39.2
Mr. Anteé continues: “What the Junkies here don’t know is that smoking Crack Planet crack is a very different experience than smoking Earth crack. Crack Planet crack, or as we Sprungians call it, ótrúlegt vá, provides a feeling of deep calm and ease.”
“We?” Rupert interrupts. “Sprungians, natives of Crack Planet.” “Aliens,” Leenda adds. “We don’t really prefer that term,” Mr. Anteé makes a face as if he’s been squirt in the eye with a grapefruit—Rupert finds this all very ironic. “But back to the ótrúlegt vá. It boosts your self-esteem, but not only that, it is accompanied by the mild, pleasant forgetting of anything terrible that might have happened to you to have caused your esteem problems in the first place. Not the events, but the psychological impact and emotional repercussions.” “That’s very specific,” Leenda says. “We have scientists, too.” Mr. Anteé replies. “We don’t spend all of our time mutilating your cattle and probing your asses. To be accurate, it’s less a forgetting than an accelerated aid to processing and, well . . . “ . . . just not giving a shit,” says Rupert. “A little like being on crack, or the drug of your choice, here, except without all the drawbacks.” “Yes.” Mr. Anteé smiles. “It gets rid of the major emotional factors that lead to drug addiction. And the kicker is, if you’re addicted to Earth meth, or crack, or what-have-you, smoking ótrúlegt vá will cure you—the effect is immediate and permanent. Earth drugs no longer fuck you up. There is no such thing as withdrawal or a relapse on Crack Planet. Simply doesn’t exist—in fact, we have no words in our language to describe those states of being.”
“Does anyone ever come back from Crack Planet? I mean, besides you?” Leenda asks.
“Well, I was born there,” he answers. “I’m a native Sprungian, but yes, lots of people come back. In fact, you know a few.”
“Angel.” Rupert says, nodding.
“There’s one. Who else fits the bill?” Mr. Anteé asks.
Rupert thinks for a minute. “Not Jesus . . . ”
“Bingo.”
“No shit.”
“Yes shit.”
Rupert laughs and Leenda feels a little better about smiling at all of this.
“Anyone else?” Mr. Anteé asks once more.
Rupert thinks again, but shakes his head. There were so many crackpot chuckleheads down there—could be anyone.
“Not Bucket . . . ?” The one nutbag in Florida who, despite his clear insanity, actually planted a seed of thought in his mind that had helped in his time of need.
“Lord, no,” Anteé laughed. “Bucket is straight-up Earth-grown crazy.”
Rupert and Leenda both sat silently, thinking.
“Well, of course there’s my brother,” Mr. Anteé says, gesturing to the aloe plant.
Rupert and Leenda notice that there is a name painted across the front of the pot: Lëslié Gôddärd Anteé.
“Its name is Lez-lee,” Rupert says with a laugh, not at the name, but that it had a name all this time.
“He. Well, it’s pronounced ‘LeeSlay.’ LeeSlay Goodahrd Anteeay.”
“Is that Icelandic?” Leenda asks.
“No, Sprungian.”
“Hmm.”
“Wait,” Rupert interrupts. “What about the story Jesus told me? Embalming fluid . . . ”
Anteé laughs. “He couldn’t very well tell you the truth.”
No, Rupert supposes he couldn’t, and only in Florida would ‘embalming fluid-engorged talking plant-monster’ be more plausible than ‘Crack Planet Alien named Leeslay’.
“So . . . not a gift from Derek Peterson.”
The room went quiet, the discomfort palpable.
Finally: “We don’t speak of Derek Peterson.” Anteé gazed out the window for a moment.
Rupert thought he felt colder than a second ago.
Anteé continued: “Yes, we come in all sorts of shapes and sizes on Crack Planet. On earth, something about my earth crack addiction made it impossible for him to be near me without losing strength. Scientists here still haven’t quite figured that out. But! One man came here, unaddicted to anything, which we’d never seen before. His parents were addicts; his siblings were addicts. He wanted to make a difference, so on and so forth—”
“Then one day, my sister . . . ” A voice behind Rupert and Leenda startled them. The door had opened quietly and they catch Angel smiling and closing it behind her as she left.
Standing before them is Stanley—missing Stanley! They’re both about to get up, but he gestures for them to keep their seats. He walks around and leans against the desk next to Mr. Anteé.
Rupert and Leenda are too stunned to say anything.
“ . . . my sister was a meth-addled idiot, Rupert, as you well know. She bought a Golden Ticket to Crack Planet, but she loved me so much, she gave it to me for Christmas last year because she’d spent any gift money she’d had on meth. She was an idiot, but she had a big heart . . . ”
“When she wasn’t fucked up,” Mr. Anteé added.
“Exactly.” Stanley smiled.
“Man, was she fucked up.”
“Indeed.” Stanley laughs. “Anyway . . . she’s super high, so I take the thing, and it’s . . . ”
“Balsa wood and gold paint,” Rupert guessed.
Stanley nods. “But that night, Mr. Anteé came to me and took me to Crack Planet.”
“Boy was that embarrassing . . . like, one of my first times collecting someone.”
“So, he takes me to Crack Planet, and I’m like, really? And there’s aliens . . . ”
Mr. Anteé makes jazz hands at Rupert and Leenda, like, me!
“ . . . but there’s also this population of happy, healthy, drug-recovered earthlings doing their thing.”
“When you’re not fucked up, you can integrate pretty well,” Mr. Anteé chimes in.
“See, after you come and get well, you have a choice to stay or go back to earth . . . ” Stanley begins to explain.
“We have a very progressive immigration policy there.”
“Well, most of them stayed, because, well, Crack Planet’s pretty sweet. So, I thought, there must be a way to save all the drug addicts on earth. I worked with some people there, including our esteemed Mr. Anteé (who bows) and created a larger, more sustainable system by which to bring addicts from earth to Crack Planet to cure them, and either adopt them into the program doing the work here on earth, or keep them there, depending on their skill set, to do related work there.”
“This isn’t like that D.E.A.T.H. program, is it . . . ?” Rupert asks.
“Oh no,” Stanley assures him. “Pyrdewy is a cocktooth and he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison for pretending to help people in real need just to get his hands on some of that Obama federal long green.”
Rupert must finally concede that ‘long green’ is not only a legitimate term, but also a good one.
“Jesus chose to return to Earth and go about doing the work of saving souls.”
“How ironic.”
“The study I had been working on wasn’t to observe the work habits of Methheads. Pyrdewy, that shitfuck, got his hands on it and used it to cover his bullshit crimes. My original study was to infiltrate the community and see how the tickets were being sold, thus creating a larger, better-connected, but still secret system of getting addicts to Crack Planet, which you did on your own. As a matter of fact, the changes you made with Fulva’s operation upped our intake by a significant margin. Good job.”
Leenda kisses Rupert’s cheek and he smiles, blushes a little.
“So, Fulva’s system wasn’t yours?”
“Nope. We have no idea how the word got out. We’ve heard the name ‘Stevie,’ but that’s all we know,” Anteé says. “We’re working on it.”
“Unfortunately,” Stanley continues, “I needed to run operations on Crack Planet, so I faked my disappearance, blah, blah, blah. In my place, I sent Mr. Anteé down to keep an eye on things . . . ” Stanley elbows Mr. Anteé who smiles and hangs his head.
“Here’s something we didn’t know then, but we know now,” Mr. Anteé explains. “Crack Planet ex-pats have a very different reaction to Crack Planet crack. While it cures you of your addictions and mega-boosts your self-confidence, for us, it’s a non-addictive stimulant. Kind of like your caffeine. Pretty harmless, makes you feel a little more awake, gets you off to work. Well, I’d been down here for a while—became fascinated with your Native American history—you know, those folks really got fucked—”
Everyone nods.
“Anyway, I thought I’d give Earth crack a shot—I was feeling a little sluggish one morning. Such the wrong thing to do. Turns out, if a Sprungian like me smokes Earth crack, I go absolutely batshit, moon-howling, punch-your-mama-and-maybe-even-your-mama’s-mama insane. And I did. Hence all that . . . emotional and mental instability. Sorry about that. Also, for the record, I had no experience whatsoever with explosives of any kind. I don’t know what a G4 detonator is. We’re all lucky to be alive.”
Rupert shifts in his chair and sort of waves it off, like, hey, no problem. Leenda smiles wide, perhaps too wide.
“Plus,” Mr. Anteé adds, “Lëslié—who had been sent to Earth to collect me, but somehow ended up in Fulva’s bathroom—got a contact high in the cavern and just blew right up—allergic reaction. We had no idea. Nothing a little antihistamine couldn’t take care of.”
Lëslié waves a tentacle.
“So,” Stanley says. “Getting down to business, here’s what we’d like to propose. You can either go on about your business like nothing happened . . . ”
They all have a good, long laugh at that.
“Or, you can return to Florida and continue to help Jesus with his work selling Golden Tickets and helping the insane Junkies of the Sunshine State become real, functional people with a purpose.”
“Can’t I just go to Crack Planet, smoke the ótrúlegt vá, be cured of all of my esteem and social anxiety issues, and live happily every after among the peace-loving Sprungians.”
Mr. Anteé and Stanley look at one another.
“You already have,” Stanley says.
Rupert doesn’t get it.
“Rupert.” Stanley is half-laughing. “What do you think Jesus gave you to smoke when the shit hit the fan?”
“But, my anxiety . . . ” Rupert protests. “The meth . . . ”
The office door opens behind them and Angel pops her head in. “Told you,” she says to Rupert. “Second time you smoked crack.” Then she disappears again and the door closes.
Goddamn her.
“Placebo,” Mr. Anteé explains. “Afterward, you convinced yourself you still had anxiety, and so you did.”
“And,” Stanley adds, “you convinced yourself you were high in all those subsequent drug binges, so you were.”
“I thought you were a little too easy to deal with,” Leenda says.
Once again, Bucket—the straight-up Earth-grown crazy person—was right. You are what you think you are.
“And that explains why rehab was such a cake walk.”
It’s quiet for a moment. Rupert and Leenda look at each other.
“Well. I guess we need to have a talk,” he says to her.
Leenda frowns.
