A young man goes home to visit his girlfriend’s parents for the first time. They are oriental. Looking down a long, empty dull-white hall, clearly the bottom floor of some building––not a house–– he vaguely encounters the father after meeting and greeting the mother. The father, or presumably him, he cannot remember shaking hands with. No formalities are exchanged. Everything is just informal; like strangers. He begins to realize that he is inebriated, deeply so. Where he is told will be dinner is a white room with no table, no chairs, and a wet floor––a room with also no people. Leaving, meandering down another hall to find a mop, in order to show some form of graciousness for this weird but not yet hostile freeform hospitality, he encounters another man in a large industrial room who does not want to talk to him. “No english” but he lets him borrow his mop (he has a mop. Handy.). The squeegee mechanism doesn’t work, and he can’t decide whether to take the makeshift slop bucket it sits atop with him or if that will be pushing his luck too far. He decided to try without asking. Considering the also-oriental gentleman’s demeanor they’re both unlikely to prefer further communication. Now what? To drag this wet mop and wet bucket, with no drying potential, no way to wring it out in that other nondescript wet-floored room with ––I’m sure–– no mop sink…or any sink…or anything other than terror in it?
He finds a sort of dance classroom. Dance on one side, a cement block wall dividing it and a tightly packed desk-ridden classroom on the other; the space connected by an open door and open air windows made of simply absence of shabby block wall material…this providing something of a student audience, I suppose, but terribly designed if that be its purpose. He stumbles in and sits amidst the class as if that is where he was headed this whole time––that he should be there, almost like this were the dinner event he was invited to, just with obviously no way to comprehend its description beforehand, which must’ve been why this invitation was so vague as a ‘meet the parents dinner’: how could you possibly describe what one would expect? But the class looks askance at him. He does not want to dance, but that is what he feels he’s going to be asked to do. As dread befalls him on this account, and because of the looks thrown at him by the remainder of the class, he fumbles with his shoes like an idiot who doesn’t understand them as objects––heels smashed in by his heels and laces asunder. As though if he fumbles with them sincerely enough he may avoid dancing or the thing that is clearly portending which feels palpably more ominous than dancing.
“Leave” she says to him. His girlfriend, the one who is apparently expecting normalcy from this completely abnormal situation. He feels guilt because he cannot discern what was expected of him, only disappointment. Neither can he see much at this point. It feels as though he’s high: vision has blurred almost completely, confused as to where he’s at and why it is such a foreign place he’s finding himself in. He finds a restroom––a place with a mirror and a sink, anyway. In it he shines his gums forth, recanting his lips. Foggy. Everything. He catches only a glimpse of his gums where they meet the teeth. A few particles despite not having eaten. They are pinkish red, like parts of his gums themselves. What has happened? “Okay, time to get out.” he thinks to himself.
Two girls stand in a room eerily alone, placed there, it seems, only to gossip as he walks by, and about his girlfriend; and they do gossip. “Why are you with her anyway?”
“Because I like her! It’s all of this chaos lurking around each and every god damned scary corner that has me so nervous,” he says, and “That’s why!” he finishes with exclamation.