Escape from Rodeo Burger—Chapter 5

I woke up standing in a long red hallway after having spilled Willa Westcott's brain circuits all over the saloon floor in Wildwood. I was no longer clutching the Colt .45, and my hand felt strange without it—like a missing limb. 

There were twelve doors on each side of the hallway. The carpet was red. The walls were red. Even the lights were red. It looked like an upscale yet seedy hotel lit up in neon. It made me think of the rotisserie ovens at the Hi-Ho Gas Station in Kilgore. In those rotisserie ovens, fat red hotdogs roll around like obscene sunburnt nudists on a stainless-steel beach.

I never ate hot dogs because they were once pigs and I am quite fond of pigs. They are intelligent creatures with pleasant personalities. When I was young, our neighbors had pigs until they disappeared. Their names were Charlie and Sue and I fed them apples. I met many pigs at the County Fair when I walked through the barns shortly before my parents left me to find my own way home. I remembered being beside a large trailer full of pigs on the highway when I was a kid in the car with my mom.

"Where are the piggies going, momma?" I remember asking her. I might have been five years-old. When you're a kid they're piggies. But at some point in life, they become pigs. Everything dulls.

"They're going to be slaughtered and turned into hot dogs and bacon for people who eat them," she said matter-of-factly. Then in one of those rare moments of tenderness she added, "Do you know why we don't eat pigs, VV?"

I shook my head no. 

"Because it's rude. We don't eat pigs because it is rude and wrong. We would certainly not want anything to eat us. Would we, VV?" 

I didn't say anything. My parents, I am convinced, did everything they could to kill my innocence as quickly as they could. They never lied to me. I was never told there was a Santa Claus or an Easter Bunny. No tooth fairy came to collect my teeth. I didn't have a birthday party, and we didn't celebrate Christmas.

Some of those pigs were shoving their noses out of the slots in the trailer. Occasionally, I could see their blue eyes. They were searching for hope and kindness in a cruel world that afforded them none. There was an intense fear in their eyes, and I couldn't look at them and imagine that they weren't conscious of what was happening to them. The only thing worse than seeing a trailer full of pigs was seeing an empty one going the other way. 

People are awful. Wrapped up in religion and excuses and their bullshit morality. It didn't matter whether it was on Pseudo or on Earth. If you look at it objectively, there is no debate. However, being human, there are all sorts of justifications for slaughtering animals. So how could I be mad at the aliens for doing the same thing to us? They were on top of a very amoral food chain. The circle of life and all that crap, on and on. 

I felt terrible for shooting Willa Westcott, though she was an android. I didn't feel bad for shooting Black Bart. He had it coming. I wondered if they would bury her on Cemetery Hill, or if she could be repaired. Perhaps, she was sentient and didn't know that she was an android at all. Who was I to say what life is and what life isn't? Because she never came out of a vagina after being put together with the right cocktail of human sex excretions, doesn't mean she wasn't real. Worse, maybe she was sincere about her affection for me and I ruined it. I wondered how the aliens were going to punish me for my impudence. 

They gave me a red hallway. I was no longer in the Cowboy Cody costume and my mustache was shaved and my hair was cut and styled like a 1920s comb-over. I stood there in a slim red suit—a sort of twenties pinstriped number with a red shirt and red bowtie, and red patent-leather wingtip shoes. I didn't know what to do, so I just stood there and thought. I figured those shoes were most likely human leather. 

The only logical thing to do in such a position was to try a door. They were all red doors with red door handles. I knocked on the first room and was greeted by a beautiful woman with what looked like a nice motel room behind her. It was not red at all inside. It was lavish, but quaint. She smiled when she answered the door and invited me in as though she were expecting me. Then she abruptly kissed me and the next thing I knew we were in bed and she rode me until I came. There was an eye in the ceiling as there had been in the first room I was in that periodically blinked. When it blinked everything went dark. 

We laid in bed afterwards and she asked if I could do it again and I said sure. She asked in such an unenthusiastic way that I began to question the reality of the moment, and then she laboriously straddled me, grabbed my penis, and slid me inside of her and took off. 

Hi-yo, Silver, away!

Afterwards, we lied naked in bed and she asked me if I wanted some bread, hummus, and fruit. I said yes. She had a TV in her room and we turned it on and watched a show called Seinfeld. She said it was popular on Earth, and I told her what Gus told me about Earth being 60 some years ahead of Pseudo. She said she already knew because she had been watching Earth TV since she has been here in this room alone. She was told she must get pregnant if she wanted to live by some red-haired Nazi woman who I presumed to be the old firecrotch, Barbie Swoon.

She was sullen and the show didn't make her laugh. She told me about her family in Texas and we talked about some of the same people we knew and places we had been. Her name was Arizona like the state. She was a cheerleader in college. I told her I had never been to Arizona, nor had I met anyone named after a state. She said she hasn't been, either, nor had she known anyone named after a state besides for herself. 

She welcomed me to sleep there if I liked, adding that she would like the company. She said I was the first person she had seen since she got there several days before. I was exhausted and slid naked into the comfortable bed with her and slept. She held onto me. I had vivid wild dreams of giant pigs in the desert that all floated up like hot-air balloons into those azure skies in Kilgore by Donut World. And I dreamt of Esther, playing her violin, until Arizona woke me up having sex.

In the morning, the alarm blared and I got dressed. I knew I wasn't meant to stay, so I decided to go to the next door to see what, or who, was inside. I hoped it would be Esther, but it wasn't. It was occupied by another beautiful woman who offered me spaghetti aglio e olio. She lit a candle and we talked about our favorite books. She said she had a husband and two kids at home, but was trying not to think of them because she was afraid she would never see them again. I wanted to tell her that she would, but I didn't know, so I didn't say anything. She asked me who I had at home waiting for me, and I told her about Esther, but it was premature to say. 

"She is more of a hope than a loved one," I admitted. I had no one else, really, besides my parents, who probably didn't care. 

Loneliness brings people together unlike anything else. The terrible feeling of neglect, being starved for attention and love. After dinner we made love and she wept. I whipsered that I was sorry and she said thank you. She whispered that she had her tubes tied and couldn't get pregnant so there was no hope for her when they found out. She was only prolonging the inevitable. Her name was Natasha. She wasn't from Kilgore, rather, she was from Lithuania. In the dark, she told me about her country and I told her about mine. There was nothing but the sound of our voices. We talked about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I didn't know anything about Lithuania. Natasha told me there was a place called the Hill of Crosses that I should see sometime. She said that Lithuanians rebelled against Russia in 1831 and 1863, and many soldiers never came home and their bodies were never found, so others put up crosses to honor them. She said there are about 100,000 crosses of varying sizes and designs on that hill. 

She asked me if I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. When I looked through the veil of darkness, I could faintly see the shadow of her naked face. She held my hand and smiled and asked me if I would accept Jesus Christ. I said yes as I had to the spaghetti aglio e olio, and she had me repeat after her words to that affect. Then we prayed in English and she trailed off in her native tongue as she fell asleep.  

The morning after yielded the same result. Next door to Natasha was Alex, a lawyer, and next door to Alex was Hannah, and next door to Hannah was Juliana, and next door to Juliana was Emily, and next door to Emily was Cynthia, and next door to Cynthia was Amber, and so on and so forth. Twelve doors and behind every door was a beautiful lonely woman who wanted to make love in order to survive. They were holding on to hope, prolonging time—if even but for a day. It was a bachelor's paradise, I suppose, but one shrouded in melancholia. 

I was sore by the time I finished those twelve rooms and when I came out of the last there was one more door at the end of the hall. A thirteenth door which I hadn't noticed before. The red number thirteen hung on it, ominously. I don't suppose, though, that the aliens believed in such human superstitions. I would assume that it was just a number to them, something meaningless and stupidly human—but I don't presume to know my captors.   

I knocked on the door, weary and depressed. Although, I had enjoyed the conversation, all that sex left me drained of my soul, it felt. Twelve days and nights of sex and talk—learning about someone's life in the course of 24 hours—engaging in a relationship of sorts until it was time to go. Efficient as it was broken. An unspoken amount of time that came when the alarm clock raged and that peculiar song played—Electric Avenue. The blistering sound of the bass guitar. The singer's acccent waking us up from a dead sleep. Boy! Boy! We gonna rock down to—Electric Avenue—and then we'll take it higher. 

I suppose it was a lifetime in twelve days and nights. A series of relationships that offered so much, but then failed because they ran the course of their unnatural expiry. You don't know how much time you will honestly get with someone in life. I suppose that is what relationships are like when you don't get lucky right off the rip and you must stumble dissatisfied from one person to the next with little time between to recalibrate and to collect yourself. When you have to kiss a series of frogs to get a princess. Pay your dues. That sort of thing. But here I was at door thirteen. Unlucky number thirteen. 

She answered and smiled. Her room was different than the others because it was larger and offered a view of Kalgon City, which lit up outside the panoramic glass wall on the backside of her room like a fire of broken glass and every gem imaginable. Towering buildings. Strange ships. Streets aglow. It was night and the city was full of pulsating neon and bright coruscating light unlike anything I had ever seen before, sprawled over such a magnificent expanse that I stood transfixed by the suddenness and scope of its magestic splednor. 

And there she stood at the door—Esther. She jumped into my arms and kissed my face until we collapsed onto the floor. How desperate she was for a familiar face and how equally desperate I was for hers—having seen everyone but for her until then. How could I ever tell her about what I had done since we met?

She pulled a lollipop from a glass jar and offered me one. She poured me a drink in a crystal glass saying she wasn't sure what it was, but it tasted something like brandy. Then she sucked on that sucker as she listened to me tell her I love her, without saying I love her at all. And that we got to get out of this place, without saying that we got to get out of this place at all. I wasn't going to ever let her go. I wasn't going to leave her, no matter what they did to me. I belonged with her and she belonged with me. 

We made love as the kaleidoscope of lights of Kalgon City poured into her room and fulgurated over us. I suppose they upgraded the impregnation pens, or maybe I was told incorrectly that they were austere cages. Those were bedtime stories my father told me who said that he knew from personal experience. The Kalgonians watched us on their televisions, or projectors, or however it was that they watched. That eye floated above the room but had shut, giving us at least the feeling of privacy. 

It wasn't like it was with the others—no feelings—pity wallowing with despair. That empty gesture that was merely a last-ditch effort to prolong life while nearly exhausted of hope. She wasn't sullen or lonely, and I needn't close my eyes to imagine her. She was there—beneath me. I was inside of her. I looked down upon her face that was aglow with all that lambent light—red, blue, red, purple, green—and I realized for the first time ever, that I was home.

In my sleep, I dreamt of the Hill of Crosses Natasha described to me in Lithuania. I wondered what it must look like—a hundred thousand crosses—and if there is such a thing for all of us on Pseudo, knowing that there isn't. I wondered if Jesus Christ was listening or watching us. I wondered if he forgave me for my sins and accepted me as I was. I had never been taught to believe in anything, especially anything as abstract as religion. But in my heart as I lied there with Esther in my arms, I had great hope. And I believed that as long as we were afforded a tomorrow, we would escape, somehow.