Archelon Ranch

by Garrett Cook

  “Hello, Reverend. Plot preserve.”

  “Plot preserve, Clyde.”

  “I’m calling to ask you a very important question.”

  “Ask away. After what you’ve done for us, I owe you one.”

  “Where is my brother?”

  Silence. Laughter. He hung up then called me right back.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “What?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me, Clyde? You have got to be fucking kidding me. That is the sort of question that only somebody who is fucking kidding me would ask. That’s pretty damn stupid, Clyde.”

  I growled.

  I breathed heavy.

  “Why Reverend is that the sort of question somebody who is fucking kidding you would ask? I’m calling you to find out the whereabouts of my brother. It’s not unusual for a guy to ask where his brother is, is it? I don’t think it’s a very difficult question either. I haven’t lost track of him for very long and I certainly doubt that you have, Reverend.”

  Patronizing laughter on the other end again. I wouldn’t have taken this shit yesterday. I had to right now, because any sign of hostility would betray my intentions. I waited until the laughter stopped. It was killing me, but I let him keep laughing, keep reminding me that I was nobody relevant, that I almost wasn’t even part of this story. But I was about to prove to him just how important I was.

  “No. There’s your answer, Clyde. No. In fact, I’m going to say fuck no. I’m not going to do that for you.”

  “And why not, Reverend?”

  “First of all, I myself don’t even know.”

  “That’s bullshit, Reverend. I don’t believe it for a second.”

  “Don’t take that tone with me, Clyde.”

  “I’m sorry. I found Bernard for you, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did, Clyde, plot preserve, and I and all Narrativists are extremely thankful to you…” I bit my tongue and waited for whatever gigantic bullshit bus of a “sorry, no dice” phrase was coming up. In my head I already heard a painfully patronizing BUT. What came out the Reverend’s mouth next was not a BUT, which was pretty diplomatic for a guy like him. Instead, I got a stern, very bad news, HOWEVER.

  “HOWEVER, this is extremely important fate-of-all-existence business that I refuse to treat lightly. I can think of no business more relevant. We simply cannot afford to treat this lightly and give out information like that, even to you, his brother. I’d be letting down my parish, I’d be letting down Bernard and letting down existence itself, which you must remember, Clyde, you happen to be a part of. I’d be letting you down if I told you or anyone. I simply can’t do it. I’ve told my operatives to take him wherever he needs to go and not to tell me where. You know, Clyde, in case something occurs.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow, Reverend. What the hell kind of something could occur that should make it impossible for the head of the Narrativist church and Bernard’s own brother to know his whereabouts?”

  “All kinds of things. Your brother’s a runaway test subject who will determine the fate of existence and prove that Narrativist doctrine is the true faith. There can be kidnapping, torture, brainwashing, bribery, temporary insanity. People say things sometimes under duress. I don’t want to be one of those people. I can’t compromise Bernard for anything or anyone.”

  “But, I’m his brother!” I wasn’t too happy about it, but I couldn’t help bringing it up.

  “I know you are, Clyde, and you should be proud. You should be thinking about the great things you’re doing for society.”

  Wandering the pyramid of this conversation, I tripped off a pressure plate, that fired out little darts of inspiration. I could see my way around this plan and had found the angle I needed. It was a damn good angle, too. I smiled inwardly at my guile, although it was actually some of the Reverend’s earlier words that had given me the idea.

  “Could we talk in private?”

  “I suppose we could. You appear to be having a crisis of faith and it is my duty to deal with crises of faith in my parishioners.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Retaining sincerity and refusing to explode and riddle the Reverend with shrapnel of arrogant laughter was difficult. I didn’t believe in him anymore, so it was easy to lie, but it was hard to act like I had respect for this guy. It was approaching impossible in fact. The faith was a joke. The book was a joke. Its author was a joke who had only had one book published that sold few enough copies you could count ‘em on your digits. I myself, though clever enough to wrangle my way into the narrative without the author’s permission was already a sick joke. It was as hard not to laugh as it was not to cry. I had to act as if I knew none of these things, which were now intrinsic to who I was.

  “I’ll be free after my lecture on choreographing incidental debauchery. It’s pretty important if we’re in something by Garrett Cook. Shall we meet in my office or is there somewhere else you’d prefer?”

  “Your office is perfect.” Easy. Shooting fish in a barrel. Trading drugs to monkeys.

  The hour was more than enough time for me to convince my boss I wanted to pick up another shift and do a run today. This was a crucial part of my plan. I needed the van to load up the supplies the orangs were taking care of for me. Luckily for me, I had anticipated that my brother would leave nothing of the house behind. In my infinite cleverness, I had also saved up some emergency shoots, leaves and grubs that could be traded for chloroform and rope. With these things stashed in the van, I drove to the meeting, stashing a gun in the pocket of my white, cotton robe.

  When I came into his office, we were friends. He jumped up from his desk and embraced me.

  “Plot preserve, Reverend!”

  “Plot preserve, Clyde.”

  I drew the gun and pointed it at his head.

  “This is about Bernard, isn’t it?” he asked, trembling.

  “No.”

  Though his office had been freonlocked to 55 degrees, the Reverend was sweating bullets. If he made any sudden movements he’d have to deal with one more.

  “What is this about, then?”

  “This is about Archelon Ranch.”

  “I told you, I don’t know what it is.”

  “Hand me your cellphone.”

  He complied and I pocketed it. I kicked the laptop on his desk closed. He had to have had an autodial program on it. Optimist or not, believer in the greater good or not, the Reverend was extremely paranoid and he wore it like a neon orange top hat. He threw up his arms in resignation and I led him out the back door and into my van, where I tied his hands. He was polite and quiet for a couple minutes until he came out with exactly what I expected to hear.”

  “I don’t know where to find your brother, I told you.”

  “But your operatives do, Reverend.”

  “I could give them a call if you’d like.”

  I mulled over it before I caught onto his game. He dials the number; the operatives come looking for him because he has to have been kidnapped. In fact, he’s probably told them already not to make any contact or look for him, because they, as the current custodians of the Protagonist were far more important than he. It was a good move and a clever one, but it wouldn’t work on me.

  “Nice try, Reverend, but I’m not that stupid. I ought to shoot you for that.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I shook my head. There were things I was beginning to understand about this man, things about Narrativism that were in his blood. If I was a bad man for selling children raptor spray or having my father killed by a tyrannosaurus rex, I was a worse man for thinking what I was now thinking. It was sick. It was as sick as the cosmic joke we all lived in, sick as the repulsive, unfair plot of the book that made selfish, flaky Bernard into the hero. I shudder to say what I told him because it was the worst way of turning a man’s heart against itself.

  “You can’t die. You have to know the ending. If I kill you, you’ll never discover what happens, so like it or not, you h
ave to comply with my demands or else you’ll never know what Bernard was meant to do and you’ll never know if he reached Archelon Ranch and you’ll never know just what he found there if he did.”

  The Reverend’s face became that of a child who had just seen his puppy run over by his own father. Nowadays, puppies are pretty rare, so it’s a truly awful look to have on your face and I’m a truly awful man for having put it there. It changed into an “I’m going to tear out your eyes and ejaculate into the sockets” look, which I liked better then shifted back to the puppy one again.

  “But you want to stop him,” he argued.

  What I said next was just as bad, just as exploitative and just as much a product of my jealousy and malice. Boy it was clever and boy it was shitty.

  “But, if Bernard’s the Protagonist and I’m nobody, I can’t stop him. Nobody can stop him and if they do it’s what the narrative wants. So, what’s the problem? You can’t do anything to stop the narrative, can you Reverend? Or is everything you tell yourself and everything you preach for everybody’s good all lies? You don’t think you’re a liar, do you Reverend?”

  Now he felt as annoyed as I had been on the telephone with him. He was the one choking back all that bile. It felt now like we were just about even and I was actually doing something to him that hurt him as much as he’d hurt me. He was trapped and he knew it. I don’t think I’d ever known two people to be as sickened by each other as we were at that moment.

  “No, I’m not a liar and there’s nothing you can do to shake my faith. Nothing.”

  “The last thing I want to do is shake your faith. It’s all you’ve got right now.”

  No, I didn’t want to shake it. I wanted to exploit it, poison it, send it through a hamster maze of paradoxes, but I didn’t want to shake it. His faith could take me to Archelon Ranch where I would live peacefully while my brother rotted in the ground, punished for his selfishness. His faith would prove my existential import, which would more than make up for what it had done to me before.

  “You shouldn’t go through with this,” he warned me, “there can be serious repercussions.”I slapped him. I slapped him real hard too. Then I slapped him again. It was hard to get myself to stop, but I had better ways to get revenge. I could do far worse things to this man than slap him.

  “Why? It doesn’t matter what I do, remember? I’m a nobody, Reverend. If you try to stop me, you only succeed in proving that I’m a threat to the Protagonist. You can’t do it.”

  “You might be the Antagonist.”

  I played with the idea. That would be something. Being a man who could destroy Bernard’s world completely, an agent of the old world order, a monster born of jungle chaos, letting it loose everywhere I go. Bullshit. No, the Antagonist was someone or something far more exotic. Garrett Cook wouldn’t allow a guy like me even that privilege. He didn’t have much respect for people like me. Besides, if I were the Antagonist, I wouldn’t have to Assert myself so hard to exist in the first place. I’d be a bigger, more functional part of the story. I would be fully developed. I would have a hookhand or an army of supernatural entities at my beck and call. What really tipped me off was the burst of snarky laughter that overcame the Reverend. He was absolutely eating all of this up. He’d found a chink in my armor, just as fast as I’d found one in his. I shut him up with a punch in the stomach.

  “Fuck you!” I screamed.

  “Fuck you!” I punched him again.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I couldn’t stop. As before he had offered me a taste of relevance and then taken it from me before I could truly partake of it. I was still stupid enough to trust him a bit, cynical though I might have been. This guy was poison — much more venomous and dangerous than I could be. Just as I had trapped him in this paradox, so too had he trapped me. We were each other’s prisoners. If I was right about the things that trapped him in his state, he was right too, and if I was wrong, we were wrong together. Did I believe I could change the plot? Did I really believe I could bring down Bernard? The argument was too exhausting; it ensnared us.

  “Where can I go?’

  “Nowhere.”

  I should have started punching again, but it would numb him to the pain, lessen the significance of the violence. I waited and let him remember that his life was in my hands whether he liked it or not and that every uncooperative action he took was another step closer to death and ignorance of Bernard’s future and the purpose of the book.

  “North. I know of a place.”

  “You had better not be fucking with me, you know that?”

  “I know that, Clyde. I know it very well and I promise I’m not fucking with you. Beyond the suburbs to the North is the Sad House. If we get to the Sad House, we can find some answers.”

  “What’s there?”

  I hoped that wasn’t one of those things like Archelon Ranch that he actually knew nothing about. Archelon Ranch sounded wonderful and I can take wonderful surprises, but the Sad House sounded miserable and I couldn’t take miserable surprises very well. I also didn’t like that the only possibility lay in another piece of Narrativist mythology. Maybe Narrativist mythology often had a certain chilling accuracy, but it was still something I didn’t like depending on. Maybe he knew so little that shooting him and going with my instincts the rest of the way wouldn’t be such a bad idea. It couldn’t turn out any worse than having to live with him. Hmm… shoot him or indulge Narrativist folklore? Shoot him or indulge Narrativist folklore? The Reverend John Calvin Jenkins preserved his miserable life for the time being.

  “The Sad House is a Narrativist sacred site, like Archelon Ranch. It’s a place the author can’t escape; at least part of him can’t escape it. Every person stores their baggage somewhere inside them and since this place is somewhere inside the author it’s therefore…”

  “Someplace inside and outside of the book.”

  “Uh huh. So, if we reach the Sad House, there’s a chance, just a chance that we might find the author or a piece of him at least, one that can be communicated with and convinced to help us.”

  I was excited. I could have the one who really made this happen tied up in the back of my van. I could force him to make this whatever kind of world I wanted it to be; a safe world, a kind world, a world where I was respected and acknowledged for my virtues. Everybody wants this kind of world. Everybody deserves this kind of world and maybe the author could give it to Bernard in Archelon Ranch, but he could give it to everyone if I got a hold of him. I drove north, toward a better future.

  VII

  Bernard pushed himself harder than he had before. The deluge of bodies walking and the universe of possibilities made the Objectivity quiver with excitement, twitch in him and torment him. It screamed out vehemently for experiences, aching for new selves, but none of those selves at all was a self worth being. For example, there was the eyeless prostitute who had found some takers working the line. The Objectivity wanted to be another one of those takers in a much more meaningful and disgusting way. It wanted to not only savor the pleasure of the Harvester she was giving a blowjob to, but also the degradation of the disgusting eyeless cow giving the chitinous, insectoid member more respect than it looked like it deserved, and as the Harvester came after a lot of sucking and stroking the Objectivity insisted that Bernard had to be a sperm and that Bernard in fact was a sperm all along.

  It moved onto processing the feelings of the comprachicos with their chain gangs of feral West Side street kids and then insisted that Bernard had to know what it was to be a feral West Side street kid inside out. Too many selves gathered in one place, chattering in their inane, grotesque, oppressed minds. Come on, it’s not so great being you. You’re not you. How could you be you? I am Bernard, I am Bernard. He had to focus on the image of his hands; make them clear. The Objectivity was blurring his connection with his body, spinning through elements of others like a slot machine. I am Bernard, I am Bernard, I am Bernard. Another hat. A strange influx of French. Je ne suis pas un chapeau,
je suis un homme. Je suis Bernard. The Objectivity gave up, though it clearly did not wish to. The desire to remain Bernard was far too strong to beat as Chuck Calloway bought him an ice cream cone, which he ate with gusto and appreciation.

  “Thanks,” said Bernard, “it’s awfully hot.”

  The fan platform above them kicked on and soon afterward the mallgoing scum enjoyed a few minutes of relief from the extraordinary heat they lived under. It did not stop them from beating the children they had up for sale or from pleasuring Johns but their appreciation could be felt. The line began to move as one of the more monstrously fat and sweaty of the patrons of the line cooled down enough to take the three steps he needed to make it to the entrance. It would likely be only a few more hours until Bernard could get in, since there were just another couple of thousand mallgoers who needed to be checked for contraband, which included outside food and controversial reading materials. There wasn’t anything else that could be called too shameful for the Mall. Still, the search was needlessly thorough and often ended with a bribe or someone getting shot. Bernard was excited that the line seemed to be thinning slightly, but still could do little more than continuously argue and assert his selfhood to his very insistent condition.

  Finally, he reached the front of the line, where he was prodded, probed, questioned and threatened, though not in that order.