Later, I said, authoritatively as I dared.  Now, do we do what they did?

Driver called up, Just imagine you’re floating slowly down like a leaf in the breeze.

And that’s just what we did, strange as it may seem. The sensation was remarkable, and made me want to giggle, and I am not the giggling sort, let me tell you.  Purple Girl and Driver welcomed us like escapee lifers. The joy of adventure was upon us. We beat it to the car in no time, Lucy and I falling into the back seat in a heap. I won’t deny it, I was beginning to find her desirable in a sluttish kind of way that I knew I was ashamed of. Although her face was pasty and pale and made me think of a regimen of hot dinners carefully monitored and early to bed for a month, the body so blatant beneath the skimpy outfit beckoned to my own starvation diet.

Where Driver produced the champagne from I don’t know, but the pop was unmistakable, and the froth on purple girl’s dress a cause for shrieking. We sped along, drinking merrily from the bottle. For a while it looked like the lower east end, somewhere north of the old docks, and then it was some kind of old fashioned suburbs, dingy bungalows from the fifties, with scrappy yards and peeling paint, and then it was fields and trees, but still no traffic. Driver was definitely up to something, but exactly what I couldn’t tell. Kidnapping seemed a possibility. Drunken good times have never precluded crime. Perhaps I was some kind of patsy about to be put out to pasture. My ignorance addled brain bubbled over with half-baked ideas, all of them doused in tacky paranoia. Lucy was all over me, licking my neck, nibbling at me earlobes, rubbing my nipples. I could no longer tell if I was pretending to be drunk and horny, as I thought Driver wanted me to, or if I’d fallen completely for my part. I gave myself to Lucy’s advances and folded into the lust of the moment. In no time at all she had mounted my lap and was riding me with gusto, my hands gripping her ass cheeks with fierce delight. Purple girl cheered on from the front. Go for it girl! seemed to be a favourite.

It was the lustiest sex I’d had in years and my climax seemed to go on for ever, as they always do in dreams, I was later to think. Lucy nestled into my chest and moaned contentedly. I peered over her warm and soft shoulder to Purple Girl’s porn worthy performance in front. Driver groaned appropriately. I thought, Been here before that boy.

With oral gratification suitable rendered and shoved aside, Driver replenished the supply of champagne, from where I could not tell it was flourished with such a thin air flavour. We drank our merry way onward. The girls seemed to think we’d paid for more, and set about slithering over each other, with a familiarity that seemed to belie the gay abandon projected. I wondered if they’d done the same on the internet from some cloud kissing condo downtown. I’d been reading about such enterprises in the Globe just the previous week. Here in our fair god-fearing town no less.

I watched and waited. Driver grinned and helped out with the odd finger and nudge.  A predictable and no doubt personally crafted shame hovered behind my shoulders, looking for a place to land. Defiant, I refused control tower the go ahead. Later I remembered Kyra from the old neighbourhood.  She was the kind of girl who would do the stuff your other girlfriends sniffed at and I always thanked her for it and refused to join the slut gossip that swirled around her. One night, months after we’d dated and parted, she’d shown up at my bedroom window, tossed out for breaking curfew. I smuggled her in and let her sleep. She left at dawn, believing what I’d said about my mother, and gave me a scribbled note. Don’t ever let them make you ashamed, it said. She died a few months later in Brian Christie’s father’s Olds, suddenly much lamented by all. I didn’t go to the funeral; couldn’t take the bullshit. This was next morning taking notes of course; at the time I merely felt the shame and refused it.

The girls emerged from each other glistening and seeking approval. We did our best dad acts. No doubt about it, Driver was better. He suggested a nifty bed and breakfast nearby, run by friends of his.  In that classic girlish reserve that even the wild ones can switch on in a moment, the girls thought they should be getting back, but driver said they’d enjoy the change of pace and started up the car. There was a weird kind of dawn going on, one that never seemed to get any brighter, and we motored past desolate damp looking fields with scraggy trees and hedgerows. We turned up a long driveway that lead to an old farmhouse badly in need of repairs. We stumbled in, bleary and ready for bed, with driver picking up a key from a series of wallhooks and leading the way upstairs. Tiptoeing and twittering, we arrived at two bedrooms in the same hallway. Purple girl and I fell into one and I assume driver and Lucy the other. I say assume, because I never did get a chance to check. Purple girl and I, after a quick gander about a fairly average B&B bedroom, removed our sweaty things and fell asleep in each other arms in moments.

I woke up in my own bed still stinky with lust some time later, looked at the clock and then my erection, which showed no signs of flagging. I felt like a man half my age and flung myself into the shower before I got into any more trouble.

Sunday mornings are usually a kind of dead zone for me, where even staring out the window from the kitchen rocker, coffee in mit, onto a frosty back garden is a perfection of pleasure. The silent emptiness seems to be just what I need. And with no wife to waltz through whining, I was all set up. Hell, there was even coffee cream in the fridge. When the phone rang I had no idea it would be Eric. Breakfast conferences were not his style. He said he just knew I’d been up to no good last night and wanted to hear all the details. I laughed and told him his timing was immaculate.

An hour later I hung up, with promises to take notes right away, and to keep him abreast of any interesting developments. I did what I was told and spent the next hour scribbling. The initial ghetto vibe had been the giveaway according to Eric. The lower astral was often like that he’d read: a trashbucket of junkies, sex, drugs and gambling. Dead people that just don’t know any better. Don’t know they’re dead and even if they did, wouldn’t care. It’s the next hit or the next fuck that counts there, a kind of eternally present quaffing of burning desires. You mean hell, don’t you? I was in hell. One of them, Eric said, he’d heard there were several, maybe dozens. There was this website I should see. 

Well, there always is these days, isn’t there? No hang up or perversion too weird for a website. The ultimate democratization of dingbattiness was my take on it all. Dogs peeing on dead babies? Just give me a minute, sir. Eric said no, this was serious. A website devoted to astral plane research. Sure there were people crying over their missing kittens, but mostly it was intelligent and instructive. I said I’d check it out.

After some scandal scribbling I started to work up a sweat. That dream sex was still pretty fresh in my mind. A long walk would cool me off, or so I thought. The neighbourhood:  Sunday morning quiet;  I glided about gratified at the lack of gardeners and car washers. Most would have been happy with a nod or an hello but the two or three I’d helped with a bit of friendly trade tips might’ve beached me with a friendly sos, the kind of call I can rarely resist when off-duty and decidedly human, and just the kind of leisurely slouch where I’d be tempted to rattle off the seamy details of my secret life for a smile and a folksy laugh.

I walked past the residential home, and stopped to gaze at its beautifully landscaped grounds. None of the sad looking inmates seemed to be about and I was glad to avoid, for once, the inevitable shouldering of their gloomy fates. This time I’d be guilty about something other than my particular brand of bourgeois respectability. Well, at least it was a slight shift of focus. My dream life faded into the autumn glow gardens of my neighbours.

Heels suitably cooled, I collapsed into a corner and completed the notes Eric had demanded. He was sure it would all turn out to be important. One day, I’d added sardonically. Or should that be somewhat sardonically? Then I noticed the message light on the phone. It had to be Gerry: the blink had her brash signature all over it.