A Tear in the Veil

by Patrick Loveland

  He walks out into the hallway and disappears for a minute. Felix looks at Rudy and says, “Sorry I flipped like that when we came in.”

  “Nah, I should have said something. I just didn’t know if you’d come in if I did.”

  Wahrheit walks back in holding a dark grey canvas satchel with a black circle on the big flap that creates a dark grey medic cross in a negative space of the unprinted center. The grey canvas is dark enough that you’d almost have to be looking for the black symbol to see it. The satchel looks full and the two slightly glossy black straps at the ends of the flap are snugly buckled in to keep it closed. “And this is for if anything hinky does come up. It’s like a survival kit. If you’re smart and go easy, you shouldn’t ever need it.”

  Felix takes the satchel and straps it around his neck and shoulder.

  Wahrheit hands him a small key and he adds it to the ring on the karabiner hooked to one of his rear belt loops then tucks all the keys back into his back pocket.

  “Don’t open it until you hypothetically would need it. It’s complicated, but the contents won’t be there the next time you open it if you do.”

  What the hell?

  “Just please… please read the instructions before using anything in here.”

  Felix says, “No doubt.”

  “If you’re smooth, this should just gather dust.”

  Felix nods in something related to understanding.

  Wahrheit opens the metal door at the end of the special entryway and Rudy steps in past him. Felix hesitates.

  Wahrheit chuckles and says, “Don’t worry, man. They can’t go off unless I want them to.” Felix steps in.

  “Oh, another thing. Don’t spend too much time together, if at all. I don’t need anyone getting suspicious that I’m in this area now. Two of you walking around together with those cameras after being in the FMC is a dead giveaway for anyone paying attention. And don’t come around here just any old time. I’ll let you know when you can come by at my discretion.”

  Still feeling a little buzzed, Felix decides to make a joke and asks, “Hey, rhetoric aside… is there anything like a ‘capital-G God’ out there?”

  Wahrheit scratches his left salt-and-pepper mutton chop and thinks for a moment like he’s trying to find a simple way to explain once again.

  “Like one OG motherfucker more like us? Maybe. It’s not in charge of anything or judging anybody, and I really doubt it created anything other than empty bottles, but the closest thing I’ve come across to a ‘God’ was surfing off the coast of Australia somewhere, last I heard.”

  Felix just blinks a few times, trying to process a serious answer he didn’t expect. His confusion isn’t lost on Wahrheit, who chuckles and closes the metal door, sealing them into the entryway. Felix looks at the holes in the walls and ceiling. He imagines what it would feel like to be caught in Wahrheit’s ‘acid and lead sandstorm’ and shudders.

  Wahrheit comes over the speaker in the camera and equipment array with a crackle and in that distorted, choppy voice he says, “–Now you boys stay out of trouble and remember: Minds are like parachutes.–”

  He buzzes them out.

  Felix and Rudy are silent for several minutes as they sit in a shuddering, rocking, empty northbound BART train car.

  Felix’s mind is racing and he’s grateful that he still has a bit of the drink and smoke in his system or he might cross over into real anxiety. He’s already on the edge as he tries to get a handle on having to see and think of things in a completely new way. You made your decision. You have to know.

  Rudy says, “I know it’s a lot to swallow.”

  “Yeah,” Felix says and chuckles.

  “He tells me a little bit more every time. Doesn’t want to overload me, I guess. The more he tells me, though, the less I feel like I understand, y’know?”

  “Man, I feel like I don’t understand anything now. I’ve spent most of my life just trying to get a decent grasp on the world the way it was. Now…”

  “It helps to think of it like… everything you do know is true. The stuff in front of us is real, true sight or not. You just have to add layers to your understanding. Like learning another language or being a child again.” He laughs. “Listen to me… those are totally Var-height‘-isms’.”

  “Makes sense, though.” Felix catches himself gently rubbing the base of his left ring finger.

  “24th Mission” signs flash by in the windows. Rudy secures his camera bag and stands up.

  Felix asks, “The Mission, huh?”

  “Yeah. Lemme know if you’re gonna be around here with a four-two-six so I can lay off it for the day and it won’t look suspicious.”

  “No problem.”

  Rudy extends his open hand at an angle. Felix slaps it and they close fists and bump them together. Rudy crosses to the doors and holds the support bar.

  Felix says, “Hey.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Sorry and… thanks.”

  Rudy chuckles and says, “We’ll see.”

  Felix furrows his brow and says, “What do you mean?”

  “I know why I want to see. Because it’s the truth. It’s what’s real. I just hope your reasons are enough for you. Hey, if you still want to thank me and apologize in six months, I’ll take it.”

  “That’s a little ominous.”

  “I don’t mean it to be. It’s just… there are some things I wasn’t prepared for. If it gets to be too much, I’ll just ask Var-height to flash me back to a pink.” He chuckles but it lacks mirth.

  “Right.” Felix feels a little less sure now.

  The BART train eases to a stop and the doors open.

  Rudy says, “Hey, don’t listen to me right now. Just a little shook up from something the other day. There’s a lot of beautiful, awesome stuff to see. Take it easy and enjoy, man.”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “You too,” Rudy replies.

  Felix says, “Hey, one thing–”

  The doors start to close and Rudy grabs one and it slides open again.

  Rudy asks, “What’s up?”

  “What did Wahrheit mean, ‘minds are like parachutes’?”

  Rudy chuckles and says, “He means that both those things ‘only work when open.’ Old quote by a noble scotch brewer if I remember rightly.”

  “I guess that makes sense from him.”

  “Exactly,” Rudy says then he shoots Felix a peace sign with his index and middle finger as he exits the train car. Or is it V for victory?

  The doors close and the train starts on its way again. Felix watches Rudy climb the escalator out of sight.

  Felix opens the front door of the flat and sees that the blue and orange “I love you Felix” sign is on. Since he’s been back, it’s always made him feel good to see it when he comes in. This time, he just feels confused.

  He gently closes the door and locks it then makes his way down the hallway past the living room. He stops by his workroom, takes off the camera bag and Wahrheit’s ‘survival kit’, and tucks them by the chair next to his drawing table near the hall door before continuing down the hall toward the sound of a creaking wheel.

  I wonder what’s in that kit Wahrheit gave me. Probably like inter-dimensional goggles, a travel guide, and a towel.

  Felix chuckles to himself.

  He pokes his head into Audrey’s editing room. She’s editing 16mm film with her Mansfield viewer-editor on a table to the right of the large 16mm flatbed she usually uses. Must be a problem with the Tank.

  The Mansfield is her backup when she doesn’t have enough time to fix her huge, old flatbed editor, aka the ‘Tank’, and she needs to finish a project. It’s an ancient but immaculate one-piece with metal reel-to-reels connected to a base which has a splicer in it and the viewer forms up from that, resembling a small TV encased in thick metal and a channel with the internal projection system left of the view screen.

  Felix says, “Hey, lady.”

  Without looking bac
k at him she says, “Where you been all my life, loverman?”

  “Just went to a movie with a friend.”

  “‘Friend’?” Audrey asks.

  She’s being mostly playful, but there’s a tiny barb on the back end.

  “My friend Rudy. He goes to State. Haven’t seen him in a while. Used to work with me at Gamestop.”

  “Cool. What did you guys watch?”

  Shit…

  “It was a chop-socky flick at the Kabuki Eight in J-Town. Thirteen fists of some shit. Special engagement. He heard about it through his school. I don’t think it was even publicized.”

  There’s a pause like she’s trying to decide if she believes him, then she says, “I got you a six-pack of a new Russian Imperial Stout I saw at Whole Foods. It’s like ten-something percent so I thought you’d be down. Also, some coffee ice cream and… oh, some great looking prawns we can whip up with baked potatoes and maybe a salad with the last of the romaine?”

  “Sounds great, thanks.”

  Felix walks down the last stretch of hallway and ducks into the dark bathroom. He opens the medicine cabinet door before turning the light. He grabs his legit prescription bottle, opens it, and empties the contents into the small wastebasket. Then he replaces them with Wahrheit’s alternatives, closes the bottle, and puts it back in the cabinet.

  He pulls the drawstring on the mesh can liner, turns off the light, and closes medicine cabinet then walks the last bit to the backdoor.

  The sound of the Mansfield creaking and lower sound of sprocket holes fluttering is still audible intermittently from Audrey’s editing room, so he goes out through the door.

  Felix walks through the grassy, fence-separated common backyard area to a staircase down to a long, narrow stretch of concrete which cuts back under the east side of the building back to the street.

  He walks down a line of trashcans, passing the two or three he’s seen Audrey use most frequently, and opens one.

  The creaking sound is just barely audible through the window above him as he lifts up a small pizza box, empties the mesh liner into the can, covers the contents with the box, then walks back down the concrete strip toward the backyard.

  18

  Felix doesn’t want Audrey to get suspicious about why he’d buy another camera when she got him a new one, so he stores the HDV-426 in the closet in his editing room. He decides to just see how he feels about ‘seeing’ through his own eyes before he starts traipsing around as a cameraman for Weird Shit Weekly.

  Things are normal for almost two weeks. Too normal. Felix keeps waiting for something to show up. Even just a spiderfly or something would stop him from becoming more and more suspicious that Wahrheit and his pills are some big joke or prank.

  When he does start to suspect this, he just has to recall the big, spooky ball in Wahrheit’s yard and the fog surrounding his houses that keeps you from knowing all of it’s there. And the solid bubble machine and the see-through bullets with the formulas inside like insects…

  Yeah, Wahrheit’s for real. What he’s all about is another matter.

  He hangs out with Audrey and their friends. He still has fun with her but he knows that soon he’ll probably have to deal with seeing Crazy Face Audrey or whatever that is. That’s the only part he’s really dreading. During this time, Felix watches Audrey real close during sad movies or when he “accidentally” leaves the TV on a really political channel to get a rise out of her. Nothing yet.

  Hirofumi and Kaori have him come by the warehouse to get a feel for how home/free works. They actually assembled decent little teams in every major territory for localization. It’s running pretty smooth.

  Except for one player on the North American servers hacking something in that lets him take other players’ bags of recycling and modify them. He could be seen flying over the city holding a ring attached to the base of a huge net filled with recycled cans and bottles hacked to float like balloons. It was all in good fun, so they didn’t ban or burn him too hard. They just tightened up their code.

  While Felix was there, Hiro personally piped in a real-time fix that took away the floating properties of the recyclables. They watched the hacker drop from the sky from a few player screens Kaori, Oscar, and Yevgeny were manning with their characters. The hacker never let go so the huge bag of cans and bottles crashed down onto the street, flattening his character avatar into mushy pulp. Some bottles and cans that had wiggled out on the way down hit the street and bounced all round, ricocheting off into NPCs here and there that have been coded to duck and look around in a panic when anything out of the ordinary happens.

  Felix takes long walks around the city looking for just a hint of strange- ness through his own eyes.

  He walks through the forested areas in the Presidio in the evening because it’s the creepiest normal place he can think of so he figures he’d be more likely to see something there. Nothing.

  He hangs out by one of the old, decaying windmills in Golden Gate Park hoping for the same but only gets propositioned by guys wanting to get nasty in the bushes. His mistake, so whatever.

  He takes a tour of Alcatraz figuring there could be ghosts or something. Not that he can see yet.

  It occurs to him that there’s no sound logic to his tactics and it’s more a question of chemical buildup, but he’s impatient.

  Felix is walking north up 3rd, returning from one of these spooky recon trips down by the waterfront. He had intended to visit one of his old favorite abandoned spots in the city. It was a lot down by the waterfront where old MUNI streetcars had been rusting and decaying for decades across an inlet from a little park that always seemed out of place in the industrial nightmare that is the Central Waterfront on the southeast end of San Francisco proper.

  He and friends would sneak through a cut in the fence over the inlet and crawl through some brush to another cutout that led to a ledge you could traverse to get to the streetcar graveyard. They’d get fucked up and hang out in the old, creaky husks. It was nice because some of the streetcars had only metal skeletons where the ceiling used to be and you could see some stars from inside on the rare clear night.

  It must have been longer ago than he thought since he had been there last because the streetcars were all gone. It was repaved and converted into another parking lot for whatever the factory is there.

  He just sat at a table in the park across the water cursing the bastards who took away one of his favorite old spots in the city.

  So all he got for his trouble was disappointment, nostalgia, and a steadily worsening headache.

  His phone rings, playing the original zither version of The Third Man Theme until he takes it out of his pocket and picks it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, studly!” Audrey says.

  “Hey, sweetabix. What’s up?”

  “Fishy filter needs new cartridges. Can you get some?”

  Felix cringes, not looking forward to having to do something that will keep him from taking some pills for his head.

  “I have a headache, baby.”

  “Aw, I’m in a time crunch and it would help a lot. And I didn’t ask you to bed me, Felix. Get your excuses straight.”

  He chuckles through the pain and says, “Fine, fine. No problem. For the record, though, I don’t think I’ve ever felt the need to make an excuse.”

  “Well, aren’t you forgetful and sweet? Maybe we can test that out later. Bye now.”

  “Later,” Felix says and hangs up after hearing her click off.

  Felix makes his way up 3rd, stopping at a newsstand shop near Moscone Center to buy a little packet of ibuprofen gel tabs and a bottle of chocolate milk. As he continues on, he drinks half the bottle, swallows both pills with a mouthful of the milk, and finishes the bottle off.

  3rd becomes Kearny up past Market, so he cuts one over to Grant and makes his way into Chinatown.

  Gel tabs usually work fast for him but his head actually feels worse as they kick in and they’re beginning to make his s
tomach feel off. He starts sweating badly and his vision blurs. He slows his pace and it hits him that all the sounds around him seem distant and quiet even though most of the sources are right in front of him. Blurry Chinese locals and tourists shuffle softly by and cars gently putter up and down the street. One honks at another that apparently isn’t turning fast enough in front of it and the horn seems polite and almost pleasant.

  It’s not just that everything is quiet. The sounds are being forced out by a low pulsing that vibrates through the base of his skull up through his brain’s reptile parts and lobes, searing everything behind his eyes and what must be the inner workings of his ears in past the drums.

  As this pulsing becomes more intense, his stomach goes from a little off to queasy and ready to revolt. He just wants to find a spot to catch his breath and let the medicine do what it’s supposed to.

  Going through the intersection across Pine, he gets a face full of all-day cookin’ real Chinatown nasty air from up the hill to his left and it’s over. Battle lost.

  He moans and speeds up, looking around for a place to hurl.

  Through his blurred vision and tears forming in his eyes, he sees a short alley street and concrete stairs that cut up the hill at a slope between a camera shop and a Chinese bargain bodega.

  Felix ducks up the alley, trying to get as far from the view of passers-by as he can but his legs get twitchy and wobbly and he loses almost all of his strength. He collapses, catching the metal rail for the stairs wide with both hands at the last second and accidentally slamming his abdomen down against it.

  He vomits chocolate milk, mostly dissolved pills, and stomach acid down onto the stairs and base of the bargain store’s outer wall. He heaves hard repeatedly until almost nothing is coming out and his chest and throat hurt.