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[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living, dead, or anywhere in between, is purely a figment of your own sick, twisted imagination. You really ought to seek professional help for that. Except for the cat, of course; that skin on the cover really is t h e Dead Cat, if that’s any consolation to you.]
When he first arrived, Ras played the tourist. Driven by Kirk and Rita in his own rental car, he visited the sights and attractions offered by Dominica, the Jungle Paradise. And slowly he learned to drive on the left side of the road. The Emerald Pool was a favorite site, where adventurers hiked through the rain forest to a cave with a waterfall flowing over the entrance into a gorgeous pool, hence the name. They visited Wotten Waven, pronounced, he was told, like “Rotten Raven,” and ate curried goat at the River Rock Café while enjoying another unparalleled jungle valley. Rita, who liked to paint rocks, had made a rock painting as a sign for the restaurant. They went for lunch at Tia’s Bamboo Cottages and soaked in his natural hot-springs swimming pool.
Then again, Kirk and Rita were just like that. They also said the house way up the hill past the Belgian villa on the road to Roseau was where Osama bin Laden had lived. Eventually, Saddam Hussein had come to stay there too. When Ras pointed out that his own country had hanged Hussein, Kirk turned to look over his shoulder. Ras’ eyebrows went high in alarm; both Kirk and Rita ignored the plunging cliff to their left to shoot glares of sarcastic pity back at him. “You know how many doubles he had?” Kirk asked. “Bush used him to get their oil and then they hung some poor clown in his place.” Ras considered telling them the plain truth that, while the original deal had in fact been for Iraq to pay the US in oil for freeing them from this tyrant, that had never happened, but instead he just muttered, “Hanged. The word is hanged.” “What?” they asked, in unison. “Nothing,” Ras sighed, waving a hand in surrender from the back seat.
To his everlasting irritation, Rita had owned the nerve to tell him he was naïve for believing in the American system of government. At the time she had been avidly devouring a novel by a woman who claimed to have knowledge of a distant world, the inhabitants of which were in possession of transcendent wisdom. The planet in question was in the same orbit as Earth, but in direct opposition, so of course had never been discovered by scientists. This was oddly reminiscent of a set of novels by John Norman he remembered reading as a kid, about a similar planet called Gor, which, he imagined, the author might have found in his big brother’s bottom drawer, along with his Playboy magazines. This trove of enlightenment, transcendent or not, was supposedly relevant to the everyday lives of the depressed, frustrated, overweight wives of assuredly less-than-transcendent insurance salesmen, lawyers and pest-control operators. The back cover of the novel Rita was reading sported a picture of the kind of vacant, overly made-up bozo-babe Ras might look for late at night, hanging drunkenly over spilled cocktails in the classier hotel bars. Sometimes they were the wives of his clients, who had hired him to find out who they were screwing on the side. Sometimes they were the client, looking for evidence of infidelity so they could take their husband to the cleaners in the impending divorce. Ras called these women “leaners,” and they were usually good for a quick shot of pussy in the elevator, or maybe an entire night of guilty debauchery, after which they had to go jump in the hotel pool to hide the evidence from an equally hammered (and equally guilty) husband. The text under the picture assured the breathless reader that the information contained in this astounding book by the above semi-blonde leaner was unquestionably true, having been gleaned from over four hundred hours of “channeling” of an actual alien, from that distant planet, by none other than the author herself! And he, of course, was naïve for having a bit of faith in George W. Bush. Maybe so, he thought ruefully; maybe so.
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| Tia’s hot pool |
Then there were the chem-trails. According to Kirk and Rita, the government put chemicals into the fuel of commercial jets, which made people angry and confrontational in the States. The short trails, Kirk explained professionally, were the normal ones, but the long, extended “horse tails” were the ones that contained the bad chemicals. Being off the major flight routes, Dominica was not subject to these chemical influences; this was the reason, he said with a straight face, why everyone here is so nice. Erasmus wondered if living in paradise might not explain it, but he thought better of saying so at the time.
He’d searched the internet for chem-trails, as Rita had suggested, and found some very interesting information indeed. There was a professional-looking article on how to avoid the deleterious effects of the chemicals, somewhat like the vizqueen and duct-taped windows scenarios to survive chemical attacks, which were published by the Bush administration after September 11 and roundly ridiculed by the leftist media. Typical, he considered. If it’s your own government attacking you, it makes sense to CNN, but if someone else is attacking you, it’s silly. And wouldn’t that, he thought, just go over great with the neighbors! Your personal introduction to Florida’s Baker Act, where no less than three, count ’em, three psychiatrists got to examine your head and spin the wheel to decide if you got the two-week brain spa or the full ninety-day Mental Makeover!
There was another article, not quite so glossy, by a Buddhist, that discussed “generators” (of what was not specified) capable of “clearing the skies of chem-trails within minutes,” for a mere eight hundred dollars each. For best effect, he recommended two of these generators. To the author’s dubious credit, Ras had to admit, the whacko did say he felt that he was personally capable of clearing the atmosphere with the power of his mind alone, by “projecting his chakras into the skies.” So, if one was just psychotic enough, as in crazy as a shithouse rat, and willing to ignore high-level winds and other natural phenomena, the sixteen hundred smackers for the generators might not really be necessary. He considered with a grin that he would like to meet someone with that kind of manic brass, but then again, he had known one all his life: Kirk. Guys like him made the world an interesting place.
After the war Ras had worked in a psychiatric ward where the aides had joked about some nut case yelling there was “smoothie gas coming from the ceiling.” If only it were true. The fixtures on the ceiling were speakers for the intercom and fire alarm system. But really, the last thing you wanted to do was stir up the natives. They wouldn’t even let their “clients” on the ward drink coffee or watch The Exorcist on HBO. He asked Kirk, if the government wanted to control people, wouldn’t it be better to put sedatives in the jet fuel to make everybody happy and compliant, rather than stimulants to make them grumpy and uncooperative? In fact, since the normal condition of most people was grumpy and uncooperative in the first place, why would they bother? Kirk didn’t have an answer for that one.
| Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens |
Kirk and (especially) Rita are really wild! And to think this is a novel with a REALLY dead cat! (That is, apparently Kirk and Rita aren’t all that fictional....)
ReplyDeleteThat was a time trip for me. The entire Iraq war was a lie, not much different than Vietnam. Outside of Memphis there was a place called VooDoo Village; your motel sounds like the stories told of the Village. Enjoyed the read.
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