Planet Fever

by Stier Jr. , Peter

  THE BUS eased by the town of Mesquite, the last in Nevada on Interstate 15, and toward the Arizona border. Arizona offered a mild test for the engine of the bus, for Arizona welcomed us with a steady and winding grade of pavement straight into the Virgin River Canyon. I stared out the window at those towering cliffs of golden orange as the sunlight cut the rocks, carving the landscape into hard angular shadows. The adrenaline from my “escape” had worn off, and now a narco-haze washed over me in waves. My mind felt like a yo-yo dipping from clear to unfocused thoughts—up and down, up and down.

  Scenery passed by, the drone of the motor chugged and the driver kept up-and-down-shifting as the bus negotiated through the steep snaking canyon. What seemed to be white-noise static ambience, I came to realize, pervaded from within my own mind, and soon the voice of a female, who sounded like the quack Dr. Jolyean back at the hospital I’d just fled, cracked through: “Please return to the facility immediately—” the transmission cut out.

  Another voice—Ronald Reagan’s—cut-in: “Do not listen to any further transmissions notifying you to return—”

  That one cut out, and Jolyean cut back in: “Please return to the facility. You are in danger. Your mind has been co-opted—”

  Cut.

  Reagan’s voice again: “They’re attempting to track you via the nano-bot drugs they gave you. Drink plenty of water and piss frequently—”

  Cut.

  Jolyean’s voice again: “Do not drink any more fluids as this may cause dangerous withdrawals to your medication….”

  “St. George! Utah’s ‘Dixie’ folks!” the driver notified over the loudspeaker.

  The bus pulled into the gravel lot of the small Greyhound station and stopped. He informed us we had fifteen minutes to “take care of any business.” I scouted a “Utah State Liquor Store” a block away, and walked to it.

  St. George: the poor, dusty town that received the brunt of the Yucca Valley nuke fallout during the testing days back in the 50s…. An Andy Griffith feel with a cheap and rusty, dusty overlay.

  I paid the worn-leathered man $3.95 for the pint of mid-shelf vodka, put it in my pack and walked toward a convenience store by the tiny bus station. I passed a guy in a three-pieced suit talking on a pay phone. Yes—this guy had been sitting toward the front of the bus and I could’ve sworn he kept looking back at me during the ride, but I tacked that thought up to drug-induced paranoia.

  “…the bus to Denver. Yes, I am on it….” he said as I walked by. He took notice of my presence and turned inward toward the pay phone.

  No, I wasn’t paranoid.

  I walked into the Circle-K convenience store and bought a turkey and mayo sandwich, a gallon of water and a role of duct-tape. I paid for the items, chugged half the water on the spot, then put everything in the backpack.

  Outside, the guy was still on the phone. I queued up a few feet away, jingling some change in my hand.

  He took note of my presence. “Yeah, somebody needs to use the phone, honey. I’ll call you when I get to Denver. Love you. Bye.” He hung up and walked toward the store, nodding at me with a polite smile.

  Smooth operator, you are.

  I grabbed the phone and put a few coins in. When I saw that the guy had entered the store, I hung up and trotted toward the bus. I boarded, walked to my seat in the back, brandished the duct-tape from my pack and took the straw hat off my head and taped it to the front of the backrest. I walked down the aisle toward the front of the bus and looked back: from there it looked like someone wearing the straw hat was sitting in my seat, perhaps looking down in reading or dozing off. Good enough. I notified the driver that I was going to stay here in “Utah’s Dixie” and thanked him.

  The door of the bus faced the convenience store, and I could see that the guy in the three-piece was still inside the store, his back to the window, waiting in line to use the restroom. I got off the bus and walked around to the other side, then trotted off down a road that headed away from the Interstate, the view of me from the convenience store shielded by the bus.

  About five minutes later the sound of the bus leaving emitted from off in the distance. I was a good quarter mile away and didn’t see anyone wearing a suit trailing me.

  My ruse had worked.

  I WALKED eastward, alongside the two-lane highway called “Telegraph St.” and enjoyed the constant hum of the adjacent power line overhead. Sandy, dry bluffs flanked one or the other side of the road, and the occasional dry gully let me know this was a barren area.

  The red, orange and yellow mesas loomed about like a huge ancient mythic castle, a vast desert wilderness.

  Something was drawing me toward there.

  Again, a firm yet non-intrusive voice whispered: to the mountain.

  I am officially cracking up, I thought. “What mountain?!” I yelled.

  A crow caw was the only response.

  I passed a sign that read “ZION NATIONAL PARK 30 MILES” and a jolt of electrified thought blasted forth into my consciousness: the name “Atoz Al Ways,” the farcical Colonel West and the diabolical Dr. Jolyean had asked if that name meant anything to me. Tucked away in a secluded recess of my mind the answer pulsed: yes, the name did mean something, and I was not supposed to let them know that.

  One tumbler to the lock of my awareness had fallen, a piece of information that was my duty to keep secret. An intuition arose: I was on a clandestine mission, I was an operative, and they were attempting to hack into my mind to get whatever information was being stowed away within my cranium.

  Another crow, or perhaps the same one, cawed.

  “No, you are paranoid, delusional and following the diversionary tactics an experimental drug has prompted in your mind. You’re walking to your doom.” The cursed Air Force Colonel’s voice now accompanied me through the thought-static.

  Perhaps I was walking to my doom, but at least this version of it would be faced outside with the sun-lit splendor of raw and awe-igniting nature, and not inside the florescent chamber of horrors known as the psychiatric institution.

  “Fuck off!” I yelled, and the echo may or may not have caused the same, or perhaps another crow to caw.

  MY SHADOW before me grew longer as the sun behind me hovered its slow farewell for the day. I’d been walking for a while when I finally came across a sign: Hurricane City Limits, Population 3,915, Elevation 3,240.

  Welcoming the weary traveler was a Dairy Queen on the left side of the road and a Phillip’s 66 gas station on the other. This road merged with the Main Street, that resided just west of a long hilly mesa and hosted rows of quaint, one-story brick houses encompassed by chain-link fenced-in yards, and a few white brick building businesses cluttered around the center of town.

  A small sign for “Pioneer Park” caught my eye, so I reckoned it’d be a good place to stop for a bit and collect my bearings. I walked a few blocks north to the small park and sat on the early-spring grass and stretched out, eating my sandwich and gazing up to the sky. The clouds floated along the darkening blue horizon as the “golden hour” ushered in the photographer’s dream light.

  I finished the sandwich, drank a little more water, closed my eyes and eased into sleep.

  A scratchy voice on a loudspeaker gave a departure time and last boarding call for passengers. I was inside an old central train station, except the trains were spaceships going off to the moon.

  Faceless men in head-to-toe black paramilitary garb and mean-looking dogs strutted about, scoping for any “suspicious persons.” I peered over to a security desk as a ninnying, high-pitched animated woman yapped at the security guard, pointing out someone sitting at a bench. The poor fool sitting at the bench had no clue he was a topic of interest. He sat smiling and sipping from his boxed juice: a man with Down’s syndrome; an overgrown child waiting and excited to get on a ship and go to the moon.

  “I don’t like the way he’s smiling,” the ninnying bitch barked, and the frequency of her tinned-voice bit my ears like an ankle-nipping Chihua
hua. “Why is he by his self? What is he drinking out of that box? I feel uncomfortable with him here, and I would feel very uncomfortable if he were to be on the same shuttle as me….”

  The faceless person behind the counter nodded and implied “we’ll take care of it.”

  I checked out the unsuspecting, childlike, about-to-be-fucked-with dude: he smiled, sipped, and awaited the magic of space flight.

  Two stern thugs, their faces hidden by mirrored face-masks on their helmets, approached him, a small robotic trashcan trailing behind. He looked up at them and smiled, and offered them his boxed drink. A leather-clad hand nabbed the juice box from him and squeezed the contents into the mobile robotic receptacle. The poor guy kept smiling in a childish “innocent-playground-no-danger-here” way, and the thugs grabbed him and stood him up. He offered them his ticket and got giddy with excitement, thinking this was “spaceship time.”

  He kept smiling, I couldn’t believe he kept smiling….

  They tossed the ticket into the robot and escorted him to an ominous iron door and he smiled the entire time and sang, “Gonna ride the ship to space” in his own makeshift melody which kept reverberating throughout the station until the hard, echoing clang of the door cut-out his words.

  He was gone and somehow I got the idea that they were going to exterminate him.

  I began weeping, and sensed attention had been drawn my way … but I couldn’t control the weeping.

  The ninnying bitch was back at the security desk.

  “I feel uncomfortable….” She pointed at me.

  I bowed my head and wept into my hands.

  Through my fingers, I spotted a pair of two black military boots entering my field of vision. I looked up and witnessed the two paramilitary guys towering above. My reflection in their masks stared back at me; I appeared to be smiling, though I knew I was weeping.

  Something else was amiss: I had Down’s syndrome.

  I thought about fleeing but instead offered my ticket. They threw it into the robot receptacle and escorted me toward the ominous iron door.

  “You’re going to exterminate me!” I attempted to yell, but all that came out was “Gonna ride the ship to space!”

  The door clanged and the air got really cold….

  “HEY MISTER, you might want to get up and indoors. At night it’s cold here.” A stringy, brown-haired girl loomed overhead.

  The park had grown quiet and dark. From the shadowy parking lot, a young man emerged. “Eliza! What’d you find over there?”

  “Some guy sleepin’ in the park. He doesn’t look like he’s from here,” she said over her shoulder, then looked back at me. “Am I right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling myself up.

  The guy approached and stood next to the girl. He had a James Dean look but with late-teen acne, and she was pretty in a plain-Jane, naive way with giant, Boston Terrier puppy eyes. She wore a flannel shirt and a prairie skirt over jeans and military-style boots, topped off with a leather jacket.

  “Hey man. How’s it going?” the guy asked.

  “I was taking a break here, and I must’ve passed out,” I said.

  “You drunk?” he asked.

  I thought about the bottle I had bought back in St. George. I hadn’t cracked it open yet. “No, just tired. I walked here from St. George.”

  “That’s a decent hike. ‘Specially in those things.” He pointed to my homemade moccasins. “‘Bout seven hours, huh? Where you going?” he asked.

  The girl just stared at me as though I were a rock star or a creature that had just fallen from the sky.

  “Zion.”

  They looked at one another. “He can’t walk to Zion tonight. It’s freezing and he’s got no gear,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He sniffed the air, closed his eyes, nodded, and opened his eyes. “Okay then. You want, you can stay with Eliza and me at my mom’s house. She’s out of town on business, but she wouldn’t mind anyway.”

  The girl—Eliza—whispered something to him. He nodded. “Yeah, okay then. And we’ll give you a ride if you want to Zion. Tomorrow.” Eliza’s brown eyes lit up and she clapped and jumped up and down like an excited puppy. “We haven’t been there in a while and it might be nice to do a picnic.”

  I couldn’t get over the fact that they were offering a complete stranger a place to crash. Were these people so naive as to allow a vagabond sleeping in the local park into their house? Looked that way. Or maybe I was a fool for going off with them? What if they were some weird couple into freaky stuff like finding random, out-of-town strangers and snuffing them for kicks? I figured I was a decent judge of character, and these two did not strike me as menacing. If anything, they were kind of simple.

  Of course, most of Ted Bundy’s victims might’ve assumed the same thing prior to accepting his advances….

  Still, the idea appealed to me, because the temperature had dropped considerably. “Sure. That sounds good. Thanks,” I said, and the guy helped me up.

  He looked at me, raising his dark eyebrows. “One stipulation, though. No booze and no drugs. Can’t have it in my vehicle or house. Period.”

  Oh shit.

  That was the catch. I hadn’t had anything to drink since … when? The mountains of Colorado? Or was it before my visit to Fillono? When was that, anyway?

  “Oh. Then maybe I should get rid of the bottle I have in my pack.”

  “You do what you think is right,” he said.

  Maybe I should pass on this offer….

  I was at a crossroads, answering to the devil on one shoulder and angel on the other. A metaphysical “Let’s Make a Deal”—the moment of truth.

  Could I do it?

  Sure.

  Did I want to do it? Spend one sober night with this strange pair?

  Fuck it.

  I uncapped the bottle, poured it out onto the dry turf and tossed it into a trashcan. I felt a mild pressure—ever so subtle—release from my brain, like a stuffed-up nose finally becoming clear.

  Eliza beamed.

  The guy nodded, then gestured for me to follow him.

  We walked to an old 1970s International Scout, a pre-SUV beast of a vehicle meant to drive through hell and high water, so long as you could keep the 7-mpg thing fed with fuel. Eliza and the guy climbed in and I got in the backseat. The giant metal doors slammed shut and I realized those were the doors that had made their way into the dream—the sound of the iron doors slamming behind me and the poor Down’s Syndrome guy with the juice box. I wondered about the meaning of that dream, just as the behemoth engine rocketed to life, cutting off any meditation I was entertaining.

  “Your driver here is the love of my life: JD Martin,” the girl shouted over the engine, looking back at me over the giant couch of a front seat.

  “And this here is Dawn Eliza Jonathan, the love of my life,” he shouted, and she bent over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “That’s right. See, he got me a ring from the Safeway bubble-gum machine.” She showed off her green, plastic smiley-faced ring.

  I nodded, still unable to lock in an accurate read on them.

  “I’m gonna get her a nice diamond once I get my limousine business up-n-running,” JD said.

  I wondered if there was a great demand for limousines in the town of Hurricane, Utah.

  “Well, you’ll probably have the market cornered in this town,” I stated.

  It took a moment before they both laughed. The vehicle veered off into the dirt and the ride got rough for a few seconds until JD steered back onto the road.

  “That’s a good one, mister. A limousine service in Herahkun. Whoa boy—I never even thought about that. You got an imagination!” He wiped a tear from his eye.

  “He’s gonna start a service in Los Angeles that takes people from their homes or hotels to big events. When I turn eighteen in August we’re cuttin’ loose from Herahkun,” she said.

  I liked the way both of them pronounced Hurricane: Her-ah-kun. Gave me a down-home feeling that
I was going to be okay under their care. Sober, or otherwise.

  “And Eliza here is gonna be a makeup artist. Get them actors and actresses to look nice for the big screen.” He put his arm around her and drew her close.

  Such optimism and naiveté. I recalled my own youthful sense of buoyancy, and wondered when it had metastasized into a shell of perpetual indifference and chronic cynicism. Probably at seventeen when I broke my leg and received a concussion falling after climbing up the side of a building as a drunk stunt and dashed any and all hope for induction into the Air Force Academy and spaceflight, which I had been gunning for.

  So I took to booze and writing.

  Exit: good cheer. Enter: sardonicism.

  “Where you from?” Eliza asked.

  “I’m from where you two are going.”

  “No shit?! L.A.? How ‘bout that. What in the hell are you doing all the way out here in our fine neck of the woods, anyway?” JD asked.

  Long story…

  JD MARTIN’S mom’s house was a one-story brick deal with an add-on garage and chain-link fence surrounding the modest, grass-thatched yard. He drove the truck up the gravel driveway to the back of the place. A couple of Australian shepherds raced toward us, wagging, barking and smiling. One of them jumped up on me, its tongue slapped my face with slobber.

  “Trumpet, get off him,” JD commanded. Trumpet paid no attention to his command. Another swish of the tongue. “She really likes you. She never does that to anybody … especially strangers. TRUMPET, I SAID GET DOWN!” This time Trumpet obeyed, but stayed by my side.

  “See? We ain’t crazy. We got a good gauge of people and these dogs sense it. I know you were thinking we were out of our minds ‘cuz who would let a stranger into their home? You passed the test,” Eliza said. Trumpet licked my hand.

  We entered through the back door into a tiny laundry room that led into a tidy basic kitchen that joined a little dining room with a small, well-kept table. The living room was situated on the other side of a threshold of hanging beads.