Weird Ones

by Vernon, Steve

"Are you letting that monkey hold you down? He's just reached down inside of you, no deeper than your soul. All you need to do is reach up and shake him until he lets go. You knew that. You were thinking it, right before I showed up."

  Maggie pushed.

  She felt something outside of her, moving inside.

  "That's it girl. Just push. Just reach. All you've got to do is to get hold of that monkey. Just reach."

  Reach.

  Maggie tried to push.

  She felt something giving. It was like to push through a marshmallow. It gave and nothing changed.

  To hell with that.

  Reach.

  Reach.

  Reach.

  She told this to herself, over and over. It became a mantra, a motto, a tattoo invisibly and indelibly scratched upon her soul.

  I need out, she thought. She looked up from the darkness and just for a moment she saw the monkey reaching down towards her.

  I need to reach out, she thought.

  And that's just what she did.

  * 16 *

  Dreams are the simmering broth of the soup that we call life. We spend so much of our time paddling about in the realm of dreams. Asleep and awake, wishing for a little more luck, a little more time and a little more money. Dreams are the stories we tell ourselves in the dark.

  Bobby had never dreamed he could be so very much alone. Anansi was gone, Maggie was gone, even the spider above his typing desk was gone. He was all alone.

  He hauled himself up the aisle of the bus, pole by pole. The bus rocked at every step of the way as it bounced and rolled over the speed bumps and potholes that Bobby's over-active imagination figured ought to be there.

  There didn't seem to be anyone else left on the bus. The blonde, the messenger boy, the telescopic pervert, all of them had vanished. They were no longer needed on stage. Their roles had been played. Now it was a solo act. There was nothing left but Bobby and the aisle and the distant vision of the bus driver, slumped over his steering wheel.

  Bobby could see the driver up ahead, with his back turned so that Bobby couldn't see his face. His heavy rounded shoulders looked like a blue-clad hillock that Bobby had to find the strength to cross. In the distance, as Bobby stumbled and staggered towards that distant blue hillock, he imagined that he heard Julie Andrews singing "Climb Every Mountain". He mentally told her to shut her Von Trapp.

  He kept moving forward, one step at a time. Tunnel vision, Bobby thought. My eyes have grown a set of preconceived limitations. There were no more distractions to nudge him off course. There was nothing else out there to see because he'd finally decided just what he wanted to do.

  He had to save Maggie.

  It was good to have a goal. Step by step he got a little closer. The aisle seemed so long and distant. He kept telling himself that it had to be shorter, but he guessed he didn't believe it hard enough. He kept moving, hand over handing himself along the bus poles that felt as rubbery as bungee cords.

  A little closer.

  A little closer.

  Finally he arrived. At the front of the bus, directly behind the bus driver's seat. He still couldn't see the man's face. It might have been God or Ralph Kramden. All that he could see was the forever long reflection of the forever long bus aisle, trapped like a recurring nightmare in the magic bus's windshield. All he could see was his own staring reflection, and the dim shrouded features of the bus driver.

  "Oh my god," Bobby said.

  "Not hardly," the bus driver answered, turning slowly around to look Bobby straight in the eye. Bobby stood there, struck speechless, staring at himself staring back at himself from out of the bus driver's seat.

  "Woohoo, deja yoohoo," Bus Driver Bobby said from out of Bobby One's face.

  * 17 *

  "Oh my god," Bobby One repeated.

  Bus Driver Bobby shook his head. "I already told you I don't do messiah complexes. I'm strictly an identity crisis man."

  "You're me," Bobby One said.

  "You'd think that, wouldn't you?" Bus Driver Bobby replied.

  "I don't believe this."

  "On the contrary," Bus Driver Bobby said. "You do believe this. You've got to believe all of this. How else do you think that any of this is happening?"

  "So aren't you me?"

  "I'm how you picture yourself. Firm, in control - a man in a uniform. A man who knows where he's going to. A man in charge."

  "I wanted to be a bus driver?" asked Bobby One.

  "You wanted to be in control. You wanted to know the route. You wanted a schedule, so that you'd know when you got to whereever you were going to."

  "So am I?" Bobby One asked. "Are you in charge here?"

  "You'd think so, wouldn't you?"

  "So who is in control?"

  "Nobody," Bus Driver Bobby answered, with a smile.

  "Nobody?"

  "The wheels on the bus go round and round, no matter how much we pretend to steer it."

  "You're not steering?"

  Bus Driver Bobby kept smiling and shrugged. "I never learned how."

  Bobby One looked out the windshield. The Infobahn was no longer in sight. Instead, they were headed straight into a whirring blur of static.

  "Oh my god," Bobby One shouted.

  "You keep using that name," Bus Driver Bobby said. "I do not think it means who you think it does."

  Bobby One kept gawking as the whirring cloud of static drew closer.

  "I loved that movie," Bus Driver Bobby said. "The Princess Bride. Did you ever see it?"

  "I'm not in the mood for movie critique," Bobby One said. "What is that coming up?"

  "Bytes. It's a cloud of factoid bytes."

  The bus rolled closer to the cloud. Bobby One could hear it now. It sounded like a hive of radio white-water static.

  "Bites?" Bobby One asked.

  "Yes, bytes. All of the bits and pieces of data that collectively make up your continued existence. Your name, your driver's license, your age, your favorite color, the name of the dog you first cried over, how many times you've fantasized having sex with someone else besides your wife, how often you shave, the amount of hairs growing in your left nostril, how many times you've farted – a census of the senses, all of the trivia that glues your life together."

  The hiss of the statistics was deafening.

  "Facts like these keep life in a constant state of static."

  Bobby One closed his eyes as the bus plunged into the hissing fact-driven sandstorm of detail.

  The last thing that Bobby One heard was the voice of Bus Driver Bobby shrieking out one final question, "What's your sign?", as the factoid bytes mosquito-gnawed him down to nothingness and beyond.

  * 18 *

  Maggie continued to reach for something that taunted her high above in the darkness, a blue butterfly, a memory, maybe hope. The shape kept changing on her as she got closer.

  She didn't give up.

  She reached a little further.

  And further.

  * 19 *

  Bobby awoke, surrounded by a great rolling landscape of absolute whirling nonexistence.

  "Shh," a voice whispered beside him.

  Bobby turned, terrified that the shushing sound might have been a cloud of the factoid bytes, but it was Anansi.

  "Oh," Bobby said. "It's only you."

  "It's nice to feel wanted," Anansi said. "Your wife sends her best."

  "You've seen Maggie?"

  "Shh, they're still out there."

  Bobby squinted. He could see it now, all around him, a sandstorm of factoid bytes.

  He was in the heart of it.

  "The eye of it," Anansi whispered. "We're in the mote."

  "The moat?"

  "Exactly."

  There were weird pamphlets, flyers and books flapping batlike through the whirling cloud of statistics. Every now and then a swarm of factoid bytes would swoop in and buzz saw the weird flapping pamphlets into pulp.

  "Flyers," Anansi said. "Harmless in themselves, nothin
g more than a bit of junk mail. Junk food, really."

  "You eat that stuff?" Bobby asked.

  "They do," Anansi pointed at a cloud of passing factoid bytes. "Like potato chips. They eat it, crap it out, and eat it again. It's kind of a self-perpetuating dichotomy. They eat the spam and then they crap more spam."

  "Come again?"

  "It's a human habit. Man builds walls of statistics so that he can climb over them and peek at the garden of fantasy that grows within the cloistered temple of his own imagination. Shhh."

  Bobby heard a galloping sound coming from the heart of the static.It sounded like the gallop of big-footed puppies, only larger.

  He caught his breath and held it.

  "Shhh," Anansi whispered.

  They came out of the middle ground, warping into and out of perspective. Bobby saw a sudden image of huge gray wolf-like beasts, with textbooks for jaws and bright crystalline scanners in place of their eyes, snapping up chapters full of the buzzing factoid bytes. It was like watching a herd of bears tearing through a colony of beehives.

  "Lie low," Anansi warned. "They're feeding, but they're also in flight."

  "What are they running from?" Bobby asked.

  "The gigabytes."

  "What?"

  "The factoid bytes are running from the gigabytes," Anansi said. "There is always something bigger, story man. Don't you ever forget that."

  A great shadow passed overhead. Bobby huddled down, feeling a little like a dust bunny hiding from the great sucking maw of the all consuming Hoover. One of the gigabytes was drawn up like a cow in the heart of a Hollywood CGI twister.

  "The megabytes," Anansi whispered. "The big unanswerable truths that men have built. Death, taxes and the need for higher education. Global warming, nuclear winter, and unscented antiperspirant. Golden calves that have been ruthlessly over-built in the gymnasiums of too-much-thought."

  Bobby just stared.

  "Listen," Anansi hissed. "Do you want to save your wife?"

  Bobby's eyes hardened.

  "What do I have to do?"

  Anansi grinned and sang a little song. "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don't know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she'll die."

  "What do I have to do?" Bobby repeated.

  Anansi pointed towards a distant blue light, just behind the herd of fleeing gigabytes.

  "Just run for that light," Anansi said. "She's right on the other side of that."

  Bobby stared at the whirling mass of factoid bytes, gigabytes and the heavy ominous shadow of the megabyte.

  "Don't think, story man. Just do it."

  Bobby stood up and ran for the light. He could feel the memory of his heartbeat echoing in the cage of his imagined ribs.

  "Run, story man. Run for the end."

  Bobby ran through the whirring cloud of factoid bytes, feeling them peeling him away, concept by belief, one memory at a time.

  "Reach, story man. Just reach!"

  Bobby reached.

  It felt like that pins and needles feeling that comes from sleeping too hard on a badly bent limb. Body lice, electro shock therapy, and a gajillion gaggles of geese galloping over Bobby's grave.

  He felt the factoid bytes unraveling the fiber of his being one strand of reality at a time. One stitch unknotted, every illusion and belief and fact painstakingly chipped away. A sculptor making a carving of nothing, whittling the pine block down and down and down.

  There are two moments in this life when we feel we can almost make a difference. The first takes place as you push your way through the wet red carpet of the birth canal; the second as you come for the very first time with the person you have chosen to love. There is a haunting ache that harmonizes behind the empire dreams that thunder at such moments. A lonely harping whisper that wonders and wants to know when will it end? What will be left after it is all taken away?

  Bobby pushed forward, leopard crawling through a wind tunnel of soul erosion. The factoid bytes honed him down into something a little sharper than life.

  Somewhere far outside of the whirling howling drone his existence had become, Bobby heard Anansi shouting at him, "Reach, story man, reach!"

  Bobby stretched out his hand, feeling his fingers stretch like vinegared chicken bones, reaching for what ever lay out there far beyond the atmosphere of facts that force-funneled into his lungs. He felt a small blue hand squeeze around his, pulling him through.

  He felt the blue, he felt the loneliness and the want.

  He felt the need.

  And then he was through.

  And he saw what was left of Maggie.

  * 20 *

  Bobby dragged himself back through the computer monitor screen, feeling the edges of the polarized glass pucker around what was left of him like the lips of a plastic wrapped womb. As he emerged back into his blue monkey dung stained office he experienced the ambivalent relief of a shipwrecked sailor crawling up onto a beach full of spear-smiling cannibals.

  Nothing had changed. The room still crawled with blue monkey dung, seething with mutated dust mites and dung sucking worms.

  Maggie was standing in the doorway. Her gray fuzzy monkey slippers were laughing out loud, their latex simian teeth runneled with a funny blue fungus.

  The monkey was still perched on Maggie's shoulder, and its hand was crammed down into Maggie's throat. By this time the little bastard had worked his way into her, shoulder deep.

  Only something had changed.

  Bobby could see his wife's hand, as delicate as a small fleshy butterfly. He recognized her wedding ring. The hand had somehow reached up through her own throat and was protruding from her mouth. Her delicate wrist twisted at an unbelievably uncomfortable angle, reaching down to throttle the blue monkey as it continued to strangle her throat.

  A closed circuit.

  "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly," Bobby whispered.

  What could he do?

  He looked around the room one more time. He felt an itch, niggling at him from somewhere underneath his skin. The answer was here, he just had to find it.

  He felt drawn to his computer.

  He sat down before it.

  For a long time there was nothing. He stared at the empty screen, knowing that there was a universe of possibilities hiding behind its vacant facade.

  And then it happened.

  Bobby felt that tiny spider that had lived for so long in the back of his brain, the one who could transport him away from his day to day troubles and take him somewhere else.

  He felt it beginning to stir.

  And then the story spider began to weave.

  "If you don't know what to do," Bobby said to the empty room. "Make something up."

  Bobby grabbed for the keyboard like a dying a man grabbing for the priest's offered crucifix.

  Nothing made much sense. He was in some kind of strange territory that stank suspiciously of lunar-induced hysteria and Rod Serling's favorite brand of cologne. Bobby sat down, and the spider began to whisper softly in the back of his brain and his hands began to type.

  Dear Prince Wakanda...

  * 21 *

  Bobby sat there, his finger poised over the send button.

  He concentrated on the blue monkey dung, which by now had wall-to-walled across the floorboards of his office like a spongy blue carpet. The wire worms worked their way in and out of the carpet, weaving strange unimaginable hieroglyphic patterns. The mutated dust mites kicked and scampered and sucked into and out of the blue moldering dung like some bizarre insectoid form of dolphin-gophers.

  Bobby had emptied his coffee tin of change, and had scattered a circle of quarters and dimes about his desk. The blue dung clumped about the coinage, lovingly tracing their hard wired forms across the upturned faces of Roosevelt and all of those blind cruciform eagles.

  Inside that circle of silver he traced another circle of printer's ink, and inside that a circle of pens. That was the hardest circle of all. There were never enough pens to be found
, especially around a writer's desk.

  Bobby kept waiting. A small bead of sweat exuded from his brow. It rolled slowly down until dropping to the floor. He heard the sweat bead land and splash in the blue dung. He wondered briefly if the blue dung enjoyed the taste of salt.

  He was waiting for some form of a sign.

  He kept singing softly to himself.

  "There was an old lady who swallowed a dog. What a hog, to swallow a dog. She swallowed the dog to catch the cat. She swallowed the cat to catch the bird. She swallowed the bird to catch the spider that wriggled and jiggled and wiggled inside her."

  The spider hiding within Bobby's brain kept whispering softly.

  Bobby kept waiting for a sign.

  He'd already been out to the kitchen for a sandwich. He'd seen the pile of plunder she'd heaped upon their floors - toasters and coffee pots and shoes of all shape and size. Jewelry and exercise gear and three brand new shovels. He thought of cargo cults and clearance centers and yard sales and potlatch.

  "She swallowed the spider to catch the fly but I don't know why she swallowed the fly," he softly continued to sing.

  Bobby kept waiting.

  He wasn't sure just what he was waiting for.

  He had fallen into some kind of gray area of existence. Facts and motivation were completely useless. All that he had to go on was his instinct and the whisperings of his blind spider thoughts.

  "She'll probably die," Bobby whispered.

  "I'm home," Maggie said, through the mouth of the monkey.

  "Hi, honey," Bobby said, doing his best to channel Desi Arnez thoughts. Lucy you got some explaining to do. "I've been busy writing."

  In fact he hadn't. What he'd been doing was giving his computer a case of total amnesia, erasing every single file he'd ever saved in its hard drive. Stories and notes and records. A novel that was three-quarter completed.

  All gone. He'd unwritten them, deleting them one word at a time in a slow creative suicide. There had to be sacrifice for the kind of conjure he had planned. Ask the autumn leaf. Learn to let go - there is strength in divesture.

  "Did you sell anything?" Maggie asked.

  Bobby could hear the monkey clamoring in her voice. The need and the greed. She wanted more purchasing power. He expected that she was broke.