by Philip McCullough, © 1997

Weasel Peregrinations
After the bong session, a knock at the door of Takimodo’s posh downtown
Bangkok suite brought one of those instantaneous phase shifts you get when you are
really baked, I mean on a chronic marijuana chronicle, this one from the calm, sedate
realization that, hey, I’m pretty cooked, to an ultra-sharp fight or flight dollop of
paranoia. Whenever this sort of cognitive event occurred, it always brought to
Takimodo’s mind the fact that they always seemed to need long, rambling sentences to
describe them. The alcohol, blunts, and craziness of the past two nights, goin’ strong and
hard until just a couple of hours ago, made3 description even harder, but he thought he
could feel the burn out washing over him like zigzag cigarette smoke rising with the last
few square bubbles of flat champagne in a cubist painting. All this was processed in
parallel by Tak’s brain to the panic induced by the simple raps of knuckle on hardwood.
Takimodo often felt left behind in non-existent conversations like the one that
followed in the silence after the knock so he asked, ‘ Are any of you expecting anyone?’
He looked in the direction of his three companions who looked to be, well, he didn’t quite
know how they looked to be.
Hans downed another shot of Glenfiddich, chased it with half a Carlsberg, raised
his laser blue eyes, flashed them at Tak and jeered, ‘Ja! Da boogeyman. Like in da vairy
tales vee dell do liddle kinder. Of course you could relate do deze tales due to your
dendency tovards younger mostly mammalian species.’
Tak reached for his silver monogrammed cigarette case on the plate-glass coffee
table in front of him. He clicked it open, took out a Nat Sherman, stuck it in his mouth,
and began to hunt for a light. He was grateful for the greasy cardboard fast food
containers and the butts and beer dregs that littered the semi-reflective surface for giving
him time to think as his hand traveled around them to the other side of the deep dark
garbage jungle, moonlit as the four of them sat in the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, glass
on two sides, high-rise panorama. Wait, I’m messed, thought Takimodo, what the hell
does the view have to do with anything, as the paranoid-sounding guitar went from light
acoustic finger picking on the neural strings of his mind to a reverb-cranked, peddle-
pushing, conductor-cranking power chord.
Takimodo pictured himself reliving the moment of the knock, only at the moment
it happened he decided to pick up his guitar from behind the mod leather couch and the
knock was nixed from that night’s itinerary. That would have been much more
copaesthetic. But no, the knock…
His hand finally made it back from its jungle journey and wearily lit a cigarette.
Must get back on track. He had almost derailed amidst last nights detritus. Must reply.
Must reply. This became the mantra of the moment.
‘Will you just shut up, you fucking fool! And must you mock my, shall we say,
proclivities?’ Takimodo spat out, playing his vocabulary card before playing what could
be a pair of deuces or a straight flush. He had been dealt his language ability through a
combination of natural aptitude for languages and his father’s term as the Japanese
ambassador to the United States.
 Duke and Elvis, Takimodo’s other fellow festers, glanced at each other. Hans
directed his blue lasers at the ceiling. Takimodo could almost see his gaze roving around
the stucco like giant Hollywood spotlights scraping the heavens as he exhaled a giant
drag from his cigarette.
The only problem Takimodo had dropping this card was related to the fact that he
didn’t know what suit was trump. Seeing as his metaphor began with poker, he still
wasn’t sure whether he had won the jackpot or started jonesing like a compulsive
housewife robotically feeding the slots in Vegas. He started repeating another silent
mantra. Must follow up. Must follow up. He wondered all the while if this derailment
was going to one for the HazMat crew, wandering around his dendrites in hermetic silver
suits, staring at his idiocy from behind tinted polymer face-plates.
Takimodo hadn’t expected his first power challenge to come in this game’s guise.
It was so electric, he could almost smell the vibes in the air. And the longer he waited,
the more crushing everything became, gathering intensity on orders of magnitude. Then
it came to him. He had to finish the vocabulary hand. None of the others knew about his
stint in an American high school.
‘Here, one of you can use my interface to look up proclivity while I go answer the
door. I guess we’ve kept whoever it is waiting long enough to qualify as fashionable.’
Takimodo tossed his UI into one of the fast-food grease buckets as he started to move
toward the door.
Hans waited, and waited some more, until Tak had almost reached the door.
Then, never once looking down from his ceiling view, Hans said, ‘Proclivity. A tendency
toward certain types of behavioral patterns.’
Takimodo almost hesitated but quickly and surely he and his reflection reached
out and grabbed the doorknob on the right door of the pair of polished steel portals from
which the age-old knock had emanated. I’ll have to put Hans on pause until this scene
plays through. Tak knew that Hans had been on a few of those slightly passé, fully
deductible European sex junkets to Bang ‘City of Sin’ kok before the former had hired
the latter away from the German version of one of those American grocery store check-
out tabloids. Contributing editor Hans Friedman was playing his hand now because he
realized from past experience how dangerous Bang-kops could be. If it was a cop (cops?)
at the door and Hans upped the ante while the rusty badges were grilling him, he could
end up in jail. Even though these guys took American Express to grease the wheels of
the free market economy, Takimodo guessed he wouldn’t have much luck with his
platinum plastic if the fuzz had already had sticky contributing editor claws all over them.
His Achilles heel was that he had let himself get into cash flow problems, while even
though Hans’ liquidity was by no means larger than Tak’s, there remained the possibility
that the three of them together could put more money into the pocket behind the tarnished
badge than he could ever hope to put together at this moment.
Takimodo’s hand had been turning the doorknob for an eternity of pure motion in
his mind. Then the cannabanoids rotated in their neural receptor sites, time swelled and
instantly the door swung open to reveal a weasel peregrination, two of Bangkok’s finest.
They were both short and very slick. Their badges, however, shone brightly in the
expensive sunset that rolled into the foyer from the main room like a Rolls Royce Silver
Phantom at a coronation. This confused Takimodo momentarily until he saw the
metaphor’s little trap. Shiny, rusty, who cares? I gotta deal with these assholes. This
train of thought was beginning to seem accident-prone.
‘Yes, what can I do for you fine upstanding gentlemen this marvelous evening?’
Heavy on the powerful sarcasm because the cops wouldn’t understand English well
enough o grab from the edifice of interaction.