“You don’t know that. People change. One day they are incapable of one thing. The next day they can do anything.”
“People don’t change. They think they do, but they don’t.”
Dr. Fourmyle dropped the medallion in the drawer. “All right. Let’s return to your date. Let’s talk about this woman you dispatched. No. Let’s broaden our scope. Let’s talk about why you’ve never been married. You’re not a young man.”
“How do you know I’ve never been married? Maybe I have. Maybe I’m married now. With kids.”
“You’re not married. You don’t have children.” The doktor tapped a finger against his skull and pointed at his groin.
“Geoff” shrugged. “Whatever. I don’t know. A wife? Kids? I can’t even take care of myself . . . I’m a serial killer.”
“Hm.”
“Fuck you.”
“According to Herr Freud, males strive for autonomy with their mother. Failure to obtain autonomy culminates in rage. Hence serial killing. Hence we must address the following issue: Mother.”
“Fuck you.”
“Did she neglect you? Or did she pay too much attention to you? There are only two options.”
Something loud passed by outside a window. A helicopter. Perhaps a small plane that had flown too close to the building.
The roar of machinery came and went.
“Mother contracted Alzheimer’s disease when I was three years old,” said “Geoff.” “By the time I turned four, she had forgotten who I was. It was very hard for me. Then, when I was six, Mother got better—the Alzheimer’s went away. It came back again when I was eleven, though. Then it went away, and then it came back, and then it went away, and then it came back. Fuck me. She kept forgetting and remembering me. I was confused. Then she died.”
“Neglect, then. And your father?”
“He died. Everybody’s dead. I killed them all.”
“Hm.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m going to prescribe you a dose of __________. Immediately. It will help.” Dr. Fourmyle dialed the pharmacy. Seconds later, a thin metal canister emerged from a chute in the wall and rolled across his desk. He secured the canister, opened it, and dumped out a pill bottle. He gave it to “Geoff,” who opened the pill bottle and swallowed the contents. Dr. Fourmyle poured a small glass of water and gave it to “Geoff.” He drank it.
They waited.
“That helped,” said “Geoff.”
“I told you it would.”
“What was that?”
“Druuugs.”
“Geoff” reclined on the chaise. He turned onto his side and curled up his legs. “I don’t know how people negotiate timecrashes and zoneshifts. With or without medication. Time is displaced in the mind at any given moment. Mnemonically, I mean. On the mindscreen, we’re always reaching back into the swill of memory and imagining potential futures. What happens when we actually, physically move through time? Psyche and the Body are terminally fused. Schized. We all go crazy.”
“If everybody is crazy, there is no crazy. There is only normal.”
“Geoff” turned onto his other side. “The world becomes more science fictionalized every day. The present moment has teeth; it devours endless potential futures. The same goes for the past. We experience endless waves of medievalization. And more. I once found myself wandering across the vastness of Pangea like Clint Eastwood in a Spaghetti western, fighting off dinosaurs, gunslingers and technocapitalists in equal measure. Space elevators loomed overhead. I have seen the moon explode and grow back like a cyst on the skin of the sky. I have seen the human pipe bomb at its most explosive—body parts toppled into the abyss spurting gore from thrashing fleshtubes. I have stood on the lip of a black hole and dared the animal to suck me into oblivion. I shared a tepid pint of beer with Charles Dickens in a pub in Soho. He told me he was Jack the Ripper. Windmills attacked me like Nephilim and I pulverized their menacing projections with a bangsword. I was a teenage werewolf. I directed films and orchestras and soldiers into battle. Then I invented celluloid and the French horn and the art of war. Bronx cheers followed me like bloodhounds desperate for their master’s affection. Extraterrestrial homunculi abducted and probed me. I killed them. Pharaohs penetrated me. I killed them. Troglodytes drew pictures of me on cave walls. I tolerated them. I robbed a bank with my index finger and thumb. I incited a stellar evolution. I fucked everyone and everything, everywhere, in the ass. I galvanized my soul, proving its immunity to existence. There is no end to my fearsome ubiquity. The future, the past. They constantly implode into the present, into a central point . . . I am that central point. I am the present. I am . . .”
As “Geoff” continued, Dr. Fourmyle called in another prescription . . .
Glp.
“And will you dispatch me at the end of this session?” inquired the doktor after a long, satisfying pause. “Will you transform into the monster and render me your victim yet again? One shot and that’s the end of the vulture. Ein Schuß und der Geier ist erledigt.”
“I don’t know what will happen,” said “Geoff.” “I don’t feel well. I know that.”
“Every day is a new day. Tomorrow you may feel better.”
“Geoff” closed his fingers into a fist and studied the vascularity of his forearm. A rhizome of veins inflated and came to life. He flexed and reflexed his forearm until it seemed as if the veins might burst.
It was the 3001st time he turned into Kyoto.
THE 4000TH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
CRITERION PROSE
“And so it begins,” thunders a voice from beyond the Curve.
Cameras equipped with intervelometer devices produce timelapse effekts. The shutter fires at exacting intervals and characters appear to move in uncanny bursts of flashtime . . .
A spaceman floats beyond the ninth circle of the Martian atmosphere. He wears a bloodred spacesuit, tight against the skin, and a disproportionate bubble helmet. A seminal strand of liquid oxygen leaks from a crack in his jetpack.
Across the vacuous ocean, we hear the faint sound of MTV’s first promotional segment, guitars blasting as spacemen erect an animated Technicolor flag on the surface of the ghostwhite moon.
Stark pause.
The spaceman erupts into a city. Tendrils of architecture infect the void . . . Optic pandemonium. Flashing strobes. Volcanic rumble as the city expands, unfolds, clanks and locks into place . . .
Pan out 200,000 miles.
Cast in silhouette, the city floats across the red eye of Mars like an amorphous pupil. No noise. No music.
The city is empty. Always empty . . .
A spaceman in a jetpack appears as if from a covert wormhole. He isn’t wearing a spacesuit. He looks like Johnny Cash—black hair, black leather jacket, black cowboy shirt, black jeans, black boots. Instead of a guitar he carries a tremendous, fiery Buster sword.
His name is Cyrano Nightranger.
He floats across the void towards the city.
Within minutes, they engage in battle. Nightranger and the city trade blow after blow against crescendos of excited, synthesized trumpets. Nightranger is wounded, rallies. The city is wounded, rallies. Back and forth they hack at one another, losing flesh and blood and wood and oil, until Nightranger finally succumbs to the Inevitable and the void receives his severed limbs and neon entrails . . .
“Crap!” rasped Daryl. Weakly, he hammered the joystick against a console.
Freddy smiled a rotten smile. “I win again,” he said. “You can’t beat me.”
Daryl exercised his fingers. They were yellow and bony and liverspotted with brittle, flaking nails. They ached so much more when he and Freddy weren’t playing the game. He said, “Nightranger did it in real life. I can do it here.”
Freddy’s laugh flattened into a meek cough. “That’s a legend,” he wheezed. “Nightranger never killed the city. This is, like, the 4000th time I’ve beat you. You’re not gonna beat me. It can’t happen.”
“There’s always a loophole.”
The hovel in which they had taken refuge was on the verge of collapse. The slightest wind produced long, loud creaks, and whenever an escape shuttle flew overhead, the walls came apart a little more, flooding the hideout with dust and asbestos. Daryl and Freddy were both thoroughly emaciated, the knobs of their spines forming an obscene curve beneath tattered, bloodstained shirts. They dryheaved regularly, as if garroted, abdominal muscles convulsing like strangled tongues. Freddy had an open sore on his neck that leaked pus and blood with slow resolution. The hovel might have been a kitchen once, cluttered with the twisted, blackened remnants of appliances from ceiling to floor. The only thing that worked was the gaming system . . .
INFODUMP, OR, THY PILES
. . . which the boys protected with their lives, like a mother protects her young. On the cusp of global apocalypse, they had decided not to leave earth. Their parents were dead. Their siblings and friends were dead. They were too far in the outrézone to get out anyway.
Everything had been trodden and razed, as if by some galactic steamroller. Vestiges of life persisted in the aftermath. There were three kinds: predators, prey, and men with resources. The latter camp had fled; now they sailed across space and time towards the Unknown. That left the others. The meateaters. The meat.
The boys had hotwired an Atari 5200 to a Nintendo Vorga. They had been playing The Kyoto Man for days. How many days they didn’t know, but they knew they had not slept since the last holocaust. Nor had they eaten. Only a few dogpoets lingered in the outrézone. Either the dogpoets would find and dispatch Freddy and Daryl, or they would die playing a video game that they prized more than life itself.
Either way, the boys would die like men.
“Again,” said Daryl, caressing the joystick. He dryheaved and flushed purple.
Grimly, Freddy turned to the mindscreen, a bubble of bloody pus escaping the lesion in his neck. “And so it begins . . .”
THE 5000 TH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
ASTOUNDING STORY
Dr. Josef Mengele was doing something bad. Voiceman Travis Manderbean stood nearby and narrated the event.
“He’s really gone too far this time, folks,” said Manderbean. He wore a cheap yellow blazer and held a 1950s rockabilly microphone to his lips. “How he flouts convention. How he cracks open the bad eggs. I daresay no man has bore witness to such a shocking carnival of subjugation. Truly this hatemonger is the embodiment of unchecked human misery. My name is Travis Manderbean.”
Daylight fell on the slave plantation. There was a cottonfield to the left, and a cornfield to the right, and bright green grass beneath their feet, and behind them rose the towering white pillars of the landowner’s mansion. Nobody remembered how or when they had arrived at the plantation. They might have been there all along.
Dr. Mengele had adopted the role of slavemaster. His hair was disheveled and cropped in a considered, négligé style with a long ear-to-ear curl that fell over the top of the head. A cocked-brimmed hat lay on the grass at his feet. He had on white breeches, a red muslin neckerchief, and a brown double-breasted riding coat with a high collar and broad lapels. Striped silk stockings terminated in buckled black shoes. In one hand he held a flexible, razorsharp sword, in the other a leather bullwhip, weapons he only put aside for seconds at a time so that he could light fresh cigarettes. Marlboros.
Dr. Mengele spoke the twangy, elastic American English of a third generation Southerner. The objects of his aggression, contrary to the Laws of Assumption, were not African slaves, but giant blobs of tissue, sallow and veined and amorphous, like larvae. Blurred eyeholes and contorted mouths materialized in the head region and emitted a dense fog that poured across the lawn. The creatures twitched fiercely when they were whipped, and when they were stabbed, they leaked a diseased, mustard-colored soot. They refused to expire. Dr. Mengele had even lopped one in half, with no small effort, as if chopping a fallen tree, cartoon entrails and gristle spattering his face and erupting into the sky, but the halves became their own entities, prompting the doktor to discipline and punish them with more resolve.
“They scream like grasshoppers,” narrated Manderbean, a crooked smile swinging from his chin like an anchor. “When one hears a grasshopper scream, one doesn’t soon forget it. I repeat: they scream like grasshoppers. And they bleed like leviathans. Once I stripped a whale of its blubber from nose to tail and what I’m witnessing here, ladies and gentlemen, confirms that I was not the victim of mere incantatory desire. Allow me the hairy arm of elaboration. I slayed the whale with a tomahawk. The daemon bore its monstrous head, rising open-mouthed from the hoary depths as if to swallow the firmament, and I leapt from the mainmast, fell the length of the Terminal Tower, and buried the hatchet in its blowhole. There was a great struggle during which the goliath and I wrestled like titans, turning and turning in the widening gyre. I, Travis Manderbean, won the battle. In the aftermath, I tore open the carcass and bathed in spermaceti and blubber—precisely in the fashion of our antagonist, now, here, before me, and before the eyes of the entire ruined world. One needs no cameras to perform on the stage of life. But it appears the mad doktor grows weary. Fatigue is a dirty slut. See how his breathing becomes more erratic. See how his knees threaten to buckle. Soon he will collapse. If only the man had access to a reliable energy drink. But this is history, and like solar whores, we must filch our energy from the sun.”
An out-of-control stagecoach clattered by on unstable wheels. Nobody manned the helm and the Clydesdales had red eyes. The stagecoach was pursued by a group of Spaniards riding vehicles that resembled overturned windmills. Flames roared from exhaust pipes.
Travis Manderbean took a stiff breath. “But what’s this?”
She stepped from the porch of the mansion and moved towards them. Manderbean didn’t question her dubious appearance; he had given up on Time long ago—not to mention Presence, Absence, and Acceptable Flows of Reality. Now he went to great lengths to make light of her, shifting his attention from Dr. Mengele to this being who, thus spake that Zarathustra, “might have once appeared on the book cover of a bodice-ripping romance or a pulp science fiction novel in which masculine bonecrushers defeat terrible adversaries so as to receive the prize of scantily clad ladies bearing preternaturally supersized breasts. I doubletake her glands even as I speak. Somebody has soaped them up with a wet sponge. They sway back and forth like bedtime stories as she moves closer, dripping suds. The nipples are hard and the cleavage is deep. Such elegant red lipstick—prior to this experience I didn’t know that shade of red existed. Without bias, I tell you the substance reposes on her lips like fresh aftershock. This is Travis Manderbean. Note the slit that runs up her skirt and exposes a limber white thigh. The skirt is diaphanous—I observe nimble panties that conceal the shadow of a frozen scream. What wide buttocks. What wild ecstasy. But above all we must concern ourselves with the glands. The glands are the things. Life-sucking, life-giving. No man would not want to hold and possess them. Here they come, folks. Brace yourselves for eternity.”
Dr. Mengele’s agitation spiked as Manderbean continued to ignore his actions and devote his narrational vitality to the “Damsel without a Dulcimer,” as he began to call her. To complicate matters, the plantation was under attack. A battalion of corny-looking, saucer-shaped UFOs had swooped down from the troposphere. They fired precise raybeams at the mansion, blowing holes in its smooth beige siding. Manderbean didn’t waste time documenting the absurdity. “If they are not extra-terrestrials,” he observed, “whence did they come? No matter. I pledge to you that these otherworldly hooligans are mere figments of my collective unconscious, just as everything and everyone are figments of my collective unconscious. The truth hurts. Lies are the price of life.”
Suddenly the woman stood before Manderbean like an apparition. They gazed into one another’s eyes, the hot sun penetrating their skin. “We are gazing into one another’s eyes,” Manderbean said, echoing Eternity, “with the hot sun pene
trating our skin. Perhaps the gaze will culminate in a kiss?” He tossed aside the microphone.
They kissed. Violently. Manderbean grabbed the woman by the elbows and shook her.
. . . the blobs withered.
Infuriated, Dr. Mengele lashed at the blobs with the whip, throwing all of his strength into the chore. Manderbean didn’t break the kiss; he caught the end of the whip just as it snapped, then flicked his wrist and sent a ripple in the opposite direction that kicked the butt of the handle into the underside of Mengele’s chin, and the Nazi’s feet came out from under him. He fell to the ground, struck his head on a rock in the grass, and lost consciousness.
He awoke. Everything was gone. Literally. The landscape. The props. The earth. He stood there . . . No, he didn’t stand . . . He hung there . . . No, he didn’t hang . . . He simply ______ there, which is to say, nowhere, no place. Utopia.
The void was colorless. It looked like this:
Dr. Mengele blinked.
Travis Manderbean pinched the bridge of his nose and removed the smiling faceplate.
It was him.
“You,” said Dr. Mengele.
“Don’t be afraid,” he assured him. “My existence is in perfect harmony with the laws of science.” He gripped Dr. Mengele’s neck and gently strangled him. The doktor struggled to no avail.
“This is the last time,” he whispered.
Dr. Mengele wheezed, “Why’re ya doin’ this to me?”
“You are an antagonist. I am a protagonist. I have killed you on thousands of occasions. This is the last time.”
“P-poisoner of all nations . . . Why me?”
“I have known and killed infinite supervillains, on infinite occasions, in infinite timeframes, spatialities and metaphysical stadiums. You are not special. You are stardust and I am the sun. I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t expect anything from anybody. I have moved beyond the chariot of time, the hammer of reality. This is my universe. Your eyes can’t hit what your hands can’t see.”
The Kyoto Man (The SciKungFi Trilogy) Page 9
