Planet Fever (23 page)

THE BUS
eased by the town of Mesquite, the last in Nevada on Interstate 15, and toward the Arizona border. Arizona offered a mild test for the engine of the bus, for Arizona welcomed us with a steady and winding grade of pavement straight into the Virgin River Canyon. I stared out the window at those towering cliffs of golden orange as the sunlight cut the rocks, carving the landscape into hard angular shadows. The adrenaline from my “escape” had worn off, and now a narco-haze washed over me in waves. My mind felt like a yo-yo dipping from clear to unfocused thoughts—up and down, up and down.

Scenery passed by, the drone of the motor chugged and the driver kept up-and-down-shifting as the bus negotiated through the steep snaking canyon. What seemed to be white-noise static ambience, I came to realize, pervaded from within my own mind, and soon the voice of a female, who sounded like the quack Dr. Jolyean back at the hospital I’d just fled, cracked through:
“Please return to the facility immediately—”
the transmission cut out.

Another voice—Ronald Reagan’s—cut-in:
“Do not listen to any further transmissions notifying you to return—”

That one cut out, and Jolyean cut back in:
“Please return to the facility. You are in danger. Your mind has been co-opted—”

Cut.

Reagan’s voice again:
“They’re attempting to track you via the nano-bot drugs they gave you. Drink plenty of water and piss frequently—”

Cut.

Jolyean’s voice again:
“Do not drink any more fluids as this may cause dangerous withdrawals to your medication….”

“St. George! Utah’s ‘Dixie’ folks!” the driver notified over the loudspeaker.

The bus pulled into the gravel lot of the small Greyhound station and stopped. He informed us we had fifteen minutes to “take care of any business.” I scouted a “Utah State Liquor Store” a block away, and walked to it.

St. George: the poor, dusty town that received the brunt of the Yucca Valley nuke fallout during the testing days back in the 50s…. An Andy Griffith feel with a cheap and rusty, dusty overlay.

I paid the worn-leathered man $3.95 for the pint of mid-shelf vodka, put it in my pack and walked toward a convenience store by the tiny bus station. I passed a guy in a three-pieced suit talking on a pay phone. Yes—this guy had been sitting toward the front of the bus and I could’ve sworn he kept looking back at me during the ride, but I tacked that thought up to drug-induced paranoia.

“…the bus to Denver. Yes, I am on it….” he said as I walked by. He took notice of my presence and turned inward toward the pay phone.

No, I wasn’t paranoid.

I walked into the Circle-K convenience store and bought a turkey and mayo sandwich, a gallon of water and a role of duct-tape. I paid for the items, chugged half the water on the spot, then put everything in the backpack.

Outside, the guy was still on the phone. I queued up a few feet away, jingling some change in my hand.

He took note of my presence. “Yeah, somebody needs to use the phone, honey. I’ll call you when I get to Denver. Love you. Bye.” He hung up and walked toward the store, nodding at me with a polite smile.

Smooth operator, you are.

I grabbed the phone and put a few coins in. When I saw that the guy had entered the store, I hung up and trotted toward the bus. I boarded, walked to my seat in the back, brandished the duct-tape from my pack and took the straw hat off my head and taped it to the front of the backrest. I walked down the aisle toward the front of the bus and looked back: from there it looked like someone wearing the straw hat was sitting in my seat, perhaps looking down in reading or dozing off. Good enough. I notified the driver that I was going to stay here in “Utah’s Dixie” and thanked him.

The door of the bus faced the convenience store, and I could see that the guy in the three-piece was still inside the store, his back to the window, waiting in line to use the restroom. I got off the bus and walked around to the other side, then trotted off down a road that headed away from the Interstate, the view of me from the convenience store shielded by the bus.

About five minutes later the sound of the bus leaving emitted from off in the distance. I was a good quarter mile away and didn’t see anyone wearing a suit trailing me.

My ruse had worked.

I WALKED
eastward, alongside the two-lane highway called “Telegraph St.” and enjoyed the constant hum of the adjacent power line overhead. Sandy, dry bluffs flanked one or the other side of the road, and the occasional dry gully let me know this was a barren area.

The red, orange and yellow mesas loomed about like a huge ancient mythic castle, a vast desert wilderness.

Something was drawing me toward there.

Again, a firm yet non-intrusive voice whispered:
to the mountain.

I am officially cracking up,
I thought. “What mountain?!” I yelled.

A crow caw was the only response.

I passed a sign that read “ZION NATIONAL PARK 30 MILES” and a jolt of electrified thought blasted forth into my consciousness: the name “Atoz Al Ways,” the farcical Colonel West and the diabolical Dr. Jolyean had asked if that name
meant
anything to me. Tucked away in a secluded recess of my mind the answer pulsed: yes, the name
did
mean something, and I was not supposed to let them know that.

One tumbler to the lock of my awareness had fallen, a piece of information that was my duty to keep secret. An intuition arose:
I was
on a clandestine mission,
I was
an operative, and
they were
attempting to hack into my mind to get whatever information was being stowed away within my cranium.

Another crow, or perhaps the same one, cawed.

“
No, you are paranoid, delusional and following the diversionary tactics an experimental drug has prompted in your mind. You’re walking to your doom.”
The cursed Air Force Colonel’s voice now accompanied me through the thought-static.

Perhaps I was walking to my doom, but at least this version of it would be faced outside with the sun-lit splendor of raw and awe-igniting nature, and not inside the florescent chamber of horrors known as the psychiatric institution.

“Fuck off!” I yelled, and the echo may or may not have caused the same, or perhaps another crow to caw.

MY SHADOW
before me grew longer as the sun behind me hovered its slow farewell for the day. I’d been walking for a while when I finally came across a sign: Hurricane City Limits, Population 3,915, Elevation 3,240.

Welcoming the weary traveler was a Dairy Queen on the left side of the road and a Phillip’s 66 gas station on the other. This road merged with the Main Street, that resided just west of a long hilly mesa and hosted rows of quaint, one-story brick houses encompassed by chain-link fenced-in yards, and a few white brick building businesses cluttered around the center of town.

A small sign for “Pioneer Park” caught my eye, so I reckoned it’d be a good place to stop for a bit and collect my bearings. I walked a few blocks north to the small park and sat on the early-spring grass and stretched out, eating my sandwich and gazing up to the sky. The clouds floated along the darkening blue horizon as the “golden hour” ushered in the photographer’s dream light.

I finished the sandwich, drank a little more water, closed my eyes and eased into sleep.

A scratchy voice on a loudspeaker gave a departure time and last boarding call for passengers. I was inside an old central train station, except the trains were spaceships going off to the moon.

Faceless men in head-to-toe black paramilitary garb and mean-looking dogs strutted about, scoping for any “suspicious persons.” I peered over to a security desk as a ninnying, high-pitched animated woman yapped at the security guard, pointing out someone sitting at a bench. The poor fool sitting at the bench had no clue he was a topic of interest. He sat smiling and sipping from his boxed juice: a man with Down’s syndrome; an overgrown child waiting and excited to get on a ship and go to the moon.

“I don’t like the way he’s smiling,” the ninnying bitch barked, and the frequency of her tinned-voice bit my ears like an ankle-nipping Chihuahua. “Why is he by his self? What is he drinking out of that box? I feel uncomfortable with him here, and I would feel
very
uncomfortable if he were to be on the same shuttle as me….”

The faceless person behind the counter nodded and implied “we’ll take care of it.”

I checked out the unsuspecting, childlike, about-to-be-fucked-with dude: he smiled, sipped, and awaited the magic of space flight.

Two stern thugs, their faces hidden by mirrored face-masks on their helmets, approached him, a small robotic trashcan trailing behind. He looked up at them and smiled, and offered them his boxed drink. A leather-clad hand nabbed the juice box from him and squeezed the contents into the mobile robotic receptacle. The poor guy kept smiling in a childish “innocent-playground-no-danger-here” way, and the thugs grabbed him and stood him up. He offered them his ticket and got giddy with excitement, thinking this was “spaceship time.”

He kept smiling, I couldn’t believe he kept smiling….

They tossed the ticket into the robot and escorted him to an ominous iron door and he smiled the entire time and sang, “Gonna ride the ship to space” in his own makeshift melody which kept reverberating throughout the station until the hard, echoing clang of the door cut-out his words.

He was gone and somehow I got the idea that they were going to exterminate him.

I began weeping, and sensed attention had been drawn my way … but I couldn’t control the weeping.

The ninnying bitch was back at the security desk.

“I feel uncomfortable….” She pointed at me.

I bowed my head and wept into my hands.

Through my fingers, I spotted a pair of two black military boots entering my field of vision. I looked up and witnessed the two paramilitary guys towering above. My reflection in their masks stared back at me; I appeared to be smiling, though I knew I was weeping.

Something else was amiss: I had Down’s syndrome.