar of whitewashed Mediterranean villas, like someone had crafted a spaceship out of a vacation photo. Other crafts appeared and disappeared, too far away for him to tell anything about them besides that they should only exist as thought.
Could it be real? A shared dreamworld? A real mental plane?
No. It’s exactly the kind of fantasy I would escape to, something to believe in just to get through the day. I need to wake up. I need to get out of here.
He looked down at the maze of lights and darkness below him and let himself fall. A lattice of walkways, glass tunnels, and floating streams of moonlit water rushed up to meet him, then passed without a sound. In the middle of a mass of platforms and lights, he aimed for a catwalk, a solid line of black stillness, over a glowing mesh of people and lights. Another dance floor.
It was different than the one he had stepped out into. There was a thick fog rolling on the floor, and all the bare flesh glowed as if under a full moon whenever the pulsing lights gave way to darkness. People flew up in pairs or floated down alone in fits of naked beckoning dancing. The music was the world; the bass generated deep in the earth, the high melodies ringing out from the air itself. There was everywhere that same hypnotic energy, that concentrated feeling of promise distilled from a million youthful Saturday nights, but he felt separate from it now. It had spit him out. Flowed around without touching him. He desperately wanted to get back inside of it. Didn’t he?
“You’re bored of it,” Michael said, appearing suddenly on the catwalk.
“Yea, I guess I am.” He must be in my head.
“You ready to learn what this place is? It will help you get some grounding. Keep you from floating around in a panic.”
A door opened in the air next to them, letting out soft lamplight that clashed with the glowing darkness of the club. It almost knocked Gradie over. He realized how much he longed for something normal, something familiar. He closed his eyes and tried to wake up again, but it was half-hearted and he gave up after two bass kicks. No matter how much those people had disgusted him, he felt something magical was still waiting.
“Yea. I’m ready.”