Forgotten Guest: A completely unintelligable recollection of spirits

Gregory lay on the modular sofa, in the partial light that the too-small bathroom door afforded him around its edges. Bathed in an all but obscured ambient reflection of the white tile and porcelain so faint he could barely see at all. In the efficiency's kitchen-living space, drunk on reefer and gin tonics, letting the majestic emptiness of a black curtain that stood between his eyes and ceiling open itself up to his minds light where were crafted dreamlike imaginings, the solitary piano and strong vocal of his headphones ran about between his ears, changing them with musical hands like a benevolent guiding force bent on creation. Like some god made of sound.

It shaped in the all-but-black a boulevard, laden with bulbed signs which he couldn't make out. From the street it crafted a solitary vaudevillian, sad and contemplative, clad in a straw hat and cane, fiercely staring at his own hands, looking to and fro down the street and raising his voice to the glowing night heavens personally. He cried imaginary tears. The vaudevillian knew himself to be an angel. He sang of flight and was lifted spinning upwards to alight on rooftops and sing city lullabies like some hoofing sandman of a show-a-night age.

Gregory was alone on the sofa, reeling from the intoxicants, spinning at comfortable speed in his head, somewhere between merry-go-round and Ring-Around-the-Rosie. Outside was a damp city, smelling of spent firecrackers and roasted peanuts, where moments before he had watched fire works explode in unison on two opposite sides, from a private rooftop. He had an overwhelming sense of place and of presence, this was his perfect execution, a prize of contentment, this panorama of the nights exploits, the physical trace of earlier imbibements still clutching him, whispering what events they each marked into him.

The first tonic an estranged revelry at club where he had never before been. The second, a conversation he had forced from his mouth awkwardly under blasting music. The third a pre-exit farewell to the music and crowded bodies of the night, the smoky piny taste born on each exhalation a last minute choice before bed in the small apartment, the taste of yeast and flour a ghost of a scrappy meal devoured in haste and desperation.

The vaudevillian never spoke of the night, but surely he felt it, he exuded in his song and choreography it's triumph, it's excess, but overall the vaudevillian winked to Gregory in acknowledgment of the shared experience of dream and dreamer. The sandman recognized that Gregory had recorded it and that they were reviewing it together in this musical way.
A door away were the lovers, who had imbibed with Gregory. Matched him more than drink to drink, whom had danced with him, and shared a cab back. Gregory knew he was peripheral, that the focus of each lovers attention on this night was surely the other, and he a third and unecessary party to it. He knew this without feeling troubled. His imaginings drew them curled together beneath the pale vale of white sheets, sleeping contentedly, the image betraying their puzzle-like correspondence, the unspoken that belied the wanton revelry of the night. That something fragile and shared and fulfilling at all was hidden beneath (or at least the idea of it) the visible layers of the evening was a comfort and Gregory's borrowed quarters seemed all the warmer for it.

There were two sets of correspondents in the tiny efficiency apartment in the city in Gregory's night. And though one was dreamed, each mirrored the other in some way, the unspoken congruity, the recollection of the events of the evening, and the completeness of the experience all made a comfort which seemed an undercurrent to their very existence at that moment. Gregory was aware of this. A side effect of the tonics, and of the smoke, a near lucid view of the minutiae of his euphoria.

And morning, he hoped would bring this same sense of contentment, he thought, as the headphones hummed to each other along his ear canal, and he dreamed of his friends a wall away, and in imaginary streets. They all sang to each other. Even beyond this chemical city, in it's antithesis, the waking banal, he hoped the endurance of this perfect dream.