Fifty minutes later it is after noon and Travis awakens again to rude red numbers screaming that his life is drifting away before his very eyes, but maybe life is better when he is asleep—when he isn’t paying attention to his attentiveness. So long as he is carefree, so long as he can leave painted horses behind him… he sighs, long and hard into the pillow. He closes his eyes for another moment, opens them, and looks at the clock again. A minute has passed. Rolling over on his side, he sets his chin on his forearm and watches the numbers for a while. They seem to be moving along faster than normal. A minute seems to take only twenty seconds, and Travis wonders if it is him or the clock that is out of whack. What an annoying feeling it is, that time is passing—that he is actually noticing time passing. It makes him want to get out of bed and at least go somewhere where he can ignore time for a while. He shoves his damp sheets aside, irritated, and sets his feet on the floor. Squinting at the clock, he smiles at himself before he swings his left hand out in a sweeping arc, knocking the clock to the floor with a crash. * So there*. That feels better.

Putting on clean underwear, clean socks, dirty jeans and a dirty t-shirt, Travis stands in the middle of his room running his hands through the fuzz on his head. He is supposed to shave; supposed to brush his teeth and eat something; supposed shower and do laundry: supposed to have a regular job, and to pay taxes. He is supposed to have a nominal existence that fits him like a cornflower blue button-up shirt instead of his favorite gray t-shirt, and he twists and tries to set the wrinkles under his arms and around his neck. He is not supposed to be up at night attacking his electric in a purple light for drunken revelers. Looking down for a moment, he realizes he’s put the shirt on backwards. Pulling his arms in through the sleeves, he twists the shirt around in the other direction. Travis looks over to his acoustic sitting against the bed and thinks one last time about all the things he is supposed to do, before picking up the guitar and heading out the bedroom door.

As Travis passes into the living room, he spies Nick sitting on the love seat, his feet propped up on a footstool, sketching. As Travis walks by toward the front door, Nick calls out, “Good morning,” without looking up.

“Yeah?” Travis says, reaching for the door.

“Whatch’ya’ doin’?” Nick asks.

“I’m goin’ for a walk.”

“Oh don’t kid yourself,” Nick says quickly, shaking his head. He continues sketching.

Travis hesitates for a moment and then smiles and decides to take the bait, “What?”

“You’ll never lose any weight that way, fatty,” Nick offers.

“I’ll be back.”

“Whatever.”

“I love you too, man.”

“Mm-hm.”

Using Travis’s pants leg for a hoist, Nick drags himself off the carpet and pushes past Travis. “Get out of the way!” Travis yells when he thinks he hears a noise behind him and runs into the dark hallway to the bedrooms.

“Fuck!” Nick says again as he smacks into his doorjamb. Feeling his way through the dark, he reaches out for the door to the walk-in closet that connects his and Travis’s room. Entering, he thrusts himself to the floor and promptly begins burying himself under dirty clothes, laughing hysterically the whole time. Travis follows suit, but instead of making for the closet, he falls to the floor and rolls under Nick’s bed, carpet-burning his left elbow. “Aw, shit!” He tries to shove himself as far back as he can, pushing dirty shoes, a hair dryer, some clothes and God-knows-what-else out of his way. For a moment, he can hear Nick shifting around, and then, silence. Travis is so nervous, he hiccups another giggle. “Shut up!” Nick whispers harshly from the closet. “He’ll hear us.” Travis tries to lay still, listening to his heart beat against the floor.

The front door’s knob jingles and then the door creaks open and shuts again. Travis holds his breath and listens carefully with his head to the carpet. He waits for the dreaded footsteps in the hall, or a voice. But there is only silence. And then, after a moment, there is the sound of the bathroom door closing on the other side of the apartment.

“What’s he doin’?” Travis whispers.

“Shut up!” Nick says again. And then after a moment of silence he whimpers, “I’m scared.”

The door to John’s bathroom opens with a shudder.

“Oh God,” Nick whines.

“Shhh!”

Travis listens closely to the footsteps as they moved through the house. First, he can hear them on the kitchen tile, lightly. Then, the weak floorboard by the couch in the living room. The living room lights turn on and light from the ceiling fan lamps wash down the hall outside Nick’s bedroom. There is a horrific moment of silence broken only by a more horrific, splintering, maniacal laugh. Travis hears Nick in the closet scooting around, desperately trying to make himself disappear.

“Where are you?” John’s voice calls out pleasantly—as though he were looking for his kittens.

“C’mere,” he calls into Travis’s room. Travis silently thanks the first mystical being he can think of for giving him the foresight to hide in Nick’s room. “You know the rule,” John says, sounding a little angry. “No hiding from Daddy!” he cheerfully cries.

Travis sucks back a giggle, covers his mouth and makes a sputtering noise pressing the air between his lips by accident. Now the hall light comes on, and Travis freezes, holding his breath. Travis watches in terror as John’s loafers appear in the doorway and enter the room, bright light following him. “Where’re you hiding?” John asks sweetly. Slowly, methodically, John’s feet turn their toes toward the bed. John’s voice is serious, calm. He sounds enraged, and yet perfectly content with the rage, happy to be so angry. “You’re not hiding under the bed are you?” One at a time, John’s hands appear before Travis, and then John’s knees, and then… the horrible visage of John’s face.

Travis can’t suppress a yelp of horror as John peers beneath the bed. He can hear Nick yelling in response in the closet. John’s face is sickeningly white—freshly painted with skin-so-soft bath powder. Two baseball caps crown John’s head, one over the other, each bill pointing directly out to the side. “Daddy giveth and Daddy taketh away,” John begins to chant. “Daddy giveth and Daddy taketh away.”

Travis bats at John’s grappling arm and yells, “Help!” He smashes himself up against the wall underneath the bed.

John’s voice grows menacing. “Daddy giveth and Daddy taketh away!” He gropes for Travis and laughs maniacally again.

A loud clatter from the closet catches both Travis and John’s attention, as Nick struggles to free himself from the pile of clothes he’d been hiding in. Seeing that John was preoccupied with Travis, he saw it was his only chance to get away. But he stumbles. John hears him. Now it was over. John turns to confront Nick with a horrible grimace. “Where’re you goin’!” Standing, John immediately blocks the door to the bedroom and smiles. Then, speaking in a ridiculously calm, collected voice, his lungs heaving from exertion, “Daddy giveth and Daddy taketh away.”

Nick falls back and scoots into the corner of the closet, holding his index fingers in a cross as he tries to get away. John stalks the closet, though. “Daddy giveth and Daddy taketh away.” He enters the closet and slowly shuts the door, laughing horribly, like a man three months in the desert coming upon water. Nick can only holler in response, “Run Travis! Run! Get away while you can!”

Seeing it is his only chance, Travis drags himself out from underneath the bed hurriedly, and makes a break for the door, falling over himself a couple of times. As he runs for the front door, and outside to get away from the madness, the only thing he can hear is the resounding howls of terror of his one friend and crazed laughter from the other.

“Maybe I should leave it open for Nick.”

Travis looks confused for a moment, turning to face John. “He lives here. He’s got a key.”

“But what if he lost it?”

Travis has no reply.

“It’ll be easier for him to get in anyway.”

“It’ll be easier for a burglar to get in, too.”

John shrugs, “So?” implying that they have nothing for anyone to steal—which isn’t entirely true. They have their equipment: guitars, basses, amplifiers, effects pedals, and of course, extensive music collections. They just feign being Brahm’s poor musicians for the sake of proximity to legend and cliché, as though they might jinx their musical progress by admitting to some material comfort. But then, Travis knows John is arguing for the sake of arguing—kidding around—looking for a joke—and John locks the door as Travis meanders off toward the Thunderchicken. They get in the car—a navy blue thunderbird; a wide, low-slung, two-door machine built in the late eighties. It has a V-8 engine that John is fond of abusing.

John slams his foot on the gas. He backs the car out of the parking spot at twenty miles an hour, and swings the Thunderchicken around in a tight arc that makes Travis lean, catch himself on the oh-shit handle, and struggle against maybe two and a half gees just to reach for his seatbelt. Shifting the automatic transmission from reverse to overdrive, John guns the engine a second time and the car peels out of the parking lot. “It’s three-thirty in the morning,” Travis says matter-of-factly. John replies by rolling down his window and screaming into the parking lot, “I hate you all, pigfuckeeeers!” Laughing in spite of his disapproval, Travis rolls down his own window to let in some of the moist, cool night air. “Give me a cigarette,” John says, swinging the car around a corner fast enough to make it fishtail.

“In a minute,” Travis offers.

A silent moment passes as the pair pull out onto Baxter Street—the road almost empty. Black gas stations, convenience stores and strip malls sit along its length. In the distance, a pair of headlights shows faintly five hundred yards off.

“Gi’me a cigarette!”

“In a minute.”

“Gi’me a cigarette.”

“In a minute.”

“Now.”

“Shut up your face. You’re fat.”

He is Travis Fleeting in his lonesome, dreaming state, right there in front of you, cuddled up in front of the television in his dingy living room, roommates fast asleep. He does not exist because he is really his glorious friends. He is his listeners. He is love found along the way. He is a strange reminder, constant only for himself in his lonesome dreaming state, his dream now static on the television screen flickering dizzyingly with the word “MUTE” spelled out in green, blocky, digital letters in the lower left corner of the screen.

Travis’s bloodshot eyes are open but not focused as he lay in the fetal position in a beat-up, corrugated, blue armchair. Bands, fields, blurs of colored shapes wash across the television. Now and then a phantom face or object seems to form out of the scrambled noise only to flicker and disappear. Tired but too disturbed by the dream to sleep, Travis stares at some point halfway between himself and the television; a halfway point of consciousness where dreams turn to mist instead of bothering us—their corporeality stolen from them by the undeniable hallmark of the drudgery of reality. There had been a carousel. There were spinning, painted horses—breathing horses— with metal shafts through their middles, their innards. He had seen it. They would bray and kick and scream, their brilliant green and yellow and orange painted skin matched by frantic wide, white eyes and teeth and blood coming from their wounds. Among them: a pale, white horse—almost gray from soot or slush ground into its hair—does nothing but get thumped by the hoofs and torn by the gnashing, burly teeth of the prettier but frightened horses. Chewed and ripped, though born of hope, the white horse stays to comfort the others, to be with them in their dizzy roundandround terror; to free them if he can. Still he hopes that one day he might stumble upon a herd of painted (not purple, orange, green, but painted like Pintos: white, brown, black) horses in Montana, and see them running free through open fields in the cold and low light of dawn.

Fifty minutes later it is after noon and Travis awakens again to rude red numbers screaming that his life is drifting away before his very eyes, but maybe life is better when he is asleep—when he isn’t paying attention to his attentiveness. So long as he is carefree, so long as he can leave painted horses behind him… he sighs, long and hard into the pillow. He closes his eyes for another moment, opens them, and looks at the clock again. A minute has passed. Rolling over on his side, he sets his chin on his forearm and watches the numbers for a while. They seem to be moving along faster than normal. A minute seems to take only twenty seconds, and Travis wonders if it is him or the clock that is out of whack. What an annoying feeling it is, that time is passing—that he is actually noticing time passing. It makes him want to get out of bed and at least go somewhere where he can ignore time for a while. He shoves his damp sheets aside, irritated, and sets his feet on the floor. Squinting at the clock, he smiles at himself before he swings his left hand out in a sweeping arc, knocking the clock to the floor with a crash. So there. That feels better.

Putting on clean underwear, clean socks, dirty jeans and a dirty t-shirt, Travis stands in the middle of his room running his hands through the fuzz on his head. He is supposed to shave; supposed to brush his teeth and eat something; supposed shower and do laundry: supposed to have a regular job, and to pay taxes. He is supposed to have a nominal existence that fits him like a cornflower blue, button-up shirt instead of his favorite gray t-shirt, and he twists and tries to set the wrinkles under his arms and around his neck. He is not supposed to be up at night attacking his electric in a purple light for drunken revelers. Looking down for a moment, he realizes he’s put the shirt on backwards. Pulling his arms in through the sleeves, he twists the shirt around in the other direction. Travis looks over to his acoustic sitting against the bed and thinks one last time about all the things he is supposed to do, before picking up the guitar and heading out the bedroom door.

As Travis passes into the living room, he spies Nick sitting on the love seat, his feet propped up on a footstool, sketching. As Travis walks by toward the front door, Nick calls out, “Good morning,” without looking up.

“Yeah?” Travis says, reaching for the door.

“Whatch’ya’ doin’?” Nick asks.

“I’m goin’ for a walk.”

“Oh don’t kid yourself,” Nick says quickly, shaking his head. He continues sketching.

Travis hesitates for a moment and then smiles and decides to take the bait, “What?”

“You’ll never lose any weight that way, fatty,” Nick offers.

“I’ll be back.”

“Whatever.”

“I love you too, man.”

“Mm-hm.”