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Skyfisher
A NOVEL
Dan Dowhal
Blue Butterfly Books
THINK FREE, BE FREE
© Dan Dowhal
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First electronic edition, iBooks version, 2010
ISBN 978-1-926577-18-0
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To Bo,
my own private voice from on high.
Article created Friday 31 October 23:43
Whether you’re a follower of Phasmatia, or a non-believer, you need to read this. It’s time everyone knew the truth about the Church, and its evil leader, Sky Fisher. I realize I’m taking on one of the world’s most powerful institutions, not to mention bucking one of the fastest-growing trends of modern times. Trust me, I wouldn’t do it if I had a choice, and I may very well pay for it with my life. Please, just read it, and you’ll understand.
For starters, don’t believe what it says in their Sacred Text, or what you see depicted on the walls of the Phasmatian temples. The Universal Spirit did not enter Sky Fisher as he stood on the top of Mount Skylight, purified after seven days of fasting and meditation. I should know. I was there. Or, more accurately, I wasn’t there ... but neither was Fisher.
No, the closest thing to a divine epiphany actually took place in a trailer a hundred-odd miles away, where Fisher and I, and Stan Shiu, may the real God have mercy on his soul, were wrapping up a whopper of a weekend binge. Fisher suffered from the worst constipation I’ve ever seen in any living creature and was struggling in the washroom when his revelation arrived. As that cosmic conspiracy of the bowels finally relented and delivered forth a raisin of a turd that even a gerbil would be ashamed of, Fisher screamed out, “I’ve got it!” You won’t find that in your Sacred Text. Holy shit indeed.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to belittle Fisher’s role in the whole Phasmatian phenomenon—none of it would have happened without him. Take that weekend in the trailer, for example. Stan and I did brainstorm key pieces of the scheme at different points during our bender, but I mean, we were just blueskying wild-ass ideas in between shots of vodka and hits from the bong. Fisher was the one who had the fire in his belly to actually make something happen. It was Fisher who took the ball and ran with it—all the way to the end zone, and well beyond that, I’d say. Still, he couldn’t have done it without our help.
Most importantly, Fisher actually came up with the money, including pouring every bit of spare cash he possessed, and could beg, borrow, and steal, into bringing the Phasmatians into reality. The rest, as they say, is history (also religion, politics, sociology, economics, science ...) and by now hardly anyone in the civilized world hasn’t been steamrolled in some way by the Phasmatian juggernaut.
Certainly things would have been different if Fisher and the Phasmatian religion hadn’t ended up becoming The Next Big Thing. I doubt Stan would have risen up and got himself killed if Fisher hadn’t become the global icon he is now. I don’t blame poor Stan. I mean, you can’t pick up a magazine, or turn on the TV, without Fisher’s beneficent smile beaming down on you, and it’s tough to keep your mouth shut under those circumstances, not from jealousy of Fisher’s enormous wealth and success, but because he’s a fraud, a felon, and one supreme asshole—and a constipated one at that.
But I guess Fisher’s holding all the cards now, and I’m the one scared shitless to leave this hiding place. The odds are when the Phasmatian monks track me down I’ll be as dead as Stan. So, I suppose that’s why I’m writing this—part revenge, part penance. If by some miracle (a real, old-fashioned one, not the scams Fisher peddles) I manage to get this onto the Net, and if it’s not deleted, and if some politician who’s not under the Phasmatian thumb has the balls to launch an investigation, then maybe it will have been worth dying for. I’m no martyr, and I’m not ashamed to admit I don’t want to die, but if I’ve got to go, I’d sure love to take Sky Fisher down with me.
Sorry. I’m rambling. As a writer (even a hack advertising copywriter) I should know better. Let me lay some of the foundation down for you, so you understand where I’m coming from—and more importantly, why you should believe me.
I first met Sky Fisher—born Louis Skyler Fisher—at Warren & McCaul, the ad agency where we both worked. The fact that Fisher was once a high-powered Madison Avenue account executive seems to have been conveniently edited from the official record–I guess they don’t want you to even suspect how he schemed to concoct the whole Phasmatian thing. The Sacred Text portrays him as a sort of wandering mystic who was called to Mount Skylight to receive The Universal Spirit. (I don’t have a copy of the Text here, so I’m going strictly from memory, but then I did practically write the thing.) So let me tell you that Fisher was an ad man, and a damned good one. You probably recall some of the campaigns he came up with in his time: PreterComm, Sashu, UtiliMotion, RoboXen, Borealex. Remember that beer commercial that had every joker in North America going around screaming, “Where’s your head at?” That was his too.
In hindsight, Stan and I should probably have been suspicious when Fisher started chumming around with us. I mean, he was a good half-dozen levels above us on the organization chart and tended to move in different circles from the rest of us lowly grunts. I think now that it was Stan he was targeting all along, and I just sort of fell into it. Stan was, after all, Warren & McCaul’s alpha geek, and had engineered all of their biggest and coolest client web sites. Not that he ever got the credit he really deserved, even when the agency spun off some of the software he developed and made themselves a tidy sum, of which Stan got zilch.
But Fisher was a smooth talker, and a consummate flatterer, and Stan and I ate it up. Drank it up too, all on Fisher’s tab. A lot of Asians have a genetically low tolerance to alcohol, but not Stan Shiu. I guess that’s why he and I had hit it off. We were both partyers (some would call us drunks), and Macbeth’s, over on East 29th Street, was our regular hangout. (Damn, I could use a drink now. Maybe when I figure out where to upload this file, I’ll find a liquor store.)
Anyway, one night, apparently out of the blue, Fisher bumped into us at the bar.
“Stan! Brad! Fancy meeting you here, dudes. Can I buy you a drink? What are those, vodka martinis? How about doubles?” He pushed his way to the front of the crowd and waved a platinum card at Bill, the bartender. “Good sir. A round for my esteemed colleagues here, if you will, and keep them coming.” Stan and I exchanged a look like we’d just won the New York State Lottery.
It’s not like we all didn’t know each other, of course. A lot of Fisher’s accounts included a web component, so we had worked under him before. He would have been familiar with the work Stan and I did. Even so, face-to-face contact had amounted to little more than a dozen of us minions sitting around a boardroom table while Fisher did all the talking. Now, here he was in the flesh, not only casually calling us by our first names, but wanting to party with us too.
Fisher played it real cool at first, sticking to innocuous conversational topics. He had