The Damned Highway by Nick Mamatas Read Free Book Online Page B

eye, and I direct the hand. I am the most important part of the body.”
    Then said the asshole, “Actually, it’s me. I’m the most important part of the body. None of you would work or even dare move without me.” Shocked, the hand reached down and slapped the ass hard for its impertinence. And then the asshole shut down. The days crawled by. The hands clenched and twitched from the pain of the backlog of shit. The eyes watered and squeezed shut, trying without result to evacuate the body of its increasingly fetid waste through the trivial power of blinking. And the brain found itself choked by pain and anxiety, driven to distraction and finally unable to even think. Not one equation, not a single strategy to gather food or gain the sexual attention of another body, nothing at all except for one statement that seared the spine—we surrender!
    And then the asshole gave way. And it accepted the surrender of the body, or most of it anyway. To the hand it said, gloating, “And because you struck me, from now on, you are the part of the body in charge of wiping me clean!”
    This is what we were reduced to, he and I. Him, in a food-service establishment, telling stories of talking assholes puckering and unpuckering in a mockery of human speech, and me, stirring through my chowder and wondering if I’d seen something in the chopped meat and veg that no man should ever see.
    After Kent State, after Watts, after Innsmouth, I cannot help but wonder if the old man had it right. The brain cannot be tamed; it cannot be accommodated. It can, however, be usurped. Will the Americans who live out here, in flyover territory, in Greyhound land, in the asshole of the country, be the ones to rise up? Will there be Freak Power?
    â€”—
    When I’m finished, I am cool and calm and collected again. Tired, though. Very tired. Writing often has that effect on me. I do my best work at night, sequestered in my kitchen and surrounded by a cacophony of television and music and copious amounts of alcohol and caffeine. The bus offers none of these amenities, but nevertheless, I am happy with the outcome. My muse is a Kentucky racehorse, sleek and slick and powerful, and at last, I am getting a grip on things. I see now how this journey should unfold. I understand where the search for the American Nightmare must truly begin. Until this point, I’ve only been sniffing around the ages, wandering haphazardly and waiting for the story to find me. But that is not how journalism works. Instead, I must find the story.
    I’ve written before about the Ibogaine Effect, just a month ago, in fact. The story was a simple one—candidate Edmund Muskie had been acting a bit strangely, and rumors were that his handlers had summoned a doctor from the Brazilian rain forest to bring forth “some kind of strange drug” for the candidate. Ibogaine, from the plant Tabernanthe iboga , had been a part and parcel of the CIA’s pharmacopoeia since the 1950s. The Frogs used it as a diet pill, all the better to oink away on rich desserts and buckets of red wine. Just the thing Muskie needed, really, even if his candidacy could have done without the scurrilous and utterly untrue rumors. The source of those rumors was, of course, myself. I created the rumor and then reported on the rumor. The Effect was that the rumor was quickly accepted as a fact and made the daily papers. That evening, news anchors in forty markets simply read off from the articles. In the bar at which I was drinking with the rest of the pool, my esteemed colleagues dutifully transcribed the material into their notebooks and then marched as one to a bank of pay phones to make the next morning’s bulldog editions. It will be interesting to see how that impacts his campaign through the rest of the year.
    Ibogaine is said to encourage introspection, to allow one to determine one’s place in and path across the universe. The brave Pygmies were the