Christopher WunderLee - The Loony - a novella of epic proportions

The cat takes offense and scrambles spontaneously to his feet, does a quick left, right, and four-padded gallop out of the room, just as Albert inspects his injuries, three relatively deep scratches running horizontally down his forearm, and the volume is then turned up, slightly, as though someone is toying with the knob within his inner ear. He hears the words, muffled, but conspicuous in their sound of sense, no longer as though he's standing behind a closed door, however very Frostian of him, and gives a good index stab into the right canal to test its accountability.

It has been going on for as long as he can remember, as if an enduring soliloquy, he just didn't hear it before, but he remembers it, remembers its distinctive modulation within the chorus. The songs have gone solo, the conductor, an eight-armed Hindu directing each octave in maestro mastery, waves them onward and their tangled tongues pitch the noise autonomously, mixing and inflecting.

Albert flings his head back against the brawny cushions of the couch and propels himself onto his feet, listening effortlessly. He stealths his way onto linoleum, takes up the wooden handled cleaver, and mindfully enters the hallway. About two doors down and to the right, he nudges the silent door open. They're still deep within their dreams, and the avenues of paradise do not want any more angels. She's partially uncovered, a nude leg dangling lonely off the side of the bed, like she'll subconsciously step out from under the disheveled blankets at any moment, and her arm is uncomfortably tucked below her belly. He can see the beginning of her left butt cheek, indiscriminately cloaked by an errant corner of the top sheet. The room is musky, stifling, warm, like a temperate cavern, she's breathing evenly. Albert moves near the bed and sees the top of his head, a sienna tiara of tousled hair lying flatly against a pillow. His mulchy chest and neck are above the covers and his closed eyelids sputter in dreamy REM.

Albert makes his way directly above the man who made the night torrential and kept him awake with the guttural coughs of his mommy's ardor. He's not seen this one before. Albert usually wakes them up before grandma and grandpa return from the confines of WASP guilt, and sometimes the men converse with him, whilst his mum cooks breakfast in her nightshirt and brews coffee in her bathrobe. They are entwined, his abdomen pressed gently against her midriff, her other leg tossed indelicately over his thigh, his right arm hiding below her chest. They are still entrenched in their nightmares, and the streets of heaven are clogged in a cherub parade.

G-man No. 2 tells him they’re headed to Chelan, Washington as they’re driving. That’s pretty close to the original site, either they’re going to do him there in some grandiose homage to his efforts (which is unlikely) or this is just the next place on the list of some bureaucrat’s clipboard. He’d imagined it all along, it would say at the top “Doctor Lochner’s Odyssey” and then, over a four-day marathon of map gazing, the assistant would randomly throw darts at a giant map of the states. Another assistant would tell him where it landed and he’d scribble that down. The agents call in; he goes down the list, checks off the last place, and tells the agent where the next one is. This is probably his only job.

Lochner has thought about running to Switzerland, sanctuary for politicos and fascists, but they’d get to him. He’s only safe as long as they can watch him. Sometimes he lets himself think about Harris. He’s got a few photos of her that weren’t confiscated after he signed the agreement. His favorite of which is one where she’s kneeling on the bed, his button-up shirt and neck-tie on, a view from the back, her head turned, a Vermeer smile on her lips, her eyes pleading for him to enter the photo and run his hands up into the shirt. You can see the silhouette of her, the shirt not long enough to cover her entire ass, so a small oval of it lies there wantonly. The next favorite he only allows himself to look at on special occasions, that’s the one in which she’s completely naked, taken from high above as she lays in their bed, her arms stretched out as though motioning for him to come to her, her entire body, from head to furry hole, visible, appetizing, pleasing. The rest are for day-to-day gazing, some with nipples exposed, or with cute outfits that reveal more than most women would allow to be seen of them, or costumes she would wear for him, the stock french maid, the dominatrix, leather strapped, number, the wonder woman gear, the viking warrior super mini-skirt and gold breast plate, etc. But Albert’s been trying not to think about her. Even when he focuses on the good things, trying ever so hard to avoid anything else, it always returns to her betrayal…

He’s often wondered why they didn’t just give him an alias and throw him in jail for some counterfeit crime, why they would devote so much time to keeping him moving, pay two federal agents to stand guard. His best guess is — he’s the last one. He knows for a fact that Feling is dead, he saw him come rocketing out of the sixth floor window and splatter on the pavement outside the Hotel Monaco in Virginia Beach. The official story is he tripped on a lamp’s wire and accelerated so fast from the fall that he smashed through the window. The problem with this is of course, gravity requires a downward arc, not a horizontal plain that sharply drops off at a given distance. You don’t throw a ball, it goes perfectly straight and then just drops. No. Two hefty guys dumb enough to look down to catch a glimpse of their handy work after the director met the sidewalk threw poor Feling out of the window. Lochner saw them with his own eyes, in real time.

He knows he will fall out of a window at some point, or be suffocated in a vat of oatmeal, or shocked to death by genital electrodes. So, he decides that once they make it to Chelan, he’s going to go see the old site and god be damned if they kill him for it. His plan, which is not the most ingenious one ever constructed, is to get a hooker and pay her to entice the G-men to give up their statue impressions. While they’re rollicking with a much-needed screw, he’s out the door, in the car, and half way to Rainier. The evergreens, just like he remembers them, shadow the road in the night, making it difficult to see ahead. It’s an old country highway up there, too, with nothing but cabins, moose, and fear keeping him company as he spins around turns, edges beside voluminous drops, bounces over wood bridges. But Albert remembers where it is, he stops just in time to see the yellow iron gate that was always there, tucked behind an innocent looking driveway with a mailbox that reads: “The MacFarthers” and a sign that says: “Re-elect Governor Gabbie Hayes, four more years means four more chances! Paid for by the citizens to re-elect Governor Gabbie Hayes, Hayes for Governor ’58.” He idles the feds’ car up, waiting for a guard to appear but nothing happens. Perhaps, they’ve abandoned it. If they have, there won’t be anything left.

Out in the forest now, walking up a road that once carried the entire moon up and down it but now is barely distinguishable, he’s pretty sure he’s risked his life to see nothing but the ghosts of the past. It’s inky dark, with strange rustlings in the bushes, the kind that cause him to stop when he really shouldn’t and peer into the darkness. Then, realizing that he’s standing there waiting for whatever it is, he begins briskly getting away, not running, in case that would be a sign, but walking much faster than before. As he jogs along, pretending not to hear the sound of dried leaves crunch under footfalls, pretending not to hear that branch snap as something steps onto it, pretending not to hear any whispers, any sounds at all, he sees light up ahead, a lot of it. Are they filming a sequel? Perhaps Mars is the next project. Who have they bamboozled to do this one? More college grads with empty checkbooks and fantasies about being involved in one of the most important missions ever attempted. That’s how it was for Lochner, he knew all along they weren’t really going, but he knew his name would be forever attached to the fact that they did. There it was in the annals of history, the Who’s Who of Science , 16th Edition, he was like Oppenheimer, he was like Bohr, he had a place in time.