Free Planet Fever by Peter Stier Jr. Page B

you almost know what it is but you could be way off—like seeing a UFO in the night sky or is it just a satellite or a plane?
    I sensed a frenzied awareness of “everything” coming together and simultaneously slipping away. My identity. My sanity. Where did I get that cassette tape? I examined the handwriting on the label. It wasn’t my handwriting. As a matter of fact, whoever had written on the label had used a green highlighter. Wasn’t Woods using a green highlighter at the diner?
    I needed a drink.

TRAFFIC CRAWLED back into the city because a Corvette had capsized and ended up on the other side of the freeway, tying up both sides. It was late afternoon when I finally entered my apartment and the place smelled like chemicals. Mona had died her hair red, which I thought was odd, and I’d have to change her nickname, but it looked nice.
    She had set up an easel in the corner of the dining room, where she was brushing paint onto a canvas. She had taken up painting and was getting quite good at it.
    “Hey, you like it?” she asked from behind the canvass. “The hair, I mean.”
    “You bet,” I said.
    “And the painting? I don’t really know what it means yet, but I saw it in a dream last night.”
    On the canvas was what looked to be a giant satellite dish on top of a mountain pointing up at a daytime full moon. Wild.
    I walked into my bedroom, grabbed my pile of worn-out notebooks, walked to the kitchen, found a “Universal Studios” shot glass tucked up behind some other pointless dish ware, then sat down at the table.
    I lifted my new purchase as gently as a newborn babe out from its brown paper sack and placed the 1.5 liter bottle of Smirnoff vodka on the table; the warning label on the back caught my eye.
    “Where’s the warning label on the bottle of life we get at birth?”
    I wondered if that thought warranted me writing it down.
    Twisting off the cap, I poured a shot and put it back.
    I decided against jotting down the thought.
    It had been two-and-a-half months since I had any booze, so the shot felt like a hatchet chopping up my throat. My hack thwarted Mona, the Blonde—now the Red—out from her artistic concentration.
    I anticipated an onslaught of cussing and scolding on her part.
    Instead, she placed her brush down, got up and approached me. She sat down across from me at the table.
    Neither of us spoke.
    I poured another shot and took it down; this time I didn’t wince.
    “What happened?” she asked.
    “My life. Maybe a few times. Maybe a few times too many. Maybe free thought and will….”
    I had expected her to say, “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Instead, she nodded. “I figured this would happen. Perhaps you should give Götzefalsch a call.”
    Götzefalsch—the quack that she found for me. How convenient.
    “Yeah, that might be a terrific idea … then perhaps you should give the Thought Police a little jingle—let ‘em know you got a drunk on your hands spilling out illegal thoughts … they might need to lock it down.”
    She was taken aback, or at least gave the impression of being so.
    “The Thought Police? Eddie….”
    I cut her off with a guffaw-like chuckle. At this particular point, my life had boiled down to a B-grade movie, and I was merely playing the role. But I was on to her. Maybe I had always known the truth. My problem, or recurring problem was that I didn’t know if I knew.
    Staring at the redheaded beauty with her fantastically false pretense of sympathy creasing across her big blue eyes, I knew that I knew something: she couldn’t be trusted.
    “Those pills must be working. Eddie, don’t drink—you’ll relapse. I don’t want to lose you again!”
    “It ain’t those pills—I don’t know what those things are doing … probably re-mapping my existence. Maybe they are the source … maybe the only loophole for me is booze. Shit, I don’t know.”
    “Eddie, we’ve been through this before.”
    I flipped through one of my notebooks. Lots