Liminal Wake Chapter 5: Kool-Aid
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5. Kool-Aid
Aside from the occasional temper flare, Joel McMillan was far from unlikeable. Bennett was grateful he’d shown him the same agreeableness and patience he offered all his sources. Saying yes to beers with the anti-Looper had been the right call—it gave him the perfect chance to pitch free publicity. For now, that’s all it was.
Graciousness was a code Bennett had held to for thirteen years, even before Professor Meer had described him in a recommendation letter as even-tempered, polite, yet annoyingly persistent—a generous assessment that conveniently omitted his habit of wearing hats in class against regulation.
As a new father, Bennett had treasured that letter. It had been the difference between a well-paying, steady reporter position and the financial insecurity that came with freelance work. Unsurprisingly, what Meer had said about him had sunk into his personality and solidified in the way only a mentor’s words can.
With maturity, Bennett had converted pestering into badgering, and badgering into a polite refusal to let gatekeepers do their job—or to take “no comment” for an answer.
But Bennett usually credited his even temperament more than his persistence with building bridges where less level-headed colleagues tore them down, trying to get in with the right crowds. Joel’s bridge, the journalist felt, was pretty strong—though maybe in Joel’s case, it was Bennett’s exasperating consistency more than his pleasant demeanor that had quietly endeared him to the PIT’s most well-known anti-Loop zealot.
The journalist’s biweekly voicemails always came on Tuesdays and Fridays at ten-thirty, each one attacking the same questions from slightly different angles, hoping for more interesting answers than last time. Joel had told him once he could always count on them for a chuckle, but Bennett knew the anti-Looper appreciated his sharp ear for inconsistencies and B.S.
As Bennett pushed open the door to the Steel Heart, the bar Joel had picked, he remembered he hadn’t sent his Friday voicemail. Nerves had scattered his focus; he must have swiped away his calendar reminder by mistake.
The bar was nicer than Bennett had expected. The floor was clean, the wooden seats were all in good shape, the lights weren’t too dim or too bright. The support columns had been meticulously covered in foil wrappers—from chocolate, or something similar—overlaying one another to look like scales.
When Joel had extended the invitation, the journo had been half-surprised Joel even drank beer. He’d figured him for the sober type, like an old-fashioned Baptist. He was usually good at reading people. He’d gotten this one wrong, though. He filed it away in mental red ink.
Still, the atmosphere felt right for Joel’s ilk. The man had self-respect and was always well-groomed, if a bit hairy. This was a bar for self-respecting people—like the cafés of eighteenth-century Britain, where rebellion stirred among civil men who drank politely. The kind of place where a few anti-Loopers might sit with a pint and quietly plan a widely disliked protest on public property until Community Welfare Officers escorted them out—or organize a doomed write-in campaign for the do-nothing Puget Independent Territory Council.
Bennett looked around; Joel wasn’t here yet. He was ten minutes early, though. He sat down in a booth and briefly wondered if his dad would be willing to stay the night at his house. He didn’t know how long he’d be here, but he’d message him later if things looked like they might stretch late. Grandpa Jaime loved his granddaughter. He probably wouldn’t mind. Then again, it had been a while since Bennett reminded him of the boundaries about what he could and couldn’t talk to her about.
He drummed his fingers on the table and sank into bitter memories of how his father used to lob accusations of “fence-sitting” and “worldliness” at him in his youth. Now he was here meeting with the public leader of a radical wing of anti-Loopers—people who never gave an inch on their position that the whole system of ending people’s earthly lives through the exploitation of the A. liminalis, and recycling the loopers’ biotechnology to aid people with more to give society, had to end totally and immediately. Even if he could, he wouldn’t talk to him about it.
Bennett settled into people-watching. It was only seven-twenty. Whoever came in now wouldn’t be the late-night crowd, and he wasn’t sure if anti-Loopers were talk-through-the-night or early-to-bed, early-to-rise types. It could go either way, but every political subgroup—especially the subversive kind—had a culture. If he was going to fit in, he needed to start learning and bending to it.
A young woman neatly dressed in black strode up to his booth and pulled out a notepad—always a good sign the order would be right. “Welcome to the Steel Heart. Can I get you something?”
“Oh,” Bennett muttered, refocusing. He popped on his smart glasses and glanced at the QR code on the table. His eyes flicked back and forth over the heads-up menu for a few seconds before he said, “I’ll have a pint of Pacific lager and the… deep-fried jalapeños, please.” He put the glasses back in his pocket and was surveying the walls on the off-chance he could spot a secret door when he let out an embarrassing yelp.
The bench opposite him had been filled with plaid, coarse dust-colored hair, and a wry grin.
Bennett scratched his head and cleared his throat. “Didn’t, eh, didn’t see you there.”
“Whatcha lookin’ for, Stillman?” asked Joel McMillan, still grinning.
“Uh,” he half-shrugged, sweeping his gaze across the room again, a flippant smile breaking out. “So, are there any secret doors in here?” This was the first time he and Joel had met in a casual setting, and he had to admit he already liked it.
“This place?” Joel blew air between his lips. “No. No, you don’t have clearance to be in the bar that has the secret doors.”
Bennett flashed surprise, then furrowed his brow.
Joel chuckled. “Obviously, I’m just bustin’ your balls, Stillman. There are no secret doors.” He jerked his head toward the floor. “But if you lift up some loose floorboards, you’ll find a lot of paper pamphlets.”
The server came back and brought Joel a beer he hadn’t ordered, setting it down without a word.
“Thanks, Lily.” She nodded with a smile two shades warmer than the one she’d given Bennett.
The journo laced his fingers on the table, rubbing his thumbs together. He remembered why he was here, feeling a twinge in his stomach. “So, Joel—”
But Joel didn’t let him finish. “You want to do a story on us. On the dissolutionists.”
“Ye—how’d you know?”
Joel shrugged. “Why else would you be here, Stillman?” His tone had a touch of sadness. “If it were something else, you would’ve asked me to come to The Mirror.”
“Please, call me Bennett. I don’t call you McMillan. You don’t have to call me by my last name, either.” He sounded almost apologetic. He didn’t mean to, but the future always colored things for him.
“I want to do a series of stories. On you, and the friends you sometimes mention in our interviews. Sort of like an ethnography: daily life, hopes, doubts, personal struggles. That sort of thing.”
“Oh, like you’re embedding in some sort of cult. Something sensational,” Joel said pointedly. He took a drink of his beer, still holding eye contact.
“No, it’s not like that. I don’t think dissolutionists are all a cult. LFA, them, maybe…” Bennett mused, trying to sound casual. He was reaching already. Too soon.
Joel’s face flushed slightly. “I’m not part of Life for All. I’ve never claimed to be.”
“I didn’t mean to insinuate…” Bennett started, but Joel waved it off—the tattoo of a broken Klein bottle, so common among anti-Loopers, peeking from beneath his characteristic plaid button-down.
“The public does kind of have a similar idea, don’t they?” he mused, one eyebrow arching in a subtle goad. “That all of us who are dead set against the Loop are cultish.”
Bennett unlaced his fingers and laid them flat on the table. Before he could answer, Lily came back and dropped a basket of deep-fried jalapeños in front of him and a tall glass of golden lager.
“Thank you, Lily,” he said, not knowing what else to say as the beer slid onto the table and nearly sloshed out of its stein.
“I don’t do polling, Joel,” Bennett answered as Lily walked away. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. But—”
“—Because you know what the real cult is. New Dimension is running a real genuine cult, by any dictionary definition. And our government lets ’em do it.”
“We don’t need to get into the ‘secret society’ thing again—the Wake, or whatever you think it’s supposedly called,” said Bennett, leaning back against the booth. “Lots of organizations contain supposedly ‘secret’ societies. It doesn’t make them particularly sinister.”
“No, no,” Joel retorted. “I mean the whole thing. Everyone who believes in it—they’re just on the outskirts of the cult. That’s how it works.”
Bennett sighed. Best not to engage on that front. “Anyway, you can work this story thing to your advantage. If your people are as salvific and righteous and, and all those good things—if you’re on the right side—this is one of the only ways it’ll come through. You’d probably get heavy readership in the States, too. We could syndicate this; it doesn’t have to be kept to the PIT. My editor has a couple contacts at the Times. I mean, it’s rare to syndicate journalism written by and about Pitsters, but not unheard of...”
Joel held up a hand against the rush of thoughts. “First of all, ‘all those good things?’ Can I trust you to compose a decent sentence?” Then he waved it off. “Okay, no, that wasn’t fair. But you have an agenda. All journalists have an agenda. I want to know what it is. I can’t just let you moonwalk your way into our ‘cult’”—he held up air quote fingers for effect— “and write whatever garbage you feel like throwing your pro-Loop readership next Tuesday.”
“I understand your hesitance,” Bennett replied empathetically, trying not to sound like his daughter’s life was riding on this conversation. “I do. If it helps, I talked to my boss already.” (He hadn’t.) “I said we’d do a neutral exposé. If there were too much slant in it, it wouldn’t be interesting.”
Joel’s nose wrinkled dismissively.
“Listen, Joel, it’s not like back in the day. I think we’ve learned a lot of lessons over the years. And The Mirror, it’s not like the Loop Daily, okay. We’ve never been that. And we’ve taken a lot of flak for it.”
A smile was peeking through Joel’s beard. “Director Varnel doesn’t call on The Mirror very often during press conferences, does she?”
“No, we aren’t the NDR Director’s favorite publication. That’s what I’m trying to say,” Bennett said, letting his shoulders loosen a little. He hadn’t realized he’d tightened up so much. “This could benefit you.”
Joel looked thoughtful as he took another drink of his beer.
The silence made Bennett itch. “What’s that you’re drinking, anyway?” he asked, eyeing the pale beer.
“Table beer.” Joel’s glass clunked onto the table as he exhaled, thirst quenched.
Bennett looked bemused. “I don’t get it. I’d have pegged you as either stone-cold sober or maybe a retro IPA guy.”
“Nah,” replied the anti-Looper. “I like beer. But strong beer? Weak men. Weak beer…” He swirled the last ounce of pale liquid. “…strong men.”
“Ah,” said Bennett.
Joel set his glass down and folded his arms. “What d’you drink, Mr. Stillman?”
“You mean what do I like? I prefer brown ales or something smoky, like a Rauchbier.” He drummed a finger on his own glass. “It’s not on the menu here.”
“Boutique taste,” mused Joel. He took up his glass again, surveying his guest. “Well, at least you’re not boring.”
“I don’t get out much, but I’m good company. And who knows?” he ventured, “You might convert me.”
The anti-Looper snorted. “Huh. Yeah.” He took another long swig.
They sat in silence for a minute. Bennett could tell Joel was deep in thought, so he started into the jalapeños. Sometimes it was better to say less. “These are pretty good,” he said, four bites into the greasy pile. Joel didn’t respond.
Joel eventually pushed his empty beer glass aside and folded his arms. “I’ll do it on one condition.”
Bennett chewed and swallowed as quickly as he could. “What’s that?”
“You have to convert.”
“What?” Bennett started, loud enough for customers nearby to turn and look.
Joel was sanguine. “It was your idea!”
“What? No—”
“You talked about converting like three minutes ago, Bennett,” he replied, reaching out to pop one of the golden morsels into his mouth. This was the first time Joel had reached for his first name instead of his last. “Look, you don’t have to believe it. And I have to talk to my friends and colleagues about it first anyway. They might not say yes. But I think you should kinda, ya know, assimilate. You can’t know what it’s like to be on the side of dissolution if you aren’t living it.”
“Joel,” Bennett said slowly, choosing his words carefully. “How can I be on your side without being on your side? You guys do a lot of arguing with the other side. I’m supposed to pretend like I’m—”
“—Haven’t you been on a debate team?” the anti-Looper interjected. “It’s like that.”
“No, it isn’t like that at all,” Bennett retorted. “I have a reputation, Joel. I can’t cosplay being an anti-Looper. People will think I’ve drunk the Kool—never mind.” He looked into his jalapeño basket, inwardly cursing.
Joel’s face darkened, then brightened again, like a cloud passing over the sun. “We don’t drink Kool-Aid,” he said. “We drink table beers.”
Another frosty, champagne-colored beer slid across the table, effervescent and foamy. Joel raised it slowly to drink. Before he pressed his lips to the glass, he said, “We’ll work out the details, but I’m pretty sure we have a deal, Bennett.”
……
Thanks for reading the first five chapters of my debut sci-fi thriller Liminal Wake, Book One of the Loop Duology. If you stumbled onto this from outside your inbox, you can find the first four chapters on my Substack. The book is on Amazon in all formats, including audio. Book Two, Oblivion’s Reach, will release in August—a full-throttle tear through the mystery of the Nots, the Loop, and an insidious corporation with beliefs that go deeper than anyone imagined.