Planet Fever (30 page)

EZ fiddled with his pen. “Man, what is his gig?”

“What do you mean?”

“We both know the Fillono angle is a ruse; he’s using Fillono for different fronts for his secretive enterprises. And he’s probably trying to track down this Moroni fella. But what’s he roped you into?” He shoved a Cheeto into his mouth and wiped off his finger with a handkerchief he had in his shirt pocket. He was more thinking aloud at this point than talking to me. “Maybe he thought you and Fillono together might have sparked some collective memory jive and fleshed out some more intel on this Moroni cat. Then he came to nab you … for what? Dial in a new program probably. He didn’t remove your tracer, so he
wants
you to do what you are doing. Maybe I am part of it … maybe I’m also who he’s trying to smoke out. But for what reason? Can’t tell right now unless he moves in on me.”

“One more thing that might interest you.”

“What’s that?”

Evel Knievel revved up his cycle for a big jump over a large fountain in Las Vegas.

“He asked me if I had ever heard of somebody called Atoz Al Ways. At the time, I hadn’t. I actually thought I had misheard him, that he’d asked me ‘what was the day.’ Anyway, while I was out there in the desert, Atoz Al Ways bungee-jumped into my reality, which was actually me going into his reality, and notified me he was the author of this reality and told me I was supposed to save the universe by finishing my book.”

EZ Buck’s face registered slight dumbfoundedness.

Evel Knievel crashed
hard.

I gave EZ the rest of the lowdown on my strange briefing I had with Colonel West: the morphing of the room into what I perceived as a “time ship,” the paralysis and inability to speak, the entire tale. Then I told him all about the encounter with Atoz Al Ways. I waited for him to either: a) promote and corroborate my story with a supplemental cockamamie quadruple-twist spy yarn requiring hyper-distention of the mind to figure out, or b) that I was in need psychological help.

He did neither. He just sat there and
thought.

THE FOLLOWING
are the contents of one Edward Bikaver’s head as he sat in bed, ruminating in the
Vagabond Inn Motel
off I-70 in Grand Junction, Colorado. (
Note: edited by the Author for clarity).

All right, Ed—you got this. You can reckon this shit out. Your man EZ is here to help. Who are the players? Colonel West, that’s obvious…. File him in the antag. (“antagonist” truncated) category.

Dr. Götzefalsch—my “mind technician”—cash is on him being in the employ of West. He’s the wind-up toy tech. antag. Damn those Cheetos look good.

Fillono: a well-meaning—hate to say it—rube, also being used by the Colonel but not as nefarious. More like a business deal but Fillono either knows he is dealing with some shifty dudes and chooses to look the other way or has no clue because he is so wrapped up in his art-institute gig he just thinks he got really lucky. Either way, non-antag….

Mona: damn. She’s a wildcard. Worst-case scenario: probably in the employ of Dr. Götzefalsch and the Colonel. Remember what my pops always said: coincidences are like the poop of a unicorn, son—you don’t smell em’ ‘cause they don’t exist. But I seem to have fallen for her. Oh well. I’ll just file that one in the token “I am a fool for love” category.

Froward Moroni: another wildcard. My hypotheses
is that he is either a deep-cover change-agent working for or with the Colonel or was working for/with them and went off the reservation, like EZ said.

They want this “book”—this
Planet Fever
, or want me to finish it, or give up the rights to it; and they want to know whether I am familiar with this dude named “Atoz Al Ways.” Atoz Al Ways: obviously an enemy to them, and a player of significance and weight. They think that if I know him, or about him, then I have some information that is of value to them. That reminds me of that hippie couple that was in front of the liquor store a while back, and they handed me a pamphlet with an airbrushed interstellar, shades-wearing guy (who looked very similar to Atoz) with the words “A to Z, Always” on it…. Poop of a unicorn, son. No such thing as coincidences….

My conclusion: I am being tracked and hounded for some coded or valuable article that is in this “work-in-progress”—obviously also of importance to this Al Ways—and I don’t know why, this is just some piece-of-shit novel I’ve been cobbling out in between bouts of insanity, writer’s block and blackout drinking. Now that I’ve “found” this book of life out there in the desert, what’s next? Is that the missing piece of the puzzle? Damn, those Cheetos look good.

“WHAT’S THE
deal with this book of yours?” EZ asked.

“Just something I’ve been piecing together since I don’t know when.” I chewed on a thick piece of jerky. “It’s a farce. It’s a testament to my procrastination. Most of all, it’s a mess.”

I hoped EZ didn’t ask to read it because I found it embarrassing to talk about that thing. How could I explain a work that made nonsense, had no coherent storyline, and was never going to be finished?

“You should finish it. Starting tonight. Then see what happens.”

What EZ prescribed was ludicrous. The thing was in various notebooks scattered in areas I couldn’t remember—that’s the problem with being a drunk on pills. I couldn’t recall where I had left off, if that even mattered. I let EZ know these things.

“Be right back.” EZ stepped out of the motel room.

I chewed the same piece of jerky. Damn this stuff took a while to masticate.

EZ returned with a little black box that had a lamp on top and wires protruding from the side. He set it on the table in front of me.

“This little invention of mine I call the Strobe Enlightener,” EZ said.

“What’s it do?”

“Do? It’s gonna help you, my friend. Do me a favor and kick off the tube.”

I turned off the TV as EZ plugged in his apparatus and hit a toggle switch on the side. A light flashed, stopped, flashed, stopped, flashed…. Radio static and hum permeated into my ears and overlapped into my field of vision in the form of blue, green and red phosphene globs dancing in front of my eyes, which began to flutter.

I was going into a trance….

SO EDDIE
Bikaver found himself, once again, in a trance-like state. How many times had he been in altered states? Too many to recall. He needed stickers like on the back of an RV with all the states he’d been in, all of them in the mind and under various circumstances; sometimes intentionally via the use of recreational and not-so-recreational drugs, other times via hypnotic suggestion, yet other times unbeknownst to him that it was happening at all. Psychiatrists, psychopathic military men, weird inter-dimensional beings, vagabond artists, boyfriends of girls he had tried to hit on, men in gas-masks and black suits—all of them shared one commonality: they had delivered him into an altered state of one kind or another. Now it was EZ Buck’s turn via some sort of hypnotic-strobe device. It worked.

EZ’s voice entered Ed’s mind. “Mona Malena.”

A blonde woman with compassionate blue eyes arrived into his thoughts. She painted on a canvas—Eddie couldn’t make out what she was painting. She smiled—she was glad to see him. His heart fluttered. He hadn’t seen her since when? Who knows. But he was glad to see her.

But: they were not alone. The doorknob to the bathroom jiggled and the door opened. Out strutted a man wearing a pearly-white grin along with khaki shorts and a Hawaiian print shirt. The man was Colonel Parley West. You could say Ed was perplexed.

“How the hell do you two know each other?” Ed asked.

Mona set down her brush. “Try to remember.”

Ed watched as Colonel West strolled across the room. He sniffed a beer mug, then poured some orange juice into it. Ed zeroed in on the beer mug and flashes of memory sparked in his mind: a bar … the blonde, Mona … a discussion about a plan … Ed’s memory needs to be erased … Colonel West gives Ed a pill … Ed takes the pill with his beer … West smashes a fake “stunt” beer mug over Ed’s head and the rest is history.

“Sonofabitch! You two have been behind all this!” Ed shouted.

“Yes, Eddie, we have. And we’re going to give you the low-down as to what the gig is. No Bull.”

At this point Eddie Bikaver smelled bullshit everywhere, but he decided to entertain the tale Colonel Parley West and Mona were about to tell….

HERE’S THE
story Colonel West told to Eddie, with Mona interjecting where necessary:

Eddie Bikaver was a drunk, hack writer who needed money. He spotted an ad in the back of a weekly rag stating “Clinical Trials—Easy $$$” and called the 800 number. He made an appointment for the physical and interview, and a week later he went there. He passed the physical (barely, his blood pressure was on the verge of being too high) but was generally fit to be a professional “guinea pig” for a new drug that was being developed primarily for military use but also for research purposes. The drug was actually “nano-robots” that went into the subject’s neural pathways and proceeded to map-out everything in the subject’s mind.

That was phase one.