Not one day after his trip at Wiz’s place, he realized Wiz was right. Mike would never quite be the same again. There were two painfully synchronized coincidences the following day. The first was their trip to the movie theater to watch “A Scanner Darkly.” The timing of the release of the movie was enough to unsettle Mike by itself, let alone the interpolated rotoscope animation and a plot line involving hallucinogenic drugs. And later in the day, as the sun was setting, the wailing guitar of Jimi Hendrix on his friend Kyle’s satellite radio made Mike feel like there was some anonymous substance casually dripping down his spine. Mike had never heard the particular song before, but something about Jimi’s voice drifted and wove its way out of the car speakers to the eerie effect of a long, trembly hand of a nearby and very alive ghost. The ramifications of both events seemed obvious and ultimately elusive all at once to Mike, who now stopped trying to put the world in a well tooled box of direct correlations and succinct messages. The best way he could understand it he knew paraphrased in another movie when a friend tries to explain to his partner in crime, “look man, you can listen to Jimi but you can’t hear him. There’s a difference man. Just because you’re listening to him doesn’t mean you’re hearing him.”
**
In his dreams Mike was trying to warn everyone. Something about the guy didn’t sit right. The grey haired figure waved crowds toward a rally off the highway in the middle of a cornfield with a neat, white tent and jugs of endless pink lemonade. When Mike looked away for a split second, the tent transformed into something entirely different, an impossibly miniature megaplex equipped with laminated banners and booming speakers. Mike tried to stop one of the naïve young kids wandering to the camp but his efforts were useless, the kid was in a complete daze. “He’s got free weed,” the kid mumbled in a slurred and monotone voice. As the crowd grew to a teeming mass, the energetic man began a riveting teleprompter speech when Mike suddenly realized it was all a trap. By the time he could react, a perfect mushroom cloud detonated over the picturesque cornfield; the last thing Mike remembered before he woke up was a vulture pecking at the scattered body parts of a stranger.
Mike stumbled out of bed to check his wallet. He wondered if he should write the dream down but then remembered what his doctor had told him on his last visit, that “nightmares are really just your brain’s way of flushing out anxiety stored up from the day.” Or, he later offered, “it might have just been the pizza you had the night before.”
There was nothing except a lint stained pill tucked under a rolled up one dollar bill. He tried to trace back through the poker game the previous night to remember where he had lost all of the cash, but then figured it was probably his other hobby—the remnants of powder inside the dollar bill—that had consumed everything. Unfortunately he couldn’t remember the night well enough to distinguish the two.
Downstairs, the television blared at an obscene volume to an empty room. Because the winner was usually first to leave, it was only the bitter and angry players left to clean up the endless pile of shit on his dining room table.
“Last poker night here,” Mike muttered to himself as he started to pick up around the house.
**
By one thirty, the sun already blazing at full force, Mike drove out for morning breakfast even though he had all the supplies he needed at home. Mike’s brain wasn’t at the capacity to fry an egg. For some reason he preferred to drive, and he also wanted something greasy to cure his impressive hangover. The battering rainstorm of the night previous barely left a trace of coolness for the day. The impending hell’s kitchen of another endless summer was knocking at the door, regardless of whether a hurricane had passed through or not. A few days ago, driving to work, Mike heard a station advertisement with an area woman interviewed about the weather. “July and August are typically my favorite months, when I’m at my happiest,” she explained, “sometimes I’ll just get in my car and sit there without the AC on, just to get toasty.” Mike couldn’t tell if he was high or not when the announcement came on, or if the woman was a real person (versus a ringer), some moron who enjoyed suffocating on car fumes for the sheer bliss of it.
It didn’t help Mike’s malice toward the Texas summer that his Nissan’s air conditioning was out. Pulling up behind a red Tahoe at McDonald’s, he cursed impatiently under his breath. He could see an endless pile of shadowy members in the car, family of five or six, with probably five more at home. A bald headed olive man with a goatee stuck his head out the window and began ordering a never ending litany of chicken nuggets, cheeseburgers, milkshakes. For the next ten minutes, a mortal rage started swelling inside of Mike, his fingers splintering a violent red and purple as he gripped the steering wheel in a seething anger. A close friend once told Mike that his tendencies toward taking his rage out on his steering wheel might eventually, accidentally deploy his airbag. The thought had never occurred to Mike, but sitting at the dumpy McDonald’s in the heat, motionless, he fantasized about the idea of having a button disposed in a car for this very purpose—self-inflicted airbag head blows. Then, Mike thought about the current, depressing situation of Muhammad Ali, the people’s champion and abandoned the idea. There were better ways of handling his emotions than self-induced concussions, perhaps he could start gnawing on his steering wheel with his teeth. For now though, there was just a natty, plastic, shrunken cover on the wheel. Hardly edible.
When Mike finally arrived to the blinking ordering display, the combination of the heat and his hangover had already taken full effect.
“May I take your order?”
Mike stared dumbly at the number seven combo-meal. The chicken tenders were starting to change shapes. One grew legs and started to walk like a tiny dinosaur toward the number six combo-meal.
“Sir, may I take your order??”
A speckle of drool began to form on Mike’s lower lip as he watched the animations, fascinated. Behind the dinosaur, the blocks of the ordering menu started to cascade and falls as if in an arcade game.
“Sir?? Please let me know when you’re ready to place your order.”
Behind Mike, a silver Mercedes began honking in longer and longer intervals.