David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

He bought his pot from a sketchy character who made you come to him. To his house over by the freeway, its windows blacked out, the fish tanks unclean.

Leo nailed a sheet over his front window. He stopped answering the phone and then the door. The world outside was full of antagonists. He stayed tethered to his bong.

The sisters had timed the intervention well. A week earlier, he might have stood his ground. In the event, he did try. He tried It’s None of Your Business, which they rejected out of hand. He tried I Might Still Be Able to See Myself Out of This, which did not convince them. It was clear that they weren’t going to leave until he agreed to something inpatient. Rosemary mentioned some very illustrious places back east. He actually thought about it.

But he didn’t want doctors poking around in his dome. He’d probably end up with electrodes on his forehead and no memory of the past few months, months that, though they had been a dense thicket and maybe full of figments, he didn’t want taken away. There was possibly some information there; maybe some of it wasn’t total nonsense. Besides, without that, all he had was this, which was shit.

So, in what had seemed at the time like a brilliant idea, Leo decided that he’d avoid the nuthouse by agreeing to rehab. The gin in the coffee mug was his opening. And in truth, he was sounding less crazy and more drunk than he had a few months ago. When Heather said, “What about all that stuff you wrote on your blog? About the shadow government, the plan to sneak tyranny into our lives through convenience, the massive plot to control all the information in the world?” Leo tried to make it sound like he had written all that in the voice of someone who thought like that. He said he was doing this because he was planning on writing a novel about that kind of thing. It even seemed to him like that was something he could have been doing.

It wasn’t too hard to get Rosemary and Heather behind the idea of a rehab instead of an asylum. Daisy sensed another deflection.

“You’re a bad drunk, brother,” she said, “but there’s something else going on here.”

Luckily, the recycling bins on Leo’s back porch spilled with empties that were incriminating in their type and number: jug-size cheapos of gin and rum, a platoon of dead soldiers, sake bottles and sherry bottles and peach brandy bottles.

That was enough for Daisy. “You the only one living in this sorority?” she asked him.

It was only when he was slipping up the pretty driveway in the white minivan that Leo started to have misgivings about his plan. There might be a slight frying pan / fire problem, he realized. Who knew what kind of recovery they dished out here?

“See, Leo,” said Heather from the front of the van, “it’s not a locked facility.”

This had been one of his conditions. And it was true that Quivering Pines appeared to be an expensive and orthodox, gender-segregated Twelve Step drug and alcohol rehab in a strip-mall hamlet a half hour south of the city. It looked like a community college with really good landscaping — there were cacti in large planter pots beside the driveway. Perhaps that was meant to give the facility a desert resonance; the desert was supposed to be so conducive to recovery and transformation.

The first night he was put in a sort of observation bed. A man who looked like an onion searched Leo’s bag for contraband, then gave him a Big Book, a slimmer volume on Twelve-Stepping in general, and a notebook, the kind without perforations, so that a torn-out sheet has raggedy edges.

The doctor was reading aloud from Leo’s blog now. Specifically, from “Another Unjust Dismissal,” Leo’s account of being fired from his friend Gabriel’s construction crew. Gabriel had hired Leo a few weeks after the Brand-New Day firing, a few days after Marilyn told him she never wanted to see him again. It wasn’t total charity — Leo knew his way around Skilsaws and speed squares. But the doctor had secondary sources. He picked a page from the folder and read its excerpts. Was that Gabriel’s account? Daisy’s account of Gabriel’s account?

“It seems that Gabriel had every reason to let you go,” said the doctor.

It was true. He’d been drunk. On a roof. With a nail gun. He would have fired himself.

Their time up, the doctor said they would meet again on Monday. “I hope you’ll use the weekend to come to terms with your circumstances. I think you’ll find that you’re really quite lucky you got here.”

Lucky? Leo left the little office in a haze of despair. Those blog posts read back to him — he really had been orbiting Planet Crane for a while there. That guy, with his pen cup marked Pens, probably was a doctor.

He crossed the quiet quad; barely noticed the beautiful day around him. He thought with relief that at least you couldn’t screen-grab something that was never on a screen, so the doc hadn’t seen that one issue of I Have Shared a Document with You .

If the doc got his hands on that, it’d be electrodes for sure, in Leo’s near future.

Leila looked behind her and saw the little white Datsun again, her two Burmese minders in the front seats. Heckle and Jeckle, she called them. They’d shown up a couple of days ago, the day after she returned from Myo Thit. It had occurred to her that she might just sneak up to their vehicle, rap on the window, and say, Maybe you guys should address the open-sewer issue and high infant-mortality rates before you spend any more money on the network-of-spies-and-stooges thing . But her Burmese wasn’t up to it, and these guys were hard to sneak up on. They were always right behind her, and sometimes they were there first.

Okay, boys, she thought, lacing up her sneakers on the steps outside her apartment, you feeling up to a 10 K?

Leila ran every day, first thing in the morning. Running was the only way she could make her body and mind operate at the same speed, which turned out to be the only time she could ever truly relax. And the thinking she did while running seemed to be more effective thinking; it was more likely to lead to decisions instead of just to more thinking. In Mandalay, running was also a good way to separate herself from the Lonely Planeteers, who would go down any rutted track if they were promised a shrine or a ruin and none if they were not.

Leila could not ignore her surveillance detail. The two men were always thirty yards behind her or in the far corner of her tea shop. And at first she was truly spooked. But they followed her in such a strange and polite way. They were not so much covert as discreet; there was no menace in their hovering.

Still, they were a pain in the ass, because everyone around her knew they were there too. Leila’s trying-to-blend-in days were over. Who wants to chat with the American girl being trailed by the secret police? Even her man at the tea shop treated her more cautiously. He still brought her Number Nines, but without his usual flourish.

She knew she had to stay away from Aung-Hla until she could sort this out. If he got pulled into it, it would be her fault, and the three hundred bucks that she hadn’t managed to get to him yet — that wouldn’t cover it. She had seen him a couple of times over the past week, but they only waved at each other across the dusty street and she thought maybe in his wave he was saying, Yeah, you might as well keep your distance . Dah Alice was off-limits also, which was seriously inconvenient. Leila could really have used her counsel now.

The problem was that Leila couldn’t figure out what she had seen in the forest, what those men had been talking about, or where they were headed. The other problem was that she didn’t even know whether she should try to figure it out. It wasn’t like she needed more work on her plate.