"In Reast"

It was a Tuesday night at the Blue Rider, and I was locked in a game of world domination across the corner table with two friends and a stranger.  I had the Confederate-looking grey armies at my disposal, and in that historical mindset was clinging to life in the remote north Asian provinces of Ir- and Yakutsk.  I’ve never much cared for Risk, truth be told.  I don’t like dice games, for starters; something about pinning your hopes to the impersonal mathematical calculations of chance.  I also never much cared for the unofficial table alliances, the resulting blocs, and the inevitable me-sitting-around-for-an-hour-waiting-for-the-end.  Because it is a long game, which for most is reason enough to avoid it.

            Friends Phil and Sam were locked over the Americas and Africa, turning a blind eye to the verdant fascist monstrosity that is Tyler.  I’d only just met Tyler.  He’s the sort of guy people meet and ask each other ‘where did they find this guy?’  A gargantuan, Panama Jack-looking fellow with a neatly clipped moustache and an omnipresent glaze of sweat on his enormous forehead.  He’d got Australia and Europe in his meaty grasp, and now he was gunning for all of Asia.  Silently gloating with that broad grin and the Oliver Hardy, half-eyed smugness routine.  Because this game was evidently meaning a lot to his sense of self-respect.  And I really wanted to beat the fat bastard because of it.

            So we’re there finishing off our third pitcher of the night, trying to keep the conversation light and pleasant.  I say ‘trying’ because this Tyler guy wouldn’t stop trying to talk politics; apparently he’s big in the local Tea Party circuit, in addition to being an objectionable heifer.  So I was liking this guy less and less, yet all the while preparing myself spiritually for the painful defeat inevitably coming my way, when my phone dingles.  Not a ring, mind, but the little text ‘dingle.’  After a bit of fishing about in my jacket, I find the text reads

Hey u are in reast

this is the cops of

the boss and

tomrrow the Fbi

will get u good

morning

It took a couple reads through, but I still had no idea what the thing was all about.  It was a 410 number, which doesn’t quite ring a bell with me.  East coast maybe?  West coast?  And what the hell does ‘reast’ mean?  Or is it a place?  Many such questions spun about in my brain.  Such as who ‘the cops of the boss’ entail, and why in the world the FBI would want to get me, in particular.  I actually began to feel a bit nauseated, trying to think of things I may have done.  I don’t download movies or do drugs.  I once got quite a bit of music from the LimeWire back in college, but that was years ago by now.  Certainly the wheels of justice don’t move that slowly!   The mind was drawing blanks all over, but in the back of it I knew it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with me really.  I’m not a bad person, outside the pale of occasional speeding and routine corner-cutting.  Certainly nothing bad enough to warrant tangling with the FBI.  Above all, the whole thing smacked of wrong number. 

“The hell is this?” I asked of the table, showing the text to Phil and Sam.

“Maybe they’re finally cracking down on commies,” Tyler suggested with an evil snigger.  Phil suggested I should text something back.  Of course, as to ‘what’ I hadn’t a clue.  Truth be told, if it were some sort of dirty cop, tipoff situation, I wanted nothing to do with any of it.  Some Harvey Keitel-ish, as-played-by-Nick-Cage illiterate detective on the other end, completely unhinged and maybe a little coked up.  Probably wouldn’t take kindly to their illegal tipoff in the hands of the wrong person.  They might be so inclined as to drive across the country non-stop in a diaper, hell bent on wreaking horrid vengeance upon me.  Something to that effect.

But what did ‘reast’ mean?  I’d generally prided myself on a large, well-rounded vocabulary.  Not knowing this word was actually the most troubling bit.  Besides which, who would I know that would text so poorly, using words like ‘reast’ besides?  It had an other-worldly, dystopian Big Brother sort of verbage to it.  Thought crime; you no read, kind of thing.  Whoever it was meant for, it would be the last sort of warning I’d want to receive in advance.  With a lurid sense of foreboding in the pit of my stomach, I finished off the last of my beer and decided to call it a night.  There would be things to look up, and it was a perfect excuse to cut Tyler’s victory short.  The fascist pig.