Seven years.

It had been seven years since he left New York, and he was still convinced that reality was of no use to him. So he avoided daylight when he could, because reality overpowered everything else in daylight, and everything else was what kept Vincent from falling apart. Only in the make-believe world of the night did he find momentary reprieve from the gaping void reality kept shoving down his throat.

Perched atop one of the giant speakers, Vincent observed. His lavender eyes were scanning the dance floor for a potential prey, something to ease his boredom for a few hours, some impressionable little goth, eager to demonstrate how unorthodox her amorous inclinations were. There were plenty of pretty girls and boys, but Vincent had gotten tired of pretty a while back. It was still better than not pretty, it just wasn’t enough anymore.

Sssso bored.

He had tried a cornucopia of alternative lifestyle choices and experimented with an eccentric panoply of practices but no matter how outlandish or shocking, none could generate any kind of emotional response beyond mild acknowledgement. Put simply, Vincent’s ability to feel had been dulled down to near-sociopathic levels.

About 15 minutes before his set, a young man in a blue silk shirt caught Vincent’s eye. The pure Dresden skin and delicate features had garnered some immediate attention on the dance floor as well. Blood rushed to Vincent’s lips as his elephantine boots landed on the floor with an unheard thump. The large doe eyes stirred some nefarious fantasies in him.

Mm. Kneel.

Vincent signalled the barman for another one of his thick red drinks and, glass in hand, slithered through the writhing bodies. He guided it in the porcelain hands on his way to the Dj booth, a half smile creasing the corner of his mouth. He felt the pale hand beneath his and crossed the large eyes like polished sapphires for just a fleeting instant, but that was all it took. In that instant everything changed. A spasm galloped the length of his spine. That young man was playing prey, looking to bait a predator. His mouth dried up and he forgot to breathe as his skin tried to recoil from the touch faster than his hand could. His mind rushed to identify this feeling, rummaging through memories long filed away. The room spun just a little bit around him. This was better than any drug.

Fear.

That’s it, fear. For a moment, he was terrified. His mind couldn’t contain it like it did most feelings he had, and the unfiltered emotion overwhelmed his senses. This was what daylight reality couldn’t offer, but even this midnight theatre never so neared waking him from his numbing haze. Still shaken, he climbed the Dj booth and readied himself for his set.

For the next hour, Vincent was Dj Israfel, and although his hands and ears were focused on his music, his eyes were set on a certain blue silk shirt. Despite his usual skill at reading people, he couldn’t see anything odd about the newcomer who caroused and conversed as any other goth would. By the time he queued his last song, he worried his aversion for reality might be conniving to trick him.

“Ey!”

Vincent jerked the equalizer a bit too high, startled by Olivier’s arrival in the Dj Booth. No one but him seemed to notice.

“Man Oli, you’ve been taking ninja classes or somethin’?”

“Eh, yea, a tree-undred pound ninja. Dat’s sexee. Wat’s up wit you? You look all not dere tonite.”

“It’s th-ere, Oli. There’s an H after the T.”

“Yea. Watever. Say someting in French for fun. And dat isn’t answering my question.”

Vincent shrugged. “Uuuh, I don’t know. I guess it must be something I ate… “

“Pfft! You don’t eat. You eat like a salad a week. Ealt-freak.” Olivier poked Vincent’s toned abdominals and Vincent responded by sinking his finger in Olivier’s love handles. When Vincent turned his attention back to the dance floor, the blue silk shirt was nowhere in sight. Annoyed, he walked down the two steps of the booth and to the bar at the back, where he ordered another one of his signature red drinks.

More. Now.

When he turned around, drink in hand, the back of the blue silk shirt was right there, some trivial three feet away from him. Yet, Vincent felt, well, nothing. He took a deep stride in the blue silk’s direction, intent on making physical contact again, but instead of following with another stride, he found himself desperately fighting gravity as Jeff, the manager of the club, suddenly stepped in front of him, both threatening his balance and griping his shoulders.

“Are you done with your set? Or is it coming up? I got the promoter here for Bedlam Legion, if he has a good enough time, maybe I can convince him to bring the band here. You got time right? Okay, so. I’ll introduce you to him, girls will flock to you as usual and you’ll make sure they’re being nice to him. You know? Reeeeal nice… Okay that’s good. Also, don’t leave too fast tonight. The computer in the office is acting up again. Okay. You’re my man.”

“I, uh…” Though Jeff had asked many questions, there really was no point in answering.

“Okay. That’s him.” Jeff dragged him along as he pointed to a table near the front. Balancing his chair on the two back legs was a bad imitation of Criss Angel, drinking the cheapest beer the club had to offer.

Snap. Twist. Bleed.

“Oh, great,” Vincent mumbled under his breath, “he’s not even goth”. But he knew what his job would entail when he signed the contract. So he put on his “warm affable goth” mask and went to work. “Hello.” He paused, and offered his hand. “I’m Israfel. How are you finding Montreal so far?”

“A lot less French than I expected.” He shook Vincent’s hand and tried to follow it with a fist bump. “You can call me Wolf.” Vincent fought the urge to roll his eyes but still left the promoter with his fist hanging in mid-air. This guy had poser written all over his factory distressed jeans and tribal print t-shirt. True to Jeff’s word though, it only took a few minutes before Vincent’s groupies came to see who this guy was that Israfel was actually sitting down – at a table! – to talk with him. A few band names thrown in and half an hour later “Wolf” wasn’t talking to Vincent anymore, but enjoying the female company instead.

Finally.

That was maybe not the hardest, but definitely the most annoying part of his job. He could have easily told Jeff off and the high-strung manager would have let him. But he was a nice enough guy, and if the club didn’t bring in a few up and coming bands for September, Jeff was the one that would have to deal with the owners, and really, he didn’t deserve a broken arm. Besides, Jeff let him spin in other venues occasionally, which, according to the contract he signed with a burly bald biker watching over his shoulder, Jeff had every right to forbid if he felt it was detrimental to the club’s business.

Vincent waited until 15 minutes before his next go at the turntables before excusing himself. He grabbed another drink, emptied it in one swallow and left the empty glass on the bar. His next set went by like the first one, except this time, there was no blue shirt at which to stare.

Vincent kept replaying the scene in his head, but the more he concentrated, the blurrier it became. Had he just imagined himself feeling some intense emotion? His second set ended and he exchanged some inane chitchat with Olivier as they switched places. Olivier was a good Dj and a nice guy over all, but apart from music, there really wasn’t much in his life, at least not much worth discussing. There was still no blue shirt sighting. With still another hour ahead of him before his last set of the night, Vincent figured he might as well check what Jeff had done to the computer this time.

The office was relatively small considering all it contained. Along with file cabinets, promotional material of all sorts, a few extra credit card terminals and some generic office supplies, it was also home to two computers, one of which was used for nothing else but rotating images of the club’s 3 security cameras. This was the computer that Jeff kept screwing up. Vincent guessed that he had tried to force a rotation through the cameras too fast for the old processor, which had resulted in everything just freezing up.

He sat in front of the jerking screen and forced a complete shut down. He rebooted the machine and then re-initialized the camera software.

He’s gone.

The stranger with the blue silk shirt was gone, yet his mind just kept going back to him, looping the 3 seconds in an increasingly faded film. He tried to remember the stranger’s face, he knew it had struck him as beautiful and delicate, but he couldn’t see it anymore. His large doe eyes; were they blue, or grey? He could only remember the blue silk. His mind was mocking him, refusing him access to more details with every passing moment. It had let him hang on to an impression for a few hours and now, it was drifting away…leaving him with a single, too familiar feeling.

Empty.

No! He wanted to feel his throat swelling, his eyes burning, his temples pulsing, his hands sweating, his stomach knotting, his heart beating… He wanted to experience all those tiny reactions the body had when feelings were intense. Not this vague acknowledgement his mind made of his emotions. He needed to see the stranger again, he needed to remember his face, to remember that feeling…

Vincent’s fingers quickly navigated through the video data on the computer. He found him leaving the club only a few minutes after his first set ended. Though the face was hidden by someone else’s top hat, the blue silk shirt was unmistakable even on the black and white screen. He let the video go on for a few more minutes while he looked for a piece of paper to note the time, and to his surprise, the doe eyed stranger came back in. As the young man passed the bouncer at the bottom of the stairs, he looked straight at the camera, and winked. Vincent’s last drink crept up his throat.

Fear? Fear. Fear!

He had felt it again. It was exquisite. It squirmed down to his loins, irrigating the soft tissue until the skin wanted to bust open. It wrapped around his ribcage, constricting tighter until his heart had no room left to beat. It swirled upwards filling his mouth with the taste of iron and vinegar, paralyzing his voice box on the way. It scraped at his optic nerve, making his left contact lens quiver erratically. Every organ, every muscle, every vein, every inch of his skin, the fear had rippled through leaving nothing untouched. It was uncontrollable, completely irrational and inexplicable. It was also ephemeral.

How long was he lost in the meanders of his mind? He hadn’t paid attention to the time since he entered the office, but now that he did, he found out he had to rush back to the floor. Oli was probably queuing his last song.

His last set of the night went by too slow. The doe-eyed young man must have slipped out when he was in the office, because he couldn’t see him anywhere. Some patrons were already starting to leave in the hopes of beating the 3am downtown traffic. Even Vincent’s music winded down, the furious industrial tracks being replaced by melancholic electro.

You lose.

His mind recognized disappointment and resignation. He almost had a reprieve from his ennui, but he let it slip out of his reach. When the lights came on after the last song, Vincent looked at the remains of the evening’s clientele. Criss Angel would’ve been turning in his grave if he had been dead, as his copycat was attempting to impress one of the girls with a magic trick so weak it wouldn’t have made it in a blooper reel.

Reality.

It was always the same. When the lights came on, Ugly Reality hurried to scar his eyes. What had been a curvaceous pinup under the strobe lights what just a corset pulled so tight it pushed superfluous fat above and below it, what had been a sharp Cleopatra haircut, was now just long bangs hiding a pimply forehead. He slumped down and sat on the floor, hidden by the half walls of the dj booth. Even the club was uglier in this lighting. The exposed pipes in the ceiling weren’t so much contributing to an “industrial” look but rather were only a testament to the mediocre maintenance they received, the occasional discrete piece of duct tape suddenly not so subtle any more. The ingenious artistic lighting above the bar was really just a bunch of scrap metal held together with wire around a red dollar store light bulb.

The empty space the music had filled earlier was slowly overtaken by the drivel of asinine conversation and overused linguistic habits. In the dark, he could see colour; lips and eyes, claws and manes. But now, everything was grey. Grey lipsticks and lenses, grey nail polish and hair dye. All the creatures and characters that shared the dance floor earlier had been dissipated, leaving behind a few unremarkable people still waiting on the coat check girl for their belongings making one last attempt at picking her up with some insipid comment.

He slowly got up. The girls from the main bar were already done cleaning most of the tables and one of the bus boys had gone to fetch the mop. Vincent started pulling chairs up on the tables as the last 2 patrons left and Jeff locked the door behind them. When he was done with the chairs, Vincent went back to the booth to pack his stuff for the night. On top of the half door, that usually kept the special requests seeking patrons out, was an empty lowball.

As Vincent got closer, he noticed the glass wasn’t completely empty. A white card was soaking up the last few drops of a thick red liquid. He picked up the glass and reached inside it.

Yesssssss!

A high-pitched tone tore at his eardrums. His left eyelid twitched. A single drop of sweat travelled along his shoulder blade. His jaw tensed. His brain hesitated before activating the synapse that would send the message to unfold the card, just as his left hand hesitated before executing the command. He thought he saw three letters, L A Z, and then 10 numbers before his sight blurred completely. His mind flailed about, trashing, convulsing, desperately looking for a word, any word, that his mouth would agree to pronounce, scrambling to enforce order. His right hand was trying to warn him of something. Something was slithering, sliding across its palm. The message was garbled and his head was busy with his mouth. Then a distant crashing sound made it through the thick feedback filling his ears, unscrambling most of his senses. He looked down at the pieces of broken glass at his feet, and a familiar word finally came out.

Fuck.