I still hadn’t given up on my lawsuit idea, though it was seeming less and less likely to come about anytime soon, and Sam Hellerman’s interest in using it as a way to generate publicity for the Mountain Dew show seemed to have dwindled to just about zero. But whatever you do on your own, he cautioned, keep the Catcher Code out of it. It was hard to see why he should care, but the ways of the boy genius are unfathomable to mere mortals like me. I told him what he wanted to hear, but of course the Catcher Code was integral to my case, the linchpin of the whole thing, and I wasn’t going to leave it out. I wanted teams of investigators combing through the archives, digging up the grounds of schools, diagramming Mr. Teone’s associations and movements looking for patterns, exposing the whole rotten mess. But failing that, I at least wanted an opportunity to make a public declaration that Mr. Teone had killed my dad and that the normal world had conspired to cover it up and had facilitated the attempt on my life as well. If that resulted in general moral condemnation of Normalism itself, as it certainly should, well then, so be it.
I had a feeling, though, that Sam Hellerman was right to the extent that as a minor I’d need the participation of a legal guardian to get anywhere with this plan. And that meant Little Big Tom. I knew it would be a long shot, but I gathered up my files and took them over to the El Capitano Motor Lodge for an informal consultation.
He was pleased to see me as always, but he was looking pretty rough, still in his underwear and leaving the definite impression that he hadn’t shaved or bathed, or even left the room, in days.
“How’s the radio silence going?” I asked. In response, he stared at me glumly, saying nothing, though if I’d learned anything from Sam Hellerman on this topic it was that it was probably not going all that well. Radio silence in the face of romantic trouble takes an iron will that few possess. And it didn’t seem very likely that Little Big Tom would turn out to be one of the few who did.
Anyway, with those pleasantries out of the way, I launched into my carefully prepared argument for the indictment of Mr. Teone and the United States of America for murder, conspiracy, and crimes against humanity, including as exhibits all the necessary documentation, from my dad’s old copy of The Catcher in the Rye to the Catcher Code, the marginal notes in the books from my dad’s teen library, my medical charts, everything I had. It was my best presentation of the case thus far. And I ended it with a simple, heartfelt plea: will you help me?
Little Big Tom took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes vigorously. He opened his mouth to speak and shut it right back up again no less than four times before seeming to give up on the idea of speaking for good. Then he just stared at me for what seemed like a long, long time.
In view of this reaction, if he had said “Get out of here” like Herr Hellerman had, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised. But instead he said:
“Karma …” Then he was silent again. “You know, chief,” he continued eventually, “there’s an old saying that you reap what you sow. It’s the old eastern idea of karma, really a very cool philosophy. When people have wronged you, the best thing to do is to turn the other cheek and not sink to their level. I think you’ll find that a life lived in negativity like that will have its effects. I understand that you’re angry, angry at those kids and … at other … various … things. But trust me about the karma. I promise you they’re not going to have an easy time, living with that kind of energy. The best revenge is not to wallow in their darkness but to seek the light. Clear a path for justice, and then let it happen. And it will. You see?”
Yes, I saw very well: it was a brush-off.
Now, it should go without saying, really, that Little Big Tom didn’t know what he was talking about. His knowledge of eastern philosophy was based, I’m certain, on a vague familiarity with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a bumper sticker he had once read while stuck in traffic behind a minivan painted like an eggplant, and possibly some mushrooms he once ate.
As a matter of fact, I didn’t, and still don’t, believe in justice, other than the kind you make for yourself. If justice were real, there would be no Normalism. The normal people would all have gotten their comeuppance long, long ago and died out by natural selection, leaving the world to the decent and the nice to rule in their place. But I wasn’t about to argue philosophy with Little Big Tom. And anyway, it didn’t look like he’d be up to any courtroom appearances anytime soon.
I was gathering up my materials dejectedly when Little Big Tom roused himself.
“If you do want legal advice, though,” he said, to my surprise, “there’s someone who might be able to help.”
We were driving on the freeway in Little Big Tom’s truck. He still seemed pretty out of it, but at least he’d had the presence of mind to put on pants. I admired that. And even if this supposed legal advice turned out to be a dead end, which I considered highly probable, at least it was getting him out of the house, or the motel, rather. My questions about where we were going and who we were going to see were waved away.
“Sit tight” was all he would say.
I sat tight.
It was yet another silent ride. I suppose that was partly owing to my having freaked him out with the Catcher Code, but also it was clear that Little Big Tom wasn’t doing so well in general. He even passed a trucker without doing the hand signal to try to get him to sound the horn, and he went by the ramp for Filibuster Road without even saying “Filibuster? I didn’t even know her.” It was almost like he wasn’t the same guy.
Eventually we exited the freeway and drove down a frontage road along the bay, finally edging in toward a little line of houseboats moored to a small dock. I almost literally slapped my forehead.
“Flapjack?” I said.
“Flapjack,” said Little Big Tom. “He has a law degree.”
“Wonderful,” I said. This ought to be good.
Flapjack answered the houseboat door with a shotgun in his hands, totally naked except for a grubby bathrobe that barely closed around his enormous belly and failed completely to conceal that which was in urgent need of concealment.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, motioning us in with the gun.
“Flapjack doesn’t like visitors,” whispered Little Big Tom reassuringly.
“Wonderful,” I said.
I had never been on a houseboat before, and I was surprised at how unboatlike it really was. Once you got down the stairs, it was like being in a compact, damp room. If a fastidious person had lived there, it might have been kind of a cool setup, everything stowed in a neat series of cleverly designed drawers and cabinets; pieces of built-in furniture doing double or triple duty, like the table-counter-desk; polished brass whatchamacallits; the sound of the shorebirds and the lonely whistle of the freight trains in the distance. Well, that was the ideal. The reality of Flapjack’s houseboat was quite different. It was a filthy, chaotic collection of little piles of junk and trash that were at various stages of joining together into larger piles of junk and trash. It smelled a bit like the girls’ restroom at the Salthaven Rec Center, the one with the broken lock. I was afraid to touch anything, lest I disturb any of the animals that were, in all probability, nesting within.
Several layers deep, poking out here and there through the grimy thicket of refuse, could be seen evidence of a once thriving and obviously pretty interesting life. I mean stacks of LPs, moldering books, guitars, electronic equipment, and quite a few large paintings leaning in careless clumps, apparently Flapjack’s own work. Some of them, despite the absence of naked ladies, seemed pretty good. I was looking at the wreck of a human life, a wreck that genius guitar playing and a supposed law degree hadn’t managed to salvage.
Little Big Tom looked at me meaningfully as Flapjack motioned to us to sit on a small benchlike sofa while he settled himself on the floor, or deck, I suppose you’d say, across from us in what I think is called the lotus position—an impressive contortion for such a fat person—with the gun across his knees. Fortunately, his belly hung all the way down to the floor, restoring his modesty. Like the Buddha. We stared at each other.
Little Big Tom motioned me to begin. So I presented my indictment against the Universe, in all its particulars, for the fourth time, handing over the documents to Flapjack at the appropriate points, telling it all as carefully and clearly as I could. I was getting pretty good at it, with all this practice. Flapjack appeared to be engaged and following me closely but made no comment till I was finished.
Actually, he stared at me for quite some time after I’d reached the end, an unreadable expression on his face. I was used to that. It was a lot to take in all at once, I knew.
Finally, he started laughing. It began as a quiet chuckle and built to a boat-shaking thunder of deep, resonant belly laughs, punctuated by the occasional ghost of a cough, and in the end dissolving into the by-now-familiar emphysemic hacking that was his signature sound effect. He wore a wry expression.
“You’ll never manage it,” he said. “Not in a thousand years.” He began to laugh again, and to elaborate on why I’d never manage it in a thousand years, waving my documents for emphasis. They got Eisenhower, he said, and Kennedy, and they got Nixon, too. The key to the whole conspiracy is a code written into the United States Constitution that, when properly deciphered, reveals that all articles and provisions contained in it are really to be understood to mean the exact opposite of what they say literally. Presidents and other leaders who resist when informed of the code are destroyed by scandal or assassination, and regular people who begin to piece it together, if detected by the Reptilians, are either instantly vaporized or closely monitored by biological microchips rigged to superheat the brains of those who get too close to unraveling the mystery. The biochips are introduced into the host subject by means of tiny darts shot from the robotic surveillance insects that monitor our cities. The only way to tell if you’ve been infected is if you see faint streams of code and Reptilian characters racing across your peripheral vision: a quick suicide is your only option then, since removing the biochip would entail the removal of the entire brain and spinal column. That’s what happened to Ambrose Bierce, Jack Parsons, and Bishop Pike, and to Jimi, Janis, Lenny, and possibly Kurt, too. And that’s how we got Vietnam, McDonald’s, credit cards, the designated hitter rule, and the Reagan presidency. Lyndon Johnson was himself a Reptilian in disguise, and in our contemporary world, the actor Keanu Reeves is perhaps the most powerful Reptilian of them all. The world’s population is enslaved by brain manipulation, mechanical insect surveillance, and credit card debt, all controlled at the Federal World Government Headquarters in deep caverns hidden in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
Then Flapjack showed me a bloody spot on his arm where he had managed to dig out a surveillance dart before it was able to deposit its parasitic biochip into his bloodstream. He nodded knowingly.
“So you see,” he concluded with a warm, ironic chuckle, “you’ll never fight them with this.” He waved my papers derisively. “They’ll melt your brain before you get within ten miles of any courtroom. But if you want my legal advice, here it is: when you see them coming, shoot to kill. It’s your only chance.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
We were silent yet again in the truck on the way back to the motel. I had certainly gotten Little Big Tom’s message, which was: it is, in fact, possible to be too paranoid. And if I didn’t want to wind up like Flapjack, I’d have to try to recalibrate my paranoia to a more acceptable level.
My lawsuit days were over. Flapjack had scared me straight.
“Thanks … chief,” I said. Of all the lessons he had ever tried to teach me, this was perhaps the only one that had worked, or even been comprehensible.
Little Big Tom rumpled my hair and smiled wearily. I left him with Sam Hellerman’s motivational tape, because if anyone needed artificially induced self-confidence these days, it was Little Big Tom. It hadn’t worked too well for me, as far as I could tell, but who knew? It was certainly worth a try.