Chapter 16
Seth was driving west on Sunset when Isaac’s consciousness resurfaced. Isaac tried to get his bearings, but his eyes had trouble focusing. It must have been a few hours past midnight. There was little traffic, and the mockingbirds were singing.
“What’s wrong?” Isaac wondered.
“Nothing at all,” Seth said, turning to Isaac with a broad smile. “Good to see you’re awake. How’s the head?”
Isaac moved it around in slow circles to test how sensitive his brain was feeling. Surprisingly, everything felt no worse than when he started the night. “Fine. Fine. Even maybe a little refreshed.”
“You’ve been out a while. I left you in the car when I stopped for tacos. But don’t worry. I rolled down the window so you could breathe.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s the least I could do.”
“What happened at Dr. Rousseau’s?”
“He was in the process of giving you the old mind fuck, and I came just in time to save the day.”
“He was? You did?”
“I knew you were in trouble. It was like ESP or whatever the aliens call it. You and I got a connection, you know? Like Rick and Morty or Captain and Tennille. I felt that spidey sense. You know that little tingle in your balls?”
“What does that mean? What did you do to him?” Isaac grimaced, expecting the worst — murder. His imagination went straight to plastic sheeting, zip ties, and a melon baller. He had to get his story straight, so he wouldn’t go down with Seth when the police came for them. What clues had Seth given him? Who were the accomplices he named? Rick? Morty? Who’s Tenille, and how did he earn the rank of Captain when Captain Flapjacks already held that position? Isaac had more questions than answers.
“I had to set things right between Rousseau and you. Get you guys on the same page.”
“...” Isaac searched Seth’s clothing for dark splotches of blood, but he appeared clean. Isaac’s curiosity wasn’t satisfied, however, so he floated a trial balloon. “This will sure make for an awkward meeting with Dr. Rousseau… next week….”
Seth brought the car to a stop at a red light. “You won’t be seeing Dr. Rousseau anymore.”
Isaac gasped. “Because he’s no longer of this earth?”
“No, because he’s out to get you.”
“But I have to go. The money. The trust fund. He’ll cancel my checks.”
Seth sighed. “I saved your life tonight. You know that, right? I set you free from those golden handcuffs.”
Isaac nodded. He couldn’t totally remember what had happened at his session. There were no images or sounds to recall, but a feeling of fear remained within him. He had been in trouble. That much, he was sure.
Seth slammed his hand against the steering wheel. “I’m sorry, Isaac. It should have never come to that. I threw you to that viper as bait when I knew who he was. What he is.”
“What is he?”
“He’s your handler.”
“My handler?” Isaac was thrown back against his seat as Seth accelerated through the changing light with enough juice to get the tires to squeal. “A handler for what?”
“That’s the real question. And we’re going to find out. Truth is, I’ve always known Dr. Rousseau was a true blue bastard.”
“How?”
“Because I was part of whatever he was doing.”
“Part of what?”
“But I’m done with that life. Calling it quits. You heard it here first.”
“Why?”
“I’m a sensationalist, Isaac.”
“You’re a journalist?”
“I live my life with one goal: to experience every sensation known to the universe.”
“Sensation?” Isaac repeated.
“Every man needs a code, and that’s my chosen code.”
“What kind of sensations?”
“Oh, every sensation possible. That’s the goal, anyway. You could say that I collect them. Like how people collect Pokemon cards or women’s panties, but, for me, it’s sensations, the feel of skydiving, or the taste of fresh panda meat cooked rare. But I want more. I want to experience everything. Some people have gone so far as to call me a sadist, but do you know what I call those people?”
“...”
“Pussies.”
“Great.”
“I'm proud to say I’ve acquired so many sensations already. You feel me? I’ve seen things... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate...”
“Sorry, but I thought the Tannhäuser gate was in Germany, not Afghanistan.” Isaac gave a contemplative pause, “Did I ever thank you for your service?”
“No, you never did, now that you mention it, but it’s cool. I didn’t serve for you or for your freedom anyway. I did that shit for myself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Finding the right legal framework to experience the sensation of killing a man wasn’t easy. It was either I do a tour or two overseas or become a cop. But I never felt the sensation of Afghani sand between my toes either, so I figured I could kill two birds with one stone.”
“How was it?”
“Hot as hell.”
“No, killing a person.” Isaac leaned forward. How’d it feel?” he asked, eager for Seth’s response like a middle school boy asking his older brother about prom night. The vibe did not escape Seth’s notice.
“A gentleman never kisses and tells.” He reached over and ruffled Isaac’s hair. “You’ll get there one day, big guy. I know it.”
Isaac couldn’t suppress his smile as he smoothed his hair back down to its resting position. “Seth?”
“Yes?”
“What sensation are you fulfilling by doing all this?” Isaac waved a hand about to indicate himself and their current situation of racing down Sunset.
“The sensation of satiating my hunger, Isaac. Have to pay the bills to eat. Not a lot of work out there for a vet who earned a Slytherin badge of honor. That’s what the business community and Ministry of Magic call a ‘red flag.’ It just screams PTSD and bad intentions. Had I known they’d give me a Sorting H.A.T. test before discharge, I would have opted to be a cop instead. Now all I can do is take jobs that leverage my Slytherin street cred, so here I am. No one will touch me otherwise. Long story short: don’t take this wrong, Isaac, but you’re just a job to me. Cha-fucking-ching.”
“Oh.”
“At least it was like that at first.”
“And now?”
“Now?” Seth glanced over to Isaac, weighing his words. “You offer the chance to experience a new sensation.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not a writer like you, Isaac, so I’m not always so great at pairing words with feelings, but I’m a mother hen looking after my chick. Nurturing. I’ve never done that before.”
“Am I the chick?”
“Bingo, and that makes Dr. Rousseau the fucking fox in the hen house.” Seth slammed the heel of his hand against the steering wheel again, accidentally sounding the horn and garnering several single-fingered responses from the drivers around them.
“But what’s going to happen with you? Isn’t Dr. Rousseau going to come after you, too?”
“I can handle Dr. Rousseau.”
“And the Slytherin board or whoever you work with?”
“I can handle them, too,” Seth shrugged. “Seeing how pathetic you are has given me a real crisis of my conscious. It’s time for a career change.”
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“My handler…” Isaac remained dumbfounded.
“You’ve got the idea now. He was your puppeteer. But you’re a real boy now. Do you get it? You’re a real boy.”
Isaac nodded, full of confidence. “I’m ready.”
Seth side-eyed Isaac. “For what?”
“I’m ready,” Isaac confirmed. “I’m steady.”
Seth reached out to Isaac and slapped him.
“What was that for?” Isaac asked, holding the rising welt on his face with tenderness.
“You were doing Dr. Rousseau’s call-and-response mind fuck. Ready, steady, bullshit.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Isaac whimpered.
“That’s the problem. It’s so simple. We got to figure out what he was training you to do. Okay? You see, Dr. Rousseau must have utilized your therapy sessions to assign you missions and debrief you afterward. Classic handler techniques. Textbook even. Now the question of questions: what did Dr. Rousseau ever have you do?”
Isaac stopped to reflect on the sessions he’d been going to year after year. But nothing stood out in his memory. He didn’t recall any secret missions. Instead, he remembered how his memory didn’t exist before Dr. Rousseau. His therapist had been an ever-present presence.
Out of all the people in the world, Isaac’s parents picked Dr. Rousseau to watch over him. He was the one they wrote into their will before his father suffered the fatal sneeze attack, the one that caused him to swerve the family car into oncoming traffic. How could they have been so wrong to pick Dr. Rousseau?
Or was Seth wrong? Isaac searched Seth to draw some sort of conclusion on his character and found nothing concrete. Yet there was something intangible there that made Isaac believe in him.
Still, Isaac would be sad to see Dr. Rousseau go. Isaac didn’t necessarily look forward to his weekly meetings with his therapist, but they had been some source of comfort. Not because of any personal growth resulting from his visits, but without school or a job, the meetings gave Isaac a way to mark the passage of time. They kept him regular. Or so he had thought.
“I don’t remember doing anything special for Dr. Rousseau other than showing up every week. He never gave me homework or anything. Or assignments. I guess the exception was that he wanted me to continue writing the script for Super Jesus 3.”
“That’s it? There were no other directives he gave to you?”
“No.”
Seth whispered to himself, “A sleeper agent.”
“What?”
“You’re a sleeper agent! Now we gotta figure out if you’re still sleeping.” Seth had a glimmer in his eye. “I will save you.”
“...” Isaac couldn’t muster up the courage to say thank you, but he was touched. Curse Dr. Rousseau! If Isaac had been going to real therapy rather than a sham therapist to mask his identity as a sleeper agent, he could have expressed his gratitude better.
Instead, Isaac sat there in silence, letting his eyes wander out the window to where they landed on a mural. Three disembodied heads floating on a white cloud were spray-painted on the cinderblock wall of a mom-and-pop pupusa place. Left, right, and middle were Tupac Shakur, Kobe Bryant, and Super Jesus, respectively. Respectfully, “THEY WILL RISE AGAIN” was written on a banner above them. The mural was beautiful and the brushwork was divine with no detail spared. Tupac’s nose ring shone under the streetlights, and the cherubs holding the banner aloft looked as soft and cuddly as the cloud they flew above. A true work of art, Isaac couldn’t tell if this was genuine graffiti or some sort of guerilla advertisement campaign for the Super Jesus sequel.
“What do we do?” Isaac wondered, finding comfort in the mural.
“We go downtown,” Seth stated with utter obviousness. He pointed out the windshield to the growing skyscrapers whose windows glittered in the night, each light marking the presence of a nocturnal cleaning crew hard at work.
“Of course!” Isaac shouted. “Why downtown?”
“To Skid Row, specifically, because we’re going to solve this mystery of yours.”
“Our mystery,” Isaac said to his mentor.
“Our mystery,” Seth agreed, “And from what I can tell, we need to save a cat, and to do that, we have to find Super Jesus. He’s the one loose thread we’re letting dangle in the wind like a limp dick in WeHo. If we’re not careful, he’s going to fuck us, isn’t he? And we know Super Jesus has been filming promotional miracles down at Skid Row, right?”
“Do you think that’s a good idea? If I’m a secret agent-”
“Sleeper agent,” Seth corrected. “I’m the secret agent.”
“Sleeper agent. Right.”
“Let me guess. You don’t have any friends or family.”
“...”
“See, you’re a fucking sleeper agent. You’re my first mentee who’s a sleeper agent!”
“I should hope so,” Isaac grumbled.
“Let me guess: there’s no one to tie you to anything, right? And most of your life has been spent in your apartment, out of sight, keeping up with the culture by watching TV and movies so you could seamlessly reintegrate into society at a moment’s notice?”
“You could say that if you were being uncharitable.”
“Sleeper agent. God damn, this is exciting!”
Isaac didn’t feel the same unless Seth used ‘exciting’ as a euphemism for anxiety-induced nausea. “If I’m a sleeper agent, then the best idea would be for me to get the fuck out of town and bail. Get off the proverbial grid, right? Whatever I’m programmed to do will probably be pretty useless if I'm on a beach in Bali.”
“Bali blows,” Seth scoffed. “Plus, I’ve never run from a fight.”
“I guess, but I would be the one running from the fight, not you.”
“That’s no good. I’m helping you now, remember? Whatever happens to you happens to me. If you’re a coward, then I’m a coward.”
“Oh yeah,” Isaac remembered. “That’s true.”
“Cowards run. Are you a coward, Isaac? Because that’s not the type of person who sparked this new sensation of altruism within me. What’s the worst that could happen anyway?” Seth asked, and Isaac immediately thought of the world ending.
“Maybe we should talk to my psychic,” Isaac suggested softly. He had the wild thought that maybe she could take Dr. Rousseau’s place in his life. He’d love to mark time with Anne and mark her as his territory by urinating on her left foot.
“MaYbE wE sHoUlD tAlK tO mY pSyChic,” Seth mocked Isaac. “Who we need to talk to is Super Jesus, our best and only chance to crack this case. Only he knows what the cat and Zee were up to at the Annenberg that night of your dream.”
“Aren’t you afraid we could play into Dr. Rousseau’s hand by doing this? Like, what if I’m running on autopilot as a sleeper agent?”
“No fucking way,” Seth said to reassure Isaac, “If anything, you’re sleepwalking. Hold on. This all started with your dream, right? While you were sleeping? Holy shit. They made it too obvious. You’re a literal fucking sleeper agent. I told you, didn’t I?”
“You did tell me. Hold on. Didn’t you do that ready, steady, command and response sequence to me once?” Isaac said, remembering when Seth offered him drugs after they visited the coroner’s office. At the time, Isaac thought he was merely the victim of peer pressure, but he now wondered if it was as innocent as that.
“Oh, did I?” Seth said, but his Cheshire smile told Isaac all he needed to know. He stared Seth down, doing his best to give him the stink eye until Seth relented. “Fine. Fine. Think of it like a type of hypnosis. After you say the ready-steady lines, you become really suggestible to ideas, especially the bad ones.”
“Sleeper agent,” Isaac muttered.
Seth smiled. “You got it now. And if your brain is fossilized by enough fluoride, like yours is, it’s game over. With all that fluoride, I’m surprised you still retain enough independent critical thinking skills to choose when and where you take a shit.”
“So why did you do it to me then?”
“Because that shit I got you to smoke was no ordinary PCP.”
“It wasn’t?”
“It was angel dust, AKA adrenochrome, AKA white rabbit. Like, for real. They call it angel dust because it’s harvested from the innocent, usually children.”
“Why do they call it white rabbit?”
“Because the chemical composition, when drawn, has got two fucking floppy rabbit ears. You’re in Wonderland now, buddy. Sometimes a dose or three is enough to de-fluoride a brain, but not in your case. I was trying to break you out of your prison. I wanted to empower you, Isaac.”
Isaac nodded.
“That’s why we have to locate Super Jesus,” Seth said. Isaac looked out the window and saw the pretty pink cylinders that marked the boundary of Pershing Square pass by them. They were close to Skid Row. “Let’s review. What do you know about the Super Jesus miracles?”
“Uh,” Isaac froze at the pop quiz and remembered what taking the Sorting H.A.T. exam felt like. “Gimme a minute. It’s a trick question?”
“It is not a trick question,” Seth groaned. “One of the first things you do in the field is to run a little recon. Super Jesus and the Super Jesus marketing team have been shooting promotional material for the new movie, what they call miracles, so we won't be alone out there, most likely. There may be a full film crew we’ll have to contend with. So far, other miracles they’ve done have been sponsoring a new extension to the metro line, creating a third Jon and Vinny’s location, and getting Ben and Jennifer back together. Now they’re on to homelessness and cleaning up Skid Row, like Hercules at the stables.”
“You think they’re doing miracles at this time of night?” Isaac yawned.
Seth slapped him back on the head to keep him alert. “Get your head in the game. There’s no rest for the wicked, all right?” He pulled the car up to the curb and stopped.
They had arrived at Skid Row. Isaac glanced out the window, seeing sidewalk tents for as far as he could see. They were all of shapes and sizes. Some looked fresh off the sales floor at R.E.I., while others were just a collection of tarps and rats nests of butcher’s twine.
The homeless milling about gave suspicious and furtive looks toward Isaac’s car that didn’t go unnoticed by Seth. “Hmm. Okay. You get a head start here, and I will find a different place to park. I’m right behind you, on your six. Hoo-ah!”
“Got it,” Isaac said as he exited the car. “I won’t let you down.” He looked back and saw Seth shooting at him with finger guns as he drove Isaac’s car away.
In and out. In and out. Isaac took a few yoga breaths to calm himself before the adventure ahead. He found it refreshing. It was a lovely night to be on Skid Row since the wind was blowing hard from the southwest, where the flower district resided. Whoever had been LA’s city planner had a certain ingenuity, Isaac thought, as the scent of fresh-cut roses washed over the street and won the battle against the odors wafting up from the sewage and refuse piled high in the gutters.
Isaac waded through that garbage, kicking aside a stack of Jack in the Box taco wrappers as he began his search for Super Jesus. There was no room for him on the sidewalks, not with Skid Row’s tenants’ tents claiming every inch. Many glowed from within, with the same blue hue emitted by your standard smartphone.
Isaac did not judge the homeless anymore. He no longer questioned their choices. If they’d rather have a smartphone than a hot meal, that was fine by Isaac. After all, Isaac believed smartphone ownership should be enshrined as an inalienable human right, right up there with life, liberty, and the pursuit of legal hallucinogens.
Isaac liked the homeless the more and more he considered them, casting aside his initial phobia instilled and installed in him by Dr. Rousseau. Isaac respected them. Game recognized game. If Isaac did not receive his bi-weekly trust fund direct deposit from Dr. Rousseau, he would have pursued a career in homelessness long ago. As far as he was concerned, the homeless had it all figured out. They don’t have to work in a cubicle or pay taxes, and they could maximize their fun in the LA sun. Every day was a vacation as far as Isaac was concerned.
It was no wonder to Isaac why the homeless population was growing. The secret was out! The phenomenon had nothing to do with the various economic forces crippling the housing market and everything to do with people opting out of becoming capitalist slaves. Isaac pondered the logistics of his future homeless living arrangements if he failed his mission. Do the Skid Row residents lock their tents before leaving for the day, or was this a community bound by a code of ethics and utopian ideals?
Focus! Isaac thought. If he were to crack the case of Super Jesus and the missing cat, he’d have to do more than solve the homeless crisis (by which he meant to say there is no such thing as a homeless crisis). He would have to “fulfill the promise of his premise.” The words of Dr. Rousseau made him shudder, knowing they came from his “handler,” but Isaac knew that he was still right. Whatever Dr. Rousseau had in mind for Isaac’s premise, he did not know, but that was for Isaac to decide now. And, right now, fulfilling the promise of his premise meant that he would have to follow this rabbit hole down for as long as he could follow it, no matter where it would lead him.
Isaac stopped dead in his tracks, not wanting to spook the animal that appeared out of nowhere in front of him. It wasn’t a rabbit, but something far more ominous. A Captain Flapjacks cat sat on his haunches, facing Isaac, still as could be, its blue Birman eyes glowing like lanterns in the dark. They were going to light the way for him.
Isaac tried to wait for Seth before following the Birman, but the cat was not cooperative. As soon as the two locked eyes, the cat was on the move, and Isaac was careful not to lose sight of him as he followed the cat into the shadows.