They’re playing the transformation game. That’s dimming the lights and taking turns watching your face change in a mirror. It helps to be a little stoned, rewire the brain, allow a little zingy looseness to settle into the synapses. Avoid acid, playing the transformation game on acid is a good way to go crazy. OK, that may only be urban legend, but why take chances? So he’s stoned, but it’s just pot, he keeps telling himself, just pot. He’s sitting in a circle, he’s tuned in to the sound of his own breathing. The rumblings of his belly. He had tacos for dinner. The people running this party bring out an antique hand mirror. Someone’s laughing. It sounds like dead tree branches creaking in the wind. The frame of the mirror isn’t plastic, but plastic’s predecessor, Bakelite. His mom owned one very much like it, bright red. He burps and tastes salsa. When he was ten his mom stopped using her favorite mirror. That’s when he accidentally broke it while fooling around, she cried for hours before forgiving him. “Who wants to go first?” someone asks, and he says, “Me,” quickly, before there’s time to change his mind. He takes another hit from the joint being passed around. The smoke is bittersweet and faintly musky. His head seems to swell. He can’t feel his feet. Sparks appear in his vision. God damn, this is some potent weed. He has to wonder about its pedigree. Too late now, too late. The smoke creeps into his lungs like a spy invading enemy territory. He shivers and sees the beginnings of something vaguely shaggy in the mirror. His face shifts around like the moon on ocean waves. It takes forever for the transformation to run its course. He sees darkness. He used to hate the dark at the top of the stairs when he was a kid. Worlds exist in shadows and many of them aren’t terribly pleasant. Someone in the circle hums the Beatles. He can’t tell which song. This night feels a hundred years long. He has to work in the morning. The boss will let him have it if he’s late again. He doesn’t even know these people. Friends of friends of friends. The pot leaves a strange, skunky aftertaste and he’s got the beginnings of a killer migraine building at the base of his neck. “I see a caveman,” he says just to get it over with, and everyone else is all, Way cool. Later on, when the game has run its course, he hooks up with a woman who’s been sitting across the circle from him. The pot’s fucked him up good, he can’t tell, is her hair red or brown or blonde. Tall or short, fat or thin? She’s a free-floating entity. A desert mirage. A shape without definable form. She tells him her name and a second later it’s flown out of his head. She says, “Let’s go somewhere private,” and he allows her to take the lead. They go to the roof. The night sky is a black lid on the world. Someone has painted stars on the inside curve by flicking an enormous paintbrush saturated with phosphorescent paint. He’s always wondered how the ancients were able to see pictures in the heavens, to him it’s all a blur of tiny lights. They probably just Lied about what they saw and, over time, the whole concept just sort of caught on. The city chugs on below him and what’s-her-name. They’re floating twenty stories above the noise and motion that never stops. They get it on by an air conditioning unit that buzzes like a huge insect. The woman makes the strangest sound when she comes and then starts talking crazy talk about Satan and the profound meaning of prime numbers, then she’s humming, it’s the Beatles, it’s Helter Skelter, and he’s thinking she’s about to murder him for no reason at all. “Man, this pot has really made me paranoid,” he laughs, and she says, “No doubt,” just before pushing him off the roof.