Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  The two young men sitting with their feet in the water were either another of Chueh’s follies or just not concerned about privacy. They had a large ornate hookah set up between them and puffed contentedly on the stems of brightly colored hoses attached to the pipe. As Harry crossed the bridge, he caught the heady whiff of gen-grass, genetically modified marijuana. Thanks to twenty-first century genetic engineering, it was one of the strongest hallucinogens known.

  The men were obviously “gen-grass plumbers”. One of them looked up and gave Harry a big, goofy grin. Then he raised his hand in ultra-slow-motion and waved. Harry wondered what the gen-grass plumber thought he was seeing, Puff the Magic Dragon, maybe?

  As he followed the path across the grassy bank and reentered the forest, he heard the gurgle of the hookah and then rippling, high-pitched giggles, like the twitter of rare, exotic birds. He shook his head with a tolerant grin. Thank god, that the old war on drugs was only a nasty four hundred year old memory, on a par with the Salem witch-hunts or the inquisition, he thought.

  Far from stopping drugs, the war created vast, criminal financial empires that rivaled the largest multinational corporations or even the combined assets of some nation states. These empires fueled the world-wide corruption of civil society that was one of the major factors contributing to the wars and financial chaos that finally ended in the Crash.

  When society rebuilt and redefined itself in New Hollywood, one of its cornerstones was the absolute right of every citizen to self-determination over his own body and what he put into it or took out. But like with the use of weapons, this right of self-determination carried an absolute responsibility. There was no cop-out plea of “I didn’t know what I was doing because I was high, drunk, or temporarily insane”. You made the initial lifestyle choice and you paid the consequences.

  Although drugs of every kind were now legal, cheap, and readily available, Chueh’s garden catered only to hallucinogens. Harry suspected this was because hallucinogens were seen as a necessary part of many religious paths, providing invaluable initial insight into higher states of consciousness.

  From what he had seen, Heaven’s Gate resembled a kind of adult theme park or enormous, quasi-religious art form, appealing not only to gen-grass day-trippers, but also to a clientele that was looking for something beyond pure physical and material gratification. It was a place where spiritual seekers could come and experience an environment maximally conducive to their special needs. Sometimes, like Harry, they hardly even knew what they were looking for when they first entered the garden.

  Harry wondered, not for the first time, why a ruthless Tong Godfather like Chueh built a place like this. It certainly wasn’t for the money. The chosen few who were invited into his secret garden were never asked to pay for the privilege. When rumors of his garden began to surface over ten years ago, people laughed and called it, “Chueh’s Looney Tunes”. They didn’t say it too loud or laugh too hard though. Chueh was, after all, the most powerful Tong Godfather in the Empire and his word carried more weight than God’s in New Hollywood.

  But when a hardheaded kingpin decides to build a secret garden park, you couldn’t blame people for thinking it was a joke, that maybe the old man had grown senile and, like Brando’s Mafia Godfather, decided to take up gardening instead of killing, although no one said that out loud either.

  Harry knew for a fact that Chueh was a long way from senile, and his garden was definitely no joke, but what it really was and how and why Chueh built it remained a mystery.

  He wondered if Chueh knew about what was going on in the Wolf Temples. From what Anton Shane said, it sounded as if the Temples were a kind of obscene parody of Chueh’s Garden. Instead of opening a person to a higher state of consciousness, they used black ice, violence, and death to call forth a predatory beast-god in their worshippers.

  Although the Tongs controlled the drug trade in New Hollywood, they didn’t control black ice. From what Harry heard, it came in through the Sinks and the Seraphim were distributing it. Now, it looked like they were distributing it through the Wolf Temples. If that was the case, Chueh would know. He’d make it his business to know.

  As he continued to follow the dirt path through another forest glade, Harry suddenly came across a large black “X” splashed across the ground in front of him. He stopped in surprise and looked around. As far as he could see, there didn’t seem to be any reason for the mark. The path on the other side of the “X” looked no different than this side, but this was Chueh’s…

  As soon as he stepped over the “X”, the forest glade disappeared and the dirt path became a narrow, yellow brick road, winding between rolling hills and fields of bright red poppies. In the distance he could see the shimmer of the Emerald Towers of OZ. It was typical Chueh.

  As he followed the yellow brick road up over a hill, he spotted an old black man dressed in bib overalls and a blue work shirt, sitting cross-legged in the field of poppies. He was chanting softly to the slow, rhythmic beat of a tom-tom he held between his legs. Harry recognized him immediately.

  Samuel Kade, doing what Samuel Kade does best, he thought. Kade was a big, raw-boned man with long, straight, black hair tied in a ponytail and a face like a rough-hewed, ebony slab. He was also a shaman trance-walker and was working with a very stoned client at the moment.

  Probably trying to lead him through the levels of a heavy acid trip, Harry thought, as he eyed the “client”, lying spread-eagled among the poppies. He wore khaki Bermuda shorts and a wild Hawaiian shirt and lay with his eyes wide open, staring beatifically up into the blue-violet stratosphere. A hypodermic stuck out of his outstretched arm. Harry could see the skin-colored button patch of a “root canal” where the needle went in.

  There were easier, more effective ways of getting drugs into the body, but nothing beat the outlaw romance of shooting up with a good old-fashioned hypodermic. And the little button patch of the “root canal” was “the perfect accessory before and after the fact” as the advertisers loved to say. No more of those unsightly needle tracks up and down the arm, no more collapsed veins and jabbing searches. With a handy little “root canal” you kept a vein open and ready for action all the time. Your one-stop convenience store, so to speak. Just stick the needle through the self-sealing membrane and shoot up. It was a clean, efficient, and self-sterilizing sure-fire seller for the man who had everything. And this guy had obviously had the works. Lost in his own blue heaven, he didn’t move a muscle as Harry walked by.

  Nor did Kade acknowledge his presence, and Harry respected that. Kade was working and up until a month ago, he had been working with Harry. The work started on the first day Jericho took him to Chueh’s secret garden, introduced him to Kade, and then left without another word. Kade asked a few terse questions and looked him over like a sculptor examining a piece of wood to see how the grain ran and whether there were knots or signs of rot or disease. He’d probably heard all the stories about Harry but chose to suspend judgment and accept him as a work in progress. In the next few months, he taught Harry not only how to shift his waking awareness to his ka but to actually unite with it and trance-walk through the door of the spirit realm and out onto the edge of the Astral Planes or into the shallows of the Shining Sea of Gods and Demons.

  Then about a month ago, he told Harry that he could take him no further. “I’ve got more important things to do than waste my time teaching you what you already know or can find out by yourself,” he told him. Then he shook his hand and added, “Good luck, son. It’s been an honor.” Harry didn’t quite know what to make of the, “It’s been an honor,” but said the feeling was mutual and hadn’t seen Samuel Kade again until today.

  If I’m really seeing him, Harry amended. This tableau could be nothing but another one of Chueh’s holographic follies, like the whole Wizard of Oz setting. If it was, then putting Kade into it wasn’t coincidental. Chueh didn’t do coincidental. He was telegraphing a message. If it was meant for Harry, he wasn’t getting it. Sometimes
the old man’s pose of oriental inscrutability telegraphed nothing but inscrutability, Harry thought.

  He continued to follow the road down around a high, rocky outcrop to where a bullet riddled wooden sign sagged from a post beside the road. A vulture, sitting on the sign, spread its wings and flapped into the sky with a raucous screech. The sign said, “Welcome to Bardoville, Population…” The rest was shot away. Harry looked up at the emerald city towering in front of him and then back down at the sign. “Bardoville?” He shook his head and grinned. It’s more like “Say good-bye to Oz, Dorothy”.

  He stepped past the sign and the yellow brick road turned into dust and tumbleweed, and the emerald towers shimmered into an ersatz, nineteenth-century Mexican border town straight out of a Sergio Leone, spaghetti western. Horses stood tied to hitching rails along the empty, dusty street. The wind blew hot and dry, and he could taste the alkali grit in his mouth. He stood facing the mottled, cracked, adobe façade of a Mexican cantina. A pair of batwing doors led into the cool, dark interior. A weathered sign hung over the door, proclaiming, “The Silver Slipper,” in a hand painted scrawl of black letters.

  He had arrived, end station. In all the time that he had been coming to Chueh’s, through all the permutations of landscaped follies, this façade, like his initial view from the cliff, never changed. Harry crossed the road and mounted the boardwalk in front of the cantina. Behind him a dry ball of tumbleweed blew down the middle of the street. He pushed through the swinging doors and stepped into The Silver Slipper.

  18

  The Silver Slipper

  Harry paused just inside and looked around. He hadn’t realized how much he missed the place. He and Jericho used to come here after every resurrection. In the beginning though, they went to local bars. It was Jericho who first suggested this might be a good way of escaping the clinical, impersonal atmosphere of the usual Eternal Life debriefings.

  After they finished hashing through the last resurrection, they would sometimes sit nursing their beers, letting the conversation flow along the path of least resistance and most interest. These talks gradually laid the foundation for a deep friendship based on mutual trust and respect. It was this friendship, more than anything else that helped Harry pull through the worst times after the disintegration of his marriage.

  Then, about six months ago, when he learned to die and began manifesting the first signs of those profound changes that nonstop resurrection was making in his body/mind, Jericho decided that perhaps a local bar might not be the best place to talk about these things. He suggested that they adjourn to Chueh’s saloon instead. A couple months later, Jericho introduced him to Chueh’s Secret Garden and Samuel Kade.

  After that, his visits to The Silver Slipper became less frequent, and it had been a while since he’d stopped in but the place hadn’t changed. It never did. It still looked like a movie-set saloon right out of the Golden Age of Hollywood westerns. A long, polished mahogany bar with a brass foot rail ran along the left-hand wall with brass spittoons strategically placed on the sawdust-covered floor. The bartender was a thickset, balding giant with an enormous handlebar moustache and biceps like Christmas hams. Behind the bar a large mirror in a baroque, gold frame reflected an eclectic collection of brightly colored bottles.

  Wooden tables and chairs were scattered around the room and a row of comfortable leather padded booths ran along the opposite wall. A large window beside the batwing doors showed a view of the dusty, western street Harry had just left. A wagon wheel chandelier hung from the ceiling, and a flight of stairs led up to a wooden balcony with doors opening off it at regular intervals. A couple of dance hall girls in low cut velvet gowns leaned over the balcony rail, smoking cigarettes, talking quietly, and showing a lot of cleavage. To one side of the stairs, a man sat at a battered piano, casually fingering the keys. He had a derby hat cocked on his head, a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth, and a half-empty glass of whiskey within easy reach. The soft, melancholy strains of “As Time Goes By” rippled from his fingertips.

  Beneath the balcony a pair of ornate batwing doors opened into another impenetrable wall of fog. Harry knew if he walked through it, he’d come out in front of an armored brass and diamond glass door that opened onto a busy street on the far side of New Hollywood.

  There were only a few customers at this time of day, and the saloon had a cool, twilight intimacy. A group of men sat around a large corner table playing cards. A dance hall girl, with her back to Harry, leaned over the shoulder of one of the gamblers and whispered in his ear. Two women in dark business suits sat in one of the booths talking intimately and nursing their drinks. There might have been people in the other booths, but if they had their privacy screen drawn, you wouldn’t be able to tell.

  None of these were the real customers, Harry thought. The real customers were upstairs. The group of men playing cards at the corner table had the heavy-lifter look of bodyguards killing time, while the two women in dark business suits, who kept glancing nervously up at the closed doors along the balcony, were probably clients, competitors, or possibly deadbeats whose fate was being discussed in secrecy behind the holographic illusion of that balcony with its dance hall girls and closed wooden doors.

  The Silver Slipper sold secrecy and security. If you wanted to buy a politician, sell a corporate secret, have a liaison with the Emperor’s wife, Chueh’s was the place to come. It sold discretion, absolute, one hundred percent, satisfaction-guaranteed discretion, and it sold it to anyone willing to pay its capricious and sometimes outrageous admittance fees.

  Despite this, The Silver Slipper never lacked customers. People with secrets to bury were more than willing to pay whatever Chueh asked because they knew The Silver Slipper was impregnable. Nothing that was said or done here ever got out, unless the client wanted it out, and no one and nothing got in unless Chueh wanted it in. Harry had concluded long ago that the place was impregnable because, like The Secret Garden, it wasn’t in the “real” world and so nothing in the “real” world could touch it.

  On the other hand, the business of The Silver Slipper was not the business of the Garden. Even though you might have free access to the Garden, you didn’t have free access to The Silver Slipper. You paid for that just like everyone else. Only Jericho and Jericho’s guests were the exception. They were always welcome and never paid.

  Harry spied Chueh, sitting in a dark corner at the end of the bar, smoking a long, bronze opium pipe. He regarded Harry’s entrance with the heavy-lidded serenity of a satiated boa constrictor. He was small-boned, slightly built, and looked hummingbird-delicate. But like everything else at Chueh’s, looks could be deceiving, and Harry knew for a fact that the old man was as hard as nails. He had the strong, long-fingered, hands of a concert pianist or a professional strangler. His wispy, white chin-beard gave him the appearance of an old Chinese sage, but he wore his steel gray hair braided in the long pigtail queue of a Tong Godfather.

  Harry walked over and bowed deeply. “Master Chueh,” he murmured respectfully as he felt a privacy screen close around them. “It is an honor to see you again.”

  “Hi, Halley,” Chueh said, affecting a grossly exaggerated, Chinese laundry-man accent. “Velly, velly good to see you again in my most humble establishment.” He bowed his head slightly, hands clasped across his stomach. Then still bowed, he looked up sideways at Harry and winked. It was typical Chueh, a laughing Buddha dressed in a denim jacket, blue jeans, and snakeskin cowboy boots, who knew where all the bodies were buried because he put them there.

  Chueh, you old bandit,” Harry grinned as the old man straightened up and gave him a high five. “How are you doing? Jesus, I’ve missed this place. How could I have stayed away so long?”

  “I don’t know, but is a most grievous insult,” Chueh said shaking his head and falling back into his Hollywood movie Chinaman role. “Next time I send leg breakers along to remind you maybe, chop, chop, huh?”

  Harry shook his head in delight. “You’ve be
en watching too many of those old Charlie Chan movies again,” he grinned.

  “Can there be too many Charlie Chan movies?” Chueh asked with a mischievous glint in his eye. “Old Chinese proverb say, ‘A Chinaman in the hand worth two niggers in the woodshed’.”

  “Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Harry asked, nonplussed at Chueh’s verbal end-run into absurdity.

  Chueh bowed deeply. “Is for me to know and you to find out,” he said inscrutably. “You looking for Doc?”

  “Yeah, is he here yet?”

  Chueh eyed him coolly. “He’s been waiting for you for over half an hour.” The tone of reproach was unmistakable. Chueh and Jericho had formed a kind of cantankerous, old man’s mutual-admiration-society that demanded absolute respect and took quick offense at the slightest hint of neglect. They had both refused resurrection and said they were determined to live through every stage of life to the end and talked glowingly about the peaceful balance, wisdom, and self-knowledge that came with an old age free from the raging, ragtime drives of youth.

  Harry was never sure how serious the two of them were about all this, but he played along anyway, murmuring exaggerated, abject apologies for being late and bowing again and again until Chueh slapped him lightly on the side of the head and said, “Don’t overdo it Harry.

  “Doc’s waiting for you upstairs.” He turned and broke the privacy shield.

  “Mae will show you up,” he said and called, “Mae,” so softly that only Harry should have been able to hear, but this was Chueh’s and of course things worked differently.

  The dance hall girl leaning over a gambling bodyguard straightened up and turned. She was a striking platinum blonde dressed in a white, low cut gown that looked like it had been shrink-wrapped to her body. She cocked her head coquettishly and winked acknowledgment. Then she leaned back and whispered in the gambler’s ear and they both laughed. Her ample bosom brushed his shoulder with enticing promise, and he half turned and pulled out his wallet. Then he peeled off a couple of bills and stuffed them down her ample cleavage. She patted his cheek and let her fingers trail languorously along his neck as she walked away.