Planet Fever

by Stier Jr. , Peter

  As soon as the rain seemed as though it would subside, it beat down with greater vengeance and fury. At this point the windshield wipers were a mere formality—the water cascaded down like a gushing waterfall. I poked my head out the window, but gusts of wind and rain pelted my face, slamming into my eyes and causing me to jerk the truck toward the edge. My best chance for survival had boiled down to me winging it. The truck bogged down in the mud, fishtailed more and seemed on the verge of going over the edge as each sodden second progressed.

  I thought I was at the top of the pass but couldn’t tell whether the sign read “scenic overlook” or “beware steep grade and curves ahead.” Now the pick-up lurched and slid downward and the engine worked on keeping the thing slowed down. I punched the breaks to the floor. My heavy breathing filled the cabin. I could see nothing, and lost all control of the truck. I was at the mercy of this mountain, and I guessed this mountain had never contemplated a concept such as “mercy” in its long existence….

  THE TRUCK slid into what would be its (and my) doom. A slideshow display of my life manifested before me in no particular chronological order: Age five: waking up on the playground after having fallen off swing, other kids surrounding me…. Age 14: kissing first girlfriend…. Age 17: falling off side of building trying to climb drunk…. Age 7: asking my dad if we could visit the remote place depicted on the Close Encounters of the Third Kind film poster…. Age 10: scoring the championship goal…. Age 15: learning to fly a plane…. Age 16: talking to a NASA guy about how to go about becoming an astronaut…. Age 25: being recruited by someone I can’t remember the name or face of for something covert and having permanent amnesia thereafter…. Age 3: inside a bubble because of an acute asthma attack.

  The images flashed in rapid-fire and random succession, millisecond bits of consolidated memory datum bursting forth, yet a dreamlike quality stretched each scenario to seemingly last seconds,minutes or even hours. I clenched my eyes shut and bellowed forth a primal yell, fearing these were my final moments on terra firma before smashing into the terminal unknown….

  The crash never occurred. What seemed to happen was more a wipeout—like spinning 720 degrees on sheer ice and coming to a sudden halt. It would’ve been a casual way to go: spinning-out horizontally into death.

  But I realized I was, in fact, not dead, for I heard that relentless rain plinking on the truck. Opening my eyes, my hands were intact and shaking, still wet with sweat. I turned the rearview down to check my face in the mirror; blood poured from a gash on my forehead.

  The engine was tacked out—my foot had passed from the brake to the accelerator. In a state of concussed delirium and shock, I was aroused into a semi-state of awareness by a tapping on the window. I rolled it down, and a tight-jawed man wearing a green plastic “Las Vegas” visor, scuba goggles, and an army-green plastic poncho leered in upon me. Between his teeth he clenched a cigarette holder with a soggy cigarette.

  “Goddammit man—get your foot off the pedal and shut your rig off—you’re gonna blow the goddamn engine to Richard Nixon’s grave!”

  I let off the gas and killed the ignition.

  “Man, you’re either a jackass or an adrenaline junky, or both.” He eyed me then the truck. In a sudden spasm, he lurched his head into the cab, his goggles no more than 3 inches from my face, his damp cigarette pressing against my cheek. “Yeah, you’ve seen the edge, there’s no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over,” he mumbled.

  “I don’t think I went over,” I said.

  He eyed my forehead then commanded, “That’s it! Out of the truck! You need immediate medical attention! And you are in luck, man—because I am a certified EM fucking T.”

  Somehow this terse, eccentric fellow didn’t strike me as an EMT. Screw it, I thought. At least I’m not mangled at the bottom of a ravine. I opened the door and stumbled out.

  “For god sakes man—roll up the window or your seats will get sopped!”

  “Eh, yeah.” I rolled up the window and looked around to see where I had landed.

  The truck had slid down a muddy side road that happened to be the driveway to what was this man’s residence. On either side of the entrance stood two tall totem poles, with a falcon carved on top of each one. The drive spilled into a flat area where a Jeep was parked, and various items (such as television sets, toaster-ovens, mannequins, LP album covers of disco bands from the 70s, a typewriter and a rubber mask of George Herbert Walker Bush) were strewn about; most of them bullet-ridden through and through. A wire fence encircled the perimeter of his cabin.

  He stopped at the gate and leered with one eye and bit on the plastic cigarette holder. “Are you armed?”

  “Uhh—no, no I’m not.”

  He reflected then stated, “Well, we’ll take care of that later. A man’s gotta be armed in this area—this is bear, wild boar, and bat country!”

  There was a sign nailed to the gate:

  The inside of his cabin was cozy in a Dadaistic, disheveled way. Scattered about the dining room table were piles of paper that camouflaged a desktop computer and printer. A cursory examination of the living room yielded thus: three mannequins wearing Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton masks, seated in various states of repose around a coffee table; Old Glory flags draped as curtains, miscellaneous bric-a-brac piled on shelves worthy of a tourist shop off Hollywood Blvd. There were also a bunch of old photographs of World War II taped up everywhere, a “Federal Map of the United States” pinned to the wall, an 18th Century musket hanging above the fireplace, and tying the room together on the far wall was framed Monet’s “Sunset in Venice.”

  He mumbled off to the kitchen, where the clatter of kitchenware clanging and falling, cupboard doors slamming and the occasional muttered cussing emanated. Through the saloon-styled doors to the kitchen, he spilled forth, brandishing a liter of Wild Turkey whiskey, some gauze bandages and an infantry knife. The cigarette holder clenched in his teeth held a fresh cig. Gone was the poncho. He sported a floral Hawaiian shirt underneath a sleeveless mountain vest. He still had on the visor and goggles. Like his front yard and living room, it was an eclectic look.

  He took the knife, stabbed it into the table. “Sit down,” he grunted.

  He grabbed two empty glasses that had been on the table and poured each to the rim, and set his cigarette into an ashtray. “First the Captain—to steady his nerves.” In one gulp he put back the entire glass of whiskey. He grabbed the knife, cut out a giant wad of gauze and saturated it with the booze.

  “Ready, set—” In a flash the gauze stung my forehead. He pulled it away and scrutinized his work, then jammed the glass into my hand and stated, “As your Captain I command you to take four of these per hour. Starting now!”

  I vaguely remembered promising Mona I’d lay off the booze, but the memory was hazy enough to ignore. I took his advice and put it back. He cut off another strip of the gauze and wrapped it around the top of my head. Pondering the wrapping, he blurted, “Shit—we need the healing stuff of Chief Rain-In-the-Face.” He poured another glass for us both, and roved across the room to a closet, where he rummaged through a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. “Alas!” he sauntered back and held up a feather. He tucked it into the wrapping on my head, put back his drink and declared, “Captain Stockton T. Jager does it again!”

  Five shots later I was “feeling no pain.”

  In fact, I wasn’t feeling much of anything.

  My host had been scribbling on random sheets of paper and feeding them into his fax machine, rambling things like “take that you pinko bastard!”

  He glanced over at me, examined the almost emptied bottle and declared, “Man—you gotta be black-ops. Anyone that dares fuck with you had better fly one way, because they are not coming back!”

  He brandished a revolver pistol from his desk drawer, opened the chamber, spun it and clicked it shut. His fax machine began spitting out a message, prompting my host—th
e good Captain Jager—to yell out “evasive maneuver!” whereupon he tumbled over, took aim and unloaded three rounds into the machine, annihilating it. He grabbed the sheet of paper, scrutinized it and set it ablaze using a Zippo lighter, then lit his cigarette via the flaming document prior to stomping it out. He surveyed the damage like a military field commander after a battle.

  “Damned collateral damage,” he grunted, sitting down across from me and pouring another round. “What’s the score—what’s your story?”

  “Uhhh, I was headed toward an old friend’s and I thought I’d take a short cut—and now here I am.”

  “Here indeed.” He stubbed the burned down cigarette into the already full ashtray and poked a fresh cigarette into his holder, lighting it. “That’s the ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where.’ I need the ‘why’ and particularly the ‘who’ dammit!”

  What the hell was this maniac getting at? This was a question I wasn’t sure I could fully answer.

  “Who? I am Eddie Bikaver, a shitty writer from Los Angeles who seems to be suffering from a schizotemporalistic condition.” I paused. “And possibly some varying degrees of psychosis, on top of alcoholism and probably a few other things they have either not figured out or invented yet.”

  He nodded, pushing his goggles up to his wrinkled forehead.

  “At one point I was a bum, and I rolled with this character named Fillono, who moved out this way and founded some sort of resort art community. The reason why—”

  “Whynot!” he interrupted.

  “Eh—yeah—I suppose so. Why not. Nothing better to do.”

  “No you rube! ‘Whynot’ is the name of the goddamned resort town Fred Fillono runs. Yeah, it’s a hoot. It’s what you’d get if you tossed 1984 and Aspen, Colorado into a blender. I was one shitsucking vote from becoming sheriff of that place. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to vote. Mescaline is a helluva drug!”

  The rain began to blink on the cabin roof. My buzz was in full effect.

  THE BOOZE had taken hold, Jager was attempting to light a fire in his fireplace while I eased back, taking in the mountain evening air and listening to the millions of pellets of water frolicking, after their long skydive from the mothership storm cloud, off the roof of the Captain’s cabin. I pondered the point of view of one of those raindrops—from the sky, forming into a droplet and then go-time, the brief exhilaration upon acceleration due to gravity, looking about and seeing thousands of your fellow raindrops above, below and about you sharing the experience of a short, terminal-velocity filled existence, the earth approaching ever-so-rapidly. One last quick view of the roof, or ground, or a tree top and then “SPLAT”—back to the oneness of water.

  “Rat bastard!” the Captain’s yelling shook me out of my bullshit Buddhistic meditation. He had mounted what looked to be a fumigation tank on his back, attached to the tank was some sort of spray nozzle. Upon closer view, it was no fumigation system, for on the tank, in bold black letters were written “U.S. ARMY.”

  “TAKE THIS!” he shouted, and a stream of gasoline and fire spewed forth from the end of the barrel, and a whirling fireball exploded in the fireplace, shooting flames out and about the room. “SHIT!” He backed away, muttered something about Dante, then picked up a fire extinguisher he had under the table and proceeded to quell the random small fires in the room and around the fireplace—careful not to disturb the now roaring flames within the fireplace. I deduced this was standard operating procedure for this man: he was a virtuoso. The fire in the fireplace gave the place a cozy feel.

  He took off the garb and tossed it into the closet. “Lieutenant Bikaver!” A fresh glass of booze slapped against my hand. “Why the hell did you take this assignment? Duty? Honor? Excitement? Free booze? Shit man, this one was so jacked I wouldn’t have taken it in my prime—and I’ve taken some weird ones!”

  Jager’s face superimposed itself then separated into two. I was seeing double. I closed my right eye and saw he had taken off the scuba goggles and now studied me through tinted eyeglasses.

  “Eh?” I asked.

  “They got you sideways and turned around and deep. You’ve been compromised. The Honcho has notified me that you need a temporary reset, and I got just the thing!” He handed me a couple of red capsules.

  “What honcho? What the hell is this?” I examined the red pill with one eye.

  “Not what, man—why. Take one! Save the other for another time. You’ll need it.”

  More booze, more drugs: I had gotten this far, however far this was. Once again my unbothered (or reckless) mindset had already made the decision. Screw it. I tossed the cap into my mouth and swallowed with a shot of Wild Turkey. I put the other one into my pocket.

  “That, my friend, is a time capsule. You will see the why shortly.”

  JAGER TOOK away the rest of the booze and withdrew into the kitchen. My vision blurred around the room, at times gaining focus then failing. Mild butterflies fluttered about my ribcage; shadows and the orange light from the fireplace reverberated into a golden glowing hue. The table, the walls, all objects in my field of vision took forth this luminance, and the actual atmosphere of the room began to shimmer.

  The intoxication of the booze melted away and was replaced by an ever-growing sensation of in-spiritedness. Though I was seated, I felt an uncanny sense of buoyancy and lightness, as though I were in a boat or possibly hot-air balloon. My vision refocused to a hyper-clarity; I could see into the essential matter of things and possibly through them.

  Hallucinogens.

  Did I write that, or think it, or say it? It didn’t matter at this point—I was in deep.

  L.S.D. or maybe mescaline?

  Captain Jager reemerged from the kitchen with a briar pipe in his mouth.

  “Powerful stuff?” I asked him, who was now just a bleary fading spot in my periphery.

  My assumption was confirmed, for in the next immediate instant, I perceived myself to be in three locations simultaneously in space and was somehow outside time….

  “I’m still in the living room, but I’m also in Doktor Götzefalsch’s office.”

  “Yes, Meester Beekaver? You said you are ver?” Dr. Sydney Götzefalsch is seated before me, scribbling into his pad.

  “I’m here and there?”

  “And?”

  “I’m also somehow back in the Lay-Z-Boy lounge chair in the mysterious location—present tense—being asked questions by Hal, the nameless, faceless Interrogator…. Can he read my mind right now? Or does he require me to speak?”

  “Pipe down, Shitbird, you don’t wanna give away everything. Someone’s gonna ask you what pill you took, probably that duplicitous Doc. Tell him a mescaline derivative.” Captain Jager lights the briar pipe and barks at me. “I know I’m lighting a pipe, you jackass! Stop narrating about me and pay attention,” he yells from his spot across the living room.

  “Who are you veet, Meester Beekaver? Kant you remember hees name?”

  Jager shouts, “Tell him Ronald Reagan. He’ll probably get a kick in the pants from that one.”

  “The Gipper.” I answer.

  “Who?” Götzefalsch asks.

  “Ronald Reagan,” I say.

  The Doc attempts to repress the shock registered on his face.

  The Interrogator now chimes in. “You seem to be in a confused state, Mr. Bikaver. Why have you stopped giving me past information? Are you having problems with your recall?”

  “Rat Bastard! He’s probably a dirty low-down AI,” mutters Jager.

  “I know I muttered that!” says Jager.

  “Get the hell out of this loop—don’t worry about what the hell I say right now!” yells Jager. “Or else they’ll track onto me too.”

  “Aha—I’m in a loop, and….”

  “A loop, eh? Vaht sort of peel deed Meester Raygun geeve too you?” The Doc seems to have regained composure from the previous blow.

  “I believe it was mescaline,” I answer.

  The Doc is tsk-tsking and shaking hi
s head. “Zat may be very contradeectory to ze other medikation you are on. I am not shure dat vas ein gut idea.”

  “Mr. Bikaver—are you having problems with your recall?” the Interrogator repeats.

  Neither the Interrogator nor Dr. Götzefalsch are aware of one another, only me, as though I were talking to each of them on two separate telephones.

  “Yes—I believe the drugs Doctor Götzefalsch gave me did something—at times I would forget where I was and what I was doing—like a walking blackout.”

  “You were on your way to Fillono’s. You took a shortcut. Rain began to fall—then heavily. You almost ran your car off the road, having a ‘near death’ experience, wherein a series of memories flashed before you. Then what happened?” The Interrogator probes for more information.

  “Didn’t we already go over this?” I ask.

  Wait a second. The Interrogator doesn’t know this part. Did I stop the narrative after the crash? Impossible—otherwise, how would I be where I am at now—to this very sentence in the story? I seem to have a certain power to withhold information. Hal, the Interrogator, must not have an up-to-date version of my activities. In that sense, I am free. But for how long?

  “Please explain,” the Interrogator says.

  “I can’t remember,” I say, just to say something.

  “Zat vas vat I vas afraid vould happen. Ve might try ein deeferent approach.” The Doc exits the office.

  I get up and go to the window. Blackness outside. Not night, just blackness. Where the hell am I? I examine my surroundings.

  Something is strange—as though this is not real.

  Am I on a set? I go to the door and open it. Outside there’s an empty airplane hangar—dark except for the luminance issuing forth from the Doc’s office, which I can now see is in fact an artificial set, built of plywood flats. From afar I hear the reverberation of footsteps, what I perceive to be emanating from more than one pair of shoes. Maybe three or four. Should I go back inside and play dumb or get the hell out of here? Wherever here is.