Withdrawal
It was so hot that shade was trying to find shade. Dust hung in the air, clinging to the humidity. Walking through it would get you filthy in seconds. Driving through it was like getting a carwash in reverse.
Irving was driving an ancient Pontiac. He'd skipped a few rest stops on account of they looked only marginally more appealing than the inside of his car, and besides, none of them had anything to drink. Irving needed a sip of something.
A billboard sprang slowly from the horizon. Several miles and a lot of squinting later, "BEEF JERKY, 50 MILES" could be read. Irving sped up a little. Anyplace selling beef jerky would have to have beverages. He drove with renewed enthusiasm, sitting up a little straighter, turning up the Waylon Jennings just a tad. The extra stridency was bracing.
50 miles rolled by in a brown blur. Dust. Lonely abandoned buildings. Desperate shrubbery. The promise of jerky.
Finally, a town hove into view. A huddled collection of sand blasted buildings, one of which sported a faded "BEFF JERKY" sign and a depiction of a maniacally grinning cow.
His boots made tracks in the aisle of the market, which is what it was. The beef jerky was simply a selling point. If you've got a desert, you've got someone who thinks selling beef jerky is a really good idea. Nature usually sorts them out eventually.
There were no coolers, so Irving grabbed a warm bottle of water from the shelf. "Mountain Geyser" it proclaimed, and indeed, there was a mountain with a geyser coming out of it on the label. He plonked it down on the counter, between the buckets of matches and lighters and cheap plastic toys and herbal supplements for increased girth. He fished out his wallet. Empty. Patted his pockets. Lint wouldn't buy him anything.
The ancient clerk and possible owner watched all of this with shiny, alert eyes. Eyes that seemed to have no color of their own, they simply reflected the available light. He pointed over Irving's shoulder, to the building across the street. Bank of the Holy Union. He nodded. Irving nodded, and headed back out.
The Bank of the Holy Union was probably the nicest building in town, and it was certainly the only bank that Irving had ever seen sporting a stained glass rose window. The atm was in front, next to the door.
He had to wipe dust off of the screen with his sleeve to see the green glow of the letters:
BANK OF THE HOLY UNION, EST. 1954
INSERT CARD
Irving inserted his card.
IRVING BELTRAN.
THERE WILL BE A FEE FOR THIS TRANSACTION.
DO YOU ACCEPT THE FEE?
Irving pressed the "Yes" button.
Irving's vision clouded, as a brief flash of light stabbed through his eyes, filled his brain, and was gone.
FEE DEDUCTED. PLEASE CHOOSE FROM THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS:
WITHDRAWAL
BALANCE
EXIT
Irving selected "Withdrawal".
ARE YOU SURE?
Again, Irving pressed the "Yes" button. As soon as his finger left the smooth metal button, he was catapulted out of his body and into a deep, velvety darkness. it was weirdly familiar and comforting and things were starting to get very strange in the area he was floating in. The pinpricks of light that he thought were stars started to form a latticework around his slowly drifting body. There was another flash of light, and he was elsewhere.
Blue. Blue and white. Wisps. Clouds! He was on his back, looking up at the sky. He sat up. Or rather, attempted to sit up. His brain was sending commands, but they didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Clouds drifted as he tried to collect information about himself and his surroundings. Was he tied down, like Gulliver? Was he paralyzed? He wasn’t getting any input from any senses but vision. He tried closing his eyes, had no luck. They didn’t seem to mind that they’d been open for a few minutes without blinking, though. That was useful information.
He decided that maybe if he concentrated on one particular part of his body, he could will it to move. He focused his entire being on the index finger of his right hand. Or rather, where he expected the index finger of his right hand to be. He imagined that it was lifting off of the ground. He felt nothing. Disappointed, he stopped trying. And heard a faint “clang”.
Interesting. Ok, he’d forgotten that he couldn’t feel anything, which limited his ability to test his theories. At least he’d determined that he could hear things, so it wasn’t a total loss. Now he was going to try to move his head to the side, to see if he could see anything besides sky.
Concentrate, visualize the physical process of movement. He heard a scraping sound, and the sky panned to the left until it met a featureless concrete horizon. Now left. The same thing, but there was a structure far in the distance. On a whim, he concentrated on seeing the structure, magnifying it and bringing it into focus. To his great surprise, it worked – his vision swooped outward until he could see the structure clearly, and he told it to stop. It looked like a rocket launch assembly, sans rocket.
Time to stand up. He thought about his waist, levered his top half up to a vertical position. More concrete, and now he could see his legs. They were metal. He brought a hand around in front of his face, and it was metal, too. He turned it over, flexed the fingers. There were grooves running up his forearm to his elbow, which had a strange sort of socket joint. The left arm had grooves in a different pattern, but the same elbow socket.
Apparently he was a robot. This had possibilities. He’d dreamed of being a robot when he was a kid, but this seemed to be a lot more work than it had been back then. If this was a robot body that he’d dreamed up, it would have lots of hidden features, and he set about finding them.
Hours later, he’d discovered rocket launchers in his right arm, a flame thrower in his left, fingers that could extend for several feet, rockets in the soles of his feet, the ability to see in the dark (he cupped his hands over his eyes), and for some reason, there was a safe built into his chest, behind a door.
He had fun blasting holes in the concrete, and was just about to try flying over to the tower when he heard a clacking sound behind him. He turned, and saw a small metal beetle scuttling toward him. It was holding something in between its front legs. He blasted it with a rocket, heard another clattering sound, whirled, saw another beetle, hit it, too. After the fifth beetle had met a fiery demise, he decided that he’d let the beetle get a little closer. It came right up to the edge of his metal foot and held up a card. He reached down and picked it up. It was a combination. Presumably for the safe in his chest. He tried it, and the door swung open. Rummaging around in there revealed a small box with a single button on the outside. Small text above the button read “Press when ready”.
Curious, he pressed it. And was immediately, and startlingly, standing back in front of the ATM machine again.
“What a minute!” he yelled. “I wasn’t done yet! I want to go back!” There was no response, just the whistling of the wind around the buildings. The screen of the ATM had changed, though. Now it said:
WITHDRAWAL COMPLETE.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE YOUR BALANCE?
Irving pressed the “Yes” button.
BALANCE
DREAMS: 2,573
NIGHTMARES: 7,127
WOULD YOU LIKE ANOTHER TRANSACTION?
Irving pressed “Yes”, of course. He accepted the fee, felt the disorientation as the white light flashed through him, and was back in the void again. This time, he was taken to a dreamland that must have been constructed sometime during puberty. Let’s just say that he spent quite a while there, and came back somewhat moist and out of breath.
Back in the beef jerky market, the old man with the shiny eyes kept an eye on Irving. Hours passed, then a day or two. The old man pulled a plastic chair from the back of the store, heated up a can of soup, and shoved a pair of sunglasses in his front pocket. He gently pushed Irving down into the chair, ignoring the stiff limbs and the slightly twitching, unseeing eyes. He covered them with the sunglasses, poured some soup down his throat, went back across the street to bed.
Irving hadn’t moved in the morning. The old man shrugged. Damned if he was gonna change a grown man’s diapers. He’d keep feeding him every so often though. He’d put everything on a tab, hopefully square it up later. He was pretty sure there’d be a later. There usually was.
There was an in-system interface to the ATM, and Irving had managed to find it. He discovered that beetles had buttons on their bellies, and if he caught one and flipped it over, a screen opened in the air in front of him. He had no need to go back to his body. He was running through his dreams at an alarming pace, having the time of his life. And he wasn’t touching the nightmares, of course. Nor did he notice that the number of nightmares grew by five for every one dream he consumed. Balances had to be observed.
Eventually, Irving had run through a lifetime of dreams, living for days or months in some of them, while only minutes passed in real life. And then he was done. There were no more dreams, his balance was zero. He went back to the main interface, already thinking about what life would be like when he got back to reality. He already felt a little hollow, the creep of listlessness. Things seemed wooden, mechanical. After spending so much time in the world of dreams, shaping his own environment, he felt shackled by the in-line processes of “meat space”, the requirement that one thing had to follow another. There was no skipping ahead, there was no opening of doors to find a miraculous shortcut, there was no instantaneous, on-demand serendipity.
The interface hung in the air over his head, and he stared at it, unseeing. It had changed. The options were reduced to one: WITHDRAWAL. EXIT was gone, and there were no more dreams. Only nightmares. Dread crawled over his back on a million tiny sharp legs. He remembered all of those old jokes about being careful what you wish for. He remembered the flash of light and temporary blindness that accompanied each dream withdrawal, recalled that there was a fee that was never specified. He looked at the number of nightmares in his account. 19,992. Almost triple what it had been. And it seemed that the only way he could get out would be to live through each and every single one of them. He took a deep breath, opened up the first one. As the darkness surrounded him, he was fleetingly glad that there was no fee for nightmares. And then it began.
Across the street, the old man with the shining eyes saw Irving’s body topple over backwards in the chair. His body was stiffly convulsing. The old man pulled out a grimy sheet of paper, called a circled number. An hour later, an ambulance appeared, strapped Irving to a gurney, took him away.
Years passed. Gallons of sedatives had coursed through Irving’s veins, an endless procession of doctors and nurses and orderlies had looked at him, stuck needles in him, yelled at him, hit him, did worse things in the secrecy of the night. Irving didn’t notice any of it. His eyes remained tightly shut, his face remained tense. He was paying his fees, living his nightmares, trying to hang on to sanity. The nightmares were different from the dreams. There was no control, there were no exits. The nightmare rolled over and through you, and all you could do was try to keep the terror from hurting you. He retreated farther and farther into himself, built walls, pulled tendrils of himself back behind the fortress, trying to hang on to who he was. He repeated his name, over and over again, afraid that he’d lose it if he didn’t. He couldn’t bear to be without a name. Names were powerful, even in nightmares.
And then one day, it was over. 14 years had passed, and he was finally able to exit the system. But his debt was not yet paid. His nightmares were over, but he still had to pay for the dreams. He knew where to go, what to do. He opened his eyes. The color had drained from his irises, leaving only a reflection of the fluorescent light above. He waited. After the years of constant, jarring movements and surprise by countless horrors, the antiseptic calmness of normal life was like a balm. He slowly began to heal, but he never spoke, not even once.
They released him eventually. He had some bland, out dated clothes that the hospital had given him, he had his wallet. He hitchhiked to the nearest big city, walked to a certain address, rode the elevator to a particular floor, walked into an office. He sat down in the waiting room, stared placidly at the blank walls. Waited. Someone ushered him inside, guided him to a dark paneled office, shook his hand, put papers in front of him, handed him a pen. He signed, not bothering to read them. He knew what they said. He was handed a checkbook and a credit card, had his hand shaken again, and was led politely out.
He bought a car, a cheap one. He drove it out to the desert, through the thick air and the waves of heat, to a cluster of weather beaten buildings. The market was still there. The old man with the shiny eyes was still there. Irving paid his tab, walked across the street to the bank, went inside, came out again a few minutes later, got in his car, and drove off. Hundreds of miles through the desert. He stopped at an abandoned building by the side of the road, pulled his car up to the door.
Over the next few months, a series of trucks came, workers repaired, built a new structure across the street. A bank, complete with a shiny new ATM. When they were gone, Irving sat behind the counter of a small market. Billboards told the world that the best beef jerky was only a few miles ahead, and Irving Beltran watched the ATM across the street, through the dust and the wind, his view punctuated by cars not interested in beef jerky. He waited to pay his debt. Beef jerky was just the hook. Those who are bereft of dreams become parasites.
copyright gasoline hobo, 2006
Irving was driving an ancient Pontiac. He'd skipped a few rest stops on account of they looked only marginally more appealing than the inside of his car, and besides, none of them had anything to drink. Irving needed a sip of something.
A billboard sprang slowly from the horizon. Several miles and a lot of squinting later, "BEEF JERKY, 50 MILES" could be read. Irving sped up a little. Anyplace selling beef jerky would have to have beverages. He drove with renewed enthusiasm, sitting up a little straighter, turning up the Waylon Jennings just a tad. The extra stridency was bracing.
50 miles rolled by in a brown blur. Dust. Lonely abandoned buildings. Desperate shrubbery. The promise of jerky.
Finally, a town hove into view. A huddled collection of sand blasted buildings, one of which sported a faded "BEFF JERKY" sign and a depiction of a maniacally grinning cow.
His boots made tracks in the aisle of the market, which is what it was. The beef jerky was simply a selling point. If you've got a desert, you've got someone who thinks selling beef jerky is a really good idea. Nature usually sorts them out eventually.
There were no coolers, so Irving grabbed a warm bottle of water from the shelf. "Mountain Geyser" it proclaimed, and indeed, there was a mountain with a geyser coming out of it on the label. He plonked it down on the counter, between the buckets of matches and lighters and cheap plastic toys and herbal supplements for increased girth. He fished out his wallet. Empty. Patted his pockets. Lint wouldn't buy him anything.
The ancient clerk and possible owner watched all of this with shiny, alert eyes. Eyes that seemed to have no color of their own, they simply reflected the available light. He pointed over Irving's shoulder, to the building across the street. Bank of the Holy Union. He nodded. Irving nodded, and headed back out.
The Bank of the Holy Union was probably the nicest building in town, and it was certainly the only bank that Irving had ever seen sporting a stained glass rose window. The atm was in front, next to the door.
He had to wipe dust off of the screen with his sleeve to see the green glow of the letters:
BANK OF THE HOLY UNION, EST. 1954
INSERT CARD
Irving inserted his card.
IRVING BELTRAN.
THERE WILL BE A FEE FOR THIS TRANSACTION.
DO YOU ACCEPT THE FEE?
Irving pressed the "Yes" button.
Irving's vision clouded, as a brief flash of light stabbed through his eyes, filled his brain, and was gone.
FEE DEDUCTED. PLEASE CHOOSE FROM THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS:
WITHDRAWAL
BALANCE
EXIT
Irving selected "Withdrawal".
ARE YOU SURE?
Again, Irving pressed the "Yes" button. As soon as his finger left the smooth metal button, he was catapulted out of his body and into a deep, velvety darkness. it was weirdly familiar and comforting and things were starting to get very strange in the area he was floating in. The pinpricks of light that he thought were stars started to form a latticework around his slowly drifting body. There was another flash of light, and he was elsewhere.
Blue. Blue and white. Wisps. Clouds! He was on his back, looking up at the sky. He sat up. Or rather, attempted to sit up. His brain was sending commands, but they didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Clouds drifted as he tried to collect information about himself and his surroundings. Was he tied down, like Gulliver? Was he paralyzed? He wasn’t getting any input from any senses but vision. He tried closing his eyes, had no luck. They didn’t seem to mind that they’d been open for a few minutes without blinking, though. That was useful information.
He decided that maybe if he concentrated on one particular part of his body, he could will it to move. He focused his entire being on the index finger of his right hand. Or rather, where he expected the index finger of his right hand to be. He imagined that it was lifting off of the ground. He felt nothing. Disappointed, he stopped trying. And heard a faint “clang”.
Interesting. Ok, he’d forgotten that he couldn’t feel anything, which limited his ability to test his theories. At least he’d determined that he could hear things, so it wasn’t a total loss. Now he was going to try to move his head to the side, to see if he could see anything besides sky.
Concentrate, visualize the physical process of movement. He heard a scraping sound, and the sky panned to the left until it met a featureless concrete horizon. Now left. The same thing, but there was a structure far in the distance. On a whim, he concentrated on seeing the structure, magnifying it and bringing it into focus. To his great surprise, it worked – his vision swooped outward until he could see the structure clearly, and he told it to stop. It looked like a rocket launch assembly, sans rocket.
Time to stand up. He thought about his waist, levered his top half up to a vertical position. More concrete, and now he could see his legs. They were metal. He brought a hand around in front of his face, and it was metal, too. He turned it over, flexed the fingers. There were grooves running up his forearm to his elbow, which had a strange sort of socket joint. The left arm had grooves in a different pattern, but the same elbow socket.
Apparently he was a robot. This had possibilities. He’d dreamed of being a robot when he was a kid, but this seemed to be a lot more work than it had been back then. If this was a robot body that he’d dreamed up, it would have lots of hidden features, and he set about finding them.
Hours later, he’d discovered rocket launchers in his right arm, a flame thrower in his left, fingers that could extend for several feet, rockets in the soles of his feet, the ability to see in the dark (he cupped his hands over his eyes), and for some reason, there was a safe built into his chest, behind a door.
He had fun blasting holes in the concrete, and was just about to try flying over to the tower when he heard a clacking sound behind him. He turned, and saw a small metal beetle scuttling toward him. It was holding something in between its front legs. He blasted it with a rocket, heard another clattering sound, whirled, saw another beetle, hit it, too. After the fifth beetle had met a fiery demise, he decided that he’d let the beetle get a little closer. It came right up to the edge of his metal foot and held up a card. He reached down and picked it up. It was a combination. Presumably for the safe in his chest. He tried it, and the door swung open. Rummaging around in there revealed a small box with a single button on the outside. Small text above the button read “Press when ready”.
Curious, he pressed it. And was immediately, and startlingly, standing back in front of the ATM machine again.
“What a minute!” he yelled. “I wasn’t done yet! I want to go back!” There was no response, just the whistling of the wind around the buildings. The screen of the ATM had changed, though. Now it said:
WITHDRAWAL COMPLETE.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE YOUR BALANCE?
Irving pressed the “Yes” button.
BALANCE
DREAMS: 2,573
NIGHTMARES: 7,127
WOULD YOU LIKE ANOTHER TRANSACTION?
Irving pressed “Yes”, of course. He accepted the fee, felt the disorientation as the white light flashed through him, and was back in the void again. This time, he was taken to a dreamland that must have been constructed sometime during puberty. Let’s just say that he spent quite a while there, and came back somewhat moist and out of breath.
Back in the beef jerky market, the old man with the shiny eyes kept an eye on Irving. Hours passed, then a day or two. The old man pulled a plastic chair from the back of the store, heated up a can of soup, and shoved a pair of sunglasses in his front pocket. He gently pushed Irving down into the chair, ignoring the stiff limbs and the slightly twitching, unseeing eyes. He covered them with the sunglasses, poured some soup down his throat, went back across the street to bed.
Irving hadn’t moved in the morning. The old man shrugged. Damned if he was gonna change a grown man’s diapers. He’d keep feeding him every so often though. He’d put everything on a tab, hopefully square it up later. He was pretty sure there’d be a later. There usually was.
There was an in-system interface to the ATM, and Irving had managed to find it. He discovered that beetles had buttons on their bellies, and if he caught one and flipped it over, a screen opened in the air in front of him. He had no need to go back to his body. He was running through his dreams at an alarming pace, having the time of his life. And he wasn’t touching the nightmares, of course. Nor did he notice that the number of nightmares grew by five for every one dream he consumed. Balances had to be observed.
Eventually, Irving had run through a lifetime of dreams, living for days or months in some of them, while only minutes passed in real life. And then he was done. There were no more dreams, his balance was zero. He went back to the main interface, already thinking about what life would be like when he got back to reality. He already felt a little hollow, the creep of listlessness. Things seemed wooden, mechanical. After spending so much time in the world of dreams, shaping his own environment, he felt shackled by the in-line processes of “meat space”, the requirement that one thing had to follow another. There was no skipping ahead, there was no opening of doors to find a miraculous shortcut, there was no instantaneous, on-demand serendipity.
The interface hung in the air over his head, and he stared at it, unseeing. It had changed. The options were reduced to one: WITHDRAWAL. EXIT was gone, and there were no more dreams. Only nightmares. Dread crawled over his back on a million tiny sharp legs. He remembered all of those old jokes about being careful what you wish for. He remembered the flash of light and temporary blindness that accompanied each dream withdrawal, recalled that there was a fee that was never specified. He looked at the number of nightmares in his account. 19,992. Almost triple what it had been. And it seemed that the only way he could get out would be to live through each and every single one of them. He took a deep breath, opened up the first one. As the darkness surrounded him, he was fleetingly glad that there was no fee for nightmares. And then it began.
Across the street, the old man with the shining eyes saw Irving’s body topple over backwards in the chair. His body was stiffly convulsing. The old man pulled out a grimy sheet of paper, called a circled number. An hour later, an ambulance appeared, strapped Irving to a gurney, took him away.
Years passed. Gallons of sedatives had coursed through Irving’s veins, an endless procession of doctors and nurses and orderlies had looked at him, stuck needles in him, yelled at him, hit him, did worse things in the secrecy of the night. Irving didn’t notice any of it. His eyes remained tightly shut, his face remained tense. He was paying his fees, living his nightmares, trying to hang on to sanity. The nightmares were different from the dreams. There was no control, there were no exits. The nightmare rolled over and through you, and all you could do was try to keep the terror from hurting you. He retreated farther and farther into himself, built walls, pulled tendrils of himself back behind the fortress, trying to hang on to who he was. He repeated his name, over and over again, afraid that he’d lose it if he didn’t. He couldn’t bear to be without a name. Names were powerful, even in nightmares.
And then one day, it was over. 14 years had passed, and he was finally able to exit the system. But his debt was not yet paid. His nightmares were over, but he still had to pay for the dreams. He knew where to go, what to do. He opened his eyes. The color had drained from his irises, leaving only a reflection of the fluorescent light above. He waited. After the years of constant, jarring movements and surprise by countless horrors, the antiseptic calmness of normal life was like a balm. He slowly began to heal, but he never spoke, not even once.
They released him eventually. He had some bland, out dated clothes that the hospital had given him, he had his wallet. He hitchhiked to the nearest big city, walked to a certain address, rode the elevator to a particular floor, walked into an office. He sat down in the waiting room, stared placidly at the blank walls. Waited. Someone ushered him inside, guided him to a dark paneled office, shook his hand, put papers in front of him, handed him a pen. He signed, not bothering to read them. He knew what they said. He was handed a checkbook and a credit card, had his hand shaken again, and was led politely out.
He bought a car, a cheap one. He drove it out to the desert, through the thick air and the waves of heat, to a cluster of weather beaten buildings. The market was still there. The old man with the shiny eyes was still there. Irving paid his tab, walked across the street to the bank, went inside, came out again a few minutes later, got in his car, and drove off. Hundreds of miles through the desert. He stopped at an abandoned building by the side of the road, pulled his car up to the door.
Over the next few months, a series of trucks came, workers repaired, built a new structure across the street. A bank, complete with a shiny new ATM. When they were gone, Irving sat behind the counter of a small market. Billboards told the world that the best beef jerky was only a few miles ahead, and Irving Beltran watched the ATM across the street, through the dust and the wind, his view punctuated by cars not interested in beef jerky. He waited to pay his debt. Beef jerky was just the hook. Those who are bereft of dreams become parasites.
copyright gasoline hobo, 2006
coughed this up at 11:12 PM
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