What the Hell Did I Just Read

by David Wong

  I scratched my chin and watched the rain for a moment. If the child she had gotten back was in fact just a swarm of fuckroaches, then the implications were almost too much for me to grasp. The question of where the real Mikey was being held was just the first in a series of questions I’d need a spreadsheet to sort through.

  John said, “All right, I want to get my dog in the room with him, then. He can sniff out weird stuff. It’s hard to explain, but if he is what you’re suggesting he is, the dog will go nuts at the sight of him.”

  Chastity said, “And then what?”

  And then, I thought, things will get awkward.

  * * *

  NON wasn’t staking out Chastity’s trailer or John’s place, and neither were the cops. Still, we decided it wasn’t wise to linger at either location. We wound up following Chastity to a motel, the rear window of the Jeep open a few inches so Diogee could stick his face out into the wind. We had gotten a break from the rain, which had turned into the kind of delicate drizzle that feels like a ghost is silently sneezing in your face.

  At 9 P.M. we were pulling in to what was without a doubt one of the five shadiest places in town—a sprawling, beat-up motel that never had any vacancies. This was the Roach Motel. It was owned by a local biker/cult leader named Lemmy Roach, and half of the rooms were meet-up spots for local prostitutes and drug dealers. The rest served as a headquarters/compound for Roach’s motorcycle gang, Christ’s Rebellion. In a town full of groups competing to see who could live the furthest off the grid, I’d say Christ’s Rebellion probably did it with the most style.

  The name wasn’t intended to be ironic or sacrilegious—Roach was a true believer. Once, while recovering from a traumatic brain injury, he had received a revelation from God charging him with a singular mission: to do exactly what he would have done anyway, only more of it. Thus, his faction of Christianity was based around the concept that the only law was God’s and that government prohibitions on victimless crimes were mere annoyances to be circumvented. Roach figured, if a person wanted to smoke methamphetamine or get a blowjob from a hooker, that was a choice that person was free to make. Harsh legal consequences were just adding suffering to sin, so humanity’s duty was only to ensure that all was done under the umbrella of safety and consent. Otherwise, he said, each of us is responsible for our own soul.

  I only know all of this because John bought shit from Roach and once had dragged me along to a big festival CR throws every November in which they gave out frozen turkeys and winter coats to needy families. Lemmy had spent an hour bending my ear with his whole convoluted Christian Libertarian worldview before I was able to escape clutching several typo-riddled pamphlets.

  We waited in the parking lot while Chastity talked to a fat dude at the front desk. It seemed like not only did they know each other, but that he wasn’t charging her for the room.

  John said, “That’s weird.”

  I said, “What?”

  “Maggie’s mom, I think she said Ted used to take Maggie to Sunday school here. That can’t be coincidence, right? Maybe Ted’s part of Lemmy’s, uh, what’s a more polite word for ‘cult’? I think Lemmy’s right over there.”

  There was a group of about six bikers across the parking lot standing around a fifty-five-gallon drum with a fire raging inside it. I spotted Lemmy among them, a gangly ginger guy. They were all shouting at a tearful woman, one of the men occasionally hugging her. It looked like an intervention of some kind. I noticed each of the men had a shotgun slung over his back. I’d recommend the same if anyone ever tried to spring an intervention on me.

  Amy said, “We should talk to him.”

  I said, “Later. That whole situation looks super awkward.”

  Chastity came back out and got Mikey from the Range Rover—a perfectly normal-looking boy, about seven or eight years old—and led him to a room. The goal obviously was to figure out if Mikey was some kind of carnivorous doppelganger without traumatizing him for life if it turned out he wasn’t. The plan was for me and John to stay out in the Jeep, while Chastity and Amy would go inside and talk with the kid (or “kid”). They’d chat a bit, explain to him what we were doing (or, you know, give him a version of the story that wouldn’t terrify him) then bring in the dog.

  Before going in, Amy spotted the local hot dog guy a block away, pushing his cart with the orange-and-yellow umbrella, the cart itself plastered with bumper stickers warning about the dangers of jihadists and Obamacare. A minute later, she walked into the room where Chastity was sitting on the bed with Mikey, armed with a hot dog and a soda. She closed the curtains, blocking our view from the parking lot while also blocking Mikey’s ability to see that his alleged kidnapper was sitting creepily in a vehicle outside his room. We’d still be able to observe, thanks to the magic of technology; Amy set up a video call and propped up her phone on a dresser, so we’d be able to watch the conversation unfold from the Jeep via John’s phone.

  On the video feed, we watched as Amy held up the hot dog and soda to Mikey and said, “You hungry?”

  Mikey looked at his mother, silently asking permission. She said, “Go ahead. You can trust her.”

  Mikey took the food and said, “Thank you” without having to be reminded to do it by his mother. He pulled the hot dog out of its wax paper wrapper and set it in front of him.

  Chastity said, “This here is a friend of mine, her name is Amy. She’s not with the police, you can relax. She’s not just a lot prettier than them, but I think you can tell just by lookin’ at her that she’s got a good heart. Just tell her what she wants to know. She wants to help us.”

  Mikey nodded but said nothing. He pulled the hot dog from its bun, then reached down with a pair of fingers and pinched off a piece of the hot dog’s skin and ate it.

  Amy said, “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  In the car, John said, “Ask him if he’s a walking pile of fuckroach.” Amy couldn’t hear him, fortunately. We were muted on our end.

  Amy asked, “What do you like to do for fun?”

  Shrug.

  “Do you like to play video games?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What’s your favorite game?”

  “Worst Day of Your Life.”

  “That’s the name of the game? It doesn’t sound very fun.”

  “I like the level where you make the old man poop his pants at the mall. I can make him cry every time. You have to make his grandkids laugh at him, that’s how you do it.”

  He peeled another strip of skin off the hot dog, revealing innards that looked like pre-chewed meat.

  “Your mom homeschools you, isn’t that right? What’s your favorite subject?”

  He shrugged. “I like smellin’ the bad memories. Mom says I’m the best at dream carving. We did metahistory this week. It’s hard. Do you know why girls make more noise than men during sex?”

  “I … what?”

  I expected Chastity to be mortified, but instead she looked up at the camera as if to say, “See what I mean?”

  “It was to attract other males in the tribe,” said Mikey, sounding bored. “So that when one was finished, the next could jump right in. That’s why a man’s wiener has that mushroom shape at the end, it’s to scoop out the cum from the last guy so his own can get in. I saw a video, where it was one woman and twenty men, one after another, she was tied down but you could tell she liked it. And that’s how it was, for all of history, the whole tribe would share. That’s what girls are built for. A guy shoots his wad and he’s done, but a girl is good to go for the next guy, and the next, and the next—”

  “Hey,” said Amy. “Do you like dogs?”

  Amy excused herself from the room, and came out to the Jeep to get Diogee.

  I said, “If the dog goes nuts, you get out of there, right? Don’t try to talk to Mikey, don’t try to Taser him, just get out.”

  Amy didn’t reply. She wrapped Diogee’s leash around her hand and led him inside the room, ready
to restrain him if he went wild. In the parking lot behind us, there was a commotion as the woman the bikers had been counseling went running off down the sidewalk. Lemmy gave chase, shouting, “You’re making a mistake, Eva! This is your family! Right here!”

  On the video feed, Diogee remained calm as Amy closed the door behind her. Mikey didn’t take particular interest in the dog, just glanced at it as it came in. Diogee sniffed around, but it was clearly because he was trying to trace the origin of the hot dog scents.

  Mikey looked away from the dog, shook his head, and said, “Pathetic. Packs of wolves used to own this land, all this. Thousands of years pass and we bred them down to that little yapping thing. Bred them to catch rats, gave them those tiny little legs. There’s a place where the Nephilim did that to the people.” Mikey had pulled the straw out of his soda, and was slowly screwing it into the end of his skinned hot dog, skewering it. “They took over, bred us so we’d have no teeth so they wouldn’t get in the way when they wanted us to suck ’em off, gave us short little legs so we couldn’t run. Only where we bred dogs so their brains would be addicted to our affection, the Nephilim bred us to be addicted to their semen.”

  Amy nervously said, “Diogee, why don’t you go see Mikey over there?” She led the dog over, but it continued to show complete indifference.

  I looked up from the phone and said to John, “I’m thinking your dog might be useless.”

  “You’re assuming this is even the same deal here. That Mikey and Nymph are the same thing.”

  On the screen, Mikey said, “You don’t think I’m the real Mikey, do you?”

  Chastity shot an alarmed look at Amy, then at the phone, meaning us. She said, “Why would you say that, honey?”

  “Maybe the real Mikey is still at Joy Park. Maybe you should check.”

  Amy said, “Where is Joy Park?”

  “You know where. Unless you’re talking about the girl with them titties.”

  Chastity said, “We’ll be right back.”

  Chastity and Amy both stood up to excuse themselves, and it was here that Diogee first showed a reaction. Not to Mikey—he went nuts at the prospect of leaving the room. He barked and snarled at Amy, and even nipped at her when she tried to grab the leash. But when she backed off, he became perfectly calm. She wound up just leaving Diogee in the room. If Mikey tried to attack him or something, I guessed we’d have to go rushing in to the dog’s rescue, even if it had turned out that he was shitty at his one job.

  A moment later, Chastity and Amy slid into the Jeep and Chastity said, “See what I mean?”

  I said, “Let’s say it’s an imposter. To me, the big news is that your son is still out there, and if he’s really at Mine’s Eye then I don’t know where to…”

  Chastity was shaking her head. “No.”

  “I know it’s hard to wrap your mind around it, but we’ve seen—”

  “No, it’s deeper than that. All of this is.”

  I said, “If you’ve got a theory, please share.”

  Chastity stared out the windshield at the row of hotel doors, each painted a different primary color. It was probably supposed to be festive but the effect was more sad, abandoned circus.

  She said, “One time, I read about this parasite, a tiny little roundworm. It spreads itself by getting inside birds, then the bird’s droppings are full of its eggs. Well, the parasite’s first problem is getting inside the bird in the first place, you see. So here’s what it does. It infects an ant. Then it makes the ant swell up big and red, so that it looks just like a berry. Then it takes over the ant’s brain and convinces it to go climb up a tree and stand there among the other berries. Bird comes along, eats the ant, thinking it’s a berry.”

  I said, “I don’t get it.”

  Chastity was staring hard at the hotel room window, nothing visible behind the closed curtain.

  “When Mikey got taken, the first thing I thought of was two years ago, on Mikey’s sixth birthday, I took him to Pizza Circus. And I remember he got scared by those fiberglass clowns they got on the wall and we had to leave early. Took him home and made him a grilled cheese instead. That’s his favorite. We sat on the sofa and watched a movie, that cartoon where Chris Rock plays a zebra, and they’re all zoo animals, tryin’ to escape. I think I laughed more than he did.”

  She stopped talking, staring at that window. We waited for her to finish the story, but she just stared. I thought I saw the curtain twitch, like maybe Mikey was sneaking a peek out at us.

  It was Amy who finally said, “Two years ago? That’s not right, Pizza Circus got trashed during the last round of craziness, with the looting. Never opened back up.”

  Chastity just nodded.

  “I don’t have a son. I never did.”

  13. WAIT, WHAT THE FUCK?

  I said, “That can’t be … no. You absolutely thought you had a son as of like, an hour ago.”

  She nodded, absently. “And I got memories. Going back eight years. But they don’t make sense, if you think about ’em hard enough. It’s all bent and twisted. He don’t got a room of his own at the trailer, supposedly on account of losing my last place in a fire. But he don’t got clothes, or toys, neither.”

  “But … how would you not notice that? Like, instantly?”

  She shook her head. “You seen them TV shows about the hoarders, people got garbage piled up so high that they can’t even walk from one room to the next? Family tries to intervene, but those people literally can’t see the garbage, can’t be convinced anything’s wrong. Your mind, it gets these blind spots to the most basic things. I got a cousin who weighs six hundred pounds, but all thought of that goes out the window next mealtime rolls around. And then I got to thinking about that parasite. All that little worm is doing is convincing the ant that it’s always been there, inside it, and that walkin’ up the tree to where the berries are is its favorite thing. Even though everything inside it should know it’s suicide.”

  I said, “But humans aren’t ants. You’re saying this thing showed up, and convinced you that you had already had a son, complete with thousands of memories going back years. How would that even work?”

  Amy said, “Your memories are physical structures in your brain. It would be the exact same process as the ant, just a little more complicated.”

  John said, “The fuckroach, we could all feel it trying to worm its way into our history. Not just looking like a cell phone, but making us remember that it was one. Making it just plausible enough.”

  Amy said, “What’s worse, it looks like the dog can’t detect these things after all. If we’re now sure ‘Mikey’ in there is one of them…”

  John said, “Eh, it’s not the first time he’s been wrong. He totally whiffed on that possessed stuffed bear I won at the Fall Festival. Just kept humping it.”

  Amy said, “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t remember the thing with the bear? It was when I still lived in that apartment on—”

  Amy clutched her hair with her one hand and said, “Oh my god. You think you’ve always owned that dog.”

  I said, “Uh … what?”

  Amy threw herself back in the car seat. “I’ve never seen that dog before today. I thought John was just dog sitting or something.”

  I stared at the motel room door. “No. Just … no. That’s Diogee. He and Molly never got along? Chewed up one of your sandals one time?”

  “I have never lost a shoe to a dog.”

  Behind the motel room window, the curtain twitched again.

  John said to her, “No, this is … they’re scrambling your brain here. This is you, not us. I remember everything. This used to be Marcy’s dog, he stayed with me when we broke up, her roommate was allergic. Years ago, same year as we had that bad winter and … all the stuff happened.”

  I said, “Yeah, it has to be Amy who’s wrong. Again.” I said to her, “You remember the night all those guys burst in looking for the, uh, thing a few weeks ago? And you threw it in t
he river…”

  She shook her head. “I remember that event, but there was no dog.”

  John said, “We took him to the vet! He ate the chocolate?”

  “Do you have the receipt?”

  “Sure, I … wait, no, she didn’t charge us.”

  “We did not go to the vet that night, John.”

  Chastity said, “If you concentrate, if you focus hard on them memories, you can break them apart, find the real memories in there. Hiding. See, they picked the wrong target with me. You can make me doubt the world, but you won’t make me doubt myself. My memory, my false memory, was tellin’ me that Mikey’s father was some guy I slept with, a guy I met at the lake and then left town after a one-night stand. But I ain’t never done that in my life—the kind of man who does that, he don’t make it to my bed. And if I had a kid, a real one, I’d be livin’ in a better place. In a better town.”

  I said, “And your friends, your family, they wouldn’t wonder why you’re acting like you’ve got a child, out of the blue?”

  “Don’t talk to my family, what there is of it, and I’m not much for socializing. That thing, it knew it. Picked me for a reason, I’d say. But it didn’t take.”

  John said, “Okay, okay. So, let’s focus on the most immediate problem. Now they’re both in there, in that room, the kid and the dog, neither of which are of this world. What the hell do we do? Leave?”

  Amy said, “If we can get it to drop its disguise can we, I don’t know, talk to it? Find out what it wants?”

  I said, “How in the world do we get it to drop its disguise?”

  John said, “We’d have to make it want to. Wait, while it’s in dog mode, does it have to behave like a dog? Maybe I go in and say, ‘Oh look, since you’re just a dog, surely you wouldn’t mind licking some peanut butter off of my balls.’”

  “Maybe just knowing we can see through it will be enough,” suggested Amy.

  John said, “I wish we still had the Soy Sauce. It would know what to do.”