Sometimes I fall asleep to the sound of ominous spheres rolling down the hallway outside my door. Sometimes I awake to the sound of spherical doom opening and closing doors in the hallway outside. Sometimes I sit and listen to the soft babbling of my empty room as it smears interrupted silence on the surface of my gloom.

But more often than not I pinch the skin between my thumb and index finger until the pain pushes me into blackness for I do not want to hear anything but my dry skin cracking. That is what brings me those dreams of hiding in an industrial park.

Never mind that. My dreams are not important. No one’s dreams are important. All dreams are bastard offspring of babbling brains. They try to escape to the dusty corners of the ceiling where cobwebs catch them, ingest them, and wrap them in plastic to sell in five-and-dime shops where frugal housewives buy them for their children so the little pests won’t cry.

It was a Friday afternoon when Casey asked me if I wanted to drive up to his college with him. “It’ll be fun,” he said. “We’ll just stay in the library and read.”

“Why do you need me for that?” I asked.

“I like company when I read,” he said. “Besides, we won’t have a lot of distractions there and I know you wanted to finish up your little project.”

“Okay.”

And so I drove up to the college with him. As soon as we approached the campus I knew I had made a mistake. It had been years since I had stepped foot anywhere near that place and I now remembered why that was so. The college seemed to suck all the psychic fluid from me until there was nothing left but a crude construction of bones topped with a sentient prune inside a pale cranium.

“Something wrong?” Casey asked. “You look like shit.”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just........... ” I said but I never finished the sentence. Instead, I

opened the door to the library and started up the flight of stairs that would bring me to the third floor.

“Why do you want to go to the third floor?” Casey asked.

“I don’t know. Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

We found a table in the corner and sat down. I set my bag down on a chair and went off looking for a book. Casey had already picked one up on the way. It was a seemingly random choice but knowing Casey, it might have been planned weeks in advance. I don’t remember the exact title but I recall it was something about antler jelly.

I left him at the table and walked to the far corner of the room. The books there were dusty and looked untouched. It was as if college students didn’t read anymore. I almost expected the books to be mere props. I ran my fingers along the spines, pushing them inward to feel the weight of them, just to make sure they were real.

After a few minutes of perusing I found a book that interested me.

I sat down on the floor and started to read. Sitting next to Casey wasn’t something I had really wanted to do. He moved his lips while he read. He also had mild body odor like cheese. Besides, my little project required unconventional reading environments and the library floor seemed to fit that description.

What was my project?

By now I cannot even remember.

Casey touched me on the shoulder. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m reading,” I said. A sound on the other side of the shelf made us both turn our heads. It was the sound of a heavy sphere rolling through sludge. Then: doors opening

and closing followed by wordy dreams being sucked through brown cotton until they scrap the dull paint on my walls and form bulbous pyramids of black glue.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I’m going to check this book out.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“They’re closing the library at the end of the semester and they want all the books in. You can only read them in here or...................................................... ”

“Or what?” I asked.

“Or you can steal them.”

“I have no problem with that.”

Casey nodded. “Didn’t think you would.”

We walked quickly down the aisle, turned right, and went down the stairs. Dizziness set in. I saw a janitor mopping a floor. A librarian was leading some young freshman up the stairs. A dog barked in the distance.

I ducked into a corner and opened the back of the book where they keep the security sensor. After a minute of impromptu surgery with my ballpoint pen, the sensor was out and I was free to adopt the book as my own.

Once we got outside I noticed how cold it had become. Normally I don’t notice things like the weather but this time the temperature slapped me in the face. Casey grabbed my arm and led me to the next building. “In here,” he said.

“Why?”

“I gotta show you something.”

I stood in front of the door to the new building and looked at my reflection in the glass doors. The library was no longer behind me. It was an industrial park filled with 18- wheelers hauling merchandise, pallets of plastic-wrapped boxes, and stocky, sweaty workers operating worn-out forklifts.

Casey opened the door for me and I walked inside.

In front of me was a vending machine offering candy bars and potato chips. I dug in my pocket because I usually kept a little bit of change on me. This time, however, I was broke. “Got some quarters?” I asked Casey.

“Nope.”

“Dollar bills?”

“Nope.”

“Well then....” I said, disappointed but understanding. Casey was usually broke. I don’t even know why I had expected him to have any money.

We walked down a hallway that was lined with brick walls and trophy cases. Occasionally there was a framed picture of some obscure aspect of biology or architecture.

“What building are we in?” I asked.

“Building Three.”

“No, I meant, like........... ” I started but stopped when we approached an elevator.

The doors opened revealing an extremely large but empty elevator. There was a sound like someone punching a bag of rice. I used to eat a lot of rice when I was in college. White rice with processed American cheese melted on top. I had probably eaten that for five out of seven dinners each week. The other times I ate a few bowls of some generic cereal. It was never extravagant but it’s all I was able to afford and to be honest, it’s all I really wanted to eat.

We stepped into the elevator and Casey pressed the button for the third floor.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I have to drop something off.”

“Where?”

“Third floor.”

“No, I meant, like........... ” The elevator started and then stopped quickly. I almost fell

over. It was then I noticed my bladder was full.

“There a bathroom on the third floor?”

“Probably,” Casey said. “Yes, I’m pretty sure there definitely is.”

The doors opened and we stepped out into a bright hallway that did not look like a college. If I had known better I would have said it belonged in some sort of office building in an industrial park.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Down here,” Casey said, leading me down the hallway and then down another corridor to the right. This hallway was darker than the first and smelt like cheese being cooked in a microwave.

“What’s that sound?” I said. It was like a tin sphere being attacked with spoons. “Dunno,” Casey said. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Where? The third floor?”

“No.”

“This building?”

“No, this college.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve never been here before.”

We reached the end of the hall. The burning cheese smell was stronger and so was the sound of sphere versus spoons.

The door was barely visible on the brick wall as if drawn in chalk. But indeed it was a real door because Casey opened it with a slight push to the center.

“Thanks for coming with me,” Casey said.

“No problem,” I said.

We walked into my bedroom and I had a seat in front of my bookshelf. I randomly grabbed a book and set it down in front of me. Casey also grabbed a book but threw his on my bed.

“Your books smell old,” he said.

“That’s a weird thing to say.”

“But it’s true.”

I nodded, opened my book, and started reading something about licorice and conspiracies. Some man named Smith had come up with some crazy ideas about hooded men in helicopters.

Casey sat on the edge of my bed. “You tired?”

“Not yet.”

“I’m going to use the bathroom,” Casey said, getting up from the bed. He walked out the door and slammed it shut.

My eyes blinked through the book on my lap. Then the sounds came.

The toilet flushed and spheres spiraled down the staircase and onto the wood floors. I heard them roll into the furniture, into the walls, into the silence like manic round vacuums.

Casey slammed the bathroom door, opened it, and slammed it harder. It opened once again. His footsteps echoed in my bathtub. The faucet turned on. Water splashed on his shoes. I heard his shoelaces become limp with moisture.

“What are you doing in there?” I shouted. No answer. “Don’t make a mess!”

The bathroom door slammed shut. The sound of it combined with the clunking of the spheres as they made their way back up the stairs.

There was a time when the stairs were covered in toys so much my father tripped and broke his neck. He died instantly. But now the spheres are the only toys haunting the steps.

A scream broke through my bedroom door. It took me longer to get up off the floor than I would have expected. I felt old and rusted out like an unused bicycle. I threw open the door and looked into the hallway. At the bottom of the steps Casey was sprawled out like an octopus.

He had fallen down the stairs.

I knew at that moment my gloom would become legendary.

All around me the wallpaper fell down in strips: tongues with stale glue and unwanted paint calling me into the bathroom where I’d find the black sun deep within the drain.

I turned the water on to flush it out while behind me the spheres shuffled into an obscure formation I’d never seen before.

The water refused to go down the drain and stayed on the outskirts of the sink, refusing to be burned beneath my sink. The water’s flesh crawled around the faucet and onto my hand.

I spat fire, burning my fingers into loops. They fell down the drain, unwilling to bow to the sun in fear.

Then I thought of Casey.

My gloom turned to soft babbling hope.

I ran out of the bathroom and down the stairs, dodging imaginary toys and hysterical strips of fatherly wallpaper. Casey’s body had turned more grotesque. It resembled chewing gum stretched over a bundle of broken sticks.

“Get up,” I said. “Get up.”

He twitched but did not get up.

I walked back upstairs and into my room. I took the elevator back to the first floor and walked outside back to the library. The stairs to the third floor were covered in hollow trinkets that tripped me up at every opportunity. I made it to the top, though.

It took me only a minute to find the book: A Brief History of Industrial Parks by Julie Antler.

I sat down on the floor between the stacks of books, adjusting my pants so I’d be most comfortable. The florescent lights above me flickered and buzzed in code.

I started to read. The pages smelled like old age and doom. Words upon words slipped through the haze of my most recent memories. Antler briefly explained the history of the pallet.

Paper cuts spread across my hands like rivers on maps. My knuckles broken apart like five-and-dime toys. I pinched the skin between my thumb and index finger.

It didn’t take me long to fall asleep to the sound of gloomy spheres and soft babbling of unread books.