Planet Fever

by Stier Jr. , Peter

  Neither Eddie nor EZ mentioned this observation to Fillono. They knew that he knew and they knew that he had prodded them to sniff out in that direction without giving away that he was covertly directing them. A good director knows how to get his actors to do the right thing, seamlessly.

  “Eddie. You know you are-a-welcome here any time. And when you finish your book, you come and be a guest lecturer, no?” Fillono smiled, sipping his espresso.

  Ed nodded. “You bet.”

  “Scoot safely,” EZ said.

  They finished their coffees, shook hands, hugged, and Ed grabbed his backpack and made way toward the parking garage to his truck.

  The truck started and sounded good; EZ had asked one of the mechanics at the resort to fix it up. He drove out of the parking garage and down the road. This time, he noticed all the cameras and tiny satellite dishes everywhere.

  On the way out, a billboard sign flashed: Leaving Whynot. Thank You. Have a Swell Day. He opted for the main highway rather than the mountain pass “shortcut” he had taken on the way in. Out of habit, he went to put a tape into the deck before remembering he had, on the way there, gutted the thing when it had eaten its final tape. He dialed into the radio and found a static-ridden frequency for the local classical music station. Wagner’s Das Rheingold cracked out of the speakers into the cab.

  The first leg of the drive was uneventful and scenic. Eddie was jazzed-up on the espresso and sweating more than normal, but was generally enjoying himself, taking care to watch his speed. He hit the Utah state line mid-afternoon and made certain to really watch his speed. He passed a sign reading “Zion” and had flashes of his adventures there. He wondered what the young couple, Eliza and JD, was doing, and he pondered if they, in fact, existed.

  As the lines in the road cruised by, his mind raced and reeled and he claims to have experienced a spiritual kinship with Jack Kerouac as words and ideas and rhythms poured forth from his mind into the ether. Too bad he was driving, because he knew that these words would be lost forever. But, accompanied by the static (no radio signals existed out here), the din of the cab and the drone of the engine, he mused a jazzy poem to nobody but the passing desert, the sky, the air, the highway and any invisible beings he didn’t know about who happened to be eavesdropping upon him, in that moment, and, like jazz, a one-off piece that existed only in that moment in time.

  When he stopped to take a leak and gas up, he put forth the attempt to catch that proverbial “lightning in a bottle” by jotting it down in the notebook, but the energy and freshness of it was lost. It was indeed relegated to the ether for time immemorial.

  The following is that proverbial “lightning in a bottle” poem titled “if I were you”:

  if I were you:

  I would: get with it….

  make certain there is an escape route….

  take her by the hand and let her know….

  wonder what it would be like to be me….

  get the fuck back to Dodge and fight like a man….

  get the fuck out of Dodge and flee like a wise man….

  investigate the way….

  wiretap the truth….

  eyeball the life….

  and run down the dirty bastard who sold you that second hand dream.

  Ed had no idea where that poem would fit into the story, so he put it here.

  The sun was setting and he was about halfway through Utah. The full moon was out and becoming brighter as the sky grew darker. He tried the radio and miraculously got another classical station. His hairs stood up when Carl Orf’s O Fortuna tumbled out of the speakers.

  He pulled into a rest area and finished listening to the song. He clicked off the radio and turned off the truck. He crashed out there in the cab of his pickup.

  THE EARLY sun crept over Ed and he woke up from a sound sleep. Aside from waking up a few times during the night because of the seatbelt jabbing into his side, or the thunderous engine of a big-rig truck that had entered the rest area, the night had been uneventful.

  It seemed like his life was finally on track. No more pesky disturbances from doctors, strange military brass, or upside-down inter-dimensional men suspended in mid-air. He possibly had a girlfriend awaiting him, or an imposter posing as one. Either way, Eddie felt fine with that—if she was the real deal, he would be happy. If she was not, he would be fine, for he would be able to utilize her character for his own creative designs. That’s the way he made himself feel better with that option. But in all actuality, he hoped that she was an imposter that had actually fallen in love with him.

  Yes, he knew how campy that sounded. But that is really how he felt about the whole thing.

  He ate a protein bar and drank some water before hitting the restroom. En route, a peculiar gentleman approached him; his eyes locked onto Eddie’s for his entire approach. The guy looked to be in his thirties and seemingly very out of place out there in the middle of the Utah desert: for he was clad in a black, three-piece business suit, polished shoes and perfect hair. As they walked by one another he continued his unblinking stare, boring into Eddie.

  Hot damn—the guy on the Greyhound who was bird-dogging me back in St. George…. Eddie thought.

  “Howdy,” Eddie said as they passed, letting him know he wasn’t to be easily intimidated.

  The man said nothing. He just stared. Once they passed, Ed imagined the guy was still staring at him from behind.

  Screw that guy, Ed thought and went into the restroom, took a leak, washed his hands, brushed his teeth with his finger and splashed cold water on his face and hair.

  He went back outside and the guy was gone.

  Bring it on, Eddie thought.

  He hit Vegas at around two in the afternoon and wondered if he should pay a visit to the good Colonel or his lackey psychiatrist. He opted against it. Better to pass right on by than get sucked into that vortex. Stick to the plan. Roughly five more hours until he’d be safely back inside the dirty belly of good ol’ Los Angeles.

  HE CLIMBED up the stairs and unlocked the door to his apartment. A flash of déjà vu hit him as he entered, as though he had been through this exact scenario before. The place was clean, relatively cool, and smelled nice.

  “Hi!” Mona, who had died her hair black, arose from behind a painting she was working on and came and gave him a big hug. “You look good. And tired. But good tired.”

  Eddie smiled. She was still there. It was nice to hug her and it was nice to be back in his place. “I feel recharged and ready to get busy finishing this novel, start a new one, maybe crank out some short stories and screenplays. Hell, maybe I even have a stage play or two in me. Time to get out of the bush leagues and become a pro’s pro. I’ve got a new lease on life.”

  Mona whistled. “Wow.”

  “It was a helluva trip.” He set his backpack down on the couch and went to the fridge. “We got anything to drink that won’t mess me up?”

  Ed could tell she was relieved at his question, and he opened the fridge to reveal some apple juice, milk and cola. He opted for a glass of milk and asked her if she wanted anything.

  “No thanks,” she said.

  He walked over to the couch and sat down. She sat in the recliner across from him. He finished his milk and set it on the coffee table, then unzipped his backpack, taking out some of his notebooks and the dusty old book he had found in the desert.

  Mona straightened up into an attentive posture when she saw him brandish the book. “What is that old thing? It looks like it’s been buried in the desert for who knows how long.”

  “That’s because it has.” He took great care in opening the cover to the first page.

  She leaned closer. “What is it?”

  “Listen closely, because this is going to sound completely crazy. But I’m trusting you with this information, so I hope you give me the benefit of the doubt.”

  Her eyes widened. She nodded and gestured with her hands for Ed to continue.

  He took in a deep breath and po
ndered where to begin. “This is the key in bringing down the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate. I know they are monitoring this right now, but I don’t care, because I have this.” He held up the book. “And, I have you. They can take neither from me, because I love this book and I love you.”

  Her face registered slight confusion, shock, empathy and her cheeks blushed a bit.

  He took a sip of milk and continued, “This is, quite literally, My Book of Life, given to me by the Author of All That Is, Atoz Al Ways. He has imbued upon me Reality Authorship, whereupon I am co-author of the universe, so long as I don’t sell or give the rights to my material away to those who wish to seize control of it. So, in a nutshell, I’m crazy and solipsistic and control the entire universe.”

  She smiled. “Um, you have a little milk on your lip.”

  Great. So Eddie had a milk mustache during his speech. Classic.

  She got up and sat next to him, putting her hand on his knee. “Eddie, in a weird way, you’re totally correct. You are in control of an entire universe.”

  Where was she going with this? A knot tightened in his throat.

  “…and you’re right. If you do not let go of these realities you have manufactured, or authored, you will not be able to get out of them. You will inhabit them for the rest of your life. As far as what I mean to you….”

  He wasn’t sure he liked where this was headed. He sensed danger. He took another sip of milk and set the glass down on the table.

  She wiped the new milk mustache away from his lips. “Eddie, do you recall how and when we met?”

  He thought about it hard. “The first instance is the bar, that night, where your boyfriend smashed a beer mug over my head….”

  She grabbed one of his notebooks he had taken out from his backpack and the tiny stub of a pencil and began to doodle on one of the pages. “Do you remember a place called ‘A to Z Research and Clinical Trials’? It’s where you and I met. You went in there because you read an ad in the paper and needed money. I was an aspiring actress with a minor in nursing so I was able to work there part-time. It was a good job that helped pay off student loans and allowed me time off when I needed to go audition. You were there, a nice guy and funny but a little shy and a little self-doubtful, but that’s beside the point. They were having you take some highly powerful drug that acted beyond what hallucinogens do. Once they realized that you could actually read people’s minds while on the drug, and began meticulously writing about how this entire organization was a CIA Manchurian Candidate Lab, they quickly ushered everyone working close to you to a secret facility by the base in Las Vegas. I didn’t even know the place I had been working was a front, I just thought it was a normal pharmaceuticaltesting facility.”

  Ed leaned back and absorbed what she was saying.

  She continued: “Eddie, they gave us a choice: sign on with the ‘Project’ and we would be rewarded handsomely, such as an acting career for me, or else be silenced, for good. Obviously, I chose the career path that involved speaking.”

  “And Moroni….”

  “Yes. He was one of the partners in the project. He took off with a bunch of samples. Nobody told me why, but I think he went rogue to do his own version of the experiment outside the lab, in society.”

  Or that’s their “cover story,” thought Eddie.

  Mona continued, “They upped the experiment with you though, and programmed your brain to inhabit a bunch of realities and bombarded you with different signals, so you wouldn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. That way, you would never be able to ‘expose’ them, because you would just seem like a lunatic. They made me sign ultra top-secret non-disclosure contracts and hired me on as your ‘handler,’ so that way they could roll you back out into the streets and watch to see if you ever made contact with Moroni, the only other guy that could bring them down. Eddie, before this, I never thought in a million years that anything like this was real. I just wanted to be an actress and help people. Honest.”

  Ed began to speak, but nothing came out because a bunch of phlegm clogged his throat. He cleared it and said, “So, we’re not an actual couple?”

  Ed noticed she had to hold back a sincere tear, or was a very good actress making him think she was holding back a tear.

  She set the pencil down and squeezed his thigh. “Oh, Eddie. I do really care about you. And I think I have developed a fondness for you. But you would never be able to fully trust me. Our entire relationship is founded upon fraud and pretense. Most of it in fact is fraudulent. Even from your side, because of your condition.”

  Wow. Reality shattered, yet again. How many more of these episodes could he endure? He had one final gasp. “Wait a second, you took all this from Chapter 80 of Planet Fever. I wrote that, and you are now just messing with me.”

  “Eddie, you wrote that chapter many times, in different incarnations and revisions as your mind tried to make sense of the programming. I’m willing to bet it tried to make Colonel West a not-so-bad guy at times, because that’s what they were trying to program into you, even though you intuited otherwise. Am I right?”

  Alarm bells went off. Aha, so she did know West. That wasn’t something they had programmed in as a false memory. His mind was beginning to get that ol’ messed-up feeling again.

  “Another thing, Eddie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They know about the plan.”

  “What?”

  Eddie heard the toilet flush. Out of the bathroom emerged the same guy Eddie had ditched from the bus, and had more recently passed at the rest stop in Utah, the guy in the three-piece. Ed then stood up way too fast and fell backward onto the couch. He felt dizzy. His mind was spinning. He reached into his pocket and found a loose pill, which he promptly swallowed. He closed his eyes.

  “So, we’re not an actual couple?” he asked again, smiling. Then he wondered if his entire plan to save the universe was shot.

  “NO, MR. Bikaver. We are not a couple in the fashion you are inquiring about,” the Interrogator says. “And your plan is shot. Nice try, thinking you could hand yourself in and then your pal, Ezekiel Buckminster, would come dashing in for a rescue. Fits your hackneyed style. You’ve been feeding us the entire narrative this whole time. That is the purpose of this interrogation. Even though you wrote down the plan with EZ in pencil and erased it, you narrated the fact that you were making a plan with him to me. We just deduced what the plan was based on that. He wouldn’t be able to make it here anyway, even if he were able to locate this place.”

  Well, here I am again. In the first person. In the present.

  “So, are you ready?” the voice asks.

  “For what?”

  “The part of your plan that we will follow. To hand over the rights to this ‘Book of Life’ of yours, given to you by Atoz Al Ways. You can yield it and inhabit a comfortable life in a scripted resort of your choosing. We will even write a decent role for you such as president or head of a bank or something. Perhaps mysterious yet popular reclusive author? Or you can remain in that chair, looping through various incarnations of your pathetic life over and over and over in what essentially amounts to endless psychological torture. The recurring cycle of being, each time being aware you’ve been through this before, but cannot do it differently: trapped in a circuit of routine like a series of déjà vu within déjà vu. What do you say, Edward Bikaver?”

  I’m exhausted. I’m beat. I’m completely powerless to stave off this insanity. But I want to know something. Two things, in fact.

  “I want a couple things first. One: since you’re going to erase my mind anyway, what is this special place?”

  The Interrogator takes his time with this one. Then he answers, “Very well, Mr. Bikaver. You are on the dark side of the moon. Contrary to popular opinion, this moon is in fact an orbital satellite space station which projects synthetic simulations of realities upon the populace of your planet, to keep you pretty much hypnotized while we utilize your planet’s vast wealth of reso
urces. We have been doing this for millennia. Next.”

  “Okay. Do you know what happened to Froward Moroni?”

  Dead silence. I hear a sliding door open and footsteps approach. From the darkness appears the figure of none other than Froward Moroni.

  Moroni bows. “Hello, Mr. Bikaver. I trust you’ve enjoyed your stay, in this, my fair recliner today?”

  What the hell is going on here?

  A third eye manifests atop Moroni’s forehead and he takes a more serious posture. “That is a third question, but I will grant you the answer. I am Tritosofthalmian, and an RA hunter in the employ of Phos Atomos Paradosi. I have been monitoring this planet for some time, and took note of large amounts of creative activity from you and the others—a group of Reality Authors for Atoz Al Ways. I finagled the rest of them out, but you were the last holdout, Mr. Bikaver, and Atoz put a lot of stock in you. The fool. When we learned he gave you your Book of Life I nearly went to the ceiling of reality with delight. If I could get you to give up the rights to your entire existence, past, present and future, gaining all the rights to all your other works would be moot. We would have it, de facto. Because we would have you.” Moroni snapped his fingers.

  A new set of footsteps enter. That same guy in the three-piece suit strolls in, carrying my backpack. He hands it to Moroni and strolls out.

  Moroni unzips the backpack and reaches in. He picks up the tiny pencil and examines it. “As a souvenir.” He hands me the pencil, then reaches back into the bag. “Now for the moment to end all strife, behold, Edward Bikaver’s Book of Life!” He brandishes it and holds it high up in the air. After a moment of exaggerated flourish, he lowers the book and examines it. “Quite dusty. Anyway, you must state that you, Edward Bikaver, give me, Froward Moroni, representing the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate, all rights to this book unconditionally.”