wife starts tossing and turning early.”
“All right then, tomorrow?”
“We’ll see. Listen, can I drop you off somewhere?”
“No, that’s okay. I still have a couple hours before my wife wakes up. You go on, I’m going to stay here a while.”
Parker stood up and reached for his wallet.
Clive stopped him. “I’ve got this. You got the cab, remember?”
He smiled. “See you at the hospital,” he said as he left the Cup O’ Gold.
Parker got into his cab and drove slowly in the rain, to the garage and right past the attendant. He wound his cab down three levels to where the Mercedes waited for him. He left the cab running and got into his other car. He started the engine and the usual quiet had been replaced by a thundering rumble. The whole car vibrated, and when Parker got out to look around, he figured out why: someone had ripped out his muffler. Just ripped the thing out. He knew who was responsible, but when he rounded the last corner of the garage, clanging and shuddering, the attendant was gone.
The vandalism was more than an inconvenience for the simple reason that Parker snuck in and out of his house every night. Being as loud as a skyrocket explosion didn’t add to that vital stealth quality Parker had spent a lifetime honing. He ended the long night pushing the Mercedes the last block, up the driveway, and into the garage. Thankfully, the rain had stopped.
When he finally laid down next to his wife, it was quarter of six in the morning. He spent the next forty-five minutes taking mental inventory of his patients, what could be done for some of them, what shouldn’t be done for others. The time passed quickly, and he was actually taken by surprise when his wife’s alarm went off.
Chloe rolled over. “Hey,” she said in her sandy, morning voice, “you slept in.”
“Yeah,” Parker said. “I guess I was real tired.” His voice, or course, was always the same timber — icy smooth. Chloe never noticed his voice in the mornings.
“I’ve got to get to the hospital.” He left the bed and went straight to the bathroom. He showered shaved, got dressed, still concentrating on the work ahead of him. By the time he came down for breakfast, he had almost forgotten the strange meeting that took place earlier. But something triggered it again: his wife was pouring a cup of coffee.
“Think I can have some of that?” he asked.
Chloe looked him over. “Coffee? You want some coffee?”
“I don’t know. I’m really… I can’t wake up today.”
Chloe smiled. “Here, take mine. It’s turbo-charged.”
And in his wife’s face, Parker detected, or thought he detected, a trace of pleasure at this admission of weakness.
Parker ate breakfast, kissed Chloe good-bye, and went to the garage. He started up the Mercedes, and the noise, in all it’s decibels, started. The garage acted like an echo chamber, magnifying the sound and throwing it around. Chloe appeared in the doorway almost instantly. Parker turned off the engine and opened his door.
“What’s going on?”
Parker shrugged. “No idea. It sounds like the muffler’s shot or something.”
“It wasn’t doing that when you came home last night,” she said skeptically.
Parker shrugged. “Could you take it in this morning?”
Chloe worked half days at a public relations firm, a nickle and dime job compared to Parker’s career, but it gave her a sense of accomplishment. She worked every afternoon, leaving the mornings free to take care of the house. Car repair always fell under her jurisdiction.
“I guess so.” Chloe disappeared into the house and came back again with a set of keys. She threw them to Parker. “Take the Volvo. I’ll bring this junk heap into Arron’s today.”
Parker smiled. “Thanks, Hon.” He tossed her his keys, went to her dark blue Volvo wagon and scrunched in. For all the times he’d driven it, he had never found the knob that moves the seat back. He drove in the same position his wife, a good six inches shorter, drove in all the way to Santa Ana’s.
Parker spent the early morning hours making his rounds, carefully checking on every patient under his direct care as well as the one’s his interns were responsible for. It was ten o’clock by the time Parker made it to the doctor’s lounge for his daily can of orange juice.
In his mailbox, there was a handwritten note from Clive Trunks: What do you say I pick you up tonight and we take a trip to the Allnighter. I’m buying. I’ll come over at midnight. Regrets Only – CT.
“How about that,” Parker said, turning the note over in his hand. The Allnighters — a city teeming with them. He crumbled up the note and dropped it in the waste basket. Once upon a time, when he was a child, he had thought he was the only one…
That night, Parker waited for Clive to pick him up at the end of his block. He arrived in a midnight blue Lincoln Continental at a little after twelve, and the two headed toward Jefferson Street, one of the rougher areas by the meat warehouses and packing stations. Parker had stopped looking forward to the outing around dinner time.
“What’s it like?” Parker asked, looking out the window at the darkened side streets.
“You’ll see,” was all Clive would say.
When they finally got to the Allnighter, it just about dovetailed with Parker’s expectations – from the outside, anyway. It stood in the middle of a group of warehouses, and everything on the block lurched to the left just slightly, like old tombstones. A hazy blue neon sign hung out front, crackling and buzzing. Parker got out of the Continental, and saw the cars. They were parked all along the block: Jaguars, Corvettes, Mercedes like his, Park Avenues.
Clive caught him scanning the street. “I told you we were over-achievers,” he said. “Come on in.”
Inside, it was fairly crowded. People mingled, talked, held their drinks without even realizing it. It was, so far as Parker could tell, just like any other bar.
“A lot of these people aren’t like us,” Clive whispered. “They just heard this was a hot place during the week.” He made his way to the bar through the crowd, Parker in tow.
“What’ll it be, gentlemen?” the bartender asked.
“I don’t know,” Clive told him. “Something with a kick in it, I guess. It’s gonna be a long night for both of us. How about a two Icepicks.”
“Two Icepicks. Coming right up.” The bartender turned around to mix the drinks.
Parker edged up to Clive. “What’s an Icepick?”
“Don’t worry, it’s not too strong.”
“I didn’t ask you how strong it is, I asked you what’s in it.”
“Club soda, a splash of milk, and a key.”
Before Parker could take it any further, the bartender came back with the drinks. They were white, translucent, without any ice. They looked a little like eggnog. Each had a thin straw sticking out. Clive picked up his and stirred a bit. There was a high, jingling sound, like ice cubes being knocked together. While Parker watched, Clive slowly pulled his straw out of the drink. When the bottom end of the straw came out, a small key broke the surface. It was fastened on.
“Let’s go.” Clive slid a fifty-dollar bill on the bar and started walking toward the back.
Parker picked up his drink and it rattled quietly, too. He followed behind Clive. “Do you Allnighters wanna take over the world or something?”
“We just want to protect each other. From some very unpleasant possibilities.”
“How can you protect yourself? You said the problem is we don’t dream.”
“That is the problem. What we do here at the center is try to duplicate the dream process. See, even though we aren’t dreaming, I think we can trick the brain into the same biochemical reactions. Some of them, anyway. Like induced daydreams.”
“That’s what you spend all night doing? Role-playing dreams? It sounds like the dregs of pop psychology to me.”
“And you spend all night driving a cab. How the hell are you trying to help society?”
“Oh, come on, Clive
. How dare you say I don’t help. I’m a doctor, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yeah, you’re a doctor, during office hours. I’m trying to be one twenty-four hours a day.”
“When you’re not hanging around with some girl half your age.”
“That’s your temper talking,” Clive said evenly. “This is what you have to watch out for.”
He held his key out, and only then did Parker realize they had stopped in front of an ornate door. It matched the bar’s mahogany woodwork seamlessly.
“Let’s go in, Parker. You can judge for yourself.” Clive slid the key into the lock and turned the doorknob.
They walked into a dark chamber with another door across from them. Clive closed the first door behind them. The room reminded Parker of an airlock. The light, what little there was, came from recessed panels in the ceiling. A tall, gray plastic garbage can sat against one wall. It was half-filled with keys tied to straws.
“We put ours in there,” Clive said, dropping his key in the can. “We don’t need them any more.”
Parker pulled his out of the drink and dropped it in.
“No drinks, either.” He pointed to a shelf. There were no glasses, but Parker could see traces of milky rings where other Icepicks had been set down. They put their glasses on the shelf and went through the second door.
The inside, the heart, of the Allnighter seemed like an epic boardwalk funhouse. The walls were made of corrugated steel. Strobelights throbbed at irregular intervals in the darkness. Film shot from helicopters and speeding snowmobiles was projected against