by Gibby Haynes
In ninth grade I began to hang out more and more at Carla’s, anyway, often spending the night there, as it was closer to school. I now have my own room in her guesthouse. I can basically come and go as I please. It’s sweet. She has a huge compound where Mr. Cigar chases rabbits around in circles. He can somehow corner a rabbit and run it around in a circle for like fifteen or twenty times before the rabbit has to lie down exhausted. Then Cigar gets close to it and barks.
Plus, I’m privy to the details of the craziest tech leaps in recent history, things that Joe Blow won’t even hear about for the next two or three years.
THE GIRL WITH THE DRUGSELLING EYES
Tonight the Itty Bitty Corporation is sponsoring an insane dance party with drug-selling clowns, as they have several times in the past. Which might actually sound insane but to our common credit we are patriotically supporting our country and our country is letting the kids do what the kids do. Sometimes the kids do “Insane Clown.” Sometimes our country does “Insane Clown.” Tonight, I suspect, it will be a little bit of both because IBC will be demonstrating a new technology during the gig. No matter what, that feels multilevel creepy—actually, Big Brother-style creepy, but who’s to know? It’s only a video system. Or we might all get eyeball cancer when we turn sixty.
I know Carla trusts me. She lets me stay at her awesome guesthouse without even asking.
And I trust Carla. I figure it’s the least I/we can do.
We’ll let them do mind control experiments on innocent children, and they’ll let us have an insane dance party with drug-selling clowns. So I don’t really mind a few government contractor types having a good time while checking out a new technology . . . I guess. I haven’t seen the aerosol screen application yet. Tonight is its debut. But at the lab I saw a three-dimensional object wrapped in the video screen stuff and it blew me away. It was basically a foot-long object that one second looked like an egg-shaped video monitor, then the next second it totally disappeared.
When Carla giddily showed it to me, she said, “Yep.”
My jaw dropped. It made me lose my balance . . . super weird. Spherical pixels and tiny video cameras make it all possible. Up until I saw the disappearing egg-screen demonstration, I thought she had simply (or not) invented a super-cool new video monitor, but Carla’s demonstration made it clear it was much more than that. The perfect camouflage, perhaps. It just depended on what the aerosol smart gel looked like at its unveiling tonight. Carla said that whatever the application, it would be impossible to believe, and given her track record I just gotta believe.
When I asked her if it were possible a person could be turned into a walking video screen, she smiled and said, “Uh-huh. And it even works on hair, sweetheart.”
AND BEAMS MADE OF BROWN HIT THE GROUND
Pulling off at the farm market a quarter mile from the party . . . it hits me like a brun of ticks. The closer we get to everything, the farther away “nothing” becomes. The weird lightness in my stomach is intensifying. In fact, everything seems to be intensifying. Without knowledge of how we got here, I watch myself park in the event-staff lot next to the office trailer. The clown is there, happily waiting for the party favors. All of a sudden I’m throwing up in the Porta-Potty.
When I opened the door, there were a ton of people milling around, the sun was going down and as my face felt the awesome embrace of that cool evening air I instantly went from feeling dizzy, sweaty and sick to being absolutely sure I was solidly in love with the world and the world in turn was solidly in love with me. As sunlight gave way to light show, my responsibilities gave way to what the fuck? The few things I’m supposed to do, at this point in the evening, become randomly unclear then completely unimportant as my field of vision fills with vibrating night glow. Nondescripts.
An overwhelming desire to be with my people while completely without knowledge of what or who my people might be. So off into the hoo-doo night I go, undaunted and afraid . . . everything all at once . . . lights cracking colors . . . humming loudly while hundreds of people glide around me in total silence, only occasionally to be heard whispering, in the distance, unimportant things of grave concern. It takes me a while before I realize that the reason everything is silent is because everything was loud. I drift away from what later I will identify as music and find myself exploring the limestone formations that line the walls of the sinkhole at Honeycomb Falls. The sinkhole itself is at least seventy yards wide, with about half of it collapsed to form a gigantic beach with 180 degrees of waterfalls, behind which are caves of dripping moss and roundish window-shaped rock formations, some of the holes deep enough to step through. Apache Indians used to camp here and around the nearby spring-fed creeks. Then the white settlers moved in and called it Honeycomb Falls, later to find out that the Indians called it the Apache word for “honeycomb.” Well, that’s the local legend, anyway, but I bet they were really Comanche Indians and I bet they called it whatever the Comanche word for “super-trippy place to hang out” is. Because it is super trippy, and there is always something new to think about . . . always . . .
Behind the falls, feeling the lights . . . The party glistens through the filter of a hundred yards and a wall of rushing water. For a while . . . I don’t even know how long. Maybe an hour. Maybe a thousand years. Leaning forward through the cool liquid sheet, face accidentally making contact with reality, I notice the view to be a slightly more focused affair than before. What earlier appeared to be a close-up of a slice of toast has now revealed itself to be a stage and a crowd of people, hundreds and hundreds of dancing people in a large, grassy field with three or four humongous oak trees. Not your run-of-the-mill oak trees but Roger Rabbit–style oak trees . . . giant ones . . . glow-in-the-dark, beyond-belief oak trees. Disorienting. Oddly animated. Well beyond real. Carla Marks has done it again. They are trees, I’ll give ’em that . . . beautiful old oak trees, but made of light, or high-high-high-definition video . . . photo resolution four-dimensional cartoons. Pasted onto themselves. Dis-fucking-orienting. So with mind blown, muddy shoes and a stick in hand named Yard Boss, entering the pulsing crowd was nothing less than an exercise in mass hypnotic freedom. At the edge of the crowd, an old man with long gray hair approaches me. Touching my shoulder, he looks me square in the eyes and says, “Mau-Mau the flak catchers.” Stumbling past, I look back and he is nowhere. Maybe even no one. Possibly nothing at all.
The confusing rumble of silence has now become music and the most amazing rhythmic experience ever. A large oak in front of me turns into a giant dragon head then totally disappears. I realize now, house music is totally cool—I hadn’t given it a fair shake. The tree now reappears as a weird box of cookies . . . I think. A variety of off-scale primates dancing nearby reveal themselves only at the edge of my vision, and their presence is comforting if not directly verifiable. I feel at ease with my furry friends . . . collectively bouncing up and down to this unheard music. Multiplying and dividing at will. What began as voluntary movements have now become an effortless flow as trees turn to insects and back into clouds. I feel good. Yes, I’ve finally found my people. Not that it’s super heavy or anything. But my people turned out to be this jovial array of misshapen primates playfully dancing upright in a void of myopic singularity. No big deal.
THERE’S A RED HORSE OVER YONDER
It seems like minutes to the hour, or it could be hours to the minute. I can’t really judge time as what I’m experiencing isn’t what I’m experiencing. It’s only a description of the experience, and that gets tricky. The devil’s in the details with reality, and when description is the only option things can get left out or added in a dozen different ways. You gotta be quick. Stay on top of it and goooo with the flow.
So with the flow I go, finding myself in front of the stage.
My primates are with me, and the DJ has a square-shaped campfire for a head. The music is so much more than sound. At least it’s being described that way.
> It’s so weird—if I think about breathing I have to think to breathe, and it’s totally confusing because sometimes I catch myself holding my breath, and I don’t know if it’s because I forgot to not think about breathing or vice versa. Like I can’t believe what I’m seeing, and I can’t believe what I believe, so it totally makes me believe what I’m seeing is real because I can’t believe it is—it has to be unbelievable or it isn’t real, and thank God it’s in slow motion.
Despite the fact that most of my thoughts literally disappear while being irretrievably stacked at a secret location in an unknown portion of my brain, I feel compelled to examine all thoughts before they become unthinkable. Then store them in a place where I at least have a chance to validate their potential believability before they are eliminated from any meaningful historical reference. Jesus, thinking about thinking is hard work, but I can’t stand the idea of losing even useless information in the thought-sorting process. After all, life is too short to waste time on anything that’s not (unbelievably) real. And not only that; how long have I been here? How long will this last, and—oh no . . . time . . . then, oh yeah, time is beginning to mean something. At some point this has to end. The bears are starting to give way to humans, and then . . .
RETURN OF THE DOG
The music stops. The sky breaks, the crowd sizzles and the primates draw themselves gone. It’s only been like seventeen years. Even though I’ve stopped dancing, as it were, the dancing motion continues from within. I find myself in a crowd of humans. The lights go still, becoming white. I stop for a moment to admire the oak trees, which are now icy bright from trunk to tip. A phosphorescent capillary system waving and weaving itself up to the sky.
I say, “Wow,” kind of loud.
A stranger says, “No shit,” kind of loud back.
This trip is awesome . . . I can never ever do it again. Even if I want to. It feels like my entire being is covered by a giant sock. I unconsciously follow the crowd toward the parking lot. Oh yeah, I remember . . . I work here. I’ve got to go to the office, settle up with the clown, generally take care of business and . . .
Where is Mr. Cigar?
Turning in a mild panic, I mouth the word Cig and hear a quiet bark from behind.
“Oh, there you are, buddy. I totally forgot about you, man. I’m sorry.”
Another bark, a wag of the tail and off we head toward the trailers and my end-of-party responsibilities.
NARCANE
I’d taken however much around five-thirty to six. It’s now like three in the morning, my phone is dead and the lights around the corners of my eyes have given way to almost-normal vision. However, the mind effects are still enough for me to be the happiest guy in the hemisphere. I wonder how I’m going to react to the good old-fashioned fluorescent lights.
As we approach the trailer, Lytle swings out of the door, wild-eyed, with a crazed look on his face. That’s fairly normal, but he catches my eye and shouts: “Dude! Where have you been, man?”
Oh no. Definitely something’s up.
“We got ripped off, man! We got ripped off! That fucking pig was watching me and just—”
“What? Whoa, slow down. We got ripped off? By a pig? You mean a cop? What are you talking about?”
“You won’t believe it, man, but he was watching me, and right as I collected from everybody, this guy walks up, flashes a badge and says: ‘What’s going on? What you got in that backpack, boss? Besides balloons and shit.’ I was totally freaked out, and he dragged me into the wheelchair-access Porta-Potty. I don’t know why I remember that. We were right over—”
“What happened, dude?!”
“So he was like, What do you got there? What are you selling? That Molly? And starts going through my shit. He’s got me handcuffed to the wheelchair rail then starts pulling out twenties while he’s going, ‘Whoa there, son. You’re a dealer. You know dealers go to jail in this county, son. They go to prison with the big guys’—you know, MS-13, Southerns, Texas Syndicate . . . all that shit. He keeps going on about what’s going to happen to me, and it’s really freaking me out.”
Lytle pauses, suddenly worried-looking.
“Yeah, yeah?” I press.
“Then, out of my backpack comes a baggie with about twenty hits in it and he says, ‘Looks like at least a hundred hits of MDMA in here,’ and shit like, ‘Wow, what a shame—that’s like twenty years in prison, son. With your other two charges, that’s three strikes and you’re out.’ Oscar! He fucking knew about me getting busted for weed last year in January twice in three weeks. Total freak busts.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, man? Like I’m going to take away your allowance or something?”
“It’s not that, man. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you . . . but you were in Florida with Carla. It was no big deal, like I said. One case got reduced to paraphernalia, and I thought the other charge got totally blown off—”
“I don’t care about that crap, man,” I interrupt, but gently, trying to focus. “What happened tonight? Why are you here and not in jail?”
The clown shrugs, incredulous. “Then the cop writes me out a ticket for running a red light. Then he takes the backpack with all our money from ticket sales and everything and says, ‘You oughta take care of that traffic violation as soon as possible, son. You wouldn’t want your past to come back and haunt you.’ Like a total asshole.” Lytle looks up. “He just ripped us off. That was all our dough from the gig. Everything. Like forty grand.”
Wow. Again, not sure if I say it or think it.
“Yeah, he knew everything, man . . . It was a total setup. I mean, what are we going to do about this asshole, call a hit man? Call other cops? Like, legit cops? Tell Carla?”
Oh, dude.
“Yeah, man,” Lytle says.
Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.
“Yep.”
Damn.
“Yep.”
“What county was he?”
Lytle pulls out his traffic/trafficking ticket. “Here it is. Sergeant Cletus Acox . . .”
Blah-de-blah. Is that name even real?
Lytle’s voice fades in a spiderweb blast of neural connectivity. Holy shit, Lytle. That was the same shit-bag cop who knew my name right before I ran into Larry Teeter. (Who wished me luck.) Then thinking out loud. “The cop must have fucking known what I was up to because of Larry Teeter, who must have conspired to—”
Somehow the two seem connected.
“Oscar! Snap out of it.”
“Huh?”
“Anyway, I was handcuffed to the wheelchair handrail! And Cleet-ass comes back after about three seconds and says, ‘Oops. Forgot my handcuffs. See you never . . . you should hope.’ He definitely got that right. I do hope I never see that asshole again.”
I nod, my mind racing. “Yeah, man, same here. Fucking unbelievable. You got busted near the toilets around the corner there?”
“Yep. I was going to find you. Where were you all night, man? I saw you near the front of the stage for a while . . . You were, like, dancing with a stick in your hand.”
“You mean Yard Boss?
Lytle flashes a quick grin. “So the stick has a name? Kind of weird . . . but cool, I guess.”
“Lytle, did anybody see the police involvement going on? Like people from the office?”
“No, I don’t think so. He had me in the toilet pretty quick . . . He was wearing kind of normal guy clothes. Creepy normal guy clothes.”
I am trying to make sense of all this, but I know that I’m due inside the trailer. “Speaking of office people, what’s going on in the office?”
“Carla’s in there now, man. She’s waiting for Jack Ogilvie and that company-government dude or something. I don’t know. I just want to get out of here. I’m going home. I’ll call you tomorrow. We gotta figure this shit out.”
“What a drag. I don�
�t know what to say . . .”
Lytle disappears. Cigar is right in front of me again, wagging his tail.
NOSTRALIAN HOLIDAY
Cigar and I walk up the steps into the trailer. The flimsy door swings shut behind us. Carla is leaning against a table—one of those long brown folding lunchroom tables—fiddling with a piece of electronics and an aerosol can.
“Hi, Carla. What’s going on?”
If she suspects I’m not in my right mind, she doesn’t show it—doesn’t even look up.
“Oh, hi, Oscar,” she says, peering at the can. “The show was so much fun. I had earplugs in, but it sounded great. I missed you onstage. What were you up to?”
“Uh . . . I was hanging out near the stage for a while. I was in front a lot with friends.” My focus is returning slowly. At least the precognition-thought-sorting process is down to a minimum. I think.
Carla smiles, still not looking up. “Cool. How ’bout the light show? I was pleased. It worked a little better than I hoped.”
In the silence I nod. “It was awesome, Carla. Like nothing . . . I’ve ever seen . . .”
“Thanks, sweetie. I think the government contractors were happy too. They should be by any minute with Dan. I’m going to give them a little one-on-one demonstration of the new system then get out of here. I’ve got an early day for the next twenty years. Oh, speaking of demonstrations, check this out.” She finally looks at me. Grabbing the aerosol can, she nods at Mr. Cigar. “Put him on the table here . . . He won’t feel anything. You’re not going to believe this.”
“O-o-okay.” My lips feel dry. I obey without thinking. As does Mr. Cigar.
