“DOUBLE FATTINESS IS ANOTHER GOOD ONE.”
Blue sky and the laboring whine of the Cessna climbing fast.
“Dreaming the Reality.”
“What?”
Blue sky. Smear of whitecapped water, a sliver of firmament. Blue sky.
Hurtling through empty space on a diagonal, gravity’s drag—what do they call it?—g-force, makes Jay’s eyes ache in their sockets, and his fingers tremble.
“Guy in a maze,” Dunn explains, no stress in his voice. No sign that he’s mid-loop of some inexplicable aerobatic maneuver involving roll, pitch, and yaw; he could be sitting on the seawall by the Tuna Club, sucking on a warmish microbrew and watching the sun set over East Peak. “Guy in a maze confronts kickboxing killers, prostitutes who can crush watermelons with their thighs.”
Jay’s muscles tighten and his stomach flips.
“Everybody’s lying,” Dunn says.
Blue sky. And the angry whinge of the plane:
“There’s a warlock with an army of female zombies brought to life by pounding spikes through their skulls—”
A sense of spinning, but with no horizon to reference, it’s like a crushing onset of vertigo until an upside-down cockeyed world slides into Jay’s field of vision and hangs there, sky, ocean, and the litter of civilization with which Los Angeles tumbles off the continent—but in reverse order—
“—all these nests of worms and centipedes that grow under the skin—”
—and Jay, eyes closing, cheeks sheet-white—
“—a magician,” Dunn revels, “who drinks human milk to keep from aging—”
—the plane twists, flips, and swan-dives earthward, toward blue-black whitecapped swirls of sea, gaining speed, a death dive, and—
“—not to mention all the usual exploding bodies, love potions, amnesia, hysterical blindness—”
—through a gathering gossamer fume that seems to be spun out of nothing, a pillow of dreams—
“—crocodiles slit open to release snow-white doves, fireballs, and this really confounding subplot involving—”
—g-forces blading Jay’s cheeks like rubber—
“—a lost little boy who rebels against his well-meaning but slutty mom.”
At the last minute, Dunn pulls back on the yoke, the Cessna arcs up and strafes low across opaque sine waves of indigo water that foam and fall away.
“Epic.”
They rocket into white blindness.
Dunn chortles: “Marine inversion from the Santa Ana situation. Hodeeho.” He eases back on the throttle and pops his sunglasses up onto his head, squinting into the impenetrable fog.
“Soup,” he says. “Technical flying from here on, ladies and gentlemen.”
Jay shifts in his seat, swallowing the acid regurge that rose to high tide in his throat.
“Skywriting, sometimes you’d go through a fat letter you just laid down and get somesuch like this. Only for the moment, though. Like you forgot something. Then it’d . . . clear.”
Jay feels delivered into abeyance. No sense of movement, or direction, just the steady hum of the twin engines and the thwop of the propeller blades in the moist air.
“Can’t we just climb up out of it?” Jay asks, whereupon a jumbo jet breaks through the brume, its belly huge, jet turbines roaring. Dunn’s prop plane pinwheels and barely avoids crashing into it.
“Whoa, Nelly!”
The noise is astonishing.
The jet vanishes almost instantly, it happens so fast Jay doesn’t even feel the panic until it’s already gone, leaving a whirlpool of turbulence and wind shear that has Dunn fighting with his throttle just to stay aloft.
“—I don’t think so, no,” he says to Jay. “We’re kinda splitting hairs between LAX and John Wayne flight grids here.”
Jay thinks: No shit.
They’re in the fog for a long time. As if someone painted the cockpit canopy opaque white. For a long time they don’t speak. Jay wants Dunn to concentrate.
“It’s like we’ve been erased,” Dunn announces finally. Fluttering shadow geometries glide past. Buildings?
Erased. Dunn has no idea how that resonates for Jay.
A Milky White Maze, Jay thinks.
Jay’s surprised he said it aloud. “My friend runs experiments with mice in mazes,” he explains. “I used to work with him. There’s one, it’s made of translucent plastic, sometimes it’s even suspended in water, lit from all sides. The rats have no visual points of reference. The world is a blur.”
A canyon of huge buildings looms dead ahead. Massing from nothing. The Cessna, jacked sideways by Dunn’s sharp reflex, banks gracefully and slips through unscathed, swallowed again by the stubborn marine layer.
“What’s the point?” Dunn asks, meaning the maze. He turns to look at Jay, his face lit cold and white and surreal and edged green by the dull glow of the instrument panel.
“I don’t know,” Jay says, sorry he brought it up.
“Maybe,” Dunn suggests, “it’s so they won’t remember how to get back to where they started. So the rats gotta, you know, always go forward.”
“Mice, but yeah.” But Jay’s mind goes elsewhere. Back to where this journey started. Vaughn and the lab: experimental neurosis. “To the doors.” Consuming themselves, in their choler and confusion.
“The what?”
“Doors,” Jay repeats. “Forward to and through the doors.”
“Oh.” Dunn, nodding as if he understands.
Crackle of static on the radio, some airport control tower, comprehensible only to Sam. Dunn asks why Jay quit that job with Vaughn. Jay recalls the day he was tasked with shaving two dozen rats’ heads, placing them in a clamp-like restraint, using a glorified drill press to puncture tiny holes just behind the ears into which thin wires were cemented and soldered to solid-state microprocessors the rats wore like football helmets, chin-strapped on, blinking teal LEDs and a whip antennae, and then Vaughn’s project leader, a sun-starved psycho-behavioral post-doc goth goddess with violet-tinted contact lenses and a tangle of ginger hair and a filthy lab coat, tapping steadily on a wireless tablet keyboard sending messages to the rats that had them gyrate tilt-a-wheel until their eyes bled and they convulsed into comas.
“I got let go,” Jay says. “Funding issues.”
A dreamworld flickers in and out of existence as the squawk of air traffic control harmonizes with the drone of the plane. Parallel rows of halogen lights beckon them forward, skewed in the cockpit windshield.
“Jeez. We’re cockeyed,” Dunn says, and fusses with the wings to straighten their orientation to the runway guides as the Cessna gently falls to its impending landing.
Then: a muddle of flashing red lights: another phalanx of patrol cars, this time police, racing along on either side of the runway to keep pace with the plane.
Unnerved, Dunn says, “Shit—what are—FUCK. Cops.” Jay, of course, assumes it’s Public’s guys, Feds, waiting to re-collect him, and starts to mentally resign himself to it, but Dunn throws the throttle forward, and the engine complains because: “Oh, man, and I got twelve kilos of pot in the luggage bay. SHIT. SHIT.”
Twelve kilos of—what?
Landing gear toes the tarmac, the tires skid and the plane bounces. Directly ahead of them, at the far end of the runway, are more cop cars and emergency vehicles and lights flashing spectral through the fog. The Cessna, powering up, accelerates toward the blockade, landing gear touching twice more before leaving the tarmac for good and barely clearing the hardware below, men in fire suits and uniform frozen, watching as the plane careens over them, one strut clipping something with a sickening metal shriek of a wheel torn loose, and the plane is tugged violently sideways, Sam Dunn screaming as he tries to hold his plane from nose-diving left: “LOSE THE WEED! LOSE THE WEED!”
The Cessna lifts wildly, knifes into the fog, and the police dragnet vanishes behind them. Muffled cry of the engines peaking and then simply cutting out. Stalled.
Silence.
“Initiating plan B,” Dunn mumbles, numb.
Jay is afraid to move. Waiting for the impact of a crash . . . that doesn’t happen. Plan B?
Dunn is fighting with switches, trying to will the engines to restart, and yelling at Jay: “THERE’S A—I’M—DUDE, helpmeout . . . LUGGAGE HATCH! IN THE BACK! IN THE BACK! THROW—THE WEED—OUT the DOOR—BEFORE I PUT THIS FUCKER DOWN! I’LL . . .” Dunn doesn’t finish the thought.
Scrambling back through the cockpit only because maybe then Dunn will shut up and concentrate, losing his balance, catching himself on the bulkhead, Jay gropes at the prominent handle he finds on the floor in the back of the cabin, twists and yanks the compartment hatch open, revealing: nothing. No dope. Just the mailbags. He braces himself to turn, confused, frowning, and say something to Dunn, but Dunn is no longer at the Cessna’s controls and as Jay’s brain struggles to process all these incoming contradictions his world explodes because the plane finds ground.
The noise of the impact is so deafening Jay registers only the change of pressure in his ears. He’s thrown violently forward, feetfirst, but somehow catches and braces himself between the backs of two seats while the fuselage fishtails and carves like the bow of a boat through turf and mud that sprays helter-skelter into the cockpit behind a bright curtain of shattered windshield glass as the plane finally impales itself on the low branches of a huge tree, bark and greenwood erupting scattershot, the smell of burnt wood and jet fuel and a gray darkness that grows a muffled silence, fingers of fire reaching upward, smoke gathering, the sound of Jay’s breathing, coughing, his own heartbeat, the sound of his shoes banging on metal, the searing pain that shoots through his ankle and then a perfect oval punches out of the darkness as the Cessna’s door falls away and a shadow passes. Chalky light spills in on Jay, the weblike fractured branches of the tree crowd the cabin, but he’s been sheltered by the seats.
The Cessna’s torn and buckled metal tick tick ticks with stress points released. Hacking up the acrid smoke, Jay tumbles out of the plane, onto the cold, wet grass of a small city park. Fog hangs curtained across a bright green field bordered by trees that seem to be holding the formless drapery aloft.
He rises onto his hands and knees, looks back at the plane. Tangled fingers of oak have punctured the cockpit like an iron maiden where Sam was sitting. Tongues of flame lick the broken cockpit glass still held in the windshield’s warped frame. Reflection of tree, sky, fire, and the exquisitely fractured safety glass prevent Jay from seeing inside.
Sirens, distant, mournful. Growing louder.
Jay gets up, his ankle fat, aching. And he runs. Like Ginger told him to.