Colonel Crystal's Parallel Universe

by Hufferd, James;

  XVII

  Fever Dreams

  How to escape this infernal spin-cycle he remained trapped in?

  “Sit tight. You’re not out yet, Honey.”

  “Benefactor? Oh, please!”

  Now, Alva Abelard Crystal drifted up quickly – not on and on and on, or trending up and up and up, as he had been, but rocketing, zinging through a cycle fleetingly of messy offices or dreams or scenes of a life and on to the next, and thence to the next, each transient bubbles of meaning, illusions popping, strings of pearls, caps exploding on a red rolled strip – up, up, up and up, and up, up, up, surpassing the mark of 99.9% awareness, to within a centimeter, a silly millimeter, surfacing! Progress stopped, paused, suddenly ended with a jerk. Then, unimaginably, gloriously brilliant rays of sunlight, all deep, blue sky, dreams all mended, ended, melted, merging, emerging. Whole!

  One last, small, brief, then extended not-really-wanted flashback to his much-earlier first forced marriage stateside. A stepson, the sweet kid of his wife, he’d had or thought he’d had by default charge and care of: who, left alone, disassembled everything in sight, time after time, never re-assembling anything. The cute kid grew quite suddenly – overnight – to a whopping two-hundred pounds, 4 feet 11, 200 pounds, with a shadow or slash of tickler mustache, totally unmanageable, by age 14. And, unbeknownst, grew enthralled, dependent totally, on a high school science teacher seemingly with evil and experimental intent, I was sure, and at least equal evasiveness. Alva, the future Colonel, at a tender age himself, had suffered intense worry over all this, feeling responsibility, without help, no one else seeming to notice or care, or even knew, even pretended to. Wife Edie had washed her hands of all of it, seemed humiliated whenever she learned, quickly fled inward. Poor, sweet kid; killed in Ambar Province.

  Why? Why so, so many, many, many, many, many dreams? Reflections? he asked himself. So many bitter, intense, perverse, unbending, unending, unwinding, stupid dreams? Flashbacks to what never was, never happened, never will be? Or did they happen, somehow? Some, at least, he knew or sensed, did, recalled very vaguely, to himself, to others. So, which were which?

  And why would his dreams be so very unlike other people’s? he wondered. Not about lost loves or rapt, wasted moments, flickering, glorious, horrendous milliseconds spent in brief delicto with persons desired or not, undesirables once known, never known, never enough known? Places. Actions added to other actions, actions, adding nothing, to nothing, equaling nothing? In sum total, all hallucinations like some terrific, horrible, terrible, horrific memoirs, memories, fake memories, prophetic, gigantic hells, dripping with betrayal, deceit, despair, guilt, evil, wrong, torment, ennui, id, guilt. Vast guilt, vaster evil, systemic, systematic, searing, soaring, dumb! Then the tunnel, the dreaded, soul-splitting death, uttering, muttering, utter demise. What? What? Why? So, why? why? why? why? why? why not? All to be born over again.

  And so, why such passion over all his systems all run amok? Happens to everybody?

  XVIII

  A Return

  “But then again, how on earth would you know what other people’s dreams are like?” he asked himself. “Maybe they’re just as bad, excruciating as yours, some of them. Maybe worse. At least, you came from a good home.”

  Colonel Crystal found he had finally come to! Following a humongous sneeze for the ages, that left him reeling close to lights out, feeling more woozy and drained than he had ever felt, ever. He felt for a moment his life weighing in the balance, and he quickly discovered the red sore lump down the right side of his neck, its soreness radiating down the well to the bottom of his throat. He couldn’t even begin to figure out where the hell he was, only that he’d come through from what seemed an extraordinarily long, long way off to get there, wherever it was.

  Boy, that was some bug!

  It slowly emerged that he was lying face-down in the green, fraying folds of his own screen-porch hammock, all but surrounded by his usual three imperfect young confidants of recent months: Colby, his sister’s boy, Kit, and Frank, both the locals, all looking down at him solicitously as he began to stir.

  “What the…?” he began. And immediately he thought, “My passion… Defense Only! I’ve got to figure out how. Most Americans would agree with me. I believe that. Everyone, nearly, it seems, keeps wringin’ their hands, what to do, sensing the enormity and wrong after all these years, all the senseless killing, the big turkey-shoot. All the in-touch people at least realize. How to stop the idiots destroying, wrecking the whole world, piece by piece, to save it in their odd, cold, crazed minds? And they know there’s lies. That’s all we get now. “It’s impossible,” they say. “Things are changing and they’re just too powerful. We have no way to ever…”

  Well, I do know how to stop it. There is a way. I must…

  “What happened, boys?” he said. “What’s goin’ on?” He shook his head to try to refocus.

  “We discovered you asleep – or we thought just asleep – in the old row boat tethered offshore down in the back-wash,” Colby volunteered. “You didn’t seem too much worse for wear, just that ugly lump on your neck, asleep and not easy to wake. So, we brought you up to the house. Your old rowboat was near to sunk in the swamp when we found you.”

  “What time is it?” the Colonel groaned, rubbing the sore and swollen mass protrusion on his neck.

  “Almost ten-thirty.”

  “What?” Only about thirty minutes had passed; he thought it might have been more like a week at least, maybe a month. The Colonel, in spite of himself, laughed in wonderment. “You mean… Is it still Tuesday?”

  “It still is, yes. Tuesday morning.”

  That seemed impossible. “So, did you two just get back, then?”

  “Yeah,” Kit answered, looking down. “About ten, fifteen minutes ago. We went over first to Cross, then on over to Trenton, to look for a part Frank needed for his truck. Right here’s your newspapers you wanted.”

  “Why is it you don’t just subscribe, Sir?” Frank ventured.

  “I thought you’d know – I don’t want to get on any local lists if I can help it.”

  The three looked at each other, knowingly.

  “When you’re seriously-vetted high military then go rogue on them, that draws a whole lot of attention – and not just the public’s.”

  “Yeah, and it gives the Cointelpro boys and girls something to hone in on,” added Colby, who’d heard it all before.

  “Right! Exactly right. You got it.”

  “So, we goin’ to have some lunch around here in a while?” Colby asked. “Or should we go out?”

  “Ask Ludmilla,” Colonel Alva answered, gingerly touching the cherry-red swelling on the side of his neck and overlooking his nephew’s cheekiness, since he was at least technically still a house guest. “I’ve got to put something on this swamp-bug bite first, though. It feels like a gun wound!”

  “How do you know what that feels like?” Kit inquired. “Don’t tell me. Ooo… it looks bad.”

  “Yep,” Colonel Alva affirmed, making a grimace at the pain. But, at least, he declined to elaborate on the gun wound.

  “Then, I’ve got to get around and get to work here, because I emailed Mr. Lawrence, Will Goldsby’s man, yesterday, or was it today? that I’d see what I could find out.”

  “Oh, uncle, uncle, are you really, really that naïve?” “No. You really don’t understand how convincing and thorough – and devious – these ‘special’ ops they do on people can be. And this could very easily be such, don’t think it couldn’t – though Goldsby probably did do some of that stuff. But, think! The fact that they, with the connivance of the media they basically own all of, have got you so thoroughly convinced, can only mean one of two things.”

  “That the truth is exactly what it seems.”

  “That’s one, I agree – but that’s only one. But ask yourself, why would they go to all that trouble, all those news reports and interviews and public denunciations for hours daily, to convince you
of something that’s true? That anyone would think from what they said was true anyway? And the other distinct possibility is, that they’ve put so much preparation and time and probably fake tears, into the operation to make it look for certain that what you and everybody else sees as the truth – which could turn out, if you really pry into it, to be exactly the opposite – sticks. In order to frame and utterly ruin a good or not-so-good man they may have a bone to pick with, a man with maybe some generally harmless, Casanova tendencies. I’m not suggesting that’s it.”

  Colby’s look mocked seriousness. “Yeah, and who has those kind of tendencies, to let’s say, persuade, right? Who has them, and works on perfecting them?”

  “Yeah, right. Exactly. Who does? Not too uncommon, really, do you think?”

  “So, you mean, maybe a lot of us, at one time or another?”

  “Yeah, well, that is what I was thinking. Maybe all of us! Men, anyway… We don’t know for sure in the case of Goldsby, which way it is. But I intend to help find out. If I can think of a way to go about it.”

  “Find out that he has or has not been a player?”

  “No. Find out if my suspicion is correct that someone on the dark side has had it in for him big time for a long time and found a means, fair or foul, of exploiting his presumed tendencies to run him to ground. I want to find out if there is, or has been, such an operation.”

  “Operation?”

  “By the FIB’s, as I call them. Or, someone like that.”

  Colby wasn’t finished yet. “So, what would that establish, if you do find out there is such an ‘operation’? That he’s a choir boy and blameless?”

  “No. that they had to suborn and apply pressure – maybe on a whole bunch of young-to-middle-aged ladies they might have had something else on individually – to get the timed-out, or nearly so, testimonies needed to bring someone they detested down. Maybe not good in a court case by now, but… That’s how it works sometimes. And it’s at least a possibility. In this instance.”

  “And maybe some of them are just copycats and say that?” Kit added.

  “You got it.”

  “Well, I think you got some provin’ to do there, man,” the other of the Florida boys, Frank, the quiet one, inserted.

  “That’s what I said. And I’d best get up and apply myself to it. Do what little I can. And get back to my real passion, saving the world and my country.”

  XIX

  PTSD

  But it wasn’t easy to break the grip of a natural longing for relaxation and escape from horrific tension and bolt back into motivated productivity in an area that nearly destroyed him. Could PTSD hold the answer to all the dreams as well as ingrained dreads? Did he want to get close to that buzz-saw and burning, blinding light again? Who was he kidding? He knew. Were the dreams somehow intended to guide him or warn him to stop, desist?

  It was something he avoided talking to anyone about, but every waking hour, on good days and bad, he remembered every single one of the 522 bombing runs he’d personally ordered in Iraq and the 2 sorties he had personally flown in Afghanistan, as well as the devastation and misery he’d personally seen on his reconnaissance tours to “pacified” areas. By far the worst devastation was that permanently to the faces of a thousand, or a hundred thousand, relatives of “collateral road kill” and perfectly good, patriotic local soldiers and shreaded ex-soldiers he’d encountered, hitting him like a block of steel rammed regularly and endlessly into his ribs.

  Some of the former looked like unimaginably terrified body doubles of his father and mother, his Aunt Doris and Uncle Harmon, his own younger nieces, grandmother, the guy in his barber shop and the grocery store back home. Precisely like them, good people, and… and, when he saw any one of those, or indeed, virtually anyone now, it brought all of them back and he just couldn’t cope. He had to. He couldn’t. His “friend," the General, A. Franklin (A.F.) Montmoracy, had ordered even more sorties and had reportedly been the first senior officer to resign specifically for that reason. How did he manage to cope by now? And then, there was that opium business in Afghanistan, protected and up fifty-plus-fold since Uncle Sam took over the reins. Someone, maybe CIA, Pentagon maybe, or brass, raking in trillions from that, maybe supplying big pharma companies to capsulize and do their deed, killing hundreds of thousands for additional billions. Could there be a more innocent explanation? he wondered. There had to be, but what?

  That business about “defending the country,” you always heard that – was pure, raw crap. Protecting plutocrats’ income streams, maybe.. His pleasant and cordial uncle and his niece Nan, now 9 years old, just how were their innumerable equivalents in Iraq and Afghanistan, Syria, going to endanger anyone’s country that they should be bombed and their living flesh burned and flayed? For what? For who? (Whom?) True, he thought, he did have a right to defend himself. But, if he went in and busted someone’s house down, say in Gainesville or Ocala, murdered people who had never done anything whatsoever to him, even if looking for gangsters, he would never think of it – how was it self-defense to go over and blitzkrieg the virtual clones in human terms of those two cities, full of children, women, defended and defenseless men, or any others, off the map? How in heaven’s name? Even if some local fighters, deadly perhaps against the unrighteous, internationally illegal vicious foreign invaders happened to be holed up there?

  But, if he, or someone, opposed doing that to the foreign equivalent cities to Ocala or Gainesville, and whole provinces the rough equivalent of Florida, halfway around the world, how the hell would that person qualify to be considered some kind of radical nutcase, while at the same time, those who supported doing very heinous things like that routinely and constantly, without so much as ever thinking (you weren’t supposed to think!), be considered the normal, sane patriotic heroes of America and the pathological world? Were those questions just too passé to ask today?

  Was it trite to ask, what would Jesus do? Or Buddha? he asked himself. Two certified CO’s, those two were, for certain! And no wonder! Or virtually anyone else really and truly sane, for that matter? How were the warmongers, the “supporters of our troops," the civilized and proper ones – and he, now that he was a so-called “radical peacenik” – not be sane and right? How the… He had to call a stop to all the truly “radical” thinking, that illegal, mass-murderous wars were good, and somehow worth the trillions pilfered for them and dumped into them for the taking, and for whose possible benefit? he reminded himself. He had to get a solid grip on that. He flattered himself that he knew how to do that.

  What kind of a world? And he had been on that insane side, not only on that side, but practiced it himself, led that madness! What kind of a world? (Big sigh). No, sobbing alone was no proper answer. Handwringing wasn’t. He’d done it himself. Now he knew he had to atone. So, what was a proper answer? What in all this freakin’ world was? There must be one! There must!

  Fight back against it! That’s what he had to do, with his latent authority and his and his anger and his resolve! Be a peaceful terrorist to the man! Because, it was all one putrid system, all of it, top to bottom! And it had to be not just lamented but confronted! A few noble families, practically less than worthless in most cases as human beings, bulwarks of companies, usually, judged by their actions, having more personal, potentially useful wealth in some instances than whole damn-blasted continents. All of which they’d earned themselves and were decently entitled to? Right? Really? Does anyone sane believe that? Yet no one would be right in doing anything about their growing monopoly on general wherewithal they defended to the teeth and spent very largely on global mass-murder or degradation, that being where the money was?

  Because, the most profitable, preferred business for many from those frankly, if he might say so, (to him) nauseating families made of corporate money who threw themselves into continued publicly-subsidized maximization of their profits, was precisely the military and military support business. If not war itself directly, then chemicals or munition
s. The banking specifically to avail all those fantastic technologies of more effective human destruction and suffering. Armaments and horrific weapons industries and private mercenary militias, and financing, the supply chain, bootleg industrial jobs base for whole regions right here at home that could have been devoted to contributing things productive and beneficial to life. Lots of the workers themselves clinging onto jobs paying scarcely enough to live on, in some cases more, to “put food on their families” while facilitating blowing apart others’ families, wives, children. But proud and saluting loyally, voting solidly, reliably, accordingly, blocking all sanity and good sense. Those suffer, too. And to think he’d blindly fought for such skewed, warped values and incentives himself? Whoa! Not pretty! If patriotism was wanting the best for your own country, that wasn’t.

  So, it was time to righteously, meaningfully, rebel, he told himself, lead, if that’s what it took, or he would surely explode. Shaken and feeling that swamp-fevered feeling again, touching with care the now festering, suppurating and sore whole swollen side of his neck, he went to pour himself a tall, stiff lemonade, while the endless faces he saw in the background of everything now were intent on giving him no peace. Hence all the incriminating, taboo thoughts Americans couldn’t have.

  XX

  Montmoracy in Steinhatchee

  Left alone with lingering insufferable thoughts, by early afternoon, the ex-Colonel nonetheless made valiant strides toward regathering his frayed wits and properly refocusing. He carefully cleaned and dressed as best he could his flaming neck sore again and skimmed through the papers, the Orlando Sentinel and Saint Petersburg Times, racing through articles about the record snow and cold up north, another alleged small-bore terrorist attack, this time in Muncie, Indiana, and the Orlando Magic’s longest-ever skid. He then put both papers aside and took up his pen to write the draft of a note to his old, retired “FIB” agent friend, “Ferd” Coningsby in Philly, asking for help in opening at least a mini-inquiry into a possible conspiracy by somebody against Will Goldsby.