Baroness Von Smith
SURVIVANOIA
Admiral of the Red
Publishing
SURVIVANOIA
Baroness Von Smith
Copyright 2011 Baroness Von Smith,
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Cover by JJ Reville and Jake Cassel (designed by the author)
Chapters six and seven originally appeared and are still available at
Once Written as the short story “The Comic Who Couldn’t Laugh”
Admiral of the Red Publishing
Visit our website at www.AdmiraloftheRed.com
ISBN-10: 1469905183
ISBN-13: 978-1469905181
For Charles, Hawkeye, and Joe
Acknowledgments
This book has been nearly a decade in the making from conceptualization to this ink-and-paper reality. Suffice it to say the entire list of people to thank is too lengthy for inclusion…you know who you are! I am, however, especially grateful to Matt Brownlie—without whom Encludsmo would not exist, to CJ Lyons for believing in me even when my belief had faltered, to my Editor-and-Mom Dr. Beverly Richards-Smith, and to Bruce-my-Bruce Weinheimer, Sr. for being infinitely patient and generally spectacular.
SURVIVANOIA
I: The Inventor and The
Instigator
(Friends)
CHAPTER 1
Encludsmo Stuckhowsen had a landlord who spied on him. Though knowledge of this fact in no way affected his routine, he fully anticipated that one morning he would be hauled away for the crime of doing nothing by a handful of imminently practical-looking men. It never occurred to Doctor Stuckhowsen that the spying landlord might instead lead to his emancipation, self-reclamation, even perhaps that ultimate indulgence, his Americanization. The Doctor lacked the audacity to conceive these things, just as the knowledge of his spy failed to en- or outrage him, lead him to set traps, or alert the authorities.
Doctor Stuckhowsen remained certain in the knowledge of his spy, though he had no tangible evidence. Occasionally he’d peer at his leftovers, examine his ice cream, certain there had been more last night. Or perhaps a book lay askew on the coffee table that The Doctor felt certain had been aligned when he’d left.
A spying landlord wasn’t a foreign situation to Doctor Stuckhowsen, a foreigner himself to these free United States. But it did seem an odd thing to him, given that he rented a condemned shack beneath the freeway overpass. He lived under the section of highway where the 110 and 105 freeways converged, and in front of an impossibly enormous billboard that said: “Put Cheese on Stuff!” The billboard towered thirty stories above him, the legs of it blocking The Doctor’s view from his rear windows.
That someone would rent such a place seemed unlikely only to those who didn’t grasp the severity of the housing situation in Los Angeles and/or were unaware that Dr. Stuckhowsen’s roots lay in an obscure Eastern European country whose inhabitants cared not who was in charge but only that the bombing stopped. Once a person fully comprehended these two contributing factors and their ramifications, it became perfectly logical for this little scientist to pay five hundred and sixty-five dollars a month to live in a boarded-up shack under the freeway.
The Good Doctor didn’t care where he lived anyway. He dedicated his waking hours to research. He tended no garden, harbored no pet, dated no woman. He’d never bothered to pry the two-by-fours off the windows, never swept the grime from the stairs.
He had come to America speaking almost no English but extraordinarily good at math. He graduated from UCLA with three separate but related Doctoral degrees, only slightly improved English, and exactly one friend. Something—his lacking language skills, perhaps—saw him still unemployed a year after graduation, living off a modest lump-sum payment the school had given him in exchange for rights to a patent. A less ardent man would have felt exploited.
Most of Doctor Stuckhowsen’s American encounters had been neutral. People tripped over his first name and occasionally asked if he was related to some composer. Mostly when they asked him this they looked ready to beat him to a pulp, which made him happy to tell them that he was not. Seldom was he in public, anyway. He did most of his laundry in the kitchen sink, acquired much of his furniture from the curb, and usually cut his own hair.
He shopped sporadically, when he remembered that he needed food. He’d wander through the market, fill a red carry-cart with canned fish, potatoes, cabbage. In the same strip plaza as the market was a thrift store, where he bought black pants and tweed jackets. One Saturday he’d found a stash of aprons. Not white—blue striped. Longer than standard, with a center divided patch pocket: The Gardena Butcher Shop had closed. He bought all seven of the aprons, then stopped at the dollar shop for elbow-length rubber gloves. Yellow. Dr. Stuckhowsen didn’t own a lab coat.
There was a single thing he splurged on: A restaurant which he frequented. Romanian. Not his homeland but similar foodstuffs: organ meats, overripe cheese, ruby wines, and black vodka. Twice a week The Doctor walked there, a mile each way. He walked with a purposeful, pronounced swing, a skiing monkey with too-short trousers and white socks, clutching an ever-present umbrella despite his Los Angeles address. He ate by himself, chatted with the proprietors in their native tongue, read Russian science journals off the internet from his laptop. Occasionally, Emil the Hungarian stopped in and they played chess. But they were equally skilled and usually stalemated. The Doctor always left a considerable tip.
It never occurred to Encludsmo Stuckhowsen to be frustrated, dissatisfied, or sad. When he grew tired of a project, he put it aside for a time, taking up another in its stead. He never concerned himself with whether a thing offered a market; he researched for research’s sake.
One day he received a notice from his bank—overdrawn. Dr. Stuckhowsen wasn’t certain what this meant. He gathered his umbrella, strode the mile to the restaurant. The girl who stood behind the counter was the daughter of the proprietor. The proprietor spoke to her in Romanian but she responded, always, in English, which inadvertently made The Doctor feel stupid, made him feel obligated to attempt English.
“Oh, the usual?”
“Naw, naw, please, the telephonic device may I use please? Here call, not a lengthy distance.”
“The phone? Sure, Doctor.”
He called a number scribbled on his hand, the number of the only true friend he’d made in college.
“Please is Mister Tyson there?”
“Encludsmo?”
Silence.
“Encludsmo, it’s Annie! Antoinette.”
“Oh! ‘Allo, Annie.”
Fond laughter. “I’ll go get Ty for you.”
Tyson arrived on the phone; they talked briefly. “Get yourself a meal, while you’re waiting, I’ll pay. I’ll pay!” He hung up.
The Good Doctor did indeed get himself a meal, thick black sausages in a wine-based gravy-slightly sweet, roasted beets and potatoes and a soft bread with a crisp, sweetish crust. He was mopping the last of the gravy with the bread when a familiar voice spoke his mother tongue.
--My friend why haven’t you called me?
Encludsmo smiled as he turned and stood. Behind him, Tyson wore the same earth tones as he had in grad school, and the same Timberland boots, and his unruly chestnut hair still fell j
ust over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. The old friends hugged.
“Odd to hear my language,” Encludsmo said in English.
--You didn’t answer my question.
The sound of his native tongue soothed him and he responded in kind. --Just busy, he replied. --We’re all busy.
Tyson insisted on paying Encludsmo’s tab, and purchased a bottle of Romanian wine as well. He then led them to his silver Camry.
--Antoinette misses you.
--And I her! And especially her cooking. And how is your little girl?
--Not so little. Seven now. In school, and growing like a weed!
--Seven! Seems impossible. Oh, turn here. And here.
--Here? There’s no road.
--It’s dirt, but it’s okay. I made this road, had to blast it out myself when I first moved in.
“Good Lord, man! You live here?”
Encludsmo blinked at Tyson. He examined his crooked, boarded up abode, which looked bleaker than usual in the sharp glare of Tyson’s headlights, then blinked at Tyson again.
“Sure. The roof does not leak. No one bothers me.”
Tyson gestured to the towering billboard. --Do you?
Encludsmo glanced at the sign, sighed heavily, shaking his head. --American cheeses.
He got out of the car, charging toward his front door as always, while Tyson gingerly picked his way through the lawn, a lengthy, brown fire hazard that had long ago consumed the walkway.
Encludsmo fussed in the doorway—three locks, to protect the research—while Tyson glanced along either side of the house. He pointed to stylized, spray-painted letters, big and bright against the dirty white aluminum siding. “Taggers.”
Encludsmo shrugged.
Inside, a yellow bulb warmed the cramped living room. Homier than the outside, the living room boasted an antique coffee table and matching end tables, a battered, overstuffed leather chair and a sagging but cozy couch covered with a thick, white afghan. Bookcases lined the walls, a chess set waited on the coffee table, and two easels held framed paintings of scenes from Encludsmo’s homeland.
Tyson plopped onto the squishy couch. --You need to move.
The Doctor frowned, paced, waved away his friend’s suggestion with annoyance.
--Then you need a dog. Maybe a fence. An alarm system.
--What I need is money.
The Doctor showed Tyson the letter from his bank. Tyson squinted at it.
--This is your checking.
--Okay.
--Where’s your savings?
Encludsmo’s face flushed and his heart picked up. --In a bank? I have none.
--Bring me all your mail from last month. You keep it, like I told you, right?
Encludsmo didn’t take time to respond, jogged into the kitchen and retrieved, from under the sink, a brown paper sack half full of envelopes.
--From the last year.
--Not much, Tyson observed. He then enviously noted nothing addressed to “resident.” He peered at his friend’s address. “110 and 105 Interchange! Lower level?”
The Doctor blinked again. --Is that not a reasonable address?
--I suppose if mail gets to it….
Encludsmo shrugged, gestured to the bag.
Tyson shuffled through the letters, found one postmarked Pennsylvania, with a name he recognized, Lucretia Stuckhowsen.
--How is your sister?
--Crazy. More than ever, read for yourself.
Tyson scanned the letter. --She writes to you in English?
--To practice, I think. I won’t tease her, obviously. Also, she believes it will help me to learn.
Curly, slanted letters told Tyson, “I got a deer repeller today, a thing with a motion sensor that you fill with water. When it senses somebody come near it, it sprays them. The police tell me this is legal. Unlike the electric fence and barbed wire. The hardware store won’t take either of those back, by the way. I guess I’ll use them to wrap Christmas gifts this year.”
--Her English is good, Ty said.
--Too bad mine is not.
--Sounds like she’s having problems with her neighbors.
--Her problems are in her head. This is a good country for her. They do not put the crazies to death.
Ty returned his attention to the bag. He pulled an envelope from it, ripped it open, and grinned triumphantly at the paper inside.
--Look here. This is your savings. You have a bit of money yet.
--How much?
--About fifteen hundred.
--Not so much.
Tyson raked his hands through his hair, gazed at Encludsmo, who took an uncomfortable step back in reply.
--Tell me what you’re working on these days.
The Doctor’s face brightened at the mention of his research.
--Come see!
He led Tyson to what would have been the bedroom, were it not serving as somebody’s laboratory.
--Here is a contention serum. That over there is—
--Finished?
--Not yet. I have Emotion Potion, that’s finished.
--What’s it do?
--Makes whoever drinks it feel warm or chill, depending on the emotions of the people around them.
--Maybe. What else? What about the contention serum? How soon?
--Two weeks? Maybe two months. Oh, it will be wonderful! It’s nearly done. It makes people not want to have.
--Not want to have? Like, things? Encludsmo nodded.
“So it makes them content. Ah. Content-shun. What else.”
“Finished? The pretentiometer, he is done.”
“What’s he do? It do?”
Encludsmo struggled for words, fell back into his own language. --Measures the level of pretentiousness in a room.
Tyson frowned slightly.
--Pretense is a form of lying, Encludsmo explained. --There is a direct and calculable correlation between pretentiousness and deceit, which in turn makes future deceit calculable, predictable. Not just how much but when and about what types of things. It’s very easy really, you simply take the contrapositive of the area under the—
--Don’t waste your breath on me, my friend. Math is one thing I’ll never understand.
--Math is merely another language. You already speak seven, why not eight?
--Some languages are harder to master than others. We’re not all as bright as you.
Tyson pulled his wallet from his coat pocket, rifled through it until he found one of his business cards. --Go here.
Encludsmo studied the card, made to look like stamped metal.
“Survivanoia? What means this?”
“It’s a made up word. It’s a weird place. They make weird stuff.”
--Like?
--Sofa-coffins, bulletproof jogging suits, gas masks in fashion colors. They distribute things, too, like radiation pills and anti-anthrax pills and baby coffins. They developed the West Nile virus vaccine. Just now they’re working on treatments and a vaccine for that new disease, Flower Flu. The one where you wake up blind?
Encludsmo squinted. “They were in paper this week past.”
“Survivanoia was?”
“Yes, that blindness disease. Ad claims you have treatment already. Not surprising, if sickness truly derived from plants. We share only forty percent DNA, so not many places to look. Lawyer says people dying for no reason. Want to class action sue.”
Tyson’s brow creased. “In the Picayune?”
--No, the arts paper, the Bi Weekly. And it could be a contrivance, anyway. I understand L.A. is the land of litigation. There was no article, just an advertisement.
--What section, in the back?
Encludsmo retrieved the
article for his friend, apologizing for having been the bearer of bad news.
“Well, like you said, maybe it’s fake. A gimmick of some sort.”
Encludsmo grinned. --Still, I am surprised to find you working at such a strange, dark place.
“That’s what a PhD in languages will get you. A crappy job in customer service. Anyway, they’re looking to expand. New company president. Just brought in a new person to head up R and D. A product like yours might be something they’d want.”
He salvaged the restaurant sales slip from his trouser pocket, scribbled on the back of it. --See one of these people. The Baroness speaks German.
--My German is terrible.
--It’s better than your English.
* * *
Something about him must have appealed to somebody, since they gave him an appointment the same week he called. That Friday, Dr. Encludsmo Stuckhowsen took the long, awful trip up north two valleys to Survivanoia in Valencia. Three buses and as many hours later he stepped onto the street in a land so green and plush he couldn’t believe he was still in Greater Los Angeles.
His appointment was with Baroness Dacianna Von Worthington. She met him in the lobby and they walked together up a white spiral of stairs with a silver railing. She seemed impossible—impossibly tall, with wine-colored hair twisted into an impossible braid that bounced gently against her hips as she made her way up the stairs in front of him. Encludsmo seldom noticed a woman’s hips.
Sunlight charmed her office, a large square room decorated like the office of a lawyer/big game hunter. An imposing white bear guarded her enormous desk. Built-in bookshelves were crammed with thick volumes and bejeweled by extravagant knick-knacks. Like the Jacob’s Ladder, which, though silent, made The Doctor smile.
He attempted small talk; she offered him wine and they spoke at length and with matched knowledge and enthusiasm, especially about wines of his region of the world. This segued into climate change, then flower flu, then something seemed to click and she wanted only to know about him and his invention.
He explained his device to her, in German, which she did indeed speak fluently, though no accent betrayed her English. Halfway through his presentation, she stopped him. The Doctor began to pack his borrowed briefcase, discouraged, but she instructed him to sit. Moments later, a man appeared in her office. “Scally,” she called him: Tall, dark, and somehow familiar. The Baroness translated to this Scally person everything The Doctor told her about his pretentiometer.
Baroness Von Smith Page 1
