Or whatever, Johnny said.
But we did go back. We managed to get a fire started. We managed to burn some hot dogs. Why did your Pap call us hot dogs? I asked Johnny.
I don’t know, Johnny said. He’s Pap.
We got drunk.
I threw up in the creek.
I was in my sleeping bag.
My head was spinning.
I remember drifting in and out of sleep; I remember the stars moving overheard through the trees; I remember that I’d worried that I’d be scared sleeping out in the woods like that, which I’d never done before, but I wasn’t scared; it was as if I could feel myself, many years later, remembering that I hadn’t been scared; I could hear everything in that immense darkness; I heard rustling and whispering; I heard Billy say, No, man, come on; I heard Billy say, Well, okay, I guess; I slept; I woke. We walked back to the state road and down to Ligonier, where we sat in the pretty square. Pap picked us up at eleven and took us to a diner before we drove back to the city. He looked me in the eyes and said, You look like you tied one on last night, hot dog.
What? I said.
He tipped his thumb toward his mouth and made a clicking sound. You’d better have some coffee, he said.
Coffee is gross, I told him.
He chuckled. Lots of things seem gross at first. Try it. Which I did, and I found, to my surprise, that the bitterness was pleasant even in my dry mouth.
I realized after he’d dropped me off at home that Johnny and Billy hadn’t spoken, hadn’t even looked at each other, for that entire day.
3
Another Monday. As had been promised, I’d received a call from Karla and gone off to Human Resources, a Strasbourg in Global Solutions’ medieval landscape, a free city at the crossroads of all the trade routes, with its own weird culture and amalgam language. I hadn’t been in HR since I’d first been hired. My colleagues, those who used their health plans and considered their retirements, were up here all the time filling out mysterious forms and pestering about reimbursements or withholdings or the rising cost of a monthly parking pass in the basement garage, but I thought the place was a bit spooky, full of hushed, confidential voices and bowls of candy and women who came and left the office in white tennis shoes.
Karla was the director of HR and by reputation a bitter, distrustful harpy who spent her hours nursing an evil resentment at not being considered a part of senior staff despite running her own department. I suspected this was more a reflection of the way my coworkers imagined that they would have felt in her position, because I sort of liked her. She wore her hair in an extraordinary crown of tiny braids, and her neck and wrists bore an impressive overabundance of bracelets and necklaces. You probably don’t remember me, I said. Peter Morrison.
Oh, you, she said. She waved her hand and her bracelets clanked. Come on in, Mystery Man.
She had me sign a series of forms. I asked her if I should read them. They all say keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told, she said. Also, they teach you the secret handshake, the passwords, and how to operate the decoder ring. Really? I said. No, she told me, but they do say that you’re an at-will employee and that either you or Global Solutions, its others, owners, licensees, assignees, and subsidiaries can, at any point, without cause or notice, terminate the agreement.
Termination upon the occurrence of certain other events, I said, principally to myself.
What? No, she said. There are no events. It means keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told, or they’ll fire your ass. Now sign this. It’s your status update form.
It listed my new title as Associate Director, Special Planning and Projects.
What’s an associate director? I said. Do we have those?
We do now, I guess. I try to tell them that the paperwork is a pain. We get audited, and they want to know where these titles come from. I tell them, don’t ask me, I only work here.
The salary is wrong, I said. I’d read down the form. It said eighty-five.
You’re damn right it’s wrong. A thirty percent raise? We’re supposed to be on a one percent annual right now.
No, I said. I mean, they told me a bigger number.
I’m sure they did. Was it Bates? That fool is supposed to be the chief financial officer, but I swear to Jesus he only understands one, two, and many. Every time he offers someone a promotion, he says one thing, and then he tells me something else. Let me be straight with you: the lower number is always the right number, so you can go upstairs and ask him if you want, or you can just sign off and I’ll get the raise into your next paycheck. Makes no difference to me.
I should just sign off, then.
Yes, she said. You should.
On the way out the door, she called me back. Hey, Mystery Man, she said.
Yeah?
I’ve seen this company go through one bullshit IPO and two private equity sales, she said. Bool-shit, she pronounced it, for emphasis. Let me give you some advice. Getting noticed is never the right strategy.
We’re not getting sold, I said.
She laughed. Nice try, she said. Maybe they won’t fire your ass after all. But please. I was born at night, but not last night.
4
Still, I had no idea what my new job was. That in itself was no big change. I contemplated calling Bates or Sylvia Georges, but they were not the sort of people that my sort of employee just phoned or emailed on a Monday morning. Instead, I called Mark. I had his business card, after all, and it listed a phone number. His voice said, Hi, you’ve reached Mark Danner. I’ll be traveling abroad this week and will return on April first. I’m available by email, or leave me a message, and I’ll call you back. I tried to write him an email, but I discovered that I didn’t know what I wanted to ask him. So I went back to doing what I’d been doing, which wasn’t much, and I figured that at some point, someone would tell me what it was that I was supposed to do instead.
I did bump into Leonard that week. Disconcertingly, I was down on twenty-three. I’d just come out of the restroom, heedlessly, since no one was ever around down there, and I nearly ran into him. He’d been texting or otherwise reading something on his phone. We both regarded each other suspiciously for a moment. Finally I said, Leonard. What? he said. You think you’re the only dude who’s ever gotta pinch one out at work? Jesus, I said with a laugh. Listen, he said, tell me straight up: Did they can you? Can me? I said. No, why? You got called upstairs. Marcy said they canned you. She said you got the nastygram this morning. Marcy’s full of shit. Shit, man, I know that. So you’re good? I’m good, I said.
He seemed relieved, and it gratified me. I liked Leonard. By the way, he said, I told my girl about your little close encounter.
Oh, man, I said. Really? I told you not to say anything.
Man, a successful relationship don’t have secrets.
Seriously?
She told me to tell you don’t worry. The UFOs, they got nothing to do with the end of the world. They’re a CMU thing.
Like the university?
Yeah, military, man. Psyops. Intelligence shit.
Well, that’s reassuring, sort of, I said.
Is it? I guess so. Personally, I’d take the goddamn aliens over the goddamn Nazis.
Nazis? I said.
Yeah, who do you think designed that shit? It was all back in the fifties or whatever, after the war. Some CIA dude and this German scientist they brought over to work at Carnegie Tech. I thought you were supposed to be into all this.
My friend is, I said.
Yeah, he said. Your friend. Whatever, my man. And then, whistling, he went into the bathroom and turned the latch in the door.
5
I’d also been visiting Johnny in the hospital, trying to piece together his little chemical walkabout. I mentioned the three a.m. phone call; I mentioned that he may have called Derek as well. Well, what had happened is that Johnny had reread Fourth River, Fifth Dimension. The psychic adept, it said in chapter fourteen,
has long been viewed by many
cultures and societies as possessing the unique ability to see the future. There is a notion of time that dominates in our technologically advanced civilization. It imagines time in geographic terms. Thus the psychic has, in effect, sharper eyesight than the rest of us. In fact, time’s higher dimensionality cannot be visualized in three-dimensional terms, and the psychic does not see into the future so much as he momentarily substitutes it for his present. Scientifically speaking, psychics are able to transform their internal time equation, thereby deriving different time-point-slopes from various points along the time curve. Truly understanding these functions requires highly advanced mathematics that we will not delve into here. Suffice it to say that the psychic “dials in” on different times through a calculitic-arithmetical process in the mind-computer. He or she is quite literally able to remember the future and convey it via quantum tunneling into the past, creating what an electrical expert would call a Feedback Loop. Technical details, for those so inclined, are included in Appendix C.
The Project sought to enhance these abilities via chemical-cortical stimulation. Many supposedly primitive peoples (e.g., Aboriginal Dream Time) have a far more sophisticated understanding of the nature of the personal time index and have used traditional shamanic techniques and rituals to transcend present-index and participate in the holistic continuum of the time function. These techniques and rituals often involve a chemical component. Contemporary science has synthesized some of these miracle molecules, for instance DMT, the so-called “death particle,” as well as creating powerful dissociative anesthetics such as Ketamine. While prior Top Secret experimentation (viz. MKUltra) focused on the mind-control effects of the so-called classical hallucinogens (“serotonergic psychedelics”), the Project sought to tie mind control to time control via the recombinant properties of the tryptamines and the NMDA receptor antagonist family.
You got the sense, reading these books, that there was just an insufficient amount of truth in the world, that the neat parsing of probability and possibility down to the merely actual was just such a drag that the author had to admit every strand of improbable and impossible narrative to the tale as a hedge against the disappointing thinness and paucity of the real reality.
So you never quite got a hold on what they were trying to accomplish, really; or, you got the feeling that they were trying to accomplish everything—a new age or the end of the world or something in between. But there was a curiously self-effacing quality to the story, too. All these secret agents and psychics and UFOlogists leveraging their vast, secret power toward some odd end that, at last, had nothing to do with them at all.
6
Well, Johnny reasoned, I just happen to have some MXE, and I’ve got plenty of dextromethorphan hydrobromide cough syrup. Might as well give it a shot.
7
Johnny’s strategy was to ride the methoxetamine through a few stages of mild dissociation before augmenting it with enough Robitussin to achieve the fourth plateau and to see where that left him vis-à-vis his personal time index, but the first intramuscular dose of MXE caused him to miscalculate the second dose, and he forgot the precise nature and exact goal of his psychonautical voyage and ended up doing what he usually did when he was fucked up, which was to sit at his computer in his underwear, drink beer, and play Panzer General II.
It seemed to him that he needed to keep injecting the anesthetics to ease the pain of improperly healed battle wounds, the many scars of many past campaigns.
And, although the Allied advances on the Western Front appeared like they would overwhelm his positions, he found himself walking along a snowy wooded path with the Führer and Keitel and a number of senior aides. The boughs of the fir trees drooped under the weight of the snow. The sunlight was distant and gray. Keitel tried to tell the Reichskanzler that it was necessary to regroup and retrench. The Allies had no stomach for prolonged combat, but they had superior armor. And what do you think, Generaloberst? Hitler asked Johnny. Mein Führer, Johnny said, clasping his hands behind his back, I have allies in England who are awaiting my word. Upon receiving my orders, they will mount a crushing civil uprising that will cripple the will of the Anglo-Americans. Yes, said Hitler, soon England will be ours. Um, excuse me, said Keitel, did you order this pizza? Your neighbor downstairs let me in. Tell that Jew Mussolini he’s next, said Johnny. He motioned to one of his aides. Give Keitel his money, he said. The aide, a chunky young officer who moved, nevertheless, with a certain feline grace through the snow, handed Keitel a crumpled ten and some ones. The Führer knelt in the snow and picked up a stone. Mein Gott! he cried. Do you see this? Do you know what this is? Yes, Johnny said. Yes, mein Führer! It is the Fist of Odin. Call your allies, said Hitler. The tide is turning. So Johnny called his fascist allies in London. Herr Morrison, he said. The line was poor, but serviceable. Morrison, the tide is turning. Hm, said Morrison, that insufferable British prick, I think I’ve heard that before. The fist of Odin! Johnny cried. Yeah, said Morrison. Bloody jolly goody well. I’ve got to toodle off and Winston my boot in the Pringle lift. THE TIDE IS TURNING! Johnny called, but the line was cut, and the enemy was advancing.
The walls were collapsing. The Generaloberstabsarzt came into his quarters with a syringe. Generaloberst, he said, this is prepared for you, should it come to that. Death with honor, Johnny said, and he stuck the needle into his ass cheek. The Generaloberstabsarzt, a heavy man, almost as fat as Göring, stroked Johnny’s cheek as he fell back onto his bed. He touched his chest, and then set his hand on Johnny’s thigh. How about a hand scan? he said.
Okay, said Johnny.
Relax, the surgeon said. I’m a doctor.
Am I dead? Johnny asked him.
For the time being, the doctor told him.
My throat hurts, he said.
Here, said the doctor. Try some of this cough syrup.
When he woke up, he was in his apartment. The ceiling fan whose blades were stained black at the leading edges from all those passages through the dusty air went around. He was on the couch. Anton was curled on his chest. There were several used syringes on the coffee table, some beers, an empty bottle of Robitussin DM. Squiggles went round and round on his computer screen on the desk across the room. Oh God, he said. A steady, dull pain thudded rhythmically in his head. No, not a pain. The door. He pulled on a T-shirt and answered it. A being—not a man, precisely, but not not a man, either, taller somehow and more birdlike, a high peaked chest that stuck far out in front of the rest of its body, a suggestion of wings, though it had no wings, the suggestion of another eye on its face, though there was no extra eye. He—he seemed like a he, anyway—was wearing a white apron with Masonic insignia, or possible bloodstains, or possibly both, and he bore in his huge hands a huge white book from which emanated the smell of burning flesh.
Delivery, the creature said.
Oh God, said Johnny. Oh God, oh God, who are you?
I’m the deliveryman.
You’re Calsutmoran?
Yes, the angel boomed, and he swept past Johnny into the apartment. I am Calsutmoran, a Seraph of the Lord Crown Ein Sof, borne out of the Pleroma in the flying Ophanim, bearing unto you the Book of Judgment and the Book of Life.
Oh shit, Johnny said.
Oh shit indeed, said Calsutmoran.
Did you come out of the hollow earth? Johnny asked.
Do I look like I came out of the hollow earth? trumpeted the angel.
Well, said Johnny, honestly? Kinda.
Calsutmoran tossed the book on the coffee table and sank into the couch. LeVay hopped on next to him and nuzzled his fingers. You know, Calsutmoran said, that’s what I fucking hate about you people. It’s the subtle racism. You think we all look alike, don’t you?
Well, said Johnny.
What’s with all the needles?
I’ve been injecting methoxetamine and ketamine.
You think I can get some of that?
You want some of my drugs?
I’m off. Why the fuck not? You got any
beers? I don’t need a needle, though. I only insufflate. I’m not a needles guy.
I’ve got beer.
Oh, and listen, I’m going to need you to make a list of who lives and who dies.
Everyone?
Yeah, sorry.
Okay.
Johnny fell asleep in the middle of the C’s. When he woke, Calsutmoran was playing Wolfenstein 3D on his computer. Best first-person shooter ever, he said.
Yeah, Johnny, I said after he’d recounted his version of all this. I’m pretty sure that that was me. Like really.
You’re Calsutmoran?
No, I said. I mean, you called me. I’m your fascist ally. Who’s Calsutmoran?
You sure are, he said, and not without a measure of affection. He was due to be released the next morning. He was off the IV and eating solid food, but he was pale, paler than usual, and he seemed shrunken and dry, like an apple that’s been sitting uneaten in the fruit bowl for a week too long. How did I even know how to use the phone?
I’m not sure you really did. I mean, you seemed to forget. Also, you kept rhyming. It was annoying.
Hm. I don’t remember rhyming. Man. I was pretty convinced that I was actually fighting World War II. Fucking RPGs. They get into your head. I was also really convinced that Calsutmoran—the DXM angel, by the way, which you should know—came to visit me and judge me for my sins. Although that may have been the pizza guy. I’m pretty sure I kept ordering pizzas.
I’m really not familiar with Calsutmoran.
Google that shit, he said. He’s like, oh, an androgynous emissary from another dimension who’s often reported by people returning from a fourth-plateau dex experience. I’m pretty sure that’s how I ended up at the museum.
An angel took you?
No, Morrison. Christ. I took the 54. God only knows how. I remember being really worried that the driver wouldn’t take reichsmarks.
I laughed. I had to. What else would I do? Exact change, I barked. Johnny laughed, too.
Oh man, he said. When those cops came to get me, I swear to God they were Asgardian warriors coming across the rainbow bridge on their goddamn white horses. I guess that was probably just the squad car.
The Bend of the World: A Novel Page 12