See also my LessWrong preface to this series, and past installments: (i) TAO Downtown,  (ii) LAVO, and (iii) Etiquette

"Go with me somewhere..."

One night, sometime during these weeks, I remember a dream I had. It’s either very late, or else time has been murdered entirely, and I find I’m walking up to the entrance of TAO Downtown alone. Sixteenth Street and Ninth, Google building behind me, Chelsea Market catty-corner, weird porthole facade of the building above the nightclub around the corner⏤but the streets bleed off into inky blackness beyond that perimeter. No people, nor any sign of them. No parked cars, even. People park cars, what else would?

Perhaps the absence of time entails the absence of people; we read its effects on others to triangulate its passage. Like watching wind rustle through the boughs of trees: women wrinkle, girls gray, shes shrivel, collagen corrodes, dames seek out dermatologists, and we know it’s later than it was earlier. That’s what I love about these girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age. The absence of time is also money. Money is markup, markup attracts middlemen, middlemen attract the misses, and the clubs hope you don’t do the algebra.

I know I’m here to meet R, who’s already inside, in that way you clutch tightly onto only a single, atomic fact at a time in dreams, white-knuckled, for fear of the consequences of this knowledge slipping into oblivion on your watch. For fear it’s the Lynchpin keeping this magic carpet ride you’re on from unraveling.

For fear your grace should fall! For fear tonight is all!

In no time or an eternity later I stand in front of the velvet rope at the club’s entrance. Opposite me, a white man dressed in all-blacks with an aura of efficiency. He was there my first night at TAO, manning that same post. The face of face control. I recite my reason for being, there or anywhere, with the rote exactitude of a toy whose string has been pulled:

‘I’m here with R.’

My charge released, and very proud of my brevity, I don’t pause for breath and prattle on:

‘I’m still new to the party circu-’

The bouncer cuts me off with a jolly ‘Hello!’ before I can mention the book, before I can establish a toehold of irony about my presence there. He’s warmly receptive, it’s opposite my real-life impression of him, and I find his salutations briefly jarring. He continues, I ought to be introduced to tonight’s manager, he says, ‘…Tuesday, who manages the club on Fridays, like tonight…’

I notice a small grin ripple across my face. I ask, ‘Who’s on First?’

‘Yeah,’ he says, in that sort of courteously bemused tone one reserves for marveling at stale novelties for the benefit of others, ‘…and Friday’s managing the place on Tuesday, and...’

I awoke at this, at my dream world being too rapidly peopled and calendared out to remain intact.

And tremble like a ... Flower!