David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“So is it Lola or Leila?” he asked her, lighting his last cigarette.

“You can call me Leila,” she said.

“You guys ready to tell me what it is you want from me?”

“I don’t know exactly. I assume it’s something that only you can do because you can get so close to Straw.”

“What makes you so sure I’ll agree to do it?”

“Leo said you have a good heart.”

They crossed the rushing creek and climbed the little brink. They were standing at the edge of something far below them that looked to Mark like a dull green lake but that turned out to be a small and oddly uniform forest in a perfectly round, sunken declivity.

“What is it?” asked Leo.

“A caldera,” said Hazards.

Leo looked blank, saving Mark the trouble of looking blank.

“A subsidence of land due to volcanic activity,” said Hazards.

“A crater?” said Leo.

“The geology is different,” said Hazards. “But sure.” He led the pony down broad steps carved into the steep rock walls and through a narrow path that ran straight between the…trees? Plants? But what plants? They were growing in neat rows, like corn, and like corn, the stalks were strong and fibrous and columnar. But these plants were taller than any corn, and lithe like bamboo. Mark looked up. A dozen feet above him, the path was covered in the green arch of the plants, a jungle allée. The plants had palmate leaves starting midway up their stalks, leaves fringed at their edges in a deep green fuzz. Mark had always been an end user; he’d never been near a pot farm in his life. If that’s what this was. But just from reggae album covers and the like, he thought that the plant around him was not marijuana. But what else do you grow acres of in the backcountry?

They came to the end of the plant alley and walked out into a meadow. One hundred yards away, Mark saw a shingled farmhouse in a small stand of trees, with a blanched and listing barn nearby.

As they came closer to the house, he heard the skkrring of a sprung screen door and saw a woman come out of the little house and onto its wide-brimmed porch.

“Baby. You’re back!” she called. There was love and relief in her voice, and she even gave a little whoop, which carried well across the wide meadow.

Leo was sitting in the kitchen of the little cabin with the woman who had hollered to Trip Hazards as they arrived. She said her name was Constance Nozzikins. Leo was helping her, he was shelling peas. He thought the cabin was about the coolest thing ever, hand-hewn and hobbity. There was a kitchen, a common room, a bedroom, and a sleeping loft.

She swished some potatoes around in a bucket of water and then started slicing them. Her knife looked sharp.

“What are those plants outside?” Leo asked. He was working by the window. “Is the whole crater filled with them?”

“It’s a caldera, not a crater, but yeah, the whole thing: four hundred sixty acres. That’s the latest crop,” said Constance.

She was hunting in the tangle of pots and pans that hung from the timber lintel over the sink. “This is one of our best sites. The altitude, I think, and the silica in the soil. And the remote location, of course. No one else gets yield like we do,” she said boastfully. He was about to say But crop of what? when she asked, “How many you got?” She meant peas. He tipped the bowl he was shelling into to show her. “Do twice that. We’re six tonight.” Leo, manually dexterous and comforted by piecework, grabbed more peas from the bowl. The sun was twenty degrees above the far lip of the walls that ringed them, and sunlight was streaming through the kitchen’s western windows; the line of evening advanced slowly across a broad field of mystery plants.

Constance had moved on to mushrooms. Her knife looked sharp. She did that tap-tap-tap thing with the point of her knife, and a mushroom fell down in tatters on the board.

“Is it pot?” asked Leo. He had never really been up close to marijuana plants before and knew what they looked like only from reggae album covers and the like.

She stopped chopping. “Leo, look at me,” she said, turning around.

He looked at her, open and easily.

Three seconds went by. Constance looked worried.

“Is this not enough peas?” he asked.

“Would you come out here with me for a sec?” she said.

They walked through the swinging door and into the common room.

Leila, Mark, Trip, and another guy who had been here when they’d arrived were sitting around a wooden table. The new guy had introduced himself as Roman Shades; Leila said she knew him from Dublin. At the table, it was clearly Mark against the rest of them.

“Look. I’ll help you,” Mark was saying, “but I’m not taking your weirdo test.”

“Roman?” Constance interrupted them. “I thought we had only one test to administer here?”

“That is correct,” said Roman Shades.

“But what about this guy? I thought he was”—she paused—“but then I looked closer, and I don’t think he is. I think Leo Crane is his real name.” Leo thought she was being rude, all this talking about him while standing beside him. “Montes,” said Constance sharply, “you vouching for both these guys?”

“I’m vouching for Leo. Leo’s vouching for Mark.”

“I was wondering about him too,” said Trip. “The extraction manifest had him as straight, but then on the way in here he seemed tuned in. I assumed they’d done him Portland.”

Then Roman spoke directly to Leo: “You’re not a Diarist?”

“What would make me a Diarist?” asked Leo.

“An eye test, apparently,” said Mark, sarcastic. In his swollen, ruined shoes, he looked like a vanquished musketeer.

“This is no good, having them here,” said Constance, talking to her boyfriend and Roman Shades only. “I want them both tested.” She was still holding her knife.

Leo felt the current of peril in the room.

“Oh, I’ll take your test,” he said brightly, sitting down in a chair at the table. “I like tests.”

Constance put a janky-looking laptop computer on the table. She tapped and clicked and then laid it open before Leo.

On the screen was a grid of numbers and symbols. To Leo, it looked like something between Arabic script and Masonic hieroglyphs.

“Wait. Don’t look yet,” snapped Constance.

Jeez . Leo looked away. How calm he felt. All this strangeness around him, and it seemed to him just like a summer evening, playing board games with his sisters on the still-warm flagstones around the pool.

Leila was sitting near him. He looked at her. She gave him a nod and a smile. Oh yeah, that’s why he was calm. He smiled back at her.

“Okay, look now,” said Constance.

Leo looked. His eyes swam a little bit, like they’re supposed to when you look at an eye-tripping postcard. “Which way do I read it?”

“Any way. Just take it in.”

“I did. Is that a fish?”

“You’re not supposed to ask questions,” said Constance, put out.

“You’re not supposed to even want to ask questions,” said Roman.

Leo thought that was unfair. He looked at Leila. She gave him another nod.

“Are you looking at it?” Constance asked him.

“I am. I did.”

“It’s not giving you a number,” said Constance.

“That’s not my problem,” said Leo.

“Can you look at it differently?”

Leo looked at the screen again, differently this time, and he saw the screen behind the screen, which was another set of symbols, or the same set reordered. He felt a surge of connections fire in his brain. Like a truth hole, but this time it was coming from inside of him. He rocked forward a bit. Was this a seizure? No, it was not unpleasant. All reports of seizures had them as unpleasant. But there was a gluey slowing of time that he recalled from febrile night terrors he’d had when he was sick as a little boy. He was an often-sick child, out of school for weeks at a time, weeks when it was just he and his mom in that big town house. She’d stir the bubbles out of ginger ale, put her cool hand on his burning brow, and together they’d watch game shows. Not so bad. But at night, running a temp of 104, his hearing went too-acute and the closets throbbed with a dark knowledge. This eye test was like that, except that the knowledge was good news, or at least unthreatening. The table spilled tableness out of its being. Light and wonder poured through the windows. Faces dappled on bodies, luminous, open.