“Your help we are in need of. Besides which a safe place must be found for you.” He smiled at me like a monkey. Maybe he just grinned at me like a monkey. I mean he lined up his front and bottom teeth and squinted and pulled his lips back really far. His nose snarled up, too. One time I took a cable car up a mountain on an island and ended up at some kind of monkey park. I didn’t know there was gonna be a park there; I just thought it was supposed to be the top of a mountain. Maybe I would have brought cheese or something. Anyway in the park there were these green signs everywhere that said stuff about the monkeys. One said something like ‘don’t look at me or I won’t be responsible for my actions’. There were two pictures next to it. The one on top had this stick-figure guy with these laser-beams coming out of his eyes and into a monkey’s eyes. Well a baboon really I guess. It had no hair on its butt. There was a big ‘X’ through the beam. In the next picture there was another stick figure guy who looked the same but with his arms out and this time the baboon was hanging off the guy’s left elbow. The baboon was holding on with its teeth.
I think maybe I laughed at the face he made. The face Pedro made. My teeth were kinda yellow, too.
Pedro ran over this bike that was leaning on a tree. I heard it twist and compress under the tires and crackle against the truck bottom. In the side mirror I saw a bike except it looked like it was run over by a truck or something. “Que hores es, señor?”
I didn’t have a watch since they look funny on my arms but there was one on the dashboard of the truck. “Two twenty three.”
“Twenty three? Good. Pedro may still get you to the plane.” He got to an intersection and cut in front of some cars and we were driving legally now. People were still honking though. “In the compartment there you will find the backup.”
I thought he meant the glove compartment so I opened it up and under some porno magazines there was an envelope. “Is this it?”
“Si.” The envelope had these flowers printed on it and these stickers of blue and black spiders like you see on Halloween. Inside there was a Canadian passport and a plane ticket and a pack of Tridents. “Don’t worry, get to the airport on time you will. Don Pedro Fages is fast in the front seat.”
I think they were the cinnamon kind. The Tridents I mean. I inspected the passport next. It had this big card in it with my picture and said ‘Certificate of Eligibility’ on top. Then in the front of the passport was the picture again but I saw the name under it was ‘Daniel’ instead of ‘Jonah’ which it usually is. I put the passport back in the envelope with the blue and black spider stickers and was about to take out the plane ticket and see where I was going when the truck bucked to the right.
“Damn bastards”.
We were on an expressway now and in front of us was this red Ferrari. “What happened?”
“Damn bastards cut in front of Pedro.” He switched to the next lane over but the Ferrari switched over in front too. It was Underworld. Pedro had Underworld on the radio. I remember some of the lyrics… deep blue, red yellow yellow red yellow. “Pedro should twist the eyeballs of this slimy rich boy until they pop out and defecate lazily in his fiancée’s hair.”
Things started to get funny then. Pedro loosened his grip on the wheel so he was only driving with the palm of his right hand. The lane markers on the road started moving forewords instead of backwards. And then I started to hear the voices like back with the talking sun statue. At first it was just a warble like I was sampling it at the wrong rate.
Zaiwhyzoeu
Yai nui owewu
Why do I know you?
Maybe it was the music but I don’t think so. Pedro swapped hands on the wheel and shifted gears. The lane markers moved forwards again. The red Ferrari wasn’t in front of us anymore. “We’re almost there.”
It occurred to me that what I was doing was a little strange. Going on a plane with a fake passport for some kind of terrorist group I mean. Pedro was a nice guy though. “Why do I know you?”
We went inside a tunnel and the fluorescent lamps overhead made shadows of light that flashed across Pedro’s face. There was a hum that went along with it like when it’s hot and sticky at night in the summer and the heat and stickiness pervades your mind but you focus on the ceiling trying not to think about it and start to doze off when a mosquito gets near your ear and you open your eyes again thinking about the heat and stickiness and the pink puss penetrations you’ll have on your body when you wake up in the morning. “Hey, don’t worry. Meet her again you will before the book is over.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. The question-answer sequence didn’t fit. But I think it was supposed to make sense then. Like those 3-D posters I can never composite out.
“But what you do with her then even Pedro does not care to know.” He smiled at me and laughed. We broke out of the tunnel and the sun came down through the windshield like it would blister my skin. Sky blue like TV. I saw this commercial I think once that had these flying tortoises in the sky. You could see their undersides as they paddled across the sky like clouds beak first.
But when I looked up all I saw was an aeroplane.
#
Next I remember being in front of an airport terminal. Pedro was saying something but I couldn’t hear him very well. I was watching this kid walk towards the truck. He was like in kindergarten with this yellow plastic book bag that looked more like a lunch box. He had this yellow plastic fisherman’s hat on and looked at me like he found me interesting. (Éminence grise) “Éminence grise.”
“What? Where?” It was Pedro. I think I was the one who said ‘éminence grise’. Pedro looked past me through my side window at the sidewalk. A group of people was standing in front of the USAir terminal. I remember seeing one girl with these tight orange pants and a white shirt with a v-neck and hi-heels and these sunglasses that reflected what they saw back at you. “You’re very perceptive, señor. Pedro would never had been able to make such things out.”
A Ferrari red like the one that cut in front of us before pulled up besides our truck. I couldn’t see inside because of the glare from the sunlight. Pedro put his blinker on. A guy with a red beret came from behind the orange girl and walked towards us. He was taller than the girl and had the silver backpack from before. I mean from later. I mean… you know what I mean. The Ferrari’s door opened and he got inside.
But you see my problem, right? How could this part come before the other part if in this part I already know Pedro calls the red capped guy éminence grise?
I learned more about them later when I spoke with Pedro for the last time. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get to that part so I might as well paste that part in now. I was frustrated with a lot of things. So I was yelling at Pedro.
“Why do you make me do these things? Why… what the hell is wrong with you people?”
“Do you not understand yet? All these things are for you. We stand here against them because it is you that wanted it, how you questioned your own blind following of what they asked you to do. Even if you do not believe, even if none of what we do is real, Pedro for one thinks there is something special about you and will stay transfixed here because of that.” I wondered what the significance of using third person was. Maybe I should start using 3rd person too. But that was stupid. Pedro was really trying to get through to me here and I was going off on tangents. “If you think our enemy is the not right one, your sign give us please. Always we will follow you. Our destiny it is to create yours.”
Pedro was so different. People don’t usually say things like that to me. People don’t humble themselves. And I was yelling at him. “Pedro, I…”
“We know talk to you they do. You understand the language of those that call themselves the Ancients.”
I don’t know if I’ll be able to get to that part because I’m still not sure what the stuff that happens way later means yet. The things that go on now are a little weird and iffy but if it weren’t like that it wouldn’t really be worth writing about. But
later, later all the allusions and foreshadowing get ridiculous like I’m living an Apocrypha written by Arthur C. Clark for some FOX show and I have to just stop.
But before I try to get linear again I want to mention Lot. Sometimes Lot will say things to me like what Pedro said, will say, about believing in me. I remember this one time I was talking to Lot about computers. I told him how when I was a kid I used to stare at the screen and think it was completely useless.
“Did you have a computer as a kid?” I think I was over his place.
“No, just a Nintendo. There was this game Zanac that I fell in love with. I would spend hours on it.” He had this bubble water with wand thing you could blow bubbles with.
“I used to have one. I would do X-Mode game programming where you would load up images into video ram and then scroll it with the vertical offset.”
“Ya, whatever that means.” He dipped the wand in the fluid and blew through the hole. “Just kidding. Is sounds cool.”
“Well, I kind of thought it was for a while. But one day I just gave up. I thought it was more like I could code and code all I wanted to but it would never affect the real world, just some pixels on the screen, just some magnetic alignments on a hard drive.”
He tried to land one of the bubbles on his finger but it popped instead. “What about that Internet thingy. You can buy books and donuts, no? That’s in a way programming that affect the real world, no?”
“Ya, your right. Something changed the past few years.”
The wand was out of soap so he dipped it in the bottle again.
“Do you know what the other thing is that I used to think was a waste of time because it could never get anything done?”
“What?” He pulled the wand out. “Do you want to try?”
“No thanks. The other thing was thought. Maybe that will change one day as well.”
Lot smiled at me then. He said, “I don’t know how do you it but you have this strange ability to come up with really orginal stuff sometimes. Like you live outside the system.”
I’m still not sure exactly what that meant but I think Lot and Pedro were both trying to tell me the same thing.
Next Chapter
Anyway I’m sorry for letting this story line thing turn into a hopeless mess. I’ll try to do better from here on in. The next major thing I remember was the tunnel so I might as well go into that. Pedro wasn’t there anymore and I had my bag with me like from before in the coffee shop. I was at a street corner at night somewhere next to a row of telephone booths. The buildings weren’t skyscrapers but they were tall enough to make me think I was in a city. And people with shopping bags and taxis with automatic doors. I remember standing in front of a building whose top stories were covered by a blue poster of a matador with a black cape twisting to face a bull lit by floodlights that turned parts of the blue white in glare. Across the street from that was a neon sign of a Coke bottle surrounded by other Coke bottles. But even neon doesn’t last. A couple of the Coke bottles were blown out. I could still make out the Coke bottle shape though. There’s a term for that, redundancy in data that allows you to extrapolate information after memory degradation. Something to do with neural networks I think.
And then next to the neon there was one of those jumbo public TVs. I remember hearing bells playing Christmas music and watching Jodie Foster on the TV. She had this sleeveless pearl dress on and came out of a black car onto red carpet into a hotel ballroom with chandeliers and men with tuxedos and slicked back hair. When she stepped out of the car the TV gave an under the door shot of her heels hitting the runway. She was bleached white by light from somewhere and was staring straight into the camera at me across the cityscape through the jumbo TV lips moving. Her lips were moving but I couldn’t understand it. The white drowned everything out. Everything but the bells playing Christmas music. Like Alzheimer’s.
From there I went underground. I think I used a subway entrance. I was following someone or going after something; I guess it must have been the red capped guy but I don’t remember too well.
In tunnel then. The walls were light blue like organ music and the floor tiles were a gritty yellow. There were narrow recesses on the sides where water had accumulated like in subways and I could hear my shoes snap the ground click-click. (tic-toc) The tiles my feet stepped on where arranged in diamond checkerboard fashion like the wire mesh you see sometimes in glass. The first thing I remember is that my head was bobbing up in down as I walked. I think it always does but usually my brain will even it out so it looks like I’m walking level. And then there was another pair of shoe clicks that weren’t in sync with mine. I looked behind me but all I saw were echoes of the clicks. I felt like I’d been up for a long time, unalert. Not alert. The asynchronous element was still there but I kept walking.
I remember trying to think but I don’t remember making much sense. The tunnel thing was bothering me. I was trying to abstract the environment; I’d ask myself what was the significance of me being in a tunnel right now. I used to do think about stuff like that a lot when I was a kid. It’s kinda silly really, like if you asked me that normally I’d just say ‘I’m in a tunnel to get on the subway to get to work.’ But then I was thinking, ‘I’m in a tunnel because I’m not moving sideways.’ I think I meant that I was walking straight but that doesn’t sound right. It’s hard for me to remember exactly what I was thinking. Like when you have a dream about some multiprocess program you’re coding and can visualize the mutexes jump around between threads as blocking and resuming occurs but when you wake up and try to debug the thing you’re clueless and just stare at the screen or maybe play solitaire.
Anyway back to the tunnel. Further ahead there were posters on the wall. Black and white of a girl looking over her shoulder. She was blond but the posters were black and white and I knew she was blond anyway so maybe her hair was whitish in the poster. I’m pretty sure it was an advertisement for some designer. Maybe Fendi. She had these round Jackie O. sunglasses on.
The tunnel bothered me. I think it was because of one of my older dreams and not just the one about the moon I told you before. Certain dreams have stuck in my head since I was a kid. Maybe I dream them over the same or with variations sometimes. Like this one dream I had after seeing ‘Life Force’ with Jean-Luc Picard when I was in middle school or elementary school. Somehow I ended up sitting in the hatch of a hatchback with a bunch of older highschoolers as they drove to their sex-shack in the Poconos. And then these bat-like monsters came down and started flying everywhere. I remember a scene in a tunnel with cars dodging them like Beethoven. The tunnel had these yellow incandescent-looking light rectangle stipple-strips on its side. Maybe both sides but the camera was facing the wrong way. Remembering dreams is hard. It’s like memories and you need dream triggers like you need memory triggers. This tunnel reminded me of the Life Force dream. And I was scared like there would be these big bat things that would come and attack me at any time.
Later the corridor I was in stopped like it was a dead end. Another poster of the girl was in front of me except this time the poster was lit by fluorescence from behind it and there was this blue glow that surrounded her body like the halo in those 16th century Virgin Mary prints except this time the halo was blue instead of yellow and enshrined her entire body instead of just her head. I thought I could almost recognize her, like her nose and eyes and stuff, but her skin tone was all wrong and eerie from the glow of her aura. Her skin turned this kind green that was sick like if you stared at it long enough it would make you unwell. She was still looking back over her shoulder as if she was walking into the blue and the poster was a snapshot of when the blue started enveloping her.
And that was it.
The hallway just ended like I was in the labyrinth or something. With a Minotaur and stuff like Picasso. I wondered why I was sent down here. Then my feet started to get cold. I looked down and there was this mist on the ground like dry ice that came up to my ankles. I was half expecting the poster to
start talking to me.
But it didn’t. Which was good. I really don’t like it when strange things happened to me.
The phone rang again. “Hello?”
“This is Pedro speaking.”
“You can reach me here?”
“You need help, si? So Pedro can reach you.”
But there was static on the line. Not static but someone else was there. It sounded like people speaking in the background in the same place Pedro was in but it could also have been cross talk from another frequency harmonic. (spectrum modulation) Something like, “We should have recruited the other instead. He seemed to have had better potential.”
“Why not both? We’ve wasted others before.”
“Is it not too late for him?” It sounded like voices I’ve heard before. From ‘the sun has set on him’.
“It would be but the process has already started.”
And then Pedro again. “Hello?”
“What was that?” The other voices didn’t say anything anymore.
“What?” And then silence for a bit. “Pedro does not hear much. Maybe you have heard a solar flare. The solar flare will cause static on systems such as these.”
But I didn’t hear static. “But it wasn’t static, people were talking.”
“Huh? Pedro does not know of that…” And then the line was quiet for a moment again like before, “Do you still trust Pedro? Pedro that has no proof. Pedro that is not one of them, señor.”
(Lot) Maybe they were talking about Lot. The voices I mean. But what do I know.
“We would hope that you use what they have given you against them.”
“How do you know…” I didn’t get to finish my sentence.
“Of course by now they will have doubts. They know about Pedro. Through the wall you must go, señor.”
“What?” I needed time to think about what he meant. I really wished Pedro had learned to use pronouns correctly. I just focused on the wall for now. I didn’t see a handle or anything. “Is it like a door?”
Circular Motion Page 17