THE 9000TH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
CRITERION PROSE
Scikungfi fight. In the technologized vein of Antonio Inoki vs. Mohammed Ali. In the future. Inoki damages Ali’s legs as Ali fails to deflect the rapidfire kicks . . .
Jiendo: Dr. Weißerwal succumbed to “Ishmael,” the patient. The doktor had never lost a match except to the sensei that trained him. He was a born fighter, a born winner.
After producing several compound fractures in his legbones, “Ishmael” shattered Dr. Weißerwal’s windpipe and almost killed him. Paramedics couldn’t fully restore him and he had to be put on life support.
During the operation, “Ishmael” showered and gave himself a manicure, pushing back cuticles with the tip of a martini stirrer . . .
“Ishmael” sat on the edge of a chaise. Two orderlies wheeled Dr. Weißerwal into the office on a rollaway bed. He spoke through an electrolarynx taped to his neck.
“Let’s talk about your masculinity,” fizzled Dr. Weißerwal.
“No need,” replied “Ishmael.” “You’ll scarcely meet a man more masculine than me.”
“All right. Let’s talk about your traumatic kernels.”
“My kernels are like ball bearings—smooth and round, mirrored and shining, innocent and untouched. They know no trauma.”
“All right. Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about . . . coitus?”
“I haven’t engaged in coitus for years. I’d be challenged to describe the act of coitus. I might go so far as to argue that the act of coitus is a government conspiracy created to disenfranchise the masses. It’s a myth. It’s a legend.”
“Your parents?”
“Dead. Always dead.”
“Your job? What is it you do for a living?”
“This and that.”
“And do you have any hobbies? What do you do in your spare time?”
“This and that. This and that.”
“All right then. What about suicide? We’ve never talked about suicide. Have you ever wanted to kill yourself?”
“I once had a bad 24-hour flu. I threw up every fifteen minutes. After the thirtieth time I threw up, I remember wishing that I were dead. I didn’t want to kill myself. But I wanted to be dead.”
“Ah.”
“Ishmael” stood, walked over to the doktor and mopped off his brow with a cold, moist sponge.
“That feels good,” said Dr. Weißerwal. “I appreciate it.”
“Here’s a pill. Take this.”
“Thank you.” Glp.
“My turn.” Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. Glp. “Ahh.”
Dr. Weißerwal said, “That’s better.”
“Yes,” “Ishmael” agreed. “Much better.”
“What were we talking about?”
“My problem.”
“Yes. What is your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem.”
“I see. Why are you here, then?”
“Because we’ve lost all sense of history. We envision the past at whim, not as it was, but as we want it to be, or as we think it was, not how it actually was, and is, and will be. And the loss of history authorizes a negation of the future. It began with the mediatization of reality and the flesh, this loss. Pop culture, etc. Stupid teenaged assholes prancing across a stage. Shitforbrained audiences. Epidemic redneckery. Then the spectacle became the real. Coupled with the slow rape of the natural world?” “Ishmael” shrugged.
Dr. Weißerwal’s breathing machine whirred. “That’s not your problem. That’s whitewash. History at large doesn’t matter vis-à-vis your subjective complications. The only history that really matters is the history of your selfhood. Period.”
“The history of my selfhood is produced by my interactions with other selfhoods all of which are produced by their own histories and their own senses of history at large. Fuck you.”
The doktor remained silent for a long time. At last he said, “Soon I will die. You won’t have anybody to talk to. What will you do then, ‘Ishmael’?”
“I’ll be all right. I’m indestructible now. I can tear my arm off and it grows back. I can do anything. And I’m famous. I’m a celebrity. Everybody knows my name.”
The breathing machine stopped. “Damn this thing,” wheezed Dr. Weißerwal. “Can you fix this damned thing?”
“I wish I could. I’ll see if there’s a technician in the hallway.”
“I would very much like that. A technician would be useful at this juncture.”
“I have to go.” He walked to the door.
“When you have to go . . . you have to go.”
“Thanks for all your help.” He put his hand on the doorknob.
“I’m glad I could help.”
“You’re a good therapist. The best.” He turned the doorknob.
“Thera. Pist. The . . . best.”
He paused. He listened to the doktor’s sterterous breaths. He wouldn’t last much longer. Maybe only a few seconds.
“I hurt. Inside,” said “Ishmael.”
“I know. Y-you’ll be . . . ok.”
“Goodbye, Dr. Weißerwal.” He opened the door.
“Goodbye. Goodbye . . . sir.”
“Call me ‘Ishmael.’” He walked through the door.
“Y-y-y . . . yes . . . ‘Ish-ma-el.’ ‘Ish . . .’”
He closed the door behind him.
THE 9500 TH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
CORMAC MCCARTHY PROSE
The daikaiju stood and put one leg forward and the sky behind him turned different shades of orange like a patchwork of autumn leaves. The city beneath him, beyond him. Dreamscape. He loomed over the world naked and staring at the atmosphere. Creosote skin. Something pulsed within the obscure silhouette of his body. Wild spirals and the engines of night. His fingers were spread apart. He reached forward with one arm and bent his left leg, flexing the calf muscle, to maintain balance when the metromorphosis began and bright yellow flames exploded from his palm, his shoulders, his thighs. The muscles in his chest and groin burned like embers. Triangulation of hearts. Something else. He didn’t fight it. The steeple of a pagoda erupted from his left shoulderblade and complemented the pagoda beneath him rising out of the trees. Gossamer skyscraper in the remote distance. There wasn’t anything in his face. A blank, black screen. Vague impression of an ocular cavity. All of this was frozen in time and above the daikaiju in sharp white letters hung the signature of his identity and beneath him the author of his pain.
THE 10001 ST TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
CRITERION PROSE
A pale red sun stained the white screen of sky. Beneath the sun—vastness . . .
The outréman lay unconscious for hours as earthsalt sifted across his febrile, naked body. When he awoke, he felt good. Refreshed.
He stood.
Hypotension. Images of ultraviolence flitted across the mindscreen. Mnemonic remnants. He witnessed the demolition of infinite bodies sliced in half from skull to coccyx, brains and blood and organs erupting in an apocryphal fête.
Strands of viscera.
A Molotov cocktail struck a bystander in the face. Smash. Blam. The bystander’s skin dribbled from the screaming bone.
Neosporin.
The wind crossed the brown land. He didn’t hear it but he felt it and it drew him out of the reverie.
It was the violet hour.
The world was flat. The world had been flattened. As if a biblical steamroller had rolled across the landscape, leveling everything in its path—trees, mountains, men—all of it pulverized and spread across the planet like tarmac. Like a glacier. A scorched glacier. It went on and on and on. Cracks extended in terminal spokes from the outréman’s feet and widened into gullies, ditches, canali. Faraway the ruptured topography yawned into deep canyons that no one would ever see or experience or fathom.
What would he do now?
Start over. Begin again. Heit
an. Every day is a new day, every breath a new breath. And yet beginnings always come to an end. Jiendo. The end.
He closed his eyes.
Mnemonic turbines. The solodex . . . rotors spun like a roulette wheel . . .
He recalled . . . his mother. It was dark and he was scared. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran her fingers over the skin of his face. “This is the life force,” she whispered. “It protects you. It energizes you. It flows from your core into eternity. Can you feel it? Don’t worry, honey. Childhood is a dream. Sometimes it’s a good dream and sometimes it’s a bad one. I know you’ll wake up. I have confidence in you. Feel the life force. Someday you’ll grow up. Someday you’ll set the world on fire. You are capable. You are talented. You can do whatever you want to do. The life force says so.” She stroked his arms and his chest and then his face again. He listened to her voice. He felt the wind. “The wind.” “Her voice.” The dirt. “Her voice.” Earth. Space. A passageway. “Her voice, her voice.” April. Beneath the dry thunder. “A way a lone a last a loved along the.” Mother. Mommy.
A kiss goodnight.
THE NTH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
CRITERION PROSE
Infodump, or, Thy Piles
With the exception of temple podia, castle foundations, pagodas, and analogous structures, Japanese architecture elides stone in favor of wood, tendered and cured with varying degrees of skill, with screens made of paper, mats made of straw, walls made of plaster and clay, and roofs made of reeds and wooden shingles or planks or tile. This elision differentiates it from Western architecture more than any other feature. The future unravels in infinite platitudes and the future of Kyoto is no exception. Soon it will be like all of the others, alone and singular, rendering the city Everything. Or it will become a simple Man of the Crowd distinguished by ferroconcrete streets and spidersteel towers. Nobody will know who (re)constructed it. Nobody leaves their conapts. No reason. The Grocery Store comes to them.
The city glints like tinfoil beneath the purple night sky. A rainbow arches out of Sector Z into an obsidian cloud. Poisonous black vapors curl from the mouths of tall, thin, mirror-plated chimneys and smokestacks. Nobody has lived here for years. Centuries. Nobody has ever lived here. And yet the city was born, and it has continued to evolve.
Long ago, it existed purely as glass, every countertop, every wall, every building a paradigm of geometric efficiency and simplicity, a congress of inflexible straight lines. Years later, glass fell into a stupor and the city converted to sheer brownstone, its bulwarks and fortifications solid brick. In some areas buildings lay in ruins while down the block stood cliffs of edifice in which elevators rose and fell without the slightest turbulence. They were soon replaced—i.e., “strangled”—by great “anthills” or “fungus chimneys” that stood over two miles high. These well-ventilated eco-structures housed insects and human beings with identical efficacy. Acceleration of technicity . . . a tangle of slidewalks and superhighways and slatstreets draped over the rooftops, festooned among the empty hard spaces . . . This led to a moment during which the city flickered between realistic construction and cartoon animétion. And then the Romantic period: how the overflowing streets unfolded into a ballast of itinerant vehicles and vulgar forms of houses and pavement that denied the still mountains. And then the Neuromantic period: flickering corporate arcologies, shoals of white Styrofoam, towering hologram logos, vidbuildings on which Coca-Cola geishas invited thirsty consumers to drink themselves into carbonated oblivion. Glowglobes illuminated the night in a vast lattice of virtual fire. The shadows of noospheric flâneurs paraded across the arcade walls and threatened to blackout the various wares for sale beyond the store windows. Exegetical cragmentation. Bonsai trees pushed through cracks in the sidewalks, unleashing their buds, crawling up and down the scaffolding of ancient fortresses. The bounty hunters are dead. The mad scientists are dead. The shitty parents are dead. Gone. Bleached ribs of prehistoric, towering leviathans. Churchspires expanded and climbed from the bones like yeast. Bituminous stonework gleamed in the rain. As the rivers boiled over, as the gardens spit pinecones and wasp husks, intricate railways inflated on the body of the city like varicose veins, culminating in a great aortic pulse. Row-houses. Minka. In this axonometric diagram, a prefecture comes to life, corpuscles gushing into the excavation and producing a fine and massive erection. The features: central square ceiling, hidden rafters, cantilevers, bottle-shaped struts, shrimplike rainbow beams, carved plinths, an altar, hisashi, raigobashira, and the core. Semiotic poltergeists hemorrhaged from the core and spiraled outwards until the dogged conurbation bore a hauntology incited by its own crackedopen selfhood. There is nothing worse than selfhood gone awry. The litany of Ego has no boundaries; it clambers up and down, up and down, up and down the xylophone at its leisure and only sleeps when it passes out from drink and fatigue. Unfortunately Ego always awakens.
Later, after the sun imploded, the shadow of a Slender Man, arms outstretched, head thrown back, lingered in the doorway. I could almost feel myself casting it.
In the end . . . but there is no end. The cityscape bucks and swerves like an old rollercoaster ride, through subterranean tunnels and across the sky, until it encrusts the world like an exoskeleton, squeezing magma from the peachpit. Lava erupts into space in obscene bursts . . . The world is not enough. Scotch is not enuff, altho it shud be . . . Especially gud scotch. Oban. Isle of Skye. But even rail scotch shud do. It dont . . . The only option is dissemination. The only option is to overcome the self. The demonic limits of the self. To wield the illimitable strength of origin, of futurity . . . I was a boy and now I am a man. I am a man and now I am a monster. But the drugs have worn off and now I can experience the nicotine. I have been deceiving my dopamine receptors. Now I am back to normal.
Normal is the stuff of legend.
THE LAST TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
CRITERION PROSE
Two figures collided on the outskirts of an Unreal City. It was dawn. Brown fog loomed over the cold grass. Corpses littered the outréscape, decaying in a timelapse of molten flesh.
The figures enacted signature maneuvers and singular resilience in the wake of token suckerpunches. When the fight was over, they faced one another and shook hands like gentlemen.
“Tell me everything,” said one man. “Be honest.”
“I will,” said the other man. “I always tell the truth. This is how it began . . . I fell in love with a woman. Her name was Sasha Crack. We were only nineteen. We loved each other and then we fell apart. I grew older. Then, last week, or last month, or thereabouts, I saw her again. It had been over forty years. We talked about the old days. I asked Sasha if she remembered the first time I kissed her. She didn’t. She asked me if I remembered the first time I kissed her. I couldn’t. We began to fight. We fell apart again . . . It was as if that first kiss had never happened. And it didn’t happen. When memory fails, history evaporates. Signification dies; the monkey loses its Kong. A terrifying lack. I want that kiss back in my head. Nostalgia for nostalgia—it wounds me. Defines me. My whole life stems from an nth degree of meaning. All this happened in the caves of steel. No. The caves of ice. Yes. My eyes flashed, my hair floated in the maelstrom. I drank the milk of paradise from the teat of a dead goat. I—”
“Wait,” interrupted the first man. “I think I hear something. Listen . . . Do you hear it?”
With great difficulty, the other man broke the iron grip of his ego. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Listen.” He pointed.
“I don’t hear anything. What is it?”
The man lowered his arm. “The sound of transformation.”
There was a long, iconic pause.
Then, at last:
“I hear it,” said the other man. “I can hear it now.”
In the distance—the sky, the surf, the wind in my hair . . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
D. Harlan Wilson is an award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist, short story write
r, literary critic, editor, and English prof. He is www.thekyotoman.com.
The Kyoto Man (The SciKungFi Trilogy) Page 11
