In a New York City night club, the patrons are happy and vibrant. The bar is ice blue. Sleek nickel bar stools and modern copper sconces dance in and out of vision as the crowd moves and shifts to the music. The crowd is laughing and toasting. Everyone is nicely dressed and they’re out for a night of smiling and singing. There is a sense of pure freedom in the room.

From behind the bar wall, a man walks into the room. A dark man. Dark hair, dark clothes, no real light on him. He can be seen, but he is only noticed very slowly. He stops and stands by the far end of the bar.

A few people sitting at the bar turn towards him and suddenly loose any expression they had on their faces. Other people in the crowd seem to stop socializing and look his way. They stop what they were doing, and look at the man as if they’re wondering about him, or maybe expecting something from him. The music in the club takes on a life of it’s own and begins to mysteriously travel through the room, as if it were coming up through the floor.

Within a few minutes, in an infectious sort of way, the crowd begins to laugh and be overly cheerful. They’re cheering as if the Berlin wall has just come down. Some women and men have their arms in the air, laughing and jumping high.

Then slowly, they stop. The patrons begin having no expressions at all. Their heads start to tilt forwards and backwards. Knees begin to buckle. One by one they start to drop to the floor and begin to expose a clear view of the dark man at the end of the bar. His face is slowly becoming more and more visible. As the face of this man is about to be clear,

CJ wakes.