Chapter 16

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Chapter 16

As he stood there in the Gasden Motel parking lot, being squeezed like a clam in a starfish death grip, the bewitching power of womanhood overtook Mike's resolve. Like the poor clam, he suspected he wasn't going to get out of this without being consumed, digested, and shit out the other end.

Lisa's entire body had adhered to that of Mike. Her arms were entwined about his neck, and her gravity defying legs were wrapped around his thighs in an acrobatic position that is virtually impossible for non-gymnasts or pornstars to perform. The reason why females of the species do not die of loneliness, as many men in exiled, incarcerated isolation do, is because they have the power to receive absolution for their sins by transmitting electro-pheronomal chemical stimulation through their tentacles. This was exactly what Lisa was doing to Mike.

Lisa must have conducted a mind cleanse on Mike, because he immediately lost himself in the embrace and hugged back. The fact that he could feel her wet tears through his T-shirt expedited his quick and thorough defeat.

Sensing herself victorious, Lisa unpeeled herself by degrees, returning to the planetary surface again via the normal laws of physics. "Who's that kid?" She asked, already assuming proprietary airs.

Mike turned to see Little Fucker wobbling beneath the overhang along the front of the motel, wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt. "Oh, that's one of the customer's kids. Give me a second." She had been here about one minute, and he had already gone all St. Peter crack of dawn denial.

"Customers?"

“Yes, we have customers now."

Lisa looked disappointed, possibly thinking Mike would be at the point of giving up this foolishness by now. Mike broke off, took Little F by the hand and scurried him back down to Tony's room. The door was open, and he stepped in to see that Tony had all the critters lined up on the dresser in their jars, cages and terrariums for feeding. The tarantula was tearing into a cricket. A three-toed kangaroo rat named Skip was munching away in a dish of seeds. The scorpion was making short work of a mealworm. Since Little F had arrived, Tony had been keeping that hideous bug's lid closed, a great relief to Mike.

“So the bitch is back," Tony said lethargically.

Mike's brain was already so fogged up with love he was ready to fight over this offense, whereas five minutes ago he would have seen Tony's bitch, and raised him. But something held him back from protesting the insult.

"I just came to tell you to keep the kid inside for a while, just in case."

“Oh, so you can't really trust her, but you still let yourself get wrapped around her finger. That's why women suck.”

Mike couldn’t believe it, but Tony sounded jealous.

“You're a pendejo to get mixed up with her again. She ditched you."

Mike hated it was when people who had no business getting mixed up in his life got mixed up in his life. "Well, I don't remember needing your permission. Besides, you ditched me too!"

Tony pounded his hand on the dresser. Skip hopped. The tarantula bared its fangs. The scorpion raised its tail menacingly. Little F leaped. "I didn't ditch you!"

"What the hell else would you call it? You left me alone in jail in Nogales. You ran away in my own fucking truck. It sure as hell looks like you ditched me the same way she did, or the way you say she did."

Tony was rubbing his forehead. "What does that mean? Explain yourself."

“Explain yourself."

"I didn't ditch you. That's all you need to know."

Mike decided to retreat while the hypnotic thrall from Lisa's return still hovered around him like an opium cloud. He didn't want to lose his buzz, so he backed out slowly. Little F looked up at him with wide, sad eyes. Mike wanted to ruffle the kid's blonde mane but no - he couldn't go down that road. He had to center himself again.

"What was that all about?" Lisa asked as Mike was putting her bags away. She had brought several heavy suitcases along, apparently intending to settle.

"Just some unruly customers," Mike said.

The tenderness of Lisa's Lambeau leap into Mike's arms had already given over to bossy bitchiness, and she hadn't even kissed him yet. "Did you fire your caretaker yet?" she asked.

Barely five minutes had passed, and Lisa had already decided that the emotional energy required to maintain the façade was no longer necessary. “Lisa, I'm really happy to see you," Mike said.

"Didn't you get my message? That guy is a creep!"

"What do you mean? Did he try something?"

"Well, no..." Could that be disappointment in her voice? "But he makes me uncomfortable. He asks a lot of embarrassing questions. He has no filters.”

“He does that to everyone. He doesn’t know any better. He’s a feral animal with no social skills. He won't be a problem. He's in Mexico half the time."

Mike wondered how was he going to explain Little F to Lisa when Tony was in Mexico and he had to take care of him.

"Just fire him. You said he sits on his ass all day."

"That was before. I know now he performs a valuable service. You couldn't imagine how much criminal riff-raff the hotel business attracts. If some pimp or dope dealer tries to set up shop here, I push a button on the wall and Tony chases them off. I can't afford to lose him.”

“Can you afford to lose me?" Lisa squealed. Her eyes got puffy, but remained dry. "Why don't you just sell this shit box and come back to San Jose? I don't know what attracted you to this dump in the first place. I certainly don't plan to spend the rest of my life here."

When people tried to push Mike's buttons it tended to have the opposite effect. Instead of yielding, he would dig in and sometimes say something hurtful that drove people away forever. But Lisa's spell still lingered, so he controlled it. “We've been through this before, Lisa. I'm not going back to San Jose. I hate it there. The people are such goddamm fake assholes I go fucking nuts. I'm through with that.”

Lisa was demanding and unyielding herself, a bitch goddess who had attained her ascendance to Olympus through the adoration of the mortal masses. She had not been this way when they had first met at the San Jose Ikea, he selling cheap Scandinavian pressed wood furniture, she dishing out platters of slightly digestible meatballs to the low budget crowd. In that idyllic phase of the past, they were just two inseparable buddies, making silly faces and tickling each other in the breakroom. The relationship had not yet advanced to boyfriend - girlfriend, because Lisa was a pressure cooker of restrained ambition, and Mike was just a poor slob in a bright yellow Ikea shirt, fun to play with and useful when her computer crashed, or she had to take some bogus programming class she had no interest in. Unknown to Mike, Lisa only had the hots for power and money.

Even so, Mike worshipped Lisa with an impossible, puppy dog love that did not begin to be reciprocated. Then he wrote a foolproof anti-hacking program that earned him a six figure income even before he graduated. Only then did Lisa's tickling attacks grow amorous.

By that time the corrosive effects of ideology were starting to wear away at the strata of Lisa's soul, eroding her personality in the process, her infectious smile tumbling into the dogmatic stream in clods and clumps. Lisa learned in college that humor was a weapon of the bourgeoisie, designed to devalue marginalized groups, so it became very difficult to make her laugh. One thing that did make her happy was Mike's bank account, which blossomed merrily when he sold off his security software for double digit millions. It was only then that Lisa agreed to marry Mike, forgetting that money is a criminal tool in the pockets of the ideologically impure.

Lisa could not quite mold Mike in her own humorless image. She got the feeling he did not really care about persecuted peoples, because she had overheard him laughing at one of his Father's beaner jokes, and he still teased her mother about why there were no stray cats around her Korean restaurant. Lisa's mother contributed to this ideological impurity by asking Mike if he was enjoying the hairballs in his Korean BBQ. Lisa's mother could be forgiven for insensitive hate speech, having been indoctrinated from a young age by the white devil to be a submissive, smiling lackey, but Mike had been ideologically reprogrammed at school to atone for his burden of white guilt, and should have known better.

Despite the glittering allure of dollar signs, there were still chinks in the armor of Lisa and Mike's love, though she would never say chinks. If God were not merely the opiate of the masses invented by the white ruling class, she would have said that one of the chink-, er dents in the armor was that she didn't want to live in this god-forsaken desert. No amount of money could assuage the agony of life in a non-deodorized armpit of hell. Then, had she not been a rabid feminist completely liberated from male tyranny, Lisa would have admitted the second point of contention, which was that she was the sex toy of a fanatical left-wing college professor who made her feel things Mike could not. However, she and the Prof had a recent falling out, which was why she was here, trying to keep her lines of retreat open.

So now Lisa sat silently on Mike's bed, trying to look sexy and sullen at the same time. In the meantime darkness had fallen, and Mike saw a shadow on the face of the parking lot that had not been there before. "Wait a second," he said, seeing an opportunity to delay the Tony argument. He hit the buzzer on the wall, then went outside.

A large black car was parked on the far end of the property, beneath a burnt-out street light. The vehicle had an official look to it, it wasn’t a car that a horny Joe or a desperate tweaker would drive. Where the hell was Tony? Why wasn’t he answering the buzzer?

Mike slinked toward the sedan. The freeway washed in all kinds of flotsam. This could be just a tired traveler who had stopped to take a nap. Mike would knock on the door gently, then kindly tell the driver to pay for a room or get the fuck out.

By degrees Mike's eyes adjusted to where he could discern a man with dark glasses behind the wheel. The driver looked so much like Agent Smith in The Matrix that it was obvious he had cultivated the persona. Nobody that geeky could be dangerous, so Mike quickened.

"This is private property," he said.

“The President wants what you have, Mike," Agent Smith replied in a casual tone, as if his government plates were a parking pass for wherever the hell he wanted to.

To Mike, Nogales already seemed years ago. The incident there was so comically absurd he had shaken it off like a particularly vivid dream, healing over his encounter in that stinking cell with the President-elect like an oyster pearls over ocean grit. Now he realized it was not a shiny pearl, but a stuck kidney stone that had not passed.

"What do you mean?” Mike asked with real confusion.

Agent Smith licked his Reptilian lips, which glowed bright red in contrast to his pale, clammy skin. "Come on Mike. The President doesn't want to do you any harm. He just wants you to come clean and turn over what you have, in the interest of national security. After that, bygones are bygones."

Even though Mike never intended to keep Little F under his roof, and still did not, when people came around trying to strong arm him into doing something he got belligerent. "I don't like you coming onto my private property, clowning around in your bogus wannabe Agent Smith clown costume on the taxpayer's dollar, wearing your sunglasses at night like some stupid 80s music video, trying to push me around. Your routine doesn't scare anyone. Your Agent Smith costume is sad and pathetic. Grow your own identity.”

Agent Smith gave him a toothy lizard smile, then lowered his glasses so Mike could see the thin, pointed, somewhat slanted ovals of his pupils. "Your litany of pulp culture sins is impressive, but I am Agent Smith," he said while flashing his government badge, which was from an agency Mike had never heard of, a department so secret it was a secret even to the people who wore the secret label on their lapels. "This is not a costume. The movie copied me. And if I were you, I would swallow the blue pill and turn over what belongs to the President, so you can get back to the happy lie you were living before, your comfortable illusion. We'll talk again.”

Agent Smith put the car in gear and crept away, staring down an indignant Mike as he made a single slow loop around him. Everybody wanted Mike to take the blue pill and get back to life as it had been before the Gadsden Purchase. He had forsaken that life by swallowing the red pill instead of the blue, in so doing unplugging himself from that Matrix of phony people he had been entwined in. Maybe the Gadsden Purchase was just an illusion too, but it was starting to feel like what Mike thought life should be. No slick phoniness and meaningless mantras, just gritty Darwinism in the desert.

“I wear my sunglasses at night so I can, so I can, watch you weave then breathe your story lines," Smith half-sang half-hissed. "If you change your mind, Mike, and you will, just contact the feds, any feds, and ask for Smith. They'll patch you through."

"I reserve the right to refuse service. Get off my property."

Smith put his sunglasses back on like lifting his colors over the enemy's parapet, then drove away. His car speakers blared the synthesizer intro from the Corey Hart tune into the night, but Mike could still hear the agent's maniacal laughter rising above it.

"I hate that stupid song," Mike mumbled. He hated the frickin Matrix too, and would have run Hugo Weaving himself off the property, as he passed through Cornudo on his way to address the ring-bearers in Rivendell.

As Mike followed Smith's slow, deliberate departure with his eyes, he spotted Tony across the street at the gas station, standing in the illuminated pump area with the old flannel-clad guy who ran the place. The two were engaged in a very heated discussion, gesticulating in exaggerated Latin fashion, but Mike could catch only faint, mostly incomprehensible outbursts of Spanglish.

Mike brushed off Smith and became curious about this, because it was the first time he had ever seen the two talking to each other. The man at the gas station, who Mike had never seen sell so much as a gallon of petroleum, did not frequent the café or the Rosebud. Mike had assumed he was a hermit. None of the locals mentioned him in conversation.

At one point Tony lit a cigarette and passed the lighter to the other man, who lit one of his own before they resumed arguing. Finally the smaller man pushed Tony, Tony pushed back, then turned and started walking to the motel, billowing angry clouds of cigarette smoke behind him. Remembering Mike's California-imported tobacco ban, he tossed the half-smoked butt to the pavement.

Mike waited, wanting to warn Tony about Agent Smith. Tony approached, snorting smoke and fury, but apparently didn’t see Mike through the haze of anger.

"Hey Tony we need to..."

"Yeah I put out my cigarette already. Leave me the fuck alone." He raged back to his room, then slamme XDd the door behind him.

“Asshole,” mumbled Mike. He sulked back to the office, befuddled by the rapidity of what had happened. Just when he thought he understood the Gadsden Purchase, the rules shifted like its ubiquitous sand.

Lisa was standing outside the office door. She jumped when Mike came around the corner. She appeared to be out of breath.

"What's the matter?" Mike asked.

“Nothing, nothing," she said, fidgeting with her phone. "I just came outside for some fresh air. I'm going to take a shower, okay?"

“You’re in the wrong place for fresh air.” He tried to hug her, but she squirted away like a fish and went back inside. Molten magma surged into Mike’s head. This rivalry between Lisa and Tony was fucking up his life. Both of them were acting like little bitches, getting pouty and demanding that he pick a side. If he had to pick a side, he supposed it had to be the one wearing his ring.

Mike sat on the lawn chair outside the office with one of the leftover beers from the golf game. He let his anger evaporate into the dry desert air as he surveyed his creation and saw that it was good. Maybe tomorrow he would get Lisa and Tony together for a fence mending round of dusty desert golf. That had seemed boring at first, but had turned out fun. Maybe the cure for Lisa's dogma disease was some pointless fun. Maybe that would bring the old Lisa back, the one that used to lie in wait behind the lockers in the Ikea breakroom, then pounce on him for a sneak tickle attack.

Summer was coming. The temperature had hit 90 today for the first time, on its way to infinity and beyond. The mutated, alien bugs bouncing off the light fixture at night were the point men for an ungodly host to come. Would he still want to stay here, during the sweltering sauna of May through September?

Mike thought that with enough liquor and air conditioning he could ride it out. Daily trips to the Rosebud, to take comfort in the heartening swell of Linda's bosom and to profit from her boundless encouragement, her reassuring words uplifting him like her firm tits, might help him get through. Even Tony, though certainly a jerk at times, could help him endure, if he and Lisa could learn to get along. That was a big if.

A horrifying scream from inside burst the rivets of Mike’s peaceful reverie. Ever mindful of the shower scene from Psycho, which did indeed take place in the Gadsden Purchase, Mike rushed inside to investigate the disturbance.

He found Lisa rattling like a boiler that was about to explode, yanking her clothes up about her and springing out of the bathroom.

“What happened?" Mike yelled. "What is it?" Lisa could not speak. The only communication she managed was a wild gesture toward the bathroom as she threw her blouse and jeans over her still waterlogged body.

Mike crept into the bathroom. At first he perceived no signs of danger but then, even as he heard the squealing tires of Lisa's Prius fleeing the Hitchcockian nightmare of the Gasden Motel, he spotted a shadowy figure on the floor by the wastebasket. It was Tony's scorpion, poised with its single outraged claw extended in self defense.

The Arizona desert is certainly afoul with creeping, slithering, repugnant beasts, and it wouldn't be the first time that an arachnid of the species Paravaejovis spinigerus had wandered into a human habitation, or even into the hallowed cigarette stained hallways of the Gasden Motel itself. But this scorpion was not some random orphan that got lost on its way home to its cool, shady rock beneath a Palo Verde tree, this was an unmistakable member of Tony Vargas's mutilated menagerie, fingerprinted by the damning missing claw.

It took a moment for Mike to decide between running to smash Tony in the face, or rushing into the parking lot to stop Lisa, who was peeling away from the Gasden Motel forever, polluting the atmosphere as she fled with toxic synthetic rubber fumes from the squealing tires of her eco-friendly Prius. Mike considered that the terms and conditions of his engagement required him to chase her, but even now his damnable obsession with tidiness would not leave him in peace. There were unattended loose ends in his bathroom, namely a scorpion running around freely.

He couldn't leave the bug to its liberty, but he couldn't bring himself to smash it either, so he grabbed a plastic cup from the cucumber water dispenser in the lobby. Then he realized the ugly little booger would suffocate in the cup, so he ran into his kitchinette, grabbed a knife, and punched air holes in it. Following this, he crept back into the bathroom on tenterhooks, found the scorpion in the same defiant posture, and eased the cup over it. This done, he went through the motions of rushing into the parking lot but of course there were no signs of Lisa, not even a bread crumb exhaust trail from her smokeless green engine.

She was gone, gone forever Accepting the futility of pursuit, Mike stormed toward Tony's room with murder in his heart. Tony always slept with the door open, never running the air conditioner. But tonight he wasn't sleeping. He was sitting on the bed, as if waiting for Mike. As if knowing what was about to happen, so thought Mike.

“You scared her off, you evil prick," Mike raged as he burst in without knocking. Little F was asleep at Tony's side.

“You’re going to wake the baby. What are you yelling about?"

"Don't fuck with me you lying asshole. You put the scorpion in my bathroom."

"Scorpion? There's a shit load of scorpions around here and you better get used to it. This is the goddamm desert."

"I'm not going to let you hypnotize me this time with your BS. It was your bug, the one with the missing claw. Are you going to tell me there's a shit load of scorpions with missing claws too?"

“My scorpion is right up there on the dresser, for your information." Tony turned toward the dresser, but the jar was gone. "Holy shit, where the fuck is it?" He got up and began prowling around the room, not so much to appease Mike but because he looked worried about his bug.

"Get out of here," Mike growled.

"What?" Tony said, not so much for clarification as because he was genuinely distracted by his missing pet.

"I want you out of here in five minutes. This is the last straw. You've completely fucked up my life, and I want you gone."

Now Tony gave up searching among his specimens and turned toward Mike. "You fucked up your own life. You're better off without that puta pendeja but you're too stupid to realize it. But don't worry. I wasn't planning on hanging around anyway. I'm tired of babysitting your pampered, pathetic, shall I say pussy ass. Talk about bugs, you got one right up your ass. Maybe that's where my scorpion crawled, up your ass. Ever since you got here you strut around like you're royalty and we're your dumbass peasants. I'm sick of it. I'm out of here."

"Five minutes."

“Make it four."

“Good."

“You'll regret it."

"I doubt that."

Mike walked back to the office. He did not look back, but grabbed another beer from the refrigerator to take out on the porch. Passing through, he somehow noticed through the anger lying over him like the shroud of Turin taking an indelible image of the crucifixion of his soul, that all of Lisa's luggage was gone. She had fled the scorpion in the bathroom dripping and half naked, but had prepared her luggage in advance. What did that mean?

Mike scrambled around the apartment for clues. The trash bag in the bathroom was missing, which Mike thought strange, because Lisa was a spoiled slob that never cleaned up after herself. Mike ran out to the dumpster with a flashlight and a broom in hand, and after a bit of jabbing around with the broomstick found the trash bag with the bug jar in it.

"Bitch played me!" he shouted into the empty, unresponsive desert air. Only a chorus of frogs peeped back their shared outrage, from puddles unknown, unseen. Mike often wondered how fucking frogs could survive in the fucking desert.

Lisa had planted the bug. She had realized she could never adapt to life in this dreary shithole, and had planted the bug so she could blame Tony for making her freak out and run. There were other reasons for her abrupt departure as well, which everybody close to Mike could see, but he remained blind to.

Mike swallowed his pride so hard he nearly dislocated his larynx. Existence was too fragile out here in the desert. Linda was right, he couldn't make it here alone.

So like Scarlett O'Hara groveling back to Rhett when she realized Ashley was a big pussy, Mike ran around the corner to catch Tony before he could get away.

It was too late. The Love Machine was already clunking onto the freeway. Mike recognized the sound of its failing valves half a mile away.

Mike Gasden was alone in the Gadsden Purchase.

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Image by Acrocynus, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons