That rare voon

Disturbingly, it came to me on the freeway. Was it the putrid smell that attracted my attention? Or was it the poorly-conceived color scheme? It could have been the ear-ripping shriek, like some opera note on a distant world. It's occupying my very thought now, as I sort through the evidence, each piece more macabre and perplexing than the last.

My weekend began as it usually did, first at the fish market. I don't care for seafood, but I come to watch the creatures fresh from the deep, displaced and disoriented as they await their destiny on platters and grills across the Southland. Yes, most are dead. Somehow, I know their spirits haven't made the move yet. Their bodies have been jerked into some parallel universe. The disturbance to their flow of life has been irrevocably inflicted. Only grimly, sadly, grotesquely, after they have been knifed and diced, consumed and flushed, have they any hope of returning to the deeps, where their souls may be remade.

That particular morning I paused over the great squids. So horrifying and so tender. And I knew how smart they were. I thought of their mastery of their world. Their squishy athleticism and their quick spirits. Now, here in the market, nothing more than a terrible pile of flesh.

How would we appear in some market of the ocean? Would we be presented in full? Or would the choice parts be butchered well before we were put to sale? I can imagine some sophisticated squid perusing the stalls, searching for a lovely wench to serve on the occasion of his wife's birthday.

Long after leaving the market, these thoughts haunted me. My world just happened to make me lucky to be on the way to Las Vegas and not on a banquet table on the seafloor.

That's when I met the voon. I was on Interstate 15, just out of Baker, on a long stretch of highway that rises for miles and miles ahead. I suppose I did hear it first. The squeals came at me from behind.

It was initially blue, some LED intense blue, that comes from a star or some flashy Wal-Mart display. Of course it caught my attention! It was beautiful. But then the other colors came - and they were legion. Hot pinks and lavenders and grotesque yellows and acid greens, all suitable for nothing but a New Wave nightmare.

Yet the vision pursued me. And I pursued it. Far off into the desert backroads, darting past the mournful Joshua trees and scrubby bushes and desiccated arroyos, I drove and drove my Pontiac Sunbird, seeking some truth in this voon's apparition.

It was well into the night, not far before dawn, after the last sliver of moon had finally made its tired appearance, that I finally came face to face with it. I had driven for hours, had given up my chance at Mandalay Bay luxury, riches at the poker tables of Bellagio. Because this awful thing, with a siren call, had wanted me to follow it into oblivion.

I had thought it was a bird. Though it had flown, it was something else entirely. It was in fact a great fish. It was swimming in the sea of the sky. As the sun finally rose, I saw its face. Her face. She was with child. A boy, she said. She had come from below and above to shriek her joy at the upcoming birth of her first son.

This all made me need a big drink of water. I went back to the car to get my bottle and take a swig. The situation had become crazier than I had imagined when I left San Bernardino. My cousins must be worried sick about me!

But I turned back. The voon was still there, patient and garish and shieking as ever. What the hell did she want?

"I'm leaving now," she said. "Give my best to your cousins - and your mother and father. Please remember me. I will never be back. And this moment will never occur again."

By the time I finally got there, how could I explain to Kyle, Manville and Ashley what I had just seen? Would they even give a shit? Why had I waylayed this vacation on such a lame vision? Was it just all the drugs?

When I met up with them in the restaurant, I tried to explain the whole thing, but they only laughed. I laughed too. It couldn't have happened. Even in the hallucinatory pre-dawn desert.

Yet when I went to the roulette table and locked eyes with the beautiful Armenian man running the wheel and heard everyone cheering me on as I hit number after number, I had to stop and thank my new friend from the desert. She had taken me from one version of the universe and flopped me into quite another.

Where was she now?, I wondered.

It was only years later, long after the coronation, my second championship and the leveling of envies, did I finally know. She and her vast and jolly family were deep in the Pacific, not far off Western Australia, in a warm sea realm of untold delights. Chief among them, fresh on the briny table, was a course of delectibles, appalling to anyone from my view, but a day's feast on the watery crust.

I was honored to be first carved.