RATS NEST

by Mat Laporte

  “You think they’re watching us right now?” New Hampshire said, mug in front of his mouth to throw off lip readers.

  “Sure they are,” said Texas, his mug in front of his mouth as well. “That little guy’s been watching us since we sat down.” Tex nodded at a boy, five or six years old, playing in the booth behind us.

  Colorado scrunched a cheap paper napkin between his hands and let it drop. “I wish he was watching us. I’d ask him to get this party started. I can’t eat anymore of these pancakes, I’ll tell you that,” he moaned.

  The waitress appeared beside us with a large platter and divvied up our plates of steaming pancakes then refilled our mugs with the sour diarrhea water that passed for coffee in that place. Tex passed his right hand over the table. That was one of his duties and if he didn’t do it, or if one of us ate before Tex made that motion with his hand, then the ritual wouldn’t work.

  The little boy in the booth in front of us was monkeying around. He kicked the back cushion with his sneaker, making contact with the small of Vermont’s back. Vermont winced. The boy’s mom was right beside him; she swatted him lightly on the seat of his corduroy pants and then continued talking to her boyfriend across the table.

  “So that’s it?” said Tex mid-chew, “we just pack up and head to the ranch tomorrow morning? That seems too easy.”

  “Packing orders come first,” I said, trying to be casual about it.

  “Packing orders?” Vermont said, his face scrunched.

  “Yeah. You’ll get them in your sleep from the carrier pigeon,” I said, careful not to reveal too much. “All part of the plan.”

  Vermont’s white cowboy hat flipped off his head to the crash of forks and knives. The little boy was frozen mid-grab, his chubby fingers clutching air where he expected to be holding cowboy hat. He was staring, transfixed, at Vermont’s head, which was a mess of third-degree burns and tufts of wispy, sickly hair growing in the few places that weren’t too severely scabbed over.

  Vermont picked up his hat. He wiped the syrup and pancakes off it with a napkin, and put it back on his head like nothing had happened. What little anger he felt toward the boy was overshadowed by his fear that, with that one innocent act, the ritual might have just been aborted.

  The state men and I exchanged some tense looks and then Vermont turned his head to look at the boy. The boy shit his pants, metaphorically speaking, and ducked behind the booth.

  I waited for a sign, some violent tear in the pattern we’d been fabricating together over the last three months through our adherence to the ritual; things like burning our scalps off to prove our allegiance and eating countless pancake breakfasts, washed down with rancid coffee. For a few seconds I thought we’d lost all that hard work at the hands of that boy, but nothing happened. We kept eating, hoping we got one free pass, or that none of the Caretakers had been watching us.

  I’ve got high sensitivity to dream-kinesis, or what some people call ‘dream-walking’ abilities. I think that’s the reason I was asked to participate in the ritual in the first place.

  How it happened was this: one day I was sleeping, minding my own business, dream-walking without any particular purpose, when one of the Caretakers approached me in my dream-state. He told me his name was Kameel, but I don’t think that’s his real name. Kameel, or whoever he is, spoke to me with a clarity I’d never heard from a dream-walker before, or since.

  Sometimes I wonder if I was brainwashed into joining the ritual because I was so in awe of Kameel’s facility as a dream-walker or if I was easily convinced because my personal and professional life was in such a disastrous state when I met him. I’d recently lost my job at the Boar Institute, where I was an Executive Financial Advisor. Back in those days I had no self-control. I’d dream-walk right through the middle of meetings and eventually management caught on.

  After I lost my job, I was borrowing money from everyone I could, doing small but risky under-the-table finance deals, constantly afraid of getting caught. So when I met Kameel, I was ready for a change and that’s exactly what he offered, plus the opportunity to use my one and only skill: dream-walking.

  Kameel told me how the ritual worked. He explained the deep history of it and stressed that strict adherence to its rules would become my number one priority if I agreed to join. Then he told me the names of some of the most famous and influential people that had taken the rites before me and hinted that I could become powerful and influential, too. The ritual seemed like the answer to all of my problems, plus I crave structure, and the prospect of months of adhering to an incontrovertible set of rules finally won me over.

  When I spoke to Kameel, my pledge sounded horrible, warped and extremely high-pitched. I remember waking up that morning feeling that something major had been altered and that there was no going back. From then on there was nowhere I could hide that Kameel wouldn’t find me.

  That was before they took my hair.

  That night, after Vermont’s hat fell off in the diner, I couldn’t sleep. I felt worried and excited. I had to resist the urge to go into carrier pigeon mode before the chosen time. I sat on my hotel bed and flipped through a catalogue to occupy myself. I ran my hands over the glossy pages, feeling them melt through my hands, into my eye-glands. Every person that had ever touched the magazine became a portal I could see and hear through if I wanted. There was a remote quality to each of their experiences—and in my experience of their experiences—that amazed me. Every one of them had their own private obscurity that I was all of a sudden privy to, and this extra bit of dream-walking power Kameel taught me to harness in my waking state sent thrills through my feet and up into my stomach and armpits.

  I could see regular curtains, regular shadows, and the unremarkable lives being lived behind them. I was totally sent, catapulted into waves of joy sensations, into fits of religious sucklage (dream-walking could be infinitely better than sex or drugs, and far more addictive). As soon as I indulged myself by entering one of those pliant, unsuspecting heads, I wanted more; at least half of my dream-walking power was occupied by this want, and that made me furious. It diminished my dream-walking powers significantly to feel so gluttonous and unfulfilled.

  I did my best to brush it off, forget it, throw it all back into a body-consciousness that was constantly rippling with strange sausage-link sensations, as I slipped from one life to the next to the next to the next. The most thrilling part of dream-walking is that thin passage between lives, where all experience becomes vacant and a pure bliss vacuum carries you along. In between vessels is the purest happiness you can find, but you can’t stay there. If you did, it would be worse than death, or so I’ve heard. All I permitted myself was one little toe tip into that nethereal bath. That would have to be enough.

  That night, the state men received their packing orders from me, the carrier pigeon. The orders were simple and everyone received the same spiel: bring a clean change of clothes in a black duffel bag. But that wasn’t the most important part. They went to sleep that night half-expecting to meet me there. What they didn’t expect was how sharp my pigeon’s beak would be when it entered their dreams. If they weren’t alerted to the seriousness of the ritual via acute psychic pain, Kameel told me, then there was a chance that some of them might not take it seriously enough—a huge liability, especially the night before the most important stage.

  So I made sure my entry into their dream-states hurt and left a mark they wouldn’t be able to forget. Kameel had trained me well.

  Everyone was already at the entrance to the ranch when I pulled up in my rental car. The headlights illuminated a pack of tired, disgruntled looking cowboys in identical costumes, topped with four white cowboy hats, each holding a black duffel bag.

  “How’d y’all sleep?” I said, stepping out of the car, laughing at their dejected expressions, a hollow fear creeping up inside of me.

  A few of them grumbled incoherently.r />
  “Seems like you could have picked an easier way to send a message,” New Hampshire said, massaging his temples with a hand decked in cheap-looking rings.

  “No,” I explained, cutting him off, “packing orders have to come from the carrier pigeon, or else the ritual wouldn’t work.”

  That was the secret phrase among us. If anyone said we had to do something or else the ritual wouldn’t work, then we had to do it, no questions asked. After I said that, everyone was quiet and kept their discomfort to themselves.

  Five minutes later, one of the Caretakers walked out of a field toward us. He was bald with nasty looking burn scars all over his head, and he was decked out in an impeccable black suit and tie, with shiny, wing-tipped shoes to top it all off. He didn’t say anything when he approached, just unlocked the front gate and signalled for us to follow him in.

  He walked in front of us into the dark field, his shiny, scarred head a beacon above his black suit. We could barely see what was under our feet: scrub brushes, some crab grass, rocks, and not much else. A few of us tripped over shadowy clumps as we walked. I was a bit disappointed. I had pictured something different for the setting of the ritual: great basalt ruins and stone archways blackened by smoke from torches passing close to the walls, as hooded people ran their calloused hands over the layers of history to steady themselves against fear of the unknown, or something. This just looked like every other empty field I’d walked or driven past in my life.

  The Caretaker never looked back, never moved his gaze from the barn as we approached it, and his rigid composure amidst all of our burbling nervousness helped reinforce the gravity of what we were about to do.

  No one said anything. A heavy feeling descended upon us as we walked through the field toward the barn. I recall having this extra sense that something fresh had taken over my life. That I was no longer a willing participant; my consent in being there was just an illusion, and anything that happened or was going to happen to me, was going to happen because it fit someone else’s vision of the world—what was going to happen was out of my control.

  We approached the barn. There was a pigpen beside it and a few pigs sleeping on their stomachs and sides. There was one pig lying on its back with its feet in the air. Vermont laughed and pointed it out. The Caretaker looked at him so sternly, it immediately shut him up, then the Caretaker gestured with his bald, fucked-up head for us to get inside the barn.

  It was a big barn and there was only one light bulb on in the whole place. The rest of the interior was buried in deep blackness. I couldn’t see through it to the other side. A few wooden poles supported what I guessed was a second level and there was hay covering the ground except in one spot, directly under the light bulb, where it had been cleared away to form a circle of bare cement.

  The Caretaker told us to drop our duffel bags and stand inside the circle. Nobody spoke. We all got in underneath the single light bulb. The circle was tight, there was enough room for us all, but it was impossible for our arms not to touch once we were inside. The single light bulb cast shadows under our hats so that our faces were obscured from each other. Silence and darkness permeated all around.

  The Caretaker ordered us to undress, just like that: “Undress,” he said and so we did.

  For some privacy, or so he didn’t have to see us in the flesh, or because if he didn’t turn around while we undressed and turn off the light, then the ritual wouldn’t work, the Caretaker turned around and turned off the only light in the barn.

  We shuffled out of our cowboy costumes and stood naked in the circle. Then the Caretaker turned the light back on. I was mortified. Under the single light bulb stood six naked men including myself, without our hats on, each of our burned scalps out in the open for the first time, marking us as initiates of the sacred ritual.

  The Caretaker walked around and inspected our heads to make sure that we were true initiates of the ritual. If we hadn’t already felt exposed and vulnerable before that, we realized that while we were undressing, a half-dozen pigs had gathered noiselessly and formed a circle around us in the dark. When the light came on, their snouts and eyes flared as though they were judging us or sizing us up. I remember they were hairier than I realized pigs could be. The way they snorted and bared their teeth at us made me feel deeply uncomfortable in my vulnerable state, and I believe I caught one of them winking at me.

  “Now we can start,” the Caretaker said, just like that, receding into the darkness once again. “The pigs will root out any unworthy candidates amongst you. You should only be afraid if your purposes here are impure. If they aren’t, relax and enjoy the ride. If they are, prepare for a reckoning.”

  With that, the Caretaker switched off the only source of light in the barn. From the darkness he ordered us to hold each other’s hands and under no circumstances were we to let them go. I fumbled for the hands of Tex and New Hampshire on either side of me. The pigs were beginning to run in circles behind us. Convulsions ripped through our circle as their speed increased.

  “Don’t look behind you,” the Caretaker commanded to us from out of the shadows.

  It became harder to keep my hands around Tex’s and New Hampshire’s. We were being pulled apart by the whirlwind of stampeding pigs behind us and the seizures going through the circle became a test of strength. I thought we were going to lift off the ground and for a second, I think we may have.

  Someone started yammering. It sounded like they were standing at the far end, running up close to my face, and then quickly receding to the back of the barn again. I wondered if it was my own voice become detached from my body that I was hearing. The voice yammered and zoomed. The sounds it made were nonsense. I could feel someone’s breath on my face, but I couldn’t tell whose.

  The circle was wrenched from side to side and the hands holding mine became slick with sweat. A strong wind rushed up my back from the whirlwind of pigs behind us, then the yammering voice reached an insane pitch and, for a moment, I could kind of understand what it was saying:

  One of you has been a pig impostor all your life. One of you is returning to your rightful pig flock with every gust of this pig wind. You feel it touch you and kiss you in your true pigness. You want to nose around with us. You want to run around and bound on all fours with us. Come nudge rocks out of the ground and reel around in mud and bugs with us. Whoever it is must break the circle now. Whoever it is must break the circle now. Whoever it is must come with us. Your little pig clothes are all in order. You’re going to be wearing a beautiful pig dress in this new pig world. You’ll be leading a pig’s life and you’ll have pig’s eyes to see it through. Whoever it is, you are of the pig and from the depths of your true pigness, you will become aware of your false costume. With every breath of pig wind, you will shuffle off your false costume and come with us.

  The pig wind became a pig gale. I didn’t think I’d be able to hold on much longer. I started doubting my reasons for pledging myself to the ritual. I wanted to go home and dream-walk through the rest of my miserable life, get by on shady under-the-table finance deals, and never pay anyone back what I owed.

  Then the voice stopped bombarding us; the pig wind ceased blowing and the circle became more relaxed. I could hear the pigs shuffle out of the barn and there was a stretch of time in which everything was quiet and our sweaty palms remained locked.

  The Caretaker announced that he was going to turn the light back on and we were allowed to let go of each other’s hands.

  We stood in front of each other under the painful light of the single bulb, naked, panting, looking at each other but trying not to at the same time. I remember Tex’s sweaty pot-belly heaving from the strain and Colorado looking at the ground, cupping his balls. New Hampshire was shaking his head. Vermont was gone.

  I looked around, thinking that he might’ve been hiding, or thrown behind us by the gale. Then I realized, as the others must have already, that Vermont h
ad left with the pigs. Our circle had been broken after all.

  The Caretaker asked us to stay quiet and get into our changes of clothes. We could leave the way we came, he said. That was it for the night.

  We met at the pancake house the next morning. I’d barely slept and I was the last to arrive. From the parking lot I could see that Vermont was there with them; his white rental car was in the parking lot and he was sitting in the booth with the others like he had many times before.

  I sat in my rental car in the parking lot of the pancake house with the engine turned off, and thought about how I felt about everything that had happened up until that point. I didn’t feel in control of the situation and I wasn’t sure what my role was now that we’d been initiated into the circle of pigs. I didn’t reach any satisfying conclusions, but I became worried that the state men would see me sitting there. So, I waved my hand over the door handle and permitted myself to leave the car.

  Over breakfast, all the state men, including Vermont, acted like nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Tex was ornery as usual. New Hampshire was paranoid. He scanned the room to see if we were being surveilled. I didn’t understand what was going on. I kept looking at Vermont for some clue about what had happened to him. Something about the five of us sitting there, waiting to be served, just like we had in the past, made me feel nervous. Was this still part of the ritual, I wondered?

  Our pancakes were served and Tex passed his hand over the table. I looked around to see if any of them noticed how strange this all was, but everyone was avoiding making eye contact with me and pretending to be interested in their pancake breakfasts instead.

  The same little boy from the day before popped up in the booth behind us. I recognized his mom as well. The little boy smiled at me. I tipped my cowboy hat at him and he bashed with excitement at the cushion next to Vermont’s cowboy hat. His mom swatted at him gently and missed and the boy disappeared behind the cushion, while New Hampshire cracked some awkward jokes.