Nonentity Page 2

  She said, “Do you like working for the government?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I mean, it’s not very interesting work. I don’t hate it. There are worse jobs out there.”

  “What do you do for them?”

  “I edit films. It’s not worth discussing.”

  “You streamline propaganda.”

  “Shhh. Be more discreet,” I whispered, nodding toward the driver. “People sometimes report things they hear.”

  “Are you kidding? He wouldn’t do that. Hell, this cab of his isn’t even registered.”

  That bothered me. The Permanent Regime mandated the registration of all vehicles under its jurisdiction.

  “Damn it, Lorna. Why the hell didn’t you tell me that before I got in this car?”

  “I didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”

  “Not worth mentioning! I suppose breaking the law is ho-hum to you. It’s unnerving to me. I can’t stand being caught off guard.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “Had I told you about it in advance, you probably would have backed out of this altogether.”

  “You’re damn right I would have. Taking risks in a police state is insane. I’m tempted to tell the driver to turn around and take us back.”

  “Please don’t. Let’s keep going. I’m sorry I wasn’t more up front with you.”

  I grunted my displeasure and turned away, peering out a window. The hills outside were majestic, rolling gracefully one by one. The green of those hills sparkled – though not as vibrantly as Lorna’s green eyes. I returned to those eyes. My frustration dissolved.

  As my nerves settled, the cab darted off the road, veering down a dirt path into a heavily wooded area. The terrain was rugged. We bounced around and I repeatedly banged hard against the roof and side of the car. The vehicle could have easily slammed into any of the trees along the path. I yelped involuntarily.

  Lorna grabbed my right hand and said, “Don’t worry. The cabbie is an excellent driver. He’s driven through this forest many times.”

  “Maybe so, but it feels like my innards are trying to leap out of my body. A warning would have been nice.”

  “Sorry. Now you know. We’ll be there shortly.”

  We traveled four or five miles into dark and spooky woods. Small creatures hopped trees we barely dodged. I stopped watching. Lorna didn’t bat an eye.

  We entered a large opening that housed a dilapidated barn. A significant portion of the roof was caving in. The red paint on the walls had chipped away, rendering the building formerly red. Patches of unevenly mowed grass filled the front yard. Our cab parked by a purple mailbox, the back half of which had burned away. Lorna and I exited the vehicle.

  I said, “What are we doing at this hellhole?”

  She answered with a mischievous smile.

  We approached the barn via a stone walkway. Countless cracks marred the path. The front door lacked a doorknob. Her knock elicited a sound suggesting the structure might collapse. There were hurried movements inside.

  She knocked on the door again. “Come on. Open up.”

  “Who is it?” a shaky male voice called from the other side. “If you’re looking for a payment, you’ve come to the wrong place. Please disperse.”

  “It’ll be your money or your blood, Mr. Lambert,” she said, almost laughing.

  “My money or my blood? Dismal alternatives. Do you have a third option?”

  “The third option is that you open the door.”

  “I don’t typically make my home available to strangers.”

  “Strangers?” she said. “You’ve known me practically all my life. Don’t you realize who you’re talking to?”

  “I could try to narrow it down, which might take a while. Can you wait?”

  “No. Stop clowning around and open the damn door.”

  The man inside said, “Lorna! What a magnificent treat. To behold your effervescence is like landing on an exotic planet. To converse with you is …”

  “Just let me in.”

  “I’ll get right on that.” The door opened slowly.

  Before us was a man who looked like he had emerged from a tsunami. He was roughly forty. His hair was three different shades of brown and in dire need of a comb. He wore bent glasses without lenses. A lime green stain covered most of his beige necktie. His violet shirt clashed with his orange slacks. He was gangly, about six and a half feet tall.

  “Oh dear Lorna,” he said, without spotting me, “you are more ravishing than I remembered. You must come around more often. It has been ages since we got together.”

  “I was here less than three weeks ago.”

  “Three weeks? Holy smokes. Conception of time is beyond me. The last ten years were over in six and a half minutes. The next hour could be a lifetime.”

  Lorna gestured toward me. “Lukas, aren’t you going to ask about the fellow I brought here today?”

  The man looked at me and jumped back. “Who are you? What are you up to? Why …”

  “Lukas,” Lorna said, placing a hand on the man’s shoulder, “calm down. This is the friend I told you about, Sebastian R. Flemming the Third. He’s safe.”

  I stuck my hand out toward him. “It is an honor to make your acquaintance.”

  He ignored my hand. He scanned me up and down with his left eye, then his right.

  “I’ll trust you, dear, and assume he’s not dangerous,” Lukas said.

  Lorna looked at me. “Lukas likes to keep to himself. There was an incident here several years ago. He was …”

  “Oh, let’s not get into that,” said Lukas. “Sebastian isn’t interested in my past horrors.”

  She said, “Sorry. Invite us in then so we can get started.”

  “Ah yes. Where are my manners? Too much time in isolation. Ever think about that, Sebastian – how a hermit can completely disregard social mores?”

  “No. I’m a bit of a loner myself, but I guess I never considered that.”

  Lukas said, “You should never guess unless you fully understand the question.”

  “Alright,” said Lorna. “Let’s move this along.”

  “Follow me to my office.”

  The three of us walked down a narrow corridor. The walls were decrepit, large holes scattered all along. The wooden floors creaked ferociously. A couple mice scurried away from us as we neared the end of the hall.

  We came to a door with a rusted nameplate that read: Lukas Lambert, Parallel Universalist. Below the nameplate was a painting of an hourglass with a blue circle on its lower half.

  Lukas grinned. “This is where the magic happens.”

  He opened the door. We entered a room consistent with the rest of the building. Thousands of papers and half-eaten plates of food were strewn about a barely visible carpet. Tattered clothing sat in moth-infested piles. A dead-rodent stench fouled the air.

  “What is all this shit?” I blurted out.

  Lukas said, “Rubbish. I should scrap every last bit of it. Know why I don’t?”

  I shrugged.

  “Because somewhere in this trash is the all-encompassing equation that has been a mystery throughout the ages. Do you get what I’m talking about, Sebastian?”

  “No clue.”

  “It’s that secret combination of numbers and symbols that will condense this whole lunatic universe into a single mind-blowing formula. It has to be in here somewhere. Once I find it, I will cease being a laughingstock to those egg-headed schmucks wasting away in university laboratories. No more will the so-called bright lights of science snicker at me from their unnecessarily lofty perches. No more will they dub me a crank. No more …”

  “Alright,” Lorna said. “Sebastian doesn’t need to hear you rant about your peers.”

  “I have no peers. Point well taken, however. Let’s get on with it.”

  Lukas kicked papers and clothing out of his way, clearing a path to a desk in the back. He reached inside a drawer of the desk and pulled out a remote control device. He roll
ed two flat-backed chairs to a spot a couple feet in front of the desk.

  He motioned to one of the chairs. “Please have a seat, Sebastian, so we can commence with the festivities.”

  I sat in the chair as he went to a set of cabinets against the wall behind the desk. He took a strange headpiece from the top cabinet. The back of the headpiece resembled a catcher’s mask. The front had two skinny red lenses jutting out about ten inches from the eyes of the gear.

  Sitting in the chair across from mine, he waved the headpiece in my face. “Do you have any idea what I hold in these overworked hands of mine?”

  “Should I?”

  “Yes. But not just you; the entire civilized world should know about this fabulous contraption. They will – someday.”

  “What is it?”

  “This is an SRF-3, the ultimate in perception-discombobulating technology. Tell me, Sebastian: Are you familiar with the art and science of parallel universalism?”

  “Parallel what? Never heard of it.”

  A broad smile formed on Lukas’s lips and I sensed that I was no longer dealing with a disheveled quack. “I am a proud parallel universalist. Didn’t you see the shiny nameplate on my door? Weren’t you impressed?”

  “I’d like to say I guess I was, but I guess I shouldn’t guess.”

  “Whoa – total mindfuck alert!” he said. “That may be the most brilliantly ignorant thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Please, no more questions.”

  “Alright then. Enough large talk.”

  He pressed a button on his remote control. The lights dimmed. He pressed another button. A dissonant mix of psychedelia and Gregorian chant filled the room. The “music” was increasingly hallucinatory and jarring.

  Lukas slipped the SRF-3 over his head. He turned toward me. The long lenses on the headpiece rotated, emitting tiny blue laser beams that pierced my pupils. A blue blotch consumed my sight. The bizarre background music faded out. It was eerily silent for about eight minutes. Then I felt myself being pulled violently across a harsh pavement. I screamed out, but my voice was mute. My body came to a halt. The blue blotch dissolved. I saw a door hanging in a night sky. The door opened and a ferocious ball of flames hurtled through it – the most earth-shattering image I had ever seen. The blue blotch overtook my vision once more.

  Lukas spoke through what sounded like a megaphone: “Do you remember this very moment, the one in which I am addressing you, right here and right now? Have you heard these words before? Is this but a flashback?”

  My response seemed to come from elsewhere: “I have heard these words before.”

  “Good. You and I are strangers in a social sense. Are we strangers in time?”

  “No. We are not strangers in time,” I said reflexively, as if programmed. I would have no power over my speech throughout the session.

  Lukas’s voice came much closer: “Why are we not strangers in time?”

  “We have travelled together. In the future, in the past, here and now, nevermore.”

  “Intriguing. Your awareness is superb. Perhaps you can use it to do something for me. Are you up for that, Sebastian?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I want you to concentrate really hard. Try to locate Lorna in this room. Point her out with your finger. Can you do that?”

  “I am blind, you fool,” I said.

  “Your eyes are blind. Your soul sees all. Search with your soul.”

  “What soul? I can’t see a goddamn thing.”

  Disappointment marked his tone. “Then I’m afraid we’re through.”

  The room’s normal lighting returned. I spent a minute shaking the blueness out of my head. Sight restored, I found Lukas and Lorna standing beside me.

  I had control over my speech: “That was it?”

  Lukas smiled, exhibiting teeth damn near rotting out of his head. “I should think so. We’ve been at it for more than an hour and a half, my friend.”

  I looked at my watch and was shocked. It seemed the session had lasted fifteen minutes.

  “Sorry to be an ungracious host,” said Lukas, “but you two need to get the hell out of here this instant.”

  I was stunned. “You’re kidding. You’re not going to explain what happened during my session? There was some weird shit going on there.”

  “Any explanation would strike you as unintelligible. You’d just end up more confused.”

  “What? This is unbelievable.”

  Gently pushing Lorna and me toward the door, Lukas said, “And I can no more make the unbelievable believable than a fish can learn how to juggle. You’ll have to come back to further explore these matters.”

  Lorna and I were soon in our cab, heading away from Lukas Lambert’s unsightly barn.

  As we bumped and banged our way out of the woods, I said to her, “That was some kind of charade. How did you find that loon?”

  “He is not a loon,” she said, arms folded.

  “No. You’re right. He’s worse. He’s a bunko artist completely enthralled with his own pseudo-science. I suppose I was his guinea pig.”

  “You’re too closed off to appreciate what Lukas did.”

  “Oh yeah? Please enlighten me.”

  She gazed out the window. “Never mind. It was foolish to bring you here.”

  “Well that’s the smartest comment I’ve heard all day. Look, I try to be open to new things. But that nut – that parallel universalist, or whatever cockamamie thing he calls himself – he performed some kind of weirdo voodoo trickery on me. I was baffled.”

  “Maybe you’re supposed to be baffled. Answers are not always immediate.”

  “Clearly,” I said. “Hey, what was with that stuff about he and I not being strangers in time? That made no sense. Not that any of it made sense.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know, he asked me something about he and I being strangers in time. I somehow told him that we were not strangers in time. Of course I had no idea what the hell I was saying. What was all that jazz about?”

  “Strangers in time? I never heard that.”

  “You were in the room, right? You had to have heard it. I told him that he and I had travelled together. Surely you remember that.”

  “Sebastian, I don’t think you understand,” said Lorna. “I was there the entire session. Neither one of you uttered a word.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FALLEN BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

  Victoria Mason was not a morning person. She wasn’t much of an afternoon or evening person either. Why did I associate with her? Her body scintillated. She boasted the sleek legs of an airbrushed model. Her blond hair draped irresistibly over her breasts. And she was lewd in bed – her lone redeeming personality trait. It was enough.

  “You stupid, clumsy asshole,” Victoria yelled at me one day, holding up her sequined dress from the night before. “See this fucking thing? It’s one of my favorite outfits, and you ripped a hole in the back of it. Such a klutz.”

  I rolled over in bed, expelled a lengthy yawn, and glanced at the clock on the nightstand beside me: 8:12 a.m. I closed my eyes.

  Victoria persisted. “Don’t you dare go back to sleep on me. You can’t get off the hook that easily.”

  I said, “Too early for petty bickering.”

  “Spoken like a man trying to weasel out of something. I paid a ton for this dress. I demand compensation.”

  “My compensation is that I’m not going to kick your ass out of here.”

  “How can you talk to me like that?”

  “That’s a hoot,” I said. “You should hear yourself talk. The way you treated that waitress last night was shameful. I was embarrassed to be with such an inconsiderate bitch.”

  “Bitch?”

  “Yeah. I wish I had a stronger word.”

  “Is that so? Here’s a word for you: cocksucker. What do you think of that?”

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  She went through an open door into my living r
oom. Even with her elsewhere, my bedroom was too cold. The musty odor went well with fading wallpaper and a shag carpet of stains. The noir setting begged for escape.

  I sat up in bed. Victoria ventured in and out of the bedroom, collecting various belongings. She spoke aloud to herself, her habit when irate (meaning she did it a lot): “Geez, Victoria. Why do you put up with this? You deserve better.”

  “Wrong,” I said. “You deserve worse. I’ve seen some of the other men you’ve been with. They stick it out with you for a while, get a few cheap thrills, and take far more lumps than is reasonable. Eventually they drop you like a sack of rat turds. I ought to learn what those fellows could tell me: that you’re nothing but a vile little tart, not an ounce of decency to spare.”

  Victoria short-circuited. She picked up several objects – book, tennis shoe, laundry hamper, etc. – tossing them at me one by one. Her arm was weak and her aim, dreadful. I stood from my bed, batting away each projectile. I cackled at her ineptitude.

  She said, “I guess we can’t all be like that dead friend of yours – Lorna.”

  My laughter became a frown.

  “Well look at that,” she said with a sinister smile. “I’ve struck a nerve. You know why that woman hung out with you? Pity. Lorna was too nice to tell you to get lost.”

  “Don’t test me, Victoria.”

  “Am I pissing you off? That’s because you never got to fuck her. She had too much taste to fall for that bullshit sweet talk you throw around. Now she’s dead, which saves her from having to put up with you.”

  I shoved Victoria to the floor. I immediately regretted that, not for its effect on her, but for what it revealed about me. I had struck a female on one previous occasion. That prior outburst flashed before me after my violent moment with Victoria. I turned away in shame.

  Victoria resumed gathering her things. Arms full, she approached me. I pictured her dropping everything to issue me a mighty slap. Instead she planted a wet kiss on my left ear.

  She said, “Let’s get together again next week sometime.”

  I gawked at her.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”