Chapter Fourteen
A Breach of Trust - The Dissolution of Friendship
It was a bright, clear Saturday morning when Jeff slipped into his blue jeans, tee shirt, New Balance running shoes and picked up the phone. Tup had called a few weeks before and said she was going to give up substance abuse. Jeff half believed her but agreed to have lunch with her that afternoon on World III because he wanted to see for himself if she had been in earnest.
It wasn’t that Jeff hoped for a solid reconciliation with Tup, but he wanted to be a friend and help her if it were at all possible. For some reason, she made him feel a little guilty. Perhaps he hadn’t said the right things to get her off drugs...maybe he should have tried to be more of a friend...like that.
That same afternoon, Jeff met Tup at a restaurant of her choosing on World III, but as soon as he found her seated at a booth he yelled, “Stop! Stop!” Tup licked the powdered pleek and whined, “You are acting like a little boy. Grow up and try some!”
During the time Jeff sat with her, Tup’s nose bled constantly and blood trickled out of her left ear while red fluid rimmed the bottom of her eyelids.
Jeff gagged and braced himself, “Listen, Tup, we aren’t going to see each other again until you give up substance abuse.” Tup pounded the table angry and screamed, “I can do what I want; who are you to boss me?” Jeff tried to explain, “There is no sense in traveling if you have to enter a new realm coughing, choking, and bleeding from every hole in your head. That is not the way I want to introduce you to my son, Vishnu.”
Tup screeched, “Wimp!” as she smashed her empty glass on the table. On World III, what they use for glass shatters into perfect squares about the size of three-karat diamonds. The glass captured the rainbow in a translucent, shimmering glow of colors, and Jeff suddenly felt he should thank Tup for this breath-taking scene. He opened his mouth to speak but then wondered, “Why am I having such an oblique response to this ordeal?”
Moreover, no one in the restaurant seemed to care that Tup was acting insanely. Jeff looked around the room and it slowly dawned on him that he had met Tup in a pleek and spid bar and grill! It was a place where you could order food, but everyone there was doing pleek and a few were eating spid as well. A feeling of apprehension came over Jeff because he knew he had been given a mind-altering drug.
Journal Entry 1,563
What I recall from The Pleek and Spid Bar and Grill
On World III
Tup sat across from me in the restaurant booth and with a knowing smile on her face, called her friend Plip over. Plip, a gangly, unkempt male in his early thirties, slid into the booth, sat next to Tup, and I watched them watching me. I snarled, “What did you have them put in my food, Tup?”
Tup...Tup...Tup...echoed in my ears as a Venetian sheep and ram of royal siege pranced through my head, doing unspeakable things, “Shakespeare, what of love’s sweet innocence hast thou made?” I had eaten something like waffles and drank a glass of what is called guzzleberry juice. Tup must have told the cook to put something in the food when she placed the order. I was a fool to have trusted her. The juice tasted a little funny but this was never a conscious thought until I started to feel weird and got lost t t t t t t in the broken glass s s s s.
Plip brought his plate with him but when I looked at the omelet-sized serving of spid, it sneezed like a puppy and then made quick, jerking movements like a lizard in an attempt to escape. Plip stabbed it with his fork so it couldn’t escape. It cried out. I had to turn my head away because I couldn’t watch. The squeaking sound the spid made resembled that of a frantic mouse pressed under cat paws.
I turned my head in an effort to regain composure and across from us, I noticed two people at another table. The man was unwrapping something tied up in newspapers, string and wax; the woman was docile and complacently picking her fingernails with a steak knife. Now I’m reliving the bizarre experience.
The man lifts a paperweight of Chicago out of the papers and tears stream down his face, forming kings’ crowns in the soup dish, which has already attracted Royal Canadian, ducks who are presently nibbling at printed flowers on the tablecloth. I turn back to Plip and the spid is now tightly pressed against the window to my right. The glass outlining it is slightly tinged with a veil of perspiration due to the spid’s attempt to diffuse itself through the molecules of the window.
Plip mercilessly extends his arm in order to take another, but I lunge forward in an attempt to save it. However, as I extend my hand and touch the window, there is nothing there…it was then that Plip and Tup laughed hysterically at me. Tup looked more and more like the snake that she was. I said to Tup, “You are a bastard.” and went over to the cashier to pay my bill and order an ambulance.
Blood was dripping down my shirt. I glanced over at Tup and Plip who were greedily licking pleek that was becoming mixed with the blood which dripped into their hands. The cashier looked amused and said, “You don’t need medical help. Just go home and in half an hour you’ll be as good as new.” I screamed at the top of my lungs, “But I’m hallucinating!!”
For about ten seconds there was dead silence in the restaurant. It wasn’t the kind of silence you experience when there is an emergency. It was the kind you experience when you are only fifteen years old and your friends take you to a party and suddenly you realize you are in a sleazy cathouse and you yell, “Hey! These are all whores!!” Then everyone stares at you blankly like you’re too stupid to respond to.
Turning to the cashier I pleaded, “Look. I’ve just been drugged against my will.” The lady smirked at me under a died-white 1950’s teased-bubble hairdo as if projecting, “Who the hell are you asshole?” It was quite evident that money was only a partial payment and realized I’d have to say something to balance the moment, thus re-establishing environmental homeostasis.
The cash register bell rang as she spiked the bill with the rest of the poor bloody bastards stacked underneath. Holding out my hand for the change, I bit in a breath of air for courage, smiled and said, “Gee, I really love your cotton candy head.” and ran outside into the street.
It was then I believe I started to have an anxiety attack and began to scream. Within minutes a male and female medical team of four appeared and tried to calm me down. However, as I was in the process of telling them what had happened to me, the pleek started to wear off and the medical staff looked as if they were trying to suppress their grins.
I apologized for making them come there for nothing, but suddenly a man in his early forties had some kind of a seizure inside the diner. I followed the team inside and when they inspected the man, they said he would not make it.
After approaching one of the medical people I asked her, “Why are you smiling when this man is going to die?” She gave me a warm, sunny smile and said, “Everyone has the right to kill their own body.” We talked for a few minutes and she told me “Some beings are so ignorant that when they have problems, the only solution they can think of is to kill their bodies.” She laughed out loud when she told me this.
I told her that I didn’t think it was funny but she said, “You can’t help people who don’t want it. All you can do is love them, but that does not mean you have to be morose about it.” She said this with true disgust in her voice, looked at me for a fraction of a second with hard, cutting eyes, and then resumed a pleasant, controlled smile.
“What ever made you become a medical person if this is your attitude?” I yelled in her face. The drugs I had taken had worn off but I was starting to feel the after effects and was very irritable. She replied brightly, “Your depressing attitude doesn’t help any one so why waste so much psychic emotion on them? Cheer up!”
I told her that I couldn’t cheer up while I was standing in front of a dying man so she added, “You are only miserable when you see or hear about these people, so by close proximity, you are ineffectually caring and by the lack of it you are, dear sir, a simple-minded hypocrite. Now run along and don’t tell people how to do their jobs.” It was then that I beat a hasty retreat back to World I.
End of Journal Entry
Universal Time 00:00:00
Respectfully submitted,
Jeff Hawk