Planet Fever (21 page)

“GET TO
the mountain
,” I heard in my head upon waking up in what seemed to be a hospital room.

In a foggy stupor, I staggered out into the bright hallway where a smiling nurse greeted me.

“Well, our sleeper has decided to join us!”

“Ahem umm—” I was unable to formulate a sentence.

“The doctor will be checking on you within the hour.” She led me out of the room, down the hall and into a larger room with chairs. A few other zombie-like “patients” walked about or sat drooling in a chair, their eyes glazed with an indifferent gaze upon nothing in particular. Another nurse sat behind a window dispensing pills to waiting patients.

The first nurse escorted me up to the window. “This is Mr. Bikaver. Looks like fifty of the Hal, a hundred other of the Thor.”

The plump, red-faced buxom lady with a florid shirt and red pants dispersed a few pills onto a tray along with a paper cup of water and set it on the counter.

“Okay, Mr. Bikaver, do you need help with these?”

I concentrated on grabbing the pills and the water, hoping to just fumble them into my mouth with a shot of water. I got the pills into the mouth and swallowed them.

“Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.”

I did as she requested.

She checked to make certain I hadn’t attempted to hide the pills under my tongue.

“Good job!” she said, as though I had accomplished something challenging. She had me sit down in one of the chairs. “We’ll just have you sit here quietly until we know the medication is doing its job. ‘Kay?”

Within a half-hour the pills came on: I became a pair of eyeballs caged inside a body made of slush. I could think, but not talk—whenever I tried my tongue fell out of my mouth and slow-motion baby-babble noises emitted from my throat.

“Baaaaaahl ohhhhhhhhv mmmmmaaaaavvv phhhhhhoooooo ddddooooooooaaaannnnnn….”

The nurse nodded her head, smiled and patted my hand. My tongue fell out of my mouth, and I watched it occur without the ability to stop it. All vocal-motor control was lost; I had but rudimentary control of my legs and arms.

“Aaaaahhhhmm gaaaaahhnnaaa gooooo tooooooo mmaaaahhhh rrrrrrr-oooooom noooooooowwwwww,” I drawled.

“Okay. Very good—you’re doing very well.” The nurse maintained her smile.

No I’m not lady,
I thought.
My tongue keeps falling out of my mouth, I can’t talk and I might shit my pants if I am not careful
.

I moped back to my room and slumped down onto the bed. My tongue continued its drunken-lizard imitation.

THE DOCTOR
came in and gave either a warm frown or a cold smile—I couldn’t tell which. Professional and nondescript, she put on her glasses, grabbed my chart and examined it.

“Mr. Bikaver, from Los Angeles. Your primary psychiatrist is Dr. S. Götzefalsch. Do you know where you are?” she asked.

I shook my head no.

“You’re in the M. Kultra Mental Care Facility in North Las Vegas, Nevada. I’m Dr. Jolyean. Do you remember how you got to here?”

I shook my head no.

“You were wandering around the premises of the Edwards Air Force Base, demanding to see Colonel West about a ‘private, top-secret’ matter, and ‘to settle the score on a bet’ you claim to have made with him. You were insistent, so the guards took you inside, called the Colonel, who met with you, then the Colonel called us because he said you were out of your mind. We had you sedated and brought to here. You do not recall any of this?”

I shook my head
no
. I didn’t even know how I had gotten to the state of Nevada.

“According to your record, you’ve been having relapses from the experimental drug you were testing in our affiliate facility in L.A., and you’ve been mixing alcohol and other drugs in with the experimental, which is bad news. It seems you arrived at the base in a black out. None of this rings any bells?”

This time I didn’t even shake my head. I just stared at her dumbly.

“It’s okay. For now, you should relax. I think today you should just stay in your room and take it easy.”

“Aaaaaahhhh woooooood yyliiiiike tooooo reeeeeed.”

“That’s good. You like to read. What would you like to read?”

“Kuuuuurt Vohnnnnnneghutt.”

“I don’t think Kurt Vonnegut would be appropriate right now in your current condition. Be right back.” She exited the room.

My tongue flapped out of my mouth. I strained to get it back in.

She returned and offered me a copy of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
.

I slurred my thanks.

The next day they escorted me into a tiny, windowless room with a small table and two chairs across from each other. Dr. Jolyean was seated in one of the chairs, a stack of cards on the table before her.

“How are you today?” she asked, professional empathy in tow.

“Okay,” I mumbled, still groggy.

They hadn’t pumped as much thorazine and halidrol into me as of yet this morning, so I felt half alive.

She gestured for me to sit across from her, and asked, “Have you ever done the Rorschach before? I show you a card and you tell me the first thing you see in the pattern. Got it?”

I nodded.

She flipped over the first card.

“Jackson Pollock,” I said.

“I know it is just ink splotches, but you have to tell me what
you see
—like when you see a face in the clouds. Got it?”

I nodded again.

She flipped over the next card.

This one wasn’t “random splotches,” but a simple yet obvious blotter painting of a man in a lounge chair. The next was of a man and a woman in an embrace, and the one after that a mountain with giant angel hovering above it. They looked nothing like the first; these were
actual
representational pictures, not random splotches.

I sensed a set-up.

Though the drugs impaired my motor skills, the area of the brain responsible for calculations, estimations and basic survival still revved:
if I answer what I see, they will write me off as a lunatic who perceives crazy things in these so-called splotches, but if I lie, they will say I’m totally delusional and cannot see the obvious pictures
.

I chose the path of least resistance and called ‘em as I saw ‘em. After each answer, she jotted into her book and flipped over the next card. Her face maintained a perfect degree of expressionlessness. I was impressed by that.

The absurd Rorschach over, she took a casual demeanor. “Very well, Eddie. You’re doing fine. Now I am going to ask you a few simple questions … they are not
literal
questions that have a definite answer, but they are just to get impressions of your mind. Okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

She commenced, “What does the saying ‘people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’ mean to you?”

“It means people who throw stones shouldn’t buy glass houses,” I slurred.

“That’s a logical answer,” she said. “How about ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’?”

I muttered something about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards preferring sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. She either didn’t care for or didn’t understand the joke.

“What does the name ‘Atoz Al Ways’ mean to you?”

I shrugged. Nothing came to mind.
What kind of question was that?
A name means nothing to anyone unless they know a person of that name, or the name is iconic, or historically known, but this was a random name that sounded fake. Did these quack psychiatrists sit around, getting their kicks by making up strange tests that had no empirical validity?

A sudden flash of a hippie girl and her boyfriend handing me a pamphlet in front of a liquor store…
Indeed, that was written on the booklet, but in the form “A to Z, Always.”

So what?

So I told the doctor the name meant nothing to me.

She continued, “What is the status of
your
book? Where are
you
at?”

For a flicker of a second, I thought she was asking about the book she had given me to read, but then my mind felt a tugging contraction and an oppressive presence ambled into my head. A sense of panic, like that in the Colonial’s office, flooded in and the walls began to reverberate and a third eye manifested upon
her
forehead.

Here we go again…

HER THIRD
eye bore into my head and her presence was somehow “in my mind.” That’s the only way to explain it. I became paralyzed—transfixed on that confounded eye—as she searched the contents of my thoughts. My heart thumped hard and I couldn’t swallow. The “I” of my identity shrank into minisculity and irrelevance.

What is going on here?

She stared and answered telepathically,
“The ‘you’ that is registered in the mind inhabited by you is a holographic simulation that we are studying and manipulating for scientific purposes. ‘You’ do not really exist, except as a fictional character in ‘your’ book.”

“Bullshit,” I wanted to say aloud, but my throat was too dry and I couldn’t force the words out of my mouth. I felt spellbound, trapped and fucked: a mouse in a cobra’s cage. None of my intellectual defenses came to mind, nothing to counter her with.

“
You can come up with no defense to this situation because any thought you have has been entered into you via us. We input your thoughts and we delete them. You are just an interface—like a computer.”

Alas, a question: “
Then what the hell do you want from me?”

The invasive mental pressure became more intense. She overwhelmed me with sheer, precise and cold psychic force, leaving my consciousness disoriented.

She scanned and I drooled.

In the back of my mind I perceived a vocal pinging: Ronald Reagan had planted a simple thought that I detected but intuited could not be discerned by this mind-intruding, three-eyed psychiatrist.

It was a thought-note in jumbled mutter-speak, yet I could decipher it: “
You are being mind-screwed, therefore you exist. Play scared and dumb.
”

I mustered up as much saliva in my mouth as possible and choked out, “I’m terrified.”

Her third eye blinked and disappeared. The room morphed back into a normal room, and my heart settled down.

“It’s okay. It’s not okay, but it’s
okay
,” she said. “We’re going to make sure you get the proper treatment.”

She stood up and opened the door. One of the orderlies came in and helped me stand up.

“It’s going to be a long road and lots of hard work, but we’ll get there,” she stated, as we walked out into the hall.

“
You are never getting out of here,”
I heard her say in my mind.