The Turd: An American Journey, Chapter 13 – Xperience Fiction

The Turd: An American Journey, Chapter 13 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

If they had to stop and think; rather, if they had time to stop and think, they would’ve wondered how the five of them got to the stairwell so quickly. They might have taken a breather for Ernest, their injured party, beset with a definite bowel blockage and, as of their rendezvous with company security, a possible broken knuckle. And if they could just lean up against the wall like common ne’er-do-wells, they would notice that they weren’t the only ones running breakneck down the stairs.

It was fast. Suddenly the executives wanted to deal. They tried to lie, but euphemisms and corporate speak fell out of their mouths flat to the floor. They couldn’t backpedal. Seventy million people were in stages of hearing their plan. Ernest could see the relief on Jasen’s face that was hiding the panic, in that the world was about to fall apart, but he wouldn’t be blamed for it.

They hit the lobby and the pathways that employees were so careful to walk through before meant nothing. It was a mosh pit with earbuds. Ernest gathered everyone behind him and barreled through from the elevator to the front doors, pushing people away like a boxer pushing a side of beef to land the right punch. But he didn’t have to chance another knuckle; the employees weren’t there to stop them, or anybody.

They didn’t talk until they were at the entrance of the parking facility, where the mob was thinnest. Apparently no one in the VidYou complex had thought to go home

yet.

“Oh my God,” Tristan said. “That was amazing. What a rush!”

“Is that phone still on?” Tristan nodded. Jasen made the cut gesture across his throat. Tristan gave him an incredulous look, but turned off her livestream.

“I think they deserve to know what’s going on,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe we should know what’s going on before we tell them.”

Ernest cleared his throat. “Y’alls big plan was to show us to the world. Well, they seen us, and now they’re freaking out. And I don’t see how anything’s better. Not spilling milk on an oil slick, but wasn’t that your big plan?”

“Yeah,” Jasen said. “Sort of. We can still work with it. I mean, they met you just sitting in a conference room. They didn’t see you sitting on the toilet. And the poop-food machine, we didn’t show anybody that. We had a whole thing planned.”

“We can still do that,” Tristan said. “Where’s your poop machine?”

“Hey, can we call it a waste recycler?’” Lysette said. “I don’t want to go down in history as the inventor of the poop machine.”

“Poop sounds better,” Ophelia said. “I mean, if we’re handing out opinions.” “Opinions are like assholes,” Lysette said.

“If we’re going to do this live, we better get home before traffic looks like that lobby,” Ernest said. “And poop-machine or no, we need a name for that thing.”

“Fecal Sequel?” Ophelia said. Jasen laughed. Tristan pointed to her.

“That’ll play,” she said.

“Great,” Lysette said. “You know, my machine can help end hunger and we’re giving it names like they should be selling it on late night TV. Okay, look. How about

Second Go?”

“Second Go works for me,” Ophelia said. “It’ll track.”

“Okay, let’s agree on Second Go, and let’s get the hell out of here.”

They drove off the campus onto an apocalypse. Based on the traffic, everybody had heard, one way or another, that the government was going to shut down the internet. Red lights were useless and every car was playing horseshoes and hand grenades with pedestrians, who themselves were running like mad.

Three blocks from Ernest’s and Lysette’s house, they noticed a portly man in a gray sweatshirt sitting on the curb with a plastic container, opened, and a plastic spoon, poised. It wasn’t the oddest thing any of them had ever seen, but when they saw a woman in an overcoat a block later sitting on the curb with a plate of what looked like meatloaf in her lap, they had an unsettling pattern.

“You think there’s a potluck in the neighborhood?” Jasen said. “Could we be that lucky?”

“You can’t borrow a screwdriver in this neighborhood,” Ernest said. “I’d say no on the potluck.”

They drove up to the driveway. Ernest didn’t know whether to be relieved to see that the protesters were gone, or even more worried.

“The protesters are gone,” Ernest said.

Lysette opened her door. “Thank God,” she said.

“If they’re not here, they’re somewhere.”

“Jesus, I hope they’re not over you.”

“I hope not either,” Tristan said. “I’m already losing followers. Been losing them since this shit thing. We got to get you on my channel, quickly.”

They found a box on the stoop, brown-wrapped, no return address, tied in twine, a bundle of thin strips of white paper done up in the binding.

Ernest picked it up.

“That could be a bomb, Ernie,” Lysette said. “Call the police.”

“Cops are busy, Lys.” He carefully pulled the papers out and inspected them. “They’re plane tickets,” he said. “Milwaukee. It says ‘Sheboygan’ on the back of one of them.” Ernest unwrapped the box against Lysette’s protests.

“Honey, if they were going to blow us up, they wouldn’t waste a couple of thousand dollars on plane tickets.

Ernest pulled out a big, milky blue box that had “Good Value Laxatives” stamped on the face with a medication panel on the back. He opened the box and pulled out a tortilla chip. Then another. Then a small slip of paper that said come find me with a

VidYou link scrawled down.

“What the hell?” Lysette said. “You dare don’t eat those things.”

“I don’t eat street meat, I sure ain’t eating these.” Ernest looked in the box, which was empty of anything aside from the pseudo-laxatives and the note, which he handed to Jasen for the link. Jasen pulled out his phone and punched it in and watched. “Holy shit,” he said, “you know what this is?”

“Obviously not,” Ernest said.

“Sorry. It’s the dude. The original turder, the original video, but it’s from a different angle. He’s, like, setting the turd up. Yo, this is from the original guy. The original turder.”

Ernest handed out the plane tickets, starting with Lysette, ending with Tristan.

“I don’t know what’s going on here, or what’s going to happen next couple days,” he said. “Best case, we’ll still be left with shit everywhere you look. If you guys don’t want to go, that’s fine. But I’m just curious enough. I got a feeling this guy can help.”

***

The flight to Milwaukee was sedate and civil, prognostication of the weather, the difference between two popular commercial models of variable resistors between a constipated elder expert and a recently-unemployed neophyte. Ophelia sat quietly in the row before Jasen, next to Lysette, providing the only rapt attention to the Second Go that Lysette had received without the benefit of fishnets and garter belts. Tristan was, predictably, on her phone.

A casual passenger walking down the aisle might have picked up the assumption that five people were eager travelers on their way to the home of cheap lager and Jeffrey Dahmer. The truth couldn’t have been farther.

“I’m not going,” Lysette said earlier as Ernest packed. “Ernie, you don’t know anything about those tickets. In fact, are you out of your mind? Did you just jump in the candy van when you were a kid?”

“Why would someone spend a thousand bucks on tickets, five tickets. Five of us.

It’s a sign.”

“Yeah, VidYou is trying to get rid of us,” Lysette said.

Jasen coughed. “She’s probably not wrong, dude. Not sure why they’d send us to

Sheboygan, but okay.”

Ernest tucked the tickets in his pockets and then walked in the door, followed by

Lysette. Jasen, Ophelia, and Tristan stayed outside while Jasen smoked.

“Ernie, we’re not just gonna get on a plane and fly halfway around the country because you got a cryptic box of laxatives. You know how crazy that is? Everybody knows you can’t go now, so anybody, anybody at all could’ve just put that there as some kind of trap. Let’s just stay home.”

Ernest walked over to the curio cabinet in the corner and pulled out a stopwatch that had been in there so long, it left a dust ring.

“Dad’s been gone ten years ago Monday, you know that? Old man would’ve flown to Florida if he found a travel brochure in a sewer. Mom hated him for that, because he would just be off, you know?”

Ernest pocketed the watch. “I could never just go, with the garage and all. I just…

I feel like we have to give this a shot.”

“Oh, and do what? Go to Sheboygan? What are we going to do when we get there and there’s no “original turder”, nothing there because this is some stupid, expensive joke someone’s playing? What if it was some protester getting even with you for wanting to flush your poo? What if it’s someone that wants your poo and they’re giving you airfare so you can come to them? What if that’s what this original turder wants?”

Ernest went to the bay window and watched Jason knee a hacky sack. “It’s not gonna get good,” he said. “The protesters. They know where we live. I don’t care if we rip the lights out of their sockets, this isn’t going away. Shit is shit. They’ll have a reminder every morning if they’re regular. They’ll come here and grab me by the hand and jump on my belly until it squirts out of me like a kicked tube of toothpaste. And that’s here.” He looked at Lysette. “It might be a trap. But what’s this but a trap with a breakfast nook.”

Lysette scoffed. “We can’t leave our home.”

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

“I don’t think you are, but I don’t feel like that changes anything.”

The door creaked open. Jasen came in, followed by Ophelia and Tristan, the latter’s phone out and up, Tristan narrating their nascent journey.

“Okay, this is Ernest Kreb,” she said, waving to Ernest with her free hand.

“Ernest, Ernie, how many days has it been since you felt one slide down the chute?”

“Oh God, not this…”

Tristan tapped her phone. “Look, we need this. We need people on our side no matter what we do, and Ernie, you’re the celeb du jour.”

“Fine. Don’t call me Ernie.”

Tristan tapped the phone again. “So how many days?”

“It’s been six weeks yesterday. I almost forget the last time I went; it’s hazy.”

“Forty-five days, wow. Does it hurt?”

“Sometimes.”

Tristan made her way over to Lysette, asking about Second Go, and they went upstairs for an impromptu presentation.

“Uh oh,” Ophelia said, her eyes on her phone. “I think I know why those people were eating on the curb. I think I know what they were eating.”

Ophelia sat down and slid her phone to the other side of the table, where Jasen picked it up and showed it to Ernest, who looked at the side for the volume.

“The governors of forty-six states have declared a state of emergency after the leak in a VidYou corporate office in which it was alleged that the FCC would authorize a shutdown, or purge of social media. The public is protesting, not with signs, but with meals. Across the country, people are sitting down at work, in parks and public spaces, even on the side of the road, with a piece of their own feces, threatening to eat en mass if the purge occurs. They believe this will crash our healthcare system, as people get E.

Coli, Hepatitis A, C. Diff and a host of other pathogens.”

“Jesus, they’re eating it.”

“So gross,” Jasen said. “Did I tell you my girlfriend wanted to do shit-play? You know what that is?”

“Do I want to?”

Jasen set the phone down. “I didn’t,” he said. “Slept in the car cause I ddn’t.”

Tristan came down, followed by Lysette in lingerie.

“What the hell?” Ernest said.

Lysette smiled. “What?”

“It’s a part of your story,” Tristan said. “The man who can’t poo and his wife who could feed the world but only as a sexpot. It’s a weird story, but I’ve worked with less.”

“So I think we’re in trouble,” Ernest said. He looked at Lysette. “I’ll tell you when you’re… when you’re dressed.”

Ernest walked over to embrace his wife. Her hair smelled like lilacs and copper wire. She nestled her hands in his back pockets.

“Are we going?” She said.

“The world’s changing, fast,” Ernest said. “Shit is getting dangerous, and I have a nuclear football in my gut. It’s a sign, the tickets, the laxative box.”

Lysette sighed. “I just hope it’s not ‘stop.’”

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