I guess the laughter was the perfect foreshadowing; a maddening, cruel laughter, regardless of the subjects, inspiration, one always knew, I knew that the laughter echoing in my mind was directed solely at me. Not all of it, some of them seemed as if they were in my position, most of them really. I wasn't even listening to what they said anymore, It was like any other party, in that, someone spoke, people laughed, you got in your piece and they laughed again. I..., we all, would furiously gulp our beers and drinks and laugh again. It was as if someone punched up a program for a party. The people I didn't know,... even their ignorance of me, clued me in to the proplike or spylike air about them. In my mind, what is the focal point of all that scares me, was the spider sitting in the middle of the wall, I usually like spiders, or at least leave them alone. I know they do usually grab something horrid from the back of anyone's mind, but that one, holding sideways to a stark white wall, truly unsettled me. It is very uncharacteristic of me, because I usually just let them occupy the corners of my home, but I took a paper napkin someone was resting her drink on and went for it, I wanted to kill it. Something made me hesitate; I, for an incalculable instant felt the weight of eyes on my back. The spider held still, Turning around I saw Diane watching me. Her smile instantly clutched my attention. Dropping the napkin, I walked to her. Retaining eyecontact, I just walked past people, who seemed to part aside at my approach.

"Enjoying yourself?," She asked, looking past my eyes.

"Yes, I-"

"You're feeling uneasy."

"I-," she gently took the drink from my hand replacing it with her own hand and lead me upstairs to her bedroom. The ceilings were much higher then you would have expected and at random, different levels hung, what I knew, was her art work. I knew before that she painted but that's not what indicated it as hers, each seemed to be a tortured and oppressed, mostly surreal, self portrait of herself; she was always naked or clothed to show an, even more naked venerability. Either she'd be cowering as the stature of fragility, assaulted by the environment, or from the gaze of an obvious, big brother, form, Always, there was a wall of some kind, to stress a shared hopelessness.

She softly laid me down on the large bed, securely in the middle. Seeing that I was disturbed by the sounds of the party, quietly crossing the room, she, soundlessly closed the door, which, pleasantly, muffled the line of smoky voices and dullened music of the party.

Undressing me, her, inadvertent, touches massaged my body to relaxation. I soon became acutely aware of my own quieting breath, as I drifted into a relaxed unreal form of meditation. Landing atop me, she left the moisture of twenty delicate kisses along the frame of my body, beginning a chain reaction of small, pleasant shivers, as I watch the only source of illumination, a soft blue moonlight filtering through the fluid clouds and large skylight above. She began to make love to me with slight graceful movements as I watch a small shadow of a figure moving across the moon; it stealthily launched from the moon, moving across the skylight and began walking in long wide circles on the ceiling. I watched it stop above me and to make it's way down the wall until it left my field of view. Taking her head in my hands, I kissed her hard, forcefully guiding her back laying to the bed, the heat of our bodies became heightened as they wetly glided against each other. On my back I felt the rounding trickling, I once watched walking down, toward me on the wall and finally as I released inside her mixing with the flood of sensation, I felt the slight pain of a puncture on my the back or my neck and must have lost consciousness soon after.

What happened next, my mind interprets as a dream, though I'm not convinced it was. I remember walking naked, lead by her hand down a long white hallway, focusing on a small black pinpoint suspended in a small corner of the threshold, leading to the party. I felt compelled to stop, as she continued on, standing in front of a black spider sitting on the middle of its web. I began to melt away from my surroundings as I stood among the gritty rubble of the coarse vast dessert around me. Periodically with the warning of small dust devils the giants from the party with the slight pull as when a train goes by, loudly swished by. The spider leaving its web, casually walked down the expanse of the white wall, finally taking its place on the floor, standing before me, it looked into my eyes.

"Why are you here?" it asked impatiently.

"I don't know!" I pleaded as another impossible figure walked toward and past me, creating stormy winds around us.

"Why are you here?"

"Why do you watch me!?"

"It's my function to watch."

"Why?"

"You need watching."

"What If I were to kill you?"

It laughed, scuttled closer, to further tower above me. "You can kill me, but to kill all of the spiders, you could not even nearly match the numbers of my offspring, thousands of them, thousands." It laughed again, abandoning him, walking back up the wall to sit in the middle of its web.

I found myself clothed and once again standing amongst the oppressive laughter and music, napkin in my hand, feeling her eyes burning into the back of my neck, lowering the napkin to the spider, it quickly scurried, frantically running away from the napkin, I hesitated, resisting the need to turn around and crushed it rubbing it between the fibers of the cloth and dropped it into an ashtray.

Quickly I turned around aggressively avoiding her gaze and made for the door.

"I guess I passed out. So here I am. Someone must have been nice enough to put me to bed." He said as looking to a man seemingly relaxed laying in bed next to him. "Do you live here or did you drink a little too much, like myself?"

The man seemed to not hear. "How did you feel before the party?," He asked analytically

"I don't know, a little depressed, sort of closed in."

"Closed in, how?"

"I guess, like when I would drive to work with the traffic lights and all the crowd of cars, they all seemed to work in concert with each other, keeping me right where they want me. Even if I were to speed to pass those large trucks that always get in my way or run a traffic light they would pull me over and even put me in jail, just to make sure that I didn't upset the plan, somehow."

"Plan?"

"Yeah, I guess it's just a little paranoid fantasy I have."

"Do you usually feel this paranoia?"

"It always seems to gnaw at the back of my mind, surfacing when I'm most unhappy."

"In your dream, what do you think the spiders represent?"

Beginning to feel uneasy he rose from the bed, in, when he stood, seemed to be an institutional white bedroom. "I don't know," he said flatly as he walked to and tried the locked door. Fumbling with the knob he nervously attempted to unlock it. "Can you help me with this?"

"In your dream, what do the spiders represent?," he reverberated.

He began knocking on the door, first softly and unsure of himself, then harder and more frantically. He turned to the man. "Can I get out of here!"

"In time, just answer a few of my questions," He said in his soothing suspiciously disarming voice.

He launched himself scrambling toward the man picking up and raising a wooden straight back chair above his head. "The hell with you." he yelled as pain, beginning at the back of his neck spreaded as paralysis, outward as a serge, to the outer reaches of his body.

The man sat up in bed, the sheets pulling away to reveal him wielding a small black remote control, as two orderlies came in dragging him screaming from the room. They brought him to what seemed to be a dentists examination room.

By now, inspired by a minor remote control induced blast of electric sedative, he was quite and subdued. The men placed him in the chair. He felt the newly implanted outlet in the back of his neck snap into place connecting with something behind him and his eyes lay focused on a small black figure crawling on the rectangular cover to the florescent lights, walking across the ceiling down the wall behind him. He screamed violently as the spider began to disappear from his field of view and he saw the orderlies hand come down hard atop, crushing the spider.

"Don't worry, guy, it's just a spider."

"As he strained to retain consciousness by focusing on the unmoving darkened spot on the wall, Diane came in.

"My parties used to be enough to set you back on track."