I tired of dragging my girlfriend around in search of hidden messages from extraterrestrials, which were only proving to be not-very-hidden messages from a viral marketing team bent on exploiting my cell phone ownership to send me advertisements. Despite understanding the ploy, I nevertheless enjoy a good scavenger hunt, but my enjoyment of it only lasted for so many minutes before it was conquered by my depression and sadness at once again finding little mystery in the world. We walked over the grassy hills of Governor’s Island, and we found our way to other art installations, but all the real wonder seemed one reality away–as though there was another draft of the day written on some other Earth where all these offerings were less hollow in tone.

That’s when we came to the machine. It was a twelve-foot-tall octagon, made of black metal, held together at the sides with sheets of lobstered brass. The entrance was guarded by twin brunettes wearing all black. The line was short but curious. There was a frail older woman talking to the four people waiting. She held a basket of fruit on one arm, and she was extolling the virtues of a proper diet at informing the consciousness.

Might as well take a look at this thing, I thought. My girlfriend agreed, and we joined the line. When asked if we wanted any fruit, I took a green apple, and she selected a kiwi.

“Only one person at a time may enter the machine,” the old woman told us as we accepted our fruit. “Do not eat the fruit until you are inside. Once you are inside, you may begin eating. Eat at whatever pace you like, but once you finish your fruit, please exit the machine and allow the person behind you to enter.”

I wondered if I would try to drag the time out or get it over with quickly. How was it possible to know myself so poorly?

It came down to skepticism: what was this machine? What was the point of it? The first person who came out passed the rinds of an orange to one of the brunette guards, who dropped it into a paper bag by her feet. I heard her say, “Yes, we compost them.” Then the person nodded, gave a short smile, clearly approving of this whole composting thing, and left, without giving any clue as to the nature of the experience of eating a piece of fruit inside the black, octagonal tower.

The tower that the old woman had called a machine.

After several minutes of grimly tossing my apple into the air and catching, it was my turn. The door opened, a short balding man came out and courteously dropped a mango rind into the compost bag, and the brunettes waved me into the machine. I smiled, which I think was probably a very skeptical thing to do, and I went inside, expecting absolutely nothing save the modest pleasure of eating a free piece of fruit.

When the door closed behind me, it was completely black. I could see nothing. Eyes open, eyes closed–it didn’t matter.

“Hello?” I said.

There was no response.

I considered the apple.

Well, okay, then, I thought, and I took a bite.

I’m sure whoever had constructed this thing expected sensory deprivation to make the taste of that apple even more sublime, but the apple was mealy and not very good, and it was this slight rot that was, in the end, amplified by the machine. I was in oblivion, and I was eating something that was half-rotten. Had they tricked me? Had they meant to give me a terrible piece of fruit? One could only wonder at the intent of the machine.

After a few bites, I stood in the dark with the wretched apple at my side, wondering if I could go out without having eaten all that I’d been given. I reasoned it was only bad luck, after all; no one else had seemed to have a problem finishing. I was sure it was not intentional. It was just me, picking a lousy piece of fruit.

Or maybe this was all some tricky plot to get me to imagine that the Garden of Eden was really a giant black octagonal tower, and that eating a shitty piece of fruit was the only means of escape for Eve. Now, there was a thought to blow your mind: what if Eve had meant to get the hell out of that place? But she didn”t want to go alone, either, so she had to get Adam to commit the crime, too. Eat this worthless, mealy apple and we can get out of here. We can go get back on the ferry, get back to Manhattan, and watch that show you like on HBO.

At any rate, the point of the thing was obscure, the apple was horrible, and I didn’t finish it. When I’d had enough of the game, I stepped outside, threw the apple into the composting bag, and made the same blank face that everyone else had made when facing the people still waiting in line.

When the milk started talking to him, Tim didn’t know how to respond.

“YOU SHOULDN’T EAT DAIRY! DAIRY PRODUCTS OF ANY KIND WILL KILL YOU, TIM. I AM ONLY TRYING TO HELP!”

He looked at the gallon jug of milk in his hand. He checked the expiration date: June 15, 2010. Still good. He tilted it back and forth slowly, as if it were a particularly delicate Christmas present, or maybe a bomb, and he felt something slide heavily within the milk.

With shocking force, the forms of two gnarled claws slammed against the plastic halfway down the jug. “YOU ALSO SHOULDN’T SHAKE MILK BEFORE SERVING! I AM ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU … IDIOT!”

Tim screamed and half-dropped, half-threw the jug at the counter in front of him. It was two-thirds full, and so he couldn’t see the thing inside once it retreated back into the white murk. He could only see the disturbance of the milk itself, frothy and choppy in the jug, as the creature within resettled.

“W-w-what? Is … are you … I mean, what’s … ?” Tim was at a loss. How was he supposed to interact with a milk jug that shouted at him? “Have I gone insane?” he asked quietly.

“OH, FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST!” the milk shouted. “NO, YOU HAVE NOT GONE INSANE! YOU ARE THE MOST BORINGLY SANE PERSON WHO HAS EVER LIVED! THAT IS WHY I AM HERE: BECAUSE YOU ARE A BORE! TO EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING. I AM HERE TO HELP. YOU CAN CALL ME REX.”

“Rex,” Tim said. “Okay. I’m … Tim.”

“I KNOW WHO YOU ARE! JESUS! I ALREADY SAID YOUR NAME NOT SIXTY SECONDS AGO! IDIOT! ARE YOU ALWAYS GOING TO MAKE IT THIS DIFFICULT FOR ME TO HELP YOU?”

“Well, I don’t–I mean, I’m not sure,” Tim said. “I didn’t even know I, you know, needed any help.”

“WHY WOULD I BE HERE IF YOU WEREN’T A MAN WITH PROBLEMS?” Rex said. “GET YOUR HEAD IN THE GAME, TIM! YOU NEED HELP, AND I AM HERE TO PROVIDE IT! TA-FUCKIN’-DA, THE DOCTOR IS IN, BITCH!”

Tim fidgeted. It was all so troubling. He stared at the jug, blinked, and chewed the edge of his thumbnail. “But,” he mumbled, his mouth full of dirty keratin, “what if I don’t, you know … want your help?”

The creature flung itself forward and its gray-brown, furry, cat-like face pressed against the plastic, pushing away the milk and revealing its brain-melting monstrosity.

“THEN WE ARE GOING TO HAVE PROBLEMS, TIM!” it screamed. “WE’RE GOING TO HAVE BIG, BIG PROBLEMS!”

And then Rex laughed a horrible, terrifying laugh, and it started to occur to Tim that maybe the fiendish creature wasn’t there to help him after all.

“POUR SOME HERSHEY’S IN HERE!” Rex said. “MAKE ME CHOCOLATE! THEN, AH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH, LET THE HELPING BEGIN!”

Driving back was always the worst part for George. Laura always cried, and it wore on his nerves. That day, coming back from Portland, the rain was oppressive, gray, and suffocating in the summer heat. Trapped in the car with his sobbing wife, George struggled to find NPR’s Global News report interesting.

Peter and Sarah were in the back, playing on their game systems as was the usual. Laura was staring out the window with her finger in the middle of a book she had already confessed to him made her feel stupid. By the look of things, she hadn’t made it more than twenty pages into it. Not that he wanted to read it, anyway–it looked like something she’d heard about on The Daily Show.

There was definitely something unseemly about his wife’s infatuation with Jon Stewart. Buying books she never read was bad enough, but she’d taken three separate vacations to New York just to go to his show (a show which, if he had to be honest, George found more than a little tedious).

The Global News was over, and he hadn’t retained a single thing. Marketplace came on. Why did he always have to try and listen to things he didn’t really like? After all this time, who did he think he was kidding?

“Did you put that hold on the new Dan Brown?” he asked her.

“Ugh,” she replied. “You really want to read that?”

He shrugged. “I liked Angels and Demons.”

“You have terrible taste.”

“Says the woman who never makes it more than thirty pages into anything,” he said. “Fine, though. Forget it. I’ll just buy it from the bookstore.”

She shook her head and defiantly reopened the book she’d been fingering for the whole ride. She lasted about four minutes.

She leaned her head back, closed her eyes, and sighed. “God,” she said, “do you ever wish you had a better brain?”

“All the time,” he said.

The following day, we kept the shades drawn. Dim light crept around the edge of the yellow plastic. We cowered, our nerves still raw from the terror of the previous night, until Gretchen got too hungry to stand it anymore and went to the door.

I couldn’t shake the thought of the door rattling and cracking during the worst of the night’s gusts. None of us knew just how the phantoms worked, but they were in the wind somehow–we knew that much–and if the wind hit you, you’d be convulsing and transforming into a monster within seconds.

Gretchen moved the pale blue towel we’d used to block the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door. I didn’t like seeing the daylight there; I felt so vulnerable. If I could see out, they could get in.

Same with the windows. Those thin slivers of light worried me.

Gretchen looked back at us guiltily. “We have to find something to eat. We can’t just cower in here forever.”

Penny drew closer to me and pressed her mouth against my ribs.

“Just hurry,” I said.

Gretchen put her hand firmly on the brass knob.

We waited for her to open the door and face whatever was out there.

The grass danced against the concrete side of the gas station in the bright, sharp afternoon sunlight. Merle stood beside his Mustang and smoked a Camel Wide. Frank was thinking about avoiding the bathroom entirely and shitting in the ditch beside the station.

“Come on, man, it’s just a fucking bathroom already!”

“You know how I feel about places like this! Remember Kansas? Remember that nightmare?”

“Whatever, man. We stopped because you said you had to go, so either go, or shit out here in the open. I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass which.”

Frank faced the restroom sign. The key, attached to a craggy, bent wire, which in turn was attached to a giant wooden block, labeled ‘Manly Key,’ was shaking in his hand.

Nearer the gas tanks, there were only a few eighteen-wheelers. Other motorists passed on the highway on the other side of a wide diamond of brown reeds.

Frank put the key in the door.

“Attaboy!” Merle said and pitched his cigarette to the ground. “Now make it snappy.”

Frank grabbed the handle and pulled back. He didn’t like anything about this seedy joint. He had legit concerns, he really did. Like, what was the place like when no one was in it? What kind of creepy-ass things crawled up out of the pipes when no one was looking? And hell, what of the bacteria, which loved dark and dank places? He figured that anything that was in the business of mutating would surely love to mutate away in such a place.

And people kept feeding it. Feeding it with their urine, their shit, their semen, their snot, and their blood. All of it into this rank den of germs that would then sit and stew, locked away until the next injection of disease-rich filth.

He turned on the light. There was a crowd standing in front of him in the nasty bathroom. It was all his family and friends.

“Surprise!” they all yelled, and Frank realized he’d forgotten his own birthday, yet again.

Cheered by the quality of beer at the party, Paul took a sip of a nice IPA and decided to take his chances mingling.

A pod of people had gathered around a clean-cut, Rob Lowe-looking guy, standing in front of an empty fireplace, telling a story through copious references to technology.

“I didn’t have my BlackBerry, so I had to login to my mail using my iPhone. Have you ever tried that? Not using the mail app, but actually logging into a client you haven’t actually set up? It’s so slow if you don’t have the 3G enabled! I have to upgrade this summer when they release the iPhone OS4, because it’s just hellish using my first generation iPhone these days. It’s like I’m living in the Stone Age, although I did just finally order an iPad. I can’t wait to get it. I got a Kindle for Christmas, but I never use it. Our IT girl has an iPad, and she swears by it. I really think it’s the future.”

Wow, Paul thought. They’ve replaced that guy’s brain with advertisements.

He found an attractive girl who looked about twenty-five, laughing at something an old gentleman beside her had said while the two of them perused the table of expensive snacks. There were slices of peppercorn-encrusted salami, a wheel of brie, assorted crackers, a fruit plate, and an assortment of dips. Paul thought the salami looked good and took a few slices.

“I love this stuff,” he said.

The young brunette’s eyes immediately went to his gut. “And what do you do?”

He loved getting asked that before being asked his name. It was how he knew he was in New York City. “I’m a lumberjack,” he said. “What about you?”

“I work for a hedge fund.”

“Oh,” he said, and he smiled and walked off, realizing that he was judging everyone there even more harshly than they were judging him.

He took another long pull from the IPA. It really tasted delicious on top of all that peppercorn salami.

It wasn’t so bad, being in a cage with a monkey. The monkey was curious, but as far as roommates went he was very considerate. There was very little feces-flinging, and he was as decent a listener as Meredith had found.

Outside, it was raining, and their only visitor was a lone, ugly child with blond hair and a sour face, who wore a blue raincoat and sucked a red lollipop, sucking it right at them, staring, waiting, and yet unimpressed.

Eventually, the little girl’s mother called out her name, and the girl vanished, running to join the rest of the crowd eating sausages beneath the protective shield of a nearby bridge.

“I certainly never thought this would happen,” Meredith said. The monkey was picking at his fur in the corner away from where he’d shat a moment ago. “I don’t suppose you did, either,” she said.

The monkey looked up.

“No, I thought not,” she said. “No one expects this. Not in a million years, but life is strange.”

The monkey bared his teeth at her. She took this as him trying to smile, trying to cheer her up.

“I know, but you never expect this when you’re just going along, doing what the boss tells you to do, you know? They definitely don’t prepare you for this in college.”

The money laughed.

“Right?” she said. “I mean … I thought this was going to be a good job. Now look at me: in a cage, smelling monkey shit all day.”

He turned away, and she thought perhaps she’d gone too far. She didn’t want to insult him. He really wasn’t all that bad.

So she added: “Well, I suppose it could always be worse, right? I could’ve been a corporate lawyer.”

Faht came in, and everyone was laughing.

Ok, so maybe the purple pimp hat was a bad idea, he thought. The trouble with John Faht was that not only was he intensely serious about silly things, but he had the ability to see himself behaving this way and know just how much he looked like an ass. One might wonder: If he could see all this, couldn’t he change? But no. No matter how much time went by, Faht stayed the same.

Oh, poor Faht. He was a truly miserable and lost soul.

But he walked into that conference room bravely, and took off the purple pimp hat and set it on the table with a smile for everyone who was there making fun of him. Yes, this was the life of John Faht. This was how it went, day in, day out.

Sometimes it seemed that everything was just one big Faht.

The storm came across the water, a wall of rain pushing toward shore and obscuring everything beyond it. Soon, it swept across the yard and hammered the large, glass windows.

Will took another sip of his tonic water and orange juice cocktail and welcomed the sound of the precipitation. Yesterday had been sunny, and that hadn’t seemed right. Not for a day when so much had gone wrong. This was better. At least now, the weather was matching his mood.

He sat down in his green armchair and looked at the stuff of his life: the handmade Turkish rug, the coffee table they’d made together out of an old door and a pane of glass, the series of monoliths comprising the home entertainment center, all of them quiet now, powered off.

Why wasn’t he drinking yet? He’d always imagined that if Mary died, he’d start drinking again, yet here he was, sitting alone with a non-alcoholic drink in his hand. Was it hope–some idiotic idea that she might come walking back in the door?

She’s gone, pal, he thought to himself. I don’t know what you’re waiting for.

But he’d done nothing. He’d prepared food, he’d eaten, he’d slept. But he hadn’t turned on the television, opened a book, or played any music since yesterday morning. He sat and stared. A day had passed. He continued to sit and stare, numb and frozen as the storm intensified, shaking his house, and his house withstood it,

staying right where it was.

“That wasn’t what I meant at all, John.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No, it wasn’t!”

“Well, what did you mean, then?”

“I want a program like this, but I don’t want this one, you understand?”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Don’t make me smack you.”

“But how am I supposed to do it? This is exactly what you want, by your own definition. What would be wrong with just using this one?”

“I don’t like the instructor, ok? Her e-mail grammar is atrocious.”

“Her e-mail grammar?”

“Her fucking e-mail grammar!”

John sighed. “She made a mistake. You should give her a second chance. Besides, why does a spin instructor need to be a good grammarian?”

His boss shook his head, swiveled in his chair, and stared out the window. He steepled his fingers. “I try so goddamn hard.”

“What were you e-mailing your spin instructor?”

“She asked me out.”

“Really?”

“Fine, I asked her out. That’s not against the rules, is it?”

“No, that’s fine.”

“Well, it’s not. She turned me down, and now I can’t go back there. She’s hot. Hot as hell. But I can’t go back there. Just another hot woman I’ll probably never see again.”

“You make it sound like such a tragedy.”

“It is a fucking tragedy.”

“What did she screw up?”

“What?”

“Grammatically. What did she screw up?”

“Oh. She wrote that I was a nice guy,” his boss said. “I mean, she wrote, ‘Ben, I think your a really nice guy.’ You know, with the, what do you call it?”

“Oh, the possessive instead of the contraction?”

“Exactly.”

John grimaced. “That’s awful.”

His boss shook his head. “I know, right? So bad.”