The Damned Highway (25 page)

——

That's enough of that, eh? Downstairs, in one of the Watergate's hotel bars, I see my lawyer. I don't know where the gun is, but my lawyer is surrounded by angry busboys, jabbing a folding tray holder at them as they encircle and try to grab at him, so I go to help anyway.

“Oscar!”

“Lono!” I lurch forward at the sound of my own name . . . no, not my name, something else. A momentary identity I wear like a blanket over my head on a witch-haunted, black, and hideous night. But it's me; my lies are as much me as anything else. For a moment, it occurs to me that I am in Washington, DC, and that perhaps I should check in with my wife and son, whom I'd sent here just days before the start of this misadventure. But then I decide that reuniting with them can wait a little bit longer. There are other things I need to attend to. Serious business for serious professionals, and there is no one more serious or professional than my attorney and I. The busboys are more Oompa-Loompa than man. Outflanked, they scatter, and my attorney and I embrace.

“How did you get away from the cops?” I demand.

“I didn't, man. Made some bail. Met some Chicano dudes in the holding cell. They had some friends on the outside front me bail money,” he says. “I'm going to have to do some favors for them. Board a boat full of white snow. That's why I'm here. To meet a guy about a guy, but the fucking kitchen is out of fucking grapefruits. Christ, Lono, the country's gone apeshit. Even the fucking busboys are voting for Nixon. Man, you should come south with me. It's not good here anymore.”

“You know that the border ain't nothing but a dotted line, you fool. And anyway, it's over.”

“Over?” my lawyer asks. He raises his hand to his temple, points a finger, and clicks his thumb. “Like that?”

“No, not like that. Let's just say that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

“You've got some funny marks on your forehead, Lono. Like little hickeys. What the hell were you doing up there?”

I shrug. “Saving the world. Nixon's not like he used to be. I got some of his mojo, gave him some of mine. He's a five-star fuckup now, a do-gooder doomed to self-destruct.”

He grabs me and hisses in my ear, “The shit! He's a goddamned monster!”

“We're all monsters, baby. Gods and monsters.” I kiss him on the cheek, like a real man does. Out of words, we go back to the bar, take a corner booth, and close it down at two in the morning.

The Long, Cold Winter of My Discontent, Redux . . . Heavier Weather . . . More Strange Rumblings and General Weirdness . . . The Ghost of the American Dream . . . The Ascendancy of the American Nightmare . . . Football Season Is Over . . . I've Gotta Get Out of This Place, and It's the Last Thing I'll Ever Do . . .

——

Winter once again in Woody Creek, Colorado. It is just after midnight on January 5, 2005, and I was here when the fun stopped. They still call this the wee hours, and there is still nothing small about the hours between midnight and dawn. These hours last forever, each one as long and endless as the black gulf between the stars. As I search for the correct keys, the ticking of the clock slows along with the world's heartbeat, and the occasional hunt-and-peck tapping of my typewriter grinds to a lethargic halt. Each ponderous breath feels harder than the previous one. These are not wee hours; these hours are among the last in my life.

They also still call this the witching hour, and they are right. This used to be when I did my best work, under the cover of darkness. This was when I was strongest—when the whiskey and the mescaline and the pills coursed through my body, and my mind burned with a terrible righteousness and sense of indignation. But those days are gone. These days, I write about sports for ESPN's website. Ah yes, the Internet, eh? It made things like my trusty old Mojo Wire an archaic relic of a gentler age. And so am I. But never mind that! When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, and I have certainly been both in my life. Ask anyone. They know. They remember. They'll tell you that I was both weird and a pro. And now . . . Now . . . I'm just old. I am no longer Duke or Lono or any of the other pseudonyms I've used in my career. All that I am is a scared old man who lives in a constant state of pain and fear. Hoover and Nixon are always with me, ghosts at the base of my brain, reminding me of evils once so loathsome that now seem quaint. I didn't just find the American Nightmare; I took it home with me. But America kept growing worse.

The world has turned dangerous and strange once again, but these days, I am not dangerous enough or strange enough to save it. No, not this time. That is a job for younger men, but I see no one stepping forward to volunteer for the duty. There is something prowling around outside my front door, and though I have heard it many times in my life, I still don't know what it is. It might be a deer or a coyote or a big bastard of a bear, but then again, maybe not, because the darkness has a way of changing things. Darkness is Mother Nature's LSD, and instead of a wild animal, the thing on my doorstep could be Nixon or Hoover or even my old friend Professor Madison Haringa. Worse, it could be a Betsy. Whatever it is, my heart is filled with fear and loathing. I am unarmed, unarmored, and I feel naked against the cold, stark truth lurking in the dark.

The American Dream is still dead. Its ghost remains only in the minds of people my age. In another generation, not even its memory will remain. I thought we stopped the American Nightmare—me and Smitty and my attorney and everyone else involved in that little caper. I thought we'd prevented it from happening when we stopped Nixon's plan to win all fifty states. But if time is a cruel mistress, then she is also a lying bitch, because the time has come round once again. Signs and portents. Portents and signs. Lines within ley lines. The stars are right once more, and in his city far beneath the ocean, Cthulhu lies sleeping . . . but not for very much longer.

It happened just like Smitty said it would, far back in 1972 when we were racing to the airport and he had a head full of primo fungi from Yuggoth. The Columbine massacre. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September eleventh. Those things have come to pass, and I know what is coming next. I may be old and bitchy and no more fun for anyone, but I still have great and terrible powers. I can see into the future. I can remember Smitty's visions. New Orleans will be devastated by a hurricane later this year, probably toward the end of summer. After that will come the tsunami, and everything else that Smitty predicted would happen. What was it Haringa said? Or was it Hoover? Or Betsy? I can't remember anymore, for I am old, and the pain medication I take for my hip leaves me groggy and unsure. And never mind that, because I digress. Whoever it was . . . one of those rat bastards told me that the cycle would start all over again. That they'd prime the psychic aether and make another attempt in 2012.

And so they are. It's already started. The American Dream is all but forgotten, a fairy tale we old ones whisper to our grand-children when they come to visit. And the American Nightmare? Well, that pig fucker is back, bigger than ever and ready for business. And business is very, very good. I am reminded of what is perhaps my favorite passage of my own work, of how the sixties were a wonderful time, when the energy of an entire generation came to a head and we were all riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. The time was ripe for change, but in the end, like all ripe fruits, things spoiled on the vine and turned rotten. Screw Las Vegas. Go up on a hill anywhere in the goddamned world, and look west, and you can very much see the high-water mark in the distance, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back, revealing a horrible, tentacle-faced monstrosity called Cthulhu. It is coming. The stars are right, and I no longer need to ask, “How long, oh Lord? How long?” I've gotten my answer. The stars are right again. Welcome to the new dark age. The age of R'lyeh.

I am tired, and I no longer have the strength to fight the bastard. I don't have it in me. I can't reinvent myself anymore. Not after years of talk-show appearances and that Vegas movie that they finally filmed. No, it's too late for all that. Too late for one last misadventure. Now I'm just another member of the No More Fun Club. I have one final task to complete, and it's one I've contemplated since I was a young man. I once told Ralph that I would very much feel trapped if I didn't know I could leave this world by my own hand at any time. At sixty-seven, I still feel that way. I'm not trapped yet, oh no indeed . . . but I see the writing on the wall and the signs up in the heavens, and I fear that pretty soon, I
will
be trapped. And believe me when I tell you . . . I don't want to be here for the end. I've taken that trip once already. I think I'll sit this bus ride out.

Tonight, I began my final preparations. I ventured down into the basement and went through boxes of files until I found these nine missing chapters from my otherwise-exhaustive chronicles of the 1972 election. My publisher and I both agreed not to print them at the time, for fear of what we might unleash. Ye Gods, better to print
Unspeakable Cults
or pages from the
Necronomicon
than to print this stuff. We tried that once before, of course. I'd convinced my editor to publish excerpts from
Unspeakable Cults
, but the pressmen went mad as it was going to print and smashed all of the machines and then killed themselves. After that, Nixon had the pages suppressed. But once I'm gone, it won't matter anymore. So I'm packing up those nine missing chapters, along with this epilogue, and mailing them off to two young speculative-fiction writers, one of whom is an avowed communist and the other of whom is a vicious Libertarian. Mamatas and Keene. Brain-damaged geeks, both of them. Despite their differences, they seem to work well together. I sense in them a kindred spirit, much like my connection to Smitty all those years ago. I will mail them the unpublished chapters, and I think they will know what to do with them. Congratulations, boys. You've just been drafted.

After that, it's just a matter of wrapping things up and bringing them to a close. It shouldn't take me more than a month. Keep in mind, I am a professional, and even in this—especially in this—I will overcome and be triumphant.

My fingers slow again, growing numb above the keys. Outside, the wind howls and the darkness shrieks. I shiver. Why is it so hard for me to stay goddamned warm these days?

I think about my life and my literary estate, and smile as I light a cigarette, safe and secure in the knowledge that the world will know I was here. That it will have heard my roar. I think about the line of broken, beaten, battered, and bloodied editors I've left in my wake. I think about my peers. I think about my family and my friends.

I think about my sidekick. My partner. The one man who always stood shoulder to shoulder with me when the hellhounds were on our trail and the bullets were flying and the bastards came at us with sharp knives.

I think about my attorney.

My lawyer.

I bring my hands to my typewriter and type.

Feb 22 05

counselor

I am typing into the future—what little future there is left. For although this is only January, I think that February twenty-second will be a good day to do it. There's a certain magic to that number. 222. It should give the occult types and the conspiracy theorists something to nod about.

I look at it again, the date and that one word. I think it's a fitting epitaph. I think it says it all. And yea, though I am about to enter the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for he will be there with me, and he is the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.

Selah!