Lights flash through the smoke, creating a strobe effect, showing me snapshots of her face, each one subtly changed by the moving shadows, each one a different girl, yet all part of the chain of her-ness. The wholeness of the person in front of me is an illusion created by the persistence of vision, the forth dimension of time. There is, I suppose, an entire person there, but all I have is my creation, my own perception drawn from the pictures flashing by, bright white and red.
                    She is a silent film with soundtrack, a soundtrack of booming bass beats reverberating throughout the ersatz club, an old warehouse rented or borrowed or broken into for the night. The sounds in the air are heavy, yet translucent, filling the space, and dancing is like swimming through the omnipresent, monolithic, yet crystal clear sounds. And she dances, feeling the urgency of the sounds in the air, the electricity of the dancers, the synergy of the moment, the beats subdividing our makeshift time. The smoke and the lights and the music and the movement of the crowd in the club all swirl into a single mass, a chaotic system within a greater pattern, while she dances before me, the only true individual element I can perceive.
                    I watch her move, this girl I do not know, not even her name; as I moved through the sea of dancers, we came together, made a connection. She wears a tight white T-shirt with red trim and a brightly colored design, which seems to be some sort of oriental cartoon character yet takes on various forms in the changing light. Her black jeans and boots absorb and reflect the light as she moves. She bobs and flows, the tight ponytails of kinky hair on either side of her head liquid slow motion through the music. I study her face, its pleasing melding of hard edges cheeks and soft details. Her large, brown, dilated eyes are staring.
                    I realize they are staring at me, and I have to reconcile the look with selfness, but I am so many selves right now. The self that is dancing, acting, smiling to her in such a practiced manner isn't even conscious, merely a shell on autopilot with preprogrammed social skills specially compiled for the dancefloor. And as that body dances, my mind dances, far more elaborately, through songs of analysis, breaking down the world around me and recreating it into a partner, my chemical and electric Ginger Rogers, who can match every step I make backwards and in heels.
                    Through the myriad elements, external and internal, there's the soft, warm hum of the nulls I dropped two hours ago. And I know that it's the nulls that are shaping my perceptions, my thoughts, my realities; the flights of my mind and the mindless cool of my corporeal self are the results of the drug. I move with the beat, absorbing the ambience of the dancefloor, even analyze the beats against a "one hippopotamus, two hippopotamus..." count (a trick taught to me by a DJ), and determine the tempo is 150 beats per minute. Even while I do this, I wonder at the ability of nulls to allow you to do these things, while your mind visits other places. And while I consider the nulls potency, and ponder if its seemingly efficacious properties are only an illusion, I watch her dance.
                    The song has changed, and she is chanting along with the refrain, her voice drowning in the PA and crowd. I look at her skin as it changes color with the lights, her light, slightly freckled complexion shining. She comes up to about my nose, so I have to look down, smoothly swerving my head along with the music, my neck gyrating slowly, polyrhythmically swaying in synch with my body. Her eyebrows are the same soft brown color as her hair. Her lips are painted green. As she dances and screams to the music, she rubs her hands against her arms, not sensuously, but unconsciously, almost neurotically (perhaps pharmaceutically).
                    I see my hand reach out and touch her shoulder, and she doesn't flinch. I softly touch her, and we continue to dance together, separately, and the electricity flows up my arm. My body is numb with the sound around us. I can feel the energy of the beat. And I notice the sweat. Mine. Hers. The other dancers' perspiration. I feel the energy of the whole room, the synergy of music and bodies and minds. I don't know how many songs have played, but the beat is now slower, and I am behind her, holding her waist. Moving, flowing. We are synched with the beat, with each other. The flow back and forth. Time is nothing real, just something we create with our drumbeats. The reality of our inner time flowing together is what I feel. Oh, it's the nulls, I know, opening up my mind or deluding me. As my groin rubs her ass and she turns and smiles, I don't care if there is an objective viewpoint to grasp, anyway.
                    Her hand is strangely cold as I grasp it, leading her through the crowd. The bodies flow in and out of the mass of person-ness: a face, eyes, a haircut, shoes, a shirt, a purse, a pair of glasses. There is the whole of dancing humanity and there are these parts, but nothing else, no individuals. The darkness and the flashing lights. The tremendous beat. The heat and smell of the bodies. We all lose our selves in it.
                    And as we walk out the door, the cool night air hits me, breaks open the self-contained world. The doorway of the warehouse, the music and colored lights pour out. They've lost their reality, are broken down into components that can be analyzed and understood. I can see the various people, and tell they are just that: people, individuals I could encounter at work or school. The music is no longer an indivisible whole, and I can discern each part, each drum, sample and synthline. The lights come from machines now, as does the smoke, no longer merely, unquestionably existing as they had moments before. Something, an incalculable element I knew was in the room with me, is now gone.
                    And now it is replaced with the sharpness of the lights outside the warehouse, the club for a night. And she stands before me and is at once more human, more real than in the club. More real than everyday life. Her skin shines a ghostly aura in the lights, against the hard stone and grime of the building, against the endless cars parked on the sprawling, cracked concrete. She stands smiling, hold my hands, leading me towards the railroad tracks, through long dead weeds, until we are behind the makeshift club, in partial darkness.
                    I think I should ask her name, though I don't know if really want to know it. Not that I don't care, but that there is something, something selfish inside me, that doesn't want interference from that reality, the banality of names. But the social self, the robot body, knows better, knows I overanalyze everything, and I am going to ask her.
                    But before I can, she kisses me. I am leaning against a post, near the abandoned tracks, and she holds me, and I hold her, and her mouth tastes like electricity. My tongue is myself, and I taste her saliva, her sweet, warm mouth. My mind is in my body, and my body is liquid as I hold her, and she moves to her own music, her own beat, slow and subtle, quiet; the sound from the club is an ambient drone beneath the music of her breath, of her body. I am lost in her, caressing her, feeling her curves, her form, her warmth, smelling her sweat, tasting it on her neck and cheek. I can feel my own body melting, my erection spreading out beyond myself, as she takes me inside. Our movements become one. And we scream in joyful agony as our selves wash away.
                    Our breath works together.
                    We stand out in the chill air, naked, looking down and admiring our self. We pick through the two piles of clothes and decided which to put on. Her clothes are soft, strange and familiar against our skin. We laugh as we put on a combination of our apparel.
                    We are still laughing as climb into the driver's seat of my car and roll down the window, feeling the cool air as we pull out of the warehouse parking lot. And we cry out in ecstatic joy, in raw happiness, in weightless abandon at the new world unfolding before our two eyes as we merge onto the highway.