Planet Fever

by Stier Jr. , Peter

  “Can we go there, Daddy?”

  My pops thought I meant to the film. “Yes, we’ll go next week.”

  The next week we went to the film. Of course I loved it, particularly the parts with the little boy and his toys going haywire and the crazy man making a mountain out of mashed potatoes.

  “Can we go to there?” I asked my dad again as we exited the movie, pointing to the film poster—that holy and strange place in my mind on that poster.

  He said it was very far away, but some day we would go.

  As an aside: I was baffled why that exact shot from that poster wasn’t actually in the movie. But that movie had seeded the desire in me to quest outer space. From that moment forward I had been focused and disciplined and knew I was going to become an astronaut when I grew up.

  Then it happened: one drunk night, in high school—my first drunk night ever—I decided to play show-off in front of a group of people, particularly Heather Halloway, and display my climbing savvy.

  The way up the side of the four-story building was a piece of cake, the bricks protruded randomly and out enough to grab and find good footing. The way down got tricky: I was cocky and certain the warm lips of Heather Halloway awaited me, her climbing champion. Midway my descent, in the midst of imagining the rest of my passionate and epic night with her, I realized neither my hands nor feet were in contact with the wall of the building. As a matter of fact, things were getting really breezy and when I looked back I had enough time to think, “there is the sidewalk approaching fast. I am falling—” followed by a surge of white electricity and a heavy cracking sound. I woke up, a concerned mom and dad hovering above me in a hospital.

  Goodbye, astronaut. Hello, drunk.

  The climb up the face of “The North Guardian Angel” grew more dangerous; it became the type of ascent professional climbers and aficionados scaled. Not some mental-ward-escaping, detoxing, hack writer on a quest of dubious possibilities.

  Fuck it—I’ll master this thing with only my hands and legs, no ropes for me.

  I had nothing to lose. I wasn’t afraid of the challenge. Perhaps that thinking was a mistake. Or maybe not. Maybe all of this was going according to plan: this was the way things were supposed to happen. But who’s plan?

  Maybe had I gone into the Air Force and done all that astronaut stuff, I would’ve been funneled into a narrowed and compartmentalized reality, never having stumbled into this alleged mission to take down a nefarious entity and their plan for universal domination.

  Yes—that road on that Close Encounters poster led me not into the literal ship that went to outer space, but to the proverbial light: the awareness that the aliens walk among us, and the bastards were pulling a big fast one.

  Reminiscing about all this, particularly my first crush of Heather Halloway, prompted me to think about Mona. Lovely Mona. I really liked her. Was she really worried about me? My guess: she had finally had enough and said to herself, “I don’t think I can handle anymore of this nut job. I am out of here.” I would have understood if, when I got back (if I ever got back), she were long-gone from my circus. When I was around I was crazy, and when I wasn’t she was worried about me because I was crazy. What kind of relationship is that? What kind of guy does that to a woman? Why was I such an ass? Obviously I hoped she would still be around, but what the hell did she see in me in the first place?

  Then the thoughts drifted to Moroni. That chimera of a man still fit into my story in some important fashion, but how?

  I took a break from scrambling up the side of the giant rock and rested inside a hollowed-out portion, like a mini-cave overlooking the vast desert landscape. I fancied myself a weird monk, surveying the off-colored spectrum of the Universe’s colossal reality. I had ascended quite a way and I hoped the other side offered an easier descent because doubts were arising about making it down the same way without a rope….

  There was a steep pitch yet to make before what seemed an easy path to the summit.

  A tree to the right of me about twenty yards had grown outward from the cliff, sideways. What other way could it have grown? I appreciated, if not related to, its tenacity to find its own direction to grow in. For a second, the thought about climbing out onto the branches occurred in me, just for the challenge. I decided against it.

  Why had I really climbed up that building back in my youth, and why was I climbing up this mountain now? As a youngster, climbing was one of my fortes and I would scale up anything: six-foot-high brown wooden fences prevalent in suburbia, lampposts, walls with protruding bricks, up to the roof of our two-story house….

  The adrenaline rush. The challenge. The perspective.

  In sixth grade, I climbed the rope in gym class faster than anyone in the history of that elementary school, but my name didn’t go up on the “record board” the resident gym teacher—Charlie “Chicken-Bones”—had put up in honor of the kid that had all the records from ten years prior. His name was “Don Deluzio,” and for a long time I had thought it was Dom Deluise, the chubby actor made famous from his absurd sidekick roles alongside Burt Reynolds.

  Wow, Dom Deluise used to be quite the athlete. My pals busted up laughing; they thought I was joking.

  In reality, this infamous Athletic King of Little Elementary had become a big-shot freshman linebacker for the Colorado Buffaloes college football team when I was in sixth grade.

  Why hadn’t my name gone up on that board?

  According to Charlie “Chicken-Bones,” my climb wasn’t “officially” made during a “sanctioned” event. When the hell were these “official” events? I wondered.

  I shrugged, knowing that I had just beaten the reigning champ, and nobody besides me, Charlie “Chicken-Bones,” and my friend Doug Chiccone (who was very outraged by this injustice) would ever know.

  The game was rigged in Don’s favor. This became very obvious when I crushed his time in the 40 yard dash, twice—and a shocked and bemused Charlie “Chicken-Bones” examined his stop-watch, looked up at me, looked back down at his stop-watch, then stated “too bad this wasn’t a sanctioned event—you would have broken the record.”

  That time I got it: Charlie “Chicken-Bones” was the high priest meant to maintain the altar of Don Deluzio and keep his hallowed records intact. Off-the-record, I had beaten his times. But I was destined to be only the clandestine usurper. No one was to know.

  A few years later—entering his college senior year—Don and a buddy had gotten “hit-n-runned” by a drunk driver while summer vacationing the South Padre islands in Texas. Don had broken his jaw and leg, which healed in time for the fall football season, but then he slipped and tweaked his knee on the turf during a practice.

  I had no animosity for him, rather I felt for the dude: he had no part in Charlie’s obsession with him. I deduced that Charlie “Chicken-Bones” had made a deal with Mephistopheles to keep Don’s records up on the board, and now Mephisto was coming to extract payment from the poor and unknowing Don Deluzio.

  I imagined Charlie weeping under that shoddy record-board hanging above the gymnasium entrance of my former elementary school, cursing the gods that his star elementary athlete’s NFL hopes had all but been thwarted when Don graduated college to become a damn fine tile salesman. Charlie’s dreams of having fostered a professional football player who had gotten his athletic start in his elementary gym class were dashed.

  That was it.

  I was destined to be a behind-the-scenes type operator—the unknown champion.

  I got it early: cynics get birthed when they figure out they are getting a raw deal by lame-ass gate-keeping puppet masters who run a strange show that has their own interests at heart, jerking off to their own puppets.

  Fuck Charlie “Chicken-Bones”….

  I continued upward and sideways, pausing to survey the best possible route to take. I found myself on what had appeared from below to be an easy angle, but was pretty much stuck on a steep face—not quite vertical but closer to it than I had reckoned.<
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  “Shit.”

  The heat of the afternoon sun, paired with my newfound predicament, caused a profuse sweating of my hands, which made climbing much more treacherous. Every time I got a decent footing I’d let go one hand to wipe the sweat off with my shirt, grab hold again and wipe off the other. For every step: one foot, one hand, one grip at a time.

  I imagined what I must’ve looked like from below: a lunatic without equipment up very high on the side of a very steep cliff.

  Keep it simple, stupid … the classic Mark Twain maxim on storytelling I applied to this impromptu freestyle cliff scaling.

  I’d have to go up and over to my left and around a slight corner, to the horizontal tree, above which access to the summit was. Step-by-step, I shinnied diagonally up a slight fissure in the rock to get to that tree, telling myself it’d be “smooth sailing” once that point was reached. So I hoped….

  A COUPLE of hawks flew around calling to one another, “Check out the dumb-ass climbing up this cliff….”

  I inched my way along, sweating, cursing and swearing if I got to that summit I’d be a better man.

  “Who are you swearing this to?” a calm voice asked.

  “You,” I blurted out.

  The sun blazed down on me, creating a blanket of heat that kept getting hotter.

  “Whoever you are,” I added.

  Across my field of vision, which was now spotted and sun-blinded, the name “Atoz Al Ways” scrolled.

  “Thanks. I still have no idea who you are.”

  The calls of the hawks began to enmesh with the sound of the stillness of the desert atmosphere and a low, pulsing hum reverberated around me. I was either tripping from heat stroke, having a peyote flashback, or both.

  The rocks became malleable, rubbery, and easy to grip. Patterns outlining the precise course I needed to scale the rocks appeared, showing a clear pathway across. The angle no longer felt steep (though I was aware of the dangerous grade)—my mind and body had “tuned” into the terrain. I became one with the mountain. It all became second nature, and I thought that’s what it must be like for a mountain goat.

  “Do not get over-confident,” the calm voice warned.

  “Okay.”

  With acrobatic ease, I scrambled to the horizontal tree. Standing at its roots, I thought the tree had it right: it was growing in the proper direction—the rest of the world was off-kilter. This horizontal tree was a marker, a checkpoint notifying the climber “you are almost there, buddy.”

  Looking up the mountain, the angle was easy for the rest of the way, and the rocks made a natural stairway to the top. A stairway to heaven.

  It took about ten more minutes to get to the summit. At the top, a cool breeze caught the layer of damp grit encasing me, cooling me down. I did a few slow, panoramic pirouettes to view the entire landscape around me. The continuous blue and white sky hovered majestically above layered rocks of gray, orange and yellow giant jagged towers, stretching forth into the horizon.

  “Oh yeah!”

  I removed my knapsack and sat down on a flat rock. Never had I experienced such a stillness before—neither outside my body nor within my own head. I was at ease.

  The sun started to hit that angle in the sky that makes its impending set known: a late afternoon sweet light that says you don’t need to rush, but it might be a good idea to think how you’re to go about your evening. I figured I’d camp out right there near the top—in a natural cove of rock (to shield off the desert wind).

  I walked around and gathered pieces of dried wood and shrubbery scattered around, then built a fire, drank some water and snacked on the rest of Eliza’s homemade granola. The blue sky turned to orange, orange to gold then gold to purple as the sun set, and the stars began to poke into the massive dome of the sky.

  OFF IN the distance a bunch of hyenas laughed as the stars speckled across the darkened sky—every single one in the Milky Way Galaxy, it seemed.

  “Hi there,” a voice from no distinct direction said.

  I couldn’t tell if it was from within my own head, or a fellow climber. I jerked my head over my shoulder, scoping the area.

  “I am speaking from both within and outside your head, just in case you were wondering.” The voice was calm but authoritative. The same voice I had heard earlier while I was scaling the cliff. The same one that intermittently had told me to “go to the mountain.”

  A few more hyenas made mockery of something else in the night.

  “I’m glad you didn’t say ‘a few more hyenas made mockery of the night’ as you were thinking of doing. It’s more subtle that you have them mocking something else in the night, rather than mocking the night itself. Nice job in not forcing the poetry.”

  “Um—thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  In no rush to advance this conversation with my invisible visitor who claimed to be both outside and inside me, I stared off at the night sky some more. A few shooting stars streaked across, inducing a sense of comfort. The existence of my new companion wasn’t bothering me, and for some reason I felt as though we were well acquainted. It was casual. I’d encountered some strange shit along the journey; this wasn’t anything new.

  The galaxy around us made its slow swirl and time passed with hyenas and light-breeze accompaniment. As I stared above, a yet deeper calm prevailed through me, and the stars ramped up their spinning in a time-lapse fashion, transforming into a circular swarm of light, quickly gaining speed, as though vertigo was being induced. The hyena laughter bended into an undulating, fast and rhythmic chorus of strange music that grew faster and faster. The desert breeze morphed into a roaring river of sound. Though everything around moved at an incomprehensible pace, I remained still and my mind serene, absent of panic and fear.

  Then it happened: what could only be described as a giant thunderclap or cannon-shot reverberated through the air, and then an upside-down man bounced into my field of vision, then bounced out. He bounced back in, then out, in then out, in, out, and finally—in.

  I was face-to-upside-down-face with a guy wearing dark sunglasses. He seemed to be suspended from something above via bungee cord strapped to his feet. The spinning and roaring had stopped.

  “Howdy Eddie. How’s tricks?” he asked.

  “Um—–”

  “You may not remember me. As a matter of fact, I guarantee you don’t remember me, so I’ll just get down to the brass-tacks: I’m Atoz Al Ways. I’m your author and employer. I understand you need some help with some things.”

  “Um—–”

  “Well, I’m here to help you finish.”

  “Uh—–”

  “Your novel.”

  “Oh.”

  “PRETTY WILD, huh?”

  “Uhhh huhhhh….”

  “This thing called ‘reality’—I wrote it. I designed it.”

  Atoz Al Ways’ bouncing settled and he hung before me. Still upside down. I looked up to see what he was suspended from, figuring a hot-air balloon. Nothing but black sky. What happened to all the stars?

  “I have you in a suspended animation right now. You are neither here nor there. You are outside space and time. And for what it’s worth, I am not the one who is upside-down. You are. Like I said, pretty wild, eh?”

  I looked down, and sure enough my feet were on nothing. I was surrounded by utter nothingness. But I wasn’t worried or terrified, more intrigued.

  “Yup, you certainly are intrigued. All of this will be in your novel. This very conversation, verbatim. And it will serve a purpose, believe it or not.”

  I cleared my throat. “Purpose?”

  Atoz smiled. “You are going to save reality. And free thought and free will. The reality I had authored has been plagiarized and rendered quite lame because of my former associate’s designs. He and his league of hacks have purloined and turned my work into a circus of sleazery, wretchedness and confusion. He’s trying to get into your head, to steer the story, hence, the Universe, in a bad direction.
You are going to get things ‘back on track.’ That’s what this is—a little informal meeting. I have employed you to do just that. Of your own free will, of course….

  ‘Huh?’ is what comes next—by you, of course—and then you ask:”

  I did say “Huh?” Then: “Am I having some sort of withdrawal symptoms from those crazy experimental pills I’ve been taking?” he and I said, in unison.

  “Now I will tell you that they gave you those pills because they are scoping your mind, to see if you have ever come into contact with me. Do you not remember….”

  Though I didn’t need to, I closed my eyes and recalled previous instances when I was asked the question whether or not I had ever heard the name ‘Atoz Al Ways’: by the psychiatrist with the third eye and the Colonel … and Moroni.

  “Yup. That is correct. They are all in league with a former associate of mine—a malcontent named Phos Atomos Paradosi. They’ve been manufacturing false, or misleading narratives in your head in order to confuse, diffuse, reuse and suffuse you with their agenda, which is shady and dangerous, and not a good deal for you and your human brethren, nor is it a good deal for your fellow mammals, the dolphins, or distant life-form cousins the trees, or really anything within the oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle of existence. The only critter that might benefit from their plan would be the cockroach, and possibly the naked mole rat, depending on what sort of spray paint they use to turn the sky red.

  “Digressions aside: Since Phos and his cohorts are not playing fair, I’m popping in as a reminder to help you along. You see, they want to eliminate free will, but they cannot do it so long as it exists even as a concept in the mind. So they’re attempting to move the very concept out of existence, at least within the sphere of your minds. But it still exists in your mind, and it exists within your work-in-progress, or rather, your novel, Planet Fever.”