CHAPTER 1
The imp reached into a crevice in Matt’s frontal lobe and opened a dopamine faucet to full throttle. He was admiring the rich dopamine flow when the opening chords of the Edgerton and Shales theme song vibrated out from Matt’s auditory nerve and echoed about his skull cavern. The imp liked to keep abreast of current events in the human world, and Edgerton and Shales was his favorite show on the National News Channel. He decided to take a break from his labor to observe the human news. He slid down the slope of Matt’s frontal lobe and jumped onto the orbital bone of Matt’s left eye. He settled into the curvature, and peered out through Matt’s pupil, eager to observe and learn.
The Right Now! News Hour, featuring Edgerton and Shales, led with a disturbing story from America’s heartland. According to Edgerton, a group of former hippies had retired to Wisconsin in the late seventies to start a beer and cheese producing commune. They became successful and over time they built a small conglomerate of local breweries and cheese factories in the Kenosha area.
In the late nineties, these ex-hippies began making generous contributions to candidates for state congress. In return for this support, a few congressmen had approved funding for genetic experimentation on cows to produce a peculiar strain of Camembert cheese. Edgerton cited some recent studies that indicated this Camembert was largely preferred by “wine and cheese liberals” and that it contained synthetic nutrients that produced children with much stronger bones than average children.
Edgerton believed that the hippies, and certain members of the Wisconsin legislature, in cooperation with the Ford Foundation, were scheming to tip the delicate left-right balance in the next generation by producing larger, healthier and more intimidating liberals. As if this weren’t sinister enough, the hippies were also putting small American flags on their beer cans, bottle labels, and cheese packaging.
A commercial break interrupted Edgerton’s reporting. It was time to get back to work. For weeks, the imp had been working hard to increase Matt’s cravings for Woodford Reserve whiskey. He walked back into Matt’s skull and climbed up the slope of the frontal lobe. Moving in and out of the crevices of the whiskey-craving area, he turned on every dopamine and norepinephrine faucet he could find. When he finished, he rested on top of the frontal lobe and waited to observe the results of his work. He began tapping his foot to “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies, which continuously played in the dim corners of Matt’s subconscious mind.
The imp felt a rush of elation as the phrase “Woodford Reserve on the rocks with a splash of water” began echoing about Matt’s skull cavern. The whiskey settings, his first real breakthrough, were finally bearing fruit.
Matt, staring vacantly at the Right Now! News Hour, began to feel the urge for a drink. He hit the OFF button on the remote control and Edgerton and Shales vanished into his 55-inch Samsung. He walked to his closet, grabbed his black leather jacket, and headed for the door, his mind now filled with a vision of a Woodford Reserve whiskey on the rocks with a splash of water. He imagined the glittering ice cubes and the amber-colored liquid in the heavy-bottomed lowball glass sitting on the dark mahogany bar of Cyril’s lounge. At the same time, he began to perceive another image fluttering at the edge of his consciousness: strawberry-blonde hair cascading down the back of a black bartender’s uniform.
Matt walked out to his carport and started his Audi A4. As he backed down the drive, the imp returned to his perch behind Matt’s left eye. Matt was the first human the imp had infested. Before this, the imp had worked in a Pit Bull and had accomplished the transference into Matt’s brain while Matt watched an Edgerton and Shales interview. The interview involved a gun-toting soccer mom who had traded in her gun for a Taser. The woman was seriously injured when the battery in her electric car caught fire while she was using the Taser to defend herself from an attack by a deranged illegal alien. This controversial Edgerton and Shales news piece produced in Matt the exact brain wave patterns the imp needed to accomplish the transference from the canine world to the human. The imp knew he’d landed in the executive suite of the animal kingdom only through a master-stroke of luck. He’d caught just the right electromagnetic frequency at the right time, and had ridden the waves into Matt’s frontal lobe. But now that he was here at the top of the animal kingdom, he had no intention of returning to the canine world, which was filled with offensive odors and only the basest of mental contemplations.
As Matt drove to Cyril’s Bar, his thoughts returned to the image of the strawberry-blonde hair tangled against the back of a black bartender’s uniform. He’d never dreamt of Jackie before. While Matt pondered this sudden infatuation with Jackie, the imp noticed the swelling volume of “Sugar, Sugar” and an alarming increase in activity in new and uncharted areas of Matt’s mind.
As Matt turned his Audi into the Cyril’s parking lot, the imp got out his notebook, ready to record his observations on his frontal-lobe experimentations. He noticed that there was a flickering light, and the fragrance of lilac emanating from previously inactive areas of Matt’s mind. He paged through his manual of the human brain - a gift from Professor Caliban at the Sturm und Drang Academy who had taught him to dream big - and noted that the flickering light was coming from the putamen and the lilac scent from the medial insula. The manual stated that these areas of the brain were often associated with sexual attraction and romance. The imp was flummoxed at these unexpected developments.
As Matt parked the Audi and stepped out into the parking lot, two small lightning bolts streaked suddenly from Matt’s putamen and medial insula, and the lilac fragrance inside his mind intensified. The imp was alarmed at the intense crackling and the blinding bright brilliance of the electrical arcing. He plastered himself flat against the inside of Matt’s forehead, trembling, afraid to get too close to the electrical currents fearing that he might, at any moment, oscillate into a transference frequency and be zapped from Matt’s mind into the tiny brain pan of some nearby dumpster rat or drain-pipe possum.
Unexpected outbursts in Matt’s mind made the imp nervous. Apparently, fiddling with the frontal lobe to produce whiskey cravings was having mysterious side effects on other parts of Matt’s brain. The imp considered the possibility that he was out of his depth. Very little of his Pit Bull experience applied in this new more complex environment. Still, as long as he was here, he intended to make a difference, and if that meant winging it, so be it. Sometimes you just had to take a chance, and roll with your gut instincts.
