Just a Couple of Days

by Tony Vigorito

  “What’re you going to do there?”

  “Consulting criminologist. Mostly it entails maintaining the internal structural organization of the facility. They want the successful applicant to maximize the number of prisoners they can hold while minimizing the possibility of any disturbances.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “Yeah, it is. And if I get the job, I’ll get a hefty commission for each additional prisoner I can add, since they get a tax credit for each head.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” Blip nodded affably and let the conversation pause. “So, do you think we can wrap this up quickly? I’d hate to lose this opportunity.”

  “Oh,” she smiled, handing him back his license and registration but keeping the Get Out of Jail Free Card. “I’ll tell you what, let me give you an escort there. If you get the job, put in a good word for me. I could use some part-time work.”

  “Great, I will. What’s your first name?”

  “Anne. Anne Applebee. Just follow me, okay?”

  “Thanks, Anne.” After she left to go back to her cruiser, Blip turned to me with his palm out.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, slapping a twenty in his hand. “I thought you wanted to go back to jail.”

  Blip pocketed the money, smiling. “I do.” At that, he got out of the car. “Hey Anne!” he hollered to Officer Applebee, who had not yet gotten back to her cruiser. “Everything I just told you was a ranking pile of birdshit, and it’s just like a moron pig cop like yourself to fall for it!”

  36 Blip was arrested. According to Officer Applebee, the charge was reckless driving and verbal assault on a police officer. She instructed me to “take your wiseass friend’s car the hell off my road before I have it impounded.” I obeyed smirkingly, and after parking his car back in the campus lot (not under the sycamore) and cleaning the droppings off his hood, I finally arrived home as dusk was just beginning to stretch its shadows before fading off to sleep. I poked around my kitchen for a while, postponing the inevitable call to Sophia. It wasn’t long, however, before she rang me.

  She was scared and angry, wistful and distraught. She cried on the other end of the line, and the most I could do to comfort her was swing the phone cord from side to side and echo Blip’s words, “Everything will turn out all right.” I told her that he had mentioned something about “the hounds of hell,” and that elicited a chuckle. She must have sensed my curiosity, and she related the story behind it. I was grateful. It gave me goose bumps.

  On the first anniversary of the day they met, Blip surprised Sophia by taking her to a luxury cabin for the weekend. On the way there, they picked up a hitchhiker who, after learning that it was their anniversary, presented them with a bag of magic mushrooms as they dropped him off. Thrilled, they thanked him and went to explore a nearby gorge, where they consumed their gift. They decided to leave, however, when they saw a father smack his son for jumping into the creek with his shoes on.

  By the time they returned to their car, the effects of the mushrooms were beginning to manifest, and they thought they’d better hurry to their cabin while they could still drive. Along the way, however, the two of them were so awestruck by a grassy hillside that they pulled over and decided to run to the top of it.

  As it happened, a nearby resident was in the habit of leaving his Doberman unleashed. When they were a good distance away from their car, barefoot and defenseless, the dog came trotting along beside them. It did nothing as long as they kept moving away from his territory, and their car, but as soon as they would stop or try to make their way back, it would bare its teeth and growl. Tripping madly by this time, they wound up having to go to a stranger’s house and ask with trembling voices if the alcoholic woman who answered the door could please call her neighbor and have him bring his guard dog in. After this ordeal of the surreal, Blip and Sophia made straight for their luxury cabin to try and salvage what was left of their trip, their anniversary, and their sanity. Blip kept repeating, “Fucking Dobermans and ’shrooms do not mix, fucking Dobermans and ’shrooms do not mix,” until they got to their country cabin, where the couch pillows were embroidered with a picture of a big black dog on a grassy hillside.

  After turning over all the pillows and leaving speculation about such a formidable coincidence until later, they discovered that they had their own grassy hillside. It was even better than the one they had seen earlier, there was no Doberman guarding it, and they’d paid for their right to be there undisturbed. So that’s where they stayed all day, running around the gentle slope, marveling at the dandelions that had been flung about the entire hill, finding cherubic shapes in the clouds, and making love under the dome of the sky. Toward evening they watched the sun set and the stars come on from their hilltop perch, then retreated back to the cabin with its full kitchen and a hot tub on the porch. Sophia described it as the best day of their lives, when no matter what tumultuous events were going on in the world or just down the road, they were alive and at peace. They decided that day that if they ever had a little girl, they would name her Dandelion.

  “And do you know what he said to me just before I went to sleep that night?” Sophia said, her voice filled with affection at the close of the story. “He said, ‘At the gates of heaven lie the hounds of hell.’”

  37 It was an appropriate anniversary of their auspicious beginning, and it was the beginning, their first moment of pure and innocent delight in each other, that they forever strove to keep in their hearts. This was apparent to any visitor to their home. A tattered placard from which their union commenced was elegantly framed and hung in their front room, and they relished any opportunity to tell and retell the story of their meeting.

  Of what am I speaking? Pardon my verse, but I speak now with honor of tale well-worn, a love story born, a mythic event that came to pass at a festival of forgotten origin. It was outside, that is certain, for Blip tells of an irritating glare blinding him as he ambled, flashes of refracted sunshine glancing at him from ahead. The source was a sign, a shiny white poster held by a joyous young sylph. She was dancing and prancing and sparkling all over, a woman whose legs were purportedly hidden by a gauzy sarong of mandalas and rainbows. But all is revealed in the pure light of day, and so were her limbs seen barefoot and blissful, skipping and stepping, tapping and hopping, foxing and trotting.

  She presented her sign to all passersby. Some people frowned and hurried away, but most of them smiled and embraced her with glee. His attention thus distracted, his libido so attracted, he wandered to where he might read the inscription on the poster she picketed with such glad-hearted pith. His mind and his body conspired to drench him with curiosity both sensual and intellectual, pushing him, prodding him, shoving him toward the zing-zippety zaftig. As he approached the proscenium of her performance, her placard pitched left, ducking the sun and revealing its message to the kind, sexy man strolling her way: FREE HUGS!

  The connection made, the communication given, the poster bounced on its corners like a card on the run, flirting and bidding him beckon her call. The letters held fast, together they carried the words of their hostess, two words that she uttered and breathed into life: “Free hugs!” Sophia gushed with the lilt of honest joy, and meant them as much for Blip as for anyone else.

  He smiled at the sign, and the fingers that held it, and looked up to see the eyes that propelled it. Their eyes locked tight and squinted with grins, swollen pupils stretched forward to soak up more sight. It was but a moment, an invisible instant, no simpering stares or protracted eye goggles, only a glimpse and a blink with recognition complete. He glanced toward her sign and smirked to himself, the smirk of a fool, blind to the inevitable but brave nonetheless. “Who,” he scratched his head like a gorilla, then asked her the question that leaped from his mouth. “Who is Hugs?”

  38 Thus was their relationship born on the swift kiss of a pun. Neither suspected what the other would become to each of them. Like phrases running wild in the Logos, they knew neithe
r who nor by what mechanism nor for what reason they were whistled for (if they understood that they were whistled for at all). They were simply compelled to come together. Sophia was the question, and Blip was the answer. And vice versa.

  It happened like this: Free Hugs, confident with his identity as a gallant suggestion, suddenly slammed into Who is Hugs?, some smart-assed interrogative who turned him into an emotional imperative by her very presence. What a ridiculous rendezvous! Christ, the two utterances really didn’t have anything to do with each other, drawn together by some clever misunderstanding, some sly twist of fate. But sense or nonsense, that which motivates the plane of language cannot be resisted any more than that which motivates the plane of life. The soul knows this, of course, as does its equivalent in the communicative cosmos. It keeps its head in the heavens, and has but one toe in the untamed tides of this world, just enough to animate the mind, which fails to see what is perfectly apparent.

  Another question, Why aren’t apples called reds?, who longed for her answer but bragged of her independence nonetheless, once heard rumors of such fantastic foolishness, such confident meaninglessness, and she scoffed.

  39 In my own time and space, I retired to the front porch with my dog, Meeko, a good-natured mutt, surely the furthest a canine could be from a hound of hell. I sat stroking his ears, watching night settle onto my isolated residential street, trying to fathom the events of the day. After a bit, I remembered Tynee’s enigmatic purple envelope, whose contents I had not yet found a chance to read. I didn’t know it then, but the boastful introduction would turn out to be no hyperbole. This is what the letter said:

  Congratulations, Dr. Fountain!

  Due to your extraordinary expertise in the area of molecular biology, you have been selected to participate in research of monumental historical importance.

  We represent a top-secret committee of military and industry representatives that has been long disturbed by the nature of warfare. Mind you, we are not so foolish as to believe that war can be done away with; indeed, we recognize the utter inevitability of it in human nature. However, the Committee for Peaceful Conflict (CPC) was founded upon a sincere belief in the possibility of humane weaponry and warfare. Briefly, the concept of humane weaponry and warfare is to incapacitate, rather than terminate, an enemy. Traditional warfare decimates entire population centers. This renders natural resource reserves virtually worthless by destroying vital transportation routes and causing billions of dollars in property damage. The toll in human suffering need hardly be mentioned.

  The CPC has been actively promoting and sponsoring a shift away from these foibles of the past for some time now. Humane weaponry and warfare is possible, and recent research in genetics puts humanity on the threshold of an era when the economic and human devastation wrought by war will be nothing more than a memory.

  Our research program has proceeded in three stages. Stage one, Operation Moneybags, was dedicated to the identification of the most efficient incapacitating agents. To that end, a massive survey of chemicals was undertaken, without success. Chemistry is the technology of the past, as you must surely realize, and genetics is the technology of the future. With that realization, the program was scrapped and begun anew.

  Let us remind you before we go any further that our goal is humane weaponry and warfare, not germ warfare. We are not searching for or looking to create a new plague upon humankind. Rather, we seek to remove the plagues of economic devastation and human suffering from the annals of warfare. War cannot be helped, but it can be peaceful.

  All disclaimers aside, once a suitable carrier virus was identified, it was brought into the laboratory for genetic mapping. This has been accomplished. Stage two, Operation Recount, involved the manipulation of the genome. We believe we have engineered a highly unique virus with specialized symptoms that, were it introduced into a population center, would almost immediately incapacitate it without a single building being destroyed and with a minimum of human suffering.

  Stage three, Operation Small Change, involves you, Dr. Fountain. In short, we need your expertise. Humanity needs your expertise. A viral incapacitating agent such as we have been describing is useless without a cure or a vaccine. We possess neither of these. Although President Tynee has assured us that you would be glad to provide your services, we prefer to allow you to decide. At the time of a decision in the affirmative, you will be fully debriefed and allowed access to our records and laboratories, as well as provided with luxurious and sequestered accommodations. Let us know of your decision via President Tynee.

  This letter is necessarily vague. It is not, however, news to any intelligence organization in the world. Suffice it to say that we are not the only nation developing such weapons. For your protection and reassurance, a team of agents has been watching your every move.

  The choice is yours, Dr. Fountain. Humanity anxiously awaits.

  The memo was signed with the letters CPC, and carried a postscript a few lines down. It read: “P.S. Better living through genetics.”

  40 The letter left me both intrigued and apprehensive. I had a team of agents protecting me? Was I in danger? I strained my eyes into the darkness off my porch but could see no one lurking about. I attempted to reassure myself by noting that Meeko seemed relaxed, and surely he would sense another’s presence nearby. But it was fast becoming impossible for me to think of anything but torrents of frightful scenarios fed by a lifetime of espionage movies. The state of mind that emerged within me was utterly unexpected and terrifying. I have since harbored nonfalsifiable suspicions that it was not entirely without psychotropic influence, given the activities of the CPC and their objectives concerning me. But this is conspiratorial conjecture.

  As I recall, I began to panic when Meeko stirred and I imagined that he heard something across the street. I glanced around wildly, scanning the charcoal shadows, then thought better of it and inspected my body for the point of a laser sight. I was clean, it appeared, but then I realized that the point was probably on my head. I felt naked and wide open, and a nightmarish dread was crawling over me like all the roaches in hell, smothering my rational faculties. I tried to calm myself, and succeeded in forcing a smile onto my face when I mused that perhaps Blip’s irrationality was contagious. I patted Meeko’s side, and he thumped his tail appreciatively. Good dog, protecting your paranoid proprietor.

  “You’ll let me know if you smell anything, won’t you, boy?” I said to him, loud and lightsome, but only succeeded in unnerving myself further by the agitated sound of my own quaking voice, greeted as it was by an antagonistic silence that stomped on my already tenuous grip on reality.

  My imagination then suddenly threw an embarrassing temper tantrum, and I sat in a frightful paralysis, immobilized by panic, for the subjective hour or so that it took a single leaf, a pioneer of the coming autumn, to drift to the ground. At last, the hum of a distant car began to fill in the shrieking void. This gave me some brief comfort, but I soon realized that the car was getting louder, much, much louder, and coming closer. Presently, I saw its high-beam headlights glare into view as it turned the corner a couple of blocks away. It was on my street and would be passing my house any moment.

  I had an impulse to race inside and hide under the covers, but acting on one’s fears only makes things worse. So I stayed put, filled with horrific apprehension, tied with the terror that bound me to my chair, refusing to let the floodwaters of fright rising in my soul chase me to higher ground. It was an enormous effort, like holding on to a scalding plate until you get it to a table, but I was determined not to move until that car passed. Nothing less than my sanity seemed to be at stake. Afterward, in a few seconds, I would surely relax again and laugh at myself.

  Meeko, irritated at the sound of the vehicle’s broken exhaust system, lifted his head and growled as the car crossed the intersection onto my block. Human and canine, we shared a few moments of consciousness that night. The approaching car filled our perception. Its high beams lit up the en
tire street and the unmuffled combustion of the engine was like cinematic machine-gun fire over speakers with blown woofers. Meeko sat up as the car’s noise increased. My heart was pounding and my stomach hurt, but then, glory be, the car was past my house.

  Boom! A deafening blast knocked the wind out of the sigh of relief I was breathing. Meeko and I scrambled to our feet simultaneously. Our two brains, still operating at the same primal level, struggled savagely to make sense out of the noise that had confronted them. Meeko began barking madly, more ferociously than I’d ever seen him. Our few moments of shared consciousness were soon over, as I very quickly realized that the noise was just the car backfiring. This knowledge did nothing to quiet my pounding heart. Thinking I was the more rational species of the two of us, I took charge and calmed Meeko down, then went inside and telephoned Tynee at his office-apartment.

  “President Tynee,” I was still breathless, and my voice was trembling. “I want to be sequestered tonight. I’ve read the letter.” Meeko began barking violently again, snarling at the door, giving rise to my own survival instincts once more. “Quiet!” I roared at Meeko, into the receiver.

  “Take it easy,” Tynee said calmly. “What’s going on?”

  “I think the team of agents might have lost me. I want to be sequestered tonight. I don’t like this one bit, goddamnit!” Either I was losing my mind or I saw a movement outside the window.

  “I’ll make the arrangements. Hold on.”

  I held on. No, I thrashed and struggled furiously against the deranged quicksand of delusion sucking me into a pit of dread. I watched Meeko in horror as he sniffed and whined frantically at the door. I felt I was facing certain death. Violent death. Any moment my head could explode from a sniper’s bullet, I kept thinking. What were my last words? Was it “goddamnit”? That can’t be a good note to end on.