Again with the damn novel.
I hadn’t finished it and didn’t know if I wanted to. Hell, I didn’t even know what the damn thing was about, or where it was going. That novel was a microcosm for my mind: a complete mess.
“Balderdash!!!” The surrounding atmosphere—if that is what you want to call it—ignited like lightening as his voice thundered. His eyes illuminated through the tint of his sunglasses. “The thing is around. Buried. Dig around for it. And remember: if you give it up, there goes all free will in your known Universe.”
I shivered and glanced around for a way out of the predicament, but I was stuck in that utter nothingness with the suspended upside-down (or right-side up, depending on your perspective), sunglass-wearing, all-knowing, mind-reading being called Atoz.
“‘Why me?’ you ask. ‘Because I felt like it,’ I retort. Stop asking these inane questions and get to it. You have a story to finish, and a universe to save. Capiche?”
“Uh—”
And within the blink of an eye he was gone, and I was back by my little campfire.
“What in God’s name was that?”
A pack of hyenas laughed for a good minute or two. At me, I conjectured.
THE FIRE diminished and the hot coals of wood breathed their orange-black undulations and emitted the occasional spark into the (again) starry night. This was accompanied by more laughter of those hyenas that found many goings-on of the night hilarious.
What was the point of everything? What had Atoz meant by saying I had a universe to save? Saving “The Universe” seemed like a very tall order, not something a man like myself was prepared to take on.
Coming to no solid conclusion, I dozed off hearing Atoz’s voice repeating on a feedback loop in my brain: You have a story to finish, and a universe to save.
The sun came up the next day and I decided to stay right there, on the peaceful mountaintop. I didn’t bother digging through the dirt to search for my novel. Why would it be on the mountain anyway? That made zero sense. As a matter of fact, I thought I had finally and utterly lost all touch with reality.
“That’s it,” I said to no one in particular. “I’m done. Out of ideas. Out of sanity. Out of order. Someone else will have to save the universe.” I laughed at that last part because saying it aloud sounded ridiculous. I waited for the hyenas to join in, but got nothing but a resounding silence. “Don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Don’t know where to go, what to say, what to think, so I’m staying right here, dammit.” I added the “dammit” for effect, and it seemed to work because a gust of wind whipped through me, causing me to tremble and wish I had a heavier jacket. That was the last thing I recall saying aloud for quite some time.
After my declaration and the gale force wind, I experienced the final repercussions of withdrawal as the narcotics evaporated from my system. An onset of delirium took over and by day three I had run out of food and water, leaving me dehydrated and starving. I was dry as a lizard. My skin was red-hot. I had officially integrated with the desert.
One night (how many nights had I spent out there? I didn’t know), I found myself spread out on my back, naked, staring at the sky and wishing an alien vessel would cruise by and nab me. What would they be like? Hostile? Hospitable? Indifferent? Most of outer space itself was hostile to humans by its very nature: a cold, airless, soundless expanse of nothingness. Empty oblivion between stars, debris, and planets. And our tiny little blue orb: a mere afterthought on the outskirts of a galaxy spinning around a universe of millions or billions of other spinning galaxies. Our planet was simply a compartment on a giant spaceship called “The Milky Way” that was ambling along the Universe, hurtling through the cosmos. And we were its tiny passengers in this planetary compartment aboard the vast ship. In a sense we were aboard a UFO within a UFO, except we weren’t “unidentified”—we were very much identified. We were individuals capable of free will and thought.
And now—allegedly—forces within the great galactic ship wished to catalogue and enslave the cargo and rip away the things that made us most human….
If true: how was I supposed to stop that from happening—with a book?
You betcha.
“MR. BIKAVER, I appreciate the exposition and flights of fancy you are sharing with me about this account. It is very fascinating and entertaining. But I must insist you ‘cut to the chase’. Did this ‘Atoz Al Ways’ character, or ‘author’ give you anything besides the anecdotal information you mentioned in your account?”
The Interrogator has grown impatient with the story. Perhaps he doesn’t think it’s leading anywhere. I don’t blame him.
“I eventually stumbled upon a bunch of dossiers. Buried in the dirt.”
“A bunch of dossiers?”
“Yes. In manila envelopes. I am guessing he left them there for me.”
The Interrogator ponders this for a bit.
I break the silence: “Yeah. I think he was trying to help jump-start me back into my novel. You know the one—Planet Fever.”
NOTE: The following is what was found in a manila envelope:
REALITY AUTHOR/DESIGNER (RAD) DEFINED: Atoz Al Ways became bored with the standard “automating reality rendering machines;” his goal was to populate his Designer Multiverse with other little designers, authors and renderers like himself, who would be free to design as they wished, themselves being unique individual creations. So he set up a program whereby certain characters would be selected and put through what he calls “Hell Life” to see if they “got what it takes”(which he was quoted as saying in a “60 Millenia” interview while puffing a cigar). Once they sign on, they are placed through a grueling reality: their memories are wiped clean and they are dropped into a random scenario whereby they have no clue what is going on. The only criteria for pass or fail: in the end, do they trust that their honcho knows what he is doing and hang on? Or do they say, “fuck it, this ain’t worth it” and go some other way, and washout?
“Trust is the foundation for any relationship, and any company worth its grain of salt is founded on trust.” …I trust them to invent realities. Do they trust me, though? That is the question.
Atoz’ early RAD (Reality Author/Designer), who happened to be a non-human, was a great disappointment. This subject failed to trust Atoz’ plan to induct human beings into the RAD Program. Who was this disappointing RAD, now turned RADiCal (Reality Author/Designer in Calamity)? Phos Atomos Paradosi, an old buddy and business associate of Atoz. Phos set up and is currently heading the N(aI)IS, which is gobbling-up all the assets of the Universe at a stunning rate.
NOTE: The key to any RAD-in-training is his “Book of Life”—if he signs away the rights to it, or allows anyone to requisition it, or coerce him into changing it, then he is washed out. Each RAD-in-training titles his own “Book of Life” whatever he wants to.
NOTE: The following is what was found in a manila envelope:
MY EYES opened and I was camped out by the side of some remote dirt road. I vaguely recalled having climbed down the mountain and wandering to here. I looked and saw the “North Guardian Angel,” that strange mountain I had been camped atop, was about a mile away. How many nights had I spent up there? When had I staggered to this spot? How had I staggered to this spot? Why was I naked?
The hyenas stopped laughing. I yawned a waking yawn. A morning breeze stoked the coals of a smoldering fire I must have fashioned the night prior.
I stared off toward the mountain I had just conquered. Though fatigue, hunger and bewilderment taunted me, any fear or apathy which might have resided within me had vanished.
A bird whistled, precisely like the one from my childhood: two slow whistles rising in pitch (G, A), followed by three successive, rapid whistles jumbled in F, octave lower F, and C. Suddenly my mind’s eye was seized by a streaming torrent of seemingly ancient symbols, but three dimensional and holographic in nature. The architecture, the logic, the programming code, the schematic, the story of the cosmos made perfect sense as a
winding yet simple, elegant equation; this information poured into me as a steady data-stream of what appeared to be ancient pictographic computer code language. It hit my mind fast and concise. My eyes shuddered as I absorbed this fleeting comprehension with awe. How would I remember all this information? How would I even relate it to anyone if I could remember it? I knew I wouldn’t. How could I? It seemed untranslatable….
“Don’t worry about the details. Do you trust me?” Atoz Al Ways’ voice asked.
I laughed loudly like the hyenas: a mad, astonished, knowing foolish laughter. I laughed so hard I doubled over and rolled around on the ground. I stopped laughing when the edge of some hard box dug into my shoulder blade.
A book.
A Book of Life.
My Book of Life….
The distant roar of a motor hit my ears: someone was heading my way. I jumped up, grabbed the dirt-encrusted book with the visible words “My Book of Life” on the cover, and tossed it into my backpack. I found my dusty clothes in there so I put them on and waited, listening to the engine’s approach.
A golden gleam of metal came forth in a wake of dust, ripping down the dirt road. The vehicle pulled into my camping area fast and skidded to a halt. As the dust settled, a golden Z-28 Camaro with dark-tinted windows appeared. The driver revved the monster engine up a few times before turning the car off. The door opened and the heel of a cowboy boot crunched into the gravel. Another cowboy boot emerged and hit the dirt. Standing in those boots was a grinning, head-shaking Ezekiel Buckminster.
“Man, you’re one wily cat to track down.” He dabbled some snuff between his thumb and forefinger and snorted.
The parched lips on my red-hot face cracked as I smiled. Some crust fell from my bottom lip.
EZ approached me, still shaking his head and now whistling in astonishment. “What the Sam Hill are you doing out here in the desert? You on some kind of vision quest or something? Shit.”
He patted me off and handed me a canteen. The water washed down my throat like a flash flood through a parched river basin. He grabbed my backpack, slung it around his shoulder, took my arm and walked me to the Camaro. He opened the passenger door, tossed the backpack inside, and I got in. The plush interior of the sports-car bucket seat felt like a nice soft hug from a favorite aunt. EZ got in, fired up the engine, and through well-engineered German speakers, Johnny Cash’s “Ghost Rider’s In The Sky” blared. EZ peeled out, spun a 180 degree turn (still peeling out) and gassed it to about 75 mph on the narrow dirt road … calm and nonchalant as an old pro.
EZ JAMMED the car up onto the Interstate and we motored due east—the late afternoon sun began its slow descent in the rearview.
“Wow. I feel clean.”
EZ chuckled.
“My mind feels clean. Clear.”
“You’re probably delirious, my friend. Heat stroke and lack of food and water’ll do that to a man.”
“I’m detoxed. Got all those poisons out of my system. No pills, no booze, no shitty food, no shitty water.”
“Sounds like you are officially rebooted, my friend.”
The motor droned and the Mars-like landscape of Utah blurred by. I checked my watch—the same one EZ handed me back at Whynot, Fillono’s Rocky Mountain utopia retreat.
A thought clicked into my mind: this watch is how EZ tracked me down….
“This thing certainly has some range.”
EZ pshawed. “Naw, man. I had to make some modifications to the homer. I rigged a portable one with amplified range and hooked it to the battery of this car, but right now it only has about a 100-mile radius, though I got something in the pipeline with far greater range, just need a secondary tracker.”
He slowed the car down and we passed by a Utah State Patrol speed-gunning the passing cars on the freeway.
“I checked your channel after you vamoosed, to see what the hell happened to you that night. Some commando dude in military get-up pulled a snatch-n-grab on you. Plugged you with a syringe while you were chilling out then put some harness on you, right there on the deck. Then up. Out of our camera range.”
“Last thing I remember was talking to Fillono on the deck, then finding myself in an Air Force Colonel’s office…. He made it seem like everything prior was an elaborate hallucination—as though me being at Fillono’s was a complete fabrication of my mind conjured up by some experimental drug I had been taking.”
EZ kept the vehicle at a steady eighty. “They got you guinea-pigged good.”
I remembered the Colonel saying my mind, via the direction and machinations of the drug, was manufacturing scenarios and invisible enemies and rendering them as quite real. Was EZ one of them?
“They must’ve had a chopper hovering above, just waiting to carry me off.” I was baiting EZ.
“No dice. Everybody in the place and their grandmas would’ve heard a chopper. You know how quiet that place is. A chopper would’ve made an apocalyptic racket. Naw man, they nabbed you in a vehicle dark, quiet and tip-top secret. I’m betting one of those triangle jobs you see on those UFO shows. Whatever it was, it was shadowy and silent, because none of the cams picked it up. Just a cloudy shape was the best I could make out. I reckoned any cat that gets snatched by commandos and spirited away in some clandestine aircraft has got to have something going on worth smokin’ out. So I reckoned I’d be the one doing the smoking. After checking the footage, I checked your last known tracker ping and it was headed south by southwest. That’s when I thought they were scooting you back to around Vegas—Area 51 Air Force Base. I know they got secretive shit going on there. You sayyou recall chatting with Fillono, then being in an office of some military brass?”
“Yup. He repelled in after Fillono left—we’d been having espressos out on the deck—I was just watching the sun go down. Next thing I knew, there he was, on the deck, babbling about the pronunciation of the word ‘inalienable’, then I was in his office—on some base, and you were right—outside Las Vegas. It was West. Colonel West.”
The radar detector on the Camaro’s dash beeped and he again slowed the vehicle down, signaled and got behind a tractor-trailer rig. An SUV with Massachusetts tags whizzed by to our left.
“Colonel West? Shit.” EZ was deep in thought.
“Yeah.”
“You are certain of this piece of data?”
“Yeah. I am pretty sure I met him once before.”
EZ checked the rearview and chuckled. A Utah State Trooper—lights and sirens—blew by us.
“That’s bad news. I think I’m starting to get the narrative here.”
“Yeah. Me too. West is definitely working with a handler mind-technician quack who goes by the name of Dr. Götzefalsch—I think that’s who introduced me to West. And he is either using or working with Fillono. I think West is trying to implement a mind-control system planet-wide. He knows I know the score, so he is trying to neutralize me, and trace me back to Moroni, who may or may not have been working with him, and if he was, he went AWOL.”
“Shit,” EZ said.
We passed by the SUV, which had gotten pulled over. The driver was pleading with the trooper, who was writing a ticket.
“I think you’re on point. But I got a hunch you are being, or have been, sheep-dipped for something else, too.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you’ve been given an alternate identity for some kind of furtive shit. They dip the sheep to get rid of all the crap on it. Figuratively, it’s getting rid of details of your life so you are not known to be an operative. Usually nasty business. Lee Oswald was sheep-dipped and he knew it. Why do you think he claimed he was a patsy? Now I suspect they can do it so the person being dipped can’t remember it happening. Makes it real hard to blow your cover if you don’t even think there is a cover to be blown.”
EZ’s spiel seemed plausible.
I wondered about Fillono. I am certain EZ mulled over him as well as he punched the gas and we cruised eastward into the approaching ni
ght.
AT 11:05 p.m. MST, EZ pulled the car into the gravel parking lot of the Vagabond Inn in the town of Grand Junction, Colorado—a small city just east of the Utah border.
The two-bed room was rustic and the dark-brown fuzz carpeting threadbare; a painting of an 1800s wagon train in a mesa-ridden landscape—the centerpiece of the wall behind the TV—“tied” the room together. A small table by the heavy-curtained window, a desk with lamp between the beds, and a small shower, toilet and sink in the back rounded out the orangish-brown-hued el cheapo motel room.
“You hit the shower, I’m gonna head to the convenience store next door and nab some goods,” EZ said.
The water hit my crunchy, dusty skin and ran down my body like a mudslide. Amazing how much dirt had gotten onto me—the water hitting the drain was brown throughout most of the shower. I soaped off twice for good measure. I finalized my half-hour hose-down by letting the water hit the back of my neck for a few minutes. I exited from that shower a new and refreshed man.
EZ had laid some new clothes on the sink: a pair of sweatpants, socks, and a 1996 Colorado Avalanche Stanley Cup Champions T-shirt—all purchases he had made at the truck-stop/convenience store next door. It all fit, maybe a tad loose on the sweats. He had also bought a bunch of Beef Jerky, some protein bars, a carton of milk, some orange juice, a box of Grape-Nuts and a bag of Cheetos.
I opened up the bag of jerky, sat on one of the beds and flipped on the tube to some program about Evel Knievel. I held the channel there, but with the volume low.
EZ was at the table eating a protein bar and Cheetos and writing in a small, leather-bound notebook. He would scribble, pause, scratch his chin, take a bite from the bar, scribble, pause, do a calculation in his head, eat a Cheeto, then scribble some more. He went on like this for a good five minutes.
Planet Fever Page 17
