Authors: Pat Connid
He pulled
the room’s heavy bay door closed, stepped on the kick-plate putting his entire
140 pounds on it, and pulled the handle of the latch downward. And after
it locked into place, Doc reached up beside it and dragged a bolt across a metal
slat that made it look like he was loading a round into a rifle that had been
built into the wall.
A series of
low
thwop-thwop
pops circled the entire room until every wall glimmered
with the flickering light of the gas lamps. No electricity in the lead-lined
room-- just more waves to Doc-- except a faint sound of an exhaust fan.
Standing
there in a grubby t-shirt and paint-plastered cargo pants, I’d never seen him
wear anything else; he put his hands on his hips, took a deep breath, and said,
“This is freedom, man. No invisible demons running through your pores
right now. Total freedom. Can you feel it?”
“I sorta
miss them,” I said. “I feel naked, Doc. Hold me?” Doc backed
away with an exaggerated look of panic on his face, then laughed and slapped my
arm.
The back
van doors wouldn’t swing open in the lead-lined room, so I had to go in through
the side door with his handheld detector.
“You know
one day, all the signals are going to make men sterile,” he said between
mindless humming noises. “Probably be for the best.”
Flipping
the device on, the amber screen rolled a couple times as the device reset
itself.
I asked,
“Speaking of which—you guys still trying to have a kid?”
Doc
shrugged. “Yes. Tiff is waiting for just the right moment.”
Inside, I
stared at the back of the van and scooted along with my knees, checking the
driver’s side first. Up and down, I swept the device along the wall.
It’s a unidirectional device so you have to be pointing at the place you
want to check out. Far as I could tell, there were no spikes as I moved
closer to the front.
“What’s the
right moment that she’s waiting for?”
“She says
pink. When her mood is... pink,” he said, his eyes trained on the device
in my hand. “You’ve got some bounce on that, man.”
I nodded.
“See that. Sorta faint, so I’m picking up the scatter of a signal.”
“Yeah,
maybe,” he said and looked around the van, eyes darting from corner to corner.
“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
going 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.