Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce

his palm flat between her shoulder blades, her skin warm through the T-shirt. He shakes her gently and feels her body tense.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” she asks.
    â€œWhere were you?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWere you with him?”
    â€œYou’ve got to be kidding. Go back to sleep.”
    â€œIf you ever stopped dreaming about him, for whatever reason, would you be upset?”
    She rolls over to face him. Her loose state championship volleyball T-shirt twists tight under her stomach.
    â€œI’m beginning to regret I ever told you about Alan.”
    And why did she? Guilt, he assumes, or as a provocation. A part of Walker fears this is her way of pushing him away. She turns back over to sleep. Walker climbs out of bed and goes downstairs. He digs some D batteries out of a cluttered drawer and plops down on the sofa with the tape deck. The old batteries are corroded, crusty and white. He inserts the new ones, rewinds the tape to the beginning, and presses Record.
    â€œYou are . . . very sleepy.”
    He presses Stop, Rewind, and then Record again, his lips within kissing distance of the microphone. “You will not dream about Alan Gass. You will not dream about Alan Gass. Alan Gass does not exist. Alan Gass is not a man. Alan Gass is not made of daisies. He is made of nothing.”
    He rewinds the tape and presses Record again. A new and less sinister idea: he could make a tape for himself.
    â€œYou
will
dream about Alan Gass. You will tell him to stay away. You will dream about Alan Gass. You will dream about Alan Gass.”
    He presses Stop. This is going to take too long. He needs to think out a strategy. Is there a button that makes the recording loop?
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Claire is at the top of the stairs.
    â€œNothing,” he says, and goes to the hall closet. He shoves thetape deck up on the high shelf and joins her in bed. That night he doesn’t dream about Alan. His dreams are uninteresting and unhelpful, a slurry mess of anxieties and fears from his waking life. He is lost and swimming in a giant ocean with small gray waves. In the distance metal transformer towers jut up into the sky crackling with electricity, and far away a boat crests each wave, a boat that he cannot reach no matter how much he swims.
    In the morning he wakes up to steam slipping under the bathroom door in misty curling puffs. He can hear Claire humming in the shower. In her dreams she is able to visit an alternative universe. It’s hard not to feel a little jealous.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Everywhere he goes he sees a Lexus. Lexi. They are a species, classifiable but indistinct. He sees one in the fire lane in front of the liquor store, then another in the parking lot at the gym. The cars are empty. He feels ridiculous each time he glares into a car. The tinted windows reflect only his own face, grim and warped.
    Before Claire, he once dragged a date to a five-year high school reunion and made the mistake of telling her that he’d slept with one of the girls in the room. The date wouldn’t let it go. She had to know which girl. She wanted him to point her out. She said she wouldn’t be comfortable until she knew. But why? Walker asked her. “So I can avoid her,” the date said. “Or maybe introduce myself. I don’t know. Something.” At the time, Walker found it amusing. God, he even made her guess the girl.
    He makes a full tape of his Alan Gass mantras and tells Claire it’s music for the play. When he wakes up, his ears are hot and sweaty from the foam headphones and, even more frustratingly,he remembers almost nothing of where he’s been for the last seven hours, an amnesiac tourist whose film rolls have come back from the lab damaged and half developed—ocean waves, broken escalators, his mother’s scowling face, a pack of vicious blue-eyed dogs. It’s all meaningless