Just a Couple of Days

by Tony Vigorito

  “What’s that s’posed to mean?” asked Manny. “Who’s rollin’ around in marijuana?”

  Brother Zebediah spoke, slow and condescending. “Just because God made marijuana doesn’t mean you should smoke it.”

  “You’re crazy, Brother.” Manny pointed at the Bible in Brother Zebediah’s hand. “Who d’ya s’pose wrote that there Bible?”

  “These . . .” Brother Zebediah lifted his Bible. “These are the inspired words of God himself.”

  “Well, just ’cause God wrote the Bible don’t mean you should read it.”

  “Heretic!” Brother Zebediah yelled, his eyes wide in unfeigned horror.

  “Hypocrite!” Manny returned the favor. “I know what your poison is, Padre. Religion. You make yourself feel good by puttin’ others down. You like to inject your soul with that hellfire and damnation talk, pointin’ out everyone else’s flaws. Yeah, that’s right, that Bible’s your poison. Every time you point your finger at someone you’re stickin’ a needle in your arm, shootin’ yourself fulla pride and self-righteousness. You think you know somethin’ the rest of us don’t? Bullshit. You don’t know shit. No one knows shit. And anyone who thinks they know shit definitely don’t.”

  Brother Zebediah was flabbergasted, so much so that he was, for a thick moment, at a loss for words. “My God, may God strike you down this instant!”

  “There you go, you see what I’m sayin’? There ain’t enough trucks in this country to haul the load of bullshit you’re try’na sell.” He looked at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling of their cell. “I don’t see no lightning, Brother.”

  “It doesn’t seem likely,” Blip entered their argument, gazing pensively at the ceiling. “It doesn’t seem likely that lightning could come into an enclosed room.”

  “Wouldn’t matter if it could,” Manny said. “I’ve already been struck by lightning.”

  This revelation brought a pause to the conversation, as both Blip and Brother Zebediah (as well as the assembled studio audience) studied Manny’s face to ascertain whether or not he was serious.

  “No lie. When I was fifteen I tried out for the football team at my high school. I was tacklin’ on a weighted dummy when suddenly it kicked back. I guess it threw me about thirty feet. I had all my gear on, but it still felt like I’d just gotten my ass run over by an eighteen-wheeler.”

  “Jesus,” said Blip. “You might have told me that when we met. That’s like having a twin. You’re not supposed to keep something like that a secret.”

  Manny smiled and shrugged. “Anyway, I couldn’t sleep for a couple weeks after that. I wasn’t even tired. I still only need a couple hours’ sleep a night now. That’s why I got into haulin’, plus I wanted to see the country. I found out soon enough that would be difficult, what with a billboard every time I turned a bend tellin’ me what I needed or what lay ahead, just like you, Brother Zachariah. I say fuck that. I know what I need and I’ll see what’s ahead when I get there. So, I use my spare time doin’ billboard jobs.”

  “Cool,” said Blip.

  “You’re abusing a blessing from God,” Brother Zebediah informed Manny.

  “A blessin’ my ass. I couldn’t make the team ’cause of that.”

  “Why not?” Blip asked.

  “Ever since that day I ain’t never shed a drop of sweat on the whole left side of my body.”

  “Come on . . . ,” said Blip.

  “No lie, Doc. I can’t sweat on my left side. Look.” Manny lifted his arms to display his armpits. Sure enough, the underarm of his shirt on the left side was a virtual antiperspirant commercial, as sure as the Statue of Liberty, while the fabric on the right was darkened with dampness.

  “Now that’s something, eh, Brother?”

  “Remarkable,” Brother Zebediah responded with uncharacteristic geniality, his mind preoccupied momentarily with something other than Biblical literalism.

  “And the nice thing is,” Manny peeled off his shirt, revealing a mountainous build. He pulled it back on inside out. “When the right side of the shirt gets all wet, I can turn it inside out and practically have a fresh shirt on.”

  62 The mad tea party continued along in much the same manner. At one point I turned to General Kiljoy to inquire what the itinerary for the day was, only to discover that he and the others were no longer sitting with me. So engrossed was I in the squabbles of the trio before me that I hadn’t noticed the others had moved to the far side of the room, where they were now talking quietly at the bar. Stupid as General Kiljoy’s earlier comment had been, it was like TV.

  I stood up to join them, and they abruptly ceased their hushed conversation. Pretending not to notice, I raised the question of the day’s activities.

  “This is it,” General Kiljoy responded, gesturing across the room with his palms.

  “We’re going to watch them all day?”

  “It should get interesting shortly,” Miss Mary assured me.

  “It’s been interesting,” I said, “but I’d like to have a few words with Blip before we,” I fumbled, “before you get down to business.”

  “Impossible,” General Kiljoy said flatly. Tynee and Miss Mary chuckled as if watching the antics of a four-year-old.

  “The least you could grant me is a meeting with him before you begin experimenting on him.”

  General Kiljoy shrugged his chin, considering. “It’s not that I wouldn’t grant you that,” he said, emphasizing that it would indeed be a regal gesture. “But we’ve already begun the experiment.” The three of them looked at me as if they’d just whooped “Surprise!” at a birthday party.

  I turned and looked at Blip, Brother Zebediah, and Manny, who were still sitting around the table, talking, arguing, and drinking tea. Blip asked Manny if he was deaf on the same side he couldn’t sweat on. He was.

  “The tea, Doctor,” Miss Mary informed me, smiling with the depravity of an executioner.

  “What about the tea?” I asked, glancing at the incongruously opulent teapot, with which Brother Zebediah was pouring himself another cup.

  “Your friend should love it.” Tynee smiled. “It’s an invigorating herbal blend.”

  “But it’s sweetened,” General Kiljoy continued, “with our very own secret ingredient.”

  “The Pied Piper virus!” Miss Mary exclaimed. Happy birthday!

  Astounded beyond reaction, I slumped down onto a barstool, then immediately hopped up and walked around the bar to pour myself a drink. I grabbed the meanest bottle I could find, Wild Turkey. I wanted punishment. “How long before its effects manifest?” I asked, after belting back a shot and shuddering as the ethanol spirits possessed me.

  “I donated the teapot,” Miss Mary crowed.

  “How long?” I repeated.

  General Kiljoy glanced at his watch. “Typically takes about one-and-a-half, two hours. That gives them about a half hour to forty-five minutes, tops.”

  I took another slug of whiskey, and though I was salivating madly from the alcohol, began to feel a John Wayne edge coming on. “I want to talk with him,” I said, swallowing the bile rising in my throat.

  “That’s not an option, Doctor,” General Kiljoy responded evenly. He was more John Wayne than me.

  I took another shot, swallowed my gag as a chaser, and regained my composure. “Work something out.” I slammed the glass down on the bar. Tynee commandeered the bottle, but I would’ve rather bitten on a fork than toss back another nip of that demonswill. “I want to meet with him now,” I continued, loud and surly, “or I’m off this project.” I spoke my j’s as if pronouncing Jacques. “Release me, kill me, or throw me in there with them, do what you want, but you’ll get no cooperation from me. I’ve only one request.” I also pronounced my qu’s as in Jacques. “I want to talk to him while he can still talk back.”

  General Kiljoy looked at me, his eyes narrow. Miss Mary and Tynee retreated to the sofas. “You got balls after all, Fountain.” He gazed at me, scanning my features, looking for signs of a bluff. Bu
t I held my cool. I was a wild turkey, after all, fast and furious, look out. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his remote control. Still looking at me, he hit a button, and the bookcase to the left of the observation window slid open. “I’ll send him in in a minute. There’ll be a glass wall separating you to protect you from exposure, naturally, but you’ll be able to see and hear each other.”

  “Thanks,” I managed, just before I threw up on the bar.

  63 General Kiljoy swore at my alimentary upheaval, handed me a bottle of ginger ale, and ordered me into a small room behind the bookcase to await Blip. He warned me that he would be watching the meeting via closed-circuit camera. The room had the same interior designer as the room in which Blip, Manny, and Brother Zebediah were hanging out. It was, however, quite a bit smaller and it had a thick glass wall in the middle. It felt much more like a confessional than I would have preferred.

  I sat there, dizzy, sipping my bottle of soda, trying to wash the acidic grittiness from my teeth, and drawing profound connections between alcohol and the French language. Was it so romantic to talk like you were plotched? And if so, why weren’t women helplessly attracted to slurring alcoholic vagrants? What if an alcoholic vagrant were French? Aha! Context is crucial, of course. That stream of thought was dammed with the realization that women also like chubby, bald, drooling people when they happen to be infants, but not when they are adults.

  I suppose now is as good a time as any to mention that I am, or was at the time I am writing about, one of those chubby, bald, drooling men that women are so disinclined to coo over. I trust I have not seriously violated the mental image readers may have constructed of me. After all, I was basically an evil scientist cooperating with the military-industrial complex in yet another dunderheaded scheme to tighten the Gordian knot of technocratic domination.

  The Gordian knot, for the uninitiated, was a knot of mythical complexity that supposedly existed in the Asian city of Gordium in 333 B.C.E., when Alexander the Great and his army took up winter quarters there. While there, he heard about a legend surrounding the knot, which stated that whoever could untie it would become king of Asia. Clever Alex, quite the wild turkey himself, took one look at the knot, drew his sword, and cut it in half. Asia, of course, was destined to be his.

  Today, the knot is of a different sort altogether. Whoever unties the military-industrial knot won’t conquer the world, but free it.

  64 The door on the opposite side of the glass opened, and Blip entered. His face leaped into a smile when he saw me.

  “Flake!” he called out, his voice tinny through the intercom.

  “How are you?” I raised my bottle to him in greeting.

  He shrugged exuberantly, clearly pleased with his predicament. “Chillin’ like a villain. I’m right about the experiments, you know.” He grinned, then cocked his head. “So what are you doing here? You’re not bailing me out again, are you? I think I’m just about to figure out what’s going on.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know where to begin,” I said, thinking how much easier it is to confess a wrongdoing to some priest than to the person whom you’ve actually done wrong. “Strange events have transpired lately.” A maudlin lump formed in my throat, and I felt like bawling. A chubby, bald, drooling, bawling man. “I didn’t know what they had in mind. I didn’t have any choice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know what to say.” I took a swig of ginger ale, then looked him in the eyes for the first time since he’d come in the room. “You were right. Absolutely right. They are doing experiments. I’m here to find a vaccine. I didn’t want to help them, but then they have you.”

  “Whoa.” Blip ran his hands over his head, pulling his long white hair back. He sat confused and silent a few moments. “Who has me? Vaccine for what? What are you talking about, man? You’re starting to wig me out.”

  I sighed impatiently, wishing I hadn’t demanded to meet with him. “The tea the three of you were drinking,” I explained, tired and resigned. “It contained a virus.” I paused, but Blip didn’t respond, only looked at me with wide eyes. To my comfort, they were filled with shock and not accusation. “It won’t kill you,” I continued. “It’ll barely even make you sick. But it will destroy your ability to use language, your symbolic capacity.”

  “Symbolic capacity,” Blip murmured.

  “They just told me you’ve got about a half hour before it becomes apparent.”

  “Who’s they?”

  I shrugged, pointing to the air around the room.

  Blip leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, facedown and hair every which way. “Symbolic capacity,” he repeated. He looked up, pursing his lower lip, deep in thought. His face relaxed into a realization. “That makes sense, I guess.” He looked through me, still thinking. “This is some kind of germ warfare, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged again. “I can’t say.”

  “Well, I can say that it’s brilliant,” he called out loudly.

  “You think it’s brilliant?”

  “Yeah, as a means to an end. It’s just a strange end. Destroy a nation by destroying the capacity of the individuals to communicate with each other, am I on the right track?” He shook his head. “Very clever. A weapon of mass anomie.”

  “Anomie?”

  “Comes from the Latin nomos. Roughly translates as the social universe, language, society, norms, the space we share in which we interact. Anomie is the disintegration and destruction of that universe.” He pursed his lower lip again, shaking his head and pausing long. “So society collapses, but what happens to individuals?”

  “They say it’s not lethal.”

  “But what’s the subjective experience like?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I will,” he said eagerly. “If a person doesn’t have a symbolic capacity, they have no self.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because the self is social.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that your sense of self emerges by interacting with others. It is born and raised in the process of human communication and interaction.” He gestured his hand back and forth between us. “In order to communicate, you must be able to evaluate what you are saying from another person’s perspective, to be sure you’re making sense. The imaginary reflection that your mind creates is your sense of self. In recognizing that you are an object in another person’s perception, you become an object in your own. That’s just the way it is.

  “Of course, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some deeper Self with a capital S. But that sense of self you are most acquainted with, the phantasm of your ego, that self is social. So, as far as your symbolic capacity goes, if this fundamentally human ability is undermined, then, ipso facto, your sense of self will dissolve as well.” He sat nodding to himself in satisfaction for a few moments before continuing. “It works like this: You become self-aware, self-conscious, only after you imagine yourself from another’s perspective. Think of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. When they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they became self-conscious, right? They felt embarrassed and covered themselves. Well, the knowledge that particular myth is referring to is our symbolic capacity, our ability to order, categorize, and name objects in our environment, including our selves. That’s what differentiates us from all other animals. Now, why were Adam and Eve embarrassed?”

  “Because they were naked?”

  “Right. But what I’m trying to say is that they only realized they were naked because they became self-aware. They imagined themselves from each other’s perspective, and became bashful. You’re the most self-conscious when you’re embarrassed, see? When you’re painfully aware of how others see you. That’s the basis of society, imagining, not knowing, each other’s perspective. Human consciousness is a big game of make-believe. It’s nothing more than mutually fanciful speculation, and the self, consequently, is nothing more than a ridiculous illusion at best and a
destructive delusion at worst. We can’t know each other’s perspective, we only pretend we can. That’s why people walk around so terrified of each other most of the time.” He pointed to himself. “Do you see what I’m talking about? Right now I’m trying to evaluate whether or not I’m making sense by imagining how you perceive what I’m saying. Apparently, I won’t be able to do that for much longer.”

  “So what’s going to happen?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. If my symbolic capacity goes, so does my self-awareness.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  “It probably means a total dissolution of the ego.”

  “But what will it feel like?”

  Blip smirked and shrugged. “Who knows? Probably the same way death feels.” He clapped his forehead in profound amazement. “Wow! That makes perfect sense. The entire path of human history has been a death wish. As a species, we have a death wish driving us toward self-destruction. It’s in every last one of us, part of our collective unconscious. We’re hell-bent on Armageddon, because with Armageddon supposedly comes revelation. Then we’ll know for certain if there’s any meaning at all to our existence.” He tapped his head with his index finger. “That’s the basic problem with being human. We’re aware that we exist, but we’re also aware that we’ll die someday. That’s too much to handle, so we force God’s hand. If the ultimate ground of being, the spirit of the universe, Brahma, Allah, Yahweh, or whatever, won’t let us in on why we’re here, we’ll just fucking try to destroy ourselves and see how It likes that. We figure It’ll have to step in at the last minute and tell us the point of all this unhappy horseshit.” Blip leaned back again in his chair, considering. “Or . . . !” The front legs of his chair slammed down as he sprung up. “We’ve had this death wish since we were cast out of Eden. See! The devil is only a drive in our mind, greed and selfishness driving us toward destruction and death. Why? Because at the end comes unity, oneness with Creation.” He sat down, tapping both feet and drumming on his kneecaps with his palms. “I should tell Brother Zebediah that.” He felt around the pockets of his clothing. “Do you have anything to write with?”