by Gregory Hill
Given their dreary environs, the Plutons wept constantly. Being cold as it was, their tears froze solid as soon as they slid out of their eyes. The frozen tears were so abundant that they accumulated into conical piles of shiny, glassy, teeny droplets that the Plutons periodically scooped out of their subterranean dwellings and deposited in great mounds upon the surface of their non-planet.
One day, it came to pass that a young and curious Pluton named Pinta said, in the language of her people, “I shall use our surplus of frozen tears to construct a spaceship.” And so Pinta emerged from her family’s underground den unto the unfathomably cold surface of Pluto. There, with the tiny sun flickering overhead, she took up a handful of tears and breathed upon them and molded them. She took up another handful and another and many more and built a vessel which glittered and shone like a crystal egg, or, if one wishes, the NCAA football championship trophy.
Pinta boarded the vessel, promised her family she would discover a warmer, happier world, and flew away toward the sun, hoping that she could find something for her people to do other than shiver and cry.
Pinta the Pluton flew past Uranus and Neptune and Jupiter and Saturn and Mars and dodged all the asteroids in the asteroid belt and then she saw Earth, all blue and green and cloudy. Goodness, she said, I’ll stop there. So she did. This was one hundred and twenty centuries ago. Pinta landed in what is now North America, right smack in what is now known as Colorado. The land was lush and full of giant beasts: sloths that could pluck the antenna off your roof; mammoths the size of busses; lions the size of elephants; wolves the size of bears; and rats the size of cats. The animals, although enormous, were placid, and the soil was loose and moist and brimming with yummy iron deposits. Pinta praised her good fortune.
But two horrible things happened. First, the warm wind melted Pinta’s spaceship, stranding her on the planet. This wasn’t horrible, exactly, since she loved Earth.
Second, soon after Pinta’s arrival, the planet stopped being warm and comfy. Clouds filled the skies, the plants shriveled up and died, the temperature nose-dived, rains turned to snow, and the entire situation went to shit. Pinta understood that her mere presence as an extraterrestrial had compromised the harmonious environmental balance of the entire planet. She was an infection. The only recourse was for her to leave immediately and hope things got better.
But she couldn’t leave because her spaceship had melted. Alas, this troubled her greatly, for Pinta alone bore the weight of the sudden decline of this lovely planet. In her sadness, she cried thousands of tears, which froze in the newly blustery weather. And so, with those tears, she didst construct a new spaceship and verily did she prepare for her return to Pluto.
But first, she had to save the animals whom she’d doomed to a frigid death. She dug a cavern in the ground and cast upon it a preservative spell of Plutonic magnetism. She intended to fill the cavern with as many animals as she could find, thereby saving the creatures from the coming apocalypse.
Alas, when she beckoned the animals to enter the cavern, none would follow. The beasts stood in the fluttering barrage of snow and watched her, dumbly, and then they walked, slithered, flew, and rumbled away from her, rudely. It was as if they blamed her for destroying their planet, which was entirely valid, since she had. Nevertheless, the rejection was very painful for poor Pinta.
“My goodness,” she exclaimed, “I wish to save them. But they do not trust me. Because I ruined their home. I have failed in every way imaginable.”
Pinta stood before her space vessel, watching the retreat of the animals. After some time, she curled into a tight ball and wept in a piteous fashion.
In the distance, while Pinta shivered in her self-loathing, a saber-toothed tiger sprang from the bushes and pursued a slow-moving wooly mammoth who was at the very rear of the massive herd of enormous animals who were rudely abandoning Pinta. The terrified mammoth turned and ran back in the general direction of Pinta, who heard the commotion and sat up to take in this display of nature in action.
Pinta watched as the tiger nipped at the ankles of the slow-moving mammoth. She watched the mammoth’s large belly sway back and forth. She watched the tiger leap onto the back of the mammoth and plunge its cartoonishly large teeth into the flesh of the mammoth’s cartoonishly wooly pachydermis. Pinta watched as the panicked mammoth carried the tiger directly toward her.
Just before it reached Pinta, the mammoth collapsed to its front knees, sending up a burst of snow and dirt. The mammoth stared at Pinta with its mammoth eyes while the tiger’s mouth tore out great tufts of bloodied hair.
Pinta raised herself to her full height and, in the language of her people, shouted, “Begone, ye great-toothed tiger! Begone!”
The tiger, with a mouth full of hairy flesh, looked upon Pinta and tilted its head.
And then, with a trumpeting roar, the wounded mammoth didst rise up on its hind legs and shake the tiger from its back. The tiger landed, dazed, upon the ground, whereupon the mammoth piledrived one hairy forefoot upon its back. Thus did the tiger die. Having dispatched her pursuer, the mammoth rose her tusks to the sky and waved her head triumphantly, flinging giant drops of her blood all about, sprinkling Pinta the Pluton. Then the mammoth wavered and dropped dead alongside the tiger.
In silence, Pinta stood and rubbed against the bony brow of the mammoth. She thought unto herself, I am the cause of this slaughter.
But alas, from the rearward area of the mammoth’s belly, there came a noise. The noise was wet and gloopy, like a large custard sliding off a laminated table top.
With great care, Pinta crept to the rearward area of the dead mammoth’s belly. There, she didst see a wondrous thing: from a large cavity, a small, wet mammoth didst emerge. It was breathing.
In death, the mammoth had given birth. Pinta scooped up the newborn creature, cute and drippy, and brought it to the deepest chamber of her underground cavern, where she placed it on a pedestal. She wiped the little critter dry and patted its furry head. Pinta wished the baby mammoth good luck and then she exited the cavern, sealed the entrance, and, seeing no point in returning to her frozen rock of a home world, boarded her ship and jetted out of the atmosphere and directly into the sun, where, as one would expect, she perished, albeit in very warm fashion.
Sadly, Pinta’s self-immolation was altogether unnecessary. With Pluto being so far from the sun, Pinta had never experienced any season other than brutal cold. The idea that a planet with a twenty-three-degree offset axis would naturally cycle between warm and cold in its yearly seasonal rhythm was completely alien to her.
In short, she committed suicide because it was winter.
And then the female human closed her eyes, slid back into her varmint hole, and the world went dark.
37
Not to sound ungrateful, oh, mysterious, imaginary, linen-clad human female but your heart-rending environmental fable has absolutely nothing to do with my original question, which, if you recall, was: Will I ever again hear the voice of Veronica Vasquez?
But, as they say, ask for a story, you’ll get a song. And Holy Lead Guitarist of The Technicolor Phoenix Scrimshaw Revolt, the tale of Pinta the Pluton just hit number one. If there’s nothing else to be learned from the experience, it’s that Jim and Jane Jones know how to jellify their fungi. But there’s much else to be learned and I’ve learned it, I say.
The lady in the gown was saying, Know your perspective, Nar. Sometimes it’s not you, it’s them, and sometimes it’s not them, it’s you.
In the case of Pinta the Pluton, it was an innocent misunderstanding of an offset planetary axis. In my case, it’s an unforgivable misunderstanding of the relative nature of time and motion.
To put it another way, I am a moron.
The world is not broken. I am broken. It’s not the world that’s moving slow; it’s me that’s moving fast. I must say, the sensation is thrilling.
Short intermission, as I indulge in a limerick.
There once was a man named
Occam.
Known for the size of his cock-am.
He said with a smirk
As he wiped off his dirk
If they cannot be beaten, then shock ’em.
Seriously though, there once was a man named Occam. He’s dead now. According to an article I read in good ol’ Omni, at some point prior to his death he said, “When it comes to figuring out how the world works, the simplest explanation is usually the most correct explanation.” Occam’s keep-it-simple-stupid theorem became so popular that they eventually named a razor after him.
Let me ask one simple rhetorical cosmological question. Who’s more likely to be responsible for the sluggish state of matter? Me, the simple human mammal? Or EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE UNIVERSE? It’s me, of course.
When I’d exited the bathroom in Cookie’s Palace for that first time, I had been, via some as yet undetermined mysterious machination of time and matter, shifted into state of ultra-overdrive, of hypertemporality. I’m Flash, Mercury, Carl Lewis, the only difference being that Flash, Mercury, and Carl could slow down when they wanted. I’m stuck running at a million miles an hour.
I lay on my back and stare at the clouds. Once they stop moving, I’ll know that my sobriety has re-asserted itself.
38
It’s time to go home, and I don’t mean Denver. Home is Vero. I don’t have a clue how long I was in my chemically enhanced state, and that’s exactly why I should get myself back on the road. Vero could be winking at this very moment.
I spent many miles of my eastward march by pondering my life as the fastest man in the world. I can walk fifteen miles in less than one second. I can alter lives, bring down governments, heal the sick, disarm nuclear bombs. Hell, I could change a car tire in less time than it takes a normal human to blink. Somebody hire me for a pit crew, pronto.
Vero once told me a story that’s applicable to my current state of mind. I’ll let her recite it. Setting: winter 1981, somewhere in North Denver. Pretend you can hear her lovely voice, with its clipped Latina vowels and droll question marks at the end of each sentence.
“We had a great big hill, Forney’s Hill, in our neighborhood and my family was poor so we had an old wooden sled with metal rails that you guide with your feet. It was at least five feet long. All the other kids had flexi-toboggans or those discs that looked like giant plastic woks. The thing is, even though it was an antique, our sled was super-fast, and it was big enough to fit all four of us, me and my three sisters. I was only four, so I was too little to drive the thing. I usually sat right behind whichever of my sisters was in front.
“One day on the hill, this other four-year-old, Bonnie Consuelo, accused me of being too stupid to race against her and her sisters on their toboggan, which was just a sheet of blue plastic that sounded like thunder if they shook it hard enough. My oldest sister said to Bonnie, ‘Stick it, Bonita. Veronica will kick your butts.’
“My sisters put me at the front of the sled and they climbed on behind and we sat at the top of the hill next to the Consuelo sisters in their toboggan. Stanley Zwygardt, a little kid in a coat made out of shag carpet, stood between us, ready to signal the start of the race. Sarah Jentsch was at the bottom of the hill, ready to call the winner.
“Stanley dropped his arms and dlooop! the Consuelos went right down the hill.
“I immediately freaked out, swerved, and flipped our sled on its side, dumping me and my sisters. I’d never driven a fucking sled before. My sisters didn’t panic. They picked me up, put the sled back on its rails, and we all jumped back on. As we pushed off again, my second sister, Cecilia, leaned forward to whisper to my ear, ‘Bust her shit up.’
“The Consuelos were halfway down the hill at this point, but our shitty old super sled was fast. As we caught up with them, Big Mouth Bonnie turned her head and opened her big mouth to shout some shit back at us sisters. In the process, she lost control and the toboggan flexed and dumped all four Consuelo sisters to tumble pell-smell down the hill. I steered us past one sister, then another, but they were all over the place. I couldn’t miss ‘em all. One of my sled-rails slid directly over the left calf of Bonnie Consuelo. The sled continued with minimal loss of velocity and we crossed the finish line moments before the Consuelos’ empty toboggan did. Sarah Jentsch did not declare us the winners, though, because she was screaming about the crimson stain that was expanding around Bonnie Consuelo’s leg.
“My sisters and I were never allowed to ride Forney’s Hill again. Also, Bonnie’s entire leg ended up getting amputated.
“The whole thing was an accident, obviously. Still, I felt like an asshole when Bonnie would limp into school with her crutches. I can’t describe my shame. Her sisters refused to speak to me. My sisters told me to buck up. But I couldn’t.
“The truth is, everybody should have been glad I ran over Bonnie’s leg, because it saved her life. When the doctors went in to clean out the wound, they found she had some kind of leg cancer; the really serious kind that would have killed her in just a few months. The only way to stop it was to remove her whole leg, so they did.
“I’m not taking credit for saving her or anything, but I sure as hell shouldn’t have been blamed for the whole deal. But we were just dumb kids and none of us had ever heard of cancer.”
*
Allegorically speaking, Vero, I’m the cancer, but not in a malicious way. More like, nobody will know I’m here until someone gets run over by a sled.
I arrive in Holliday without further incident or epiphany. But boy am I excited to see Vero.
I enter Cookie’s Palace Diner. Nobody is looking at their signs. Instead, Vero, Sandy, and Old Timer are looking at each other, their mouths forming words that expose their upper incisors. One suspects that they’re saying some variation on, “Just what in the tarnation/hell/fuck is going on here?”
I am delighted. My signs have worked. They generated a genuine reaction from genuine humans!
Let’s parse this diorama for usable data. Vero, Sandy, and Old Timer are clearly in states of bewilderment. Both Sandy and Old Timer have a touch of the V-shape to their eyebrows and a hint of a squint, which suggests either suspicion or anger. Old Timer is raising his right hand, as if poised to point a finger. And, look, Sandy’s chest is thrust forward, emphasizing—I can’t help but add—her shapely bosom, and her hands are at hip-level, palms-up in the international sign for “What the shit?” The success of this gesture is impressive given that she’s holding a coffee pot in her right hand and, get this, not a drop has spilled. She’s really a whiz with that thing. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that she is prepared to use it as a weapon.
Most significantly, Sandy and Old Timer are looking directly at Vero. Why not? Vero’s the wildcard in this scene. One minute, it’s coffee and gossip. The next moment, the string-bean guy heads to the bathroom and Sandy finds herself pointing a gun at this city chick who has scooted her chair out from underneath herself and is falling to the floor.
Then, a few seconds later, it’s as if none of this had happened. Everyone’s right back where they were, except they aren’t. Because what happened, happened.
Consider Sandy’s thought process, starting with the sign I placed before her. “I am not a ghost.” Who the hell pulls a stunt like that? It had to be the string-bean who installed them, surely. By the way, I hate it when people call me a string-bean, but it’s true. I’m six-eight and thin as a rail. Sorry I haven’t mentioned my weight earlier, I didn’t want you to form an undue impression of me since string-beans are always portrayed as the dim-witted arachnoidal object of pity. If you don’t believe me, watch a coming-of-age movie.
It’s an elaborate plan to fuck with us, thinks Sandy. City people are always fucking with country people. Maybe it’s one of those Group-Mobs that I’ve seen on the internet where one minute you’re enjoying Styrofoam Chinese at the food court and the next minute all the so-called civilians who are similarly enjoying their own lunches begin to leap about in a choreographed interpretation of
the Alan Parsons hit, “Games People Play.”
Sandy has a point. Group-Mobs are amusing when viewed from the privacy of your home computer, but let’s look at it from the perspective of the victim. And yes, the innocent eater of Styrofoam Chinese is a victim. When thon’s food court compatriots begin their exhibition, the poor fucker’s entire concept of civil society is temporarily inverted.
“All these people,” thinks thon, “have planned this thing out and no one thought to invite me.” This spurs regressive thoughts of third-grade outcastery: solitary stroganoff at the far corner of the cafeteria, games such as “don’t stand in line next to the extremely tall kid.”
The Alan Parsons hit continues for several verses and one interminable harmonized guitar solo, which these Group-Mobbers interpret by leaping about like extras from the Sandy Duncan production of Peter Pan, which I have never seen, until the song awkwardly fades out and all the participants erupt in self-applause.
With plastic chopsticks, our innocent eater attempts to bring a morsel of shrimp to thon’s mouth. Thon looks at the half-cold morsel of food, lathered in corn-starch and high-fructose corn syrup and lets it plop back into the Styrofoam dish.
In a word, no one likes to be pranked.
Switch focus to my darling Vero. She is struggling with internal conflict. Her dominant facial expression is What is going on here, underlayed by a strong serving of physical pain, a consequence of falling on her ass a moment ago, one presumes. If anyone’s been pranked, it’s her. Her chair disappears, she bangs her coccyx, and then the waitress drops a pistol on the floor and starts trying to help her.
