by Rob Hart
I linger in the hallway. I can feel the buzzing of the fluorescent light on my skin. It feels like ants. Ghosts dance at the edge of my vision, moving back and forth at the end of the long hallway. When I turn to look at them they’re gone. I don’t feel safe in the hall so I step into the room. Another nurse arrives, a kid with acne and a bad bowl cut. He’s wearing bright blue scrubs and looks barely out of high school. He hands Aesop a cup of thick, black liquid, which Aesop drinks, grimacing as he holds it to his lips. He pulls it away from his mouth and his teeth are black.
I think I’m hallucinating again. The male nurse looks at my face and says, “Activated charcoal.”
“This does not taste good,” Aesop says. And he drinks some more.
The male nurse turns to me. “We have to get him inside. Are you family?”
“No, just… a friend.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to sit in the waiting room.”
Aesop gets up, tosses me the keys to the car. I don’t put my hand up in time and they fly into the hallway, where they hit the floor and skid into the wall. He rolls his eyes. “Take care of my car. You’re going to be okay. Keep up on the tea.”
The two nurses lead Aesop through another door.
And I’m alone.
I watch the Braves beat on the Mets for four innings. I should feel bad because the Mets are my home team, but I was always partial to the Yankees. I sip at the tea, which is cooling off, which makes it taste worse. The ER stays mostly empty. A guy comes in with a blood-soaked towel wrapped around his hand. He sits for five minutes and goes in. There’s another guy here who was asleep when I came in and he hasn’t woken up yet.
I don’t know what to do. Driving back to camp doesn’t sound like fun. Mostly because of the hallucinations but also because of the people there who apparently want to kill us. But I have to get that book. Something bad is about to happen, and the book is the key.
I don’t want to leave Aesop. In part, because leaving a man behind isn’t how I roll. But also because I feel like I need him. Not just that in my fucked-up, DTing state, I need a shoulder to lean on.
It’s because of what he said.
It’s like he flicked a light switch. This emptiness inside me is suddenly filled up. Not fixed, not healed. But there’s enough light for me to see what I’m doing. To maybe get working on feeling like a human again.
The game ends. I want to stay here in the air conditioning and the comfy leather seat and melt into a puddle of myself and think about all the fun new things I’ve been given to consider, but I know I have to get moving.
Brenda is at the counter, still on the phone. I approach, stand off to the side. Enough so she can see me, but not enough that I’m intruding. She sticks her finger in the air, and this time I abide. After another three or four minutes of affirmations, she hangs up and turns to me.
“Can I help you, darling?” she asks.
“My friend,” I tell her. “I was hoping to find out how he was doing. Maybe I can see him.”
She nods. “What was his name again?”
“It’s…”
I realize that Aesop is more than likely not his real name.
“This is going to sound ridiculous but I only know him by his nickname,” I tell her.
“You’re right, that is ridiculous. Without a name, there’s not much I can do.”
I look around the waiting room. “It’s pretty empty. It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of other people who came in with severe mushroom poisoning, right?”
She huffs, picks up the phone, asks, “Davea, can you come here?”
She puts down the phone and points to a nearby chair. “Just wait.”
After a few moments the triage nurse from earlier comes out. She goes up to Brenda and the two of them chat for a minute, throwing glances my way. I probably look half homeless and half crazy. Unkempt hair and beard, sweat-stained clothes. I wouldn’t blame them if they just called a security guard to deal with me.
Luck is on my side. Davea comes up to me and says, “You came in with Mr. Stack.”
“I did. Is he okay?”
“He’s gone…”
I jump to my feet. “What?”
Her eyes go wide. “Oh god, no, I’m so sorry, no, I didn’t mean it like that, oh fuck…” She looks around, and Brenda is shaking her head. “I mean he was transferred. In cases of amatoxin poisoning the patient has to be taken to a hospital with an active liver transplant unit.”
I sit on the edge of the seat, my hand on my chest, trying to will my heart to stop screaming.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “Really. I’m new. I’m getting used to some of this stuff. I should have...”
“No, no, it’s fine,” I tell her. “Just, okay. Can you tell me where he was taken?”
She goes to the desk, takes a post-it sticky note, scribbles on it, and hands it to me. “It’s a few towns over. They took him by ambulance. It’s a precaution.”
I stand up, turn nearly in a full circle, not sure what to do next.
She looks at me with a little more caution. “Do you need me to call someone?”
“No, I’m good.”
It’s a lie, but she seems to accept it.
I start the car, turn on the radio. “You Learn” by Alanis Morissette. That’s a good one. I call up the bookstore on my phone, pull up the map app, and it’s about twenty minutes away. Click on the GPS button and a robotic female voice tells me to turn left out of the hospital.
I hope the battery lasts because once this is gone I have no fucking idea where I’m going. I don’t even know where South Village is in relation to here.
I take it slow, turning out, giving a wide berth to the cars that are approaching. After a few minutes I feel confident enough to pick up speed. My vision is still a little wonky, but no snakes, no bugs. No ghosts throwing themselves in my path.
It’s good to have a purpose.
Having a purpose makes everything a little bit clearer.
I sit outside the address for a few minutes, wondering if I got it wrong, or the information is out of date. It’s an old house. A house that time and landscapers forgot. There are weeds growing up around the base of it, the lawn wild and overgrown. The siding around the upper windows is falling apart and the stairs leading up to the porch are crumbling.
Then I see the cracked and faded sign next to the door. I squint and can make out: SONNY’S BOOKS.
I step out into the heat, feel something crawling on the back of my neck, slap it and come back with a clean hand. Blink a few times. Climb the steps. The door is open and inside there’s a staircase, and darkened rooms to either side. It’s immaculate, a stark contrast to the outside. The only light is what’s streaming through the windows. There are shelves on every wall, close to buckling but arranged neatly, almost reverently, with books.
No one seems to be around. I start in the room to my right, scanning the shelves, wondering if there’s anyone here to help. I circle half the room before I realize all these books are non-fiction, which means the book I’m looking for isn’t in here.
“Can I help you?”
Standing in the doorway, like he materialized out of shadows, is an older, stooped man. Snowy white hair and beard. His body is caving in around the stomach region. He’s in a blue polo and khakis and nice shoes. The sight of him makes me miss the insanely beautiful woman at the other bookstore.
“I sent an e-mail,” I tell him. “I was looking for a book. The Monkey Wrench Gang.”
He disappears into the darkness of a hallway. There’s a chair in the corner so I sit.
After a few minutes, footsteps approach and the man reappears, holding the book. He presents it like a QVC model and it’s the same edition I had in the library dome. I stand up, relieved, and he tucks it under his arm.
“How much?” I ask.
He shrugs. “How much do you have on you?”
I pull out my wallet. I keep all my money in a coffee can buried ten paces from
the bus. I only keep a little on me. There’s never any reason to exchange cash at South Village. I’ve got a ten-dollar bill, folded neatly and tucked behind my driver’s license, for emergencies. I take it out and unfold it.
“That works,” he says, taking the bill and handing me the book.
“Well then, thanks,” I tell him. I place it under my arm and turn to leave, but he clears his throat.
“You’re from that place with all the hippies, aren’t you?” he asks.
That makes me laugh. I must really have gone native. “That I am, sir.”
“Well, listen, I got something that might be of interest to you and your friends,” he says. “Will you hold on a minute?”
“I’m in a bit of a rush…”
“Please,” he says. “It’s important.”
“Okay.”
He disappears into another room. I scan the shelves and it’s not long before he comes back. He holds out a flier. There’s a protest scheduled in two weeks, to oppose a new fracking operation in the town between this one and South Village.
I may not be an expert on fracking but I’ve absorbed some stuff through osmosis. It’s a popular topic right now amongst the environmentally-conscious at camp. Liquid gets shot into the ground at high pressure to break up shale rock and free the natural gas inside. It’s a little like solving a problem by hitting the earth really, really hard. Which is how I like to solve problems, so right off the bat, I figure it’s not a good thing.
Fracking comes with risks. Contamination to ground and surface water, air pollution, the possibility of triggering earthquakes. There was a guy at camp a month or so ago, said he was traveling the country to spread the word about it. He would show people a video on his phone, of a man leaning over his kitchen sink, the water running into the basin, and holding a match to it.
The water caught fire.
Water isn’t supposed to catch fire.
Apparently the groundwater feeding his town got contaminated by methane freed up by a nearby fracking operation. Guy notified the Environmental Protection Agency, but the company doing the fracking said there was no way to prove a connection. So the guy sued them. The company won, then countersued for damages. They won again. The guy lost his home. Six months later the EPA proved the methane came from the fracking.
I don’t usually get sucked into political causes, but this one pissed me off.
“Do you think you and your friends could join?” he asks.
“I’m a little surprised we haven’t heard about this,” I tell him.
“Local city council manipulated the rules to push it through without a public hearing,” he says. “They didn’t want us to know about it. There’s a group of people getting together to explore legal options, but we’re going to try some good old-fashioned protesting, too.”
“I’ll put up the flier, make sure people know,” I tell him.
“Will you?” he asks. “We need to fight this thing. We can’t let some rich sons of bitches put our town at risk just so they can afford a third vacation home.”
“I will,” I tell him. “I promise.”
He smiles, hands me back the ten-dollar bill I just gave him. “You know what? The book is on the house. You just make sure to get some people out there.”
I fold up the flier and the bill, put them in my pocket. “Thank you.”
As I head out, I figure he’ll be getting his wish, probably sooner than he expects. I can’t be sure until I sit down with the cipher and the book, but this seems like the kind of thing the Soldiers of Gaia would want to hit.
My phone is nearly dead by the time I get back to South Village. I park on the back road again, because I’m worried about who might see me coming in the front, and anyway, it’s closer to the bus.
I trudge through the forest, going slow. It’s bright and hot and the forest is filled with the sound of insects, a slight breeze rustling the greenery. As I approach the bus I see movement inside.
I stop, crouch down into the brush.
Maybe I’m seeing things.
No, there’s definitely someone in there.
I push aside some dry earth, stick the cipher inside the book, and put the book into the ground. Cover it up with dirt and leaves at the base of a tree I’ll know to look for. So I can find the right spot quickly, I use a stick to make a light gouge in the bark. Then I stay low, creep up on the bus, putting my feet down carefully in spots where it looks like I’m not going to crunch anything. I manage to get up alongside the door. The windows are down so I can hear the person inside.
It’s a conversation, but one-sided, like the person is talking on a phone. Which is weird, because this is a dead zone for cell service. Some carriers get a weak signal by the main dome. This far out, there’s nothing.
I listen. Male. Don’t recognize the voice.
“He hasn’t been here all day… I’m sure of it… Do I wait and find out or do I blow my cover? … No, his name keeps coming up… He has to know something… Okay, let me get out of here before he comes back.”
I stand up, push my way through the doors, and climb onto the bus.
Holding up his hands, one of which is clutching a big chunky device that looks like a cell phone, is Katashi.
“Kon’nichiwa,” Katashi says, his face breaking into a wide, confused smile.
“Shut the fuck up,” I tell him. “I heard you.”
“Okay,” he says, his voice neutral, completely unaccented. It takes on a chilly quality. He looks around the bus. Thinking. Probably about what he said, and how much I heard, and how much I could have surmised from it.
“There’s an explanation for this…” he starts.
“You’re with the FBI, aren’t you? Are you an informant, or an actual agent?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“So, agent then,” I tell him. “That kind of sucked that they maced you too when they dragged us all out of here.”
“It’s important to keep up appearances.”
“Look,” I tell him. “Why don’t you make both of our days easier and tell me what the fuck you’re looking for. I’m willing to bet whatever it is, I don’t have it.”
“Bullshit,” he says. “You and Aesop are hiding something.”
The whole English-as-a-second-language thing was smart. The sheer frustration of not being able to communicate with him made a lot of people pass him over until he was wallpaper. He leaned into that, smiling a lot, being polite and considerate, enough that he never got on your nerves, but you didn’t appreciate him so much you wondered how he spent his time.
Now that the truth is in the open, he looks like a different person. Coiled. The fingers of his left fist are curling inward, like he’s getting ready to use it, in case I decide to do something silly. A southpaw, then. That makes me think this isn’t the first time he’s been on my bus.
I’m nearly twice his size and he doesn’t seem too concerned. I’m sure he has actual combat training. I’m not currently playing with a full deck. This isn’t a fight I want to have.
“Aesop and I aren’t hiding anything,” I tell him. “We drive around, pick up chicks, trade beard-grooming tips. Guys doing guy stuff. Like Vikings.”
He squints, not thinking my Viking joke is funny. “What’s with the sudden interest in books, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“The trip out to the bookstore yesterday. Did you find what you were looking for?”
Motherfucker. They’re tracking the car, or my cell.
“I’ve got a thing for the Hardy Boys and the library here didn’t have The Secret of the Old Mill,” I tell him.
“Bullshit,” he says. “You’re looking for the key to the cipher. And I think you have it. You can end this whole thing by handing it over.”
Okay. He can’t be the one who rushed me in the woods. His asshole buddies took the cipher off me back at the black site, so if he did have the book, he wouldn’t need me. Which means it probably was Marx who has the book.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I tell him.
“If you could be reasonable here, I can protect you,” he says, dropping the tough guy act, thinking he’ll reach me another way. “I promise.”
“Protect me? You’re going to protect me? I’m supposed to trust you, after you and your friends dragged us out to the middle of nowhere for an interrogation that shit on, what, two or three constitutional amendments?”
“That wasn’t my idea,” he says.
“Why even do that? What did you hope to achieve? All it seemed to do was piss off Marx even more.”
“That was kinda the point, yeah,” he says. “The Japanese thing, we thought it was a good idea. Help me keep a low profile. But I wasn’t getting the intel I needed fast enough. Someone got the bright idea that if we made some noise it’d move things along. And it did.”
“You assholes. You thought the best way to handle a powder keg was to put a match to it?”
He shrugs. “Like I said, not my idea.”
“If you were following me and Aesop, how did you miss the beach meeting?”
“We got there after everyone left.”
“God, you suck at your job.”
“Listen. You don’t understand what we’re up against, okay?”
“Enlighten me.”
“How much do you know about industrial farming?”
“Are you kidding? Nothing.”
He points to my bed as he sits in the chair in the corner. I want to stay standing, because I don’t want him to feel comfortable, but my whole body aches.
“Here’s the thing about farming pigs,” Katashi says. “Pigs shit. A lot. Tons and tons of it. And it all has to go somewhere. So you’ve got these things called concentrated animal feeding operations. CAFOs. So at CAFOs, they pump the pig shit into lagoons. They’re pretty frightening to look at. Because they turn bright pink. It has something to do with the interaction of bacteria and antibiotics. So there was one up in North Carolina, people in a nearby town start getting sick. Seems it was seeping into the groundwater.”