Wacky Drugged Out Hippie Story

Barker had given me something in the parking lot.  A pill.  He wouldn’t tell me what it was, just that I would find it ‘rad’ and ‘groovy.’  So I took it.

We weaved through the crowd in the bar, winding our way like serpents to an empty booth.  We sat down on the leather-like covered benches, elbows on the scarred wooden table, leaning our heads close together so we could hear each other over the noise.

Barker signaled a waitress who brought over our customary pitcher of Margarita’s.  When we poured our glasses Barker leaned towards me again and said, “Man, I had a crazy thought today.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Listen,” he said.  “What if we’re all, like, characters in a story?  Like, we don’t really exist except in some dude’s head?  Like, maybe there is a God and he’s this author dude sitting at a typewriter and making us up?”

I looked at my fingers wrapped around the Margarita glass.  They had started to pulsate, getting bigger and smaller, bigger and smaller. 

“What do you mean?” I asked.  “Like, we’re not real, just in someone’s imagination?”

“That’s it, Clarke!” Barker cried.  “That’s exactly what I mean!”

I thought this was weird coming from a devout atheist.  Barker had never gone in for the idea of a god before, capitalized or not.  One time he had explained to me how Chaos Theory dictated that nothing was random, that everything was a series of events that happened one after another.  If you traced all the events in the universe backwards, he said, all the way to the Big Bang, it would show that when the very first particle created in the universe took off, it went off in a direction that would, billions of years later, culminate in Barker being pissed off that day.  My thoughts were becoming less coherent.  I thought about that pill again.  And my pulsating fingers.

“Everything would make sense that way,” continued Barker.  “Like, how we were able to get this prime booth in a crowded bar on a Friday night.  Like, how, when you’re in a hurry, there’s always someone paying by check in the express line.”

I watched his brain light up his forehead with a sequence of lights.  It looked like a special effect from Star Trek.  But he was right, it would explain a lot of things.

Why were there never cars coming until I wanted to make a left hand turn?  Did those people exist around the corner of the road before I got there?

Barker interrupted my thoughts.  “Listen, we don’t even know if we knew each other before today, man.”

“What do you mean?  We’ve known each other since we were kids.  I know you exist,” I protested.

“Dude, what if those memories were just made up now?  What if we just sort of came into being right out there in the parking lot.  You can’t remember everything that’s ever happened to you right at this moment, can you?”

That was true, but I was blaming it on the pill he gave me in the car.  I couldn’t, really, be definite that my memories of us, or even just me, were real or not.

I said, “Wait, there must be a scientific way to prove that we’re real and not made up?”  I was grasping, but you could always rely on science to shoot down fantasy and fun.

Barker slapped the palm of his hand on the table and yelled, “Ha!  How could it?  The author would write all that in, right?  He could, like, wrap his own science around his own universe.  If a scientist tried to figure that out, the science would work out to be whatever the author wanted it to reveal.”

He was right.  The entire world would be created in any way he wanted.  Nuaga’s, instead of being raised on farms, could be caught in traps in the dark forests of Illinois before being turned into furniture covers.  Beer could taste good.  Women could make sense.  The possibilities were endless. 

The world swooned around me.  Yellow lights floated over the crowds head.  The crowd.  I didn’t know anyone in the crowd.  Were they real, did they have a back story?  Or were they just cardboard cutouts made Barker and mine’s benefit? 

My fingers pulsated madly.  I looked at Barker, staring back at me with pinwheel eyes, his red lips glaring from the center of the forest of his grizzly beard.

I didn’t remember Barker having a beard.  “Hey man,” I said, “have you always had a beard?”

“Of course, man.  You can’t be a prophet without a beard.”

“Do I have a beard?”  I honestly oouldn’t remember.

“No way, man.  You can’t grow a beard,” he said, “it just looks like you have a dirty face.”

I slid out of the booth and tried to stand up.  The world swirled around me in multicolor phases.  I cursed the damn pill that Barker had given me.  I was that if I was straight I could laugh off everything that he had told me.  As it was, it all made sense to me.  It was a little way out there to think that there was a story just for me, I mean it would have to be just for me if I were the first person narrator, right?  Did Barker have his own story?  Did the fake milling crowd have a story?  I didn’t know.  I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I pushed my way through the fake people, fighting for a way to the door.  Music pounded in my ears, words floated through my brain.  I pushed through the large oak doors out into the calm, cold, night.

My breath poured out of my mouth in a fog.

I was a character in a fucked up story.  My God was some guy sitting around thinking up all this crap.  Why? For what? 

And what would happen to me, I wondered, if he got bored of it all.  Would my entire universe end up in a crumpled ball next to a wire wastebasket?

What would happen to my life, my thoughts, my self, if the story were to suddenly end

Letter To Sandy

Dear Sandy,

     It’s been a long time since we’ve written back and forth.  There’s been a few changes in my life, so I figured it was high time to write another letter. 

     I moved down to Texas, finally.  I was living in the city for a while, right downtown, but it turned out to be too much of a distraction.  So I decided to scrape up all my money and buy a large piece of land out in the middle of nowhere.  In Texas, it can be easy to be out in the middle of nowhere and still be close enough to something to not feel like you’re completely isolated. 

     During my time here, I have driven around quite a bit.  When I was looking for my land and stuff, or going between cities.  Sometimes I would drive on a long stretch of straight road, looking at flat grassland dotted with stands of trees, sometimes a watering hole, a bunch of cows and fences.  When I say fences I don’t mean white picket fences, or chain-linked fences.  No, I mean, back to the basics “shove a stick in the ground and wrap barbed-wired around it” fences.  Sometimes I wonder just how old they are.  Are they from the 1800’s or whatever, or did someone recently grab a bundle of sticks and make a fence?

     But this is the amazing part (amazing to me, anyway):  sometimes I’ll be driving and I’ll see some land and there’ll be a house on it.  I know, a land with a house!  Big deal!  But it’ll be an old house.  A ramshackle shack, with a deteriorating roof, crumbling porch, peeled and faded paint.  Sometimes it’ll have windows, sometimes they’ll be busted.  The front door might be on it and closed, or it could be gone completely, or hanging open, on one hinge, in a lonely kind of way.  I wonder, then, do the people that own the land know that there’s a house on it?  Does anyone own the land?  If they know the house is there, why do they keep it? 

     Anyway, I bought a big piece of land.  Not to sound like I’m bragging (I’m really not, I’m just in shock), but the land is big.  Large.  HUGE!  Jack would say it was "Fucking enormous!" if he saw it.  And then he’d say it again once he realized he was only looking at a part of it.  The real estate agent wanted to know if I was going to raise a large contingent of cattle.  I laughed and said I was just going to write.  He shook his head.

     So we took a tour of the land, but we didn’t go over all of it.  Just a piece of it.  It’s got a modest (I swear!) house set pretty far back from the road.  My driveway is a long dirt road!  And you know what?  It’s got one of those fences made of sticks and barbed-wire, too!

     I know you’re itching to make fun of me so let me tell you right now that, yes, I did buy a pick-up truck.  Go ahead and fall over laughing.  I’ll wait.  Just so you know, I kept the Lincoln, too, but now I also have a big ass pick-up truck.  I also bought an ATV to scoot around the "estate."  Hell, I might need to use the pick up.  I could run around my yard naked, and nobody would ever see me unless they were in a helicopter.  I did not, though, buy a cowboy hat.  Or boots, either.

     The other day I was working on my new project, the book about the man who’s haunted by his dead wife, and I just hit that writer’s block, you know?  I just couldn’t work for anything.  So I did what I normally do, which is unpack a few boxes, re-arrange some furniture, straighten up around the house, have coffee on the back porch, anything to shake that block loose. 

     Nothing was working, so that’s when I decided to take the RAM into town and buy the ATV.  I figured there was a lot of land I hadn’t seen, so I was going to ATV my way across it.

     When I was a kid, even a small yard was a kind of adventure.  There’d be the one corner I don’t ever remember being in, and I’d go there.  In a very small way it was kind of exciting.  Not that I’d expect to find anything, but I could just think to myself, "I’ve never touched this fence post until now!" and it would be an amazing thing.

     Well, imagine that on a much larger scale.  I took the ATV and zoomed off in one direction, figuring I’d drive a straight line to the edge of the property. 

     I know that when you think "Texas" you equate it with flat, barren desert.  That’s so untrue, though.  My land has hills and grass, at least one pond, and a fairly large number of trees.  They aren’t big trees, like up North, but small and stunted trees.  But sometimes they grow thick.  I headed for a stand of these trees near a pond and over a small rise so it can’t be seen to easily from the house.

     As I got closer to the trees I saw that there was — get this — a house!  No, I didn’t get lost and circle around to my own house.  This was different.  Smaller.  It was, in fact, one of those ramshackle shacks I mentioned earlier!  What amazing luck!

     I stopped the ATV a fair distance and stared at it.  It was obviously old.  The once white paint was peeling off and showing gray wooden boards underneath.  Actual wooden boards, not particle board or sheet rock.  There’s a porch.  The windows looked whole.  I guess since it’s so far back from the road, and hidden by the trees, no teens ever came by to vandalize it.  I got excited, I could feel my heart beating a bit faster. 

     I went closer to it.  It looks so lonely, sitting there by itself.  The windows were all dark and the front door was closed.  I have to admit, I got a little nervous.  I half expected some crazy old coot with a shotgun to come out blazing out the front door.  Some old guy who had no idea that he didn’t own the land he lived on anymore.  You know, like those Japanese soldiers that got lost on deserted islands for years and were never told that the war ended.

     Luckily, no old armed men came storming at me.  I carefully walked onto the porch, which I thought would collapse.  It held, though.  The door wasn’t locked.  It’s one of those old locks, which the keyhole underneath the knob.  I would’ve peeked through it but, being a horror writer, I could just imagine something poking through it into my eye!

     I just let myself in.  My God, it was beautiful in a horrible kind of way.  No electricity runs out there.  No water.  No anything.  It was dark inside, especially coming in from the bright outdoors.  Everything looks intact, like someone lived in it and then just up and left.  Or died in bed, never having relatives come and check in on the occupant.  I worried about that, actually.  But everything was there, even if it was rotting and falling apart. 

     Heavy curtains still covered the windows.  There are old end tables and chairs.  A big, green, velvet covered couch with big ornate carved wooden legs.  I wanted to sit on that so bad, but I’d rather check to make sure a family of rats or something isn’t living in it first.  The kitchen has a wood burning stove!  It’s fully furnished.

     Mold climbs up the walls and my allergies, which I never had until I moved here, kicked into high gear.  I figured I should come back and explore at a different time.  Maybe get a mask or something.  The house has two stories.  There’s a very narrow staircase that goes up (or down, if you’re already up, ha ha).  There’s a  bedroom on the ground floor, with an iron bed.  Thankfully, the bed is not occupied.  I suspect there are more bedrooms upstairs, though.

     It’s really neat, but also kind of creepy.  I poked around for a bit, even though I didn’t get very far.  There’s lots of stuff still in that house and I wonder why.  I’m definitely going back there.  It’s my house, right? 

Your good friend,

Austin