The Disillusionists. cont'd...

Mike backed his mint '97 Lexus out of the garage and idled it down the driveway. I sat in the passenger seat and gawked at the trees, which appeared to have grown in the short time I was inside. Mike reached up and tapped a garage-door opener thingy on the visor and as we reached the gate it had just clicked fully open. Mike powered through and looked over like a show-off, "I call it the Bat Cave."

The gate closed behind us and we accelerated smoothly. The five of us were pressed back into the seats and the leather popped enzymes of scent at each crinkle or crease. May, Jay and Alexis took turns giggling in the back seat, pretending to kiss just to freak me out and hootin' on a travel bong. I hadn't experienced anything like it since I left high school in grade nine. Entering Mike's world required full use of the senses. I asked Mike what he was rebelling against. All he said at first was, "This. All of this." He waved his arm, indicating the passing traffic, houses, streetlights, you name it...

Mike could think on his feet. He knew what to say in any given situation. He looked for other scammers, somebody he could believe. I got the sense that the others were beginning to annoy him, something I could relate to. There was a time probably when they instructed him, but they had peaked too soon and were destined only to become freaks.

"Why do people think that space is so frightening," started Mike, "I mean, did it ever occur to them that we live in it to?"

May reached forward and rubbed my shoulder, it didn't surprise me, it was the most natural and re-assuring feeling in the world. Mike continued, "It's as though they are separate from it all."

"Like Goddesses." Said Alexis, somewhat out of context. Was that the first thing she had said this whole time? She had a voice like an un-ripe apple on a cheese-grater. Sour, wet and gravelly. Some women were unlucky enough to wear their experience on their face. Alexis wore it on her voice.

"We are..." Mike said as he rolled down his window to yell at a squeegee kid - funny, you only see them in the suburbs now, "Touch my car and I'll break that fuckin' squeegee off in your fuckin' ass." Mike shook his head, "Every fuckin' intersection..." Mike seemed to relish the confrontation and was disappointed when, at the next intersection, no one approached the car.

"At least he was doing something. Half the time they just walk by with a cup."

Mike didn't appear to have heard me. He was deep in chin rubbing mode... "Anyway, where was I... oh yeah, essentially the earth is an egg floating in a milky cluster of eggs which mostly are dead or not yet fully formed. Occasionally it is struck by a sperm but so far, none has penetrated it's thick, rocky crust. You see, the sun is the mother's soul... the solar plexus?

And, the centre of life is the potential inside of the egg. Energy. The centre of the earth."

Mike looked over at me.

"Time is relative. We are subject to greater forces than our own, be it lunar, gravatational or say, I don't know, solar flares? What may take generations for us is merely a blip on the radar screen."

"Billions. Billions of years," croaked Alexis again.

"Exactly. We, my friend, are merely bacteria. Caretakers as it were. If we have a purpose it is to safeguard this organism and frankly, I think we've done a pretty piss-poor job so far."

Mike chewed silently through his theory as though looking for a gap, a hole in his reasoning or perhaps, a parking spot - which he found immediately in front of the warehouse we now approached on foot.