The Mentor Read online

  The Mentor

  a novel by

  Pat Connid

  Copyright © 2012 by Pat Connid

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters (alternately, written permission from the author will suffice).

  Certain characters in this work may seem terribly familiar (ie. celebrity reference) but it can be assured these are, in fact and in total, complete fabrications, and thus no libelous implications about the upstanding and fine nature of any of the aforementioned celebrities they may coincidentally resemble is to be inferred by the reader; as this work is translated from its original Sanskrit, any phrases or names that appear to invoke said similarity are by chance, the expression of which will be edited and feverishly adjusted at the first hint of trouble.

  For My Wife

  Sorry about the occasional, low-grade insanity. And thank you for putting up with me, those times I'm once again swallowed by that world. I thought (at the very least) I should introduce you to some of the friends I've made there.

  See attached.

  Chapter One

  My best guess is that I woke up because the cargo van hit a speed bump or seam in the pavement or sleeping transient, and I bounced like a bug in the microwave.

  I tried to push myself up but another bump had just been waiting for me. I got thwacked by the van floor again, my tailbone hammering the bare, corrugated metal. My head spun (well, spun more), and I flopped over onto my spongy stomach, then back again.

  Beneath the whine of the van’s engine, there was still the faint echo of my dream. Don’t think it was a very good one.

  When I pressed my chin into my chest, forcing my head to steady, and it became clear there wasn't anyone in the driver’s seat, I set my contemplative dream analysis aside for the moment.

  Struggling to my knees, I clawed at the bare, inner skeleton of the cargo van.

  Then, it felt as if the vehicle had taken a deep breath…

  I looked up to see nothing but blue sky filling the windshield. In my dream-wake state, I envisioned the vehicle's headlights were like eyes and, when it saw what I couldn't, it tried to look away from what was coming.

  The van tipped down hard, and I lost my balance. Tumbling between the driver and passenger seats, I was jammed hard in the back with the corner of something.

  I looked down.

  A heavy-duty, plastic toolbox had struck me, its handle banging away like an old English bobby's baton. I turned my head just as the van hit a final seam in the road.

  This was where the pavement met a slated, wooden dock and the vehicle’s hollow interior turned into a soundstage, filled with a frantic Jon Bonham drum solo-- pitta fitta pitta!-- and I watched as the lip of the dock was swallowed by the van’s hood, then suddenly everything went quiet for a moment.

  Another deep breath.

  It was only a few seconds before the van’s nose hit the water, and my doughboy body slammed into the dashboard. Again.

  I then began drifting toward unconsciousness before even managing to get fully awake from my previous bout of darkness. Slipping away, I had one question taking precedence over all others: How'd I get in a van?

  ONLY A FEW HOURS earlier, I’d come home from working at the movie theater.

  Sure, I was twenty-six and still working at a teenager's job, but the hours were easy and to make matters easier, I could drink there. Well, we weren’t allowed to drink. Simply, the manager never came downstairs.

  Ever.

  There was a pneumatic slot and a never-ending supply of plastic tubes for the cash that traveled between downstairs and upstairs. Some of us had a suspicion the manager might not exist at all. But, if he did exist, there had to be a giant room with plastic tubes bouncing hard and bursting open, spewing cash onto the floor, whilst he’s rolling around in piles of dough, stark naked, throwing caution to the wind and dismissing concerns about paper cuts to his pink parts.

  In truth, nobody who worked there cared either way.

  We did our jobs fairly well. My best friend Pavan and I kinda sorta would get drunk every night while we cleaned theaters and tore tickets for patrons.

  It had been around midnight when I’d walked the three deserted blocks home and climbed the rotting stairs past Wicked Lester’s. Someone had found the hidden volume knob under their jukebox, cranking it up loud. I walked up through a haze of dust and dirt spat from the ancient, wooden paneling, and then I slid into my apartment on the second floor.

  Clicking the switch by the door, the dull, orange light in the kitchen twinkled off the beer can castle on the stove. I dug into the half dozen bottles of beers in the fridge and pulled one out, then settled onto my hard couch.

  When I’d moved in, years ago, there had been some furniture left in the apartment after the last tenant skipped out on the rent in the middle of the night. But as anyone could guess, if someone was willing to leave furniture behind, it was obviously the sort of stuff worth leaving behind.

  I drank half the beer in one tip of the bottle and tried to remember if the couch had originally been there when I’d moved in. Did I get it off Craigslist? I couldn’t remember. Either way, it was a horrible couch. It smelled like an old person might have once died on it. Given the odor's bouquet, obviously the oldster had died of something involving bacon.

  Didn’t matter, it fit snuggly into my simple lifestyle. Work, play, and be happy.

  No.

  Edit: Work, play, drink beer, and be happy.

  Maybe better: drink beer, work, play, be happy.

  Whatever.

  I had low expectations from life and felt certain life shared the sentiment. Paid my taxes, turned the mattress every couple months, called my mom as often as I could endure it, and sometimes-- when I walked by expired parking meters-- tossed a quarter in just to stick it to the man.

  What you put out is what you get back. Like some sort of karmic flotsam and jetsam; except, I don't really believe in karma. I believe in balance—or maybe more precisely: payback. Problem is, though, everyone's working from a different ledger.

  And if they've got your name in a column and you don't have theirs?

  That's when things can get out of hand, and you don't even see it coming. I suppose that's the best way I can describe how it all began that night.

  Hindsight's 20/20… but it probably would have worked out better had I laid off the beer a little.

  Maybe not.

  In my second-story apartment above the bar, the couch faced the corner where the two outside walls met, its back to the kitchen. The dining room, living room and kitchen were essentially all just one space. However, I'd designated dining room from living room with the placement of my uncomfortable couch, like some sort of shithole apartment feng shui.

  It made the space a little more crowded, but gave some sense of a living area in the apartment. I suppose it was one step above Les Nesman and his masking tape "walls." A very small step.

  Where the last tenant likely had a television—apparently the one piece of furniture they felt valuable enough to take with them—there were two wooden, orange crates of compact discs I’d collected over the years. On top of that was a combination clock/radio/CD player my mother had given me ten years earlier.

  Six months prior to that night, one of my old Ozzy CDs started skipping. It was either Diary or Blizzard… can't remember. It was the one where the asshole producer starts to fade out the song during an amazing Randi Rhodes guitar solo. A litt
le drunk, I let years of being frustrated by that little musical abomination get to me, and I kicked the tiny stereo against the wall.

  Sure, a somewhat disproportionate reaction but it's a really, really good solo. Now, I have a hole in the wall and a busted CD player.

  Clock still works.

  Most nights, I fall asleep with my uniform on. Black polyester pants, red polyester vest and white dress shirt. Working at the theater, the cuffs of all of my shirts are permanently stained the color you might see on the bottom of a homeless guy's feet. All of my clothes smell like Playdough for some reason.

  In my closet, there are anywhere from four to seven outfits exactly like this, depending on what part of the laundering cycle I am in. Gilligan was a clothes horse compared to yours truly.

  The music downstairs, after passing up through my floor, became a dull thumping sound, spiked with an occasional drunken, treble flutter. Not exactly music anymore. Still, it was oddly soothing, as if it were reminiscent of some early sensory memory. Maybe this was the sort of thing a redneck baby might hear in the womb of its redneck mama any night of the week as she worked the brass pole at Poppers.

  At first, I thought the sound of a key in my door's lock was just the loud music banging my empty beers cans around. I've passed out to that pleasant twinkling before-- a little like twelve-ounce wind chimes.

  Then, I heard the door swing open because its hinges hadn’t been oiled since before the invention of dirt. Turning, I was surprised because I hadn’t had an impromptu midnight visit from my sorta girlfriend, Laura, in a very long time. Midnight visits from Laura meant she was likely buzzed and horny. I was the former and, at the sound of the door opening, also instantly became the latter.

  However, I am not attracted to men. Especially large men.

  As the large man rounded the corner at the end of the short hallway extending from my front door, at first, I could only see the whites of his eyes. Strangely, that phrase instantly bounced around in my head in the most surprising way. I felt… odd.

  “Dexter, so glad you are in,” he said, flashing a perfect, toothy grin. He’d crossed the room so fast I’d lost sight of him twice. However, he didn’t seem strained by the effort, despite moving so quickly around the room.

  Trying to get up from the couch, get away, I felt my head swim. I was buzzed, more buzzed than I'd realized. No way was I going to be able to defend myself in this condition. Honestly, I really can’t defend myself in any condition, so the plan was the same if I'd been sober: run. But, I couldn't.

  So, I braced for impact, but he didn’t hit me. I must have looked stupid, covering my head like some seven-year old’s first time in a carnival haunted house. Looking up, between my cola-stained sleeves, I saw that he’d sat atop the two orange crates. Briefly, I wondered where my clock had gone.

  The fear began over-clocking my brain, dampening the light in the room. It was as if, unable to run, my mind wanted to shut down and hide in some dark corner of my skull.

  This guy—calm, just staring at me with a smaller smile now— looked fit but not overly muscular. Honestly, I couldn’t be sure of that. He was wearing black jeans and a black bomber jacket. Underneath, I think, he had a black t-shirt on. The man himself, also black.

  So, kind of a theme then.

  He wasn’t bald, but his hair was trimmed close to his head. One look at it, and I was convinced it was perfect. Odd, that word had come to my mind again—perfect teeth, perfect hair. But, that’s what I thought. I felt if the hair on the left side had been measured with a laser, it would match the length on the right exactly.

  Not that I was interested in his hair, I was just too afraid to look at what might be in his hands.

  “Dexter, you do not look well.”

  “What do you want, man?”

  He crossed his legs and put his hands on his knees. I exhaled the breath that had been trapped in my throat after finally realizing he wasn’t armed.

  “What do I want? You mean what do I really want? I don’t believe we know each other that well yet, Dex." He smiled wider. I was holding my breath again. “What? Do you think you and me are that close? Buddies who spill our inner most secrets to each other? Hey, all right. You go first!”

  He’d asked me a question-- I think he did-- but, what was he talking about? God, my head… how’d I get so buzzed?

  “Quickly, then, so we can get started.” He brushed away some invisible lint or dust from his pant leg. “What was the twelfth word the baker said to you today?”

  What? What the fu—

  “Dexter,” he said louder. His smile faded by another degree. The room was vibrating even more now. “Dexter, stay with me here.”

  “Okay, what? Why… what do you want?”

  Putting both feet flat on the floor, a hand still on each knee, he said: “When you got up this morning, you went downstairs for your morning sugar buzz. What was the twelfth word the baker said to you today?”

  What the hell he was talking about? Was this some sort of code? Or, it… what did he say?

  “I don’t—“

  “Dexter, if you don’t tell me what I want to know I’m going to take one of your thumbs, cut into the epidermis, through the muscle, snap the bone, strip away the sinew and tendon, poke a hole in the end, and turn it into a key chain.”

  I was now less buzzed.

  “You ever try to hold a beer in your hand with no thumb, Dex?” He added, the smile entirely gone now. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

  Then, the whole room began breathing around me— pulsing and suddenly alight, crackling with electricity.

  Everything was humming, quivering.

  I looked down to my hands. They were shaking.

  That’s when I knew I wasn’t really drunk at all.

  I looked up at him, he seemed to disappear, then reappear, jumping around the room, again. This time, I realized my eyes had simply begun to water-- the images around me were just refracting through tears which hadn’t yet fallen.

  My mouth opened and I croaked, “Elephant."

  His large face came toward me and blackened out the sky. He said, "What was that? What did you say?"

  I repeated, "Elephant. He said 'elephant' to me."

  In the dark, pulsating room his brilliant grin burst back, and it sliced into every part of me, piercing through my chest and then enveloping me in a loud, electric hum.

  “Yes!” He punched a triumphant fist in the air, splitting the sky above us. “Dexter, yes.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, trying to sit up. Then, the thought: I had been sitting up. Was my body now sliding? Oh God, so tired.

  Lifting my head took effort, but I could see he had disappeared again. I prayed he’d left the apartment, but I knew better. My limbs began to shake uncontrollably.

  “To answer your next question, Dex, I’ll say you are left-handed and an alcoholic and lazy.”

  Check, check and check.

  “So, it was easy to know where to put the beer you would first pull from the fridge. Front left. Hell, you must’ve thought it was your birthday and the beer fairy had brought an extra cold one. ‘Course that beer was full of poison," he said. "Not a very good fairy, if you ask me.”

  With the word, my tongue grew thick and my mouth, instantly dry.

  “Poison?”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. Just a little nap.” Like a god or devil, his voice emanated from the pulsing walls around me. They shook with his every word like the membrane of a stereo speaker.

  “Please…”

  “A quick couple of notes,” he said, and I found it hard to blink right. My eyeballs were dry as tennis balls. “The average amount of oxygen in the air we breathe is roughly twenty-one percent. A quarter of the oxygen you ingest is used by your brain. In a closed environment, especially one where stresses are applied to the subject, hypoxia is inevitable…”

  Just before I tumbled away into deep space, he slapped me awake.

  My eyes went wide but refus
ed to focus.

  He continued: “Not yet. Now, O-2 saturation less than about fifteen percent, well there’s a quick and steady decline. The water between target and surface is called ‘the head.’ One foot of water exerts a pressure of .43 pounds per square inch…” What was he saying? What was he talking about? His voice trailed off, and I chased it into the dark.

  With leather-gloved fingers, he pulled my eyes open again.

  I saw, one last time, his large, dark face over mine, serious and terrifying.

  For an odd, fleeting moment, he seemed to be searching for something. As if there were an answer written along the deep lines, blemishes and busted capillaries of my face.

  If he wanted an answer, I'd have given it to him. I'd have given him anything to stop, to not hurt me.

  But, I didn't have the first clue what the question was.

  Finally he leaned back and said, “I hope you got all that.”

  I tried to say something, anything, but words failed me.

  The ceiling above his head shook violently, and as the plaster began to crumble, those parts breaking away bursting into flames, through the gaps streaks of light bled through like the sun itself had split the midnight sky and was now bursting into the room, searching for me.

  My entire body was wrenched toward the light and, as his face dissolved away, I heard him say:

  “Lesson begins.”

  WHEN THE VAN HAD sunk far enough to hit the lake bottom, I woke up again.

  Hell, it could have been a lake but for all I knew it was the ocean. Any ocean. On a moon circling a distant planet.

  I had no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there.

  It was pitch black, which made it difficult to effectively shake off the world of dreams I'd just come from.

  Around the vehicle, the water gurgled, as if the lake had swallowed me whole and began slowly digesting its meal-- juices swirling around, sliding into crevices, looking for soft tissue to start in on.