A Mirror for the Stars

by John Ploskina

  5

  Karen and that goddamn Vespa. She adores that thing. Rides it fucking everywhere, rain or shine. In the coldest months of winter she puts it in storage and pines over it every day. She does not own a car. When the Vespa is out of commission, she takes the bus. When she moved to Chicago, she drove the Vespa all the way there. I shit you not. It took like, two days.

  It sounds like a lawn mower, and it goes from zero to sixty in about eight hours.

  “Good to see you again,” I said, shouting to be heard over the agonizing wheeze of the engine. “So, who’s the creepy bitch trying to kill us?”

  “Just a monster,” Karen said. “They have lots of monsters. Some are born that way. They make some in labs. I’m not sure where she came from, but it doesn’t matter. She’s a monster, and that’s all.”

  “Ah. I suppose the next question is ‘Who are they?’ The Military Industrial Complex?”

  “It’s so much worse than that,” Karen said. “That phrase makes you think that it’s only part of the system that’s fucked up, you know? Steve just calls it ‘The Establishment.’” She actually took her hands off the handlebars to make little quotation marks in the air with her fingers. The Vespa shuddered and veered off course. Karen grunted and grabbed the controls. “It’s not just arms manufacturers and the military. It’s dozens of huge corporations and the entire government. It’s really all one big entity.”

  “Who’s Steve?”

  “Just some guy I work with.”

  I didn’t like her tone of voice at all.

  “Let’s stop at that diner up ahead. They have TV,” Karen said.

  “Oh, you’ve been here before?” It didn’t seem like the kind of place she’d frequent. I doubted there were smug nerds with windswept haircuts and Emo glasses slinging eight dollar cups of coffee behind that rusty old Art Deco façade.

  “No, but everywhere has TV,” Karen said, leaning into the turn to bring us into the diner’s parking lot. Gravel crunched beneath the Vespa’s tiny wheels.

  Karen was right. There were at least three big screen HD televisions in the little diner. They seemed oddly out of place; enormous, gleaming and new, while everything else was rusting and falling apart. Not only that, they were strategically placed so that no matter where you sat you’d have a perfect view. I ordered a cup of black coffee and a grilled chicken breast with fries.

  “I wouldn’t eat that if I were you. I don’t think they have organic chicken here,” Karen said.

  “No, probably not,” I admitted. “They probably have bizarre-o mutant chickens that look like big, feathered centipedes with hundreds of legs and wings each. They keep them locked up in big long cages.”

  “Their suppliers probably do,” Karen said flatly.

  At any rate the coffee was awful.

  “So, there’s a baseball game on TV,” I said. “Is that why we’re here? Turn into a big Cubs fan since you moved out this way?”

  “No. Stop being stupid. Don’t watch the TVs. Watch the people watching TV.”

  The Cubs were getting shellacked by the hamster-fucking Pirates, and we’re talking late season Pirates here. It wasn’t pretty, and I was barely keeping my bland, tasteless, potentially myriapod chicken down. Mercifully the game went to commercials. A tall, handsome, lantern jawed dude appeared. His eyes were big, soft and kind, like a cherub from a Claymation Christmas special. He grinned, and I wanted to basically punch him to death, in the face.

  “I can’t explain it. Even after fifteen years, my wife is still the sexiest woman I know,” said Lantern Jawed Dude.

  “Oh my God,” Karen said. “I can’t take it. I’m going to look at you.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re the opposite of him. Watch the people, not the TV.”

  The scene changed, and the camera focused on close up shots of different shades of make-up, floating around the screen. “Shhhh, don’t tell him your secret is the fabulous array of cosmetics from the Armelle Company,” said the disembodied voice of a female narrator.

  Lantern Jawed Dude came on again. He shrugged and scratched the back of his head. “She works so hard. When I get home, I’m going to give her a massage.”

  “Aaaaauuugh….” There was a moaning sound over my shoulder, and I realized that the waitress had slipped into some kind of lustful trance while reaching over to refill my atrocious coffee. Her eyes were glazed over, and a thin river of drool ran down the laugh lines in her haggard face. There was a look of pathetic, open longing in her face as she gazed up at Lantern Jawed Dude’s shining visage. She did not notice as my cup overflowed and scalding hot coffee slopped all over the table.

  “Um, hello?” I said.

  It took real effort for the waitress to look away from the television. I could see it in her eyes. She stared at the river of coffee, which was scathing its way along my arm like magma.

  “Hyuh? O-sorrabout-that.” She mumbled and slumped away.

  “Did you see that look in her eyes? That’s a form of hypnosis,” said Karen. Her eyes were locked on mine. “Stimulate the base functions of the brain then introduce a high-level suggestion.”

  I took a look around the room. All the women had that same glass-eyed stare.

  “Sex sells.” I shrugged. “What does any of that have to do with the government?”

  “That make-up is full of chemicals that cause cancer, brain damage, early onset Alzheimer’s Disease, and who knows what else? But the FDA lets it slide, because the big companies can bribe politicians to write loopholes in regulations to let them slide, while smaller companies get run out of business. Meanwhile, the chemicals make people dumber, and that makes it easier for the same politicians to get reelected. Then the big corporations get them to write in even more loopholes. It’s like they’re turning everyone into zombies.”

  Karen threaded her fingers together in front of her face. “Government and these big corporations are now woven together, into one gigantic entity. They regulate, mass produce, genetically modify and chemically extend the shelf life of pretty much every single thing you ever buy and use. It doesn’t matter what party you vote for, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Anarcho-Capitalist or a Socialist who thinks the government should strictly regulate everything. We don’t actually have a say in the way the government operates. All we have is this… thing… this Establishment, and all it wants is to make people stupid and sick, so they’re easy to control, manipulate, lie to and rip off.”

  “Ok, let’s say I accept that premise for the sake of argument,” I said. “How do we get from there to a stewardess trying to kill me and then crashing a plane and slicing up the survivors with… blood whips? I mean, what do you even call that shit?”

  “It’s my fault. Like I was saying, you’re pretty much bombarded with propaganda and thought control bullshit every waking moment, right? So what’s left for them to control?” Karen closed her eyes and tapped on her forehead with one slender finger. “Your dreams.”

  A chill ran down my spine. “What exactly do you do at that research lab you work for?”