Blood gushed from the puffy claw marks that serrated my 14
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wrists. Tanuki’s presence made everything feel okay. I wanted to nuzzle his nose against mine and tell him I loved him. I wanted to hold my ear to his body and listen to him purr. Most of all, I wanted to assure my furry black cloud that we would never be away from each other again. Living in Cat Brain Land with my best friend would be so much better than the isolation I was pressed up against. The only thing missing here was Ann.
About twenty yards separated Tanuki and I.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Closing.
And then he ran.
He turned and dashed away from me, across the desert. I tried to follow him, but the harder I ran, the deeper my feet sank into the brain floor. Weighing no more than ten pounds, Tanuki sped gracefully across the mushy ground. It probably felt like a trampoline to him. To make things even more futile, I was out of breath. My heart thundered in my chest, threatening to explode. I collapsed beside the cactus and pressed my face against the ground where he’d sat just moments ago.
I opened my eyes some while later, having passed into a half comatose state, when the brain clouds mewed, followed by a shriek that penetrated Cat Brain Land from the outside.
“Ann!” I cried, instantly springing alert. My voice was drowned out by the mewing of the clouds.
The cat tentacles snaked up the clouds, rising to get Ann, I was sure.
Groggy, a little breathless still, but powered by a manic force, I ran.
After a while, I slowed down. I stood about right where the cat tentacles disappeared, but they were still above the sky.
I couldn’t scream anymore. I was battered and exhausted. I had to face that I could not reach out to Ann. No matter if I screamed myself, I was not going to reach her. She was not going to hear me. I could not save her from the cat tentacles.
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CAMERON PIERCE
The tentacles reappeared. A doll-like object fell from their paws, a doll-like object I knew to be Ann, but as the paws released her, her legs fell separately from her body, as if the paws had torn her apart at the waist.
Her disconnected halves landed a few hundred yards ahead. I rushed across the desert to meet her, and although the distance was short, every step was a drunken stumble. I wobbled and staggered. My bones were flimsy and weak. I couldn’t breathe. Ann lay perhaps a hundred yards ahead when my knees finally gave and I collapsed. She saw me and called my name. I called back to her. She started crawling toward me, dragging her legless body across the jellylike ground. No longer possessing the strength to stand, I crawled to meet here.
And I told myself that we would stick together no matter what.
No matter if we were lost in Cat Brain Land, no matter if we’d been horrific and inhuman to each other for a long time, we remained two people who once loved one another more than anything, and somewhere, in the desert or the mountains beyond, we had a cat to find.
16
HOLIDAY SINGS
THE EGG DILEMMA
I’m in the living room of an apartment that isn’t mine, making small talk with a woman who has vomited into the same bucket for at least half an hour. She says it’s her dog. She swallowed her dog and now she wants the crawly bastard back. That’s what she calls the dog. A crawly bastard. The apartment does not belong to her or anyone she knows. “But I’m not concerned,”
she says.
“Why should you be concerned?” I say, because these things happen.
“But I’m not,” she says, and she pukes some more.
This is how I’m spending my last day on earth. Tomorrow, the World of Friends will arrest me and ship me to a slave outpost on Venus. I know this because the WoF sent a letter last week notifying me that I had been selected for their Venusian slave program, and that I should not try to escape or alter my sentence because the World of Friends only has my best interests in mind, and because they will find me if I make a run for it. Being a slave is a dream, they say. I’m supposed to take their word for it, and why wouldn’t I?
A paw emerges from the woman’s mouth. She heaves 17
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once more and a scruffy brown head pokes out, spreading the woman’s lips until they crack and bleed at the corners and someone’s knocking at the door.
“Who is it?” I shout.
“World of Friends, open up,” a man’s voice. I have never met anyone from the World of Friends and wonder if somehow this apartment and the woman and my imminent detainment have some common factor linking them together. “Open up,”
the voice repeats, louder.
I walk across the room but stop short of the door. What if it’s all a practical joke? Rule #6921 in the Friendly Fascist Handbook says that standing in the same room with the World of Friends is punishable by death. I look through the peephole but it’s blocked. I say, “What about Rule Six-Nine-Two-One?”
“You’re forgetting Rule Seven-Four-Eight-Seven,” the voice says.Rule #7487: Negligence to permit the World of Friends entrance into any room is punishable by death. I shrug. I guess it doesn’t really matter which rule I break if I’m scheduled to be deported tomorrow anyway. What the hell.
I open the door and am immediately sprayed in the eyes with mace. “Holy shit!” I scream, but it’s a garbled version of it that comes out. “It burns,” I howl, “I’m blind!”
I stumble back from the doorway and trip over the woman choking on her dog, which barks as I hit the floor. “To ensure your personal safety and that of the World of Friends,” the man says. He must be standing above me but I’m too busy scratching my eyes out to notice. The dog barks again.
Finally, I can make out a blurry fractalization of the room.
The woman is coughing up blood and the dog laps at the red puddle with its long tongue. The man from the World of Friends turns out not to be a man at all. He, or it, is a chicken. A regular goddamn chicken. It kicks the can of mace away from me and I wonder how it managed to spray me in the eyes or hold the 18
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mace at all. “Jon Ito,” the chicken says, “your deportation to Venus has been deferred indefinitely. You have been chosen to eat the last egg ever eaten legally before the anti-egg act takes effect nine-o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. Are you in your current condition fit to appear on international broadcast, or should we sentence you to death?”
“Wait a minute,” I stutter, “What’s going on? I don’t understand.”
“The World of Friends has awoken. There will be no more egg-eating in the universe, not under our jurisdiction.”
“You mean that you’re all a bunch of chickens, and you’ve been asleep all this time we thought we were being controlled and monitored every second of the day?”
The chicken pecks at my nose. “Your tactics of deception will not work on us. Television or death. Choose now.”
I shrug. “Television, I guess.”
The woman still bleeds and her dog still laps at the blood as the chicken drags me out of the apartment by the hem of my pants.
I pick up the silver four-pronged fork.
This is it, the last egg ever eaten by creaturekind. I set down the fork and pick up the glass of cinnamon-spiced whiskey. The chef, another chicken, pecks at my ankles. “Don’t rush me,” I tell him. “You can’t imagine how hard this is.”
I had watched the chicken fry the egg on medium heat in garlic-seasoned olive oil, dropping from its beak dashes of rosemary, thyme, basil, and shrimp extract. The idiots should know I’m allergic to shrimp, but they say nothing. On the drive from the apartment to the studio, I learned more about the anti-egg act from the squad car radio. As of tomorrow morning, the Tasmanian mongoose can no longer suck on the yolks of exotic birds without risking serious jail time. Fishes small and large can no longer eat the eggs of other fishes, be they small or large, without a hand-slap from the World of Friends. Now 19
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they’re forcing me to eat the last egg ever eaten legally on live, international broadcast. And when I walk offstage and the crowd goes wild, they’re going to shoot me.
The executioner pecks at a corncob behind the velvet curtain, only the fabric separating him from the audience. I know he’s there and that he’s eating corn because I passed him as they directed me onstage.
I sip at the whiskey. Within seconds of swallowing the last bite of egg, they’re going to kill the cameras, usher me backstage, and then the guard will shoot me with the .44
magnum strapped to his back. Five-million chickens have their beady eyes poised on me, and that’s only the ones packed inside the stadium. I wonder if any humans, any that I know, are watching from home, if they haven’t already been shipped to detainment camps. “Fuck,” I say, but not loud enough for even the chef to hear.
It’s not that I hate eggs, but I don’t like them either, not particularly. An occasional omelet is fine, but the texture of eggs—over-easy, scrambled, hard-boiled, anything—never suited me. I chug what remains of the whiskey and bury my face between my hands. The audience clucks louder, a manic steady drone like a factory of wind-up monkeys. I wonder how that woman and her dog are doing. Still bleeding/licking, probably. Or maybe the dog turned on the television after I left and now they’re watching me sweating up here, getting pecked by the chef and squawked at by five-million chickens who all look exactly alike.
And then it strikes me.
I don’t have to be this man, Jon Ito. Wherever I came from, or whatever I might think of this egg dilemma I’m in, all that matters is the mysterious apartment housing a woman and her crawly bastard. Not that I want to return to that living room and smell her vomit, because even if that’s what I wanted to do, it might prove impossible to escape the studio and navigate my way through a city potentially unlike any I have ever seen prior 20
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to the awakening of the World of Friends (which happened way too suddenly for my taste).
No.
What it means is that this stadium and the apartment are the same place. I am Jon Ito only because I choose to be in the living room of an apartment that isn’t mine, or at least because the World of Friends chose for me to be there.
The egg on the plate opens its yolk mouth and speaks. It says, “This is the condition Deleuze called schizophrenia, and you know what happened to Deleuze.” And then there is no egg mouth.
“Who the fuck is Deleuze?” I ask the chef.
The chicken shits on my sneakers as the crowd squabbles louder than ever. For a moment I’m relieved that I never suffered from social anxiety, but then again, maybe I do. Right now I’m having a nervous breakdown. There are no chickens anywhere (except they’re everywhere), there are people watching me and these people love me (for god knows what reason), there is no such thing as the World of Friends (there could be nothing without the World of Friends). Sweat runs down my face like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t know what’s happening anymore.
I get this idea that I should rip off my face but this is crazy. No matter how apeshit the world goes, you’ve got to know better than to rip off your own face. Jon Ito would know this. Who can I be now that I’m gone? It’s a distant voice in my head that I feel approaching, growing. It tells me to rip off my face, to unleash the yolk explosions, that everything will be fine soon enough. Since I want everything to be fine, I decide to do it . .
. to someday claim this new voice as my own.
I start by plugging my nostrils with my thumbs and then steadily pull up, up until the cartilage busts and I’m breathing blood. The chef flaps his wings as a red-slick yolk pops out of the hole in my face and splatters across the chicken’s back. I can’t say how I came to have yolk in my face, but whatever the yolk is made out of melts the chicken into a puddle of bones, 21
CAMERON PIERCE
feathers, and one red-and-white checkered apron.
Plop-plop. I separate my slippery flesh like vaginal lips and more yolks pop out, floating toward the audience. The yolks break on the chickens in the front row first. Further back in the stadium, fleeing chickens clog the exits. Excess yolk leaks from the hole, which is now fist-sized. It crusts over my eyes and mouth and forms a yolk mask and I smile. Whatever happens next is totally up to me. John Ito never died. He is going to be born very soon.
This is the end of the line for me.
I’m a yolk-faced mess in the same strange apartment, watching myself birth yolks from my face on the television.
The dog yacks up something awful in the middle of the living room, blocking my view of myself. “Could you move a little to the right?” I ask.
The dog pauses mid-vomit. “I’ve swallowed my woman,”
he says. “Woof.”
I turn up the volume with the remote control since I really don’t want to touch the sick dog or act like his blocking my view is such a big deal, which it kind of is. It’s not every day that you find yourself destroying the creators of the universe on international television. A human arm emerges from the dog’s mouth and someone knocks at the door. The World of Friends is dead and the other fascists are still fighting for power, so no law can compel me to open the door this time.
Whoever it is knocks again, louder. There isn’t any peephole so I can’t see who it is first.
A second arm forces the dog’s mouth wider than it should go and reminds me of a video I once saw of a python swallowing a baby hippo.
“I hear the television. I know you’re home,” a man’s voice.
“It’s not my home,” I call.
The woman’s head, the same woman who swallowed her 22
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crawly bastard, pops out of the dogs mouth. The dog can’t take it anymore and it dies. “Just open the fucking door,” the woman says. She might be the reason for all of this, and so I obey.
I unlock the door and open it. Standing there is not just a man, but a man-woman attached at the hip by a giant egg.
“What’s this?” I say.
The man-half of the man-woman says, “I’m Bart Starr.” As he says this, I scrutinize his sagging, maggot-crawling flesh and vintage Packers jersey. Hell, maybe he is Bart Starr.
“Nice to meet you,” I say, sticking out my hand and worrying about the maggots. I realize that the man-woman has no arms and withdraw my hand, worrying that maybe I already offended them/him/her by offering an impossible handshake.
Bart Starr nods his head at the woman, who appears to be catatonic. He says, “This is Billie Holiday, straight from heaven and with one last song just for you. Can we come in?”
“I don’t do religion,” I say.
“Let’s play catch,” Starr says. He pushes past me into the apartment, dragging Billie with him. “Nice place you’ve got here. Too bad you’ve got to come with us when the music’s over.”
I glance at the television just to make sure the footage of me is still playing so that Bart and Billie know they’re not the only ones who have claimed their hour of fame. Too late.
I’m no longer there. It’s now an episode of Doogie Hauser. I always hated that show despite never seeing an entire episode.
Regardless, I don’t think the boy doctor normally cuts nurses’
tongues out with a scalpel and then stitches chicken fetuses in their place, which is what he’s doing right now.
“You a fan?” Bart asks, kicking at the dead dog with his foot.“No,” I tell him, leaving no question about it. Apparently the woman died before crawling entirely out of the dog, so they’re bloating there together in the middle of the living room, taking up space.
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CAMERON PIERCE
Bart shrugs, looks at Billie. “Let’s get this rolling,” he says, and punches the egg.
The egg cracks and Billie Holiday gets sucked through the crack and into the egg. The crack seals itself and the egg appears good as new. “That should do it,” Bart says. “Ru
b that egg with good lotion while I use the restroom.”
But Bart Starr doesn’t use the restroom. He instantaneously dissolves into a writhing heap of yolk, no different than my face. Then the television blinks out and Billie Holiday sings from somewhere far inside the giant egg, which rests on the pile of Starr yolk. She’s singing about being in an apartment that isn’t hers and making small talk with strangers and more than ever I want to leave this place. For the first time I also get the feeling that I have always lived in this apartment and that I am finally approaching the heaven in the gloomy center of it all, into that Venus where the World of Friends always wanted me to go, where the disembodied voice emanating from nowhere reminds me that free will is a lie, singing the same song, the same strange song that pushes me beyond the lips of the sun and into fireworks of afterbirth. Now a choking newborn writhes on the floor in a pile of dog and woman, an almost-embryo greedy to fill itself by sucking the yolk from my skull, by sucking me dry.
24
VISITOR GANESH
He hates fish. Jack hates fish and that goddamn Marybot cooked fish.I grab the teakettle off the stove burner and fill three mugs with hot water and sprinkle a handful of instant coffee granules in the three mugs. The trout frown up at me from the pan. For three weeks that robot has cooked nothing but fish for lunch and dinner. “Jack doesn’t eat fish,” I call.
Marybot slides into the kitchen on her bicycle wheel-legs.
She buttons her white blouse. “He can eat it or starve. I didn’t have time for groceries,” she says.
Once again, I wonder why I married an android.
I pick up one of the coffee mugs and walk out of the kitchen.
“I haven’t seen Jack in ten years. The least we can do is show him a decent meal.” It’s useless. She can’t know what a decent meal feels like, but most people don’t anymore, not since the FDA pressured the feds into making it illegal for anyone to live in a residence that possesses less than seven microwaves.
Lost in Cat Brain Land Page 2
