Eventually, I noticed that the streets weren’t the same after dark. I’d go down Pollard Lane at 1 AM, and there was an angle, a kink, that wasn’t there at 2 PM. What was that? I expected to reach 13th Street after a couple of blocks, but I didn’t. I would keep walking, soon I’d hit a cross street I recognized, and I’d find my way home. Something was off.

Probably me. How could there be streets in my own neighborhood that I didn’t recognize? I mean I’ve been here forever.

And then one morning it occurred to me: the streets didn’t get wonky at night until I died.

I wasn’t dead very long. I touched a live wire that shouldn’t have been, the EMTs got my heart beating pretty quick, I was a little woozy for a week or so, end of story. (Aside from the bills, which took a while to pay off, cough cough).

My brief death had no long-term effects, except for this sense of everything being askew late at night, occasionally. Most likely a few brain cells without oxygen for a little too long. A tiny bit of brain damage. Almost entertaining.

The next time it happened I was not wandering around in the dark. I was sprinkling vinegar on my fries—my chips, that is, because this was an English-style brew pub, serving fish’n’chips, and various other menu items garnished with wee silent ‘e’s. The basket of chips had been lined with the page of a newspaper. Actually, some sort of food-grade faux-newspaper, the same goofy news stories in every basket, with the same grainy photo of forgotten movie stars waving from the bow of a cruise ship. AMERICAN COMEDIANS ARRIVE IN LONDON. Tiny black dots of vinegar expanded and made the news copy into unreadable gibberish. Maybe it had always been unreadable gibberish. A server was comforting someone at the counter behind me who had mistaken the mushy peas for guacamole. I forked a chunk of fish into the tartar sauce and watched the spreading vinegar change the grainy cruise ship into a jovial face beneath a bowler hat. It was like the top layer of an oil painting had been cleaned off with turpentine. I muttered something—I don’t remember what—and someone at a table by the window said, “We got a dead boy in here?”

I started chewing the fish and somebody behind me put one hand on my shoulder, and one hand on my forehead, and tilted my head back. A click and a bright light in one eye. Then the light clicked off and my head was free again. So to speak. Couldn’t protest, because the fish was still several chews away from a swallow.

“Nope,” said the guy behind me. He put his little penlight in his shirt pocket. “But something’s going on there. Hey! What’s going on in there?” A tap on my noggin. “Don’t talk with your mouth full. Wait till you’re done with that cod. No rush. Wouldn’t be a bad move to wash it down before you start thinking. Hey, what is that? A diet soda? Why didn’t you get a beer, brother?”

“Stop asking him questions when he’s eating, Paul,” said the man by the window.

“Eh. Heimlich Maneuver poster by the cash register, Arthur,” said Paul.

It seemed to take an eternity to finish my little piece of fish. It took so long that Paul and Arthur each helped themselves to several of my chips. I took a sip of my soda.

“Now then,” said Paul. “I did a quick-n-dirty brain check, and it looks like you spent some time dead recently. Are you aware of that? Or am I wrong?”

“Couple minutes,” I confirmed.

“Sometimes people die for a tick and they don’t know. It happens. Anyway, you were dead long enough that your dormant bleep-itty-bloo woke up.” He didn’t say ‘bleep-itty-bloo,’ he said some word that sounded like it might be Chinese, with a bunch of ‘j’s and ‘sh’s, but it might as well have been bleep-itty-bloo. “Crazy streets, right? And windows where there shouldn’t be windows.”

“I didn’t notice the window thing.”

“You’re a lucky guy. Sooner or later, you’d notice the windows, and then the people in the windows.”

“And the stairs,” Arthur said.

“What’s on the stairs?” I asked.

“‘What’s on the stairs.’ Holy shit! HA!” said Arthur.

“But that’s all moot now,” said Paul. “We’re gonna shut down your bleep-itty-bloo, and you’ll be good as new.”

“We need a Q-tip,” said Arthur.

“Yup,” said Paul, and plucked another chip from my basket. Arthur looked around, saw two ladies of a certain age, as they used to say, sitting in a booth, and strolled over to them. I couldn’t hear what he said over the Cage the Elephant Spotify playlist the cashier was sharing with us, but one of the ladies opened her purse, rooted around, and handed Arthur two Q-tips. Sweet smiles all around.

“He has a way with the ladies,” said Paul.

“Those ladies, anyhow,” said Arthur. “We should pick up their check.”

“We should,” said Paul. He dipped one of the Q-tips in the tartar sauce, told me to turn my head to the right, and stuck the Q-tip in my ear. “Here we go,” he said. He gave it a gentle twist. And he instantly vanished. Arthur was also gone.

In fact, everyone in the brew pub was gone. Except for me. Everything was bathed in a sickly green light, from fluorescent tubes above, which I was certain had not been fluorescent tubes a moment earlier. “Paul?” I said, “Arthur??”

“Oh shit,” said Paul’s voice from somewhere far away.

The doorway to the rest rooms now led to a stairway, and there was a weird shuffling noise. It got louder, like a bag of soggy laundry dropping from one step to the next.

All the windows were mirrors.

Then something impossible moved in the glass, and I couldn’t stop screaming.