commission for years now), but it came with a tangible sense of reality that confused him. Jake gestured for Will to come over to the house and then disappeared back inside. Unsure what to expect, Will crossed the street, walked up the flagstone path, climbed the creaky porch steps, and followed Jake into the dark, old home.
Entering the parlor, Will immediately smelled bacon and heard the telltale spitting and sizzling sounds of frying fat coming from a room in the back. Going down the long shotgun hall, he came out into a low-ceilinged kitchen, where Jake had all the gas burners on the cast-iron stove cooking, with scrambled eggs in the wide skillet and tomatoes and thick slabs of bacon on the grill. “I didn’t really have time to make anything fancy, the boys only called a few minutes ago to tell me you were coming. But bacon’s good, right? That’s honestly the only food I miss from the States. America sure knows how to make bacon.” He took a plate from the cupboard and, piling the eggs on high and topping it with the mix from the grill, set it on the small table in front of Will. “Eat up. It’s hot and delicious.”
Will did not know why he felt so comfortable; perhaps it was the odd familiarity of being back in Detroit, or the safe, comforting reassurance of knowing he was in a dream. He sat down and dug in. The food was delicious. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was, he could not remember the last meal he’d eaten. “Where are we?”
“Good question,” said Jake, pulling up a chair across from him. “Simple answer is that we’re in a mix of your mental landscape and mine. Very confusing to move through at first, and tricky to get orientated in, but you get used to it. But basically, like I said, we’re wandering around in a blend of my subconscious and yours.”
“How’s that work?” Will asked, taking another bite.
Jake shrugged. “Beats me. I ain’t the pharmacist. As I understand it, the prime ingredient of the drug is extracted from a common root, one plant, and in some way we are both somehow connected back to that single source. I guess this is what lets it blend the different visions of its visitors. Impressive and very deluxe stuff, light years ahead of what the other guys have got. I mean, putting aside how incredible it is that we’re commingling our individual and unique hallucinations, there ain’t many drugs out there can conjure up a decent breakfast, am I right? That doctor is a genius.” He leaned over to the window and pointed past the faded gingham curtains. “Your vision out there. What is it, Chicago?”
“Mmmn, no, iz Detroight,” said Will, his mouth full.
“All right, well, see, we’re also in my grandparents’ house, up in Accord, New York. Upstate. So, this here is a mishmash of pieces of your unconscious world mixed with chunks of mine. Now, I don’t know why my mind would conjure up this sad sack memory for me, I’ve been in plenty nicer places, but I guess it’s some sort of symbolic recollection for me. Like I said, it’s fascinating. When Bendix described what he was up to, I volunteered right away.”
Will mostly wanted more breakfast, but he thought he should ask more questions first. “How do you know Bendix?”
Jake shrugged. “He’s been doing various tests with us ever since the war. Initially, he was mixing up Thorazine with variations of crank to try to change a soldier’s sense of time, you know, so that things would seem very slow while the GI was actually moving very fast. It had potential, but there were big physical setbacks, massive strokes and coronaries. Then he had an idea for how to interrogate suspects under doses of lysergic acid. That went kinda badly too. Bendix sent over some LSD batches from Bern that were way past the point of potent. Test subjects were flying out of hospital windows to escape the purple dragons and pink elephants. Two strikes were enough, and Washington sent me back here to smoke him. Then he pulled out this ace from up his sleeve, right in the nick of time, too, ’cause his number was up. But he put this on the table and everyone saw the potential right away. This could be huge. If he’s got what he says he’s got—and it sure the hell looks like he does —then it’s going to be the biggest thing since ol’ Madame Curie discovered radium. But like I say, I don’t know what it is exactly, Bendix is using some mix of ergine, DMT, ibogaine, and other stuff. I don’t ask many questions, the guy spooks me, honestly. The lab boys can sort out the details, all I care about is what we can do with it.”
“Yes. Very interesting. Really, fascinating,” said Will, only half listening while slathering butter on his toast. He felt entirely at ease; it was nice to be back in the States again, even if it was only in a fantasy. He liked Jake too; the man spoke with a down-to-earth straightforward style that reminded him of home. It made sense to Will that Jake came from good upstate country people. He wasn’t like the other New Yorkers, with their obtuse, long- winded ways. Will wondered how Oliver and Jake had ever become friends when their personalities were so clearly miles apart.
“It is fascinating,” Jake went on. “Think about how a drug like this could affect the entire topography of war. I could be at one latitude, see, and you could be thousands of miles away, but if we’re dosed at the same time from the same batch, shazam, we’re sharing a single stage together. Like we are now, get it?”
Will nodded, only vaguely understanding.
“What this means,” Jake continued, “is that you can fly over one of Ho Chi Minh’s camps in the deepest, thickest jungle and dose them by air, like you’re irrigating crops. At the same time you carefully dose up your own GI force that’s sitting back in, say, West Germany, all gunned up and ready for action. Talk about your goddamn ambush, the Commies will be loony-eyed and drug dreaming, wandering through their ancestral mud-hut homes, when—ka-bam—good ol’ Yankee Joe kicks down the bamboo door and scorches a flamethrower in their faces. Then it’s like ‘Oh, hello’ and ‘Sayonara, buddy!’ all in the same breath.”
Will shook his head. “Wow, incredible. I never imagined stuff like this was possible.”
Jake smiled. “Right now Bendix is the only one who can do it, no one else is even close. Mark my word, once the kinks are ironed out and the army labs start cooking up their industrial-sized batches, boy howdy, it is going to be a whole new ball game.”
“Seems like it works pretty well already. I mean, this bacon tastes really good,” Will said, loading up his fork for his last big bite.
Jake nodded. “Yeah, well, the clinical tests are almost done. But like I said, we still have some kinks.”
“Like what?”
“Well, finding proper dosage levels and looking at the long-term impacts on the subjects; these drugs can put quite a strain on the system. I’m pretty sure that’s what took out Boris, his heart exploded. Then there’s the question of how you’re affected in the real world when you’re hit here. We’ve got more bodies buried in the basement than we have answers. Also, what if the effect isn’t lethal, if it’s only a crippling injury, then what? Then we get weird stuff like Ned’s muttering coma.”
Will stopped scraping his plate and looked up. “Ned? I thought she was working with the Russians.”
“Ned was working for Ned; every other loyalty she had died back in Spain when the Fascists shot all her friends. Since then, she’s been working with anyone who paid her. She would have betrayed this operation too if she’d had time to figure it out. I’m pretty sure that’s why Bendix gave her a funny dose. His methods are, well, like I said, the guy spooks me, but this is the new frontier, right? There is so much we don’t know. We need more experiments, you understand. Sorry.”
Wolfing down his food, taking in the surreal atmosphere (out the window a herd of bleating sheared sheep caught his eye meandering up Larned Street), Will had only been half-listening to Jake’s story. It was fascinating, but so was so much at the moment, his world had become a grand orchestra of overstimulating sensations, with every sensory section—horns, strings, percussion—all going at full tilt. However, Jake’s last point did catch Will’s ear, the way a perfectly chimed triangle can cut through a symphony, and at the word “Sorry,” he looked up to find Jake aiming a pistol directly at his head.
Without thinking, Will ducked and flipped the table up. Jake fired the gun into the ceiling as he tumbled backward with the remaining eggs, butter, bacon, and scalding coffee spilling, yellow and black, all over him. Jake aimed the gun again as Will dashed out the hallway. A shot hit and splintered the doorframe behind him as he dove out to the porch.
Leaping over the rickety stairs, Will took off down the walkway and ran across the street. Running past a pair of grazing goats, he heard another gunshot as the wig shop window shattered out in front of him. Not waiting for a second shot, he dove in through the revolving doors of the Penobscot Building, scrambled across the lobby with his head low, then ducked into the stairwell by the elevators, slamming the door shut tightly behind him.
Running up the stairs, Will thought through the weirdness and tried to form a plan. He realized that Jake was already an expert in this field, he had probably been hunting in this hallucinogenic terrain for some time. Jake also had a sizable advantage in that he had figured out how to actually get his hands on a weapon, he had a gun, while Will had only his wits, which at the moment were not nearly as focused as they needed to be.
Will reached the third floor and flung open the stairwell door only to find himself facing a rolling green
