Once I saw a secret dance.

I was lying on the top bunk in the room my brother and I shared. I looked up at the ceiling as a car passed outside. The room lit up and the arms of the ceiling fan stretched and whipped all around. Every part of me melted into the dance of the ceiling fan, and then as quickly as it had begun, the dance ended. I played the moment over and over again in my head, and every time the dance changed slightly. It was then that I realized how false memory is.

I began rehashing memories of my past: birthday parties, school, lying with my mother on her bed. These were fact, or so I thought. Every one of them had been twisted by my brain. My personality wasn't shaped by experience; it was shaped by how I remembered experiences. Maybe the world was nothing like I remembered it; maybe my life was a day dream I was having while lying on the top of a bunk bed.

Maybe if I closed my eyes and slept a little I would wake up in a different place. Maybe when I woke up I would be the only one alive. I'd wake in the top bunk, but instead of the ceiling I'd see the night stars through the large hole in my decrepit roof. I'd lie still for hours, terrified, wondering if I was dreaming. Then I'd build up the courage to slowly sit. The dust would roll off me in sheets. I'd carefully climb down from the top bunk in order not to break the rotten wood. On the bottom bunk I would find a decayed corpse, hundreds of years old, just as I would find two in my parents? bedroom, and in every bed, in every decayed house on the block.

Later I asked my brother if he remembered that night. I wanted to know if he had seen the secret dance and what he thought about it. "Don't be silly," he said, "people don't think about that kind of stuff."

No insects, no birds, no animals, no people. No crickets in the night, no birds chirping, no fear of death from predators, no human connection. Everything is left perfect except for decay. Plants force themselves through the highways and into the light, as houses sag and decay. The thin layer of concrete forced upon nature's raw muscle is cracking and falling away.

At first I read books, thousands and thousands of them. Slowly this ceases to interest me. Later I find diaries and love letters in people's houses. I scour the deserted earth looking for these, or anything that will connect me to what a person was. I carry my collection from shelter to shelter in carts and wagons; in a world where everything is mine they are my only possessions.

I sit and read their thoughts and emotions, and sometimes I feel them near me. Johnny Thompson, always afraid that someone is waiting to murder his loved ones, Sandra Thygerson, secretly cuts her stomach and legs. Fred Custer wants to be a woman. All of them are here with me quietly looking over my shoulder. All of these people are my friends. I am a voyeur, living through their unfulfilled dreams and desires. During these times I feel alive enough to smile, maybe even enjoy the sun and the silence all around me. This is what I do now that all doors are open to me.

She wore a gray dress with short sleeves. Her hair was cut to shoulder length, and her bangs were cut to her eyebrows. I pushed her down onto the grass behind the school. She flung her arms around my neck and smiled at me. Her bony thighs poked into mine as we tried to fit on to each other. I felt powerful and vulnerable.