This was neither here nor there. I had to get back to work. I pulled my hand back, readying myself to punch through the fucking door since this guy was giving me guff. My hand was yanked behind me and pinned. “Sir,” a voice said “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” The private security guys marched and hustled me through the rain and tossed me out of the privilege bubble. They reamed out the young kid who was supposed to be watching the gate. I thought it best to pursue other options before these vengeful thugs maced me.
2
No home, no car. I didn’t have my wallet or weapons, as these had been seized by the medical establishment. I was still in my nutjob scrubs. Well, these were certainly desperate times. I was going to actually have to do some work. The Roaming Tome offices were four miles from here. I started the slog.
By this point, the rain and stress and exhaustion were beginning to get me down, so I laid some truth on myself. They hadn’t cut my brains out. I’m still living the life that I chose. I live hard, get in fights, sleep late, and cruise on drugs whenever possible. I do way less work than any reasonable person could expect me to do. Things were good. I had myself to thank, so I gave thanks to myself.
The office finally came into view, so I ran the last quarter mile to get out of the rain. The storm was worse than the one that dumb asshole Gramiphonius had cooked up. “May I see your ID, sir?”
“Dudley, its Forrest, you deficient semi-moron. You’ve let me into this building for sixteen years. I’m the best damned writer this magazine has ever employed. Just let me in.”
He blinked in confusion. “Your ID, sir?”
“I lost the Gods-damned press pass, Dudley! I’ve been through nine circles and fifteen triangles of hell over the last few days! I’ll fill out the paperwork to get a new pass. Just let me in so I can pick up my assignment.”
“You need to go downstairs to processing, if you don’t have your ID, sir.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir’, you slobbering baboon! You’ve known me for most of your life! I fucked your sister and forced her to abort your nephew! I told you a few weeks ago that you put the ‘ID’ in ‘idiot!’ Let me through!” I tried to jump the counter, but he pushed me back and I nearly broke my wrist.
“Please go down to processing, sir.” He was expressionless as always; the kind of mindless desk drone who has become more and more common in President Gild’s Provisia.
I picked myself up and leaned over the counter. “Dudley, after I’ve handled the present crisis, I will pull your guts from your stomach, sculpt them into a demonic sigil, solidify them with papier maché, put them back inside you, and open a hotel for the most evil beings in the universe. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
I went down to processing. This was a bureaucratic nightmare of unfathomable proportions. They had lines to put you on other lines. They had booths that corresponded to letters and slips of paper with letters and numbers that they called out with a fiendish and sadistic randomness. A kiosk would take your picture for your ID and then immediately forget it, and you’d have to start the whole thing over again. The workers were the lowest of the low, people less qualified than Dudley and the addled hedgehogs who worked in the mailroom. I had spent six hours here once in an effort to bill the magazine for a keg of scotch I bought during a job. I wondered if I had the fortitude to endure this trial.
I sat down on one of the countless seats and put a sleeper hold on the person next to me. At least a dozen people saw me do this, but the first rule of bureaucracy is don’t be a hero. They didn’t stick their necks out. I stole the chump’s ticket, which said B055. He had BO, alright. I took his wallet for good measure. I was still going to have to wait. A television monitor spewed asinine trivia and reports of missing children. I was informed that the singer Lady Crystal Crowne was the first woman to win two Plutocrat Prizes. This did not impress me. I hated that this grinding machine, the bowels of the magazine, had nothing that I could destroy. There was nothing else to do but wait.
I waited. “I’ll wait ten more minutes, and then I will ask why I haven’t been called.” I told myself. I waited more. I saw that I didn’t have a watch. Time ticked away, seconds of good hard living I’d never get back. Maybe the doctor was right. Maybe consciousness is a curse. I’ll never be happy until I’m dead. Why the hell am I here? What will any of this improve? I’ve already burned so many bridges, stepped on so many people. I—
The bastards finally called my number. “Listen up.” I said. “I’m Forrest Cromwell. You’ve heard of me. This Gods-damned magazine would be bankrupt eight times over without me. I lost my press pass. I need you to print me up a new one so I can get past that chump Dudley.”
The woman, who resembled a mollusk, typed placidly on her keyboard. “I’m sorry sir, but we cannot help you.”
“What the hell do you mean, you cannot help me? It’s your fucking job to help me!”
“According to this, you’ve been added to the mental illness registry. We’re not able to issue you credentials or employ you.”
“I was pardoned by a high-level representative from the government. I’m not on any damned registry, because I’m not crazy.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Boy howdy,” I said, sounding painfully like Mission Creep, “I am sick of hearing that. Tell me right now what I have to do to sort this out.”
“You’d probably want to go to the Wellness Department and file an appeal of your status with the Mental Health office. If you bring back the paper work, we can issue you a new press pass in six to ten business days.”
Six to ten business days. Now I was beginning to get the Fear. It’s one thing to die on your feet at the hands of brutal bikers or Flagsuckers armed to the teeth, but I was going to starve to death. I did not have any more time to waste here. I rushed out of the building, still dripping wet. The nut house uniform was sticking to my bark. I was sure that I was going to get some sort of walking pneumonia from this. I longed for sunlight. I just wanted to stand in the sun and reach my hands toward heaven for days and days.
Fortunately, that guy I rolled had a number for a cab company in his wallet, along with enough for a ride to the Wellness Department. I summoned a cab and stood shivering until it showed up. The driver had a bizarre accent—I pegged him as Kargivian diaspora, one of the people who fled the islands after all the shit went down. He drove like it, too. He drove like a man who was swerving to avoid the flashbacks of massacres as they unfolded before his eyes. This fellow was alright.
3
The Wellness Department was closed. There were no windows low enough for me to break in. The door was unforgiving. I slept in a box I found behind the building. ‘Slept’ is probably too strong a word, but I wasn’t a writer again until I could get that Gods-damned press pass. The things are worth their weight in gold. You flash them at bouncers, security, desk jockeys, and they get out of your way. It wasn’t a credential. It was identity, survival itself.
I paced the parking lot, fighting a gang of stray cats for an old bagel to ward off hunger. The Wellness Department finally opened and I forced my way inside. “I’ve been mistakenly added to the mental illness registry.” I said. I looked so pitiful and crazy by this point that I was actually trying to be polite. “How do I file an appeal?”
“Do you have your discharge papers?”
“What?”
“Your discharge papers. The documents explaining how you were added and giving me the NUT code to overturn your registration.”
“Er—no. I don’t have that. Look, can you call Weeping Willows and have them fax it? I don’t have a car or anything.”
“We can’t do that, sir. You’ll have to write them and have them mail it.”
“They can’t mail it! I…”
“I’m sorry sir.”
“Look, I’m not crazy. Do I seem crazy to you?”
“Next in line, please.”
“I ASKED YOU A QUESTION! DO I SEEM CRAZY TO YOU?” I had known it
would come, and it came. The snap. You can feel a part of yourself bending as they put more and more heepshit onto you. You feel your patience warping like the bottom of a wagon, and finally it gives way. I might never get off this registry. I might be a non-person forever. But if they were going to do this to me, I was going to deserve it.
I reached across the desk of the pitiful rabbit who was helping me and toppled her coffee onto her computer. I jumped the desk and threw my weight into the filing cabinet; it broke a cheap table like a martial artist smashing a board. I punched holes through their monitors. I took off my soaking wet clothes and ran bark-naked through their aisles. It took them over twenty minutes to get rid of me. The cats had destroyed my box in a preemptive strike. It was raining heavily again.
The payphone was ringing. I walked my naked self up to it and calmly answered. “You done consider my offer yet, boy?”
I grimaced and scratched some loose bark on my ass. Giving in always tastes like a heepshit sandwich to guys like me, but a chance to escape this bureaucratic limbo took some of the sting out. “I’d entertain the possibility,” I allowed “On the condition that you can sweeten the deal with a ride and some clean, dry clothing.”
“THE RITE OF DESICCATION”
Mission Creep had brought me clothes, alright. I was wearing an ornate red robe with silver inlay at the necks and cuffs. It looked like I was going full cult in this new chapter of my life.
We pulled up to Main Street in Plenty Burrows. I didn’t care for this bustling, prosperous, contented street any more than I did its outskirts, with its off-the-radar nuthouses. If this was the seat of the conspiracy, it was shocking that they were doing so little to hide it. We pulled into a back parking lot of a nondescript building that literally said ‘Dry Men Lodge’ on it. It shared the lot with a salon and a bank.
He parked his corvette and swaggered calmly towards the building. “Why don’t you have to wear one of these stupid Gods-damned robes?” I inquired.
“Today’s your ‘nitiation.” He said. “I done done mine already. I’m Nth Degree.” Well. That was a predictable crock of gibberish. I followed as he pushed open the door and led me down a flight of worn stairs. Water stains adorned the walls of this sad, pathetic place—it looked like the building had been off crying somewhere. Mission Creep flung the door open, and that was the game changer.
I was in the most palatial meeting hall I had ever seen. Marble tiles of zigzagging white and black stretched off towards distant stained-glass windows, depicting deities I had never heard of. I did some spatial calculations and realized that we had to be underground. How were the windows lit with sunlight? Thick curtains of crimson velvet slid closed over them, the work of an invisible hand. An intense nervous chill descended on me. The sense of opulence, divinity, and wrongness were simultaneous, undeniable, and intense.
In the back of the room, three men in masks sat on thrones made from gilded snakes. They were now the only things visible, garishly lit from above. There were no rafters or visible spotlights. Holes of light had opened in space, like a God poking his finger through reality. “Approach the thrones.” The voice sounded human enough, but hollow and distant, as if spoken through a long metal tube. I walked. I was struck by the feeling that the thrones got no closer as I made my way towards them. Finally, the spatial paradox seemed to cease and I was about ten feet away from the three men.
“Do you know why you’re here?” The masks were pale and frozen, the painted black lips immobile. It was impossible to tell which one was speaking; it could have been one of them or all of them, or a voice of someone unseen. It felt like hoarfrost was making its way into my spinal column. In spite of my terror, I desperately wanted to sleep. It was like something in my body was shutting down.
I remembered that I had been asked a question. “I am being recruited.” I said.
“You are being recruited.” The three sat motionlessly. No skin was visible, their necks wrapped with red velvet and their hands clad with black gloves. Perhaps these weren’t people. Perhaps they were just mannequins or dolls that had been positioned here as a prop, some kind of test. “You are being recruited because, without knowing it, you have served us for a very long time. Are you aware of the Schism?”
Under normal circumstances, I would have regarded the question as an insult. Everyone with an eighth-grade education knows about the Schism that divided the ruling class into the Nobles and the Ignobles. The conflict had raged all through my childhood. “Yes. I’m aware of it. It was wrapping up when I was about eighteen.”
The one in the center moved. It tilted its head back mechanically, and gave a preposterous imitation of a human laugh. “Ha. Ha-ha-ha.” The head shifted awkwardly back to its original position, the black featureless and anonymous eyes regarding me. “It has not wrapped up. The Ignobles and their agents are desperate to restore their power. But we are ahead of ourselves. Your service predates the current struggle. Your career helped our cabal to defeat the Ignobles in the Schism, and has since continually thwarted their plans to return to power.”
“How?”
“The Goblin Games are Ghastly and Egregious. Published in Vicarious Living. Article exposed illegal post-peasant practices permitted by Ignoble governors. Prince Theodore’s Brain Is Better Off Outside His Head. Published in Roaming Tome. Publicly embarrasses a family with ties to the Ignoble restoration plot. Anyone Can Be Commander Choke. Published in Trips and Trolls Magazine. Your work on this article destroys a genetics lab controlled by the Provisian Pharmaceutical Corporation, an Ignoble front. Snake in the Grass. Published in Roaming Tome Magazine. Destroyed a Time Zone controlled by the Church of Provisian Saints and a section of the Recreation Bureau controlled by Ignoble operatives.” I didn’t say anything. “You’re thinking that it was just coincidence that you helped us and not the other side.” I was unnerved by their way of saying exactly what I was thinking. Being able to cut through the heepshit and see the truth on one’s face—that kind of quasi-telepathy is supposed to be reserved for only the best Outlaw-Journalists.
“Yes.”
“You are correct. Had you helped the other side in this secret war, even once, you would have been killed by Mission Creep or one of his men. But you were lucky. And to complete your initiation, you must try your luck one more time.”
The one in the center raised his hand, lifting a goblet. “The stories we mentioned were not the first time you helped us. Do you remember?” I wracked my brains, trying to think of other articles I had written that had screwed powerful people. Everything was a haze of drugs and blood. “It was when you were still a boy. Back at the orphanage.”
“I didn’t write anything that early.”
“It wasn’t what you wrote.” Mission Creep silently approached the center figure and took the goblet. “Don’t fret. This is one of the secrets that we keep. Everyone has repressed memories. Everyone has suffered or perpetrated something they can’t endure. And all that is forgotten pertains to power.” Mission Creep handed me the goblet. It had a panoramic image of a shriveled man embossed on its platinum surface. The man seemed to be turning to dust. “The human memory is like a clam. When something irritates it, it coats the particle to protect itself. The grit is forgotten in its pearl of omissions. These are the treasures that we keep.” I looked down into the fluid. It seemed like an ordinary glass of wine, but the dashboard of my brain was covered in warning lights. It was hard not to spill any of it with my case of the shakes.
“You will now participate in the Rite of Desiccation. The elixir you have in your hands induces a dangerous level of dehydration. The repressed memories are triggered as your body fights to preserve itself. It is a variant of the phenomenon of having one’s ‘life flash before his eyes’ just before death. These are the deleted scenes. This is the thing that is so bad you hide it from yourself.”
I was still in the grip of Dread, but a switch inside me had flipped. I wasn’t going to make it through this if I didn’t make use of my greates
t weapon—my balls. I had already relived some painful memories when the Quack had me under at Weeping Willows. “You’ve obviously read my shit.” I said. “Do I seem like a man who needs to hide from himself?”
“If you are a man, or any mortal at all, then you are. We know that your STE forces you to consume an unusually large amount of water in order to live—the price of having cell walls instead of cell membranes. We put your odds of death at one in three.”
“One in three? That’s worse odds than Kargivian roulette.”
“There is only one way to become a Dry Man. If you refuse, there are still the remains of your past life to try to salvage. The Roaming Tome, the Registry, evictions, whores, heartless bureaucrats…it’s all right where you left it.”
It hurt to hear them boil my whole existence down to this pathetic litany, but they weren’t wrong. Stellar talent and superhuman ballsiness had not gotten me far, and at best I’d only be able to salvage what little I had. But for once lust and greed were not my main motivation. There was only one thing driving me as I bolted down that red stuff—curiosity. My previous life was pretty shitty…everything had become a maze of burning bridges. But that desperation, that pain, would be nothing compared to knowing that I had been given the chance to find the deepest part of myself, and that I had turned away.
Fables of Failure Page 7
