The Kyoto Man (The SciKungFi Trilogy)

by D. Harlan Wilson

  “What’s that?” Mr. Nightranger raised an arm and pointed at the desk. He kept his arm extended as he walked over to it. Mr. White joined him.

  Shoulder to shoulder, they stared down at the book. It was a children’s book. The title:

  The Awful Boy Who Turned into an Even Awfuler Man

  by

  Stanley Ashenbach

  And for its cover art, an illustrated black-and-white version of this picture:

  [IMAGE OF A SMILING YOUNG BOY]

  “That looks like somebody,” said Mr. Nightranger.

  Mr. White coughed. “Everybody looks like somebody.” He reached down and opened the cover to the first page in the center of which was a quote.

  “No man is an island. But one man is a city.”

  —Jean-Jacques Faitremonté

  “What’s that mean?” said Mr. Nightranger.

  “I don’t know,” said Mr. White.

  “Who’s Jean-Jacques Fatermont?”

  “Faitremonté.”

  “Right. Fatermont.”

  “I don’t know.”

  They listened to each other breathe. Mr. White turned the page. There was a dedication. It read:

  I dedicate this shitty book to whoever wants it. It is the first and last goddamn book I will ever write. Sayonara. If anybody needs me, I will be in the weight room getting jacked. Fuck off.

  Mr. Nightranger made a face. “That’s no way to act. What kind of dedication is that?”

  “I don’t know.” Mr. White turned the page, paused, and turned the page again. He continued in this fashion until he reached PAGE 42 . . .

  The plot unfolded with minimalist efficacy. On each page, a boy stared at the readers—the same boy on the cover of the book—standing straight, arms limp, feet shoulder width apart, sometimes blank-faced, sometimes expressing emotion, but never a surplus of emotion, and always making the readers feel uncomfortable, somehow, implicating them for something they had done or were about to do. There was no writing. No dialogue, no descriptive passages. No exegeses. The boy told the story with his face, his posture.

  He got older. Taller. Mr. Nightranger and Mr. White watched him pass through the awkwardness of puberty and then his jaw sharpened and his limbs filled out and he grew a flimsy goatee and it disappeared and he grew a thick mustache and it disappeared and then Mr. Nightranger looked back and forth between the book and Mr. White and the book and Mr. White and so on and wild-eyed he said:

  “It’s you.”

  Turning the pages with increasing urgency, Mr. White said, “It’s me.”

  On PAGE 42, Mr. White began to metamorphose into a city . . .

  The scene slipped into slow motion as Mr. Nightranger produced a weapon. “You’re coming with me,” he said in a deep, languid drawl.

  On PAGE 44, flesh gave way to WOOD-REEDS-PLANKS.

  The walls of the red room broke like pulp. Mr. Nightranger slipped through the jagged interstices.

  On PAGE 46, WOOD-REEDS-PLANKS conquered flesh. Usurpers.

  The walls opened up like vortexes, consuming Mr. Nightranger. One wall after another. He fell into eternity again and again and again.

  On PAGE 49, a city slept beneath a red sun.

  Image of Mr. Nightranger treading the black, vacuous waters of the Outer Limits. He held his breath, placing his thoughts elsewhere. He didn’t fear death. What frightened him was life.

  On PAGE 50, centered: “It was the 666th time he turned into Kyoto.”

  THE 1000TH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO

  EXCERPT FROM THE SLUTTY MINUTES: A NOVEL,

  ALLEGEDLY WRITTEN BY THE KYOTO MAN

  The manuscript for The Slutty Minutes: A Novel was discovered circa 2030 A.D. in an abandoned log cabin on the Cahulawassee River, which originates in Georgia’s Blue Lick Mountains. Approximate date of composition: 1892 A.D. It was composed by hand on a 100-foot roll of indissoluble alkaline papyrus. Harvard antiquarians, archivists, and holy divers claim the papyrus had been manufactured in the year 2189 A.D. and contained faint traces of Martian soil.

  The following excerpt, “One Minute Before Dusk,” constitutes the seventeenth of 306 chapters in The Slutty Minutes: A Novel. It is featured here with the permission of ASPRAEN (Amerikan Society for the Preservation of Recorded Acts of Evil Nihilism).

  SEVENTEEN

  One Minute Before Dusk

  “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a VERY good movie,” said Gregory Farnswürth, eyes crazed with purpose. “It’s a Jimmy Stewart movie. I highly recommend it. You should see it. My church buddies and I just watched it the other day. Everybody liked it.”

  Ferdinand stared into space. “I’ve seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” he replied vacantly. “It was atrocious. One of the stupidest films I’ve ever watched. Lackluster. Plodding. Stupid. Jimmy Stewart is a douchebag. A bad actor with bad hair and a pedophilic accent. The man speaks with his teeth, not his tongue. Asshole. Cunt.”

  Taken aback, Gregory took a few moments to collect his wits. He had not expected such a brash and honest response. It was as if he had been hit in the chest with a rubber mallet. He felt hurt, violated. Confused. “You didn’t like the movie?”

  Ferdinand passed a blade across Gregory’s throat, severing the trachea and jugulars. Blood and mucous flowed down his sternum into his lap. Ambivalent, Gregory observed the gore, then turned his attention to Ferdinand. Before dying his mind wandered through a fresh world of morning. The sun peeked over a great willow tree on a golf course, showering his face with warmth.

  Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow, tomorrow . . .

  [With the exception of several flowery Rousseauesque passages, all of them disposable and in some instances abortive, the next 1509 words are unreadable, blotted with ink and, according to paleographic studies, tears and urine.]

  . . . slut. She admitted it, too, after a share of unjust coaxing. And yet he didn’t know how to negotiate this young lady’s prehensile aggression. She hurled herself against the biological repercussion, ordered him to annul her, but as he adjusted the yoke, she distracted herself with postsynaptic alterity, etching slapdash glyphs into her turbocharged haecceity, and then she sacrificed herself to the dogpoets, dispensing with crotchwear and write-offs and qualia, and she demanded that he invalidate her, and when he adjusted the yoke a second time, she objectified him via references to the phalanges and the herpetologists and capricious focal adhesion, and she went on to emasculate him with an impressively diverse and well-seasoned lexicon of irreverence. Bitch. It was an unwarranted assault. He concluded that the human condition is at its worst in the delirium of machinic congress, even if congress isn’t in session. The walls of civility fall away and we shit on etiquette, molesting our animal cores like anchoring fibrils. Performativity accompanies the locomotion.

  From this point of departure, the would-be blacksmiths oscillated back and forth: one moment they exchanged tender apologies and compliments, the next they engaged in hot scatological martyrdoms. All orifices for themselves. She drifted into an ecstasy that transcended simple body-mindscreen pleasure, imagining a kind of galactic interpellation of her testimonial into the rotten mouths of scar gardens.

  “I love you,” he whispered. “I want to marry you. I want to spend my life with you and grow old together.”

  She made a face. “Grow old?” She made another face. “To grow old is to grow mold. There’s nothing good about it, whether you do it alone, or among friends, or among humanity. I will always be young.” She choked to death on a testimonial. “Now I am dead,” were her dying words. Her breasts deflated and flopped into her armpits. Her lips twitched and wilted into an obscene denovation.

  Wrinkled flower petals corkscrewed to the floor and congealed into a puddle of wet shit.

  Ah, the slutty minutes . . .

  He awoke, alone, supine, a bead of ejaculate hardened in his navel. Sunlight passed through a kinked blind. He winced, rolled over. Fell back asleep. Dreamt of forgotten memories, of equatorial humidity and Third World
misery. Awoke, feeling refreshed. He stared at his forearm. The hair was getting longer and would have to be sheared. He wished he were different. A different person. With different desires, goals. “Dreams.” It made him mad, this disability, this failure in his character for future change. He crawled out of bed. It was nearly dusk. He shuffled into the kitchen. Looked around, uncertain of his objective. He shuffled back to the bedroom and into the bathroom. He removed the ejaculate from his navel and dropped it in the sink and it clicked against the porcelain like a marble and disappeared into the drain. Stepping into the shower, he turned on a radio. The voice of Travis Manderbean said: “—sound and fury, signifying everything. Make no mistake, folks. When everything is signified, apocalypse ensues. The question is what kind of apocalypse. One in which a man named Ferdinand gazes at the dead rodents spread across the lawn? Or one that involves the junk props of the science fiction genre, a panoply of tentacled aliens, alternate histories, scheming androids, and gee-whiz hi-tech novums gone awry? Either way, the nuclear family will suffer. As in The Parent Trap. As in The Sound of Music, only in the end, the Nazis win, and the Von Trapps are hurled into a pit of fire. Recall Where the Red Fern Grows. The coonhounds die and are buried—that’s life. If only every community would manufacture lifescapes that captured the evanescence of all things. This is the problem with humanity, dead or alive. The inoperable community. The fetid Norseman on the hilltop whose balls have gone unscrubbed for centuries. I am not trying to confuse you. I am merely the voice of representation in troubled times. Times have always been troubled. It doesn’t get any better. And yet utopia is not out of reach. This is Travis Manderbean. My real name is Travis Manderbean. Either I exist as a figment of one man’s imagination, or I am a voice that echoes across the hills and valleys of every man and woman’s auditory canal. Avoid stenosis; when the canals close, there’s no going back. I own an original Picasso sketch called “Pour Roby.” It is quite simple—chickenscratch, really. I suspect the artist produced it in a matter of seconds, perhaps while eating a poached egg for breakfast, or piddling around the bagno. In 1960, the sketch is worth 400 dollars. In 3060, it is worth one billion dollars. I will sell it to the tenth caller for this latter figure. If you are from the year 5070, you may just obtain the bargain of your life. This is Travis Manderbean. And now we return to the hyperkinetic gorefest—”

  He stepped out of the shower and unplugged the radio. Drying off, sadness eclipsed madness. He knew he would always be the same. Neurons fired; terminal signals flowed down the snarl of wires. The sound of transformation wasn’t meant for his ears. It fled across the crystal waters like the caw of an albatross.

  THE 1001 ST TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO

  HYPERKINETIC GOREFEST

  A red sun blooms onto the white screen of sky / at the beginning of the making of amerikans g. stein inscribes “once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard / ‘stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last / ‘stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree’” / thus she commences an attack on patriarchy and arboreality and goodoldboy networks of desire / the experience of reading this sycophantic book approaches soul murder / zeitgeists prefer the first stanza of “lunar baedeker” in which m. loy inscribes “a silver Lucifer / serves / cocaine in cornucopia” / notwithstanding that latter crag of alliteration, an always-already deranged slight of language / flashforward to the first words of the artificial kid / b. sterling inscribes “reverie shines, the planet’s edge lined in luminous atmospheric haze, her broad, shallow seas sparkling, her big coral-atoll continents brown and green and white through rifts in scattered clouds” / a more authentic techné of text-subject conversion / and now we return to the hyperkinetic gorefest / timecrash timecrash timecrash timecrash zoneshift / shogun assassin (a.k.a. kozure okami) is an ultraviolent jidaigeki film tailormade for the Amerikan marketplace / released in 1980 / artisans of the samurai filmind regard it as a classic / it plumbs the transcendental depths and uncovers the bottom nature of evil chi and sckikungfi ethics / one should not possess (and be dis/possessed by) the audacity to inscribe a terminal paragraph (à la dostoevsky) / dostoevsky stands on the crenellated apex of the loftiest turret in debtors’ prison / the author’s silhouette looms like a Biblical plague above a flatland of stripmalls / of martial arts studios / of coffee shops / of oil quickchange stations / this is the future / the way of the future / and now we return to the hyperkinetic gorefest / kyoto is a city that lives in a van down by the river / i.e. a list of important daikaiju monsters incl. biollante (transforming plant monster) gezorah (giant alien-possessed cuttlefish) hedorah (pollution-spawned monster) spacegodzilla (mutated godzilla clone) dagora (carbon-consuming space monster) monster x (mysterious alien monster) / i.e. there is more to life than daikaiju and vicissitudes of flesh and edifice / timecrash zoneshift timecrash / a mantra rattles down the hallways of the white motel / THE SKY THE SURF THE WIND IN MY HAIR / THE SKY THE SURF THE WIND IN MY HAIR / christ if my love were in my arms and I in my bed again / and now we return to the hyperkinetic gorefest / infodump or thy piles / the war had been fought by stick figures controlled from remote bird nests / it lasted for fifty years / in its wake urbanity disappeared / they tried to rebuild the cities but every time they imprinted a skyline onto the horizon it imploded and the earth swallowed the superstructure and the memory of creationism / time passed / eventually the humans that remained on earth forgot how to build things / etc. / the aforementioned legend belongs to a secondary character named ira überstein and he loves travis manderbean / (they might be the same prestidigitator) / there’s another secondary character who drags around a bench everywhere he goes because he’s afraid to sit down on any inanimate object but the bench / however the central question regarding the main character and primary textual instrument remains / not only why he transforms into a city / why the city of kyoto japan / the answer to this question issues from the loudspeakers in the rafters of the pole barn / the answer reminisces a gramophone recording disrupted by eerie scratches skips blips / the answer succumbs to a war between sentient metropoli (à la clash of the titans vis-à-vis molting cities instead of mythological superhumans and gods and beasts) / antennas cross like swords / leaning towers collide / chunks of asphalt catapult across the sky in broad arcs and rubble bleeds into the gutters / and now we return to the hyperkinetic gorefest / in the philosophy of time travel r. sparrow inscribes “when a tangent universe occurs those living nearest to the vortex will find themselves at the epicenter of a dangerous new world” / and later r. sparrow inscribes “the manipulated living are often the close friends and neighbors of the living receiver they are prone to irrational bizarre and often violent behavior this is the unfortunate result of their task which is to assist the living receiver in returning the artifact to the primary universe the manipulated living will do anything to save themselves from oblivion” / truer words never spoken-stolen / this is not a movie / this is what happens when talking heads stop dreaming and reality becomes ubiquity / the kyoto man becomes an outréman and peregrinates from lifescape to lifescape ravaging the postapocalyptic mythemes épistèmes metonymies / tcz / temporal fashion catastrophe / long tears in the stockingfabric of the spacetime continuum render different spontaneous fashion statements and architectures all imploding and collapsing into one another / everybody hallucinates an alien-capitalist takeover from a control booth in the attic of the organic theater / the manuscript dies / fiction devolves into fact / alpha into omega / blankety blank / the rape of narrative etiquette / galactic anus of bad storytelling / ur-constructedness / destined to weird gradients / the retro-(re)creation of history / an ultraviolent affair / a hyperkinetic gorefest / timecrash timecrash / sickness jaundice metro-meta-fictional-morphosis / it is the 1001st time he turns into kyoto / and in the end everybody is born and lives and dies and is forgotten / there is only a zero degree of meaning / there is only __________ / there is only the sky the surf the wind in my hair . . .

  THE 3000TH TIME I TURNED
INTO KYOTO

  DIAGNOSTIC PROSE

  The sun had not yet risen on the mindscreen. It was a good mindscreen, and tasteful. The sea bled into the sky, but not to an estranging degree, and certainly not to a degree that the mindscreen offset the governing atmosphere and ambience of the restaurant.

  His head resounded like a conch. One after another, waves broke upon the shore.

  The. The.

  On an angular dais . . . the skeleton of Steve McQueen. Not the real one. A Bullitt jacket hung from the shoulderbones. Tealights illuminated the skull sockets, the ribcage, the pelvis. Postmortem candelabra.

  Otherwise the restaurant was conservatively decorated. Prosaic gaga aesthetics. A professional Händler von Manierismus on the farside of the restaurant tried to outshine the skeleton with intimidating tactics, but he was a freelance artist, uncontracted, and the sous-chefs chased him out of the establishment with great paring knives.

  Deflation.

  He couldn’t keep his eyes off the skeleton. He often felt like Steve McQueen. In Bullitt.

  Timecrash.

  Everything changed. Everything but selfhood. Which was fluid, unfixed. Schizossified. A Body without Meaning (BwM).

  —I think the timecrashes have stopped, he said. The woman narrowed heavily mascaraed eyes and took a deep breath, augmenting the line of her cleavage.

  —Timecrash, she murmured. T-I-M-E-K-R-A-S-H-H-H.

  —Indeed.