The Mentor

by Pat Connid

  “Could be residual charge in the engine, static electricity.”

  “Yeah, usually it takes a while for that to bleed out, man,” he said. “Could be.”

  Another half minute of silence, and I’d moved to the opposite wall. Still, just an echo, nothing definite. I asked, “How often is she painted pink?”

  “Not often enough.”

  “Which is?” I remembered my conversation with Pavan about the dome light, the only thing that had worked on the van when it went into the deep. Maybe there was some emission from there.

  “Hasn’t been pink yet, actually.” He looked like he was trembling, slightly.

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah and I can’t jerk off or anything because we think it would be best for me to save all the little guys up and unload at the same time.”

  I crawled under the light in the middle of the van’s ceiling and held the device there. No change.

  “Is that what ’we’ think?”

  He nodded. “More her, actually. But, you know, she’s smarter than I am.”

  I ran the meter across the dash, the panel, the glove box. Nothing there. “So she walks around naked in a rainbow of colors, except pink, all day and you haven’t had sex in…”

  “Seventy-four days, nineteen hours and about twenty-four minutes.”

  I said, “Bummer.” Clicking on the light agitated the meter’s needle.

  “Well, don’t do that. You’re just picking up radiation from the light, man.”

  “There could be some push into the low radio frequencies signal if this were just a light,” I said, clicked the light off and the reading went away. “But that be pretty minor.”

  Doc peered into the door window and when I turned the light on, meter pegged again. I looked at him across the seat.

  “Yeah, I don’t know... but you’ve got some ultra-high in there and that shouldn’t be coming from the bulb. You turn the light on, could be that something else on that circuit sends out a signal.”

  “Then, every time you open the door, something in here sends a location.”

  “Wow, yeah,” he said. I nodded and added: “So you know where and when I got in and out of the van. But maybe no constant track.” I hit the light with the flat of my palm a couple times and it cracked and smashed. Holding the meter to the busted light, I opened the door. No light, no burst of signal.

  There was a problem with the light/GPS tracker theory. The Mentor had put me in the van for a ride. Just the one. That should have been the last time the van was in my possession. Had he anticipated I’d pick it up from the impound lot?

  I came out and yanked the side door, and it closed with a clang that rattled off the thick walls. Running the hand held signal detector up and down the van again, there was still the faintest of signals, just slightly stronger maybe, but I couldn’t zero in on it.

  We checked under the hood and Doc even climbed underneath the vehicle since he’s skinnier than me but came up empty. I was pretty sure all my friends were skinnier than me.

  “Might be in these side panels,” he said, the meter in hand showed the slightest bounce as he moved it from side to side. “But you said he reinforced them.”

  “Yeah, I’m not getting in there without a circular saw.”

  “Got one,” Doc said and clicked off the detector.

  “Not in the pool is it?”

  He thought on that for a moment. “I hope not. Lost the pool.”

  “You mentioned that,” I said. “No, I’m not cutting into this. If he put another tracker on the van, he wouldn’t bury it in steel. Might be residual RF from the radio receiver, sympathetic vibrations in the metal… But, for the time being I’ll just park it a few blocks from where I want to be and walk.”

  Instead, I picked up a hammer and rapped on the right side of the van, then walked around and did the same to the left.

  “More hollow on the other side. Weird.”

  “Makes sense,” I said and put the hammer down. “That way you can be assured that it lands on that the driver’s side when it plunges into a quarry lake.”

  “Is that something you’re likely to do with it?”

  “Not again,” I said. As he raised the door to the Quiet Room, I nodded toward his studio up stairs. “You got enough black acrylic paint to do some work?”

  “What sort of work?”

  “Van painting. If I have someone looking for me, they’re looking for a white van.”

  Doc stared off for a moment. “Not black. But, I got a bunch of paint left over after that Piedmont Park Spring exhibit got shuttered before I could get even halfway finished.”

  “I remember that,” I said, nodding. “The fertility one that got shut down after the religious symbolism began to look a little too, um, Freudian.”

  “Just after we erected it.” A year later, the regretful pun still had him grinning from ear-to-ear.

  “Yes, ‘erected’, thanks for that.”

  “Protests, letters from school boards, threats to permanently pull city funding… I still have the photo from the paper. I’m like a blur in the background, just off the unpainted tip. Art in motion. Kinetic creativity.”

  “Okay, so you have left over paint from the project?”

  “Yeah, a shit-ton of purple!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Over the years, I’ve made several semi-serious attempts to learn how to meditate. Most of the times that I sought spiritual singularity or tried to get my chi lined up with my chakras, I’ve just fallen asleep. There’s just something about lying down, relaxing, clearing one’s head that seems to naturally lead to zzzz.

  When they’re not setting themselves on fire, Tibetan monks are said to sit and meditate ten hours a day. You would sort of envy them, that level of concentration and commitment, but what are they mulling over for ten hours? And at this supposed higher level of consciousness—TEN hours a day, every day— those guys should be churning out new ideas.

  But, nope, nothing. No great works of literature, no cures for cancer, not even a cool card trick. I think they’re either sleeping or simply looking to get out of the daily rock-paper-scissors showdown that picks the next volunteer for self-conflagration.

  The closest I’d come to a meditative state was driving long distance, hours a day. The repetitive pattern of the white-dashed line, the binaural hum as the tires gnash into the black top... that puts me into a zone.

  It was probably somewhere between one and two in the morning when I finally gave up trying to fall asleep. You'd think crashing in Doc's garage-turned-workroom-- all that paint, acetone, and whatever else he's got in there-- I'd be out like a baby (one that'd be given a half bottle of Children's Nyquil).

  My only thought was to head out, go for a drive and try to bring the sleepies on.

  The one thing that tripped me up was the thought there might be some sort of signal coming from the van. A little paranoid, sure, but life-threatening, bizarre scenarios brought on by sadistic asshole abduction, trust me, it just comes natural.

  I did not want to get back on his radar.

  A walk, then. Clear my head, and then maybe back for a couple hours of sleep. And if there were a convenience story midway that, who knows?, stocked a beer I liked, maybe that might help too.

  Sitting up slowly, groggy, I was still in LaLa land when a fist took hold of my shirt, jerked me upward, and then slammed me down against the crappy couch. Beneath me, two ferocious springs took their shot and drilled into the middle of my back.

  Before I could take a breath, the hand was back yanking me forward, and I felt a sweaty forehead connect with mine.

  “You’re not an easy man to find, my very good friend Dexter,” The Mentor said.

  I raised my hands to grab my head, it was throbbing, but they were brushed aside like thin kitchen curtains in a thunderstorm. A snap at my neck, then the small sting of a bug’s bite, and cold, black ooze quickly began to spill into my brain.

  A rag doll, my vision blurring, he hadn�
�t even bothered with binding my hands. Whatever he’d given me, it worked fast.

  Looking up, the ceiling turned to sky, and just beyond his head in the dull light the heavens were turning the color of scraped steel. He looked down to look at me and that perfect smile was like staring into the sun.

  “You’re slipping fast, little brother, so I’ll be quick here,” he said, as his voice rippled the world around us. “The safest and quickest trek, as you’ll discover, is north but that’ll earn you some serious confrontation, challenges—like in the forest areas. They’re cooler but don’t go unarmed.”

  Son-of-a-BITCH!

  “Bring water with you,” he said, his grip tightening. “The rule is a gallon of water a day. But you and I know how much a gallon of water weighs. Heavy as shit. Ain’t that right?”

  Vaguely, I remembered there was, above me, a vase or glass-- a window?-- and I thought if I could kick at it, the shattering, would catch someone’s attention. At least it might get a neighbor on the phone to the police.

  “Right? The weight of a gallon of wat-TER” His grip got tighter.

  I growled back: “Eight pounds.”

  “Eight?”

  “Eight POINT three-four,” I said, surprising even myself by the recall, which was an echo of a voice, one of my college professors, in my head. I then added: “Ass-HAT.”

  “If you can steal a compass, you should. You need to make a beeline to safe quarter—not walk in circles.”

  As I spun downward, my breathing slowed, and the black ooze, which felt now like down quilts folding over my body-- he jerked my body, bringing me back.

  "Not yet, sleepyhead."

  I heard a window shatter but I knew somehow it wasn't real. Something in my mind was breaking down, breaking way. As my vision faded, I could feel a pressure building behind my eyes.

  “Out in the open, that dry air, keep your mouth closed. I know that’ll be a tough one for you, Mr. Chatterbox,” he said, lifting me as he laughed.

  For a man as strong as he was, he still struggled as he put me into a fireman's carry. His words were a little strained, now: “No shorts. Long sleeves, long pants. Nighttime is relatively safer to travel but then you’re talking about all sorts of crawling nasties: snakes, scorpions, centipedes and worse. Look for game trails which can lead to somewhere better temporarily but remember they’re called game trails for a reason.”

  I started to fade, drifting off, anticipating my next new hellhole. My captor growled in exertion, his body banged against the wall as he opened the door to the garage and headed to the outside.

  “Hold on, hold on now, stay with me,” he said moving faster now, his momentum picking up. “Now, remember the "rule of threes" isn’t just for jokes, Dexter. Very important. Food, water, air. You need to worry about water. No more than three days without water, right?”

  As I fell back into the blackness, my head lolled up and I saw stars.

  So beautiful.

  So, so beautiful.

  “Okay. You’re ready. Ready as you’ll ever be.”

  Then, I heard my two most hated words on the planet.

  “Lesson begins.”

  I DON'T OFTEN HAVE sex dreams. This is not because I don’t wish to have sex dreams. I wish every dream could be a sex dream. There’d be shtup-a-palooza all night if I had it my way but no one running the dream booth ever seems to be asking me for a playlist.

  In fact, most of my dreams are completely unconnected. I’m talking to a butterfly that’s spinning acorns for an AM radio station in rural Missouri during the football game while the glass tilts back and shows me the easiest way to sew the monkey’s arm back on the stapler’s bad mood.

  Seriously. They are that jumbled, messed up.

  I wouldn’t even mind messed up if, say, between the football game and monkey’s arm somewhere there’s a naked Jennifer Connelly or something.

  Still, it was clear that I was dreaming. Or at least that seemed to be the explanation that made the most sense. The woman I was making out with as we sat, tired and leaning against the thatch wall after dancing all night under the fruit-covered Jello bats (see?)… Well, she was a passionate kisser.

  Did I know her? She was really, really into me.

  Finally, she pulled back—needing to confess her love to me, most likely, before we consummated our love in a passionate, even violent, expression of two strangers seeking solace in one other.

  And she said: “Rrrarrrrnnnnttttt!”

  IN GENERAL, WAKING UP— the mind discovering that the reality it had taken for granted the past several hours is a fiction and now distrustful of this new construct— waking up can be pure terror.

  Most of us, by the time we’re old enough to be conscious of this terror, have grown so familiar with it, and that particular extreme fear is processed, packaged and sent to some cerebral incinerator (likely to be recycled and reformed into sleep apnea, narcolepsy, or even nighttime erectile dysfunction, who knows). We don’t even notice how unnerving the transition can be.

  Occasionally, I’ve woken up, only to be instantly confronted with a new, instant mind-numbing horror that snaps into my brain, questions like, “Where am I?”, “Who is that?’ and “Are my tetanus shots current?”

  Within seconds of waking, my heart began to race, but each time I tried to open my eyes, I was punished by the angry sun. My sense of smell was really the only data channel with any information to process, and it told me something was really rank. And, for once, that something wasn’t me.

  I’d been sitting up, my hands bound behind me and when my fingers flexed, the grit they found felt like dirt. But the oppressive, stuffy heat told me this was indoors, the sun then coming from a window on the opposite side of the room.

  The donkey leaning in the open window above me griped again and I thrashed my head a couple times so he’d—no, no—she’d stop licking my face. I must have had some food on it. Or I’m just hot to donkeys.

  Donkey?

  My shoulders felt like they were shredded on the inside and my hands were strapped together with thick ropes. Best guess is that I’d been dragged by my bound hands a good part of the journey to wherever I was now.

  Suddenly a pant leg eclipsed the sun, filling my blurry vision. It smelled like sweat and dirt and was oily against my face. The man was chattering at me, angry, but I didn’t understand a word of it. Arching my neck back, I saw he was chasing away my new girlfriend. He closed the wooden shutter, latching it with a feeble rope.

  He looked down at me as he tightened the knot behind my back. I said: “That’s not the first time I’ve woken up with an ass in my face.”

  His expression didn’t change as he yanked on the cord a couple times to make sure it was secure.

  “Too easy?” I said; my throat raw and dry. “Yeah, you wait. I’m just getting warmed up here. Saving the ‘A’ material for the big close.”

  Across the dry, dusty room, there was an empty table, three chairs. No plates or cups, just a huge bowl in the center.

  Desert.

  I concentrated the word again: desert.

  Just before passing out, I'd realized The Mentor had been spewing info for surviving a desert, so it wasn’t a complete surprise. Before I passed out, I’d tried to come up with every desert in North America, to prepare myself.

  But, we don’t have a ton of rifle-toting, foreign-tongued donkey owners in North America. So, I’d been on the slow boat to Crazyland again for however long.

  “Where am I?”

  The man bent down, his dark face scarred and chipped by the elements. Either that or this dude was getting the real cheap moisturizer and paying the price.

  He said something to me, asking me a question. Rolling the words over and around in my mind, I had no idea what he was asking. Inferring as much as I could from my surroundings, it didn’t seem like he’d asked me if I needed a glass of water (he didn’t appear that accommodating to tied up guests) or if I thought the surviving members of Led Zeppelin were ever goin
g to get back together. No friggin’ clue what he wanted?

  I said, “Nice breath. You haven’t been brushing after meals, have you?”

  Bobo the Malodorous asked his question again, this time louder. I shook my head and shrugged. He seemed to be getting agitated and when I caught sight of the AK-47 slung over his shoulder, so it seemed agitated wasn’t the ideal disposition for my new friend.

  Another rolling boil of words flooded over me and then he shouted something, spitting as he did. Staring me down for what felt like an eternity, he muttered something, took a few steps back and pulled the window on the opposite side of the room closed, the flap arching downward on its hinges, and the panel of wood banging on the sill until it settled into place, a sliver of light slicing at a small spot on the dirt floor.

  Looking around the room, about fifteen feet down the wall, I saw one other man in similar condition to me; except he was a dozen years older, maybe a foot taller, and had a bullet hole just below the hairline. Dirt covered head lolled forward; his dead eyes were wide as if something important had just occurred to him.

  “Listen, I’m not with that guy,” I said. “I don’t know who he is or what the crazy bastard who put me here said to you, but I don’t need lead to the head for any reason. Just let me know what I can do to help—“

  The man wailed at me, then spun the rifle toward me. He was insistent, asking me the same thing, over and over. I shook my head, “no” because whatever he was asking, it seemed like some sort of accusation. At least by the look in his eyes, that was my guess.

  “No, no. Wasn’t me,” I said, fully aware my words were wasted. “I've never even met your sister.”

  Slowly, my nasty-breathed friend took a step back and exhaled, lowering his weapon. At the sight of that, I also exhaled.

  Two more men burst into the room through the door, and one of them began barking at my new BFF. I took this chance to investigate my surroundings, look around. One big room. Two windows, one of which was above my head, the other directly across from me. A door to my left was closed and in front of it two guys with rifles were talking with the other guy with the rifle. Typical. Everyone but me had a cool rifle.