Planet Fever (4 page)

What the hell was this lady talking about?

I didn’t care for her mind games. Was this broad on the verge of a punch line or was she out of her flipping mind? To that point, my existence had been a dull and listless one at best; nondescript by humanity’s standards.

So what the hell did she want with me? I had freelanced hack jobs, writing cheap fiction for different low-key magazines and one unfinished novel. And when I was really desperate for money I’d do clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies. Other than that, lazy, broke and drunk would’ve been an apt description of me.

I wasn’t a nuisance to anyone and had an implicit agreement with the rest of the world to not bother me.

And now this strange but beautiful lady ended up in my living room talking nonsensical smack about my bullshit “reports” that I barely remember penning because it’s quite probable I was drunk on the job.

I needed a drink.

I WAS
sitting on the couch listening to the static-garbled frequencies emanating in my head when the Blonde—who told me her name was Mona—walked back in from the store. She had a brown paper sack in one hand and a huge bottle of Stolichnaya vodka in the other.

She set the bottle down on the table. “I figured you needed this. Although, I don’t condone it. Or think it’s a good idea.”

I nodded in appreciation and walked to the kitchen to get a glass. I then went and sat down at the table, unscrewed the bottle then poured myself a shot.

The Blonde, or Mona, began putting the assortment of groceries into their appropriate places. I sat there and stared at her as she went about her business. How odd that she seemed to possess a complete awareness of my kitchen: a familiarity that only can be achieved by spending a lot of time in or studying a detailed schematic of the place.

I blinked, raised my shot glass and toasted, “To my hospitable hostess. Cheers.”

She grinned (a bit nervously, if you ask me) while I put back another shot. It went down clean and smooth.

After the fourth drink, comfort and looseness settled in again. The static-ridden frequencies in my head had subsided. I was sort of glad this person was at my place; any company—especially attractive company—sometimes beats no company at all. Hell, maybe her presence would jump start the motor to get some more writing done. Plus I was grateful, for she had sponsored my booze-cause for the day.

I poured another one. “I apologize for having blacked out on you last night. And I’m sorry I have no recollection of you at all. But I do appreciate this.”

Mona nodded, sat down across from me and looked square into my eyes. “The reason—well—you have no memory whatsoever is—well—you’ve sort of been….” She tried to find the correct way of phrasing whatever she was trying to say, and nervously doodled with the pencil on a blank page of paper while still looking at me. “It is a very precarious matter.”

I put back the drink. She got up, walked into the kitchen and grabbed a shot glass. She rejoined me at the table and took to a more serious posture, once again her gaze intent upon me. I poured her one as well as another for me.

She placed the shot-glass between her thumb and index finger. “You’re not
actually
a writer. You’re a double-spy of sorts, employed by the Free-Thought-and-Will-Chapter, to report on certain cells of the N(aI)IS. Your implanted pseudo-ego, however, is in the form of a burned-out writer who is either a genius or sub-talented, depending on his mood, who spends his time scraping for money by being a guinea pig for pharmaceutical companies and drinking booze.”

“Huh. You don’t say….” I said.

She didn’t skip a beat. “Your reports to the Chapter are usually received every few months. You write these reports in the form of short-stories, poems, scripts, and the big one,
Planet Fever
—your so called “work-in-progress”—as an amalgamation of different formats, which create an encrypted code, which we’ve codenamed ‘My Book of Life.’”

“Fascinating.” I grinned.

She paid no attention to my attempts at smart-assery but kept unfurling her spiel: “We haven’t been able to locate you for a while; we believe the N(aI)IS has stripped your mind of your identity and re-indoctrinated you as your pseudo-ego … as a precautionary measure on their behalf. It was after one of your short stories surfaced in a porno magazine that we were able to find you. I was hoping that at least some of your memory was intact, but it appears they did do a thorough job on you.” She put back her shot and cringed, coughing once.

I was ready for a hearty round of bellowing laughter at any moment. She remained unflinching and quite serious.

“What’s your problem, lady?” I took a deep breath and steadied myself. “All right, I know my writing is garbage. But for you to insult my intelligence and mock me just for your own warped sense of intellectual kicks isn’t worth a bag of groceries and a bottle of booze. Now, you did a damn fine job of parodying something that I would write—and maybe gave me some new ideas—but I think this joke has run its course.”

I put back the shot for good measure.

“I don’t know who the hell you are, or I can’t remember…. I know I’m a drunkard but I know what reality is…. Now, you are more than welcome to stay here and drink with me or you could leave. If you go, the bottle stays.”

She started to say something but bit her lip then smiled, opting to stay. She drank with me, all the while keeping her own booze intake as well as the conversation within the realm of reason: small talk, chitchat, the weather, when I planned to finish the novel…. The entire time she doodled with that damn pencil into one of the blank pages of my notebook, sometimes erasing what she had just doodled.

Her tone was becoming somewhat bothersome: it seemed to suggest she were patronizing me. I felt like a little kid who believed his own fantasies and describes them to his parents as they play along with the game. I couldn’t pin down her angle. A sense of unease crept over my entire being.

The last moments are fuzzy, but I believe I took another shot and passed out.

“YES, MR. BIKAVER
, this is all very interesting and amusing, but you’re not getting to the point. You do not seem to believe part of the story—or you are at odds with who your character is, Mr. Bikaver….”
The Interrogator’s voice tapers off.

I’m back in the Lay-Z-Boy recliner—nowhere in particular.

“
This might be a tad intense, but we’ll skip the formalities of the rest of this particular sequence in time and move to a few years prior. You have been drinking with the girl and flirting with her. In response, her boyfriend has just smashed a beer glass over your head. Now, tell me what happens afterwards….”

My mental projector begins to roll the footage and I travel back to….

…AWAKE.

Sticky barroom floor.

Surrounded by a small group of people and one extraordinarily attractive blonde with big blue eyes.

Had I seen her before?

My head throbbed with a pain worse than any imaginable hangover. The Blonde helped me up. I was convinced I had seen this girl before, perhaps in a dream or déjà vu. Just having been knocked out….

“Sorry, that had to be done.” Her voice reverberated within my head. “We think they might be on to you—never mind now—c’mon.”

She pushed a bottle of liquor into my hand and led me by the arm up some stairs. A warm stream of sweat—or blood—curved down my face. We scampered into a storage room.

I looked into a mirror.

I looked terrible.

A huge, bleeding welt was ballooning on my upper-left forehead. An incessant ringing, accompanied by a police-like APB radio call, echoed in my head. Any form of speech sputtered forth from my mouth as incoherent babble. The Blonde doused the head wound with alcohol, then tossed some gauze and tape over it. She stripped me naked then re-clothed me in reeking transient grab that smelled like the inside of an elephant’s ass. My mind reeled and popped and spun and received strange radio transmissions. My entire body ached. If it weren’t for the raw pain, I would’ve thought this was all a bad dream.

We went down the stairs and out the back door.

The cold, night rain splashing on my head refreshed my aching frontal lobe. We walked in silence until we arrived at a lakeside park, where she sat me down on a bench.

“See you soon,” she whispered.

And the Blonde was gone.

I tried to think, but thinking at this point was futile.

No recollection of past, a vague conception of present, and didn’t care to endeavor an ounce of thought into the future.

The bottle of liquor she had given me was still in my coat pocket. I twisted off the cap and drank, then curled up on the bench as the rain continued its cool, diligent massage on my confused soul.

I WOKE
up on the park bench. It was sunny and early in the morning. Miscellaneous people, out for their morning lakeside stroll, showed an obvious, despotic disdain for my dingy presence as they passed by. To them—and to me, so it seemed—I was a drunken vagrant. The leather boots on my feet looked as though they had been run over by Irwin Rommel’s entire Panzer division back in 1942, were found in the North African desert a half-century later, shipped over to the U.S. then slipped onto my feet. My pants seemed to be fashioned from a dirt/fabric hybrid and smelled of stale piss. The grubby, butterfly-collared shirt I wore appeared as though it had been discarded in 1978. To top it off, I had on a dusty, olive green corduroy jacket and a hat made out of straw. I clutched an empty bottle of vodka in my left hand.

My mouth felt like a long-forgotten septic tank. My head felt as though it was ready to explode at any moment.

I sat there for a while and listened to the birds converse with one another.

A peculiar-looking gentleman made his approach from across the park. He was clad in a black top hat, white button-up shirt, baggy white pants (tucked into black, knee high boots), and a red overcoat. He looked like a classic circus ringleader. Leashed in front of him trotted a medium-sized, stout bulldog, attired in WWII American bomber pilot regalia: jacket, helmet and goggles—all custom-fitted for the beast.