The Expanded Universe
Patrick was standing in a mall he'd never been to, holding a fountain drink he hadn't bought, and the dead at the storefront glass were smashing their heads on the glass trying to get in. He knew, based on his extensive movie collection, that this was Dawn of the Dead. Not a dawn. The dawn. His sleeping brain was firm about the distinction.
The Muzak was still playing. Something with a saxophone. Nobody had turned it off. A man in a suit the color of his own name climbed onto the directory kiosk and lifted a microphone that wasn't plugged into anything.
"This is Ron Burgundy," he said, to the food court, to the dead, to whoever might be listening, "reporting live from what I can only describe as a moderate to severe workplace incident." Nobody corrected him. A woman in a torn cardigan pressed her face to the glass of the Sunglass Hut. "Sources on the ground are telling me, and I want to stress these are unconfirmed, that this may in fact be the news."
Four girls came down the dead escalator in formation, unbothered, mid-conversation.
"Okay but that one's kind of iconic," Gretchen said, nodding at the cardigan woman.
"Her jaw is GONE."
"I'm just saying. The layering."
Ron swung the dead microphone toward them like he'd found his second story of the night.
"Ladies. Can you speak to what you're seeing here?"
They walked through him. Not around. Past the Cinnabon, a man in a suit two sizes too confident had claimed the empty counter and was addressing an imaginary crowd. Patrick didn't recognize him and somehow knew him completely. Red tie, arguing with the eye. The kind of guy who'd been on television so long he'd become a rumor about himself. "Tremendous mall," the man was saying. "People are calling it the best mall. I don't own it yet, but I'll tell you, this whole situation, this thing with the—" he gestured, expansive, at the entire concept of the apocalypse, "—handled. Day one. Everybody's saying it." Nobody was saying it. One of the dead reached for the tie and got a fistful. The shot came from behind the pretzel stand, and the dead let go and dropped. The shooter didn't look up. Black shirt, white skull worn soft at the edges like he'd had it a long time. He was already moving to the next one, punishing each one like they had killed his family. "Hey," the suit said. "That was mine to handle. I had that." "Fuck off." Patrick stood in the middle of all of it and felt a thought arrive, the way the good dream- thoughts do. Somebody's going to option this. Not survive it. Option it. His brain had skipped past the apocalypse and landed in a boardroom. Four studios at a table. All of them wanting the same mall. He tried to work out the rules of it — whose dead, whose jokes, whose version of justice — and whether you could really put Ron Burgundy and a man who executed the undead by hand in the same movie without one of them filing a complaint with HR. Which was, he thought, exactly the kind of thing Gil wouldn't shut up about. Movies are changing, man. Gil said it at least once a week, usually over the second beer, usually while Patrick pretended to look at his phone. I'm telling you. I watched Terminator last month and Kyle Reese has a brother now. He never had a brother. Nobody else remembers the brother. And Patrick would say something like maybe you're the one with the brother, Gil, and Gil would get quiet in a way that wasn't quite offended, and the night would move on. In the dream it seemed less funny. In the dream it seemed like maybe Gil had a point. Everything here was bleeding into everything else. Maybe that was just how it worked now. Maybe someone had merged the files. Then somebody was pounding on the glass from outside and everyone sprung into action. She was on the far side of the entrance doors, palms flat against the glass, a smear of blood at her temple and her eyes going straight to him across forty feet of food court like she'd been looking for him specifically and had finally, exhaustingly, found him. "Hey," she mouthed. Then, when that didn't move him fast enough: "Hey. You. Yes, you. Come open the door before I have to think less of you." He crossed the food court. Behind him Ron announced that a mysterious woman had appeared at the perimeter and that he would be attempting to secure an exclusive. The girls were arguing about whether her jacket worked. The confident man declared that he'd predicted her. Frank shot something from the roof. Patrick got the door open. She was through it before it finished swinging, and up close there was something wrong with her in a way he couldn't name and didn't mind. She looked past him at the mall like she knew where the light switches were. "You're not from here," Patrick said. He didn't know why he said it. "No," she said. "But you keep leaving the door unlocked." She wiped the blood off her temple with the back of her hand and looked at it, mildly annoyed. "Clara." "Patrick." "I know," she said, and then looked away as if she regretted saying that. Around them the movie kept happening. That was the strange grace of it. The dead pressed the glass and the anchorman narrated the pressing and the girls rated it and the man in the tie took credit for the glass, for the dead, for the whole trembling architecture of the end of the world, and none of it touched the six feet of floor where Patrick and Clara were standing looking at each other. "This is a dream," she said. "You know that." "Getting there." "You're going to forget most of it." She said it plainly, "The mall. The tie guy. All of it. But I wanted—" She stopped. Started over, which he'd learn much later was a thing she only did when it mattered. "I wanted to see you before the part where I have to be a stranger again." He didn't understand it. He understood it completely. It was that kind of dream. He kissed her, or she kissed him, and the argument over who started it would run for the rest of his life. Behind them Ron Burgundy gasped and said this was developing into a human interest story and he for one was not too proud to cover it. Nobody covered it. The dead lost interest, the way the dead do. The saxophone kept going. What happened next happened the way it happens in the dreams you're a little ashamed of and a little grateful for, quick and complete and stupidly tender, on the floor of a mall at the end of the world with the pretzel salt in the air and a cardboard cutout of a superhero standing sentry. There was more feeling in it than the setting had any right to hold. He'd think about that later too. How you could build the most ridiculous room in the world and still put something real in the middle of it. Afterward she lay with her head on his chest and said, "This isn't going to be the last time I show up somewhere you don't expect." "Is that a threat?" "It's a scheduling note," she said, and he laughed, and that was the good part. That was the part the dream gave him for free before it took everything back. Regina George turned to look at them. She'd been over by the fountain the whole time, apart from the other girls, watching the water with the patience of someone who had stopped being in this movie a while ago and had wandered into a different one. When she turned, her eyes had gone the flat wet black of the truly dead, but she was smiling, which the dead never did, and her teeth were wrong. "You know what's so sad," Regina said, walking over, unhurried, gorgeous, catastrophic, "is that you actually think you're a person in this." She had Clara by the throat before Patrick got his feet under him. Bit down at the shoulder, clean and casual, the way you'd try a fry off someone else's tray. Clara didn't scream. That was the thing he couldn't shake. She just looked at Patrick, and there was blood at her mouth now instead of at her temple, and she said, "Okay. Okay. This is the part," like she'd read ahead and hadn't wanted to. There was a length of chrome railing in his hand. The dream provided it. He didn't decide to move and he moved anyway, and he did the thing you do, the thing the movie had been teaching him to do for the whole first act, and it did not feel like a movie at all. It felt like the worst thing he had ever done. Regina came apart the way the dead come apart. Clara went down slower, and he caught her, and she was already going, the light in her doing that thin dissolving thing, thinner each second, and she got one hand up to his face. "Don't write anything embarrassing," she said. Then she was gone, and it wasn't funny, and the saxophone was still playing. Ron Burgundy removed his hat. "We'll be right back," he told nobody, "after these messages." Patrick woke up. He lay in the dark of his own bedroom, in his own year, in a bed that had one person in it, and he was crying, which was humiliating, because it had been a dream about a mall. "It felt real," he said, out loud, to the ceiling. The ceiling declined to comment. He wiped his face. He got a glass of water. He stood in the kitchen at 3 a.m. and understood, in the clean and terrible way you only understand things at 3 a.m., that he was thirty-one years old and profoundly, structurally alone, and that the most connected he had felt to another human being in the last two years had been to a woman his own brain had invented and then, for reasons of narrative, killed. There was really only one healthy way to process that. He opened his laptop and posted to Craigslist. Missed Connection — you: mysterious woman at the mall (during the apocalypse) — m4w This is going to sound insane and I've made my peace with that. You were on the wrong side of the glass. I was inside, holding a beverage I did not purchase. There was an anchorman doing color commentary. There was a man in a red tie taking credit for the collapse of society. There was a heavily armed gentleman in a skull shirt doing what I can only describe as "the Lord's work, freelance." You told me to open the door before you had to think less of me. Reader, I opened the door. We connected. I'm not going to get into it. It was, and I want to be clear about the setting, the single most meaningful relationship of my adult life, and it took place on the floor of a food court while a saxophone played and a cardboard superhero stood guard over us like a chaperone who'd given up. Then you were tragically killed by a popular girl who had, without warning, become a zombie, and I had to handle it with a piece of railing, and I have not been okay since, which is a strange sentence to type about a dream I had four hours ago. If this is you: I recognize the odds. I recognize you are, at minimum, fictional. But I have never felt more understood than I did by a stranger who knew where all the light switches were. Please respond. I have follow-up questions about the scheduling note. (No, I will not be explaining the scheduling note.) He read it back. He laughed, alone, which is either the healthiest or the least healthy thing a person can do. He posted it. He went to bed. He genuinely did not expect anyone to answer. Two people answered. The first email came in a little after nine the next morning, and it was, against every reasonable expectation, perfect. Hi. So. I've read a lot of Missed Connections, mostly out of a low kind of despair, and this is the first one that made me laugh in a coffee shop like a crazy person, so, congratulations, I've been asked to leave. I have questions of my own. Chief among them: did you win the fight? Because you never say you won the fight. You say you "handled it." A man who won the fight says he won the fight. Anyway. I'm not a fictional woman who died at the mall, which I understand puts me at a disadvantage. But I do know where most of the light switches are, and I'm not a zombie as of this writing. — Sarah p.s. what beverage was it He read that one four times. It had the same thing the dream had. He couldn't have said what the thing was. He typed it was a fountain drink and I stand by it, and hit send before he could talk himself out of it. The second email came in that afternoon, and it did not go as well. I saw your post. You should not have written it. I understand why you did. But you should not have. There are people who read things like this and there are things that read things like this, and you have made yourself easier to find, and I need you to understand that "easier to find" is not a good thing to be, not for you, not yet. The woman was not fictional. You know that. That's what's bothering you. It isn't the dream. It's that you've had it before and you'll have it again and each time the reason is different and each time it's true. I'm not a threat. I'm a scheduling note. When you're ready you'll know what that means. Until then, take the post down. Clara Patrick looked at the sender for a long time. c.fontaine@ — the domain was a string of numbers, and when he clicked it his browser said the site could not be reached, had never been reached, would not be reached. He sat back. "Nope," he said, to the empty apartment. Because here was the thing. He had just met the single funniest, warmest, most alive woman on the entire internet, who had asked whether he won the fight, and then some person named Clara — the dream name, which was frankly a violation — had written him a paragraph about how he was "easy to find" from an email address that did not resolve, and told him to take down the one funny thing he'd done all year. You did not, Patrick felt, respond to that one. You blocked that one. You went and got coffee with the fountain-drink lady. He deleted Clara's email. He did not take the post down. Out of spite, mostly. He would remember all of this, years later, with the specific nausea of a man realizing which of the two women had actually been trying to help. They got married in the fall. Sarah kept the beverage line in her wedding toast. She said it was the first thing she'd ever known about him and, statistically, still one of the more reliable. People laughed. Gil cried, then claimed he hadn't, then claimed the ceremony had "definitely been in a different church last time," and Patrick told him to drink some water. It was good. It was, for a while, uncomplicated in the way he hadn't known he was allowed to have. Which is why the kitchen, three years in, caught him a little flat. Sarah was doing the dishes. She wasn't looking at him, which is how he knew it was real before she said it. "I want kids," she said. "I want to have kids with you. I've wanted to say it for a while and I keep not saying it, so. I'm saying it." Patrick set down his coffee. He loved her. He wanted to say yes. He'd wanted to say yes for a while himself, if he was honest, in the small hours when he let himself want things. But there was the other thing, the thing he'd never quite managed to explain to anybody, the thing that lived underneath and woke him up sweating maybe once a month and left him useless for a day. "Sooooo," he said. Sarah turned off the water. "I have always said I didn't want kids," Patrick said, "because — okay. Because I keep having these recurring dreams where the universe totally collapses. And it's always a different reason. Sometimes my friend Josh institutes a theocracy and kills everyone. Sometimes it's zombies. Sometimes it's Ebola. One time it was, I want to say, Thanos. Genuinely Thanos. Anyway." He picked his coffee back up. "Let's go out to dinner." Sarah looked at him for a moment, dish towel in her hands, the water still ticking in the pipes. "Get your coat," she said.