The Number Dream

By Scott Milder

Twenty-three years old, on the twenty-third of October, in a

downtown club in San Francisco.
It all happened in less than three minutes.

The face that hit the newspapers the morning after was grainy
and five years old. It was a publicity shot from the actor’s last
hit movie, just before the decline. There was a half-smirk above
an open-throated white shirt, a tiny gold cross framed by a
beautiful jaw line and chin and two tanned collarbones. The hair
fell in a self-conscious wave, bleached with just a little bit of
the original dirty blond at the roots. The eyes were wide, and
they appeared kind, but they were also somewhat empty.
It was just a newspaper photo, after-all. And a bad one, at
that.

It started with marijuana in the limo on the way to the club,

then went to three shots of tequila, with salt off the chest of
some laughing, pasty-skinned model. Three lines of cocaine before
the doors opened. Not great stuff, but good enough. The actor’s
eyes were bloodshot, but anyone standing close enough to notice
wouldn’t have thought much of it, because his smile hid
everything. As it was, the person who always stood closest to him
was his younger brother, another actor who had yet to hit it big
but who would win an Oscar six years into the future. The brother
was handsome in a more rugged way, shorter with darker hair and
the skin of their Sicilian father. But tonight he wasn’t the
actor. Just the brother.

1
 He knew there was something wrong; something about the actor’s
demeanor that night put him on edge, but he didn’t say anything
until much, much later. By then there was no one around to hear
it.

The window down, the breeze chilled like champagne.

“I had that dream last night,” The actor said. The model was in
his lap.
“What dream?” Said his brother. “The number dream?”
“Yeah.”

The club was owned by a friend of the actor. The owner was about
six years older; he had been an actor, too, and was still
remembered. He had a TV show in the late 1980s that was a hit, and
then he did a string of movies, and only three of them were flops,
and even the flops reviewed well. He never won an Oscar but he was
nominated once and he had both an Emmy and a Golden Globe to his
credit. He retired from show business awhile ago, and with his
money he opened a nightclub in Los Angeles, and then this one in
San Francisco. He didn’t act anymore, but he catered to all his
old friends and was known as the greatest thrower of parties that
had lived. And he got laid a lot.

“Just 23. Like a neon sign. Over and over and over again.”
“You’re fucking weird, brother.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t think it means anything. I think it means you’re
fucking weird.”
“I think it means something.”
A papery sound like a locust’s wings. A roll of the eyes.

2
 “You need to stop it with the psychics and shit, brother. It’s
messing with your head. A dream is just a dream.”
“Fuck you. It means something.”

It all went down in the bathroom. At any time there could be as

many as ten or twelve people in there: crammed into the smelly,
chromed stalls; smoking or washing their faces at the sinks;
sometimes staring into the mirror and examining the unique
positioning of their eyes. All familiar faces to those of us not
in the club, washed and purified by a thousand bright lights and
movie cameras, now haggard and drawn but still glamorous in their
way. A mop of curly black hair here, two stone-chiselled eyes over
there. Ten or twelve glowing smiles. No rotted teeth. They may
have all been junkies, but they made it work for them.
An undulating shroud of whispers cloaked the bathroom, pierced
by the occasional wavering laugh. It used to be that the stalls in
here were mostly for sex, but that was before the druggies took
over. Now the sex was generally upstairs in the balcony.
Occasionally someone still got adventurous in the stalls, though,
but not often.
The actor stood crammed in a stall with another man. This man
was famous only to the famous. Bald, fat, and pink, lips like
liver, eyes like two scratched emeralds, wide nose a mess of burst
capillaries. He wore a suit always on the verge of getting
wrinkled.
This man was famous to the famous because of what he always
brought with him, and that was why he was welcome in this
bathroom.
Tonight he had a syringe, and with green eyes glinting he handed
it over to the actor, who perched on the cracked seat with his

3
right shoe and sock off. The cocaine roared strong in him and he
felt the hammer thump of his heart against his ribs, but he wasn’t
worried. Even though it hurt, he wasn’t worried. He wasn’t
thinking of the number dream right now.
The actor’s brother stood out by the sink, chatting with another
man and smoking a cigarette, never quite looking away from the
stall. He was protective of his brother, but since he was the
younger and less famous of the two he mostly kept his mouth shut.
He himself wasn’t much interested in drugs. He would live a long
time and make a career playing heavies and gangsters before
hitting his own sharp decline in his mid-forties, but by then he
would be far too rich to care.

“Well I don’t know how you can call it a nightmare.”

“It’s not, really. It’s just not very pleasant. I don’t know
what it means.”
A laugh. “Jesus Christ, it doesn’t mean anything! It’s just a
goddamn dream.”
The actor shrugged. “What is today? The 23rd?” The model
squirmed, clearly bored with this conversation, but the actor
wasn’t done yet. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the flashing
sign: “23 ... 23....”
“It just makes me feel kind of sick,” he said quietly. “Whenever
I wake up I want to puke.”
“You’re just fucking weird,” said his brother. “It doesn’t mean
anything.”

When the actor went into the bathroom he encountered a lot of

back slapping and hand shaking. Some of the people he knew, most
he didn’t. They all congratulated him on his last picture, which

4
they called brilliant and wow and totally underrated. All lies.
Everyone knew the actor’s last movie was shit. His last three
movies were shit. The last thing he had ever done that was of any
substance was an HBO movie three years back where he played a gay
prostitute with AIDS. He even did a little firsthand research in
this very bathroom. He convinced one of the waiters -- a handsome
young guy who told the actor he was from Indiana and had written a
screenplay he’d love for the actor to read -- to go into the
bathroom with him and suck him off in one of the stalls. The whole
episode took about ten minutes, and the actor didn’t get much out
of it, research wise. He later found out that this kid from
Indiana was HIV-positive, but he wasn’t worried because all the
kid did was give him a sloppy, overeager blow job and worm one
hard-knuckled finger into the actor’s asshole, and the actor
didn’t think you could get AIDS from that.
That was three years ago, and that kid was long gone -- back to
Indiana, into a hospital, into a grave maybe, the actor didn’t
know -- and all the back slapping and hand shaking and bullshit
congratulating ended after just a few seconds, as soon as the
others saw where the actor and the bald, pink man were headed.
Once a person stepped into one of the stalls with another man it
was like he didn’t exist. Everyone knew there were only two
possible things you could be in there for, and they left you to
it.

The rest of it took less than three minutes.

First, the actor put the needle into a vein between two toes on
his right foot. He never injected into his arm because he was an
actor and his reputation was very important to him. He didn’t want
anyone to think he was a junkie.

5
 Second, he depressed the plunger.
Third....
The next part took a few seconds. The actor closed his eyes. His
lips started to move into a smile, but they lost strength and fell
slack. One eye opened and fluttered a little bit.
The cocaine was still in his system. The hammering of his heart
became the booming voice of a god, his ears cold drums filled with
anger. His chest constricted. He coughed. He tried to take a
breath. That was one of his last conscious thoughts: okay, you’re
fine, BREATHE....
The brother watched all this from his vantage point beside the
sink. The fluorescent light flickered, made a sound like it had
bugs burning alive in it, and the stall door was only half open so
the brother couldn’t really see what was going on. He wasn’t
worried until he heard the moan and the bald man hurried out of
the stall. Under his pink skin he had turned white and his eyes
were too wide. He caught the brother’s gaze for a second, and then
he tried to smile as he hurried out the door.
The actor moaned again. It was a wet sound. The quiet
conversation in the bathroom stopped abruptly, and everyone turned
and looked at the stall.
“Hey, man, is he okay?” It was a rock star with dirty blond hair
and three days growth of beard under his crooked blue shades.
“That don’t sound good.”
The brother stepped forward and pushed in the stall door.

“Jesus Christ died when he was thirty two.”

“What?”
“Come on, baby,” the model said. “Let’s stop talking about all
this heavy stuff. I want to have fun tonight.”

6
 “Thirty three.” The brother said.
“What?”
“I think it was thirty three.”
The actor thought. “No, I’m pretty sure it was thirty two.”
“Whatever. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Thirty two is twenty three reversed.”
“Oh, shut up. Just shut the fuck up.”
“What is today? The 23rd?”

They didn’t believe in lights at this nightclub. The place was

pulsing with laser blue adrenaline, cloaked in the stench of spilt
drinks and too much sweat. There was a strobe off somewhere by the
stage, and when the brother kicked open the bathroom door the
actor started to seize.
The brother hauled him by his armpits out onto the dance floor.
Vomit and white foam left a trail on the floor, and under the
thumping music a few perceptive people might have heard the actor
gurgling through his breath. His head lolled forward, and his hair
fell in front of his face like a damp rag.
A few people looked and stepped obligingly away, but no one did
anything to help. One girl, a brunette with fake double Ds,
cackled and pointed. She didn’t recognize the actor, and the
brother wouldn’t be a face for another two years. Neither of them
worth much more than a laugh.
The brother worked his way toward the front as quickly as he
could. He threw his head back over his shoulder, looking for the
door, and caught the eye of a pretty blond with pixie-spiked hair
and glossy lipstick. She didn’t see his face; to her he was just a
pair of too-white eyes and two rows of snarling teeth. She stepped
quickly away.

7
 A minute and a half.
The bartender saw what was going on and came around to open the
door. The bouncer jumped up and grabbed the actor by his feet.
Outside the wind was like an ice maker, so cold it was hot. The
brother tried to lean the actor against the wall and slapped him.
“Hey!” He yelled. He snapped his fingers in front of the actor’s
eyes. “Hey, bro! Hold on!” The actor’s eyes fluttered. The right
one rolled up. The left one stared forward.
A stray thought bubbled up from inside the actor’s soupy brain.
He saw lips, cracked and bleeding, and a tongue twittering behind
stained teeth, and he thought lips I want to kiss those lips and
then the thought popped and floated away like gas and the actor
slid down the wall until his ass hit the sidewalk. Another thought
dislodged itself -- this toilet seat is cold -- and then the
actor slid over onto his side. He belched, and vomit trickled down
his cheek and pooled.
The bouncer and the bartender were kneeling beside the actor.
One felt for a pulse and they both looked at each other, eyes
trembling, and then out into the street. A crowd was gathering. A
few bums and a couple yuppies here and there. One cab driver, who
kept saying “Is that man okay? Is that man okay?” in heavily
accented English.
The brother had his cell phone out. He stepped into the street
for better reception. He was shouting something, but later he
would remember only a buzz in his ear and the shrill sound of his
screams.

“You’re not going to die. Just stop with that, man.”

“I know that. I’m just saying it’s kinda freaky.”
“You’re just fucking imagining things. You might as well be

8
seeing signs in tea leaves and shit. It’s nothing. Just dreams.”
“I know it is. It’s just freaky.”
“No, it’s just you. You and those fucking psychics and shit that
keep messing with your head.”

The last real thought the actor managed to form had nothing to
do with drugs, or infected waiters, or even the last three shitty
movies he had made. All he knew was that his left arm was numb and
he wanted to roll over. So he did.
Two seconds after he rolled onto his back, he vomited. The
bartender wasn’t watching. The bouncer was trying to stop three
college kids not on the list who had taken this opportunity to try
to sneak in. So this end took just a few seconds.
The actor aspirated the vomit into his lungs. He choked,
spitting ropes of saliva and puke into the air. Some of it hit the
bartender’s cheek. He tried, too late, to roll the actor back onto
his side.
Ten seconds before the end of his life, the actor was conscious
of the bartender’s hands on him and the high, keening wail of his
brother, but he could make no sense of either sensation. All that
he saw was a field of black and a blinking sign above him.
The sign was neon, red and gold and white, but it was fuzzy and
the actor couldn’t make out what it said.
He thought he saw numbers.
And then the sign went out.

© 1999 by Scott Milder