The Kyoto Man (The SciKungFi Trilogy)

by D. Harlan Wilson

  “Sam” said, “My memory isn’t working properly.”

  “Oh.”

  “I have difficulty remembering certain things. For example, I don’t remember the Stick Figure War. Was that during my lifetime? Honestly I can’t remember.”

  “Curious.”

  “Timecrashes wiped out everybody’s memory. I think mine is especially wiped out. I don’t even think it’s mine.”

  The doktor coughed, once. “Especially wiped out. You think you’re special, then.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You said ‘especially.’”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Meaning isn’t fixed. It’s fluid. You told me that. You always tell me that. Verbatim.”

  “And yet you say ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ Meaning you meant it another way, a very specific way. A special way.”

  “No.”

  “And if something is wiped out, it’s wiped out. There are no degrees. Something cannot be ‘especially’ wiped out just as something cannot be ‘especially’ human. Or inhuman. Or dead.”

  “There are degrees of inhumanity.”

  The votive went out. Dr. Grindhaüß lit another one. “Timecrashes are unfortunate incongruities,” he said. “Different subjects experience them in different ways.”

  “I understand.”

  “No you don’t. Nobody understands anything. That’s the problem. Timecrashes have negated objectivity. The objective world has ceased to exist.”

  “I thought you always said objectivity was a myth.”

  “Hmm.” Gripping his elbows, Dr. Grindhaüß strode across the office and gazed out a tall, narrow sash window.

  “I did a little research,” said “Sam,” “and I think I know what city I turned into. It was Kyoto. The symbols in the mountains. No other city in Japan has symbols quite like that.”

  “No other city in Japan has symbols quite like that,” echoed the doktor.

  “Yes. But that’s not it. I mean, the research I did—it didn’t matter. I know it was Kyoto anyway. I don’t know how I know. I don’t know why. I’ve never been to Kyoto. I’ve never thought about Kyoto. I may have never even spoken the word Kyoto, ever, in my life, until today. And yet . . . Why didn’t I turn into Toledo? Or Montreal? I’ve been to those cities. I still think it was a dream. I know dreams are impossible. I know over half of the homeless population in the world consists of former oneirologists.”

  “Now you are reiterating the word ‘know.’ You know this, you don’t know that. Ergo your epistemological dilemma vis-à-vis the monstrous-masculine desire.”

  “Sam” turned onto his side. “Monstrous-masculine?”

  “Indeed.” Dr. Grindhaüß stepped away from the window and made an anxious waving motion that “Sam” perceived as a motion he would make if a monster were attacking him. “I won’t bore you with the gory details. Well, perhaps a touch of gore.” He lit a cigarette, smoked it, and put it out in the bowl of a gold hookah. “Essentially the monstrous-masculine—viz., the quote male monster unquote, a decentered ape-creature projected onto the abjected protagonist that is your Self—this evil motherfucker connotes a fear of castration and facilitates an Oedipal conflict with regards to other people slash characters on the quote hangnail’s edge unquote of the social field into which you have been interpellated. Ergo, for the man to become the monster, whatever form it takes, thusly”—he lifted his hands and knotted them into claws and made a twisted face—“or thusly”—his face went blank, his limbs rigid—“whatever the form, he negotiates and to some degree annihilates feelings of rabid disempowerment.”

  “Can something be annihilated to a small degree?” “Sam” interrupted. “Isn’t annihilation a non-negotiable . . . I don’t know. You get annihilated, or you annihilate something—that’s it, right? You can’t partially annihilate something or get partially annihilated. Just like you can’t be partially human. Or inhuman. Or dead.”

  Dr. Grindhaüß eyeballed “Sam,” said, “You said ‘annihilate’ six times and ‘something’ three times,” then continued. “Your alleged transformation into the quote monster unquote belongs to the realm of the fantastic, i.e., fantasy. In short, your condition, your affliction, your delusion, viz., this horseshit about transforming into a city, which we might call metromorphia . . . hmm”—he wrote the word down in a cordovan leatherbound journal—“this instance of metromorphia dictates three primary ephemera. One, as stated, an anxiety about disempowerment. Two, the activation of your death drive as a means of not wanting to be abject any longer. And three, an inevitable psychic bewilderment apropos the Jekyll slash Hyde binary created by the monstrous-masculine versus you, the everyman, the ordinary guy, the nothing, the superzero. You are a superzero. In the end, we are all superzeros. Everybody lives and dies and is forgotten. That’s why we feel bad. That’s why we turn into monsters. It makes us feel . . . good.” He laughed to indicate what one does when one feels good.

  “I feel sick,” said “Sam.”

  “Perhaps some music, then.” Dr. Grindhaüß sat at his desk and touched a knob on a vintage Crossley radio that looked like a Catholic church. The sound of Jim Nabors singing “Ave Maria” crackled from the speakers. “I like this asshole’s voice,” he said. “Who would’ve thought Gomer Pyle could carry a tune? And such a deep and powerful tune. You probably don’t know who Gomer Pyle is. Long before your time. Mine, too.”

  “Sam” vomited hot celluloid onto the chaise.

  Dr. Grindhaüß sprung to his feet. “Jesus Christ, ‘Samuel’! That’s an antique! At least throw up in a barf bag.” He pointed at the dispenser near the foot of the chaise.

  “This is what happened the first time,” he said, strands of thermoplastic drooling from a half-open gash. “Only there was that picture. Now the picture’s gone. Now it’s inside of me.”

  The doktor retrieved a towel from an armoire, told “Sam” to get up, knelt and scrubbed the mess. “God almighty. What did you eat for breakfast? What is this business?”

  “It’s happening again. I’m going to change. I’m going to turn into Kyoto. I can feel the architecture welling up in me.”

  “Could you get me a can of Spot Shot? It’s in the armoire.”

  A ringing noise pierced his brain like a javelin. Terrific anguish. “Help me,” he whispered. “I’m . . . becoming . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” sighed Dr. Grindhaüß, scrubbing harder. “The dawn of the becoming-animal. The abstract machine must make the territorial assemblage open onto something else. Basic schizoanalysis. Unleash and embrace yourself in its true form. Do it. And then fetch me that Spot Shot. Our time is up anyway. You know what? Why don’t we plan on . . .”

  It was the second time he turned into Kyoto.

  THE 3RD TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO

  PHONOGRAPHIC RECORDING

  The voice radiates from a dark and spiritual chokeflow, flames of static enveloping its delicate articulations:

  “A hollow breeze passes across the rooftops. Windmills spin and creak. Electricity flits up and down antennas. Three shingles loosen and blow into space . . .

  “The city is empty.

  “The city is alive. And decidedly gendered.

  “He can feel the ducts and tunnels and sewerpipes of his underworld, the leaves of his kaiyushiki teien and konshoniwa gardens, and the cascades of his ryumon-no-taki waterfalls, his streets and temples and statues and matenrou of the distant past and the near future, his lights, the furious voltage of his lights, and the stench of stir-fry he disseminates from every wooden and paper and straw and asphalt and plaster and clay orifice . . .

  “Leaning spires. Wrenched copestones. Bamboo . . .

  “He senses everything, from the tallest, sharpest, most polyphonous and cumbersome edifice to the smallest shot glasses arranged in neat rows over mirrored sushi bars . . .

  “He tries to move. To flex a muscle. Nothing. Stasis. Altogether immobile, helples
s. A sitting duck. A smiling Buddha.

  “He imagines the scream of a daikaiju . . . Dark, metallic, unending—the scream careens across space and time, vaporizing everything in its path.

  “Urban psychosis. Metromorphic lunacy . . . It spans two minutes, or 200,000 years. Then, an earthquake . . . orange lightning bolts stretch across the body of Kyoto in a tectonic frenzy . . .

  “For a moment he perceives himself as the shadow of a man-thing. A giant, lumbering humanoid with no face, no hair. His head scrapes against an orange ceiling of sky. Solar flares burst from his shoulders and thighs as he trudges across the city, feeble, aimless, alone . . .

  “He awakes. Naked.

  “The earth feels warm. Cooked.

  “He discovers himself afoot, staring across a vast desert. No hills. No plant life. In every direction, a ravaged landscape—scorched and ruined. Dead.

  “Hunger . . .

  “His body temperature approaches a precarious index.

  “He falls to his knees. Tears pool in the sand. Tears evaporate into the atmosphere.

  “Many miles away, somewhere in the decayed folds of history, a man makes love to a prostitute. The narrative of their intercourse resounds with fuckwords and taboo mantras intersected by theoretical soliloquies on genetic operas. Their prose mitigates new flights of fancy as juices drip from the pages and entire paragraphs implode into mere splotches of pubic hair. Under threat of orgasm, the man grows violent. He resents the prostitute for conjuring his rich substance. He beats her lightly at first, tapping her face, scolding her breasts, but the onset of ejaculation sees his authorship move into the danger zone. Using a utility knife, he peels the vellum from her flesh and reveals the squalid pulp fantasies of her core . . .

  “He awakens. He vomits . . .

  “It is the third time he turns into Kyoto.”

  THE 26TH-170TH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO

  DIAGNOSTIC PROSE

  . . . the twenty-fifth time he had turned into Kyoto, and back again. Cognitive estrangement dissolves into straightlaced scaremongering. He blinks . . . in the late twenty-first century, where Nazisploitation splatterschtick cinema has not only become a cultural norm but the dominant form of cultural capital. Everybody unemployed by Hitler’s posthumous and haunted “Single Digit” Corporation suffers constant ridicule and develops supernatural insecurities.

  Credits soar onto the page dragging long blue trailers in their wake, as in Superman (1978), only the credits also bleed from hideous gunshot wounds . . . Suddenly the producers realize that this aberration is neither a screenplay nor a film. Embarrassed, they retreat to a gentlemen’s club to discuss future creative content over Old Fashions and Manhattans. Onstage, state-of-the-art strippers do listless Time Warps, weighted to the earth by Barsoomian implants . . .

  —The first thing we need to do is put a fuck scene in there, says Ira Überstein, fingering a wayward toupee. What’s the main guy’s name again? Buck? What is this, a science fiction picture? Science fiction is for fags. We need to change that name pronto. Well, let’s do the fuck scene first. Here’s what I suggest . . .

  Elsewhere, Buck unexpectedly bifurcates into 144 different versions of himself . . .

  Back up. Backup. Bckp.

  . . . He acquires the prostitute from an ALDI with money he makes panhandling banned scikungfi moves to naïve yuppie teenagers looking for a quick high. It’s a Septimus-6 model, somewhat de rigueur, yet ruinously outdated, an incongruity among anomalies, and therefore “ordinary,” square as a misplaced idiom, if not utterly taedio afficitur . . . As the “Styrian Oak” contends:

  —The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else.

  —Yeah, that’s true, drones Überstein. Then allude to Huxley or some shit. Alphas and Betas and a Brave New Bogarts . . . What about a gynoid? No narrative is a narrative without a sequined gynoid to stare at. Looks like Viriginia Woolf, this one. Ha. Yeah. Only without the big nose and give her some big tits and a good fucking body. Jesus. And shave that preternatural bush into a nice trim landing strip. If it’s a merkin, torch it like a marmot that bit off your finger. Mind the overlip, too, and somebody teach her how to work a stripper pole . . .

  Plate 2.XX: A topless Mrs. Dalloway with flower stems clenched between nicotine-stained dentures swings around the Golden Rod like a teenage gymnast. Illustration courtesy of the Genetic Edition of “Bada Bing Woolf” (Longface Collection).

  . . . He watches idly as an enormous hydraulic smart-arm removes the Maria from a sepulcher on an upper shelf. Another, more delicate smart-arm secures Buck and the lovebirds are ferried to a private red room with velvet walls and a heart-shaped bed sheathed in plastic. Buck flips a switch on the back of the Maria’s neck and tells it to lie down on the bed and spread its legs. The legs creak open like a door in the House of Usher. Buck takes off his clothes and sizes up the machinic terrain . . . No foreplay. He climbs atop the robot and accesses the Primary Text. He makes love to it, spinning it onto all fours and infiltrating the Secondary Text. The robot is voluptuous, with large sagging breasts and a beautiful round ass; he can readily grab the synthetic flesh of its hips as he thrusts his member into it from behind, asking if the robot likes his member, and if it wants more of his member, and if it has ever experienced a member quite like this Kantian thing-in-itself, this noumenon.

  —The noumenon, drones the robot in an electric whirr. The noumenon. The noumenon.

  —Don’t you think a willful use of the slang term noumenon in reference to the penis, particularly an erect penis, is stupid? asks Buck in a colloquial tone, thrusting harder, reducing the Secondary Text to a splotch of barcodes and chickenscratches. Then again, the act of sex is stupid in itself. So is the importance many subjects place on sex. Freuds come to strict attention, bury themselves in grassy knolls, and subjects make funny faces—that’s sex.

  He slaps the Maria’s dire flipside.

  —Sometimes this stupidity produces offspring between fertile humans. Usually it is enacted for recreational purposes. My point is simple. Noumena belong to philosophy. They don’t fuck things.

  The Maria nearly bites its lip off when it cums. Vascularized fat—pungent to the taste—fills its mouth and flows onto the bed in thick strands.

  Buck yanks himself free, flips the Maria onto its back, and reengages in a detailed analysis of the Primary Text.

  The prostitute’s eyelids flutter closed. It smiles and savors the afterglow of orgasm, wrapping its legs around Buck and pulling him closer, deeper, ensuring that he writes his opus with precision and flair and ample metaviolence . . .

  Ira Überstein sips a crystal snout of Turkish coffee. Too fucking hot. He burns the roof of his mouth.

  —Fuuuck!

  A breathless assistant hurries into the office. Überstein kidney-punches him and tells him to eighty-six the Turkish coffee and bring him an iced mocha. He withdraws the order, bashes the assistant’s head in with a computer keyboard, and exiles him from the gentlemen’s club.

  Überstein turns to the board of directors with a primal growl.

  —All right what the fuck are we gonna do about this fuck scene? Where do we go from here, I mean?

  In response, an epidemic of wrinkled, pensive frog faces on popsicle sticks . . .

  Überstein grinds knuckles into eye sockets. He groans and says:

  —Thank you for that cornucopia of ideas. As always, your intellects glint like tupperware. You dildos make seven figures a year and you can’t even figure out what to do with two pairs of genitals. Christ. I’d be surprised if you milquetoasts knew how to hold your dicks and make a urinal shine. I gotta do everything myself. So be it. So this fuck scene is gonna be real graphic, like. Borderline XXX with lots of tits and ass and bush shots, but no showing the piledriver, only the balls, and only for a flash, like, for half a second, and make sure those goddamned balls are shaved; we can’t rightly shove a pair of hairy balls in everybody’s faces. Right. So he’s fucking this mechabitch, okay? Halfway through let�
��s have the protagonist fracture into 144 different versions of himself, all of whom continue to buttfuck the robot or whatever. Not sure how this is going to work. Not sure why he breaks into 144 versions of himself either. There’s some kind of Biblical significance connected to 144, I think. Yeah? Attribute it to a timecrash/zoneshift. Always attribute things we don’t feel like explaining to timecrash/zoneshifts. Let’s call those TCZs from now on—that’s what they call them in the news, and it never hurts to exercise mediatized verisimilitude, even though sex is almost invariably a matter of sheer fantasy. Right. So there’s this schizo gangbang thing going on or whatever. In the end, the different versions of Buck accomplish orgasm in unison, short-circuiting the Maria. Also in unison . . .

  . . . they become 144 versions of Kyoto. They all stand, extremities flaccid, and their eyes roll back into their heads, and their eyes glow white, whiter, whiter still, and the smoldering luminescence blurs the contours of their BwMs, dissolving the meaningless flesh, and the stick figures beneath the surface pulse and contort and discharge technologized screeches that skyrocket and shatter glass and brick and plasteel with equal joie de vivre . . . Barbaric yawps. The rooftops, sharp and gold, pulverize the Maria, and its light goes out in a quiet spray of ersatz nuts and bolts . . . The rooftops butt heads like ganado bravo in a tauromachic battle royal, snorting, growling, bucking for (de)territorialization . . . ARCHITECTUALYPSE . . . Like a rash in fasttime, the Kyotos spread across the entire state and leak into several adjacent states, bulldozing animate and inanimate objects . . .

  Dust rises. The sky turns deep red. It always turns some shade of red.

  Tranquility.

  In the past, on a different continent, Dr. Josef Mengele overdoses on Elective Madness, carefully saws off a boy’s skull, and draws pictures with his fingertips in the thin film of mucous that covers the brain tissue. The boy tells him he can feel it. Dr. Mengele concludes that his brain is an impractical repository of livewire nerve endings.