by S. G. Browne
The travel agent keeps talking, giving me different options, her sultry voice arousing more than just my curiosity.
“We also have a great deal on a two-week trip through Italy, France, and Spain,” she says. “It even includes an optional Disneyland Paris package.”
And I’m not getting the phone sex vibe anymore.
I’m also wondering if it was a good idea to call and ask a travel agent to help me pick a destination. I should have just figured this out on my own. After all, it’s not like I’m looking to book a travel package or take any guided tours. I just want to go someplace where no one can find me.
Problem is, since I’ve never been out of the country other than Tijuana, I have no idea where to start. And I don’t have the time to sit in front of a computer and try to figure out where I want to go. By this time Christmas day, I need to be wherever I’m going. Starting over. Changing my identity.
Becoming a new and improved version of me.
“I’m thinking something more remote,” I say. “Preferably someplace warm with an English-speaking populace that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.”
There’s silence on the other end of the line. I’m driving along Wilshire Boulevard through Beverly Hills, waiting for a response, wondering if we got cut off.
“Hello?” I say. “Are you still there?”
“Yes, sir.” The travel agent no longer sounds like a sex phone worker but more like a pissed-off ex-wife. “I’m still here.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes, sir. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you with your travel plans. But thank you for calling.”
And then she hangs up.
CHAPTER 58
I pull up to the curb and get out of my car and look at the address written on the back of Joey Balsama’s business card, then I look up at the corresponding street number on the mailbox.
3070 North Rockingham Avenue.
This must be the place.
Two stone pillars frame the entrance to the driveway, which is blocked by a black, six-foot-high decorative wrought-iron sliding security gate. Beyond the gate, a blue Mercedes sits parked in the circular driveway. Behind the car, the clay-tiled roof of a two-story Mediterranean home rises up above the Japanese maples that obscure the rest of the house from view.
I look up and down the residential street, waiting for JFK or Captain Kirk to make an appearance. Maybe even Holden Caulfield to show up and make some comment about this place being full of phonies. But all of my alternate egos have grown silent. I don’t know where they went, but it’s good to have myself back. It’s good to know that I’m still here. At least for a little while.
I look once more at the address on the back of the business card, then I walk up to the intercom. Above the gate, a video surveillance camera sits on a post inside the property, pointed in my direction. I smile and wave, then I reach out and press the button. Ten seconds later, a male voice comes over the intercom and asks me who I am. So I tell him. Then I hold up the business card for the camera and, acting like Joey and I are old friends, I say:
“Joey Balsama sent me.”
Before I put the business card away, the security gate starts sliding back on its track. I drive inside and head toward the front of the house, feeling a little anxious and wishing James Bond would show up. Or Indiana Jones. I’d even settle for Elvis’s swagger, though I doubt his appetite for deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches would help right now. Nor would his ability to belt out a solid rendition of “Don’t Be Cruel.” Besides, I’m too anxious to eat. And there’s not a karaoke machine in sight.
The front door is already open. Standing in the doorway and eating a sandwich as big as my head is a gorilla of a man who nearly fills up the entire door frame. He’s easily six and a half feet tall, with a shaved head, shoulders like cinder blocks, and forearms so thick he should have heads sprouting from the end of them instead of hands.
And I’m wondering if it’s too late to change my mind.
“So . . .” He takes a bite out of his sandwich. “Joey sent you.”
I nod. “He told me you were the right man for what I was looking to get.”
“That all depends,” he says, his mouth full of meat and cheese and bread.
“Depends on what?”
“On what you plan to use it for.”
Somehow I didn’t think making a black market transaction would require having to explain my motives. I kind of figured it would have a no-questions-asked kind of vibe. Still, I don’t think it would be a good idea to tell him the truth, at least not in the absolute sense, so instead I opt for a CliffsNotes version of what I plan to do.
“Let’s just say it’s for a good cause.”
“Good causes are like good art,” says the gorilla, then he takes another bite of his sandwich. “It’s all a matter of subjectivity.”
Funny. I didn’t think I’d be getting a lesson in philosophy with my illegal purchase.
“When it comes down to it,” he says, chewing, “every terrorist thinks he has a good cause.”
Funny. I never thought of myself as a terrorist, either.
Suddenly this is getting a lot more complicated than I’d planned.
But when you’re trying to save the soul of humanity, you have to expect things might get a little messy.
I have to admit, saving the soul of humanity sounds a little grandiose, but I don’t believe it’s hyperbole. After all, when you become someone else, the real you ceases to exist. If the real you ceases to exist, then the fundamental purpose of you also ceases to exist. And if the fundamental purpose of you ceases to exist, then isn’t that the essence of the soul?
I believe Big Egos have stolen our purpose. They’ve stolen our reason for being us. They’ve stolen our souls. And it’s up to me to help get them back.
Truth is, everyone wants to be the hero of their own story.
I realize that after what I’ve done, I probably don’t have much hope for saving my own soul. But I’m hoping it’s not too late for all the others who still have a chance to be who they’re supposed to be and to play the role they were born to play rather than playing a role that belongs to someone else.
“It’s personal,” I say. “But no one will get hurt. And it’ll end up helping a lot of other people, too.”
The gorilla stares at me, measuring my answer, studying me with his dark, unblinking eyes. Then he takes another bite of his sandwich, nods his head once, and steps out of the way.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s talk business.”
CHAPTER 59
Dr. Seuss walks through the room, wearing a striped top hat and a tuxedo with tails and telling everyone how he doesn’t like green eggs and ham. Then he starts in with the whole one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish bit again. He’s been doing that for the past fifteen minutes, back and forth from one bit to the other, occasionally climbing up on a chair and telling everyone “I’m the Lorax and I speak for the beer,” as he raises his glass to his lips and drains the rest of his pint.
I watch him and wonder how long he’s been taking Substance D. And how long it will be before he believes he’s covered in bugs.
But he’s not the only one at the party who looks like he’s high on something.
William Faulkner stands at the entrance to the hallway, taunting Ernest Hemingway, calling him an overrated hack and waving a red table napkin like a matador waving his cape. Hemingway charges toward him, bent over at the waist, index fingers held up on either side of his head like horns as John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald watch, laughing and applauding and stoned on gin-and-tonics. Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë stand nearby sipping cocktails, acting as if they find the entire proceeding boorish and juvenile.
When Hemingway charges into Faulkner and they both tumble to the ground in a tremendous heap of arms and legs, Fitzgerald laughs so hard he sprays a mouthful of gin-and-tonic all over Jane Austen, who doesn�
�t find the situation amusing and grabs Fitzgerald by the hair before slapping him in the face.
So much for her sense and sensibility.
I walk away from the chaos as Hemingway and Faulkner wrestle on the ground like a couple of drunken fraternity boys and make my way toward the giant stone fireplace, the opening of which looks like a portal to a parallel world, a crack in space, and I wonder what I would find if I crawled through it.
On one side of the fireplace, Bram Stoker sits in a large, overstuffed purple wingback chair with Mary Shelley on his lap, the two of them discussing corpses and the living dead and staring into each other’s eyes like a couple of lovesick teenagers. Stoker leans forward and whispers something into Shelley’s ear and she smiles and nods, then she stands up and takes his hand and they walk down the hallway toward the back of the house.
Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, who have been trading amusing insights and quips for the last twenty minutes, observe the two amorous authors as they disappear into the guest bathroom. Twain remarks that it appears Shelley is going to become a Stroker. Wilde gives him a high-five and the two of them decide they should go listen at the bathroom door.
“In the name of research!” Twain raises his glass in the air as he and Wilde stumble down the hallway.
“Hey Phil,” says Robert Heinlein, who slaps me on the back on his way to the wraparound couch, where he joins George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien, H. G. Wells, and Ray Bradbury in a game of Dungeons and Dragons, with Tolkien presiding as Dungeon Master.
Shirley Jackson and Sylvia Plath sit next to each other on the floor near the couch, smashed on wine, gossiping like a couple of high school cheerleaders, while Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler perch nearby like vultures, eyeing the two women and conferring with one another over glasses of scotch.
Several guests converge upon the dining room table, including Aldous Huxley, who is double-dipping tortilla chips into the guacamole, and Charles Dickens, who sits nearby scarfing down a plate of cocktail shrimp with a napkin tucked into his shirt collar. When he finishes, he hands his empty plate to William Shakespeare and asks if he can have some more.
The Bard gives him a look of disgust and mutters something about being eaten out of house and home. Then he takes the plate and walks into the kitchen, passing Kurt Vonnegut, who is making a cat’s cradle out of a piece of string. When Vonnegut is done, he holds his hands up to James Joyce, who looks at the cat’s cradle and shakes his head and says, “I still don’t get it.”
In the kitchen, which is connected to the dining room and the great room in an open floor plan, Fyodor Dostoevsky keeps trying to engage Franz Kafka in a discussion of existentialism as Kafka scuttles around on the floor pretending to be a cockroach, much to the delight of Virginia Woolf, who laughs so hard she starts to snort. Shakespeare ignores the lot of them and says, “What fools these mortals be.”
Out in the great room, Truman Capote and Jack Kerouac have set up a karaoke machine and Capote is singing “Dancing Queen” while Emily Dickinson and Dorothy Parker whistle and applaud. Dante yells for everyone to shut the hell up as Edgar Allan Poe and Tennessee Williams shout out requests. William Golding stands in the middle of the room, holding up a conch, trying to get everyone’s attention, while J. D. Salinger stands in the corner, eyeing everyone, looking awkward and uncomfortable.
I watch everyone and wonder if they’re real or if I’m real. If I’m their dream or if they’re mine.
If two people dream the same dream, does it cease to be an illusion?
I listen as Kerouac starts singing “On the Road Again,” then I meander past Samuel Beckett, who is hanging out by the front door, constantly looking outside and checking his watch, apparently waiting for someone.
Down the hallway, Twain and Wilde stand outside the bathroom trying to one-up each other with clever witticisms while occasionally stopping to comment on the groans and cries of pleasure emanating from behind the bathroom door.
“It’s not the size of the cock on the man,” says Wilde. “It’s the size of the cock in the woman.”
Past the bathroom, the hallway branches off into two separate hallways, each of them with a couple of doors, and I wonder if one of them leads to the penultimate truth.
The first door I check is closed but not locked and when I open it, I find Emily Brontë on her hands and knees on the bed with her dress pulled up and her panties on the floor while Ian Fleming stands at the edge of the bed with his pants around his ankles, jackrabbiting her.
For a moment I see Indiana Jones having sex with Mary Magdalene and it’s like I’m looking through a portal into another reality, experiencing parallel lives at the same moment. Then Fleming and Brontë return and Fleming asks if I would be a sport and give them some privacy.
I close the door and continue to the next room, where the door stands open to reveal Victor Hugo, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson smoking cigars and ripping on American authors. In another room, Lewis Carroll and C. S. Lewis are standing in front of an open wardrobe, sharing a joint, completely stoned, laughing and daring each other to climb inside.
Eventually I find my way to the study, where Leo Tolstoy and Herman Melville are snorting cocaine on a framed photo of a family of four. Both Tolstoy and Melville look up suspiciously when I enter.
“Mind if I join you?” I produce a small plastic bag containing half a dozen capsules filled with white powder and set the bag down on the table.
“What is in capsules?” asks Tolstoy in a thick Russian accent.
“It’s called Can-D,” I say.
“And what does this candy do?” asks Tolstoy.
For a moment I see a beam of pink light in the glass, reflecting up into my eyes, transmitting information directly into my consciousness, allowing me to see the world as it truly exists: a fake. A cardboard facade. Then the beam is gone.
“It makes everything seem better than this reality,” I say with a smile. “It’s like no experience you’ve ever had before.”
Melville gives me a smile and a nod and tells me how Moby-Dick was really just a euphemism for his cocaine habit and that he’s been chasing the great white whale most of his life. The entire time he grinds his teeth and wipes his nose as Tolstoy grabs my offering and starts emptying the contents of the capsules onto the framed photograph.
I notice that Tolstoy and the man in the framed photo have the same head of hair.
“So what is your story?” Tolstoy asks as he starts to chop up the white powder into six lines.
I introduce myself and Tolstoy says he’s never heard of me.
“I’m pretty famous in the science fiction community,” I say. “I didn’t have a lot of commercial success while I was alive but I’ve been called the Shakespeare of science fiction. Over a period of twenty-seven years I wrote more than one hundred and twenty short stories and forty novels, with nearly a dozen of my stories adapted into films.”
“Forty novels?” Tolstoy cuts up the powder while Melville watches the lines form like a ten-year-old kid watching a confectioner drizzle hot fudge across an ice-cream sundae. “I do not believe anyone could write so many books. Is ridiculous.”
I tell him it’s true. I also tell him that one of my books was named as one of the 100 greatest English language novels of the last century.
“What are some of the titles of these novels?” asks Tolstoy.
I tell him a dozen or so. He laughs and dismisses me with a shake of his head. “Counterclock World? The Cosmic Puppets? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I do not believe anyone would pay money for books with titles such as those.”
“Me either,” says Melville.
“Those are not literary titles,” says Tolstoy. “Those are names of children’s books. War and Peace. Anna Karenina. Now those are real titles.”
“And Moby-Dick.” Melville grabs a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill and tightens it. “Don’t forget Moby-Dick.”
“That is not a real title, either.” Tolstoy takes th
e rolled-up Franklin from Melville. “It is the title of a pornographic magazine for women who like large penises.”
“Or men who like large penises,” I say.
“Yes.” Tolstoy gives Melville an appraising glance. “Or men.”
Tolstoy leans over the framed family photo and snorts one line with his left nostril, then another with his right before handing the Franklin to Melville, who takes it like a dog accepting a piece of cooked bacon. Melville snorts up his two lines so fast he doesn’t have time to blink.
“You amuse me,” says Tolstoy, “with your talk of excessive novels and ridiculous titles. Even your name is ridiculous. Not the name of a serious writer.”
Melville nods his head in obedient agreement, even though my last name and the title of his novel share some common ground.
I just shrug and say I can’t choose the name I was born with.
“No,” says Tolstoy. “You cannot. But your name chooses you. And your name is a barometer of the vocation at which you were born to excel. Tolstoy. Dostoevsky. Chekhov. Those are names of literary giants.”
“And Melville,” says Melville.
Tolstoy ignores him. “It is not possible for you to be successful writer with last name such as yours.”
“Yeah,” says Melville. “It’s presumptuous.”
“I think you mean preposterous,” says Tolstoy.
“Right,” says Melville. “That’s what I meant.”
A moment passes where both Tolstoy and Melville watch me to see what I do next. My initial reaction is to tell Tolstoy to take his discriminating self-importance and shove it. Or else go fuck himself. Either one of which would be much more satisfying than taking the high road. But I don’t want to make a scene. The last thing I want is for someone to mention any kind of confrontation. As far as everyone else at the party knows, I was never in this room.
So I decide to take a different approach and hope the Precrime unit isn’t watching.
“Why don’t you each take one of mine.” I indicate the two remaining lines on the photograph. “As a show of respect. And to show there’s no hard feelings.”