Witness

INTAKE

It was a dark and stormy night. John Shaftsman's thumb was growing heavier by the minute as he plodded though the puddles in the breakdown lane of Route 30, also known as Conestoga Road after the wagons of the first settlers that set out west on this very road in search of a new frontier .

Shaftsman was soaked, as God Himself seemed to be pouring buckets of water on him alone, sparing the homes of the god-fearing Amish that surrounded him.

Then he saw a dim pair of headlamps approaching him. Just his luck: a fucking Amish buggy sporting LED lights, the Pennsylvania Dutch's latest flirtation with modern technology, and don't get me started on the Mennonites.

The buggy came to a halt right beside John. "Hello stranger, what brings thee to these fields on such a night? Just trying to wet thy whistle, were thee?" The bonneted driver cackled at that one. John could barely make out her silhouette in the dark fog. He knew that a dalliance with a plump Amish hausfrau was out of the question. He would probably have to render 5,000 quarts of butter and raise at least three barns before he would be able to get into the pants or petticoats or whatever of such a religious zealot.

"I am just trying to get back to the town of Blue Ball," John said.

"Well thou art shit out of luck," the buggy driver said. She bent forward to afford Shaftsman a gander at her massive hooters, which threatened to pop out of their titanium M-cup containment chalices at any moment. She was definitely a bad mama jama and built like a brick house, mighty mighty. She had obviously had fully engaged the local cuisine of shoo fly pie and funnel cakes. And she had everything that Uncle John needed.

" I'm headed to Intercourse, myself," she said. "Although I could drop thee off at Bird-in-Hand, which I'll admit is not a thrilling as Intercourse.

"Young man like you, I would think you might be better off in Intercourse or at least Bird-in-Hand," the buggy driver said. "A strapping young buck like thyself needs some regular release. Art thou sure that thee wantest to go to back to Blue Ball?"

"Did I say Blue Ball? I meant Intercourse," John said as he climbed in and sat down beside the pulchritudinous buggy diver. He noticed that the cab fortunately had isinglass windows that could you could roll right down, for which he was thankful, as he was soaked to the bone.

The virtually topless buggy driver turned toward the passenger seat and beckoned John to climb in. "Surely thee hast enough sense to cum in out of the rain."

"Just checking, how do you spell that?."

"Spell what?"

"You know, 'come.'"

"Well, it ain't got any 'o's or 'e's in it, if that's what thou meanst. Well, climb aboard, stranger. Climb aboard anything that thou fanciest, I mean," the overendowed Plain woman said, batting her not inconsiderable eyelashes at our hero, slapping him on the knee and giving him another hyper-libidinous chuckle.

"So it is to Intercourse that we are bound then, my Fancy man. We wilst get there sooner than thou expecteth, I warranteth"

John reckoneth that was true.

"Since when are soaking wet denim pants considered to be fancy?"

"No, thou misunderstandeth me. We calleth anybody that is not one of the People Fancy folk. Like people wearing clothes with buttons, for instance, or even clothes in general. We call ourselves Plain people to distinguish us from the English and the Fancies."

"Well, you're wearing clothes," John protested.

"Not for long, sweetie, Not for long," the well-stacked buggy driver told her fare, as she pealed down one of her silos and her mammoth right titty was launched straight into John's lap. John wanted to do the polite thing and maul said titty with his right paw, but was prevented from doing so in the close quarters of the buggy's cab.

The buggy neared the strange toroidal cloud that had been looming in the distance for quite some time.

INTO THE SINGULARITY

"What the fuck is that?" John asked his pseudo-low-tech Uber driver.

"That's what meteorologists calleth a standing wall cloud and physicists calleth an event horizon," the alluring buggy driver told her charge. "It's just like the cloud that surrounded Skull Island in the move King Kong or the mist that surrounded the Scottish village of Brigadoon in the movie of the same name."

"Brigadoon?"

"Brigadoon, as depicted in the eponymous movie and Jack Kelly musical , is a Scottish village that cometh into existence for one day in a century and then fadeth into nonexistence until the next century.

"I thought I saw a sign pointing to Brigadoon a few minutes ago. I thought it was a fictional town, not a real place," Shaftsman protested.

"John, you will findeth that the boundary between reality and fiction is kind of blurred here in Pennsylvania Dutch country.

"Get a load of this, my Fancy" the unlicensed Uber driver said, as she cracked the reins and, the two horses went into a trot. As the team rushed into the wall cloud, John could hear faint whispers that grew louder with each step. He also felt ghost-like tendrils brushing against his cheek.

"There's somebody else in here with us," John cried out.

"Not to worry, my Fancy, they are just the cloud wraiths,"

"What the fuck are cloud wraiths?"

"They are those of whom we do not speaketh."

"Didst thou not just speaketh of them?

"Yeah, maybe. Things are bit complicated here in Intercourse PA, my Fancy."

"Wait, I've been in Intercourse. Hell, I've worked in Intercouse, and Senator this is no Intercourse."

"Why didst thee call me Senator?" Delilah asked

"Sorry, I'm getting thee confused with Dan Quale."

"Phew, thanks a lot. What a moron! Can you even imagine such an asshole becoming President? He is such a dummy that he can't even spell the word 'potato.'"

"Well, I can imagine it very well. In the Fancy world where I come from, Donald Trump is President."

John's voluptuous buggy driver pushed him toward passenger side . "Get out!" she said in true Elaine Benes fashion.

"I shiteth thee not," John Shaftsman replied in true Jack Paar fashion. "It appears you Plain people really are living in the past. Literally."

"Shaftsman, thou hast no idea."

"How dost thou know my name is Shaftsman?"

"It's right here in this story I'm reading on my iPhone."

"iPhone? I thought thee Plain people escheweth modern technology."

"We doth, officially. But we hideth it from one other. Almost everyone hath an iPhone, but they keepeth it on the down-low."

"And what do they calleth thee, my lovely chariot driver?"

"My name is Delilah Stolzfus. Now we have been properly introduced," she said.

"Of course we have already been improperly introduced," she noted, nodding at her jumbo right tit, most of which already resided in John's lap. She freed the tittie in question out of its M-cup containment vessel, spilling it all over her passenger's lap and onto the floor mat . She slipped her hand underneath said tit and began to stroke John's left thigh, running it from his crotch to his knee.

John gasped at this blatant violation of standard erotic protocols. He arched his back to increase the pressure as her fingers curled around his throbbing bratwurst and she began to pump him rhythmically through his jeans. He could feel the wetness of his precum as it flowed out of his pounding johnson and into his tighty-whities.

His balls began to ache, and for a moment he thought he was back in Blue Ball, Pennsylvania all over again. She unzipped him and slid her hand inside his zipper to contact his naked flesh, pumping him all the while. Suddenly John felt her long, sharp, decidedly non-Plain crimson nails as they pierced the sensitive skin of his one-eyed monster. She ran those razor-sharp talons all round the hood of his mighty, trembling cobra, opening a small streamlet of blood that flowed down the length of his shaft. She squeezed her hand around his painfully pulsating rocket launcher and began to pump him, slowly at first and increasing her speed gradually. John arched his back and came, shooting a heavy torrent of white milk into the frosty nighttime air of Pennsylvania Dutch country on this November evening. His pike became somewhat flaccid, but then rose Phoenix-like back into the upright and locked position, immediately ready for another blast.

"You almost had me worried there, chief. But here you are," Delilah said. "All ready to rumble once more."

"Sorry," John said, "that's never happened to me before."

"What? What has never happened to you before?" the buxom buddy driver asked.

"You know, more than a hundred milliseconds of flaccidity."

"Don't worry, sweetie. It happeneth all the time. Thou just doesn't remembereth it, that's all . None of you guys do, but it's okay. It's what maketh you guys so precious and cute. Look at this," she said, lifting up his heavy, re- engorged shaft (Fortunately, she had been doing a lot of curls and other forms of weight-training, in anticipation of just such an event.)

"Lookie what we gots here," the depraved Amish buggy driver said. "It looks as though someone's volcano is about to erupt again."

"How come that sign sayeth the way to Blue Ball is to the left, and the next one sayeth it is to the right?" Shaftsman asked his self-appointed muse.

"Thou art going to find that space-time is pretty non-Euclidian here inside the event horizon, I meaneth here in Brigadoon, I meaneth here in Camelot. Thou art going to be able to travel from any spacetime event in the multiverse to any other event."'

"Get out!," John said and gave Delilah an Elaine Benes push of his own. "I guess I won't need to remember all the stuff in my Euclidian geometry textbook."

"Not only that," Delilah said. "It's OK if thou don't know much about history, don't know much biology, don't know much about thy science book, don't know much about the French thou took, don't know much about geography, don't know much trigonometry, don't know much about algebra, don't know what a slide rule is for (who does?). But I do know that one and one is two, and if this one could be with you, what a wonderful world this would be!

"Of course, if thee are one of those losers who still think one and one is two, thou doesn't know much about postmodern deconstructionism, Delilah scoffed.

"No, I sure don't, ma'am, Not sure I want to either."

WALKING TALL

"Here, I'll show thee. You remember that dust up between the Amish and the townies in Lancaster a few years ago?"

"Who can forget it? It was in all the newspapers for about a month or so. It was also in the movie Witness."

" Dost thee wanneth go seeth it?"

"Dost thou meanst time-travel into the past? I'm afraid that is impossible."

"I think thee will find that few things are impossible here in the false quantum singularity. Come on, let's go see . I am up for a few rounds of fisticuffs. Ready?"

"Just lead the way, my muse."

"OK, here we goeth, my strapping Fancy man." Delilah said as she cracked the reins , and the buggy left the road and veered to the left. Delilah followed a well-worn two-track for a couple of miles and then slowed the buggy.

They were soon completely enveloped the by mist. "Here we art, slick."

"That was a pretty quick trip for a voyage several years into the past!"

"Like I said, space and time work a little differently here in Brigadoon, my Fancy. Come, lets walk to the end of the cloud. But we can't go into the town. that might create temporal paradoxes, tearing the universe apart. So be careful to remain within the cloud."

"Are we cloud-wraiths now?"

"You got it, Shaftsman."

"They walked to the very edge of the wall cloud. Delilah held John back with her right arm. From here, we can only look into the past, not enter it."

John peered into the "real world" or at least the "real past."

There they stood, the humiliated girl with an ice cream cone implanted on her forehead and the smirking townie bully.

Suddenly, a lone figure pushed himself off the wall he had been leaning on. He tipped his Stetson over his eyes and peered out at the perpetrator of this act of humiliation. John recognized him at once as Billy Jack.

Billy Jack took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He quoted James Dean, "You've been reading too many comic books, Bernard. You know, they tell me I have a violent temper, and I suppose I do. I have tried to calm myself, using Navaho purification rituals and vision quests. I have been bitten by over one hundred rattlesnakes, and I can channel their venom at will.. But when I think of what you have done to this poor child, who is so innocent and so gentle that all of her runaway hooker fiends call her Bambi, I just go berserk."

Billy Jack quickly delivered a spinning roundhouse kick to Bernard's right jaw, and an assortment of molars, bicuspids, canines, and incisors flew against the far wall. On the bright side, Bernard was not going to pay for the three root canals he as so desperately needed.

A guy who was the spitting image of Harrison Ford snuck up behind Bernard and tapped him on the shoulder. "Watch this," Delilah said in the excited voice of Mackenzie Phillips in the movie American Graffiti.

As he turned to acknowledge the tap, Bernard was struck again, this time by a quick right cross to his now nearly toothless jaw. "Down goes Bernard, Bernard is down!" said the disembodied voice of Howard Cosell. Bernard's jaw had been completely dislocated and was now hanging sideways out of his mouth. "my wod du fat for?" he said.

"Here dude, let me fix you up," the Harrison Ford clone said. He extended his hand to pull Bernard upright.

He took Bernard's hanging jaw in his hand. "This is going to smart a little , buddy,." he told the townie bully. "OK here we go. One, two..." and then he suddenly snapped Bernard's jaw back into its sockets with an audible pop.

"There, you go." Jake said., dusting the sawdust off of Bernard's shoulders. "Now you're as right as rain Practically brand new."

"Mutt the fu?" Bernard said. "Mutt happened to free?" Never a skillful wordsmith, his enunciation was still less than stellar due to the lack of any remaining dentition.

"Mutt about my teef?"

"Oh, they're right over there by the wall. Should be pretty easy to find." Jake Stolzfus told his latest customer. "Don't sweat it, we Plain people have a great dental plan. Covers orthodontics, implants, oral surgery, you name it. Show him, Eli."

Eli Stolzfus raised his overly-muscled, blacksmith's right arm, tossed the horseshoe he was working on back on the fire, and swept his arms over the array of iron dentures hanging on the wall, just like Vanna White showing a newly revealed letter on Wheel of Fortune. He also showed off his vast array of chisels and hammers. Finally, he grinned at Jake, revealing a set of iron teeth not unlike those sported by the villain Jaws in the James Bond flick Moonraker.

"Mime cool," Benard said. "My got berry, berry good HMO."

"You sure? Our dental plan is free. Never had a customer complain, at least not intelligibly," Jake said reassuringly, sweeping the remaining dust from Bernard's shoulders.

"Who is that guy?" John Shaftsman asked his dripping wet buggy driver.

"Yeah, ain't he neat?," Delilah exclaimed. "He's a Philadelphia cop who's hiding out with us for a while. He really enjoys thwacking people, and we don't mean to discourage him.

"I thought you Plain folk have taken an oath of nonviolence."

"Oh no., Besides, violence is hunky-dory with us, so long as it's in self-defense. Or if it's directed against someone who has really pissed you off."

"What is that cop's name?"

"Right now he's going by the name Jacob Stolzfus, but we like to call him Dirty Jake. He can both raise and raze a barn in one day, all by himself. His real name is John Book, but nobody calls him that here, because we want to keep his presence here a secret."

"Well, whatever you call him, that cat Jake is a bad motherfu..."

"Shut thy mouth."

"Just talketh about Jake." Shaftsman protested.

"No wonder they call him 'Dirty Jake'" Shaftsman added, "He must take on every dirty job there is."

"Yeah." Delilah said. "He's a complicated man, and no one understandeth him but his woman."

"I'll bet that's true," John said.

"I doth have one bone to picketh with you ," John said, "other than the one thee hast taken out my pants and pumpest now as though thy life depended on , but please don't stopeth that."

"OK, my Fancy," the delectable Delilah Stolzfus said. "Goeth ahead and shooteth right into Momma's mouth."

"Thanks. That really makes me feel like family." John Shaftsman said, and Delilah slid her razor sharp nails up and down his pillar, even as her tongue resumed its circumnavigation of Shaftsman's happy stick. She grabbed his pulsating balls and began to squeeze them hard. Like a vampire, she raked the filed and sharpened points of her teeth up and down the Fancy man's phallus , all the while giving Eli Stolzfus a thumbs up for the excellence for his orthodontic work.

John's volcano then erupted, spewing white lava into the crisp autumn air. As they lied there spent for at least 700 milliseconds, John raised a finger in Columbo-like fashion. "Just one more thing," he said.

"Oh yeah, and what wouldst that be?" his Amish muse asked.

"Well, it's just this. Billy Jack and John Book are fictional characters Thus, nothing you have shown me is real."

"I think you will find that fiction and fact are hard to distinguish here in the Dreamscape, my Fancy love."

"Dreamscape?"

"You know, the false quantum vacuum, the multiverse. Surely thou hast read at least one book on pop quantum physics. Doth the name Deepak Chopra ringeth a bell?"

"Oh yeah, right. Everything is maya, illusion, nothingness. Only a dream. But even pure emptiness canst be very profitable, if thou doth doest it right. You know, mega book deals, lecture tours, franchised TV shows, that sort of thing.

"That's what I think about Dirty Jake, John Book and Bernard. They are just images, taken from the movies and photoshopped against a green screen. Hasn't thee ever heard of CGI?"

"They're just as real as thee and I are," Delilah said .

"Well, the jury is still out on thee. I could be dreaming right now," Shaftsman said.

"Exactly my point. We are in a collective dream, also called the Dreamscape. Physicists call it the multiverse, in which all possible futures and all possible universes occur.

"If you want, you can go over and stomp on Bernard's face, break his nose and crush the orbital bones and around his eye. Would you like that? Would that cheer you up?"

Shaftsman shrugged his shoulder, sniffled and said, "Yeah, maybe a little. Of course even that might be an illusion."

"How about we go over there and let Bernard stomp on thy face. Would that be enough to convince thee that he's real? I'm sure he's feeling a bit testy now."

"Probably would," John acknowledged.

"OK, come on. Stand up. We'll walk right over there."

John began to get out of the buggy but then got right back and said, "You know, I think I'll waive the actual stomping on my face. I believe you."

"OK, my Fancy pilgrim. Our work is done here. Let's head back to the ranch."

"The ranch? What doth thee raise on the ranch?"

Delilah gave him a particularly licentious grin. "Humans," she said.

"Humans?" Shaftsman said in a tremulous voice. "I'm a human. "Art thou going to raiseth me?"

"Why, John? Doth thou think thou art already as high as thee can get? That sounds pretty smug to me, my adorable Fancy. Not to mention xenophobic and bigoted."

"I do not wish to offend thee, my Amish Beatrice. I will accompany thee to whatever dark realms thou leadest me."

Delilah grinned. "OK then," she said. "Strap thyself in. It's going to be bumpy ride."