Planet Fever

by Stier Jr. , Peter

  This time I didn’t even shake my head. I just stared at her dumbly.

  “It’s okay. For now, you should relax. I think today you should just stay in your room and take it easy.”

  “Aaaaaahhhh woooooood yyliiiiike tooooo reeeeeed.”

  “That’s good. You like to read. What would you like to read?”

  “Kuuuuurt Vohnnnnnneghutt.”

  “I don’t think Kurt Vonnegut would be appropriate right now in your current condition. Be right back.” She exited the room.

  My tongue flapped out of my mouth. I strained to get it back in.

  She returned and offered me a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  I slurred my thanks.

  The next day they escorted me into a tiny, windowless room with a small table and two chairs across from each other. Dr. Jolyean was seated in one of the chairs, a stack of cards on the table before her.

  “How are you today?” she asked, professional empathy in tow.

  “Okay,” I mumbled, still groggy.

  They hadn’t pumped as much thorazine and halidrol into me as of yet this morning, so I felt half alive.

  She gestured for me to sit across from her, and asked, “Have you ever done the Rorschach before? I show you a card and you tell me the first thing you see in the pattern. Got it?”

  I nodded.

  She flipped over the first card.

  “Jackson Pollock,” I said.

  “I know it is just ink splotches, but you have to tell me what you see—like when you see a face in the clouds. Got it?”

  I nodded again.

  She flipped over the next card.

  This one wasn’t “random splotches,” but a simple yet obvious blotter painting of a man in a lounge chair. The next was of a man and a woman in an embrace, and the one after that a mountain with giant angel hovering above it. They looked nothing like the first; these were actual representational pictures, not random splotches.

  I sensed a set-up.

  Though the drugs impaired my motor skills, the area of the brain responsible for calculations, estimations and basic survival still revved: if I answer what I see, they will write me off as a lunatic who perceives crazy things in these so-called splotches, but if I lie, they will say I’m totally delusional and cannot see the obvious pictures.

  I chose the path of least resistance and called ‘em as I saw ‘em. After each answer, she jotted into her book and flipped over the next card. Her face maintained a perfect degree of expressionlessness. I was impressed by that.

  The absurd Rorschach over, she took a casual demeanor. “Very well, Eddie. You’re doing fine. Now I am going to ask you a few simple questions … they are not literal questions that have a definite answer, but they are just to get impressions of your mind. Okay?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She commenced, “What does the saying ‘people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’ mean to you?”

  “It means people who throw stones shouldn’t buy glass houses,” I slurred.

  “That’s a logical answer,” she said. “How about ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’?”

  I muttered something about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards preferring sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. She either didn’t care for or didn’t understand the joke.

  “What does the name ‘Atoz Al Ways’ mean to you?”

  I shrugged. Nothing came to mind. What kind of question was that? A name means nothing to anyone unless they know a person of that name, or the name is iconic, or historically known, but this was a random name that sounded fake. Did these quack psychiatrists sit around, getting their kicks by making up strange tests that had no empirical validity?

  A sudden flash of a hippie girl and her boyfriend handing me a pamphlet in front of a liquor store… Indeed, that was written on the booklet, but in the form “A to Z, Always.”

  So what?

  So I told the doctor the name meant nothing to me.

  She continued, “What is the status of your book? Where are you at?”

  For a flicker of a second, I thought she was asking about the book she had given me to read, but then my mind felt a tugging contraction and an oppressive presence ambled into my head. A sense of panic, like that in the Colonial’s office, flooded in and the walls began to reverberate and a third eye manifested upon her forehead.

  Here we go again…

  HER THIRD eye bore into my head and her presence was somehow “in my mind.” That’s the only way to explain it. I became paralyzed—transfixed on that confounded eye—as she searched the contents of my thoughts. My heart thumped hard and I couldn’t swallow. The “I” of my identity shrank into minisculity and irrelevance.

  What is going on here?

  She stared and answered telepathically, “The ‘you’ that is registered in the mind inhabited by you is a holographic simulation that we are studying and manipulating for scientific purposes. ‘You’ do not really exist, except as a fictional character in ‘your’ book.”

  “Bullshit,” I wanted to say aloud, but my throat was too dry and I couldn’t force the words out of my mouth. I felt spellbound, trapped and fucked: a mouse in a cobra’s cage. None of my intellectual defenses came to mind, nothing to counter her with.

  “You can come up with no defense to this situation because any thought you have has been entered into you via us. We input your thoughts and we delete them. You are just an interface—like a computer.”

  Alas, a question: “Then what the hell do you want from me?”

  The invasive mental pressure became more intense. She overwhelmed me with sheer, precise and cold psychic force, leaving my consciousness disoriented.

  She scanned and I drooled.

  In the back of my mind I perceived a vocal pinging: Ronald Reagan had planted a simple thought that I detected but intuited could not be discerned by this mind-intruding, three-eyed psychiatrist.

  It was a thought-note in jumbled mutter-speak, yet I could decipher it: “You are being mind-screwed, therefore you exist. Play scared and dumb.”

  I mustered up as much saliva in my mouth as possible and choked out, “I’m terrified.”

  Her third eye blinked and disappeared. The room morphed back into a normal room, and my heart settled down.

  “It’s okay. It’s not okay, but it’s okay,” she said. “We’re going to make sure you get the proper treatment.”

  She stood up and opened the door. One of the orderlies came in and helped me stand up.

  “It’s going to be a long road and lots of hard work, but we’ll get there,” she stated, as we walked out into the hall.

  “You are never getting out of here,” I heard her say in my mind.

  THE FOLLOWING is from a piece of notebook paper found wadded up in a garbage bin outside a Gas-N-Go truck stop, St. George, Utah. Handwriting matches that of Edward Bikaver, Jr.

  Don’t know the date so will separate each entry with an “*” for each day since I’ve been here

  …After Rorschach, some questions: glass houses, rolling stones, a strange name, and the location of my book…then that third eye!!!

  I went small.

  I vanished into a holographic reality, and she let me know I was screwed!!!

  More drugs pumped in and the rest is like recalling a dream…

  ******

  I think I’ve been here a week or so but I can’t quite remember. Lots of drugs. Mind is foggy, but I still write on this piece of notebook paper during moments of lucidity…

  I keep hearing the words “zion” and “get to the mountain”. The voice is commanding but soothing. All I can answer back is the question, “huh?”

  *******

  They moved me to another part of the facility which is peopled with derelicts beyond Down’s…drooling and babbling like overgrown toddlers. Were they like this before they got here? Are we being turned into vegetables?

  ********

  During “arts and crafts group time” I looked over across
the room and there he was!!! Chuck “the Born Again Poet”—drooling, eyes empty and spirit cancelled. He sat hunched over, brushing watercolors onto a paper canvas… He looked at me, paused, then resumed painting. Did he recognize me? If he did, he wouldn’t or couldn’t acknowledge it.

  During lunch a female got on the table and began to strip naked while doing a spaced-out dance. I recognized her: it was Lustra the sensual trance-dancer! Another one from the Moroni band! She was too busy getting accosted by the orderlies to remember me. I think we are all too hopped up on drugs to really interact with one another; she and Chuck seem to have been here a while so they have been really drugged up. Is that what is to become of me?

  **********

  The nurse orderly—nice lady, for the record—grabs me by the arm and leads me to a table where the others sit. “We need to find a project for you to work on.” I check the “make-your-own-moccasin-kit” and point to it. “Oh, yes that ought to be a good one for you to work on.” She is genuinely excited. I ask her how long I have to make it and she says each project usually takes 2 weeks of one-hour daily sessions. She left me to my job and 15 minutes later I had fashioned a pair of moccasins.

  “Oh wow—you’re already done?” The nurse patted me on the head.

  I think they were testing how much of my faculty was intact, because the next dosage of pills was much higher. They are trying to void me out. But they keep asking me about “My Book.” Do they mean my novel—Planet Fever? Why do they want to know about it so bad? It is not finished and it is not good.

  Have I brought this entire scenario upon myself as a ruse to trick my mind into finishing the damn book?

  I need to get out of here soon…

  IN THE dayroom all the derelicts, including me, sat, our eyes fixed on the TV, our tongues dangled from our mouths, drool dribbled from chins. Looney Tunes cartoons played at a low volume.

  Daffy Duck charged onto the screen in full swashbuckling garb, thrust his sword and the backdrop suddenly disappeared. Daffy asked the animator to return the scene, then walked off the screen….

  I knew I had to get out of that place.

  “Damn right you’ve got to get the hell out of there! They are sheep-dipping you.” Ronald Reagan’s voice echoed from somewhere in my brain.

  “Whaaat?”

  “They’re mind-humping you, man. Digging deep….”

  “Can they keep me here legally?….”

  Daffy attempted to reason with the animator, but was erased, then redrawn as a guitar-playing cowboy. He tried to play the guitar but got no sound.

  “Legally or not, they ARE keeping you here, BUBBA! If someone comes to check on your condition to see if you’re ‘fit’ to be released back into the wild, these swines are gonna pump a time-released adrenal-psychotropic into your blood…. When you’re in front of a board or judge the dastardly drug will go off and POW! You’ll go crazy like a G-D Mandril that just had his balls electrocuted and hurled his own shit into a gallery of astonished onlookers…. The judge’ll stamp ‘DO WHAT YOU WANT WITH THIS MANIAC’ on your file and that’ll be that….”

  “Why are they doing this?”

  Daffy demanded some new scenery, and the animator fashioned a trivial, colorless line-art background. Daffy asked for color, and was himself painted an array of random colors. “Not me, you slop artist!” Daffy yelled. The animator erased his body and re-illustrated him as a flower-headed, weird amalgamated creature, a flag on his tail with the word “screwball” emblazoned upon it.

  “Because THEY KNOW that YOU KNOW the score. Even through the fog of psychological warfare you have seen the EYE OF THE ENEMY, and they don’t like it! They think you’re more than just a dupe or rube now: these bastards think you are a high-value enemy target, of utmost importance, and a potential menace and threat to them. That’s why they are hacking your brain.”

  “What does that mean? I can barely control my bowels, so there’s no way in hell I can pose a threat or escape. Why do they want to know about my crappy novel so much?”

  “Because, man—it holds the key. They want it, or they want you to finish it and hand it over, or they want you to cede the rights to it so they can finish it. That’s the brass tacks and I don’t even know exactly what the score is there. The Honcho hasn’t told me. As for your escape: when you trilocated through space back at my cabin you also stumbled into alt-time, and we pre-viewed this very scenario fold out. We dosed you with a special adrenaline/serotonin booster that can be triggered only when you think of what we call a ‘code prayer’.”

  “What honcho? What the hell is the code prayer?”

  Daffy had been rendered as a sailor, and as he began to sing “The Song of the Marines,” an ocean background was drawn behind him and he fell into the water.

  “Oh, you’ll meet him. Great guy. The ‘code prayer’ is a combination of words we figured you would never use until you need it.”

  “What are you waiting for?! Tell me the damn prayer.”

  “Not yet. If you think it right now, you’ll end up running around like a berserker. We must wait until the right opportunity arises. It is only for escape purposes. DO NOT ENGAGE THE ENEMY. Then, get your ass to the mountain in the desert. Good luck, man.”

  “What mountain in what desert?”

  No answer.

  Daffy flew around in an airplane, the animator drew a mountain in his path. The plane crashed off screen, Daffy and the windshield still in flight. Daffy “bailed” out and ripped open the parachute, which became an anvil. He crashed to the ground and in a stupor hammered away on the anvil, reciting “The Village Blacksmith.” The anvil animated into an artillery shell, exploding on the next hammer strike, and Daffy finally snapped, insisting the animator reveal himself. The animator drew a door before Daffy and closed it on him. The camera pulled back: Bugs Bunny sat at a drawing table, and asked, we, the audience, “Ain’t I a stinker?”

  Everyone in the room smiled. We liked cartoons.

  THE FOLLOWING is from a piece of notebook paper found pinned up on a “tourist info” wall at the Hurricane City Center, Hurricane, Utah. Handwriting matches that of Edward Bikaver, Jr.

  ***************

  The sensual artist I once knew as “Lustra Love-Joy” approached while I was trying to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the dayroom. She was out of it, but she offered me a wide-brimmed straw hat and a little ruck-sack she had been fashioning (from a kit) for who knows how long. Was this some sort of code? Who knows. I took the items and thanked her. She began to dance again and was promptly sedated.

  ****************

  Mona. She stopped to pay me a visit. How did she know I was here? Maybe Dr. Götzefalsch. She seemed sad. She just doodled with pencil in a notepad. I couldn’t really interact with her because of the fog of the pills. I wanted to tell her many things, like how I really liked her, but my tongue kept falling out of my mouth and all that came out were baby sounds. She looked like she was trying not to cry. She brought me a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie.

  “Taaaaaaaaank yooooooooo,” was all I could say before she left.

  ******************

  At 6 am yesterday morning, parched from the pills, I got up and went to the water fountain down the hall. The place was quiet, until I overheard in her office around the corner the doctor talking to another doctor about me. I also heard the words “permanent” and “resident” and “wing.”

  “I am doomed,” I thought…

  Oh, the brilliant timing of Chuck the “Born Again” Poet: he had decided to hijack the commons area for an impromptu, masterful and very loud poetry recital, this one including props: a fire extinguisher.

  “FIRE!” he yelled the first line of his poem.

  “TCHCHCHCHCH-CHCH-CHCHCHCHT” bellowed the extinguisher.

  “MAN!” he yelled the next line, and again the “TCH-CHCHCHCH-CHCHCHT” of the extinguisher.

  “EXTINGUISH!” he yelled.

  “Sweet Jesus get me out of this Don
key Kong,” I muttered, and felt the release of the adrenaline/serotonin emergency dose. That was the secret “code prayer.”

  Two front-desk nurses along with the doctors and the security orderly ran over to what had become a bonafide commotion: Chuck’s “poetry recital.” The morning food-delivery crew was wheeling in the breakfast carts, leaving the front doors wide open. My room nearby—I grabbed my hoodie, the small backpack and the straw hat and strolled out of there. Casual.

  This seemed to be a wing to a larger facility, like a hospital. I got into an elevator and smiled at a few exhausted ER specialists. They stopped off at the third floor and a few other people got on. I surmised that the facility I was in was large and compartmentalized; nobody paid attention to me on the elevator + the guy at the security desk didn’t look up from his newspaper when I walked by.

  Outside the sun peeked up and I could see my breath… I had on grey sweats, grey hoodie and my moccasins so I started jogging through the town. I jogged out into the Las Vegas rush hour. Las Vegas in the early AM seemed like any other town: a bunch of bleary-eyed people in traffic going to some miscellaneous shit job – something I had been attempting to avoid doing in life so far. But at what cost?….

  My sanity, perhaps.

  Or were all these drones idling in their cars the insane ones? Who knows. No time to think about that.

  I jogged up to a cab parked in a lot of a two-bit hotel/casino and asked where the Greyhound station was. He pointed me in the direction and in five minutes I was there. I checked for any cash, and noticed I had a stack of twenties. I wondered where that had come from then guessed Mona had slipped it into my wallet. I bought a ticket to Denver and got on the bus. I figured on the way to Denver I could figure out how to get back to Fillono’s utopia in the Rockies.