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decent supermarkets in Mayfair or Port Richmond.
    Fortunately the Sav-N-Bag was running a special on a big plastic tub of peanut butter. Not a name brand, like Skippy or Jif or Peter Pan. Just generic peanut butter. I put it in my dirty plastic carry-basket, then added a bag of undersized apples. The tab came to nine dollars. Hell, on this budget, I was good for another month and a half.
    My grocery order safely tucked inside a planet-strangling plastic bag, I walked back up Frankford Avenue and stopped at Willie Shahid’s beer bodega on the ground floor of the apartment to buy the cheapest six-pack I could find: Golden Anniversary, for $4.99.
    Willie—not that I knew his name yet—looked at me, probably thinking, Wow, you’ve lost your girl and your taste in beer, all in one day. Welcome to Frankford.
    I ate dinner as the sun went down over the tops of the rowhomes of Frankford—four tablespoons of peanut butter, one apple and two cans of Golden Anniversary. When dinner was over, I still felt hungry. And not nearly drunk enough.
    I tried Meghan, got her voice mail. I left a message:
    “Hey, it’s me. Mickey. Or, if you prefer, Mr. Wadcheck. Look, I’m really sorry about last night, and to be perfectly honest, I’m a little confused. If you don’t totally hate my guts, please call me back, okay? Okay.”
    Okay.
    I put another one of my dad’s old albums on the turntable: Pilot’s eponymous debut LP. I’d loved the second track, “Magic,” when I was a kid, and wanted to hear it again as nature intended—with scratches and pops. The way my dad heard it.
    The wah-wah guitars made my head hurt, though. I went into the bathroom and helped myself to two Tylenols. I wanted to take it easy, after all. You know us O.D.-ing, over-the-counter-pain-reliever junkies.
     
     
    And then it happened again.
     
     
    One minute I was sitting up. The next, I was on the floor of the same strange office. There was the same brown paper taped up over the windows. Same potted fern. Same filing cabinets. Same lounge chair. Same desk. Same pudgy doctor sitting behind it.
    The office was dead silent and stifling from the dry radiator heat. I could smell the burning dust.
    What was going on? I had no idea. This all felt and looked real. This was not a daydream nor a fantasy. I was not hallucinating. Every sense I had told me the same thing: I was actually in this room.
    Looking down, I saw that the ring and pinky fingers of my left hand were still missing. There was no wound, no scars. Just smoothed-over skin where the digits should be.
    If this was a dream, then I was again in the past. I wondered what year this was, and started searching for my laptop—realizing a second later that I was being an idiot.
    Meanwhile, Dr. DeMeo spun in his creaky metal chair and flipped a switch. A typewriter hummed. He cracked his knuckles, and within a few seconds the room was full of the machine-gun clacking of the keys. When was the last time I heard that noise? High school?
    “Don’t mind me, Doc,” I said. “Just going to help myself up off the floor here.”
    Dr. DeMeo continued typing, completely oblivious to me.
    “You can’t hear a word I’m saying, can you, you fat sweaty bastard?”
    The typing stopped, but only because Dr. DeMeo had turned to look at something on his desk. Then he resumed his clack-clack-clack-clacking.
    “Hey, you’re a busy guy,” I said. “It’s okay with me.”
    I took a few steps forward and peeked over Dr. DeMeo’s shoulder. As a writer, I considered such a thing an inexcusable sin, punishable by dismemberment. But DeMeo couldn’t see me, so what did it matter?
Subject took 500 mg. fell into a restful sleep within 2 min. Subject woke approximate 90 minutes later and proceeded to describe the test room in great, yet vague detail. Pressing him on questions such as what color was the carpet? How many drinking glasses on the table? Did you notice anything of note on the walls? resulted in generalities meant