by Andrew Fox
I stare behind me, watching the fading sunlight form a corona around Colossal Elvis’s black curls. “Elvis and Ann-Margret came here in 1963 to film Viva Las Vegas…”
“It’s gone through many expansions since Bugsy Siegel built it. There’s a little statue honoring Siegel, in a courtyard next to a dead rose garden. A memorial to a murdered Jewish gangster… I’m surprised those officiously pious twats from the Graceland Corporation didn’t take a sledgehammer to it when they bought the property.”
The truck comes to a halt next to one of four hotel towers surrounding a central auditorium. None of the buildings appear occupied. The front two towers have some kind of rippling lattice work winding around them. The guards yank me outside. What I thought was decoration is actually the structure of a roller coaster that surrounds two of the towers. The tracks rise and plunge through monumentally scaled scenes from Elvis’s movies: the Bourbon Street honky-tonk from King Creole, the emerald breakers from Blue Hawaii, the massed race cars of Speedway.
The wheels of Trotmann’s chair strike the concrete behind me. “Can you smell the scents of decay? This wasn’t a good investment for Graceland. They sank over two hundred million dollars into this complex just before GD2 steamrollered the economy, and then they were able to keep it open barely more than a decade. It’s been fifteen years since any thrill seekers have taken a spin on Elvis’s Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On roller coaster. Care to go for a ride?”
He’s bluffing. “If it’s been fifteen years since any maintenance was done on this ride, none of the hydraulics will work. Your men can strap me into a car, but it won’t move.”
“Smart boy. But what you can’t see too well in this light is that one of the cars is stopped just before the first big drop. We can get you up to that car through the hotel tower’s windows. One good push could be all it takes to get it rolling. And then you’d have maybe ninety seconds to wonder just where metal fatigue has taken its toll. Will you scream for Elvis to save you as his rusted pelvis breaks away and you are ejected from mangled tracks twenty stories high?”
He squeezes my hand. “But that’s a daytime game. It’s night, the time for adult entertainments.”
The guards pull me toward the security fence that surrounds the towers. One of the MannaSantos men unlocks a gate. The entrance courtyard is lined with dead trees and statues of Elvis: bronze figures, dulled by a green patina, portraying him at every stage from boyhood to his final performing days in Memphis.
We enter the arena. I’m ushered past acres of silent, dusty slot machines, lit only by dim emergency lighting. We climb two sets of unmoving escalators to a third level above the gaming floors; a guard carries Trotmann’s wheelchair, and two of the old man’s followers help him up the steps.
“What casino was complete without a dinner theater?” Trotmann asks. My eyes are stunned by what looks like the entrance to a 1950s-style movie palace. Ribbons of pink and aqua neon, startlingly bright after the dimness of the rest of the complex, coil around the empty box office. The marquee blazes with hundreds of light bulbs that spell out THE VIVA LAS VEGAS EXPERIENCE. “I believe you’ll find the performance quite… nostalgic.”
Inside, the theater looks like a gargantuan cabaret, with dozens of small round tables. The walls are covered with drapes of pink velvet, and the ceiling is lined with what looks to be tufted emerald leather. Oddly, there’s no stage. Except for us, the big room is empty.
Loudspeakers crackle all around me. “So you’ve returned with your playmate and celebrity souvenir, Trotty-Trot,” a voice booms.
Not just any voice — the voice of Hud Walterson. And also Benjamin, who plunged face-down into a cauldron of boiling human fat. Trotmann’s grinning like a cat who swallowed an ostrich. “Some people just won’t stay dead, eh, Shmalzberg?” he says.
“I’m not impressed with your ghosts anymore,” I say, half expecting an enormously corpulent man — or a rubber facsimile — to rise from the floor. “Especially not in a theater that’s probably wired up with a thousand tricks.”
“I’m not a trick, Dr. Shmalzberg,” the amplified voice says. “And I’m not a ghost. Unlike almost everything else that can be experienced in this theater, I am a thing of substance, great substance, and regrettably real. You wish to see my true face? It’s the last thing you will see. But I have much to show you before then. Put the RM on him.”
My two escorts force me into a chair by one of the tables. One of them ties my wrists behind me. Trotmann rolls himself to the table’s edge and presses a button. A tray slides open. He pulls a banded headpiece from the tray and unfolds its spidery arms, then slides it onto my head. The touch of its silver titanium makes my scalp tingle. Nerves all over my body are jumping with anticipation. The spider nesting atop my head isn’t unfamiliar to me. It’s a more sophisticated version of the personal Realité Magique device I used hundreds of times to bring Emily back to me.
My vision grows hazy, as if someone has stretched my optical nerves and twisted them like strands of melting licorice. I wait for the headache… yes, there it is, accompanied by a brief flittering of nausea. Both headache and nausea disappear quickly, much more quickly than I remember. This system is generations beyond the primitive unit I paid to have jury-rigged twenty-five years ago.
My vision suddenly unclouds. The theater still looks like the theater. Only now I see things with unsettling clarity, as if every grain in the green leather on the ceiling is in perfect focus. And the men and women clustered around me all look like Elvis and Ann-Margret. Even Trotmann; although he’s a wizened, octogenarian Elvis.
I hear puffs of compressed air high above my head. Floating near the ceiling, an Elvis blimp, roughly man-sized, slowly navigates in my direction, the propelling puffs of air apparently issuing from its posterior. Its face, bloated round as a trash can lid but still recognizably Elvis, talks to me in the voice of Hud Walterson.
“This theater is a lost treasure,” it says. “Probably the most powerful Realité Magique installation ever constructed in North America. The technology was outlawed soon thereafter for health reasons — just like most pleasurable vices have been.”
The blimp hovers above my table. Its broad forehead glistens with moisture. Droplets fall, glittering in the theater’s spotlights. They hit the table and spatter, striking my face, smelling like ripe human sweat.
“This theater has provided me with some of the only pleasures I’ve ever known. Perhaps once we are all reduced to bones, the crawling and creeping things of the earth will know pleasures which we have denied them by our selfish, cruel lives, free at last to navigate our corpses. Do you think so? My father discovered this place. When he knew he was dying, when it no longer mattered that he’d burn out his nervous system utilizing this technology, he brought me here to show me things. Foreign capitols he’d visited as a young man; mountains climbed; the few women he’d known in a carnal way.”
The blimp begins to descend, expelling gas all the while. By the time it reaches the ground next to me, it’s taken on the aspect of an obese but decidedly non-blimplike Elvis. “Disorienting, isn’t it? All of the theater’s default templates come from old Elvis musicals. But the genius of this setup is its multithreaded interperceptivity. A male customer didn’t merely experience his wife or girlfriend as Ann-Margret; he experienced himself as Elvis — Elvis singing, Elvis driving a race car across the top of Hoover Dam. And all the members of his party shared that perception of him as Elvis and themselves as Elvis or Ann-Margret. The system’s neurological radiations are powerful enough that many of the effects can be experienced even without a headset, although a headset’s modulation provides a richer illusion.”
Elvis is still losing air. He’s dropping substance by the second. His skin hangs loosely from his frame, as though something is eating him from the inside out. “The most dangerous and exhilarating aspect of the technology is that transmissions can be pushed in both directions — both into the brain, and from the brain, outward. A discipl
ined mind, at considerable risk to itself, can take hold of the templates… and make of them its own creatures.” Elvis’s famine-stricken face caves in like a ball of Silly Putty crushed by an invisible fist. When it reforms, it is the face of Hud Walterson and of Benjamin. Only now the familiar almond-shaped green eyes and strong dark brows are puckered by extreme emaciation.
I close my eyes tightly. Shockingly, this gives me no relief — my lids might as well be glass. “Why make me sit through this production of Andy Warhol’s Elvis? Trotmann wants to kill me on a broken roller coaster. That I can understand. But not this. You can take the Elvis remains any time you want. Why not get it over with?”
“I want you to know me,” he says, coming close. His breath smells of things dying. “You’re an important man to me, Dr. Shmalzberg. That’s German, isn’t it? ‘Fat city’… that would’ve applied to my brothers and me at one time, but not to you. You’re important to me because you helped give my progenitor’s life and death meaning. That movement you helped found made him a legend. And you caused my brother Benjamin’s death —”
“He committed suicide,” I say. “Jumping into a vat of boiling fat was preferable to suffering more of Trotmann’s torture.”
“Liar! Liar!” the ancient Elvis/Trotmann screams.
“No matter,” the walking skeleton says. “What matters more is what you intended to do with that glass container of freeze-dried fat. I want to melt myself from existence, Doctor. And at the same time, I want to melt every other human being from existence, too. And you want to use your magical old fat to put flesh back on humanity’s mean fucking bones. That makes you my nemesis, doesn’t it?” He smiles, showing blackened gums that have pulled away from the roots of the few teeth still hanging in his head.
My stomach lurches. Suddenly I’m lying on my back, surrounded by some kind of translucent plastic box, open on top. I can move my arms, but they’re strangely weak and uncoordinated. All I can do is flop them up and down. I try to sit up. My muscles won’t lift me. I can’t see past my own chest — my view is blocked by folds of fat, folds of my own neck fat. I try to say something, but all that comes out of my mouth is a wail, muffled by my own blubbery cheeks.
“Welcome to life as an eighty pound infant.” My self-proclaimed nemesis lurches into view above the box, now dressed in a researcher’s white lab coat. He reaches a rubber-gloved hand into the crib and tickles my chins. “No woman gave birth to you; you came to term in a vat of artificial amniotic fluid.” He presses a button, and the rear part of the crib raises up hydraulically, pushing my torso into a sitting position. He forces my jaws open, then shoves a plastic tube into my toothless mouth. “Feeding time, little man.”
A sweet, milky liquid begins flowing into my mouth. I can’t help but swallow. The faster I swallow, the faster the substance flows. I’m constantly on the verge of choking, but somehow the machine senses exactly the maximum volume Fm able to force down. My nemesis watches me eat, a sardonic smile alternating with an expression more forlorn and haunted.
“MannaSantos was formed during GD2 from sixteen smaller companies that staved off bankruptcy by merging,” he says. “One of the companies was DietTeck International, the weight-loss firm that boasted Hud Walterson as its most prominent celebrity client. They preserved his frozen tissue samples. I can only imagine how delighted the MannaSantos scientists were when they discovered what they had in their inventory: the genetic material of a man with one of the most severe cases of congenital obesity on record. An ideal source of test subjects for their planned line of genetically modified weight-loss foods.”
My stomach aches. But the rate of flow still increases. God help me — I can’t stop sucking it down. Even when tears of pain begin flowing down my obese cheeks, I can’t stop sucking it down.
“Human cloning had been outlawed years before. But they did it anyway. Federal regulators were never much of a concern.” He leans down to wipe a tear off my cheek, but keeps the feeding tube firmly lodged in my mouth. “They made twelve of us. Someone had the notion to name us after the twelve sons of Jacob. You met my brother, Benjamin. My name is Joseph — the one who rose from slavery to become the power behind the pharaoh.”
My crib winks out of existence, replaced by a sturdy institutional bed, surrounded by bars. “You’re now six years old and 220 pounds. You suffer from childhood-onset diabetes and an enlarged heart. You’ve never been hugged or caressed or kissed; you’ve never played with another child, not even one of your eleven identical brothers. The only toy you’ve ever seen is a sock monkey that was placed in your crib, now tied to the bars of your bed. You think that sock monkey is God, because it’s the only vaguely human thing you’ve ever seen that hasn’t stuck you with a needle or shoved something vile down your throat.”
It’s hard to breathe. Joseph must’ve suffered from asthma, too. A machine above my head hisses. My left forearm, pudgy as a fire hose, stings as a purplish liquid enters my veins through a shunt. A technician stands over me. He attaches a tube to a shunt in my other arm, then presses a wooden dowel into my right hand and forces me to squeeze it, again and again, heedlessly crushing my fingers. I watch my blood run away from me, filling the spirals of a plastic tube as if it’s eager to escape the disaster that is my body.
The lights dim. The only sounds I hear are the humming of the equipment, my brothers’ snores, and the desperate puffs of my own breathing. Footsteps now. I smell an unfamiliar cologne. A tall, dark silhouette stands above me. Hands lower the rails surrounding my bed. My body involuntarily tenses, anticipating a wound, but the man lays a cool hand on my forehead. The kindness in his touch is electric.
“No, Joseph,” he says. “I haven’t come to inject you or take a sample. My name is Theodore. I’d like to become your friend.” I’ve never been spoken to before; spoken about, but never to. His voice is a thousand times more nourishing than the MannaSantos nutrient shakes. “I just started working here. I thought you might like to hear a story.” He pulls a chair to the side of my bed.” ‘Once upon a time, deep within the Hundred Acre Wood…’”
My visitor continues reading, but his voice is replaced by Joseph’s. “His name was Theodore Weiss. He’d been ordered to shape the data gleaned from us clones into practical applications. He and his wife, a fellow biologist, suffered moral qualms when they discovered how we were being treated, but their protests were ignored. Weeks before I first met her husband, Mrs. Weiss was killed in a car accident. They’d had no children. Dr. Weiss decided to personally better the lives of as many of us as he could, as a memorial to his wife. This is the story he wove for me, feeding it to me along with tales of the Hundred Acre Wood and Beatrice Potter.
“Over the course of many nights together, we discovered something quite amazing. Amazing to me; less so, as it turned out, to my benefactor. My mind, cruelly unexercised to that point, absorbed knowledge and new skills like a proverbial sponge. My progenitor Hud Walterson had been an intellectual nova, a genius, but his light was annihilated by the black hole of his obesity. He didn’t attend school past the third grade, trapped in his bed by the shackles of his flesh. If he’d had access to teachers, books, a computer… he could have accomplished anything. Anything. He would’ve been remembered as one of the great minds of his time, instead of a freak who sparked a vigilante movement.”
My body changes, grows. I’m a teenager now, inhabiting a much larger bed, restrained by leather straps. They cut deeply into my pillowy flesh. I’m now somewhere beyond six hundred pounds. My mind is afire with concepts and data I can barely comprehend, higher mathematics and molecular biology far beyond what I was taught in medical school. But I sense this blizzard of cogitation is a blind, a curtain I’m trying to draw to block something I can’t bear to see.
At the far end of the long, darkened room is a thick window, reinforced with wire, about two feet square, that looks into a bright operating room. An autopsy is being performed on the far side of that window. I want to look away, but I can’t. Doctor
s are taking a gigantic body apart, organ by organ, slicing through folds of blubber with electric scalpels. Dismembering a body that looks exactly like my own…
“‘Project Walterson’ was brought to a premature end eight years ago, Dr. Shmalzberg. Hints of illegal cloning had been leaked to federal regulatory agencies. MannaSantos hastened to cover up their tracks, destroying all evidence of the project. Including, of course, us — we eight clones who remained. But before they cremated our enormous euthanized bodies, they performed autopsies, gathering whatever last scraps of data they could. The project’s shutdown was hastened by the escape of one of its subjects during a power failure — my brother Benjamin, who was more ambulatory than the rest of us.”
Joseph’s almost emotionless patter belies what I’m feeling, what he remembers feeling, what he now forces me to feel. My oversized heart beats with terrified urgency, as if it could supply this body with strength to snap its bounds.
But then those bounds loosen of their own accord. Theodore Weiss and another man help me onto my wobbly legs. “Joseph,” Weiss whispers, struggling beneath my arm, “I won’t let them butcher you. I’m taking you home. I can adjust the records, make them believe you’ve already been disposed of…”
The dormitory blinks out, replaced by a spartan room filled with computer equipment and furniture sized for a Walterson. “He made me disappear,” Joseph’s voice continues. “He was in a position of high enough authority that he could alter secret files and leave no fingerprints. The final disposition of the clones was a hurried, almost chaotic affair, and our corpses were virtually indistinguishable. Dr. Weiss lived in a house at the edge of MannaSantos’s enormous desert compound. Even then, his health was beginning to fail. He performed more and more of his work from home, rarely making the seven-mile drive to his office. My education accelerated tremendously. I required little sleep, laboring at his computers for up to twenty hours a day. Every new byte of knowledge, I consumed voraciously.
