CASE 5: All Aboard The Incan Party Bus, Part 3

“I’ve found that, rather than make me feel like less of a man — if you can forgive the phrase in our modern, feminist era — taller women make me feel more masculine. It’s not the idea of conquest — I don’t much like dominance in any regard — unless, of course, it’s within the confines of consenting sex — but rather that there’s more of you to admire.“ The second of my three Tinder misses — no pun intended — looked at me quizzically. I’ve gotten used to this. Our culture is one extremely hostile to short men. I wish I could say that this has never bothered me — it has — but at a certain point, I’ve had to accept that there’s really nothing you can do about it, save accept yourself and hope other’s do too. “This is all to say, circuitously, that I find you very attractive.” The five foot nine woman blinked away shock and began to seriously consider me as a sexual object, when Santi tapped me on the shoulder. The sudden appearance of my cartoonishly tall, dark and handsome friend dispelled any chance of my interactions with this woman going deeper than being small circles in one another’s Tinder chats.

As a rule, I try never to be mad at friends, but it is very hard to talk to women when Santi is around — I’ve told him as much.I turned, prepared to make stern, disappointed eye contact with him, but the look on his face shut me up.

“Iz… we have a problem.”

“Well,” I said to the woman, giving it one last shot. “You know where to find me; about six weeks deep into your Tinder history.”

Santi led me to the pre-bathroom couches, upon one of which Kazam lay sprawled and drooling.

“Ugh, poor guy,” I heard a woman say as she passed him.

“It’s that K that’s going around,” said her genderless friend, as they held open the bathroom door.

“Do you have any?”

“When don’t I?” The closing door cut off their laughter like a sound effect.

“That’s Kazam, from our first case,” Santi said.

“Oh, I thought I recognized him. What’s the matter, did he do some of the K? I’ve got to get my hands on some.”

“No, Iz… and no!” Santi shook his head at me. He had a pretty laissez-faire attitude to party drugs except for ketamine, which was unfortunate, as I’d recently found it to be one of my favorites. It had many of the nice effects of Molly without the need to touch everything and flail. A Molly for adults, a friend of mine had taken to calling it — Margaret. “No, he didn’t do K. Look.”

I followed Santi’s point to Kazam’s man bun but saw nothing except for thick, healthy hair — impressive in itself at our age. I was just about to express as much when something about the universe seemed to shift. “Oh… oh shit.”

Hwi dere! D universe wants you to see widout yow eyes.

“Is that… a baby mindbreaker?”

“I guess the only portal I could open was one so small only a baby could fit through,” Santi huffed.

“I see that you’re upset, Santi, and I want to honor that, but I don’t think now is the time.”

“Fair,” Santi said, as he pulled his crystal off from around his neck. “It’s pretty cute.”

“It is,” I said, drawing a dry erase marker from my back pocket. “A shame what were going to have to do to it, but that’s nature I suppose. Red in tooth and — ah! Shit!”

The adorable little psychic demon flung itself at me and I hit the deck in an acrobatic maneuver that made clear to me the Tae Kwon Do lessons had been paying off. My self congratulatory pride would have to wait, however, because the little guy landed on the head of a woman who’d been given the task of getting drinks for all her friends. It wrapped its tentacles around her brain and its maddening eye began to pulse. The woman’s eyes rolled to the back of her head and she began to wilt. Santi grabbed her as she fell but not in time to keep her from flinging drinks into the faces of three middle aged hot people in disco pool party outfits.

“The fuck!” one of them screamed.

“She… um…” Santi mumbled.

“She did that K that’s been going around,” I lied, grabbing at the little mindbreaker and hoping no one saw.

Why stwap entrowpy? The adorable little demon said as it flung itself from the woman to one of the hunks Mike had been ogling. Santi and I ran towards him as he collapsed across the laps of the couple who’d been trying to pick him up.

Da hooman bwady is ah impedwemt to fweedom.

“Ketamine!” Santi explained as he tried to lift the hunk.

“It’s really strong!” I added trying to stab the fugitive little demon with my dry erase. The mindbreaker fled from me and Santi chased after it, arms out, set to tackle. He got his hands around it and tried to bring it to his chest, but here, finally, his high school days of playing American Football proved worthless. It wriggled out of his arms and used Santi’s back as a springboard, flinging itself in a parabolic arc high, high into the air.

A hush went through the crowd and I thought, for a moment, that everyone else was following the same action, but that was, unfortunately, not the case.

“That’s her,” someone whispered.

Just then, a small woman in a very very big hat stepped up to the DJ booth behind the decks.

“What’s up?” DJ Golda Mayer said, in an extremely confident whisper. She cut the music and suddenly the sounds of the city bled back in. Cars honked, helicopters whirred, somewhere, inexplicably, a Mexican family set off fireworks. “All aboard the Incan Party Bus!”

With a touch of her fingers a groove started to build, slow, quiet. Heads started to nod, feat started to tap. She reached out her fingers towards the decks and that’s when it happened. Finishing its parabolic arc, the most physical of actions for a creature of pure psyche, the little mindbreaker landed, perfectly on her head.

The DJ’s eyes rolled back. She started to stumble… then righted herself. Leaning close to the mic, in little more than a whisper she said, “It want’s you to see without your skin.”

Then the beat dropped, and it was immaculate.

Even I, who’s sensitivity paled in comparison to Santi’s, saw it then, the psychic matter of the whole crowd — everyone touched by the deep-psyc — kibbutz house — flowing towards the booth to be gobbled up by the little demon who was no longer so little. That’s the power of a good DJ, I suppose¹.

“I don’t think I’ve ever said this to you before, Santi, and know it brings me no joy, but you really fucked it with this one. I’m calling Ashleigh.”

“No!” Santi snatched for my phone and I felt fury well up in me in a way nearly as potent as the guilt that followed. “We can do this without her.”

“Where have you gotten that idea? We’ve only had one, awful, magic lesson.”

“Look what we’ve done in the last year, Iz — “

“Nine months.”

“Look what we’ve done in the last nine months; Banished ghosts, planes traveled, survived a Scooby Do and none of that we’ve needed help for. We need to solve this the way we normally do — just go off vibes.”

I took a deep breath, but it was not tasty. “That’s the problem, Santi. This is where just going off vibes has gotten us.” I drew my marker out of my pocket and raced towards the booth.

The mindbreaker, now the size of a small man, clocked me, and the DJ leaned in. In little more than a whisper she said, “stop that Jewy little man… it’s ok. I can say that. I’m Jewish.”

Groovy people dancing to the groovy music closed in on me. I tried to keep away from them but my four months of Tae Kwon Do lessons were not up to the job. The amazon I’d been chatting up only twenty minutes before got her hands around my neck, and terrified as I was I couldn’t help but noticed that this could have been — had the day gone very differently — exactly where I’d wanted things to go. My vision was narrowing to a point around the woman, porky pig-like. I saw only her glazed over eyes, I saw her shag hair cut, I saw the key rise just below her nose and the white powder fly up as she inhaled.

Her hands relaxed from my throat and she collapsed back into Santi’s waiting arms.

“What — “ I began to ask.

“The ketamine,” Santi said. “It’s really strong.” He ripped me away from the throng and pulled me back towards the bathroom lounge area. “Here’s the thing, Iz,” he said, rushing to get the words out. “I can’t focus, but you can. I’ve got a plan, but I’m going to need you to trust me.”

“Santi,” I said, “when don’t I?”

He loaded more K onto his key and stepped between me and a throng of people who I could tell, had they not been possessed, would be really fun to party with. “Open a portal.”

That seemed like a pretty bad idea, seeing as that’s how we’d gotten into this position, but I’d already told Santi I trusted him implicitly, so it would have been embarrassing to go back on it. Holding my marker in front of me I focused as hard as I could. Just outside my field of view I could hear Santi wasting more of that really great ketamine to defend me. Terror raced through me, but I didn’t let it stop me. After all, I’d always been afraid during tests but I still got excellent grades. Holding in my mind an image of the white board back at my Caltech office, I proposed to myself the simple multivariable calc equation for growing a paraboloidal portal. How large it needed to be and how quickly I needed it to grow I had no prior for, but I chose a rate and size that felt right, and bothered as I was with him, Santi had been correct to say that vibes had gotten us this far.

With a sweet, high sounds, and the faintest whisper of Yiddish, a hyperboloidal hole opened in the universe.

“Umm… hey. So about that iMac?”

“There!” Santi said, dropping his key and wasting even more of that very good ketamine to point at the DJ booth. “There’s a laptop there! Tell all your friends!”

“Yo! Dudes! Let’s go delete our Facebooks!”

The throng descended. Waves and waves of cool people smothered us. The hunks all pinned Santi and only the normal looking people grabbed me, and even then, as I was sure I was going to die, I couldn’t help being a little hurt by it.

I reached for him and he reached for me and then the music stopped. Slowly at first, and then in an avalanche of flesh the party fell away from us. The cool, stink free air struck us both in the face and we took the tastiest of breaths.

Leaping to my feet I got a clear sight of the DJ booth. The music had stopped, silenced as so many ghosts fought over the laptop to try to access and then delete their Facebook pages. The mindbreaker tried to devour them, but there were just too many for it to deal with. As a hoard the mid aughts ghosts beat and pummeled the demon until it exploded, showering the party with psychedelic, glowing goo. Unimpeded then, the ghosts descended on the laptop and the frantic, psychic action must have been too much. It burst into flame. Collectively the ghosts wailed in a way that would have sounded pretty cool at a Mumphord and Son’s concert.

“We need iMac’s!” a ghost yelled.

“We neeed them!” a chorus answered it, and then, in a chaotic swirl they flew into the air and descended down into Los Angeles.

“We saved the day,” I said, “But I think we also unleashed a hoard of ghosts unto every used electronics store in LA county.”

“Well,” Santi shrugged, retrieving his kugel from where he’d tucked it next to my backpack. “More work for us.”

¹ It’s a common misconception that DJ’s just stand in front of a crowd and push buttons but it’s, in fact, a very demanding job. It takes a huge amount of skill to turn a crowd of disparate, lonely people, into a groovy mass.