The Emerald Burrito of Oz Read online

  Next I wandered over to the U.S. Customs building, which was not hard to find; it was a monstrous construct easily as big as the rest of the town.

  I walked up a long marble stairway leading to a single tall door in the center of the building. Pushing the door open, I found myself in a claustrophobic little waiting room, like in a dentist's office. It seemed a strange thing to find inside this huge building, like Dr. Who's phonebooth in reverse.

  A plump little woman with glasses sat behind a little window with a door next to it. "May I help you?" she asked, without looking up from her paperwork.

  "Yes," I said, "My acceptance letter says to show up here—today!" I smiled, but no return smile was forthcoming as she reached for my papers.

  "Have a seat over there," the lady said, indicating a row of uncomfortable-looking chairs against the wall.

  I sighed and sat down, plunking down the knapsack next to me. There were some eight-month-old, dog-eared magazines on a table next to the chairs. I picked one up at random and leafed through it, agitated.

  Finally, fifteen or twenty minutes later, the portly lady called my name. Then she handed me a stack of documents as thick as a phonebook, and for the next hour and a half, I performed my dronely chores.

  There was a form from the IRS, to verify that my taxes were all paid up. By signing another form, an "Official Record of Exoneration," I held blameless The United States of America and any or all of its agents in the event of "any unseemly and/or unusual transformation as a result of use of the Salina Gate."

  There were the usual things, like asking for next-of-kin, DNA scan permission in case of death, and three or four things the ACLU will eventually be having a field day with, such as "allocation of any discoveries and/or scientific breakthroughs, blah blah blah, to the United States, in order to safeguard national security."

  Right. So if, while in Oz, I stumble upon a magic berry that turns water into gasoline, and by some miracle, it works when I bring it back (something that has never happened), I'm supposed to turn it over to Uncle Sam rather than make a kazillion dollars? I don't think so.

  I signed the damned paper anyway. I signed everything. I wasn't going to throw away the whole trip on a technicality.

  The guard at the front desk gave everything the once-over, then, satisfied, sent me through yet another door, which led into a covered walkway across a parking lot, and into the bowels of the Gate Building itself.

  Once there, I presented my passport to seven different dead-ass functionaries, who each scrutinized it past the point of absurdity, then poked through my backpack, frisked me. Maybe there's some counterpart to them in Oz, the Redunderheads or somebody, endlessly repeating the same meaningless task, banished to their own little happy gulag (for their own good of course) by Glinda. Luckily, I did not qualify for a cavity search. I really got the feeling that the government is not happy about allowing this whole thing to go on. But it's not like they can do a hell of a lot about it.

  I mean, since the shake-up and everything.

  Who knew? Who would have ever guessed what the truth was? People were smelling the vapors since the forties, but everybody was dead wrong about the particulars. The most canny theorist was dead wrong. The most bug-shit lunatic could not come close to the truth. Forget the Philadelphia Experiment, forget Area 54, the Hollow Earth.

  Who the hell could have predicted that Kennedy was offed because he was going to inform the world that Oz was real and we'd been closely involved there since before the end of World War Two?

  Not even Blitzheimer knew that.

  Good old Noel Blitzheimer.

  A CIA operative for thirty years, Blitzheimer, risking life and limb, called a press conference on April Fools Day, 2002, to announced to the world the address of a web site. Here he'd assembled top secret documents, photos, video and sound files chronicling the U.S. presence in Oz since the forties.

  Blitzheimer said, "The Cold War is over. There is no reason to hide the existence of this magical place any longer. I accept responsibility for this breach of National Security, and am willing to face the consequences."

  Some say that Noel was having a breach of mental security right around the time that he let that particular cat out of the bag, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that he never faced any charges, and is now something of a national hero. But even Blitzheimer didn't know everything, and the snowball effect he created was truly astounding. Once started, there was no stopping it.

  Gore got on himself with a live feed to come clean, and the rest was history, as they say. Although anyone old enough to have been directly involved in the whole conspiracy and the subsequent cover-up has done a good job of evading history thus far. Funny how that works.

  I was nearing the end of the gauntlet.

  Finally, the last guy, a skinny bug-eyed creep, stamped my passport and handed it back to me. "Behave yourself," he said as I cleared the last metal detector and hefted my knapsack back up onto my shoulders. "Oh—by the way," he added, sniffling, looking more and more each moment like Barney Fife on speed, "you might have some problems with that laptop." He pointed to the x-ray outline of my little Superbook. I gave him a quizzical look, hoping he might elaborate, but he just flashed a goofy smile, and turned back to the next customer, a long-haired, leather jacketed dude who he waved right through.

  The long-haired guy had what I guess you'd call a swashbuckling manner about him. Sculpted dark blond beard-and-moustache combo. Kind of rakish and buff, with a twinkle in his eye. I was inclined to dislike him on sight, but he smiled at me, too, as he passed. I was still adjusting the straps, trying to get my shit together. It didn't look like he had any luggage at all.

  I made my way down a hallway that rivaled any architectural monstrosity of Soviet excess, a way-too-huge walkway to—what? I still hadn't seen the Gate, didn't actually know what it looked like, or what the actual apparatus of movement from one realm to another was.

  I had some ideas, but no one I'd ever spoken to who had firsthand experience of the process had ever told me anything useful. Evidently, it was different for everyone.

  Aurora told me she'd had "Body and Soul"—jazz saxophone genius Coleman Hawkins' masterpiece version—on a disc in her Walkman, and when she came into the room, she hit play, closed her eyes, and started dancing. And when she opened her eyes again, she was in Oz.

  Now, here I was, about to find out for myself. I'm a Hawkins fan, but Aurie's style is not exactly my style. I'm more of a "Hail Mary" kind of guy when undergoing great stress. I haven't gone to church for about ten years, but I still invoke the "St. Anthony" algorithm while looking for lost keys.

  The anxiety I thought I'd shaken in the morning was back with a vengeance. I was terrified. I started saying what I could remember of the rosary.

  The hallway ended in a cement wall, with a big garage door in the middle of it. Two guards with automatic weapons stood on either side of it. There were a few people there before me, including the longhaired guy, waiting to try their luck. I got into the line behind him.

  Someone behind me was speaking. I turned around when I realized he was talking to me.

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  "Fifty-thousand to one." He was a beefy guy with a big beard and hornrimmed glasses. He was wearing a really tacky "Dorothy" tee shirt. "Fifty-thousand to one odds of exploding." He giggled. "Feeling lucky?" Giggle, giggle.

  "Why don't you shut up, ese?," somebody said from in front of us in line. It was a young, well tailored latino guy with a suitcase. "You gotta bum my trip right when I'm having one of the best days of my life, eh?" Then to me, he said, "Don't listen to him, homeboy, only putos explode." He pointed at the fat guy. "Like you, maybe, Dorothy. Or like Kenny G. or something."

  Just then the huge speaker horn hanging from the wall above the door shrilled, "Alphonse Gutierrez!" The latino guy smiled. "Vama-nos," he said, and strode toward the door. The garage door opened up slowly, and it looked so benign, like you could walk in there and get th
e lawnmower or something. You couldn't actually see what was in there, because there was yet another corridor to go down, this one low, dark and foreboding. I knew something was going to look really foreboding at some point.

  The guy with the suitcase looked quite happy. Go figure.

  Happity HI oh Yay!!!!

  Stop it, you little asshole! (Sorry. The Thing in my laptop is trying to learn English, I guess. It's really starting to bug me. But I'll get to that in a minute.)

  I heard the closest guard on the left say to him, "walk slowly towards the opposite wall."

  "Some people actually implode," the guy behind me was saying, gleefully, "they find these little inside-out bags of skin, all bloody and disgusting."

  Alphonse Gutierrez walked inside, and the garage door swung shut. I remember thinking, I hope this guy isn't a puto and doesn't explode, or implode, because I don't want to have to hang around in Kansas for a week while they clean up and try to figure out why.

  I spent the next few seconds staring at the woman directly in front of longhair man, then I heard this total Don Martin sound come from behind the garage door. There was a Thurm!Thurm!Thurm! thing that kind of ramped up to a a liquid Sproiiing!!! sound. Then that was it. They called the next guy's name.

  I guessed Gutierrez made it through, cause he didn't come out, and all systems were still "go."

  I found the sound effects to be a little disconcerting. The combination of those and the rosary effect made me about ready to lose control of my bowels.

  The lady at the front of the line didn't seem to mind. She was blonde, about forty, gauzy cotton skirt and turquoise jewelry everywhere. She was clutching an enormous, phallic-looking crystal to her chest. She had her eyes closed, chanting something to herself, or maybe she was just out of her mind, babbling, I don't know. She opened her eyes, saw me looking at her, smiled. She put her palm to my forehead for a few seconds, I guess to give me some sacred vibe or whatever, and then slowly turned back and resumed her chant. Okay.

  By the time it was her turn, I'd heard a BorkBorkBork, a few Feeeemm!! s and a couple of other ones too hard to write down. The big nerdy guy had been regaling us with Gory Details of Gate Disasters until the longhair guy threatened to slap him if he didn't stop.

  Her name shrilled out of the loudspeaker. Her name was Linda something. Linda looked like she would orgasm soon, and I kind of hoped she would do it on the other side so I didn't have to watch anymore. She stepped forward, and got the same advice from the guard that everybody else was getting. Without slowing down her chant, she walked forward past the open garage door. It closed again, and I happened to catch the look on the long-haired guy's face. He was watching the door, with a big smirk on his face.

  "Watch," he said to me, shaking his head.

  I listened for the sounds, but this time, there was nothing.

  After a minute or so, the door swung open again, and two of the guards went inside. They came out after a little while, one on each of Linda's arms. I guess she didn't want to come out. She was crying and pissed off.

  "Let me GO!!!" she screamed. "It's not fair. I know I can get through! It's just taking a little while, that's all. Let me GO!"

  And so on, back down the long hallway, back to Kansas.

  I noticed that the big nerdy guy was down the hall way ahead of them.

  "I knew he would talk himself out of it," longhair guy said. He looked me in the eye. "Don't freak out, man. You're gonna do fine."

  "Yeah?" I said, in no mood to be patronized, "how the hell do you know?"

  "I just know," he said.

  I looked at him, looked away, thinking about his lack of luggage and the apparent ease with which he'd cleared customs. Like maybe he did this all the time. He certainly looked that way, all nonchalant, when his name was called.

  "Ralph Dudley."

  "See you on the other side," he said, and sort of jogged through the garage door. I remember thinking what an Errol Flynn-type asshole this guy is. Ralph Dudley? Whatever. I heard the noises. He didn't come out, and his body evidently hadn't done anything unusual.

  I waited.

  "Eugene Speilman"

  The Horn of Doom had blown.

  I walked forward.

  The door swung open again, this time for me. I felt like a sky-diver. Houdini going over Niagara in a barrel. Gene Speilman walking through a doorway to Oz.

  The guard on the left side started to open his mouth.

  "I know," I said. "Keep walking towards the opposite wall."

  On down the tunnel. It was dark, and smelled like old dry horse-shit, dirt, hay. Like a barn.

  Of course it smelled like a barn. It hadn't changed since old Joe Snelling, in a fit of patriotic fervor, had given it to the government back in the forties. He'd sat on his little discovery through the fifty or so years since he'd found little Dorothy Gale asleep in the hayloft; why he'd waited so long to tell someone about his discovery is something of a mystery. Maybe he was so awestruck, he felt that some harm would come to him if he exposed it to outsiders. Perhaps it was his growing dementia.

  Probably nothing much had come through to Earth on Joe Snelling's watch, judging from the few people that had gotten back through it in the subsequent sixty years. Farmer Joe seemed to have been too scared of the Gate to try it himself, though we know he'd seen little Dorothy go through it several times.

  Dorothy seems to be one of the few to reappear back at Salina. Ozma's Gate in Emerald City, the counterpart to the Salina Gate, tends to land its travelers in a random variety of locales throughout North America.

  What, if anything, had gone back and forth through the Salina Gate while Snelling had custody of it remains a mystery. We know that he'd had some kind of contact with the Gate, and that this had somehow adversely affected his sanity. By 1943, Farmer Joe was too wacked out to tell anyone much of anything; he was too busy shooting at the imaginary Zeros that kept buzzing his cornfield. He gave the Gate to Roosevelt so that he could use it to fend off the Imperial Japanese invasion force that was threatening Kansas.

  "Keep walkin'" he'd cackled at the four FBI men who'd come to check out his story, pointing to the far side of the barn. "Keep walkin' and see where ya get." Two agents had followed his instructions, and the two remaining men had watched in disbelief as the pair seemingly faded into the far wall. Two months later, the disappearing agents had reappeared, one in Taos, New Mexico, the other in Pensacola, Florida, both with the same fantastic story.

  I could see that famous wall of the barn opposite me now, and the closer I got to it, the less it seemed like I was getting anywhere near it. It was like I was on a treadmill, but I could see my feet moving forward on solid earth. It was as if someone was matching my pace, pulling the wall away from me as I walked toward it. But I knew that nothing was moving except me. And I was moving in a truly weird way.

  It got more and more like one of those dreams where you're trying to do a perfectly easy, normal things like dial the phone, and the dial comes off, or the buttons stick or misfire, and meanwhile you're starting to be distracted by other features of the dream, other constellates taking on a certain tangibility. It was getting just like that— where objects, things and ideas were malleable, and interchanging their properties.

  I thought of my cats, about whether or not Penny would take care of them while I was gone, whether or not I'd see them again, and there they were, spectral, walking on with me for a little while until I realized that they weren't there, couldn't be there, and then they weren't.

  But then I'd see other things, snaky brown Lovecraftian phantoms slithering by this way and that, and wonder who was thinking of them, if it wasn't me. And even though I was still technically trying to enter the barn, the landscape was changing. Water was running, I could hear it off to my right, then I stepped in it. A little stream was rolling past in and out of the wall, which was starting to smoke up and become indistinct. It was actually lightening and dissipating.

  Things were starting to really
swarm up on me, and I heard the Don Martin noise revving up. The lightening and dissipating stuff accelerated. I could see sunlight through the smoky walls. I started running towards the far wall, panicking, still not getting any closer, screaming, when the final SPLANG-OING! ! occurred and I found myself standing up to my knees in water.

  The rays of the late-afternoon sun were slanting through the trees and glinting off the stream I was standing in the middle of. In Oz. About five feet away and to the left, a fiddler crab was sitting on a boulder, pointing at me with its claw and convulsing. It took me a few seconds to realize it was laughing at me.

  I flipped off the crab and slogged out of the stream, following it down a gentle slope where it joined a larger river. Setting my pack down, I reached into it and got out my Fodor's Guide, and the little U.S. Government pamphlet entitled, "So You're Going to Oz..."

  I opened the pamphlet, and shot down to the section on "Arriving." It said:

  Congratulations!

  By now, you've probably made it through the Gate, and are a little bewildered. This is understandable, and is a completely normal reaction.

  Take some time to look around you. Most visitors from Earth find themselves arriving somewhere in the general vicinity of Pawt'kwee, or, as it's known in its Gale-ized form, Munchkinland.

  The Pawt'kween are not only quite happy to be called "Munchkins," but find it an amusing and endearing term. The older, long-lived Munchkins have very fond memories of their first visitor from Kansas.

  I did what it said; I looked around me. I unfolded the Rand Mc-Nally Map of Known Oz. If this was Munchkinland, what I had been soaking in was probably a tributary of the Munchkin River; I assumed that was what the wide rushing waterway in front of me was. It made sense. Beyond the river I could see farmland, and strange looking barns and farmhouses dotting the landscape.

  I flipped the pamphlet open again:

  There is probably foliage all around you. If there is, see if you can find a bush with large purple and yellow leaves. The leaves should have a large pattern of concentric circles. This is a "Language Bush." It should allow you to converse with anyone or anything that you come in contact with.