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* * * * *
CLICK!
A tape recorder, clicking off at the end of a cassette. Arnie had apparently set the thing on the table before me at some point. I hadn’t noticed. He grumbled an apology, fished out a new tape and went about changing it. I glanced over at his discarded notebook, saw he had abandoned his note taking just after the word “Holocaust.”
I pushed away the plate of chicken, rice and snow peas that was the Flaming Shrimp Reunion. I had been picking through it for the last half hour, leaving the chicken. That bird, I knew, had lived a very sad life and I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. It also had spent its days covered head to toe in bits of other birds’ crap.
At the moment I thought of the dead chicken, who I had named Fred during my meal, I glanced out to the highway across the parking lot. I saw a semi truck zip by, hauling rows of caged turkeys. The thing was hauling ass, going at least eighty miles an hour, a cloud of feathers in its wake. Some kind of turkey emergency.
“-got your cell phone bill, did it list the call you got at Denny’s?”
“What? I’m sorry.”
“The call you got from your friend at Denny’s when your friend was sitting there next to you without a phone. Was that call on your cell phone bill?”
“I never thought to check.”
The waitress swept by and claimed my plate, dropped off a fortune cookie and my ticket. She ignored Arnie. I held the cookie in my hand, tried to concentrate and “see” what the fortune said inside it. I found I couldn’t.
Arnie scratched his head, knitted a question with his eyebrows.
“So the black stuff, the Soy Sauce, it’s a drug, right?”
“Well, I’ll get to that.”
“And it makes you smarter? When you take it, it lets you read minds and all that?”
“Not really. It heightens your senses. I think. I don’t know. When you’re on it, it’s like overload, like if you hooked your car radio up to one of those interplanetary SETI antennas. You get shit from all over the place, can see things you shouldn’t be able to see but I don’t think it would help you do your taxes.”
“And you still got some of this stuff?”
He glanced quickly down at the silver canister.
“I’m getting to that.”
“You’re on it right now? That’s how you did the thing with the, uh, with the coins and the dream and all that earlier?”
“Yeah. I took some today. It’s fading though.”
“So the effects don’t last that long.”
“The side effects don’t last that long. The effects will last the rest of my life, I think.”
Maybe longer.
Arnie scratched his forehead. “So, the kids that died, this is that rave overdose, right? I remember all that a few years ago, seein’ it on CNN. They thought they had gotten ahold of some tainted Ecstasy or somethin’ like that? So you were the guy that-“
“-I can’t figure out at what point the party got turned into a ‘rave’ in the newspapers. There was no techno music or dancing or PVC pants and there was certainly no raving. Freakin’ rave. It’s one of those words they throw around to scare old people. I know three black guys that got into a fistfight in a Burger King parking lot last year, and the next day the news called it a ‘gang war.’”
“What color is the interview room down at the precinct?”
“Uh, white. It’s flaked off in places, shows institutional green underneath.”
“And if I contact Detective Appleton, he’ll remember talking to you?”
“Good luck finding him.”
Arnie made notes.
“So?” I asked. “What do you think?”
“I think you’ve probably got a book here,” he said, “flesh it out a little.”
“A book? Meaning a work of fiction? Meaning it’s all bullshit?”
Arnie shrugged.
“It’s nothin’ to me. A story is a story. I’m just a feature reporter, so the fact that you think it happened is my story. But it’s like Whitley Strieber, writes that book about aliens. Nobody would ever have heard of it, except he sells it as non-fiction, swears to the end that it all really happened.”
His eyes flicked over to the little metal canister again. I realized my fingers had been fidgeting with it.
“Well, I’m not into that whole aliens thing, but I don’t think it’s right to label the guy a fraud, Arnie.“
“Exactly. He’s got a nice house, though. His own radio show. Played by Christopher Walken in a movie. Wouldn’t you like that? You know, I don’t remember leaving the house with any change in my pocket. You could have slipped those coins to me.”
“Without you feeling it? And the thing with your dream? Come on, Arnie.”
Gotta love the skeptic, mon.
“I saw a sleight-of-hand artist in Vegas who, as part of his show, would call somebody out of the audience and steal the glasses off their face. No kidding. He’d send the poor sap back to their seat and they’d be squinting around, tryin’ to figure out why they couldn’t see all the sudden. There’s no magic, Mr. Wong. Just knowing tricks the other guy doesn’t know about. I can make myself invisible just by standin’ behind ya.”
I stood up. “Come with me. I wanna show you somethin’.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just to my truck.”
We made our way out to my rattly old Ford Bronco II. I bought it after my old Hyundai got totaled a few years ago in a manner that was undoubtedly unique among all vehicles ever totaled in vehicle history. We’ll get to that story later.
I approached the rear and dropped the tailgate, revealing a white sheet covering a large box the size of one of those plastic portable dog carriers. Not coincidentally, it was a portable dog carrier. I turned to face the reporter.
“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen, Arnie?”
He grinned, looking over the box. Like a damn kid at Christmas.
Look, everybody! The crazy man carries around a big crazy box! Let’s gaze upon his collection of batshit-insane artifacts! Wheeee!
“One time,” he began, “I was down in my basement and there’s just a couple of bare light bulbs that hang down, you know? So it’s all shadows, and your shadow kind of stretches out across the floor. Anyway, one time, out the corner of my eye, you know, it sort of looked like my shadow back there was movin’ without me. I don’t mean the bulb was swinging and the shadow was just wavering back and forth, I mean the limbs were, like, flailing around. Real fast, too. It was just for a second and like I said, it was just one of this tricks of light you get out the corner of your eye. But I tell ya, I didn’t go back down there until it was broad daylight out. Is what you got in there gonna beat that?”
“I need you to get in that mindset, Arnie. We’re out here, in public with lights on and the whole world’s solid and lined up real neat. But down in that basement, in the dark, alone, you believed in things. Dark things. I need you to open yourself up like that. Okay?”
“It was just somethin’ I thought I saw. I never said there was anything there, Mr. Wong.”
“Just humor me. Ready?”
I threw back the sheet. Long pause.
“Do you see it?”
“No. Or, you know, it’s an empty cage.”
“Turn your head, so you’re looking at me. You should see the box out the corner of your eye, just like the shadow in the basement.”
“Okay.” Arnie’s grin was fading. He was losing patience fast.
“Do you ever go in the bathroom at night, Arnie, and for a second, just a split second, you glimpse something in the mirror other than your reflection? Then you turn the light on and, of course, everything’s fine again. But just a half a second, maybe while you’re leaving the room, you see out the corner of your eye that it isn’t you in the mirror. Or maybe it is you, only changed? And what’s looking back at you is something completely different? Something not very human?”
“Let’s go back inside, okay? Your story was more interesting.”
“You’re going to die, Arnie. Some day, you will face that moment. Regardless of what you believe, at that moment either you will face complete non-existence, which is something you can’t possibly imagine, or you will face something even stranger, something you also can’t possibly imagine. On an actual day in the future, you will be in the unimaginable, Arnie. It is physically impossible to avoid it. Think about that, right now. Set your mind on it.”
Silence, for a few seconds. Arnie nodded a little.
“Okay.”
“Now, without turning your head, look at the box.”
Arnie did, recoiled, yelped, stumbled and finally fell on his ass.
“Oh, shit!” he gasped. “Shit!! What the shit is that? Sh-shit! Shit!”
I threw the sheet back over the box, closed up the Bronco. Arnie scrambled to his feet and backed up ten steps, half way to the door of the restaurant. He pointed at the Bronco.
“How did you do that? And what the fuck was that thing? What the fuck?”
“I don’t know what it’s called. Pretty freaky, isn’t it?”
“You—you made me see something. Something out of my own head. You freaked me out so I would see something.”
“No, it’s really there. I’m surprised you saw it so easy. You must have an open mind. Most people don’t see it that fast unless they’re stoned or drunk.”
Arnie kept stepping back, muttering.
“I was in the Navy. Diver. I saw some shit, deep-sea shit that didn’t look like anything that belonged on this world. But that was nothin’, nothin’ like that... that thing.”
“I want to tell the rest of the story, Arnie. I need to. I need to get it out. But you need to take it for what it is. The truth. Are you ready to do that?”
Arnie looked at me with uncertainty, then nodded.
“Okay. Until I figure it out for real, okay.”
“Eh, that’ll have to do.”
After a moment we walked back toward the restaurant. As we passed through the swinging doors (still painted with the slogan “Hola Amigos!!”) I picked up my story.
“Anyway, so the cop comes in and tells me John is dead...”
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Copyright
© 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part
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or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the
author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People,
places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events,
is purely coincidence.