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anexperimentallife · 10 months

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Alex and the Oracle

This is a humorous short I sold many, many years ago, before I even knew I was autistic, but the rights have reverted to me, so I'm in the middle of a rewrite/update in preparation for re-release as part of an "Alex And" collection. The premise (inspired by some of my own weird impulses) was, "What if things that might LOOK like random impulses or compulsions were actually a form of precognition?"

Alex and the Oracle by D. Robert Hamm

The first thing you need to know about Jimmy Cane is that no matter what anybody says about him, he’s not crazy. And I don’t say that just because he’s my best friend. Sure, he once showed up to a black-tie affair wearing lederhosen and leading a ferret on a leash, but I think that falls under "eccentric." Also, in his defense, I’m pretty sure lederhosen are considered formal wear in some parts of the world, he was wearing a black tie, and the invitation did say, “and guest.”

Okay, so maybe he’s a little bit crazy, but if you had Jimmy’s ‘gift,’ you would be, too.

See, Jimmy’s a precog, but not in the traditional sense. He doesn’t actually know what’s going to happen; he just gets these compulsions that usually seem to work out in the end. That whole thing with the lederhosen and the ferret? Set off a Rube Goldberg-type chain of events that saved a guy’s life. In addition to the general agitation that comes when he tries to resist acting on his compulsions, knowing that something as small as, say, what color socks you’re wearing could be a matter of life and death for someone puts a lot of pressure on a guy.

So when I let myself in over at Jimmy’s place to find him on the floor in a bathrobe surrounded by thirty or so cases of diet soda and blowing up an inflatable kiddie pool, it wasn’t the strangest thing I’d ever caught him doing.

“Hi, Alex,” Jimmy said between breaths, “I know, I know. Don't have all the soda yet; I just couldn't wait to get the pool ready.”

Which made perfect sense, in a Jimmy kind of way. I grabbed a couple of Blue Moons from the fridge and kicked back on the couch until he finished with the pool and plopped down next to me, panting. We clinked our bottles together, and he drained about a third of his in one long drought. He sighed and wiped sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his robe.

“Okay,” I said, “Whatcha got?”

We long ago gave up on serious predictions about the outcome of Jimmy’s compulsions, but we make a game of seeing who can come up with the most outrageous guesses. We play as a team against reality, and give ourselves points every time we out-weird what actually happens. Two-on-one odds may seem a little unfair, but reality’s been doing this a lot longer than we have, and it has the home field advantage. So far, reality is winning, and I don’t even want to talk about the point spread.

“Diet soda, kiddie pool… Gotta be a connection there,” Jimmy said. “I was thinking maybe a pile of aspartame-addicted carp showing up on my doorstep.”

“Nah, not weird enough. Make ‘em talking carp and I think we’ve got something. I got a better one, though; how about the Apocalypse is nigh, and diet soda will be the only currency of value in the aftermath?”

“Makes sense; only mutants would actually drink the stuff. But what about the pool?”

“Like you said—mutants.”

“What does a kiddie pool have to do with mutants?”

“Oh, so now I’m supposed to be an expert on genetic anomalies? Maybe it’s their religion.”

Jimmy nodded sagely and stroked the three-day growth of beard on his chin. “Hm…” he said. “Plausible. Hope you’re wrong, though; I think I’m allergic to apocalypses.”

We toasted to our brilliant predictions, and Jimmy went upstairs to get dressed so I could chauffeur him around for the day. He’s got this old VW Microbus, and while it runs great, he hates driving (everyone else hates him driving, too), plus he hadn’t really slept in a couple of days, which meant he’d be a danger to life and limb out on the road alone. (Although, knowing Jimmy, if he actually felt compelled to drive, an angel would get its wings and somebody’s dead dog would come back to life.)

I do a lot of things like that for Jimmy, but it’s not a one-sided deal. He doesn’t really benefit much personally from his gift—in fact, it often screws him over—but it does provide him with just enough resources to take care of basic needs so that he can follow his compulsions full-time with no visible means of support. That seems to include whatever I need in order to get by when I take time off whatever crappy day job I’m working at the time to give him a hand and help clean up his messes.

It’s like some kind of weird temp job where I get to go on wacky adventures with my best friend and still keep up with rent, and even though it’ll never give me financial security, and even though it’s made having any kind of decent career impossible, and even though no girlfriend I’ve found so far has been willing to put up with our little adventures for more than a few months, I challenge you to come up with a better job at any salary.

Because let me tell you, being friends with Jimmy is never boring.

After several years of this kind of thing, Jimmy was showing the strain. Over the past year, I’d seen him almost in tears a few times trying to choose between three identical boxes of cereal, and there was that time he couldn’t sleep unless he wore his shoes on the wrong feet and listened to yodeling records for three days straight. Don’t even get me started on the truckload of frozen mangoes in cold storage.

It was getting to the point where Jimmy wasn’t sure what was a ‘gift’ compulsion, and what was a random impulse, and fewer and fewer of his compulsions were bearing fruit—no mango-related pun intended—or at least none that we could see. But even if he could resist the occasional impulse, he doesn’t dare, just in case doing so might have a disastrous effect on someone else. He’d even started seeing a psychiatrist, but the only thing the doc was able to do for him was prescribe sleeping and anxiety medications.

Even with the meds, or maybe in part because of them, Jimmy was in even worse shape for driving than usual, so it was a damn good thing he’d called me. Once he was ready, I fired up his microbus, and we drove the forty minutes into Kansas City, where we spent the next few hours, stopping at grocery and convenience stores. At each stop, Jimmy pulled case after case of diet soda off the shelves with increasing degrees of agitation. When he found one that “felt right,” he was able to relax for just a few minutes before he started being drawn to the next case. A few places we had to talk them into letting Jimmy go examine the back stock. You’d think they’d refuse, or at least get a little annoyed, but Jimmy has this—I don’t know—this childlike, innocent vulnerability about him that’s hard to say no to. He lives in kind of a different world than most people do, and sort of expects everybody to be as nice and as helpful as he tries to be. It’s hard to say no to Jimmy without feeling like an asshole.

Sometime around ten o’clock that night, Jimmy guided us onto I-35 North, and we waited for the compulsion to tell us where to stop. We finally found the “right” convenience store about halfway to Des Moines, and I hit the men’s room while Jimmy perused the displays. I finished just in time to see Jimmy explode out of the store waving his arms and screaming, “No! Not that one! I need that one!”

He was charging straight at a grizzly bear in denim and plaid flannel. Okay, not an actual bear, but if a real grizzly ever met this guy it’d pee its fur, scream like a twelve-year-old girl at a Jonas Brothers concert, and run crying for its mommy. Man-bear had—you guessed it—a case of diet soda under one arm. Jimmy slammed into him at full speed, and cans flew everywhere.

Man-bear’s face went from surprise to ugly(er). He pulled back a fist the size of my head, and before I could get there Jimmy was flying backwards to land on the blacktop. Man-bear dropped the soda and took a step forward.

“Don’t hurt him,” I hollered. Okay, it was a little late for that.

“You want some, too?” Man-bear said, and I froze. I wasn’t just afraid he was going to beat me up; I was afraid he was going to eat me.

Now, I’m not the world’s bravest guy, but I do think pretty fast when the alternative is getting turned into hamburger. “No, he’s my little brother,” I lied, “I-I take care of him.” It was the best I could come up with. Hey, I said I think fast, not that I do it particularly well.

“Doin’ a pretty crappy job of it.”

“I know,” I didn’t have to fake anguish. Imminent death has that effect on me, especially when it’s mine. “ Look at him, though,” I pointed to where Jimmy was crawling around muttering to himself and gathering up the fallen cans while blood dripped from his nose to the blacktop. “You can see he’s not, y’know, quite all there in the head, can’t you? It’s not his fault.”

The trucker scowled at Jimmy, then at me. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s a little, uh... touched, you know? He gets it in his head that something—like one particular case of soda—is important, and he thinks something bad is going to happen if he doesn’t get it.” Well, that much was true.

I spread out my hands in appeal. “Look, I’ll pay for the soda. Hell, I’ll buy you ten cases.” Man-bear was silent. “C’mon, man, do you have a brother?”

Man-bear looked at Jimmy again and nodded slowly. He sniffed, then in a wilted growl said, “Keep your money. Tell him I ain’t gonna hurt him no more.”

While I stood gaping, Man-bear pulled a grocery bag from the cab of his truck, got down on all fours, and started gathering up the cans along with Jimmy. It took me probably half a minute or so to pick up my jaw enough to pitch in myself. Man-bear even got a cold pack from the cooler behind his seat for Jimmy’s face, and before he got back into his rig, shook Jimmy’s and my hands and said that while he wasn’t going to give any details, we’d changed his life.

Once Bruce’s rig was out of sight and we were back in the Microbus, Jimmy grinned at me, split lip, bloody nose, and all. “Alex, you were brill—”

And for the second time that day, Jimmy got punched in the face. Some things simply have to be done.

“Ow. What was that for?”

I glared at him, trying to ignore the fact that I felt like a total ass for hitting him. “I felt compelled, okay?” I started the car and pointed us back toward Lawrence. “I’m getting worried about you, man.”

“Yes, I could sense the concern in your loving punch.”

“Sorry about that, but are you nuts? That could have gone a lot worse than a punch in the face.”

“Two punches,” he said.

“Okay, two punches. I said I was sorry. But man, that has got to be the craziest thing you’ve ever done, and I’ve seen you do some crazy shit. Did you see the size of that guy? He’d give Mount Everest a Napoleon complex. We could have ended up in the hospital. Or jail. Or both. Hell, maybe even the morgue. Did you even stop to think we could have just politely offered to buy the soda from him instead of trying to tackle him?”

Jimmy’s face went slack. He stared at me for a few seconds, then hung his head. When he spoke, he sounded even more tired and beaten up than he looked. “I was so caught up in...” He looked back up at me. “You really do take care of me, Alex. And I don’t say thank you enough, but you never complain, and then tonight I almost got you… I’m sorry, Alex. It’s just… This is a bad one.”

I very carefully didn’t look at him. “Just think next time, okay?” I threw in some Ramones to cut short the Hallmark moment, and we cruised along to Blitzkrieg Bop.

About halfway through I Wanna Be Sedated, Jimmy turned off the music. “Hey, Alex? If we changed that guy’s life like he said, this diet soda thing is starting to play out, right?”

“Looks like. I just think it could have been handled differently.”

Jimmy shook his head. “I know, but if it’s starting to play out, my ‘gift’ or whatever should stop poking at me, or at least ease off a little, but it’s getting worse. And there are all those other cases.”

“Jimmy, I—”

“This so-called ‘gift’ pretty much runs my life, Alex, and it’s getting worse, and I can’t control it. I never wanted it to begin with. What if it gets one of us killed someday?”

I didn’t have an answer. When we got back to his place I was going to hang around to make sure he was okay, but he said he’d put me in harm’s way enough for one weekend. There wasn’t much I could do except make him promise to call me if he needed me.

My phone woke me a little before three a.m. the next night, which would have been fine if it were a supermodel calling to profess her undying love, but that, I decided, was an unlikely scenario, and stuck my head under the pillow to wait for the ringing to stop.

It didn’t.

“I have a hammer,” I yelled, “and I’m not afraid to use it.” Apparently the phone was unafraid of percussive maintenance. I tracked it to the pile of laundry under which it had made its rebel lair, and flipped it open. “Please state the nature of your emergency.”

“Alex! I’m glad you’re up.” Jimmy sounded like an auctioneer who’d been up all night mainlining double-espressos. “I dialed you like, nine times. Are you busy?”

“No, I was just going through the yellow pages trying to find a re-education camp for wayward cell phones. Look, it’s three AM, and you don’t sound like a buxom supermodel.”

“That has never been my aspiration. You said to call if I needed you. And I do. So I am. It’s the soda thing.”

I squeezed the bridge of my nose and censored myself. I had told him to call. “Okay, what do you need?”

“I know how to make it stop. Gotta get one more case and get to this little spring in the Flint Hills. About a hundred and fifty miles. Don’t trust myself to drive that far.” He giggled and switched to a bad falsetto. “Help us, Obi Wan. You’re our only hope.”

“You can’t play the princess-in-distress card, Jimmy. First, it’s not fair, and second, you know I’m already in.” If he didn’t trust himself to drive, I sure as hell didn’t, especially when he sounded that out of it.

Half an hour later Jimmy lurched in and knocked (in that order) dressed much like “The Dude,” from The Big Liebowski, only Jimmy’s bathrobe was fuchsia. He banged his shin on the coffee table, but barely seemed to notice. His nose and lip were still swollen, and his eyes were spider-webbed with red, but he was practically vibrating with nervous energy.

“You look like crap,” I said. “Did you sleep at all?”

“Can’t sleep. Gotta go. Here.” He dug into the pockets of his robe and handed me a printed-out map along with the keys to his old VW min-bus.

“Okay,” I said, “but shouldn’t you be wearing pants?”

He looked down at himself and frowned. “What’s wrong with swimming trunks?”

“Dude.”

“Okay, okay. But we gotta hurry.” Jimmy’s a little smaller than I am, but I managed to find some clothes that didn’t fit him too badly. (I let the Cthulhu slippers slide. You have to pick your battles.)

Jimmy had a bunch of those big plastic bottles—the kind that go on top of home water coolers— filled with slightly brownish water and strapped together in the kiddie pool in the back of the mini-bus. “What the—”

“No time. I’ll explain on the way.”

By the time I had the mini-bus in gear he was already asleep, slumped against the passenger door. I knew how this worked, though. As soon as I stopped heading toward our destination he’d wake up frantic. Besides, I probably wouldn’t get anything coherent out of him until he’d napped, so I bit down on my curiosity.

He woke up about halfway there. “Take the next exit,” he said. “That’s where the last case is.”

I pulled off the highway. “You wanna fill me in now? And please tell me we’re not going to get our asses handed to us by a human grizzly again?”

He laughed, bouncing up and down on his seat. “No promises on that count, but I don’t think so. As for filling you in... Wait. Turn here.” We pulled into a service station with all its lights out. Jimmy opened his door.

“Dude, they’re closed.”

“Gonna check the hours on the door and see how long we have to wait.”

The station wouldn’t open for three more hours. “All right,” I said, “That’s plenty of time to fill me in, so spill.”

“I’ll warn you, it’s going to sound crazy. I’m going to sound crazy, but hear me out, okay?”

I said I would, and he continued. “You saw how I got earlier. I had to get some sleep before I finished this thing or I was going to fall apart. Or even worse, screw it up. But I couldn’t. I even took a sleeping pill, but all it did was make me spacey. I finally gave in around one and poured the soda into the kiddie pool.”

He paused and stared out the window. “Keep going,” I said, “You poured the soda into the swimming pool, and then what happened?”

He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “I started pouring, and there was this... face.”

“What, at the window? Somebody was watching you?”

“No, in the pool. A woman’s face, there in the soda.”

Now that topped the weirdometer, even for Jimmy. “Right. You’re sleep-deprived, and like you said, you were on sleeping pills. People see things.”

“Whatever. Anyway, it freaked me out,” he said.

“Understandably.”

He got quieter. “Her lips started moving. She was saying, ‘help me.’”

“Hang on—You know it wasn’t real, right? Unless... Is your ‘gift’ giving you visuals now?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. “What could I do?” he said. “The more I poured, the more of her there was, until there was this… this beautiful woman standing in the middle of the pool. She was real, Alex. She had sort of blue-tinted skin and long green hair, and she reached out of the pool and called me her hero and kissed me, and—Hey, what are you doing?”

“I’m starting the engine. And unless I hear something of the not-crazy variety come out of your mouth in the next five seconds I’m turning around.”

“Wait, Alex. Don’t freak out on me.”

“We’re way past that. Look, it’s probably just sleep deprivation combined with Ambien, but we gotta get you looked at.”

Jimmy grabbed my sleeve. Not like he was trying to pull my hand off the steering wheel, but just to emphasize his words. “Alex,” he said. “Please. I’m not crazy.”

“Maybe not, but something’s wrong. What kind of a friend would I be if I—”

“Okay, okay” he said, “Just for argument’s sake, let’s say I was hallucinating, and that it’s from not sleeping because of this compulsion. What’s the fastest way to fix that? The only way to fix it?”

I sighed. “Seeing it through.”

“So see this through with me, give me a day or two to catch up on sleep, and if you still think I’ve lost it, I’ll go to a doctor or whatever you want. I mean, come on, it’s a few hours of driving is all, and then we’re done with it, I promise. Deal?”

I rolled my eyes and climbed into the back to stretch out by the kiddie pool. “Damn it, Jimmy, there’d better be a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.”

It only took a few minutes for me to doze off. I couldn’t have been asleep for long, though, when I woke to shrill ringing. Jimmy jumped into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and started the engine. We threw gravel getting back on the road.

“What the—” I looked back at the service station. The front window was broken out. “Jimmy! What did you do?”

“I couldn’t wait. She can’t hold out much longer.”

I climbed toward the front. “That’s it. You’ve lost it, man. Pull over right now. If you pay for the damages they’ll probably let you off with probation.”

Jimmy’s voice was choked and he was blinking back tears. “You don’t understand. She’s dying. There weren’t any security cameras, and I left money on the counter to pay for the window. If I drive fast we won’t get caught.”

“We? I didn’t do anything except ride along with a crazy man!” I reached for the steering wheel, but we were already going fast enough that I’d probably flip us if I grabbed it. I got out my phone. “Pull over now or I’m calling the police.”

I wasn’t really going to. As far gone as he was, he might try to outrun them, and things would only get worse.

He called my bluff. “Go ahead. If you’re still my friend, though, wait until it’s over.”

There wasn’t much of an alternative. About an hour later Jimmy turned onto a dirt road. When we got to the end of it and bounced to a stop I grabbed the keys from the ignition.

“Help me with the bottles,” Jimmy said, “The spring is just a little ways off.” He unbuckled himself and moved toward the back. I grabbed his arm, and he looked me square in the face. I have never seen him so determined. “What are you going to do, Alex? Hit me again?”

Ouch. I let go, and Jimmy’s expression softened. “I know you think I’m crazy, but I can prove I’m not.”

He started pulling stoppers out of the water bottles. “I hope she’s up to this. She’s in pretty bad shape, or I’d have tried it earlier.”

I had to clench my jaw to keep from responding. Jimmy un-stoppered the last bottle and leaned over it murmuring. “I know,” he said, “But we have to prove to my friend that you’re real before he’ll help us get you home.” He turned to me. “She wants you to know that not all of this is her. Some of it’s just regular water and soda.”

“Great,” I said, “Tell her those bottles don’t make her butt look big. Honest.”

Jimmy scowled at me, and I was about to say something more when the water moved. Trickles from each bottle snaked up and joined to form a translucent face like in, what was that movie... The Abyss or something. It—correction, she—stuck out her tongue at me before turning to Jimmy with an expression of such adoration that it broke my heart. The sun was rising, and it glinted off of her in reds and golds. Jimmy touched her lips with his fingers and she kissed them, then lost cohesion and flowed back into her bottles.

All I could do was stare.

“Well,” Jimmy said, “Am I crazy?”

Either she was real, or Jimmy’s insanity was contagious. I preferred to believe the former. I had to work my mouth a bit before anything came out. There isn’t much to say when you witness the impossible. “What are we waiting for,” I growled, “Let’s get her home.”

We used the deflated kiddie pool as a sled where we could, and carried the bottles one by one over the rough spots until we reached the spring.

Jimmy finished filling me in on the way. The woman’s name was D’lahna, and she was a naiad, a water nymph. She’d been exploring “Overhill,” as she called it, when she somehow got stuck in a soda bottling plant. She wouldn’t have lasted much longer if not for Jimmy and his gift.

We poured first the bottles, then the final case of soda, into the spring, and D’lahna rose up out of it more beautiful than you can imagine. And very, very naked. I stood staring until Jimmy punched me in the arm. “Hey. Mine.”

“Sorry.” I averted my eyes. Kind of. Hey, she might have been my best friend’s girl, but she was gorgeous. I tried not to gape at her, and searched desperately for a way to cover the awkwardness. How do you make small talk with a mythological creature?

“So, uh...” I said, “Sorry about the whole thinking you were imaginary thing. Nice place you’ve got here. Love what you’ve done with it. Seems like a quiet neighborhood.”

D’lahna laughed. If you’ve never heard a nymph’s voice, I can’t really describe it to you except to say it sort of... sparkles. “Your friend is funny,” she said to Jimmy, then looked at me. “This isn’t where I live, Alex, but it will get us there.”

It took me a moment to process that. “Us?”

I turned to Jimmy, who had just stripped naked. (Now there’s a sight I hope to never see again.) He grinned at me. “I’m going with her,” he said.

“But you... She... You can’t...”

“It’s okay,” Jimmy put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be in touch.”

They offered to take me with them, but instead I watched as Jimmy took D’lahna’s hand and waded into the middle of the spring with her. They turned translucent and flowed into the water.

It was a long drive home, and I thought about the two of them all the way.

Two weeks later I turned on the kitchen faucet, and out came an invitation to Jimmy and D’lahna’s engagement party. They’ve already set me up with a date—a wood nymph friend of D’lahna’s who, Jimmy thinks, just might break my losing streak. He mentioned a possible job offer, too.

And guess what D'lahna's family's favorite fruit is? Yeah, at least now I know what to do with all those frozen mangoes.

#writing #urban fantasy #rob writes #my writing

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