Dance & Drink & Screw

There was one section inside the house where a river flowed. A man with long black hair had been caught in this river trying to jump one of the many logs that crossed it. When I followed this river I reached a balcony in the house that overlooked a canal in Israel.

It was nighttime and I could hear singing on the canal and see, further away, the lights of Israeli homes and offices. The singing grew closer and I knew I'd been to this place before. The singing came from an ancient young people who lived in these rivers - had done so for many thousands of years, even before the arrival of human civilization.

They noticed me on the balcony. One of them jumped over the house's fences and easily climbed the walls until he joined me. I was afraid but he didn't do anything except continue to sing.

Something fell from the sky - the piece of an airplane - and one of the buildings across the canal exploded. More pieces landed near us - one of them hitting the house I was in. The singing had stopped and now we ran through the house, trying to escape the fire and the cries for help. Someone lamented they had seen a father and his child fall into the canal.

I was barefoot. I ran back to the balcony to collect my boots, ignoring calls for me to save my life.

She was one of the carnies, a young woman with long black hair that worked in one of the amusement park's booths. When the fireworks accidentally exploded inside the booth, she had been wearing a white dress. But it was somebody else who stepped outside of the booth that night, took her boyfriend's hand and walked towards the other rides. Nobody could tell the difference but me. I looked at her and knew it wasn't the same person.

Her booth stood abandoned, empty after the fireworks accident. When I went to investigate it I heard a soft whisper: "I'm here... I'm here." Invisible, trapped - she couldn't be seen by human eyes or leave the booth until the body snatcher returned.

I threw a blanket in the booth and it covered her form. She was crouching on the earth. But the only way to get her back inside her body was to recreate the fireworks accident with the body thief present.

They came to the classroom and told us we'd have to put on a dance show. I turned to Cheryl and said that I'd be anything - the manager, the marketing officer, the PR, the runner, the designer, the photographer - anything but a dancer. She laughed and pointed out that we all had to take part in the choreography.

We could all dance, and we did with Michael Jackson hats and large steps across the stage in our white tank tops.

Later, I washed my hair kneeled by a bus stop with the water from a tap. Took us a while to figure out it was the wrong stop and we needed to walk back a few blocks in the dark until the right bus came along. In the rush to leave, I had no time to wash off all the conditioner.

I lived with all my brothers and sisters in our father's mansion. We had any room we could choose, but somehow we chose to sleep together in the same bedroom - a row of bunkbeds for children of all ages. Our mansion was on a hill, part of a grand estate that was used by local walkers and visited by international tourists.

Some of us had been in the car accident that killed our father. I asked my brothers how old I was then. None knew too well but they thought I'd been three years old. I was one of the children in the car when the collision happened. I couldn't remember how he died. It was a national tragedy that people still spoke of years later.

I was standing outside the cinema's ticket booth when Melanie Griffith approached. She wore large sunglasses. I came over to say hello and she said:

'You know what that columnist from The Sun said about me being a fan of neenaw?'

'Yeah. Is it true?' I asked.

'Yes.'

I was meeting Neenaw anyway so when she showed up, I gently stirred her towards Melanie and introduced them. There was a bit of awkwardness at first, followed by a quick kiss to the lips. When Melanie left I said to Neenaw:

'I can't believe you just snogged Melanie Griffith!' There I was again, exaggerating a little kiss. Neenaw had her rollerblades on; she skated down the road and disappeared into the horizon.

I was sharing a flat at the time with three other people: a young guy bound to a wheelchair and two girls (one of which looked like Beyonce.) It was a brand new flat with large rooms and wooden floors. During one of our trips out of the flat, we left our wheel-chair bound friend alone and he got murdered by a psycho with a drill who was hiding underneath our floorboards. The builder in charge of fixing the kitchen found some of his blood on the chopping counter, but the body was never retrieved.

I always wondered about the floorboards in that particular part of the flat. I could hear someone underneath it unscrew them and slide out when nobody was around - a large, hairy man in jeans overalls who claimed that we had stolen real estate from him. He came for the girls afterwards with his killer drill. When he murdered the blond one in our garden while disinterested joggers went by, Beyonce lookalike had already moved out.

Comets hit planet Earth again - this time only two of them. The first one crashes somewhere far away; the second heads in our direction, a red ball of fire slowly growing in the sky. It falls in the river with a great crash and disappears from view.

The river bubbles, all its fish devoured in a frenzy by what landed in it. Men go into the water, leg deep, and laugh. I tell them to get out, that they'll also get eaten by whatever came from space. They disregard my warnings.

The thing in the water grows and comes together like grey playdoh, forming the shape of a dinosaur. The river is now devoid of life. The creature climbs out and stands on a podium as if it were merely a statue. Those that approach it for a viewing get killed.

Now it's on the move. It's going to eat everyone in this city. We don't have the technology to stop it.

Jason Voorhees is not behind the first cupboard opened to the group, the one keeping an ironing board that springs out and slams the floor. Neither is he inside the second cupboard, though we do find a grinning girl's head propped on top of folded towels which elicits a round of screams. There's still a third, and final, cupboard to open - the one inside an alcove, surrounded by books. A friend takes up the challenge and gets an axe through his head. The group panics, disperses, fights for the room's one exit - a narrow staircase leading to the mansion's ground floor.

Jason looks slimmer these days, darker - as if he's constantly stepping out of a murky lake and wandering around in wet clothes. The hockey mask doesn't hang from his face anymore; it sits on his head like a second set of eyes. The road outside the old southern mansion leads to other grand, decaying homes surrounded by a wintry forest. The road is littered with people who have run away from Jason, who have even hurt each other in their desperation to escape him. From the road I can still see people partying inside the house, a fancy-dress ball in full flow, no cares in this world - as if Jason wasn't amongst them.

I show you the streets of Montreal at night. All the shops on Rue St-Denis are closed and the sidewalks are empty. The second-floor windows, however, tell a different story: they are alive with the flickering shadows of people dancing; the music reaches us. We walk north, towards the Plateau.

You tell me you don't want to go to Club Bitch in your outfit. I show you a side street, with stores that sell slightly more extravagant clothes. In a shopping gallery, I peer into one store and see a shirt that would look great on me. I point it out to you but you are not interested; you'd rather flick through the clothes rail someone forgot outside the shop.

Some of Montreal's supermarkets stay open 24-hours. We go into one, and while waiting in line to pay for something, your song "I Want It" comes on the radio.

Back on the streets, heading back to Club Bitch. The free weekly newspaper Mirror, which can be found in every bar and street corner, is packaged this week as an orange juice carton. I'm surprised to see they are using a photo of Ryan on its cover. I drink some of the orange juice and it tastes good. I wonder if Ryan has kept a few cartons at home as souvenirs. I wonder if I should take some cartons home with me.

Malice lies on the grass, outside the pub in Camden. The boys are messing around with two remote-control cars by the bar counter, so I go outside and join her. She smiles at me, her lips full and sensuous, her skin translucent underneath the black corset, her black hair cascading over the green. She props herself up with her elbows.

We talk about zaubin. "He told me you were in Camden when the place went up in flames," I say. She's surprised when I tell her I was there too. She is about to give me details of the bars she visited on the night the fire raged through Camden market when the boys come out with their remote-control cars. They give Malice one of the remotes, the one that controls the metallic green car that is as flat as a lawnmower.

Horses trot in Camden. One of them, a young mare red as wine, carries a little girl. My remote-control makes the little mare turn left or right, circle the grass enclosure. I use the control to make the little mare speed up her trot until the girl is about to fall off.

Alien abduction is real and is happening right now all over our planet. I know this because I've been abducted many times.

The last abduction happened during a visit from my high school friend Susannah. We were hanging out in my apartment when a flash of light hit us. As in other times, the clock seemed to stop and leave everyone in suspension (there were other friends with us who simply froze on the spot). As an abductee, I was kept awake even though I could barely move. I saw Susannah changed into the white gown they prefer us to wear before entering their craft; she stared at me in horror as she was lifted into the sky.

There's a gap in my memory until the point Susannah and I managed to escape the space craft. We pushed through one of its tiny windows and realized the craft was atop a New York building. We jumped onto the building's roof and made our way as fast as possible to its back alley. When we looked up, we could feel the presence of the space craft atop the building, even though it was invisible to human eyes.

The next sequence of events is known to many as the mysterious attack on New York that the U.S. government refuses to explain. Susannah and I witnessed it all. We were running away as fast as possible from the space craft when, from the sky, three giant helicopters broke through the clouds. The largest one, as mighty as if it carried a leader, landed on a medium-sized building. From its inside burst out a muscular, gigantic man, who proceeded to demolish a sky scrapper in construction with his bare fists. He took the workers in the building as if they were dolls and threw them to the ground.

The other two helicopters carried thin, floating figures that pursued Susannah and I. One of them, with black robes and an old face, caught up with me and circled my throat with his cold hands. As he strangled me, I grabbed his throat and squeezed as hard as I could. I held my breath and played a survival contest with him. As our breaths disappeared, he shape-shifted into a dog.

"You can let him go now, dear," said one of the other floating shape-shifters to my attacker.