SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“This is a fluke,” I said. “Just because he saw it happening doesn’t mean he affected it. How do you know he wasn’t supposed to win anyway?”

“C’mon,” Marty said. “You know what the odds are of guessing the right card every time?”

“No,” I said. “But neither do you.”

“Did anything happen to anyone else?”

“Yeah,” Dave said. Déjà vu again. “In the tank I saw Veckner giving a pop quiz today. So this morning over coffee I looked up the answers. Sure enough, she gave the quiz, and it was fill in the blank.”

“That can’t be right,” I said. “I mean, Veckner teaches Eastern Religion right?”

“Tradition.”

“What?”

“Tradition, not religion.”

“Whatever, Eastern Tradition, Eastern Religion, you know it like the back of your hand.”

“Not this material I didn’t.”

Or did he? I was becoming confused.

“If you saw the answers to the quiz why did you bother looking them up?”

“I saw myself taking the quiz, and studying beforehand. But the quiz would have been a surprise otherwise.”

Marty’s tongue was rolling across the top of his lip, and if the room hadn’t been soaked in patchouli and pot, I’m sure I would have smelled the gears grinding. “We have to go back in,” he said.

“We can’t,” Dave said. “Remember.”

This was scary because I did remember. This is what Dave had said—was saying—about what Marty was going to say next, only Marty hadn’t said it yet, but then he did.

“Right,” Marty said. “We have to wait til our systems build up more DMT.”

By Sunday things were back to normal. We hadn’t seen any further ahead. Danny used some of his winnings to spring for a feast of wine and flaming cheese at the Greek restaurant in Old Town, a real treat since I was living mostly on burritos at the time. We talked a little bit more about it over dinner. Dave suggested we all abstain from anything over the next week and to practice some basic lotus position stuff. Apparently he and Danny had processed the whole trip a lot better because they meditated. I was surprised to discover that Danny was into that too, but then again we were all dabbling in transcendental mind expansion. It didn’t seem like a bad idea. I was a bit strung out from the last trip, so drinking a lot of water and juice over the next few days wouldn’t be horrible.

The last trip had been okay for my schedule but Dave and Marty had gone to class the next day, so we all agreed to meet on Friday after Danny’s shift.

Everything went down about the same, except I admit we were all a bit more excited.

I say about the same because Marty altered the mix a bit.

“Don’t take these until you’re ready to close the lid,” he said. “They’re more potent.”

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked. I was concerned, of course, about the psilocybin.

“I added DMT to the mix. So the molecules don’t deplete your own.”

That somehow made sense, I figured he wanted to be able to try again sooner rather than later and that with the extra dose he wouldn’t have to wait. I knew better, but a dose was a dose. It was after I drank the vial that I realized why he really wanted it. It was the holiday weekend and he wanted to see further ahead than two days. I realized that fairly instantly because we were on the way to the Indian reservation casino and he was explaining in the car. And then we were at the casino. And then I was back in the Greek restaurant the week before, and there were tentacles at the restaurant, and there were eels on my date with Julie the past Tuesday, and then Marty was dead.

That caught me off guard.

I should mention that I couldn’t quite nail down how long I was in the tank. I didn’t have the discipline that Dave and Danny had. I had two weeks of information happening at once, fast forward, rewind, freeze frame, and then I was in the back seat of Marty’s red Mazda.

Steve Miller was cranked up on the stereo, and it was black outside.

I’d been calm, but then, with the realization of Marty’s demise, a course of adrenalin shot through me. “You guys didn’t see that?”

Everyone else in the car ignored me. Dave was sitting next to me slowly nodding his head as he mouthed the lyrics to Jet Airliner. Danny was in the passenger seat rolling a joint by the dashboard light.

“Marty,” I asked the back of his head. “Did you see that?”

He was calm, probably thinking about the casino takedown we were about to pull off, and the fact that we were about to make a fortune over the next few days. “It’s not what you thought,” he said.

“No?” I asked.

“No. I end up fine.”

A slug-like eel slid up onto his left shoulder, around the back of his neck, and disappeared over the other shoulder.

“What the hell?” I said. I think it was the psilocybin, but it could’ve been the diatomic particles too, either way, that was the first time I saw one out of the tank.

“Just focus on the program,” Marty said.

“Right…Yeah.”

We’d decided to call it the program when we got out of the tanks. It was Marty’s idea. “A plan,” he said, “is just that. A list of steps that with preparation fall into order, a mere intention. The program has already happened. All we need to do is show up.”

We didn’t quibble with him. There was no point. We were broke, just enough for gas, but that was okay. We would drive to the casino. Danny was going to play a few rounds of roulette. We would all be hungry and tired so he wouldn’t waste time. A few spins, enough for breakfast and a suite and then we’d rest, save the next day for the big money and comps.

And that’s how it went.

And it was eerie.

Danny put his chips on the red box with the number twenty-three and when the wheel finished spinning the little ball landed in the corresponding pocket.

“A winner,” the croupier yelled, and then raked a stack of chips over to Danny. “Place your bets,” he continued without missing a beat.

“Red five,” Danny said. The croupier raked the two stacks across the felt table to the red box marked five, spun the wheel, and tossed the marble. When the wheel finished spinning, the marble landed on red five.

“Another winner,” the croupier called out.

To see it happening again was mind-boggling. We knew the winning number so Danny picked the winning number, and we always saw him pick the winning number. But which came first I couldn’t figure out, and when I tried, when I thought about it too hard, I just lived it again.

Over the next few days, I felt like I was a character strolling through someone else’s movie. I had a starring role, and my costars had their parts to play as well. The dealer or waiter or bartender would say his line, and then I’d say mine. The words didn’t seem forced or contrived. I said what was on my mind even though I knew ahead of time what I was going say, always surprised at the words as they came out. It was natural, yet not.

Dave and I both won big at roulette and the casino version of High-Low, Acey-Deucey. That card game was on the floor. Marty and Danny were the only ones to mess with the poker lounge. They both avidly enjoyed gambling and, Marty more than Danny, basked in the attention of the winning seat. Danny played the role with a bit of realism, dark sunglasses, keeping quiet to himself. Not Marty, the higher the stack of chips, the more flamboyant he became. I was tempted to go in and warn him to keep his cool, but the poker lounge was loaded with flying eels and tentacle clusters. I wasn’t going in there. He was handing out chips to every girl that walked by and it wasn’t long before he had a thin blonde on either side. It was his parading that got us our comp though, a suite that made our first one look like a pillbox—grand piano, master staircase, pool table, hot tub, the whole bit.