1758 Watershed Drive (Part I)

I have some very fine friends and I'm a pretty lucky guy (knock on wood). My girlfriend organized a few of my friends to write a book inspired by details in my life and in my friendships. All for my 30th b-day. I thought it turned out pretty darn hilarious, so I'm going to post it here:


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Chapter 1: The Destiny

by Eric Chan

He looked at his watch again. 11:47 P.M. If he only had taken care of this earlier he wouldn’t be in this predicament now, he thought. The noises were starting to get louder.
11:52 P.M. Almost there. Luckily, he had preplanned for this potential calamity earlier and had gotten everything ready for his arrival back home. The cab made one last sharp turn into the alley. He had the payment ready and quickly gave the driver the money. He knew that he could make it up the stairs in 48 seconds. He had timed this in many different types of conditions from dry versus wet weather, carrying nothing or lugging around his laptop, and even days when his back spasms were acting up.
11:53 P.M. He was feeling spry today and made it to his apartment door. Apartment 733. The 7 was looking a bit darker that normal. The cheap luster must be wearing off, he thought. As he fumbled to get the key out of his pocket, he recalled why he had picked this apartment. The location was central to most important locations, but the place was a bit run down. It had potential; however he just never took the time. It was because of the number. 733. 7 for the month of his birthday, July, which he looked forward to each year. 33 for the jersey number of his favorite basketball player, Larry Bird. He had a thing for numbers and random superstitions like that. There was also that other reason, her.
11:57 P.M. He ran quickly to his desk. The laptop was on as planned. In fact, the home page for his fantasy baseball team was up on the screen already. He clicked on ‘Change Active Roster.’ He moved two pitchers to the starting lineup. He quickly scanned his team’s performance for the day. Another terrible day, he thought. His eyes then sharpened onto one specific part of the page. Paul Konerko went 0 for 8 in a doubleheader. “Fuck you Paul Konerko,” he muttered under his breath. He whizzed through a few more screens as he had done this for many years. “Sit your ass down,” he sternly instructed towards the computer. Done: Paul Konerko was back on his bench.
11:59 P.M. He looked at his watch one more time. Perfect, everything done in the nick of time. His team was ready to compete tomorrow. Now, he refocused on the other problem.
The voices were starting to get louder. It had started on his cab ride home. He went to the kitchen to pour a glass of red wine. Sitting down in his couch, he relaxed and tried to focus on the noise. He needed to see if he could hear it more clearly.
The cacophonous sound started to become more refined. It was a woman’s voice. She was upset. He took another sip and closed his eyes. He needed to get a better sense of the situation. This was only the eighth time he had really focused on the noise. He still wondered if the noise was really there, or if everything was just in his head.
He had pondered the possibility that he was starting to lose it at thirty years old. His back spasms were acting up on a more consistent basis. He no longer was dominating the computer in his NBA Live Playstation games. And that noise. It had only started to happen after his birthday celebration. On that night, he had gotten back home completely intoxicated. He immediately jumped into bed hoping to get to sleep quickly and have his body take care of the alcohol while he was asleep. He had an uncanny ability to get sleep anytime, anywhere. Then, out of nowhere, that noise started to bounce across his room. He jumped up and looked around. The noise fell silent. He relaxed once more onto his bed. He thought about the fact that she was there at his party. He had known her for a few years now, but he knew that they had a special connection together, and were starting to hang out a bit more. When he had heard that she moved into this building, he took the opportunity with his expiring lease to find another place to live. He spent weeks looking around her area and when he saw that Apartment 733 was available in her building, he took the coincidence of all that good fortune and his superstition of numbers to take it without even looking at the apartment itself. He told himself that he would make it work and anyways he had lived in worse conditions. Some of his places in college were downright nasty and he had made it through those dark days. If he could make it back then, he could certainly deal with whatever the apartment looked like now.
As the days went by after his birthday, there were occasional times where the random noise would make itself evident again. One time it happened while at work during a team meeting with senior executives from his company. He recalled that day very specifically because it his company’s annual planning session. He dreaded that meeting because it involved various executives who knew nothing about what the market really wanted and then hearing them giving their strong opinions on what the marketing message should be. These idiots waste so much time on this shit, he thought.
The vice president shouted out, “We need to re-message that we are focusing on become the leading enterprise software vendor with an emphasis on global outsourcing from the China market.”
“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, “this couldn’t be the message they were going to go with.” And then it happened. It started off with whispers, then gradually got louder to a sharp noise. He looked across the room quickly. Everyone was debating the vice president’s grand plan. No one seemed to be hearing anything. He closed his eyes for a moment, and the noise started to become some random words. Whose words, he wondered. It sounded like a man who was worried. The words from the man were starting to become a bit clearer. “Please like it.” Then the noise stopped.
“Lestat, what do you think,” the vice president asked him. The vice president was an idiot, but Lestat knew that his promotion may be resting on giving full support to the vice president in front of the CEO. He looked at the room one more time, wondered if this would be the day that he gave everyone a piece of his mind. He rationalized that the job paid pretty well, and more importantly, there was a dart board downstairs that he and his fellow co-workers snuck down to once a day. He calmly told the dysfunctional group that if they refined the message, and changed a few words around, the message that the vice president had was quite powerful. He proposed a few minor tweaks, but basically keeping the vice president’s message intact. The group started to discuss amongst themselves. Lestat looked toward the window wondering how much more of this crap he was going to have to sit through. Then the noise started up again. It sounded like drums at first, then slowly migrating to a bunch of loud whispers. He closed his eyes once more. The same man’s voice was there. He put down his glasses onto the table and wiped his hands across his eyes. He then heard it. “I got this one in the bag. Everyone is going with my message.” Lestat shot a look quickly across the room. The vice president was sitting there nodding his head toward the group. As the vice president turned his head slightly, he caught Lestat’s eyes sternly focused upon his. The vice president smiled and then winked.
The next few weeks, he relaxed and gave little thought to that episode at work. Sure, the noises were coming and going. Sometimes an hour a day. Sometimes not for a few entire days. He wasn’t sure if there was a pattern to all this. But even when the noises appeared, he would let it go because he was occupied elsewhere. Anyways, it wasn’t like he was going to do anything with these noises. He wasn’t even sure that the incident at his work really even happened, or even more likely, whether it was a made-up figment of Lestat’s mind. Nevertheless, he tried to have fun with it. Lestat had always dreamed about the possibility of having special powers, like Superman or the Dark Knight. Maybe in a random way, this could be his, for however long this would last. Either that, or he was completely out of his mind. A few nights later, he would hear women’s voices. One night a woman was complaining about her cheating husband. Another night a woman was yelling about her car being broken into. He really had no desire to do much about these voices. First, he had no idea about who these people were. Second, he was in the midst of his NBA Live season and he was having problems with his Celtics team after losing Paul Pierce to an injury. He was running a bunch of scrubs out there and he had to focus so hard on getting by with close wins. He was good when he needed to be, and he knew it. Third, even if he could get a better sense of where the voices were coming from, what would he do about them? It’s not like he had a superhero’s suit in his closet. Nor did he even have any real powers. He couldn’t shoot lasers from his eyes. He couldn’t command the weather to do his biding. Lastly, what was he even contemplating trying to put himself into? Fixing someone’s marriage? That’s a real superhero for you.
12:43 A.M. To focus or not to focus, that was the question, he muttered loudly. He was starting make out the woman’s voice. He heard a “Please.” He then heard an “Outside.” He focused a bit more and could make out the word “Car” and then the number “1758.” The phone then rang. The noises went silent. Who was calling at this hour, he wondered. It was almost 1 A.M. “Hey Lestat, what’s up?” It was her.
“Not much, how are you doing?” Lestat asked in a somewhat higher pitched voice. He had always wondered why he did that. He was always making fun of everyone else who went with the high pitched voice when talking with girlfriends, potential girlfriends, or just a girl he was simply trying to hook up with. It must be some random complex that men have with the opposite sex, similar to adults going into the baby talk mode when dealing with babies. It was just a way of life, and a phenomenon that simply could not be explained, he concluded.
“I heard you running up the stairs, was something wrong?”
“Nah, I was uh…running late and had to take care of something at the apartment. Everything is cool now.”
“That’s great. Hey, I was wondering…..”
He loved her voice. It was sweet, yet not overly so like he saw with tons of Asian girls. It was a firm voice, too. One that had conviction behind it and had a sense of purpose. But frankly, her voice was only the tip of the iceberg. Since the day he met her, he knew there was something special. She was smart. Not necessarily brilliant like a professor or a scientist, but she had clarity of thought that made everything she said sound so profound. He would talk about everything with her, from politics, to work, to even former boyfriends.
“….you know that club that Will has been talking about for months. Well, it has a special band coming in today and I thought it might be cool to check it out.”
“You mean Lestat.”
“Yeah, that one. I know you think it’s cheesy to go to a club named after you, but this place sounds pretty legit. What do you think?”
He recalled Will mentioning this club more than a few times over the past couple of months. Lestat was convinced that Will kept on mentioning it because of the club’s name. Lestat. I guess it was trendy to name something after a vampire, he thought. Dark, brooding, balancing between good and evil. He didn’t care as much that the club was named the same as his. It was actually a cool name for a club, he thought. A bit eerie, but cool. He was just annoyed because this would give everyone another reason to have conversations about his name.
He remembered during high school the numerous questions he got about name. There was this one asshole. Matthew Puck. “Show us your fangs, Lestat,” Matthew used to shout across the common area. Some guys could be such dicks sometimes. But worse off was the times where he was with strangers and he would have to give some long winded explanation about how his parents were trying to come up with a creative name and that his Chinese name sounded a bit like Lestat and that Lestat wasn’t for the vampire, but instead it was an old French word for “condition of life.” He wasn’t really sure that this story held a lot of truth behind it but he had told his version of what had happened so many times that he almost convinced himself that the story was the truth. He never really asked his parents about it either. He was convinced that his parents purposely wanted him to grow through life with people asking about his parents and their thought process on such a creative name. He was pretty much over it now, but once a while, it would strike an irritating chord down his spine. These episodes with Will were certainly one of those. However, at the moment, the situation was a bit different. There was a much more important player involved now.
“Sure, I’d love to. When do you want to go?
“I’m thinking now. Are you ready?
As he was about to definitely say yes to this rare opportunity to have one-on-one time with her, the noises started to reappear. Not now, he thought. He closed his eyes for a second. He could make out an entire phrase now. “1758 Watershed Drive.” Interesting, he thought. Maybe tomorrow he would stop by to see if it was really a woman who lived there, or if there was even a Watershed Drive that existed or maybe it was in a different state altogether. But tonight, this wasn’t the night to screw around with his noises. It was all about her.
“Lestat, are you still there?”
“Yeah, sorry, I just got distracted for a moment. I’d love to.”
“Great, your car or mine?”
“My car is in the shop, so it’s probably going to have to be yours.”
“Okay, meet me downstairs in five minutes.”
The noises reappeared. There was a quick beat to it now. Then the words, “Please……help.” Oh fuck, he thought. This cannot be happening now. He attempted to walk through the possibilities on what could be happening. Maybe it was an old woman who fell down while going to the bathroom. Maybe she was shouting toward a loved one who lived with her. His mind then quickly shifted towards a worse case scenario. His mind tended to work that way. What would happen if this woman was trapped in a home engulfed by fire and couldn’t get out. What would he do about it? Somehow figure out where this address was and save the day? Was he going to blow out the flames in a single breath? This was ridiculous. Maybe he should call the cops, he thought. He would do his part; they would do theirs. However, what could he tell the cops? He was already imagining the conversation.
“911.”
“Hi, I need some help. There is something wrong at 1758 Watershed Drive.”
“Okay. Calm down. Are you currently at the premise?”
“No.”
“Okay, is someone you know at that location?”
“Not exactly……”
“So how do you know that something is wrong?”
“Well, the voices in my head are telling me.”
“Sir, this is not a line for your adolescent prank calls. Please refrain from doing this again, otherwise, we will find you and charge you with a misdemeanor.”
“But……”
“Thank you and good night.”
The voices were now repeating themselves - quick and with a sense of urgency behind them. There was also a sound of concern in her voice. “1758 Watershed Drive. Please help.” It was a continuous loop now and an annoying one at that. It reminded him of the people who tell the same stories at every party. Tell a different story for crying out loud! Were people that boring and lifeless that they had no choice but to go with the same stories over and over?
“Lestat?”
His conscience was now starting to get the better of him. Best case, I find this address and assuming it’s local, I stop by, see that nothing is wrong, and realize that I’m crazy and have just screwed up an opportunity to spend some time with her. Worst case, I find this address, realize that something is wrong, that I do have voices in my head, but can’t do anything but stand there and watch it happen. Okay, he reasoned, he needed to find some clarity to his voices immediately as it was starting to drive him crazy. Maybe he really should just stop by tomorrow and see if there really was a Burnt House. I mean, how often was he going to get this chance to go out with her? Damn conscience…
“Yeah, sorry. Hey, random question. Have you heard about a street called Watershed Drive.”
“Umm…..yeah, I think so, why?”
“You have? Is it close to us?”
“Kind of, it’s on the way to Lestat, but it’s in the District.”
“The District. Oh, for crying out loud. Hmmm...I can’t really explain it right now, but I need to go there.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Unfortunately now.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
This was getting out of control. Did he really want to bring her into his mess? What would he tell her - that he was part crazy, part insane? That he was hearing noises in his head? Yeah, that would be a great way to kick off a conversation. But she asked if she could tag along. That was a positive sign, he reasoned with himself. Maybe this could be positioned as a trip for them to explore a part of town that they’ve never been to together. Lestat was great at rationalizing things to fit a story he wanted to create.
“Sure. But bring a coat. I’m not sure what we are going to be dealing with tonight.”
“Dealing with?”
“Ummm…I’m just joking….just bring it. We’ll stop by for a second and then head over to the club.”
“Cool, see you in a second.”
“Great.” He hung up.
Lestat looked at his clock. 1:00 AM exactly. This was going to be interesting. This would be the first time he tried to validate one of his noises. This, coupled with the fact that she was coming along, was just crazy. Fuck it, he thought, I’m thirty years old, and if I’m going down, I’m going with all my guns blazing. He looked at the mirror across his creaky bed and realized he had two imaginary six shooters pointing at himself.

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Chapter 2: Return of the Silk

by Zita Maliga

The doorbell rang cautiously, Lestat thought, considering that she had called him up at 1 o’clock in the morning to go clubbing. It was a bold move on her part, but not out of character for Lucile, who had recently returned from the hurricane-struck city of New Orleans. He hadn’t known where she was for days after she left. One day Lestat was walking past her in the parking lot, at 7:15 in the morning, when Lucile religiously began her daily commute. Then, the next day Lucile was gone. Even their mutual friends hadn’t known where she was and her absence had haunted him, until the third day after her disappearance, when a seemingly casual, anonymous inquiry made to Lucile’s secretary unraveled the mystery of her departure.
Lestat heard the first chime of the doorbell and then a pause, as though someone had gently pressed the doorbell and then let their finger linger there before finally letting it go. As though releasing the doorbell was another decision, which had to be weighed with gravity equal to the act of choosing to announce oneself with the first ring. Or had time slowed down, Lestat wondered, as it sometimes felt like when he was excited. The presence of Lucile making every second more meaningful, full of possibilities.
It was 1:08 AM exactly. Lestat closed his laptop, as the Google directions finished their slow descent through the printer. He couldn’t go anywhere without first getting directions off the Internet. At least he could confirm that the voices in his head were guiding him to a place that actually existed. The District wasn’t the kind of place you wanted to look lost in. Not that it was outright dangerous to walk around there at night. The District was downtown, full of people and safe enough if you picked the right pockets of artsy urban self-renewal. Rather, the District was opportunistic and bad things happened to people who wandered as tourists.
He felt his back peeling away from the leather armchair as he got up to open the door. Clothing had become a sopping burden in the last week, after the air conditioning broke down at the height of the heat wave. Lestat pulled the plastic off a freshly pressed shirt and managed to get a few crucial buttons into place before he opened the door.
“Looks like you could use a few more minutes to get ready,” Lucile said, after her once-through glance of Lestat. She had a way of quickly summing up new situations, and Lestat had noted this gift in previous encounters. He wondered if she could see more than his outfit with that glance.
“It’s good to see you too,” he said with a little smirk and stepped back to let her in. Lucile was wearing a black halter-top and fitted white pants with heels. The halter top was loose, but the heat wave, which hasn’t relented its grip even at night, had formed beads of sweat on her skin that caused the silk fabric to pause and rest on her curves as Lucile walked past him into the apartment. Her shoulder-length black hair curled slightly inwards at the ends, forming a gently swinging curtain that framed her face as she walked. Her dark brown eyes met his gaze for a second and held Lestat transfixed. He turned his head to keep her gaze, as though reading a story. A story so engrossing that he couldn’t help but finishing. Like a novel that keeps your drooping eyelids propped open well past the hour you had committed yourself to a restful sleep. It was the sort of look that a person gives when they have something they want to communicate. Something they are sure about. Since Lucile’s return from New Orleans, Lestat had noticed a subtle change in Lucile’s demeanor. Lestat saw Lucile though the lens of her new gaze and realized that the late-night request to see Lestat’s namesake didn’t have the whim of impulse as its motivator. As Lucile guided the movement of her purse onto the black leather sofa, Lestat noticed her short, practical nails were unpolished and beneath each nail, there rested a wedge of dirt like a handful of new moons. Or was Lestat imagining things again? Like the voices in his head. Was any of this real? There was one thing he was sure about - that whatever Lucile had seen in New Orleans, he was about to find out tonight.
“You managed to get here so quickly,” Lestat said. “This is what happens when you cut the travel time down to an elevator ride. I’ll just be a minute. You look great, by the way. Do you want something to drink before we go?”
“No, I’m good. Well, maybe a glass of water.”
“It’s in the kitchen. Second drawer on the left.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“I got it.”
“How’ve you been, Lucile?”
“Good. And you?”
“Getting over a cold, but better now. I think I was getting sick from the air-conditioning but I’m better now that it’s broken. Not happier, but healthier. How’s work?”
“The same.”
“Family?”
“Still in Cupertino.”
“Apartment?”
“Fine.”
The conversation flowed smoothly, like a Class I river. Ordinarily this would have bothered Lestat as he considered small talk to be mundane, boring, lifeless. But Lucile was anything but, and going through the motions gave Lestat a sense of control. Besides, the ease with which the words flowed out of him made them almost subconscious and Lestat embraced the flow as a sign of their natural harmony.
Lestat heard tap water flowing in the kitchen and turn on the faucet in the sink so he could shave the five o’clock shadow back to early morning. A dab of aftershave and he was ready for the night. It was 1:18 A.M. exactly when Lestat emerged from the bathroom. It was getting very late.
“Hey Lucile, any idea how late this club is open 'til?” Lestat asked, drying his hands on his trousers. He had decided to wear a metallic-silver, button-down shirt and black pleated pants for the club. The white sneakers weren’t exactly the best match, but his formal black shoes were uncomfortable and he only wore them if he had to go to meetings.
Lucile grabbed her purse. “It’s open ‘til 4. We should still make it in time,” she said.
“I’m ready to go,” Lestat said, opening the apartment door and letting Lucile through. “Do you still have that red Tercel?”
“The same,” said Lucile as they walked towards the elevator. Lestat pressed the elevator call button and they waited, both staring at the closed metal doors. The brushed steel was reflective and they both saw out two hazy silhouettes facing them.
“Do you ever watch those ‘documentaries’ on the Discovery channel?” asked Lestat, testing the waters. He wanted to see if she would be open to the idea of the voices in his head as being anything other than a paranoid delusion. “You know, the ones that investigate ghost stories and haunted houses as though they were a real phenomenon?”
“Sure,” replied Lucile. “People think they hear voices under stairs. It’s all nonsense. I saw part of one a long time ago about an exorcist living in England. What about it?”
“Smackdown,” thought Lestat. He couldn’t tell her the real reason for the detour now, though he really wanted to be honest with her and felt torn. This was harder than the time he had opted to trade Francisco Liriano for Arod. He had debated the trade for days and in the end he had decided to make the switch. The team had finished better because of it. He had trusted his gut and it had paid off. He steeled himself. Lestat would tell Lucile about the voices…as soon as the time was right.
“I just happened to see a documentary the other day,” he said. The time was not right. “I thought you might have caught it, is all. Sometimes people end up watching the same show. It’s a sign that they have common interests.” There, switch back to flirting. Better to move towards familiar ground. Was it still possible that Lucile didn’t know that he liked her?
The elevator door opened and they stepped inside. Lestat could once again hear the woman’s disembodied voice and the crackle of a house on fire. He coughed, trying to make it go away.
“Air-conditioning,” he offered as explanation. But how would be explain the voices?
The elevator reached the garage and they stepped into the dimly-lit garage. Lucile riffled through her purse for the keys. Lestat looked around for a sign. Any sign that what he would be doing next would be the right thing. The voices were driving him crazy. He needed a release waiver. “Make me a free agent,” he thought, looking up towards the sky. As they walked towards the car, he noticed a dragon sticker on Lucile’s rear bumper, the Chinese zodiac sign for 1976, the year of the dragon. He reached for the door handle. “Game on,” he thought, and stepped inside.


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Chapter 3: Scalable Solutions

by Paul Davis

The voices came back, sort of a murmur in the back of his mind, with the subtle intensity of a headache that never manifests itself into intense throbbing pain. Every time the sounds came through they seemed both clearer and further away- he made a quick note of the irony that as he came closer to this predestined destination, the wireless reception in his head grew fainter.
Lestat had developed strategies to avoid paying attention to those sounds while at work, just as he had as a child whenever his mind wandered to lustful or uncharitable thoughts, masking his guilt with so much static of sounds and words. The most effective strategy he had come upon was to recite in his mind the in-between song banter on some of his favorite albums, the bridging skits from hip-hop albums that amused him against his best attempts, and singularly poor yet amusing scraps of lyrics from songs he hadn’t listened to in a decade. He would repeat these phrases in his mind in order to block out the sounds which he was certain did not originate in his own head, though thinking that they were not of his own origin only made him feel crazier.
He would create a blanket of white noise to avoid those beckoning calls from sources unknown. Lestat often wondered if his mind was like his laptop’s wireless connection, jumping from one dimly-received network to another, only culling tiny bits of data from a larger whole. Still, he only gave those ideas so much time to develop, instead repeating Ryan Adam’s debate with his producer over which was the best Morrissey solo record, or half-finished punch lines from hip hop skits.
“Little half-dead’ll be more than motherfucking half-dead if he doesn’t fill my motherfucking drink up!”
“Cut up? Ain’t no cut up goin’ on round hurr. I’ll cut yo’ li’l ass up!”
“Totally Viva Hate”
“So you can suck me. Take that one to heart.”
“I’d like to drop my trousers to the world.”
“Help.”
“What about the voice of Geddy Lee?” What, indeed?
“Help…”
“I’ll fill yo’ motherfucking mouth up”
“Help…….”
“No need to be scared, child. It’s just the Lord doing His work”
“Help…………”
Lestat had effectively found a way to not avoid hearing the sounds and voices, only to obfuscate them further.
“There’s been a lot of talk about this song, maybe too much talk. This is not a rebel song…”
“Help………………..”
“Tammie, Angela, Marie……” “uh, uh, bitches I wanna fuck?”
“HELP.”
The voice was faint but strong. As he and Lucile drew back the door on the elevator, he tried to smell whether there was any hint of a fire, as if he could take the crackling in his head and find an olfactory manifestation of it. Lestat thought of another Discovery Channel documentary in which children born without the sense of sight further developed their other senses, and for a second wished he had a bit of their talent for super-smell.
The wait as the elevator creaked down its old wires had been interminable, as he questioned whether he could explain to Lucile what they were doing there without sounding insane, paranoid, delusional, or all of the above. Is there a difference? he asked himself. Doubtful, just academic psychological distinctions.
Lucile had noticed on the elevator ride down that Lestat had grown pale, with a few beads of perspiration draining down the crown of his forehead.
“You working too much?”
“Yeah, long hours at the outsourcing mines.”
Nothing a couple of shots of Jameson and a few pints couldn’t fix, he cannily observed.
“Your VP staying on message?” Lucile asked with a slight smirk.
“Yeah, he’s a good man,” Lestat responded, attempting irony but wondering as the words escaped his mouth exactly what he meant by that, and just how he expected Lucile to respond to a dry non sequitur that alluding to nothing.
Lucile frowned, and he knew he had effectively ended the conversation in its tracks, unable to keep up the slightest work banter while the great beyond was broadcasting through a portal in his head.
Too bad I can’t just Google the source of these voices, he thought.
Read the tags and see what they’re trying to market.
Cross-check the Wikipedia entry on “strange voices from Watershed Ave.”
I spend too much time in front of a goddamn computer.
“You need to get out more often,” said Lucile, attempting to bring the conversation back on track.
“That’s really shitty man, you’re like his fuckin’ idol.”
“HELP ME.”
“If that cocksucker Hannity asks me one more thing about American jobs, I’m pulling this microphone off me and walking away…”
And in the moment, it was as if the world’s biggest nitrous hit had just gone to Lestat’s mind, as the intersecting voices of Watershed Ave. and his Vice President opened up, streaking through his mind like two test airplanes creating concurrent sonic booms across the Nevada desert. The crackling sounds intensified, the implorations for help grew into a musical rolling moan while seemingly every internal dialogue his VP had reserved for his own private file battered Lestat’s psyche. Fearful yet mellifluous sighs of terror and resignation provided the soundtrack to a decade worth of briefings, of strategic discussions about trade embargos and emerging workforces, of disassociated figures and charts, of scat porn and late nights eating cold KFC.
Lestat’s complexion turned an ashy olive as a million livewires sparked in his head, as Lucile turned to find him a step behind her, writhing and spasming on the parking lot asphalt while a thin stream of saliva and vomit streamed from the right side of his crooked mouth.
Lucile called his name, and he could hear her, though she seemed much further away than his VP’s scheissefilm fantasies. Lestat’s eyes remained open, and he watched with no judgment or understanding, as she kneeled down, put her hands on his shoulders, tried to wipe up the fluid he could barely feel as it now streamed out of his mouth. Her voice was further and further away now, as she continued to hold his jerking left shoulder down while she placed her hand on his balmy forehead.
“Fuck! No reception.” Lucile swore rarely, but now was the time.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!”
Somebody could hear her.
Lestat could surmise that much as he faded into unconsciousness, his last freeze frame in the real world being the sight of Lucile bestridden by a strangely familiar figure in an anachronistically dated and ill-fitting pinstripe suit.