We pulled up to the Target. Zebo was driving; she was a bit tired and out of sorts and kept apologizing for her erroneous turns through the parking lot, although I had no preference for our path and no where in particular to be.

�I think it�s closed,� she said.

It certainly looked closed, but the frequency at which I patronize the Target was such that I knew precisely what time it closed and we were well in advance of the deadline. We cautiously approached the door and it slid open to admit us. The inside of the Target was dark. The cavernous warehouse was open from end to end, filled with soft grey mist and rows upon rows of empty grey pews. A low candle was lit here or there, and any altar that the pews faced was blurred from detection by mist. Handfuls of dark grey outlines mingled here or there along the aisles. We exchanged a glance and left the building. While it still said, �Target� on the sign, there was a small post that we hadn�t previously noticed which read, �NYU Church�.

�I�m amazed they were able to switch it over so quickly from being a Target,� I said, avoiding the point.

�A lot of people must come here.� she said diplomatically.

The following day I returned, I�m not sure why� perhaps I wanted to confirm to myself that the church was as mysterious as it had seemed, that it was still as strange by daylight. But inside the building the lights were brightly lit, and Target shoppers milled in and out pushing bright red baskets and buying $5.00 DVDs. Before I could be astonished, I ran into my old friend Darren outside the door. He was looking for some place to set up a sandwich board advertizing a dance class that his church put on. He was a Quaker, I remembered, but besides non-violence I wasn�t quite sure what being a Quaker entailed.

�Darren!� I enthused, �So good to see you again!�

We chatted briefly about the dance class and his church and then I explained to him my strange experience of the night before and wondered aloud if they simply changed the Target back to a Target during the daylight hours, and how much work that must take to move everything in and out.

A strange, ominous look came over his face, and he took my arm as we walked into the store.

�What you saw last night wasn�t your imagination,� he said. �The interior of this Target isn�t really here.� He lowered his voice. �The store is actually an illusion.�

I was about to protest, but suddenly the back of the store looked a little darker than it had before. The lights seemed to flicker� was it my imagination or did the whole store seem to flicker in and out of darkness, in and out of mist? Partly because I wanted to be closer to him, but mostly out of fear, I looped my arm the rest of the way through his. We walked back until we reached a hallway full of messy offices�I hadn�t remember these being here the many times I�d come to Target before.

Darren led me to one of them and sat me down in an office chair.

�You see, your soul is like a pure and flawless liquid,� he began. �When you do evil things, when you lose yourself in petty and earthly things� you begin to fill up your soul with other liquids.�

I tried to imagine my soul as a liquid. I imagined it being completely transparent, in the shape of a raindrop falling through a sky with white clouds, bending their shapes as the light passed through it. I added a photoshop lense glare to accentuate its purity. Then I imagined the soul being filled with something else� perhaps orange Gatorade? Would the two liquids mix, making a watered down soul? Would the soul then taste like new Snapple Mineral Water�that is, like regular Snapple only after all the ice cubes have melted? Or would the two liquids be immiscible, like a black-and-tan, and the soul would slowly drain while the orange Gatorade would swell until it filled the whole raindrop?

The next day I brought Zebo back with me� I think she also needed a bit of follow-up after our strange experience in the mist. Darren was explaining that there was much more to the world than our five senses could detect, and through this organization he had been exposed to many of them. Getting involved in the organization, he said, had changed his life forever.

We were sitting in the office again, familiar in its clutter. An old rainbow computer screensaver chased itself around an idle screen. I was drinking a glass of milk, but Darren had a glass of a strange class of tangerine-colored pills that seems to be melting as if it were the 8th time your dog had spit them out instead of swallowing them. �Why are you drinking that?� I asked, �What could be better than drinking this delicious milk?� Zebo clapped her hands together. �You should try some of Darren�s drink!� she said, sounding a bit crazy in her enthusiasm. I took the glass and shook it to make the melting pills come far enough down the side to reach them with my tongue. Almost immediately the feeling of tangerine took a hold of my being. My mind filled with tangerine, tangerine exploded in front of my eyes, it was such a delightful tasty flavor that I could think of nothing else. My body left the ground and began to weave through the air like a long ribbon in a soft wind.

�They�ve asked me if I would join the choir,� Zebo said nervously, �what do you think?� I didn�t think anything, I was the flavor of tangerine. It occurred to me faintly that she was half Jewish, and therefore she might be hesitant to join something billed as a �church�, though it was clearly much more than simply that. It occurred to me that no one had been talking to Zebo except for us. �I�ve always been musical,� she said, perhaps to herself, �but I�ve never been much of a singer.� She played the violin, everyone knew that. I would have thought she was a bit mad, with her worried talking to herself, except for she did that most of the time anyway, and I was a ribbon of tangerine: unfit and unwilling to stand as a judge of someone else�s sanity.

I saw Darren out of the corner of my eye. A dark and troubled look had spread across his brow. His gaze passed right through us, but I did not want to see what he saw beyond. If not for my tasty tangerine thoughts, I would have been frightened.

That's a pretty crazy dream! I've had crazy dreams, but that's a really organized crazy dream.
» jinyu on 2008-06-25 05:49:24

That is really really creepy.... :S
» randomjunk on 2008-06-25 07:35:19

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