A DARKNESS PALE

SOURCE

…Irie’s estranged dad, Dec, arrived in LA to sell some bespoke weed to some high end customers… But what he really wants is to reconnect with Irie and let her know about the Source Orchard… But he’s losing his mind to a new disease known as The Drift…

Source

Elevator to the lobby Dec thought, what was happening with my pants? And thought, here we go again. Blank and going down. Trying to get away from Muscle, he could remember that, but he couldn’t remember why.

Doors opening he no longer remembered who he was, just that he was something smooth. He was a smooth motherfucker, and it was odd, the man who forgot, but also the one who had been forgotten. And he was a smooth motherfucker. It was important to be a smooth motherfucker when you didn’t know anything else. He smoothly spun through the hotel’s revolving door and velcroed his vinyl duster around him and pulled his elongated fedora tightly to his crown. The thick rain wasn’t so bad, nothing corrosive, nothing that otherwise might make you sick, so said the CDC. And he was dressed for it.

So this must be where he was supposed to be.

A vanilla fudge Cadillac pulled up, tires crunching. A driver built like a crab, sporting a fedora slightly smaller than his, hopped out. “Very good,” he said, jerking open the rear door.

So smooth and he found himself slipping into the fancy car. This one with real leather seats covered in a vinyl sheet. Where he was supposed to be, going where he was supposed to go. He did not know. He placed his hat in his lap and took in the sights. Downtown Los Angeles. So now he knew where he was. Darkness oozed into glowing storefronts and streetlights, and the rain made all the hustle and bustle waxy and out of focus. He found himself feeling quite relaxed and was reminded of the Iggy Pop song, “The Passenger.” That song was about being a smooth motherfucker whacked out on hard drugs. Right? He didn’t detect himself to be under the influence of anything at the moment, though he knew that for most of his life this had not been the case.

Contemplating chemicals brought him back. Drugs were part of the reason he’d been kicked out of his childhood home. His dad owned a bunch of Ezell’s Chicken restaurants, making him a respected Seattle business man. Getting respect from the community was very important to his dad, being a Moroccan immigrant with a black wife. Anything that challenged the status quo was not to be tolerated. When his son, always a bit of a disappointment, began actively embracing the emerging hippie culture he was shipped off to a private school. It was there, two years later in 1972, right after the Haze Incident had blown the world up, that he smoked a strain of cannabis so intense, it literally sent him to another world. Was shit ending, or beginning? He knew something else was going on. There was a tear in reality. He’d seen it, and felt it, and stuck his foot in it.

The beginning of the Answer project. He stole enough money to scuttle over to Thailand, where the rumors said the strain had originated. He located the farm, nearly getting murdered twice. Sheer tenacity and bullshit got him a job working the crop, and also got him in bed with the lady in charge.

Then she became pregnant. She died giving birth to his daughter, Irie.

With the lady gone things at the farm overheated and he took Irie to Oregon, to his uncle’s place, an apple orchard in the wilds outside Astoria. His uncle was a hippy biker and had no truck with him growing some plants with the strain he’d smuggled back. When his uncle took a bad turn and sprayed himself across a quarter mile of highway 101, he and his cousin Muscle started farming alternate strains and kept the orchard as a front. He dug into the Answer project, exploring the other world in a spacesuit made of smoke, in order to gleam the meaning of life. And whatever lay beyond.

This was who he was. He was Decent Baglavitti.

In the back of the Cadillac, Dec patted the pockets of his suit and found a map showing how to get from downtown to Cypress Park. There was also a card with Irie’s address.

His daughter. Tonight’s mission was his daughter – that was why he had to get away from Muscle. Back in 1993 when he and Muscle had run into trouble with those gangsters from Canada and been forced to burn down the family house and flee, Irie had joined AES. Muscle was still paranoid she’d get them busted, put them on Berserker status. With his brain working again he could clearly recall back in 1993 when they’d finished listening to that last voice mail from her, the phone on speaker in that room at the Meindorf Inn in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Muscle said, “We gotta ghost again. She’ll burn us. We gotta be double gone now.”

“I just can’t believe Irie would join AES,” Dec said.

Muscle was already packing. “That’s because you never really paid attention. She was always training for something like this.”

“I guess” Dec murmured.

“Dude, she’s seen like every shitty action movie ever made. And she believes that shit. I always thought something was simmering, like getting ready to blow. It’s not a complicated equation.”

Irie was the opposite of complicated, but she wasn’t simple either. Dec would never call himself a Taoist because he felt doing so was a grand contradiction, but he dug a lot of the concepts, which was why he always called Irie the uncarved block. Ever since she’d come into his life she’d been solid and stable. She’d been the anchor that kept him and Muscle from floating out into the stars.

From the research he’d done in the last year she was still with AES, but there weren’t Berserkers anymore, or at least it wasn’t like how it once was. Covid and the Big Dip changed all the rules. But still, risk. But even if he was at risk of getting him and Muscle on Berserkers status, Irie still needed keys to the Source Orchard. The Source Orchard, right. That was why he was here in L.A. That was what all this was about.

He found himself getting choked up. He never was good with emotions. He’d always been aloof and cold, more of an ideas man. He and Muscle had landed in Aspen, Colorado and set up a new farm. When everything became medicinal and legal it was his idea to rebrand into an exclusive elite boutique with him in his white suit doing personal house calls, working with the client to create unique strains personally tailored to their particular needs and wants. The idea with Source Orchard was salvation. The answer to the Answer. Thanks to the Big Dip the world was getting colder and colder and pretty soon they’d hit the new ice age. Irie wouldn’t be cold though, not if she didn’t want to be, he was making sure of that.

Dec selected a moleskin and fountain pen from his bag and scribbled about how thinking about drugs could bring him back the next time he went blank, and how the Source Orchid was the salvation. The answer to the Answer, like that. And he was drifting, sure enough. The little information out there on drifting said it could progress fast or it or slow. Either way he had to do everything he could to hold on, at least until he’d seen Irie again.

The car pulled to a stop and Dec thought, that too. The appointment. Instead of getting a cab to Irie’s place, he’d gone to the appointment. What to do about that?

…Dec finds himself trapped in a fancy house at the top of Angelino Heights as the Drift continues to take over…