The entire apartment smelled like a stale cigarette. Somehow, this surprised Brad. Liz, for her faults, had seemed clean to the point of prissy. Ashtrays were everywhere – most of them emptied, but none of them clean. They all had that dusty pall of ash a well-used glass ashtray quickly picks up, and Brad now gathered that throwing them under the faucet for a quick wipe-down wasn’t Liz’s style.

Liz and he stood, staring at one another, in her living room. A ratty orange-with-minor-other-colored-threads couch was flush with one wall. A halogen torchiere was nestled in the corner. For a desk, she had a wooden cable spool lying on its side. The top appeared shiny and glossy, but somewhat lumpy, as if someone had lacquered it but done a piss-poor, amateur job. Underneath the lacquer surface appeared to be a few pictures and other scrapbook-ish mementos, permanently entombed in the industrial grasp of whatever long-chain hydrocarbon had been poured onto the surface.

Against the other wall, a 25-inch TV sat on some cinderblocks. Against the side wall was a cheap-looking table with a computer and CRT monitor piled upon it. Brad counted three ashtrays in, on, or around the computer itself. An inkjet printer tilted precariously off to the side. Printed-out sheets were piled everywhere; a few even had burn marks from when they’d ventured too near an active ashtray.

There was no sign of pets. This also surprised Brad. He’d taken Liz for a cat person.

The room itself was yellow. The walls appeared to have once been white, but nicotine had stained them, and the incandescent bulbs that provided the bulk of the illumination (the torchiere was switched off, and all the windows were covered by heavy, homemade curtains) only added to the jaundiced appearance of reality here in Liz’s little slice of heaven.

“It’s, like, nice,” Brad said, attempting to look solemn. He wasn’t sure why: solemn just seemed the best bet. Respectful.

A brief shudder tried to grab him, and he mentally choked it down. Some perverse, evil part of his brain was trying to trick him into delving deep, into living through yet another one of those ten-second moments of déjà vu: to sense that this was all just a repeat performance, and he’d passed initial judgment on Liz’s apartment a thousand times in a thousand duplicate lives. His teeth ground against one another. Sweat broke out.

He sat on Liz’s couch, attempting to appear nonchalant as he did so. The surface of the couch was slightly scratchy, like sitting on a woolen sweater. Brad didn’t look forward to sleeping on it.

Had the déjà vu fully grasped him, it would’ve been number ten or eleven for the day. Thankfully, after the one that made him flop onto the floor like a prize sturgeon, the others had been microbursts of psychic torment, a few seconds long, tops. Still, with each new instance, he felt like his brain melted just a wee bit further. It almost made him want to check his shoulders to see if he had congealed grey matter there amongst the ever-present drifts of dandruff.

Another helpful sprite spoke up in his mind. Maybe he didn’t have to sleep on the couch. He could always try seduction, right?

Fear and shame had a brief catfight. Depression won.

“I, uh, really appreciate this, Liz. It feels a lot better here. Safer.” This was a bald-faced lie. Brad’s stomach was knotted up in fear, and he was having a very, very hard time convincing himself that it made any difference where he went or what he did.

He was in a rubber dinghy, and it was rapidly approaching the falls. Paddling furiously just made him look stupid to the tourists with the binoculars, over on the shore. Brad flipped them the bird, in spite of their nonexistence. Like most self-indulgence, it felt great. When you’ve been doused in gasoline and set on fire, the guy with the spritzer bottle is a welcome relief, even if he doesn’t truly make a damned bit of difference.

Brad swallowed and tried to look relaxed there on the couch. As human lard, relaxation mostly just meant that what little muscle definition he possessed vanished. He took on the shape and texture of a fine-grained beanbag. Brad was totally oblivious to this fact. Liz, strangely, didn’t seem to notice or care. There was an elephant in the room, both figurative and literal, yet neither the elephant nor his keeper seemed aware of his elephantine presence.

“I don’t like to eat dinner until later,” Liz said. “Do you want to watch TV?”

Brad found this a lovely suggestion. It was the verbal equivalent of being handed a hot bowl of fresh mac and cheese: mental comfort food. TV was your friend. It never made you think too deeply, too long, or about things that took you to dark places.

“Yeah, man, that’d be great,” Brad said. “I, uhm, I’m not in your spot or anything?” Having little experience as a houseguest, even as a child, Brad tried too hard.

Liz didn’t seem to care. She sat next to him and switched on the set. The game show network came on, featuring a rerun of old-school Family Feud. Brad quickly began trying to guess what would be the most popular color of car back in 1978. In this, he and Liz seemed evenly matched. They both shouted out guesses, managing to come up with answers that landed on the survey about half the time.

It was the most fun Brad had experienced sober in quite some time. Nor was there even the hint of déjà vu for the entire episode. It was almost like God had granted him some kind of last-minute reprieve. He began to wonder who, precisely, placed the eleventh-hour phone call on his behalf. Not being the praying sort, he was pretty sure it wasn’t him.

Intellectually, he tried to talk himself into believing that the relief was simply a matter of the misfiring neurons settling down, the chemical balance having somehow managed to right itself. But on that more essential, gut-check level, this all seemed more like divine providence. Brad even stretched an arm out behind Liz without thinking about it, simply as a function of feeling at home. Stranger still, she didn’t react.

All of this became apparent to him as the show wound down and another episode began. It was at this point he realized his arm was dangerously close to being (in a technical sense) around her shoulders – a fact that clearly couldn’t have escaped her attention, yet she wasn’t behaving in a typical Liz manner. She hadn’t, as an example, begun to scream “Rape!” This was puzzling.

If anything, she almost seemed to be leaning slightly against him. Brad’s mind began to race, stripping gears that hadn’t been meshed in this manner for years. Just what the hell was going on here? Was she still stuck under the influence of some odd form of nurturing instinct? Did Richard Dawson have some mystical power over women, even on a 30-year tape delay? Was she just lost in the moment? Or was she, in some vague way, exhibiting some mild semblance of a pseudo-romantic interest in him?

Brad’s last sexual experience (with another person) had been alcohol-fueled, highly awkward, embarrassingly brief, and regretted afterwards by both parties. In fact, that had been the last time he’d stepped foot into North Hall on campus, spending the rest of his days at Antioch skulking in the more familiar territory of Willet, watching all his friends (and everyone else) getting laid left and right.

It hadn’t taken much for him to jump the proverbial Antiochian ship. Wasn’t the whole point of college to get laid and get high? He’d done plenty of the latter, nearly none of the former.

And now, here was Liz. Very close to his personal space. Bony, and with a shiny, heavily made-up face that reminded him somehow of a beauty school practice dummy. Tiny protruding breasts, barely marking their territory against her blouse. Curly dirty-blonde hair that looked both store-bleached and slightly congealed: not like it was dirty; more the way hair got when you washed it with way too much shampoo and didn’t manage to rinse it all out.

He didn’t even know much about her history. He knew she’d arrived at the office as an intern, just like he had, but she’d come from much closer: LSU. Still, he was fairly certain by her flat accent that she wasn’t a native Louisianan. Which meant she could be from nearly anywhere. Midwest. Northwest. Much of the East Coast. Odd, with as much time as he spent with Liz and Ethan, the subject of her hometown had never come up.

If he had to guess, he’d guess Florida. She was, after all, just a wee bit tawdry. And for better or worse, when he thought tawdry, he thought Florida.

Richard Dawson did his thing. Brad began the ponderous effort of gradually shifting his mass a bit closer to Liz. This required a great degree of concentration. Done too quickly, and he could smother her, like a bull walrus squashing a cute little baby seal.

Brad frowned at this image, fairly certain that the walrus and the seal didn’t often share beaches, except perhaps at water parks. Still, if a bull walrus were to crush something, it seemed somehow appropriate that it would be a baby seal. Brad wasn’t sure why. He just went with it. And his baby seal was a particularly bony and skittish variety.

His gelatinous movements had no negative effect. She didn’t scream, or jump up, or turn slightly greenish and away. If anything, her cheeks seemed the slightest bit red, although it was difficult to tell through all the makeup. He could be mistaken – badly mistaken – but it almost seemed like she was giving him positive cues.

The transformation of prudish Liz to cuddly Liz deserved long, deep thoughts, just not at the moment. For now, there were the further elephantine attempts at snuggling closer, not to mention the highly erotic sensation of feeling another torso pressed up against his. Who knew protruding ribs could be such a turn-on when they nestled in your rolls of fat?

“Potato!” Liz yelled, responding to the current survey question: “What is your favorite side dish?”