Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (5 page)

I reeled from the imagery. I was being deluged with disorienting optical static even more intrusive than the words being shouted in my ears during the first exercise.

“Vat is your favorite color?”

The Taj Mahal at sunset. A gauzy glamour photo of three children with Down syndrome standing in front of a Christmas tree.

“Vermilion!” I shouted.

“Name your best quality,” Anders instructed.

A stone arrowhead. A fat woman’s cleavage. An F-117 Stealth Fighter parked at an air show. The world was spinning. An insane whirling kaleidoscope of colors and pictures.

“My punctuality!” I shouted.

“Vat is your greatest flaw?” Anders asked.

A recreational Jeep stuck in a ditch. A baseball pitching machine. Dolphins leaping out of the water in unison. I could no longer tell what was actually being projected on the screen and what shapes my brain was creating out of the rippling, turning bands of color.

“Ahhh fuck I hate…late women,” I answered.

A tombstone. A collectible motorcycle. Question after question. Bile crept into my throat. My legs shook involuntarily.

I tried closing my eyes, but an unseen camera in the room betrayed my tactic. Anders warned me to keep my eyes open and chided me about joking with my answers.

A rabbit chewing on a wood chip. A woman nude except for a headband. My friend from childhood?

The questions continued. It felt as if I was drowning in the sensations of the room. Sweat coursed down my temples and over my forehead. I was constricted, almost breathless.

“If you could have two of anything, vat vould you vant?”

A Brazilian football player catching a ball with his face.

“Vaginas,” I answered with a gasp. “Vaginas on my…hands.”

A T-72 tank model kit.

“What is zee name you call yourself?”

The strange way Anders phrased the question had to be intentional.

“Vaginahands?”

“Who is—”

Anders was interrupted by a ringing telephone.

“Excuse me, Herr Parsons,” he said.

The images abruptly faded to a deep gray static. A soothing ocean of nothing. The room was dark again. My pupils were so blown out I could barely make out my hands resting on the arms of the chair.

I heard a pop of audio, as if Anders had turned off the intercom. He had only switched channels. When he answered the phone, his words were broadcast through the chair’s headrest.

“Hello,” Anders answered.

“Becca, I can’t talk now,” he said in a perfectly normal Midwestern accent. “No, we can talk about this tonight. I’m with somebody.”

There was a pause as the person on the other end, presumably “Becca,” said something to Anders. I took a moment to absorb this new information. Anders Zimmerman was a fraud on at least one level. He sounded like he was from Des Moines, not Dresden.

I realized that if that asshole was faking a German accent to earn kooky science credibility, well, it had worked. But the proverbial jig was proverbially up.

“It’s not Megan,” Anders said with evident anger. “She’s gone and I haven’t—”

Becca shouted something so loud it was audible (though unintelligible) in the headrest speakers.

“No, no! No, sweetheart, it’s just some jerkoff who found me through U of C. I don’t—”

Ol’ Vaginahands had heard enough. It was a struggle to get out of the slowly rotating seat, but with a grunt of effort I flopped out on the side.

It was difficult to navigate by the stroboscopic flash of the digital collage on the wall screens and I tangled myself up on the seat’s hydraulics. I spun uncertainly and nearly fell back on my knees. At last, I was able to steady myself by looking at the distorted reflections in the glass back wall. It was much darker than the other three walls.

I shuffled my way to the back wall. With one hand resting on the glass I slowly worked my way to the door I remembered in the middle. My fingers found the latch and I opened the door with a pressurized thump and a rush of air.

Anders was still on the phone when I emerged from zee chamber. He looked up with surprise.

“Herr Parsons, I varned you not to get up!” he exclaimed, setting aside his cordless phone.

I blinked away the stars from the lights. My head was swimming with the aftereffects of the digital torture and I still wasn’t steady on my feet, but I was through with the bullshit. I was even content to leave without confronting Anders, but he stepped between me and the door to the stairwell.

“You have not yet manifested your inner self,” he said.

Anders was wrong about that. His stupid light show hadn’t answered my questions, but he had unwittingly told me exactly what I needed to hear. Thanks to his bizarre attempt to scam me, I could see Zee Retarded Matrix. I didn’t cram years of human understanding or journalism school into an hour in a computerized funhouse, but I
did
manifest my inner self.

I was an asshole.

I gave Anders a shove. One-handed. Not enough to knock him over, I’m not a particularly tough or strong person, but it was forceful enough to make him take a step back. He looked at me with surprise.

And let me go.

A Special Delivery

Strange as my visit was to Anders Zimmerman’s amazing Technicolor dream chamber, there was an even stranger epilogue.

About a week after I discovered my inner self, I was sitting at my desk working on an article for Something Awful. The doorbell rang and I answered to find a FedEx deliveryman. I signed for a standard FedEx shipping envelope.

I tore open the perforated tab and a single playing card spilled out into my hand. It was the ace of spades—the death card.

On the back was a message written in fine-tipped black marker.

“I see you when you’re sleeping.”

It was signed with the initial “A” printed in a circle.

I called Anders and received his voice mail. The message I left for him was, well, let’s just say it was intemperate. I promised to do things to his face that are a crime just to contemplate. I remember at the end of the call I told him I would jump up and down on him until his guts popped out of the top of his head like a tube of toothpaste.

Anders never returned the call, which was probably for the best. He wasn’t the sender of the mysterious message.

By the time I learned the true identity of the sender it was much too late.

The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest her or his patients in the care of the human frame, in a proper diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.

 

—Thomas Edison

 

I had restless leg syndrome. My doctor confirmed it. He said with restless leg syndrome, the symptoms usually get worse at night, or in the evening when it’s time to relax. And then he said something else: REQUIP.

 

—REQUIP
^®
television commercial

 

O
ne of the downsides of living in the throes of the Information Age is all that damn information. It’s right there in the name of the age. Mocking you.

You run into information everywhere, even when you’re trying to avoid it. You search Wikipedia for information on bathyspheres and you end up at the wrong end of a series of links two hours later reading about the fat-tailed Dwarf Lemur.

You search for a video of Hillary Clinton crying during the 2008 Democratic primary and you end up getting distracted watching booty claps.

Beware the booty clap videos, my friends. Were there only a map of the Internet there would be a drawing of a clapping booty and a warning to Internet users: Here There Be Booty Claps. Many men have gone searching the Internet for a noble cause and never returned from the booty-clapping Sargasso.

Thong vortices and laudatory asses aside, no subject suffers from a more perilous overabundance of information than health material. A Google search of the word “sex” produces 729 million results. A Google search of the word “health” returns just shy of one and a quarter billion results. That is 100 percent conclusive proof that there is more health information than porn on the Internet.

Yeah, you feel that? That is the earth shattering under your feet.

Fortunately, you can get some help for that as there are about 750 websites for people with earth fragments embedded in their feet.

Hundreds of general purpose health sites cover the full panoply of medical conditions. They contain searchable libraries of medical information and news. Nearly all of these general health sites include a helpful self-diagnosis tool.

These are the tools of the devil. Occasionally, they do manage to correctly diagnose a medical condition. Something with very clear symptoms or very unusual symptoms. You can figure out you’re having a heart attack or that all that blood shooting out of your orifices is hemorrhagic fever.

Too bad most medical conditions aren’t that clear-cut. Hundreds of diseases can share identical symptoms or a person may only manifest one or two symptoms. Worse still, minor symptoms can often be linked to serious illnesses.

For a hypochondriac, these tools and the wealth of medical information on the Internet can lead people down very dangerous paths into self-treatment and obsession. There is even a portmanteau for hypochondria in the Information Age: cyberchondria.

WebMD, one of the oldest and most comprehensive medical sites, offers a symptom-checker that can produce some truly terrifying results. For example, selecting a knee ache experienced in both legs produces a list of possible causes that includes lupus, Lyme disease, and rheumatic fever. Not listed: jumping off a fence, sleeping with your legs in an uncomfortable position, and “your fucking overactive imagination.”

This ability to instantly magnify the most minor ailment into a life-threatening or incurable illness is just one of the dangers of the information overload threatening hypochondriacs. Another dire trap can be found on the fringes of medical science, lurking in the Internet Twilight Zone waiting to be found by the impressionable morons who don’t trust doctors. Fake diseases, fake cures, and misdiagnoses are rampant.

I wanted to begin this book without diving in the psychosexual deep end of the Internet. Give readers a little time to ramp up to the strangeness. Internet hypochondria presented me with that opportunity and, by luck of geography, contact with three types of hypochondriac living within driving distance.

Sweet, Deadly Lies

Imagine a world where everything you think you knew to be true was actually a façade created by global corporations working in concert with world governments. Imagine this unholy union bent on poisoning the world’s food supply with one of the deadliest toxins man has ever created. The corporations have cleverly concealed the poison as a popular low-calorie sweetener and the government regulators are allowing them to sell it to an unsuspecting population in order to…

In order to…

“Profit,” believes Doctor Bitsy Schwab.

She and her friend Leslie Jefferson are part of Mongoose, one of the many online organizations, forums, and outreach groups dedicated to victims of the artificial sweetener aspartame.

The fear of so-called aspartame disease, and the deadly effects of most artificial sweeteners, is pervasive on the Internet. aspartame disease is also one of the Internet’s oldest and most enduring examples of self-diagnosis on a mass scale.

The FDA and regulatory agencies around the world have come to agree that aspartame is a safe food additive. Confirmaton of its safety is backed by research from nonprofit agencies and respected institutions. These findings are dismissed by critics as collusion with aspartame manufacturers, a massive corporate enterprise headed by agricultural and chemical giant Monsanto.

Dr. Schwab and Leslie Jefferson don’t trust the FDA. They think aspartame is a deadly chemical and they agreed to meet with me at the conference room of a Holiday Inn Express in suburban Chicago to discuss aspartame’s many dangers. Getting in touch with them was the hard part, convincing outspoken advocates of the anti-aspartame movement to talk to me was as easy as asking them once.

Unfortunately, I waited until the last minute to call and book the conference room at the Holiday Inn. I was sorely disappointed when I was told over the phone that the conference room was already booked by a clown ministry for children.

“All three days,” explained the apologetic concierge at the Holiday Inn. “I just was in there. They are in clown makeup talking about Corinthians.

“And rapping,” he added in a breathless whisper.

According to the same concierge they also had balloons and a man in a donkey suit. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

My next phone call was to Dr. Schwab’s office to change the appointment. Dr. Schwab’s “office number” rang to a cell phone carried by Ms. Jefferson, who was never officially introduced to me and answered the call as “Dr. Schwab’s office.”

I could hear a baby crying in the background.

Ms. Jefferson was not pleased when I suggested a change of venue to one of the Holiday Inn’s many comfortable rooms not prefaced by “conference.”

“What if you’re a pervert?” Ms. Jefferson asked.

“I’m not a pervert,” I lied.

“I’ll call you back,” Ms. Jefferson replied, and hung up the phone.

Two hours later I received a return call from Ms. Jefferson. She was eager to lecture me on the value of Dr. Schwab’s time, which, she insisted, could be better spent, “Saving real lives.” Damn the fictional characters.

“I just need about an hour of your time to talk about the dangers of aspartame,” I said.

“Aspartame, yeah?” Ms. Jefferson replied. “She is a leading expert.”

“What field does she have her degree in?” I asked, but Ms. Jefferson ignored the question.

“We’ll meet you at Ed Debevic’s,” Ms. Jefferson said. “Same time as before.”

Ed Debevic’s is the worst place to attempt to conduct a serious interview second to, maybe, a German machine gun bunker on D-day. It’s an infamously flamboyant Chicago restaurant where the theme is “annoying 1950s,” and everyone who works there looks and acts like someone cosplaying at a
Grease
fan convention. The music is loud and the waiters and waitresses yell and dance on the countertops.

I’m sure it’s a hoot for adult children and tourists from Japan who want to be yelled at and humiliated by a giant white lady. For me, it was an expensive distraction and probably punishment for botching the Holiday Inn meeting. I could think of no other reason why a hippy doctor would want to hold a meeting at a restaurant willing to set up a trough of trans-fats and Diet Cokes at your table.

I arrived ten minutes early and requested the most isolated booth in the farthest reaches of the restaurant. The booth really wasn’t that isolated, but Vic, the chubby and sexless waiter with the oily bouffant hairdo and rosy red cheeks, insisted it was the best he could do. He accepted my twenty-dollar bribe and tugged nervously at the bottom of his too-tight bowling shirt.

“Won’t be too busy for another hour,” he suggested.

An hour and two milk shakes later and Ed Debevic’s had filled up. It was something short of raucous, but there was the ominous buzz of a countertop dance in the atmosphere. I saw a Japanese man with a cell phone camera out and children yelling. It wouldn’t be long now.

I was feeling bloated from the milk shakes and beginning to wonder if Dr. Schwab was going to stand me up. When Vic passed by again I made a critical mistake.

“Can I get a Diet Coke?” I requested.

He glared at me, in the throes of his carefully planned sassy waiter performance for a nearby table, but he gave me a curt nod without breaking character. Just as Vic returned with my Diet Coke, just as the first countertop dance of the evening began, Dr. Schwab and Ms. Jefferson arrived.

“Diet Coke, huh?” Vic shouted over the thumping and cheering for the benefit of Dr. Schwab and Ms. Jefferson. “Why bother, you can never lose enough weight to stop being ugly! Pssssh!”

He set the drink down and whirled away. I glared at his back and then returned my attention to my arriving guests.

Dr. Schwab was a small woman in her late fifties. She had thin features and a face that was deeply lined. Her skin looked fragile and reminded me of flattened origami paper that had been folded and unfolded a hundred times. Her graying brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail that exploded behind her head and disappeared down her back. She was dressed shabbily in layers of old sweaters completely inappropriate for the warm weather. A rainbow-strapped canvas carryall hung from a drooping shoulder. It overflowed with pens, receipts, papers, loose antacids, and all the other debris of an unfashionable woman’s purse.

“Hello,” Dr. Schwab said. “This is Leslie. I believe you spoke on the phone.”

Her companion, Leslie Jefferson, was an immense black woman with bulging eyes and tree trunk arms she kept folded atop two of the largest breasts I have ever seen. Well, I did not directly see her breasts. She was wearing a huge pink Space Jam T-shirt that hid them from view, but I was able to detect the spore of giant breasts distorting her shirt and forcing her to cross her arms at an unusual angle. I sensed them indirectly like deadly radon or the traces of a powerful Jedi.

“Mhmmm, yeah, we spoke,” said Leslie.

She grunted and slid her bulk into the booth. Her body shifted and rippled like a bear rubbing its back against a tree. When she had finally settled in she had left barely a third of the bench for Dr. Schwab. The small woman didn’t seem to notice she was nearly crowded out of her seat. She deposited her carryall on the table and I could hear the metallic crunch of shifting keys.

“Mister Parsons, this is grotesque.” Dr. Schwab pointed to my Diet Coke. “I will not discuss this with this grotesquery as you have it on the table. Was that intentional? To insult me? I’m insulted, but unfazed.”

I got up to take the soda over to the counter.

“I wouldn’t drink anything out of any of their cups,” Dr. Schwab warned.

“Residues and whatnot,” Leslie added, and Dr. Schwab nodded gravely.

A scrawny teenager was crooning away from the top of the big counter on the far side of the restaurant. He was singing tunelessly and clad in an ill-fitting prom tuxedo from circa 1958. Through the right eyes it looked like one of the overdressed zombies from
Night of the Living Dead
had shambled into a karaoke bar in hell.

The two ladies drank distilled water they brought in a metal flask (“plastic contains toxic phthalates”) from their own wooden cups. They refused to eat Ed Debevic’s hamburgers on the grounds that the meat was, according to Leslie, “Hormonally out of whack.” They seemed slightly annoyed by the singing and shouting.

I felt no sympathy; it was their fault we weren’t enjoying a quiet Holiday Inn where they could have indulged all the flask water and antacid tablets they wanted.

Dr. Schwab and Leslie settled on a pair of Cobb salads that they meticulously dissected onto napkins before eating. They seemed to relax a little once they were actually cramming lettuce into their mouths, but the incident with the Diet Coke had set the tone.

I was of the enemy. I was in league with the world governments and the aspartame manufacturers.

“Let me just ask you directly,” I said, not knowing how else to begin. “What are the side effects of aspartame? The risks?”

Dr. Schwab wiped her mouth precisely with a napkin before answering.

“There aren’t risks associated with NutraSweet and all aspartame sweeteners. There aren’t side effects. It’s poison, not a food additive.”

“But they put it in food, so it is a food additive,” I countered.

“Exactly,” Dr. Schwab said.

She exhumed a musty accordion folder from her carryall and pulled out a thick stack of papers held together by an industrial-strength paperclip. She passed the papers across the table to me.