Lee Harper Oswald

24

Rupert pushes his way through a mass of thick-stemmed, dinosaur-vegetation, vines and mega-leaves thrashing and slapping at his face, but he moves swiftly. He has to keep up. Ahead of him—leading him, he thinks—a form moves stealthily through the jungle foliage. All around him, the dark-night avian sounds shriek and whistle, calling to one another. He thinks they’re talking about him. Grass blades slice his fawn flesh, lighter, almost white in this darkness. But he has to keep up.

He moves faster, closing the distance between himself and his guide, and he sees a flash of fringe, the flutter of a feather, a swathe of grey hair, silver in the pale moonlight filtering through the palms above—Efunibi. Efunibi. And then he’s gone.

Rupert stands breathless in a clearing, the scent of long-past brush fires lingering, combining with the stinking decay of animal meat and meth. The birds have flown and it is silent, deafeningly so. Rupert covers his ears to it. Soon, behind him, muted by his hands, comes a grunting and moaning, of someone being eaten and of one eating. Or the sound of lifeless pleasure, a communion with a thing that has ceased. Rupert instinctively denotes the latter, and removes his hands—the sound is obscenely loud, accompanied by a soft, moist pushing and pulling. He turns to see an orgy of repulsion—several small, naked men, their ashen flesh glowing against the charred ground, thrusting themselves into any opening they can find in the animal carcasses strewn around the space of a circle, a depraved sacred rite embracing myriad species. Rupert’s diaphragm heaves a spastic push upward but he doesn’t vomit, nor can he look away.

The sounds of this sickening display grow louder, more intense, closer to all the little deaths threatening to explode over and into this stratum of putrefying dead flesh. Finally, a man in the center begins to whimper, weak at first, though building, coming closer, closer, louder, he is keening now, and then he bursts into flames. They all catch like blazing dominoes, their quarry cooking beneath them, finally free from their filthy assault. The stench of roast flesh and fresh coitus assaults Rupert’s senses, then he sees from his peripheral his guide, standing at the edge of the clearing. Efunibi turns and walks back into the jungle. Rupert runs.

Again, he catches up, almost able to reach out and grab the fringe of Efunibi’s jacket. The flora is not as dense now, more like an overgrown path. Rupert feels safer being on a course that had at least once been tread forward and back from wherever it is he is being lead. He didn’t want to be the first. The vegetation thins a little more with each step, and with that, he can see further into the edges of the path. Suddenly, huge misshapen marionettes, dangling from vines and flailing grotesquely, swinging their foam-flesh limbs at Rupert. He can make out their faces—Fulva, and Bill, and Osceola, and Tommy, and Bucket, and Joe, and Merideth, and even Derek Peterson, though his face is indistinct—all snarling and flapping their arms and legs. Those who make contact create no impact. Rupert feels nothing, and all he hears is a cackle from Efunibi, who has once again disappeared.

Rupert now stands in the middle of a colossal cavern, its bottom flat and damp, its ceiling a roiling, living thing, at the center of which sucks a quivering, puckering anus. Rupert covers his head intuitively, though nothing falls, but there is a sudden and blinding fluorescent blue-white light, and after the flash, the hovering asshole remains, but the cavern is now bright and furnished with numerous items—shining steel countertops, blenders, pails and buckets, gas cans and funnels, glassware and tubing. Immense storage containers line the entire diameter of the area, bubbling and stinking, manned by masked, HazMatted henchmen. Rupert realizes these men work for him. But the anus above still sucks, and sucks, and soon, he feels his feet lift from the ground, and he his heading straight up, squeezing into the now-gaping, living hole. It closes around him, compresses his form, changes him somehow, and in no time, births him above ground, out of the heart of a grass-covered burial mound.

He is clean. He is on his hands and knees, and he looks down into Leenda’s eyes. He moves between her legs, losing himself in an instant, almost crushing her, and she moans, but keeps a steady gaze. It pierces him and runs electric through his brain, zapping rhythmically into his heart. He closes his eyes and he comes closer, and closer, green flashing behind his lids with each thrust, each step nearer to rapture. The green light means go, it says go, and he lets go . . . .

* * *

When Rupert woke up, it was dark. His usual frustrating failure to finish what began as a wet dream came as a blessing this time. He didn’t think these sheets were ever changed.

The green message light on the phone next to the bed blinked on and off, illuminating the entire room. His head was empty, but of what? He had no way to comprehend, but the final image of Leenda stayed, sound and lasting in his mind.

Surely it was her.

He picked up the receiver to retrieve the message, impatiently enduring the motel’s preamble, and then:

“Hey, Mount Macaca.” Pyrdewy.

Motherfucker.

“My people tell me a large, moo-lah-toh guy came sniffing around the D.E.A.T.H. program today. Said it was the first time they’d ever seen you. Not good, my friend. The Spliphsonian has a policy against hiring liars, even to mop shit.”

Rupert sighed, still groggy.

“You’re in a lot of trouble, guy. You’ve got one last chance. You’d better get your ass back down there tomorrow, bring your Methhead posse, if indeed they exist, and do what I told you to do. We need scholarly research. And we need you to play along, get it? Gotta go along to get along and you need to get along if you still wanna keep doing what you’re doing, capisce? And, hey . . . better keep an eye on Marge. Sounded like she took a shine to you.”

The call ended with abruptly-cut laughter. Rupert rubbed his eyes.

“No,” he said out loud to himself. “Nope. Fuck this. I’m not doing this. Fuck him.” And with that, he turned over, pulled a pillow over his head, and sank back to sleep, meditating and synchronizing his deep breathing with that final dream image of Leenda, on the grassy mound.

In the dark, the Plant with No Name smiled.

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23

The AC hit Rupert and his nipples pinged erect as if alarmed. He hated this ritual. The lobby radiated an abnormal serenity and for a moment, he was baffled, until he looked around. Angel was not at the desk. Rupert stopped. At this point, he was convinced he was the only guest here at the Royal Courtyard Econo-Regency Chalet, and so his first suspicion was that if she wasn’t here, she must be in his room. This made him feel panicky, but he wasn’t sure why—there was nothing there worth stealing. Except maybe the Plant with No Name, who hadn’t spoken to him since that day in Fulva’s bathroom.

Rupert sighed, reflecting on what his inner voice just said.

At that moment, Angel jumped up from behind the clerk’s counter wearing a conical hat she’d fashioned out of outdated perforated printer paper. Though she made no sound, the movement startled Rupert and caused him to squeal.

“I hate you,” he told her when he recovered a moment later.

Angel smiled and said nothing.

In his room, Rupert’s eyes fell first to the phone, on which no green message light blinked back. He was half-relieved, but half-sad. He was trying to accept that he liked the sound of Leenda’s voice and missed it when a day passed without it, of which there were many, because she didn’t call every day and he was too terrified to call her. Every day he’d think she’d lost interest, but then there’d be a message “checking in.” It was an act of consideration that was difficult for him to decipher, as, like a lot of things, it wasn’t a huge part of his emotional vocabulary.

Rupert lay across the bed, like he did every time he entered his room, for the rest of the day. He hadn’t bothered to turn the light on, so there was only the fading orange-pink setting sun through the sheer curtains to illuminate the room, which diffused a calm, settled feeling. He was sure that he had lost his mind and that he wasn’t interpreting everything around him as well as he would be under normal circumstances. But then, his “normal” wasn’t typical, so then he wondered if he ever did.

He’d lived with this crippling anxiety for so long, his inability to relate to others because of it, he had no idea what was and wasn’t normal. What was strange behavior from a person and what wasn’t—what was malicious and what was benevolent, or even scarier, compassion? Concern? Love? He realized that on some level, it all blended together—an incomprehensible, inseparable flood of chemicals, inside him and inside everyone, which no one could interpret with any level of competency—and this made him feel crazy and terrified. Did everyone feel this way? Presumably, one would need a certain level of self-awareness, and Rupert thought perhaps society’s most positive thinkers would say that, yes, everyone felt this way, but the more he interacted with other human beings, the more he doubted. He supposed this was why he made a career in entropy. In spite of all the intellect and consciousness of human beings, there did seem to be a distinct lack of self-awareness. Rupert felt very alone in his crazy and terrified feelings.

He had no business even thinking about something like compassion, because, again, it wasn’t part of his life’s language. He didn’t know how to speak it, let alone understand and process it, so there wasn’t any point in thinking about it. Rupert forced himself to be glad there was no message from Leenda, and though he ultimately failed, he told himself he succeeded anyway. Because that’s how you survive.

The soothing sounds of the passing traffic and the inarticulate yelling of disparate, shirtless Florida Men mollified him as far as was possible. The mute aloe plant squatted against its stem in its glass of water, silhouetted against the waning sunlight.

Rupert took a deliberate in-breath, exhaled slower, and started to self-talk. He’d heard it was helpful. For something. Working things out.

“Although you may or may not being going crazy, Rupert, you did still manage to accomplish something here. Maybe more than you ever have. I mean, you’ve tried harder at other things and still got nowhere, but here, with all this, it’s like you’re not even trying and things are happening. You’re not even trying . . . ”

Rupert became quiet, sluggish thoughts moving through his grey matter and, like leeches, sucking out the relevant information. In this case, Rupert had to face the fact that his social anxiety—above and beyond what would be normal—appeared almost entirely eliminated, and somehow that worried him. The fact was that he wasn’t trying. He hadn’t tried from the day he’d arrived. And, in this period of relative nervous calm, for the first time he had to sincerely examine what his anxiety had done to his life. He worked himself to mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion, and because people around him didn’t understand him, or thought he was weird, it didn’t matter. It got him nowhere.

But here, somehow, and with his anxiety having dissipated, his thinking cleared and his actions proved more efficient. And the people around him—hell, they didn’t even notice that he was strange. Not here. Not in Florida, this magical hell. They even sometimes acknowledged his successes. And, for better or worse, they cared about what he did, even if it was being pissed off at him. People always talk about the difference between good and bad attention, but little has been said about bad attention being better than sheer indifference. Rupert, regretfully, had to admit—it was.

A strange, frightening tranquility washed over Rupert, and soon, he began to doze—

* * *

“What the ding-dong-douche are you talking about?” Shit Pail asks, eyes half-crossed and, maybe, Rupert is afraid, even in his jacked state, taking another dump.

“I have no idea,” he answered, though he does. He knows exactly what he’s talking about.

“Fuck,” she added, head lolling backward.

* * *

—and as he dozed, his mind circled through the accomplishments he’d managed in a stunningly short period of time: he made a decent living selling Golden Tickets to Crack Planet; he’d learned how to market and sell methamphetamines; he’d learned to make Shake n’ Bake; and now knew how to set up his own legitimate lab.

I think Leenda cares about me.

Success, success . . . drifting, drifting . . . dozing, slipping into slumber . . .

Thank you for saving me . . .

Leenda’s face swam beneath his eyelids.

“Thank you . . . ”

Rupert’s eyes flung open and his thoughts stopped, altogether.

“ . . . for saving me.”

He refused to get up. He refused to look at the plant.

“And fuck all those stains.” It was the voice he’d heard in Fulva’s bathroom, no mistake. It sounded a little like Christopher Walken, if you threw in about half-a-cup of Gary Busey. That alone freaked Rupert out. If that voice had a face, Rupert imagined Wilhem Dafoe.

He sat up straight, looking at the Plant with No Name. It didn’t move.

“Stains?” he asked, hoping at this point to not receive an answer.

“Those stains. Fulva. Bill. Osceola. Jesus is alright, but Bananas, Fuckit Bucket, the McEejits, Pyrdewy . . . ”

“How do you know about Pyrdewy?”

“Omniscient, occasionally omnipresent, all that shit. Seriously, fuck ‘em.”

“You’re a plant.”

“I resent that and I’m going to forget you said it. Because I like you, Rupert. You are a perfectly competent human, smart, not terrible looking as far as those things go. I notice you have a rather wry sense of humor . . . ”

“I’m talking to a plant.” Rupert said and lay back down.

“Okay, I suppose I can accept that you can’t accept this. But, you should listen to me. Even if I am a plant.”

Rupert heard the plant heave a resigned sigh.

What the fuck?

“Strike out on your own, man,” it said.

“What? I can’t,” Rupert replied, though he knew he’d been entertaining this idea all along.

“Bullshit. I know you’ve been entertaining this idea all along, so do it,” the Plant with No Name said.

Damn it. “How? Where?”

“You already know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You must go . . . ” The plant began speaking in an exaggerated mystical way.

“Come on,” Rupert pleaded.

The plant sighed again.

“You must go . . . ” It repeated, still mystical but more forceful.

“Fine. Go where?’

“To the land of the Roseate Spoonbill, the Great Blue Heron, the American Alligator, and the lowly, leprous Armadillo.”

Rupert curled his lip is disgust.

“It’s true, they carry it,” the plant informed him.

“I know . . . ”

“Well, don’t look so . . . ” Another sigh. “You must go . . . to the land of the Long Leaf Pine, the Myrtle Oak, the Saw Palmetto . . . ”

“This isn’t helping me know what the he—”

“—the land of the Slash Pine, the Cabbage Palm, and the Camphorweed . . . ”

“Are these friends of yours?” Rupert muttered, half-sarcastic, half-actually wondering.

“Look, shut up. That’s it.”

For a moment, Rupert thought the Plant with No Name had once again forsaken him with silence. A few minutes passed and he began to doze again, but this time, it felt . . . odd. He lifted his head with some effort and looked at the plant. Against the lingering glow of sun, he saw some sort of smoke rising from it, its aloey-tentacle-leaves gesticulating. Rupert felt wrong, but not altogether unpleasant.

“You have to think big, Rupert. You have to go find Efunibi.”

Rupert repeated the name once, twice, and the phone started to ring. He didn’t hear a thing and fell dead asleep.

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21

“Finally,” says Shit Pail.

Rupert is starting to feel a little guilty about referring to her as “Shit Pail” in his head, but he doesn’t remember if he’d even caught her name to begin with, and of course, it’s far too late to ask.

“Yes, finally,” he says, shifting his sitting position on the floor. His ass is beginning to ache.

Shit Pail rummages through her bag, which contains everything that’s ever existed in the history of Man. Things falling out include a standard nail file, mints, a protein bar, an airline barf bag, a stale half-slice of white bread, the Shambhala Pocket Classics edition of The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh, a row of eight red raffle tickets, a piece of black Basalt, and a knotted, but deflated long orange balloon. That’s just what fell out.

“That took a while,” she says, still pushing her entire arm around in the big, allegedly-handmade, woven Costa Rican bag.

“Well, I wasn’t really trying, was I?”

She stopped and looked at him.

“Yes, sweetie. Had you been trying, you’d have been in like Flint.”

“Flynn.”

“In like Flint. It’s a Movie. Coburn.”

“The film’s title was a play on ‘in like Flynn,’ which referred to Errol Flynn and possibly his sexual exploits, which I assure you wasn’t, nor would be, the case in this story.”

Shit Pail shifted on her shit pail.

“You’re kind of an asshole.”

“I know.”

“Woolah!” Shit Pail yells, jolting Rupert out of his too-self aware pity party of one.

“What?” Rupert lost the thread.

“Sorry. Woolah.” She pulls a blunt out of her bag.

“Weed?”

“And crack. Better than nothing. I forgot it was in here.”

“Screw it. Light it up.”

“Second time smoking crack.”

“First,” Rupert corrects.

“Sure.” She grins, lights up the Woolah and Rupert continues.

22

The following day, beneath an uncharacteristically grey and brooding sky, Rupert and Joe went to the D.E.A.T.H. program site. All the driving around with Jesus had helped Rupert become pretty familiar with the area, and as they pulled down the muddy road in Joe’s muddy ‘89 Yukon through a plain of Pampas grass and Saw Palmetto, passing big, slow-moving, liquid-carrying tanker trucks, he knew he was somewhere near Spanish Point, where Leenda’s burial mound was located.

As they approached the site, Rupert saw that nothing about this operation appeared legitimate. Joe didn’t appear to notice anything amiss, which made Rupert more suspicious.

The flat plain had a massive pit dug into it, and into the side of the pit was the opening to a drift mine, which looked cartoonish—a big, squared tunnel entrance propped up by large wooden beams. Methheads of all stripes and levels of withdrawal walked into the mine with big, empty blue buckets and shuffled out with them full of brackish-looking water. They then walked unsteadily up a rickety set of wooden steps out of the pit, over to a couple of open tanks, up the aluminum steps to the top of those, and dumped the water in.

If Rupert squinted, the entire enterprise resembled a modern-day depiction of the now-discredited theory of slave labor building of the pyramids—the kind of thing you used to see on the History Channel before it was taken over by “reality” shows such as Possum Hunter and Ancient Alien Plumbers. Hundreds of thin, unhappy, sick people toiling zombie-like, performing the time-honored tradition of monotonous, soul-killing slog on behalf of their betters.

When the open tanks were full, the tanker truck alongside it would drop its industrial hose in, suck up the water, cap off, and move out, replaced by another.

A work trailer stood some distance from the pit. A few Tweakers shook and scratched themselves in a short line outside the door. Some tottered around the back where a few barrels had been placed to throw up in. When he or she was finished, they’d dip a scoop into a bucket of sawdust and throw it into the barrel over the fresh vomit, then either return to work, or to the line outside the trailer.

This is pretty fucked up, Rupert thought.

“Joe, does this look normal to you?” Rupert asked.

Joe looked through the windshield at the scene before them, considering it, and then to Rupert:

“Well, I don’t know what it is yet, so I don’t know.”

Unexpectedly astute. But still.

They got out of the Yukon and walked to the trailer. As they neared, a woman in coveralls came out and adjusted her hard hat. She had a sturdy-looking Maglite holstered at her side. More hard hats and inferior flashlights hung along the railing of the trailer steps, for anyone to use, Rupert supposed, though he didn’t see many workers wearing them. He suspected they didn’t much care if a chunk of mine ceiling crushed their heads to a pulp—in their condition, they might have hoped for it.

The woman stopped as she walked down the steps, ignoring the barrage of comments, questions, and outright pleas of the Tweakers who’d been waiting to speak with her. She watched Rupert and Joe as they approached.

Rupert elbowed Joe, who had thumbed the screen of his phone while he walked. The phone was again reholstered into Joe’s back pocket.

“We’re here for the program,” Rupert said.

She examined them, but less Joe than Rupert.

“You don’t look too strung out,” she said to him.

Rupert looked at Joe—Rupert hadn’t noticed he was sweating a little and he had a slight tremor.

“Not yet,” Rupert said.

“Stocked up, huh?”

Rupert shrugged. “Came prepared.”

“Well, it’s only going to make it worse for you in the end,” she snarled, clearly disgusted with everyone and everything around her.

Rupert noticed an embroidered nametag on her coveralls that read Marge.

“Can I call you Marge?” he asked.

“No,” she answered, curt. “You don’t call me anything. Grab a couple of helmets and lights.”

Rupert did and handed Joe his.

“Follow me,” Marge said, and they proceeded to the pit, down the stairs creaking beneath them, and into the mine opening, dodging working Methheads.

The tunnel was black and crudely dug out with a few support structures spaced too far apart for Rupert’s sense of well being. Marge said nothing, but as they progressed, the tunnel grew wider and taller, eventually opening up to about the width of a two-lane road. The deeper they went, the more the scenery changed.

As he tried to avoid the sloshing buckets carried by the teetering Methheads, Rupert let his flashlight beam wander over the walls and ceiling—small calcium carbonate lumps and bumps ran in haphazard formations along the edges of the tunnel, their sources found leaking above, drip, drip, dripping the measured geologic process that would build them into something more. As the trio moved on, the formations grew larger, drifting in shades of chestnut, ochre, tawny, amber and white, creating stalagmites and stalactites, flowstones and helictites, what they called “soda straws”—hollow, cylindrical mineral tubes—and “bacon strips,” when the flowstones grew down in rippling sheets. Rupert had visited a show cave up in Virginia, so this wasn’t entirely new to him. It looked as if they’d mined their way into a natural cave system.

Marge walked fast and soon there was a little distance between them, enough that Joe felt comfortable enough to have a conversation.

“Hey Rupe,” he starts. “Mom started to get a little suspicious last night after you left.”

“Suspicious of what?”

“Of you.”

“For what?”

Someone, somewhere threw up and its sickening echo traveled throughout the caverns, triggering a vomit domino effect that continued throughout their conversation.

“Something about the possibility that you might share our special recipe with some other operations around here.”

“Joe, why would I do that?” The whole we’re-all-big-time paranoia began to irritate Rupert.

“I dunno,” Joe shrugged. “She heard somewhere that you’ve been dealing with Tommy Bananas. Maybe even Bucket.”

Rupert was torn between the concern he felt at knowing people named “Tommy Bananas” and “Bucket” and the speed at which Merideth could obtain this ridiculous information.

“I’ve known the woman for fewer than twenty-four hours!” Rupert stopped and took a deep breath. “I’ve never heard of them, Joe. But so what if I did?”

Joe shook his head. “It’s not how things work, Rupe. You just don’t do that.”

“Know people? You can’t just know people . . . ?”

Joe’s back pocket beeped nine times in various tones, then started ringing.

Rupert’s eyes rolled involuntarily back into his head. “You know, I hear you can keep that from happening . . . I don’t even own one and I know that.”

Joe fumbled with his phone. “I know, but I don’t know how—”

“Hello, The Gorge (Fine Men’s Cloth—”

Joe hung up. “Yeah,” he looked to Rupert. “I need to figure that out.”

“How do you even have any reception in here?”

Finally, Marge stopped for them to catch up.

“Used to be a show cave,” she said. “Till water seeped in from the Gulf.” Another fifteen feet and they rounded a corner, entering a huge, cathedral-sized cavern.

They stood at the edge of what looked like an underground lake.

“Wow,” Joe whispered with the kind of awe that might be inspired by a Close Encounters ship landing. Rupert was pretty amazed, too. He’d seen cavern lakes before, but nothing like the size of this thing. Enormous stalactites pointed down to the water, pocking its surface with a light, eerie rain. Around the edges that were accessible, Methheads came, scooped, and left. Marge pointed her flashlight to a place on the cavern wall across the water where the color lightened considerably about ten feet up.

Must be on an incline, Rupert thought.

“High water mark,” she said. “We’re about halfway there. If you want in on this, you’d better start soon.”

“Why is it being emptied?” Rupert asked, forgetting for a moment why he was there.

“What the hell do you care?”

“Um. I guess I don’t.” Rupert rubbed the back of his head.

“I don’t know,” she answered anyway. “I don’t care either. But I guess it’s cheaper to use these sorry sacks of shi—you guys . . . than to run a length of industrial hose and pump it. Anything to save a buck. Right, let’s go.”

They wove their way back through woozy Tweakers and into the too-bright grey outside.

“Is there paperwork?” Rupert asked as Marge retrieved their helmets and flashlights. She laughed and walked back to the trailer.

“Come back tomorrow, seven a.m.,” she called over her shoulder.

No. Nothing about this was even a little bit legal. Stanley would have had nothing to do with anything like this.

Rupert and Joe walked back to the Yukon and as they passed one of the idling tankers containing a lunch-eating driver, Rupert yelled over the rumbling engine.

“Hey! Spanish Point’s around here, right?”

“Yeah!” the driver yelled back, chewing what looked to be a classic bologna-on-white and jerked his thumb back behind his head. “About half-mile!”

“Thanks!”

They climbed into the Yukon, and Rupert waited until Joe had finished looking at whatever he was looking at on his phone. When he looked up and moved to put the key in the ignition, Rupert asked: “You going back tomorrow?”

“I dunno. Maybe. You?”

“Hell no.”

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20

Joe McEejit lived with his mother, Merideth (pronounced, Joe stressed, Merry Death) in a trailer way in the back of the Stately Swamp Mobile Home Commons just off the Tamiami Trail. The trailer park reeked of meth-making, and various colored clouds of smoke puffed from every other trailer. Rupert rode shotgun in Joe’s 1992 Jimmy Yukon down a cracked paved road that wound through the park. They passed a man covered in what looked like tar being handcuffed over the hood of a tan, rusted-out 80s Chevy Cavalier. As they passed, Rupert heard him yell, “If I had some crack, I wouldn’t be out here stealing . . . ” Joe didn’t notice. But Rupert’s attention shifted the instant they drove around a double-decker trailer creation on a turn. Not a trailer designed to be a two-story habitat, but two single-wide trailers stacked and welded together, with a chain ladder going from the bottom to the top. But that wasn’t what impressed Rupert. As they rounded the curve, he could see the back of the makeshift structure, over which was painted as a massive faded rebel flag with the words “The South Will Rise Agian.” The a was a tiny, less-faded later edit a fat Sherpie marker between the i and n.

About thirty seconds later, they pulled up next to what Rupert presumed to be the McEejit household. A broken fiberglass birdbath stood in what passed as a front yard and a red Hodaka Combat Wombat motocross dirt bike leaned up against the side of the trailer. It looked youth-sized and old.

As Rupert followed Joe through the door, he was overcome, not by meth cooking, for once, but the smell of baking cookies. An old woman with auburn-faded-to-rust-colored hair came out from behind the connected counter island that separated the kitchen from the dinning/living room area.

“Who the fuck is this asshole? Is that a purse?”

Joe handed her two Golden Tickets to Crack Planet and Rupert and his man purse were forgotten. She squealed like a non-crack-smoking old woman who’d won a trip to Vegas with an unlimited supply of nickels to play the slots, except she likely smoked crack and the slots in this scenario shilled out free crack.

“Crack Planet, here we come!” Then she stopped. “How’d you get two tickets, Joe? What did you do . . . ?” She looked about to come at him, but Joe threw his hands up and pointed at Rupert, who braced himself for a light pummeling. But she stopped and looked up at him.

“Who the fuck are you? You’re fucking huge.”

Rupert opened his mouth, but Joe spoke.

“Mom, this is Rupert.” He explained the deal they’d made and she contemplated it for a moment.

“I hear Crack Planet’s pretty amazing,” Rupert said, voice low and polite.

Merideth shot him a look, and then Joe, who was occupied with his phone.

“Goddamn it, Joe, put that fucking thing away. We have a guest.”

Joe slid his phone into his back pocket. Merideth said nothing else, but only returned to the kitchen and opened the oven. The fresh cookie smell wafted stronger, warmer. Rupert passed Joe a dubious look, but Merideth returned with a tray stacked with still-steaming cookies and set it on the table. Her shirt neckline was a little low—not embarrassing-cleavage low, but low enough to reveal a tattoo high on her chest that said “Don’t Fuck with Gramma,” embellished with a rose and a leaping manatee, which Rupert doubted they did. It looked old and faded, as if she’d gotten it long before she’d reached the conventional age for grandmotherhood. That was a little unsettling, though not unexpected.

Rupert thought of Bucket jumping onto—into—the deceased, definitely-not-leaping manatee, but was snapped back to the present when Merideth said: “Well, let’s get cookin’ then. But first, have some cookies.”

Rupert picked up a cookie, still warm between his fingers, and looked at it. Chocolate peanut butter, he thought, though he was a little leery. They stood in a meth lab trailer with an old woman who cooked meth and with whom Rupert did not want to fuck. He considered declining like he’d declined Bucket’s offer of post-cook coffee.

Joe grabbed one and took a bite. He had his phone out again and thumbed through something or other, then looked over at Rupert. “Oh, they’re clean. Mom would never put that shit into her cookies, right mom?”

“You’re goddamn right.”

Rupert took a bite and the chocolate-peanut-buttery goodness slid down his gullet.

It was the single best cookie he’d ever eaten in his life.

“Oh my God,” he said through another bite.

Merideth grinned, the gums of her dentures the same color as her hair. And then they all stood there for a moment—Joe eating cookies and thumbing his phone, Rupert eating cookies, his mind blank, and Merideth standing there, enjoying the fruits of her labor. But the quiet filled only with cookie-chewing was too much for Rupert’s still-delicate social composure, and he said: “So, you have grandchildren?”

“Fuck no,” she said, as if she really meant it.

Silence but for the cookie chewing. Then:

“Did you hear about that fella, tried to shoot Trump at a rally in Vegas?” Merideth made small talk.

Rupert eyes lit up. “Did he?”

“No, thank God.”

“Oh.” Rupert wondered what ridiculous, hypothetical garbage the country could have been spared, should the worst happen in November. Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, perhaps. Maybe ending ANWR drilling restrictions or rolling back environmental regulations. Suppose he would increase the likelihood of using nuclear weapons again for the first time since 1945. Or, Rupert thought, possibly he’d oversee the longest government shutdown during a psychotic temper tantrum in order to get billions of dollars for this completely unnecessary wall he’d keep talking about between the United States and Mexico that no one but a handful of heartland bigots would actually want or think we need. Maybe he’d legitimize white supremacy, or use mass shooting victims as photo ops. Perhaps he’d politicize or monetize a deadly global pandemic. All predicated on the inexorable deterioration of the man’s brain, as he’s clearly in the early stages of dementia, in addition to being illiterate and clinically narcissistic.

Rupert snickered to himself—he had a pretty wild imagination sometimes, even in this godforsaken upside-down state.

Merideth waddled down the hall and behind a curtain on the other end of the trailer. Rupert and Joe both grabbed another cookie each and followed her.

There, Rupert was confronted with a massive, immaculate, complex system of tubes and stands and glass beakers. It was awe-inspiring.

“Wow, Meri . . . Merry-Death, you did all this?”

She stood with her fists on her hips, nodding and admiring her own creation. Then:

“Joe’s lucky I let him near it.”

Joe nodded, dispassionately resigned to his complete incompetency.

“But, I like bakin’ better than cookin’, so fuckknuckle there’s gotta do it. He does okay. He only fucks it up now and then.”

A faint ringing issued from Joe’s back pocket, and then a voice: “Holly’s Hush Hush Lingerie, how may I help you?” Joe nonchalantly slipped his hand into his back pocket and hung up the call without removing the phone.

Merideth smacked Joe upside the head. Joe hardly seemed to notice.

Rupert chewed the remainder of his final cookie.

“Well,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Let’s get started.”

Rupert took notes as they worked, and during a quiet moment when Merideth wasn’t instructing, Joe asked Rupert:

“Hey, Rupe, have you heard of this government-funded meth work program?”

Rupert froze.

“No.” He returned to mixing the pseudoephedrine with the red phosphorus and hydriodic acid. He realized he had begun to believe the D.E.A.T.H. program didn’t exist.

“I guess it’s some kind of thing that puts Methheads to work as a form of rehabilitation. Their pay is accumulated and once they get clean, they get a lump sum to go start new lives.”

“With some kind of supervision, of course,” Merideth added.

“Hmm,” Rupert said. “Sounds interesting. Are you thinking about checking it out?”

“Well, Mom wants me to,” Joe said, and Merideth nodded.

“Get clean, get the cash, and then he can have it back.”

“Have it back . . . ” Rupert said.

“His habit.”

“Of course,” Rupert replied. For the first time, this whole scene struck him as a little depressing. Joe seemed like an okay guy.

“Supposed to be a lot of cash,” Joe said. Rupert looked at him—he was thumbing through his phone again.

“I’m going to maybe check it out tomorrow. Wanna come?”

“Sure.” Rupert said impassively, and he prepared to filter out the red phosphorus.

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