by David Beem
Fabio breaks off in a sprint.
Historic Infiltration of the Space Pirates movie set by Russian Mind-Control Monkeys, Featuring Cameos by Zorgnarian Pirate Gary Busey and Space Chicken David Hasselhoff, as Chronicled by Herodotus (C. 484—C. 425 BCE)
The parachuting mind-control monkeys are driving everyone on the Notre Dame campus vodka bananas. They might’ve been driving everyone regular bananas, but these are Russian mind-control monkeys. Over there, it’s all vodka all the time.
The first sortie invaded the library a half hour ago. But don’t let anyone be tricked into believing these monkeys have pressing business there. The truth is they are supposed to have landed at the Golden Dome Building. But these are union mind-control monkeys, and for every supervillain who’s had an army of mind-control monkeys march to his bidding, there’ve been dozens more who’ve sat around with nothing to do while the so-called organized labor force clocked up overtime flinging dung.
With a little more than two hundred monkeys tearing around the campus library, the police on set outside the Golden Dome Building have dwindled. Now, a grown man in a feather suit, beak, and gigantic red wattle arrives on set. Murmurs ripple through the hundreds of assembled spectators. Next to the space chicken is a Zorgnarian pirate dressed in tall boots, tight leather pants, black vest, and white shirt. This man waves a space machete overhead.
David Hasselhoff and Gary Busey.
The crowd cheers. The costumed actors take a bow.
“Anybody seen Johnny Gemini?” Busey asks, his eyes bugging out.
Spectators look left. Spectators look right. Dak Q. Neutron is nowhere to be found.
A banana peel slaps Gary Busey’s space machete. David Hasselhoff wrinkles his nose and picks it off with thumb and forefinger. The thespians turn their gazes skyward. A dozen mind-control monkeys in purple-and-yellow onesies parachute in behind them. The crowd laughs.
Hasselhoff leans nearer Busey. “That in the script?”
“Dunno,” Busey replies, waving his space machete around to sell it just in case. “I don’t read scripts. I just make up my lines on the day.”
Hasselhoff shakes his head. “Well, don’t look at me. I’m a space chicken. You think I’d have signed on if I knew I had to be a space chicken?”
Busey sneers. He sheathes his sword and leans in for Chicken Hoff. “These movies are gettin’ too weird for me.”
CHAPTER FORTY-three
Shmuel surveys the depressions in the gravel around the van. He kneels next to one of the larger ones. He bends over, presses his fingertips into the gravel, and smells the area. He takes care not to miss a single disturbed pebble. Then he bounds to his feet and sniffs the air. Wang leans against the van and folds his arms. No matter how many times he’s seen his friend do this, it never gets old.
“What’s this all about?” asks Ralph, rubbing the lump on his head and joining Wang at the van.
“Shh!” says Wang. “Don’t disturb him.”
Shmuel sidesteps along two sets of tracks, dragging his feet to make a third, identical set of tracks next to them. He compares the two sets of tracks as Consuelo makes a fart sound on his arm. Christine rolls her eyes and then checks the paint on her nails.
“The spook called Danny hit you on the head with a gun?” says Shmuel, addressing Ralph. Shmuel focuses on one of the three large depressions in the gravel. “You fell there.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” says Ralph, still rubbing the lump on his head. “That’s where I woke up.”
“Silence, docu-hackterian!” says Wang, uncrossing his arms. “Shmuel, you man-boobalicious genius bastard: continue.”
“The CIA spooks were no match for Dak Q. Neutron,” says Shmuel. “He totally kicked their asses? They fell here, and here?” He points to indicate the other two large depressions in the gravel. “Neutron went off that way?” Shmuel points toward campus. “And lo, I bring you a mystery…” Shmuel’s eyes widen. He points to smaller tracks in the gravel. “A mystery babe, dude. She’s wearing Coco Mademoiselle Chanel Paris? She dragged the two CIA spooks into a Mustang?” He indicates the drag marks in the gravel, and a second set of depressions Wang concludes must be car tires.
“A Mustang,” deadpans Ralph.
Shmuel nods.
“And we’re to believe you got all that from that,” says Ralph, gesturing with his hand to the depressions in the gravel.
Shmuel nods again.
Ralph’s eyebrows rise. “Well, fuck me.”
Ralph pushes past Wang, flings open the van door, and climbs inside. Wang gives Shmuel a wink and a thumbs-up. A minute later, Ralph emerges with his camera.
“Come on, then. You said Johnny went into campus. He’ll be in wardrobe by now. But we’re not done with our movie, and there’s no way they’re going to let you two on set without me. We can get some good footage. I’m thinking maybe you guys can make a sermon or something. Maybe we’ll find a good set for you to do it from.”
“A sermon on the mount…ing of babes!” says Shmuel, grinning. Wang gives him a fist bump.
“Mysterious Coco Mademoiselle Chanel Paris babes,” replies Wang, also grinning.
“What about us?” asks Christine. Consuelo stuffs a fistful of grass into his mouth. Ralph frowns.
“Yeah. You guys better stay here. Guard the van, and wait for Fabio.”
Olga lowers her binoculars and clicks her tongue. Some fifteen feet behind her, a bump comes from the trunk. Bah—so much to do, so little time. Nothing is ever easy. She stalks to her car and chucks the binoculars into the passenger seat next to the rocket launcher, then rounds to the back. She raps the top of the trunk twice, and the muffled voices cut off, then redouble their complaints.
“Mmm—mm!”
“You. Boyz. Shat up!”
“Mmm—mmm!”
Scowling, she draws her gun and holds it near the trunk as she jacks the slide. Chu-chunk. The inside of the trunk becomes deathly silent.
Olga rounds to the front of the car and hefts the rocket launcher from the passenger seat. A faint wave of ennui passes through her, and she questions—just for a fleeting moment, mind—whether there may be more to life than blowing shit up. The ennui passes. She hefts the rocket launcher onto her shoulder and flips up the sights. There may be more to life than blowing shit up, she reasons, but a girl’s got to earn a living.
CHAPTER FORTY-Four
“Edge! Edge!” The hand on my arm is shaking me and rattling my teeth. I open my eyes, and a blurry bearded face coalesces—Fabio!
“Come on, buddy, get up. Come on, get up.”
He pulls me to a seated position.
“Where did you come from? I thought—?”
He throws my arm over his shoulder and tugs me toward the curb, but we just rock back and forth for a second while he pulls and releases, and pulls and releases again.
“Okay you’re too heavy,” he says. “Come on, dude. Give a guy a break.”
Working together, he helps me to my feet, and we stagger from the grass plot behind the restaurant into a large concrete lot.
“Where’re we going?”
“The shit’s hitting the fan, buddy. Here.”
Fabio presses something metal into my hand. A necklace? No, a medallion.
“Where’d you get this?”
Fabio rolls his eyes. “Shmuel. Long story. You know, I think they’re doin’ whipits off empty whip cream cans? Those guys are one recreational drug use away from spontaneous combustion.”
“Fab.” I hold up the gold medallion, and my brain starts cranking. Is Dad behind this? “What’s it for?”
He smiles and shrugs, and then points over his shoulder without looking. “It’s a key to your storage unit, buddy.”
Realization crashes in. Rows upon rows of uniform white mini-garages. We’re not in another parking lot. We’re at the storage facility!
“Of course,” I mutter. “The cloaking device. Dad’s strategizing again. He made sure you knew one part, while I knew the o
ther. That way—”
“Cloaking device? Wait—Dad?” Fabio’s jaw drops open. “Your dad? Is he okay? Oh shit. Oh shit, he’s not okay. Oh God, Edge. Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
We stop walking. I lean on him, but it’s too much—we’re going down. I land on my elbow. Pain shoots into my back. Crap, that elbow already hurt. I lean backward, trying to ease the pain, but it hurts everywhere. A feeble whimper snaps me out of my problems. I roll to my side, and Fabio crawls out from under me. He hacks and wheezes. I avert my gaze and use the inside of my shirt collar to dab at the corners of my eyes. A thin whistle builds from far away.
Christine and Consuelo are making out when they hear it. The distant whistle is instantly familiar.
“Holy shit,” mutters Christine, dragging her arm over her swollen lips. “Is that?”
“Incoming!” yells Consuelo.
They dive forward, arms splayed, to belly-flop onto the gravel drive. When nothing blows up, they cover their heads and curl into fetal position.
The whistle grows louder. A rocket speeds overhead. A storage unit explodes.
Seconds later, the pair sits up. Christine shifts to face Consuelo. His cheek is smudged. She puffs a lock of gravel-encrusted hair out of her eyes. Her four-hundred-dollar D&G T-shirt has a hole in it that isn’t factory standard, and Consuelo’s five-thousand-dollar Cucinelli dinner jacket is gray, not white.
“Why does this keep happening to us?” she moans.
Consuelo shrugs. “Dunno.”
They sit in silence for a full minute while Christine picks gravel out of her hair.
“Guess what?” asks Consuelo.
“What?”
“I found a roll of our gold toilet paper hidden in the van.”
Christine’s eyebrows lower. “Those bastards!”
Consuelo shrugs. Christine sneers. Their house blows up, and Wang and Shmuel steal their stuff? Those guys have no sense of decency whatsoever.
Wait—what if?
“Maybe there’s a golden lining to be found in this,” she says.
Consuelo frowns. “That’s literally what those assholes stole: a golden lining for assholes.”
“No-no. I mean I saw a gold and silver exchange coming in,” she clarifies.
Consuelo’s head tilts. “You think they take toilet paper?”
“They don’t call ’em gold diggers for nothin’.”
Consuelo blows out a mouth fart. “You’re hot when you’re gross. Kiss me now, or lose me forever.”
A thunderclap blasts over us.
I’m flattened. Oh, man. The hurts. All the hurts.
“You okay?” asks Fabio.
“Rough day.” I roll to my side. Thick black smoke rises from the middle of a line of storage units. Fabio expels a sigh.
“So much for that,” he says.
My hand tightens on the medallion, and a thin ray of hope goes out in my chest.
“Any idea what was in there?” asks Fabio. “What was so important?”
I shift to face him. His face is covered in soot. “Only everything.”
Tendrils of fire peek out from behind the nearer storage units. The acrid taste of smoke is thick and bitter. I expel a burst of air. The Great Eye sees all. He’s always one step ahead. Dad gets me the key, Fabio tells me what it’s for, and—boom—Nostradamus gets there first. He must be nearby. He must’ve read my mind, knew I needed to get into the locker. Did I figure it out too soon? Or maybe I figured it out in the wrong place.
“It’s the Russians,” says Fabio, his wild eyes scanning mine. His face is earnest.
I stare at him askance.
“The Russians are after us,” he says. “Don’t suppose you could, um, you know, suit up? Time to be a superhero, buddy.”
I shake my head.
“No?” he says. “What do you mean no?”
“Not safe.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There was a cloaking device inside the storage unit that was supposed to keep me safe from Nostradamus’s interference.”
“Those clone guys you told me about? They can get into the Collective Unconscious?”
I shake my head again, but this time, all the blood rushes to my brain. I teeter, and Fabio grabs my arm.
“Campus,” I say.
“Huh?”
“I’m not there yet. I have to be on campus. Dad told me. Face my greatest fear before I face him.”
“Him? Who him? What greatest fear? Are we doing Jumanji now?”
“Don’t you see? It was never about the storage unit. It was about outsmarting the mind-reading seer.”
“The words coming out of your face hole right now aren’t making any sense,” he says. “But you’re going to need your best friend, so I’m in. Besides: Russians.”
I stare sideways at him as we totter forward, speechless. It’s too much. I can’t ask him to face this with me.
“What?” he says, like he’s also capable of reading my mind. “I’m not gonna stand around and wait for Vladimir Putin to kill my best friend.”
Historic Oddness, Even by Hollywood Standards, as Chronicled by Herodotus (C. 484—C. 425 BCE)
Deciding what is the oddest thing about the movie set for Space Pirates: The Stench at Galaxy’s Rear End is up for grabs. But be advised: It is the oddest thing up for grabs, not galaxy’s rear end. Grabbing that would be a grave mistake. For one thing, she doesn’t like it. But for another, the wise man never fails to heed a movie’s tagline, which in this case states in no uncertain terms: the junk in her trunk’s got all the wrong kinds of funk.
For some, the oddest thing about Space Pirates filming on campus at Notre Dame is the presence of Dak Q. Neutron’s pirate starship, known as the Buck Rogers’ Jollies. For when it comes to politics at Notre Dame, frankly anybody’s jollies are frowned upon, unless you’re a Catholic priest or football coach, which Buck Rogers is not. So while the presence of the Buck Rogers’ Jollies is quite unusual, it isn’t the oddest thing.
Some have said Gary Busey’s presence anywhere is odd. This is true enough, and it’s an opinion supported through peer review and evidence, namely his face, mouth, breath, nose, ears, eyes, hair, arms, legs, toes, fingers, knees and elbows, pores, crotch crickets, and otherwise cultivating what is better known as the Gary Busey Brand. Put simply: crazy is Gary Busey’s business…and business is good. Still, at this place, on this day, even a Gary Busey standing next to a Space Chicken David Hasselhoff isn’t the first odd thing people are noticing.
The first odd thing people are noticing is the swag.
The monkeys are just handing them out like candy.
It’s true, the monkeys themselves are odd. They’re not naked and spiraling into a deep depression in a zoo, as one might expect. These monkeys are roaming free, and wearing spandex onesies and blinking electronic caps with antennas on their heads. But the Notre Dame crowd is trained to notice one thing above all else: money. The monkey swag are heavy gold medallions featuring a Celtic knot design on the front and a switch on the back, suggesting they’re mechanical. Swag like that is expensive, even by Notre Dame standards, where money flows like the bladder on a drunken hobo. Already the rumor mill is beginning to churn, with everyone whispering suspicions on who could afford to literally throw gold at monkeys. What makes this the oddest thing is Notre Dame money tends to get spent on season football tickets, campus expansion projects, or private tropical islands. Until today, nobody has ever thought to spend it on parachuting swag monkeys.
Another odd thing worth mentioning is the two stoners who’ve snuck aboard the Buck Rogers’ Jollies to seize control of the set’s loudspeakers and preach to the crowd gathered below. Security has all but given up trying to control the set. For the average rent-a-cop pulling down eleven bucks an hour for the Security Solutions Guild, “swag monkeys” are practically an engraved invitation to pick up snorting glue. The two proselytizing stoners on the Buck Rogers’ Jollies are merely the final fuck-it in a long line of fuc
k-its. They had thought the final fuck-it had been explaining to Gary Busey why he can’t bring his AK-47 on set, but they were wrong. (Incidentally, the AK-47 remains an unresolved problem, as Busey snuck it aboard the Buck Rogers’ Jollies anyway and stashed it where he is sure no one will find it.[7]) At least security doesn’t have to deal with the monkeys perusing the Darwin section of the Notre Dame library. Those crazy monkeys don’t understand a word they’re reading. But not to worry, they’ll figure words out eventually, if given enough time.
CHAPTER Forty-five
“Aw, come on, dude… They’re never going to take us seriously?” says Shmuel, fiddling with a lever on the control console at the helm of the Buck Rogers’ Jollies. Exasperation churns in Wang’s belly.
“Stop that.”
“Why?” asks Shmuel, looking up. His eyes are round and awestruck. “You think we’ll go to light speed?”
“No,” snaps Wang. “I don’t want you to break it. That’s a piece of cinema history, dumbass. Now shut up. I’m trying to proselytize.”
Wang faces the rowdy congregation below. From his vantage point on the massive spaceship set, it’s easy to imagine himself addressing peasants from a palace balcony. He raises the ship’s steampunk-esque microphone and blurts the first thing that comes to mind. He knows from experience that, twelve percent of the time, the first thing that comes to mind works every time.
“BLESSED ARE THE BABES WHO PUTETH OUT FOR THE NERDS. FOR THEIRS IS ETERNAL TECH SUPPORT AND PUB TRIVIA CHAMPIONSHIPS!”
A plastic spring water bottle flies past his face. His head jerks instinctively to the side. Scanning the crowd below, he spots a pretty brunette as she shakes her fist once in a gesture of disappointment. She spots him spotting her and hurriedly gives him the finger. His cheeks go hot.
