Dadaoism (An Anthology)

by Oliver, Reggie

  Out of boredom, the girl fires a Super Missile into the void and watches it until its propulsion flame goes out. Momentum will carry it as far as it wants to go.

  “What’d you do that for?” he asks her.

  “What does anyone do anything for?” she says from behind a lime green visor.

  She wasn’t making it easy. Jimmy supposed that was his fault.

  “Hey,” he says, “look at the fat lip on that crater. I bet we’d get some hangtime there.”

  “We’re on the moon,” she reminds him. “You could sneeze and get some hangtime.”

  He drums his fingers on the steering wheel as they putter on past the swollen crater. “You know what?” he asks, then waits for her to say ‘What?’

  “What?”

  “Let’s break up.”

  Her suit has no flexible neck, so she twists at the hips as she does a double take. “Excuse me?” Her eyes are narrowed on the other side of the visor. He can see the interface reflected in her pupils go from ‘scan’ to ‘combat.’

  He feigns surprise. “What’s up?”

  “What did you say?” Vein-like canyons in her suit begin to glow brighter.

  “Just now? ‘What’s up?’”

  “Before that.”

  “I said let’s make up.”

  “Oh.” The building energy around her dissipates. “Why would we need to make up?” she says with an interior headshake.

  “Oh—you aren’t mad at me?” He is flying by the seat of his irremarkable pants.

  “Of course not. Why would I be mad at you?”

  “Well, I know you aren’t the biggest moon fan. I’m just really full from lunch—I dunno if I could handle Zebes or SR388 today.”

  “The moon’s fine, babe. I couldn’t be mad at you about that.” She rests the tip of her arm-cannon on his knee. It is warm from the dispatched missile. His knees lock up and he finds driving extraordinarily uncomfortable.

  “It’s funny you should say that,” he says as he shifts around. “Love, I mean.”

  “Did I say ‘love’?”

  “Love’s a funny thing. One second some fourth grader creates you, and then you love him, and then . . . uh, ka-blammo: ten years go by.”

  “The best ten years of your life.” She runs the cannon along his thigh.

  He starts and arches his back. “Do you wanna, maybe, lose the Varia Suit? Just because, you know . . . I can’t, uh, can’t see your face.”

  “Sure.” There’s a blindingly beautiful burst of photonic disturbance, and Jimmy is suddenly seated next to his unarmored imaginary girlfriend, who might as well be called Colette for the purposes of narration. Her street clothes, also suitable as moon clothes, are dark jeans and a white polo patterned in lots of tiny green 1-up mushrooms. He remembers the first time he saw that shirt—he felt like he had 99 lives. Imagine her prim face, black hair, and intelligent voice however you like—this is what Jimmy usually does. “Is that better?” She looks at him endearingly, possibly from behind glasses.

  He’s unsure of how to answer her question. He sees her face and eyes against the backdrop of deep space and gets the visual impression that she’s the only thing existing—never a good feeling when trying to end a relationship—and he realizes that maybe the moon was a bad choice for this.

  He tugs the wheel of the rover and they do 360s around one of the smaller craters. “Let’s go somewhere else,” he suggests. “I think I made myself sick.”

  “I told you not to eat all that pizza.” This was a reference to the flat-faced monstrosity they’d consumed together for lunch, with spinach, caramel, anchovies, pineapple, green peppers, and sun-dried tomatoes sprinkled copiously like confetti. “I know just the place.”

  He sneezes and is lifted up out of the moving cart, spinning around in backflips. She jumps out of the vehicle, dodging his suspended sputum, and lets the rover idle into oblivion. As this is happening, a person-sized emerald pipe pops out of the crater they’ve been circling. Colette grabs Jimmy’s wrist before he has time to vomit, for he truly is feeling sick now, and they plunge into the warp pipe to the tune of a familiar sound effect.

  The transmission is near instant. The other end opens up in a pinkurplorange sky, facing downward, and they are spit out. Jimmy tumbles through disorientation, readjusting to the sensation of gravity tugging at his innards. He’s gyrating around all sorts of axes, and can only make out a mosaic of color before he hits the ground.

  He is submerged, kissed on each pore by plastic orbs. They tap every inch of him, comprehensive like a school of piranhas. They are multi-colored and semi-transparent, all coolly aglow with light from the surface.

  He digs to the top and finds himself plunged into an oceanic ball-pit; it stretches to every horizon, probably wrapping all the way around and coming back again. Twin suns (fraternal, not identical) are setting and sharing one end of cloudless sky.

  He’s awkwardly wading and trying not to think of depth when a royal blue ball bonks him in the temple. He’s turning to face the direction of it when a snappy yellow ball doinks him in the nose. Colette is popping them into her mouth one at a time and spitting them like an octorok, completely disrespectful of their unswallowably sized design.

  “Okay, okay,” Jimmy concedes as he struggles to navigate to her. An orange ball bops his open eye, meshing into the socket perfectly, and he’s left dead in his tracks and blinking hyperactively. She saunters over to him, moving like a mermaid through the non-toxic waters. He pulls his hand away from the eye and she sees that it’s now bloodshot and half-shut.

  “Oh wow,” she comments. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m good.” He stretches his jaw and gets the last of his blinks out. He notices she’s still looking at his eye, her face tilted into sympathetic pain. “What?”

  “Nothing. You’re good.” She looks around the bubbly expanse and breathes deeply. “So what do you think?”

  “I like it. It’s like you took deep space and filled it with distilled manufactured fun.”

  “There were originally all sorts of incredible things to do here, but one ball-pit led to another and . . .” She need say no more. Instead she reaches for a creamy brown ball and bites it like an apple. “Dif one’f fufge.”

  Jimmy, recently realizing he can stand on the dense balls, is nothing short of amazed. “How come you never brought me here before?”

  “I’ve been working on it for a while, saving it for a special day. This is a special day, isn’t it?” The sunset backs her statement up.

  Again Colette is imposed over an empty backdrop of sky, rich as it may be, and he’s socked with that same sensation: nothing else exists. For his mental intents and purposes, it may as well be true. “This place is really impressive. Do you, uh, think we could go somewhere less open, though?”

  “By less open do you mean . . . more intimate?” She leans in as she says it, and her breath is slogged and hot with fudge.

  “By less open I mean . . . more closed.” He sinks back as he says it, losing some footing and submerging six inches.

  She pinches her nose and ducks under. Before Jimmy can react, he feels a tugging at his leg—and then he’s sucked down through the ball-pit by anchorial weight. The orbs get darker the farther he gets from the pinkurplorange sky. They rush and rub all around him, and he feels like a quark navigating subatomic grooves. The dive is about as long as a sonnet, and the bottom is filled with a dry darkness.

  He wasn’t cold on the moon, but he is cold here. He is afraid to speak, but the lack of sound forces him to renegotiate with courage. “C-Colette?” he suggests. There’s a clicking sound and a fwoosh brings a campfire to life. It illuminates a tiny dome, with concentric lines running along the wall, and Colette on the opposite side. When he sees her Eskimo parka he adds two and two. “Are we in an igloo?”

  “We are in an igloo,” she confirms. “All alone with full tummies and a warm fire.”

  Jimmy looks around again; there’s something he’d miss
ed in the soft light. Stylized crayon drawings cover the inside of the ice-bricks. They are all of past dates with Colette: a sweltering weekend in New Crobuzon during the nightmarish heat wave; an afternoon on the Belafonte with Captain Zissou; an entire summer in the Mushroom Kingdom. There are dozens more, and plenty of unrecognizable future dates scrawled out in 64 waxen colors. The dim flame nullifies the variances.

  “Take you back, don’t they?” Colette says to her slack-jawed real boyfriend as she pets a snoozing polar bear cub. Jimmy is fixated on one peculiar sketch of a neon green lake, from which he seems to be waving with a third arm.

  “Some of them.” The igloo is too small to stand, so he slides across the icy floor, careful to circumvent the cub. “Colette, listen. There’s something I’ve been trying to say since lunch.”

  “You’ve never been much with words. I have to hold the bucket every time you sit down to milk the alphabetical udders of a keyboard.” She tweaks him on the nose.

  “Yeah, exactly.” He frowns embarrassedly. “You can see how this is difficult.”

  And for the first time she picks up on something she’s been overlooking. He’s distant, heavy-hearted, in a way that imaginary boys never are. How long has he been like this? Since lunch? The whole day? All week? How long? “Wait—” she asks, “—what is it?”

  “I’ve been wondering for a long time if this is healthy,” he begins. The campfire puts strobes into his speech. “I mean, uh, our relationship.”

  She is quiet, still, and attentive. The bear cub feels her grip tighten and dreams of being digested.

  “Don’t you ever feel like maybe . . . that?” Jimmy wonders if what he’s saying makes sense.

  “Do I ever feel like this is unhealthy?”

  “Yeah. I mean, maybe. I mean, I think . . . we should just be imaginary friends.”

  She looks into the core of the flame and her imaginary pupils are fine. “Yeah, you’re right. I do feel unhealthy—after a long day of fueling your creativity; after a full shift of playing muse to a mute; after a lifetime’s labor for an unappreciative hour and a ‘Let’s just be imaginary friends.’ Time well spent.” She slides the polar cub across the igloo. Then she curls up and her body morphs into a gelatinous orange ball, which drops a small flashing pellet and rolls out the igloo’s narrow entry tunnel.

  Jimmy, alone with the bear cub, recognizes the pellet. The twisting gear in the center, the gold-titanium casing: it is a Power Bomb from her Chozo suit. He regrets everything. This is not going the way he imagined it would—and that’s the most surprising part. Before he wastes too much time, he lies flat on his back and tries to crawl out of the igloo. He’s in the barrel of the dwelling when the bomb goes off and champagne-corks him the rest of the way. Ice-bricks spin through the air as the igloo flies in every direction. In the aftermath, a polar bear cub, black with soot, cries for its imaginary mother and tries to lick itself clean.

  Jimmy doesn’t open his eyes until he’s stopped skidding and he’s heard the last block of ice fall to the ground. What he sees is a towering frozen cave, in which the igloo must’ve been centered. Every single surface is slick and illuminated with a glacial glow. Blue and violet crystals stem freely from the walls. They range in size from golf tee to blue whale, as demonstrated by one colossal cerulean formation on the ceiling. He is watching it sparkle, hypnotically, when Colette steps into his vision.

  “Admiring what you see?” she challenges. “Because this is what you’re giving up.”

  “But I still want to be friends.”

  “Imagine that! Me too,” she says with crocodilian sarcasm, then tugs him up by his ear.

  “Colette.” He is out of breath, and speaking loudly over the pounding blood in the side of his head. “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.” His words reverberate around the crystalline cavern, striking different chords.

  “I don’t think you understand what you’re saying.” She gives him a push in the chest and he flails to stay upright.

  “I . . . don’t understand what you’re saying,” he confesses. He does, however, know she is at least peeved.

  “You imagined me in the first place, Jimmy.”

  “ . . . Yes.”

  “What do you think happens to me when we break up?”

  “ . . . No?”

  “Yeah. Exactly.” She crosses her arms and makes her posture jaunty. “Why are you doing this anyway? I took you to the moon, and the infinite ball-pit, and Crystal Caverns. Just today. Look at this.” She straightens the glasses she might be wearing, then stomps her foot. The ice below cracks.

  “Colette, c’mon.”

  “You watch.” She commands obedience. The ice splinters now. Jimmy sucks in enough breath to puff his cheeks. The floor shatters beneath them and they fall into a denimous sea. The descent has all sorts of contradictory effects on the body—the cold clears his head, and his popping ears dizzify. His vision is clouded by arctic murk, but there are fuzzy lights below. They get brighter and brighter as the couple drops, until they’re somewhere closer to the ocean’s floor than its surface.

  The only sources of light are biological, but what a light it is. All kinds of jelly-, angler-, and miscellanei-fish light up the deep with bioluminescence. An octopus clutches a glowstick in every tentacle, different colors all around, and lets them leak strategically into a liquefied laser show. It makes mistakes occasionally, blotting them out with its ink. The contours of Colette’s face are awash in the lights of the submarine disco (which, with a bit more thrashing and bubbles, might make a submarine rave).

  “You can’t do this on your own,” she reminds him. “I’ve got the keys to the Imaginary Workshop. You remember how wicked that place is, right?” And she taps the side of her head, the same spot where she hit him with a plastic ball only minutes ago. “You say you want to break up with me, but guess what? You need me. I’m the corner of your mind that creates places like this.” An underwater volcano erupts beneath their feet for emphasis. “Places where you can battle Lavos, and launch rockets at your feet to soar to new heights, and eat pizza no one would ever make. Places where men are werebears, and punks find bodies in their clothes hampers; where zombies invade Old West one-room schoolhouses and turtles grow diamondified shells; places where it is never going to stop raining, and places where you can break up with your imaginary girlfriend. I’m also the corner of your mind that knows exactly why you request their construction.” And her sly look shanks him in the ribs.

  “Bwohbb bwo bowwubbiz bwe,” he blurbles. And in the bubbles she knows he said (( “That’s what confuses me.” ))

  She waves at the octopus to take it down a notch, and it ignores her.

  (( “Colette—” )) she understands through the dialect of drowning, (( “—if you’ve got all the creativity, and you’re just my imagination to begin with, then that means I’ve got it too.” ))

  She rolls her eyes, which looks awfully strange underwater. “Obviously. But you have no idea how to use it. I do all of the work.”

  (( “But I think I have to try.” )) The heat from the volcano finally hits him with cohesive warmth. He loves it, even if it feels like he is in a cloud of fresh pee.

  “So that’s it. You’re finally consolidating the personalities, huh?”

  (( “Trying to. I’ve still got twenty imaginary friends to track down in here. Besides, do you even really like me? Or is it just because I imagined you that way? Right now I’m imagining that you’ll answer honestly.” ))

  “It’s just because you imagined me to like you. No offense, but that should’ve been obvious a long time ago. Nobody likes you—and I’m part of you.”

  (( “Haha, I guess so.” )) He smiles likeably.

  “And you do acknowledge that this is all indicative of a serious diagnosable disorder, right? You’re breaking up with yourself, in a sense. I mean, you might as well just be looking into a mirror right now.”

  (( “Maybe I am.” ))

  “And for the record—
not to be too brutal or anything—but I mean it when I say how boring you are.”

  (( “Who’s breaking up with who again?” ))

  “You’re breaking up with you. But seriously, I’ve met sections of your brain you don’t know exist. I’ve covered both hemispheres, chipping my way through the corpus callosum like some cerebral Shackleton. There’s nothing else out there. I’m it. So you can trust me on this: you are despicably dull.”

  (( “Bummer,” )) is all he can say. (( “Am I ever going to stop alliterating like you?” ))

  “No. But by the time your writing career ends, you’ll have a huge combo multiplier racked up. I’m talking alliterative hi-scoring, name entry—A A A  J I M, the whole deal.”

  (( “Can we go back to the moon? I know I’m not going to drown, but this is like being in free fall. You have no idea how uncomfortable it is.” ))

  “I have a very good idea, actually. But yeah, I think you’ve had enough simulated drowning.”

  And here they are, back on the moon, whose surface is still shining serenely. Things rarely change here.

  “That better?” she says endearingly.

  “Yeah.” He gulps non-air thirstily. “Mostly. Hey, you know when I said that I wanted us to stay imaginary friends?”

  “Yeah. You aren’t going to end up reintegrating me into your consciousness down the road, are you?”

  “No way,” he promises. “There are parts of your personality that just wouldn’t work on me. But I really meant what I said about keeping you around. I meant it so much, actually, that I’d like you to meet someone.”

  As he says it, the forgotten moon rover (which may or may not have been soaring unnoticed overhead) comes crashing to the ground between them. In the driver’s seat is a guy who looks like Jimmy, but better (and may or may not be wearing glasses).

  Jimmy says, “Colette, this is my single imaginary friend James.” The dude grins. “He likes all the same things as me, but is better at them and is generally more confident when doing them. And he’d make a great imaginary boyfriend.”