“Let’s pursue the matter of the photograph next time. ‘The Photograph Matter,’ as it were.”
Pause. “Ok.”
“Remember to take your medication.”
Pause. “Ok.”
“Sometimes the effekts aren’t noticeable for years.”
Pause. “Ok.”
“I called your pharmacist personally and told him to give you an unlimited number of refills.”
Pause. “Ok.”
“No more than twelve milligrams a day.”
Pause. “Ok.”
“Take it easy, ‘Sid.’”
Pause. “Ok.”
“I’m serious. You need to relax.”
Pause. “Ok.”
“Smell the flowers and so forth. Try not to be an asshole. You know.”
Pause. “Ok.”
“And remember what I told you. Remember what I always tell you. You are not special or unique. But you exist. Somehow existence must be enough.”
Pause. “Ok.”
“Well. The session is over. You can leave now.”
Pause. “Ok.”
“You know where the door is.”
Pause. “Ok.”
“Goodbye.”
Pause. “Goodbye.”
It was the 257th time he turned into Kyoto.
THE 500TH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
HAIKU + PROLOGUE + ETC. + HAIKU
a man’s silhouette
flickers in the window—
the offal of God
Kyoto lies upon the earth like a sleeping dog. Overhead, the rays of a crimson sun bleed into an azure sky. No wind. Sound of a peacock spreading its tailfeathers . . .
Nobody practices tai chi near gardens of water and fragrance. Nobody wears thin-skinned gees and aerobicizes limbs in fluid, mechanical synch as a bird lands on the freshly pruned branch of a bonsai tree. Nobody inhales molecules and exhales fumes. Men in dreadnought coats are as much a mystery as they are nonentities.
Regiments of multicolored felt streamers and banners run vertically over the streets and hang down the faces of buildings. They are marked by thousands of golden Japanese symbols and icons in possession of deliberately cryptic meanings. Cobblestone streets. Green awnings. All of the zaibatsus have been consigned to an epistemological vacuum.
Difficult to gauge which Kyoto is this Kyoto. Kyoto present, past or future. Kyoto fact or fiction . . .
There is no time . . . The present does not exist—the moment it happens, it becomes the past. The future does not exist—the moment it becomes the present is the moment the present becomes the past. The past does not exist—prove it.
I can prove what I see now. Transparent eyeballs are for robosapiens in legwarmers. This is my prologue. It begins with a haiku. It ends with haiku:
Like the flower,
my petals rev and spin
like the turbine
The accidental tourist may dive off of any plateau and enter Kyoto from any orifice at any given time. No matter where you originate, you will culminate in the city.
This is not a movie. Ceci n’est pas une image mobile.
Evening. This sky is cobalt blue and swells of foliage glow red and orange and green and the golden spires of temples rise out of the foliage as if authorizing the science fictionalization of reality. Here is a picture:
[IMAGE OF A STICK FIGURE IN A BOWLER HAT]
Here is another picture:
a metoroporisu darkly
illuminated by strange fingers;
electric desolation . . .
Daimonji.
Wind kicks up. It echoes with the distant clang of swords, the erudite grunts of dead warriors.
Long, kinked filmstrip of Kyoto, each frame an Art Deco stillshot.
Creak of an opening book . . .
. . . gate of the Three Luminaries . . . a bamboo grove in the Sagano district . . . the moss garden at the temple Saiho-ji . . . sand cones erected on . . . painted statue of a geisha with hair ornament standing next to plum blossoms . . . Kung Fu studios constituted by sliding paper walls, restaurants constituted by sliding paper walls, living rooms constituted by sliding paper walls . . . the Shaka triad of Horyu-ji . . . Expansion/ clarification: the statue of the geisha possesses/professes multiple arms with stunted fingers; it may not be a geisha . . .
The moon hangs in a starless night sky like a shark tooth.
449 fathoms of
urban fles©h/ettes—
a quiet stain
THE 510TH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
FLASH FICTION
. . . Adam’s apple goes up and down and down goes eight milligrams of RX#4470973.
It was the 510th time I turned into Kyoto.
THE XXXTH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
CHARACTER SKETCHES
In this chapter, a large number of “urban planners” or “social economists” or “joystick analysts” congregates at Camp Bell in Bliptown circa 2013 A.R. (After Reality) in order to discuss the most effektive means of negotiating the continued aggression of the Kyoto Man, who is systematically destroying the Earth. Describe each character in unbearable detail (approx. 4000 words apiece). Use ellipses ad infinitum, per omnia saecula saeculorum . . . Employ the following criteria:
NAME:
PHYSIOLOGY:
PHYSIOGNOMY:
PSYCHOLOGY:
PATHOLOGY:
PHRENOLOGY:
PHENOMENOLOGY:
NIKTO:
Halfway through the sketch of the twenty-sixth character, the Kyoto Man erupts somewhere nearby, razing Bliptown, and all of the “urban planners” or “social economists” or “joystick analysts” explode and burn. Emphasis on the whining futility of existence, the purring meaninglessness of life in postmediatized, postreal society, where the diegesis of a pop song dictates Any Which Way But Loose. Favor extrapolation over promulgation . . . [For the last sentence, do something different than the usual: “It was the XXXth time, etc.” ]
THE 666TH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
CRITERION PROSE
Once upon a timecrash there was a bounty hunter named Cyrano Nightranger. Mr. Nightranger had been commissioned by the Frogs of Industry to detain a man, dead or alive, who could metamorphose into a city. The name of this man was a subject of clambaked debate—different hermeneutics of suspicion revealed different signifiers.
Infodump, or, Thy Piles
To date, TKM (The Kyoto Man) had metamorphosed into the city on 665 isolated occasions/occlusions. The planet was in shambles. The infrastructure of the human mindscreen had collapsed like a haphazardly erected Tinkertoy. It had been determined by a well-respected TKTM (Tartar of the Kakistocracy of Telepathic Murnausferatu) that, if TKM metamorphosed on just one more occasion/occlusion, humanity would recede into the night. Cities could not be rebuilt at the rate he destroyed them. Even futuristic construction machinery failed to rally against his corporeal-architectonic prowess. Ancients and medievalites were completely helpless and could only administer blank stares if they survived the rude Armageddon. Wind blew harder in the absence of Edifice, earthly or manmade. One myth recounts that, as a goodwill effort, TKM attempted to follow in Frankenstein’s monster’s footsteps and retreat to the Arctic, via the Orkney Islands [beat] Iceland [beat] Greenland, where he could no longer harrow the human race with the threat of extinction. But the deep cold winters prompted rabid transformations from man to metropolis, the friction of which melted the polar ice caps . . . Canada was gone. Michigan was gone. And yet Michiganders had always been Canadians at heart, despite being associated with Midwestern Amerikan ethics, ideologies, modes de vie, etc.
The question remains as to how we arrived at a figure of 665 occasions/occlusions. Such a transformation is no doubt difficult if not impossible to document and historicize. Even TKM himself claimed not to know how many times he had “behaved badly,” as he framed it in an interview on the Red Sky at Morning Show with Kalypso Shadrach, although, ad infinitum, per omnia saecula saeculorum, whether or
not this man was the man who had “behaved badly” could not be proven by apposite kakistocratic personnel. In any event, the number 665 was decided upon by the very TKTM who concluded/occluded that a 666th metamorphosis would incite a global apocalypse. The board members knew well that 666 was the mark of Satan, but they made no attempt to correlate TKM’s antics with devilry—Biblical, literary, filmic, etc.—chalking up the matter to AFC (Absolute Fucking Coincidence). AFC, after all, had been responsible for some of history’s greatest horrors, e.g., the circumstances that led to the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Hitler was cited on countless occasions/occlusions by TKTM in defense of the argument to the point that we began to doubt if Hitler even existed in the first place, let alone TKTM, who could not exist in any case as clairvoyance is the stuff of dreams, insofar as we can remember what historical artifacts such as dreams “look like” . . .
The fairy tale bursts at the seams, rupturing into the Ordinary.
. . . slipped into a burnt sienna knee-length leather jacket, vintage, circa 1970s, with a jackknife collar and roomy sleeves that fell below the wrist. Mr. Nightranger called the act of putting on the jacket a “brownout” in view of how it jeopardized his archetypal all-black image. But he remained black enough, and a little variety dans le modèle had never been anyone’s death-knell. It was at this juncture that he developed a troubling relationship with eggs. He could not describe the relationship. Likewise he could not deny the relationship.
TCZ.
Mr. Nightranger no longer wore the brown leather jacket but the skin of a lion; the dead animal’s jaw fit nicely on his skull, fangs snug against the temples. He shrugged the skin off and surveyed his outfit. Same all-black ensemble he had put on before Time and Space had burst like an amniotic sac of ignited hydrogen sulfide.
Vertigo. False memories of soul murder . . .
A red room. On one wall hung a landscape portrait of Bavarian mountains—profound snow-capped peaks overlooked a valley, green and sloping, that rolled into a smooth blue tarn; in the distance, a castle rose from the trees like a cluster of white rockets. There was a porcelain sink in the corner, and next to it a children’s desk, with a long, slender book neatly arranged on its surface.
Naked and shaved, the twins hung on meathooks attached to cables that rose to the ceiling.
They were boys. Eyes closed. Skin pallid, unblemished.
Their toes grazed back and forth across small pools of blood that had accumulated on the floortile beneath them.
Mr. Nightranger shuddered . . . felt something cold and anomalous . . . another false memory. The abductor spoke through the medium of the abducted, his mouth a deflated gash . . .
He turned his head. A tombstone scraped against bedrock . . .
A man. Nondescript. And yet not without character. Tall, thin, neat. He wore a blue uniform and hat that looked more like a Halloween costume than an authentic emblem of professionalism. His eyes were steel gray, with red irises, the walls producing a photographic effekt.
The nametag on his chest read:
MR. WHITE
“Who are you?” asked Mr. Nightranger. His voice reverberated like a dull electric charge.
Mr. White said, “I don’t know.”
“Where are we?” Mr. Nightranger’s hands grew heavy, as if filling with sand. His fingertips turned purple and exploded like haywire coronets.
The mindscreen played and rewound and replayed the scene—an act of imagination against his will.
“Where are we?” he repeated.
Mr. White said, “The nightmare of reality. The panic room of narrative.”
Vertigo. Mnemonic fictions . . .
A figure entered the room through a faux portal, head obfuscated by a nimbus cloud. Sturdy puffs emerged from the cloud near the mouth region, then ascended and spread across the ceiling in a poetic succession of ripples. A white jacket fell from the cloud like a curtain, tethered at the waist. The figure carried a black case. Its shoulders arched from its torso like cannonballs on sticks of bamboo.
Mr. Nightranger and Mr. White stared absently at the figure as it drifted across the room toward the twins.
The smoke cleared as the figure placed the case on the edge of the sink, turned on the faucet, and doused the arm of a monstrous smoking instrument, something like a cigar, or a bong, but more complex, its bulk technologized by a trellis of slim tubes and copper wires.
Full head of gleaming black hair. Rounded jaw. Pejorative rictus grin.
Dr. Josef Mengele.
[Halfway across the sky, we hear the tsunamic curses of Ira Überstein.]
He brushed off his hands and lit a cigarette. He smoked it to the filter with Olympic velocity and lit another one, smoking it slower, relishing it, lips treating the butt like hard candy, sucking it, milking it, salivating on it . . .
Chainsmoking, Dr. Mengele snapped on surgical gloves. He removed a scalpel from the case.
He made an insertion into one of the twins’ abdomens.
The twin’s eyes opened, flared . . . He screamed. At first he didn’t know why. His brother jolted awake. Screamed . . . They groped and writhed on the meathooks.
Dr. Mengele punched the twins in the heads, dazing them, and then he shoved a fist into the new wound. He probed the region, dreams of history slipping through his fingers . . . He seized the artifact. Cigarette clenched between twisted incisors, he removed his hand, gripping what appeared to be a tract of barbed wire, jointed like a chainlink, wet with dark purple blood and bright yellow bits of tissue. “Hand über Faust,” he announced . . . Each barb became progressively larger and opened the wound wider as it came out and the twins screamed louder and louder . . . Dr. Mengele accelerated the process, as if taking up an anchor from a boat, and the wire went on and on and on and formed a pile of metal and gore at the doktor’s feet as the hysterical twin collapsed and crumpled, desiccated, skin wrinkling, legs and arms disappearing into his torso.
The last barb to emerge from the twin was the size of a billiard. The twin twitched obscenely, drooling and blubbering. Then he wilted, died. The soaking husk of a junebug.
Dr. Mengele silenced the brother with another punch, cracking the boy’s neck.
The twins’ corpses quietly swung back and forth on the meathooks.
Mr. Nightranger and Mr. White monitored the conte cruel idly, with detached awareness. They felt next to nothing yet were perfectly aware of the circumstances.
They couldn’t move. Awake, alive, but numb—they had slipped into a trancelike state. Neither man knew when it began. Mr. Nightranger worried that it would never end.
Dr. Mengele peeled off the gloves and dropped them into the sink. He crushed out a cigarette with his boot heel and lit another one.
He turned and caught his breath, glaring down at the intruders.
“Der Poisoner aller Nationen,” he said automatically. A subtitle in crisp white lettering formed beneath his feet: “THE POISONER OF ALL NATIONS.”
Either the doktor’s gaze or the sound of his voice dissolved the spell—Mr. Nightranger and Mr. White were free.
“Mengele,” said Mr. White. “I know you. I killed you.”
The doktor laughed. “ABSURD,” read the subtitles. “I AM NOT DEAD. I AM ALIVE. I WILL ALWAYS BE ALIVE.”
“What’s happening?” said Mr. Nightranger.
Mr. White removed his hat and tucked it beneath an armpit, as if preparing to deliver a business pitch. “Calm down. I’ll handle this.” He stepped towards Dr. Mengele.
“GAAAAAAAAURDS!!!” read the subtitle.
“Nobody’s coming,” said Mr. White. “It’s me and you, Herr Doktor. I killed you before. I’ll kill you again. No matter how many times I find you, I’ll kill you. Because Time and Space want me to.”
Terrified, Dr. Mengele paced backwards. He was four feet taller than the stranger and carried 200+ more pounds of lean muscle. Tolerably versed in the English language, he got the drift of what Mr. White had said to him; meaning-making was an
other matter. He had certainly never seen Mr. White before. But something about the man touched a nerve in his core. The immanence of his own death overwhelmed him. He hyperventilated.
PANTING SOUNDS, read the subtitles.
Mr. White moved forward. “Grow up, meathead. If you want to be a crazy Nazi pimp, you must be prepared to look long into the abyss.”
“What’s happening?” said Mr. Nightranger.
Dr. Mengele fell to his knees—slow splash of blood—and broke into tears. He continued to chainsmoke.
WEEP. PUFFPUFFPUFFPUFF. WEEP, WEEP.
AEEIII!
Mr. Nightranger stood agape.
Mr. White slapped him. “Snap out of it. You’re having a breakdown. You’ve been standing there for hours. You’re not breathing.”
Rubbing his jaw, Mr. Nightranger thanked him for saving his life. They drifted into a heated discussion about eggs—cooking techniques, symbolic applications, the emergence from the cloaca, etc.—and concluded that the subject of the conversation was, while riveting, ultimately pedestrian. They moved on to other topics, territorializing with one word what they deterritorialized with another, as dark human effigies flickered in and out of view, menacing shadows and silhouettes, creatures of intelligent civilization . . .
The room filled with the traffic of existence.
Oblivion.
Mr. Nightranger blinked. “Where did everybody go?”
“I don’t know.” A history of carnage retreated to the far corners of Mr. White’s mindscreen.
Even the corpses of Dr. Mengele and the twins were gone. And the room had been cleaned, sanitized. “Something’s wrong. We need something.” He cogitated. “Exposition. Infodump. Thy piles . . .”
The Kyoto Man (The SciKungFi Trilogy) Page 6
