The Good Humor Man

by Andrew Fox

  He’s going to do to me what he just did to Swaggart. How can I fight back? Despite his incredible technical accomplishments, he’s basically still a child, an unsocialized, horribly abused child. Like Benjamin was. Except that, unlike Benjamin, he’s an outraged child, angry enough to burn the world —

  “Now, Dr. Shmalzberg, let’s see if you are made of sterner stuff.”

  Nausea and vertigo hit me again. Then I’m in a strangely familiar bedroom, lying on a king-size bed, atop a velvet leopard-print bedspread. Multiple television monitors are built into the wall, early RCA models — this is Elvis’s bedroom at Graceland. The theater must have this “set” coded as one of its templates.

  A large mirror on the dresser tilts so that I can see myself. “I’m not without a heart, Doctor. I’ve decided to grant you what undoubtedly would be your last wish.” I’m Elvis — naked, fat Elvis, spread-eagled, wrists and ankles tied to the four bedposts.

  Joseph reappears. Four of him, all skeletal. They surround the bed, white doctor’s coats hanging from their bony shoulders like shrouds. Good Lord… they each have a cannula, all four of Trotmann’s design, with those fiendish cutting heads.

  “With these devices,” the Josephs say in unison, “you and others of your kind helped create the mania that helped launch MannaSantos. Which then created me. It’s only fitting that we close the circle. And what loving son wouldn’t want to relive his father’s greatest moment?”

  They switch their cannulas on. I hear the cutting heads clicking, like the mandibles of an army of marching insects. No anesthetic, no hyaluronidase — they’re going to cut me straight up, like what Trotmann did to Benjamin. God. Here it comes —

  Four cannulas dig into my flesh. The pain, agonizing, but… almost bearable? Cutting heads eviscerate my belly folds and flabby thighs. Blood splatters the four Josephs’ white coats. I should be out of my mind with agony. The only possible answer — Joseph never experienced Trotmann’s sadistic liposculpture himself. He’s only heard it described. If I can manage to hang on, maybe I can figure out how to deal with him…

  “How does it feel, Dr. Shmalzberg, to be on the receiving end of your own barbarity?”

  “Trotmann’s… barbarity, you mean. I treated every patient with dignity.”

  “Then it’s a shame you can’t be operating on yourself.”

  Operating on myself? In this Alice in Wonderland world, that could mean my salvation. I’ve overridden RM settings before. Those years I was clinging to Emily’s memory… I almost burned out parts of my brain abusing the equipment. But I’ve never tried controlling a system of this power. And I’ve never had to compete with a rival controller much more skilled than me…

  The Josephs turn up their cannulas’ pumping rates. The flow of my fat and blood and effluvia into the collection jars doubles, then doubles again. My body… it’s shrinking. The folds surrounding my middle grow smaller by the second. I’m starting to feel it now, what Swaggart must’ve felt — a horrible weakness, a hunger that slashes my organs with its claws.

  I can’t afford to wait any longer. I concentrate on the front of my skull, imagining invisible “hands” sprouting from my forehead and reaching for the four cannulas. I feel the beginnings of a tension headache. I’ve partially reversed the direction of the RM’s electrical impulses, forcing it into a two-way flow. With those infinitely malleable “hands,” I reach into my Elvis skin, sliding beneath the dermis to the shrinking layers of fat where the cutting heads are reducing me to bloody pap. I take hold of the cutting heads, hidden from Joseph’s sight, and bend the metal, struggling to reshape it into much less malevolent forms, the shape of my own cannula’s tip. The exertion soaks my faux form with sweat.

  Almost there… I’ve got a leg up on him in that I know cannulas intimately. Ahh… the cutting has stopped. Now, if I can reach the suction units without his noticing, reverse the flow — I can pump the fat back into this body. With the dream logic this RM world seems to go by, that should pull me back from the brink of starvation. I have to distract him. What precoded scenarios would the theater have that might pull his attention —?

  “Joseph, you’ve experienced some of the worst humanity has to offer. But human beings are capable of amazing kindness, as well as cruelty —”

  “Hunger is making you babble, Doctor. You might as well recite the Canadian national anthem, for all the good it will do you.”

  Not babbling. It’s here, in the theater’s “library.” I knew it would be — it’s one of the iconic Elvis moments that everyone remembers. “Have you ever experienced selfless altruism, known the joy of giving with no expectation of payback? Let me show you —”

  I “push” him into a second scenario. Let him be Elvis this time. The effort makes my head pound, but I’m rewarded by the echoing ripple of his amazement. He’s so flabbergasted that he doesn’t struggle against the scenario. He stands on the lot of a Memphis Cadillac dealership. It’s summertime, hot and sticky. He’s having fun, picking out Cadillacs to give away to friends and employees, walking around dozens of new Eldorados and Sevilles, telling the salesman which ones to prep for delivery to Graceland.

  He’s already picked out thirteen cars when he comes across a black family staring through the windows of the showroom. They’ve driven up in an elderly Ford, well-maintained but showing its decrepitude. The wife, a bank teller named Mennie Person, jokingly tells her husband that since her birthday is coming up in two days, how about that nice blue Eldorado there in the corner…?

  I make Joseph feel what Elvis felt at that moment; the burst of endorphins the scenario stimulates in his brain makes it easy. Here is a mother, just like Elvis’s beloved and long-gone mother Gladys. She’s a member of a race to whom Elvis owes a debt of affection and gratitude, ever since his boyhood days of sneaking into the back pews of black churches to listen to the singing. He knows he can brighten her entire year through an act of unexpected and outrageous generosity, and maybe impress upon those youngsters the essential goodness of people, a goodness that can leap across racial boundaries.

  “You like that car?” Elvis/Joseph says. “I’ll buy it for you.”

  And while I let Joseph bask in that burst of endorphins, I’m reversing the flow on the cannula pumps, returning my stolen substance to me. But as I regain my strength, I wonder if I can do more than merely distract Joseph. Weiss taught him much about science and biology; but what did he teach him about morality?

  The four skeletal Josephs, who’ve been motionless since I shunted him into the Cadillac dealership, now spring back to “life.” “That was surprising,” they say, appraising me with new wariness. “You’re far more talented than the hapless Mr. Swaggart. But I don’t see what you hoped to accomplish —”

  Straining, I slam him into another scenario before he can see what I’ve done with the cannulas. He’s Elvis again, this time returned to Tupelo to cut the ribbon on a newly built playground he’s donated to the city. Maybe this scenario will stroke Joseph’s emotions more — he’s surrounded by poor children who’ve never had a decent ball field to play on, children as impoverished as Elvis once was. But he’s fighting me this time, struggling against the theater’s coding. Forcing him to stay inside the scenario is as strenuous as physically wrestling him.

  “Joseph,” I say, projecting my voice across the cloudless Mississippi sky. “This is part of what humanity is about, too. For every act of violence or neglect, there can be a countering act of healing kindness. You can choose to be on the side of kindness. Hud Walterson came from a desperately poor family. Members of his family, your family, could still be living somewhere in poverty, in need of the help you can give them. You could find your family, help them —”

  “ENOUGH!”

  The Tupelo playground and blue Mississippi sky shatter. My skull feels like it shatters, too. I make a feeble attempt to grab for another scenario to shunt him into, but he’s learned how to block my access to the theater’s library.

  “How DARE yo
u try to toy with my emotions!” the four of him bellow. “There is no ‘kindness’ in the human animal. ‘Kindness’ is the drug Theodore Weiss fed me so that he could steal the fruits of my genius.”

  Their attention falls on the fat collection jars, now empty, completely drained back into me. The four Josephs scream with pure rage.

  The bedroom vanishes. I’m lying in loose dirt, staring up at a merciless desert sun. Distant reddish hills block the horizon. I pick myself up, surprised I’m not chained or shackled. I’m back in my own body, a few dozen yards away from a solitary ranch house.

  “This is where I buried Dr. Weiss.” I whirl around. Joseph is behind me, just one of him now, but an imposing giant of at least four hundred pounds. “And this is where I will bury you.”

  My flesh contracts again, and I don’t have Elvis’s eighty pounds of extra adipose to act as a buffer. He’s not using any fancy symbolic modelings this time, just a brute projection of his own memories of starvation. I double over. Deprived of its fat stores, my body begins leeching nutrients from my bones and organs. My metabolism races — I’m burning with fever. I roll into a ball, trying to squelch trembling that threatens to bounce my eyes out of their sockets.

  I try to parry with memories of my own, recollections of enormous meals, Passover Seders at my great-uncle’s house, my great-aunt forcing one more helping of greasy matzoh farfel down my gullet… but Joseph swats this away.

  He’s going to kill my mind. There’s no reaching or dissuading him. I have to hurt him, as badly as I can. God forgive me.

  Conjuring a scenario from my own memories is infinitely more painful than pulling one from the theater’s library. I feel something break behind my eyes. But a terror of death forces me on.

  We’re in the auditorium of Trotmann’s church, on the edge of the pit. Waves of heat rise from the boiling fat to sear my face, and they sear Joseph’s face, too, because he’s occupying the body of his brother Benjamin. He’s teetering at the edge of the pit. Mentally, he’s fighting me like a wildcat. But this time I’ve shackled him to a body and mind almost precisely like his own, and that glue helps me maintain my hold.

  He’s still starving me. My heart is growing weak. I force Joseph to say his brother’s last words —

  “My name… my name is Benjamin. Benjamin Walterson. Not Hud. Benjamin.”

  And then I send him toppling face first into the fat. My memory of the burn I received from flying blobs of superheated fat — I stretch it over his whole body. I add a more distant memory, of second degree burns I received early in my career as a Good Humor Man. Those dying nerve endings add their screaming to the maelstrom. He’s bucking, kicking, enormously strong. Forcing him into the memories is like trying to drown him — Fm straddling his thrashing body as I force his head beneath a pool of lava, burning my own hands…

  By sheer force of will, he tears away my projection. I lie dazed on the hot sands, back behind Weiss’s house. But Joseph is sprawled on the red earth, too, his unmoving bulk lying face down. Did I manage to —? No. He forces himself to his feet. All that effort, at unknown cost to my cerebral cortex, and I’ve only managed to stun him…

  “Very… very good, Doctor. You’re making this a contest. But you’re merely… postponing the inevitable. I’m younger than you are. Stronger. With infinitely more experience manipulating this system. And lest you forget, I can have your physical body killed at any time, with just a word.”

  I’ve hurt him worse than he’s letting on. He’s shaking. His voice quakes, even as it echoes powerfully from the surrounding hills. But my own strength is nearly gone. And he’s tensing for another assault —

  My fever spikes. Blood feels like it’s boiling. The sky whirls like a gigantic funnel cloud. I raise my arms, trying to ward off this wave of agony. I can see my wrist joints, the long bones of my forearms, as though I’ve stuck my arms behind an x-ray scanner. My organs are on the verge of collapse… my shrunken heart muscle thin as a stretched rubber band…

  He thinks I’ve hurt him as badly as I can. That I’ve shot my last arrow. But I’ve got one left. I nock my arrow and let fly.

  Conjuring the scenario is like swimming against a tide of molten lead. Binding him with the remaining shreds of my strength, I drag him back in time twenty-six years. To a burning candied popcorn factory on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I sense blood running from my nose and ears. The prelude to a cerebral hemorrhage? But there’s no stopping this now. I’m standing in the middle of a crowd. We’re waiting for the famous Hud Walterson, waiting for him to escape yet another junk food conflagration, confound another posse of lawmen.

  But that’s not going to happen. Not this time. Because his face appears in an open third-story window. Hud’s face, and Joseph’s face. That’s right, Joseph. I was there. I saw your progenitor die. I feel his panic skyrocket as he recognizes the event I’ve nailed him to, just as I see Hud’s/Joseph’s expression crumble into despair as the flames fill the room behind him.

  I know despair. I impale Joseph with something more elemental than memories of the searing of flesh. I make myself remember Emily’s death, and I drag him down into that inferno pit of memory with me. I make him know what it was like to watch the person you love more than your own life be humiliated, crippled, and finally squelched by a cluster of cells that have gone on a senseless rampage. I make him know what it was like to have every bit of oxygen squeezed out of your soul.

  I look up into Hud’s face, and I remember his agonized expression of despair. I recognized that despair because I’d lived it, too. Now I make Joseph live it — the realization that everything you are will soon be ash, soaring into flame-driven updrafts to be scattered and lost. All tomorrows are gone. All possibilities for happiness, for connection, even for pain, all wasted. You’ve thrown it all away, and the gesture means nothing at all.

  Your suicidal gesture means nothing, Joseph.

  His hair and clothing ignite. But the worst of his agony is over, because he’s beyond feeling. He topples out of the window, already stiff, a short-lived comet plummeting to the asphalt.

  I let go of the scenario. It slips away from me like a whale carcass sliding off my boat just before the weight would capsize me. Back to Weiss’s desert vista…? No. I’m returned to the casino theater. Thank God. Thank God. Whether the rest of my life is measured in minutes or decades, I will dedicate it to the opposite of despair.

  There’s no sign of Joseph, either inside my head or out in the theater. Something’s wrong with my field of vision, though. I try to get up from my chair, stumble against the table, and discover that my hands have come loose from the cords. My wrists are bloody, rubbed raw. So my struggle wasn’t entirely in my head.

  Swaggart is next to me, flopped over the table. He still has a pulse, but otherwise he’s completely unresponsive. McNaley and Kelvin, the two guards, sway on their feet like sleepwalkers. Their faces twitch as their eyes slowly focus on me, as if they’re surfacing from hypnotic trances. How much of Joseph’s and my combat spilled into the theater’s ambient atmosphere, enveloping them despite their lack of helmets?

  Awakening, they don’t appear hostile; just dazed. “Do… do you have phones?” I ask them. It’s hard to make my mouth work right.

  “I… we… we don’t…”

  “Find a phone,” I say. It’s like talking with a mouth full of wet concrete. “Call an ambulance for your friends, and for the others. Joseph doesn’t have any hold over you anymore. I don’t think he’s in any shape to hurt anyone ever again.”

  Suddenly, their faces lose their befuddlement and take on a profound fright. They’re pointing above my head, behind me —

  I turn around. The main entrance doors, a dozen feet tall, tremble, buckle, then burst open, flying inward with such force that they leap off their hinges and crash to the floor.

  My God. It’s the Ottoman. He’s gigantic, easily nine feet tall. His suit is in shreds, pierced through by shards of his destroyed limousine. His face is a mask
of blood. But his mouth still works well enough to scream my name:

  “SHMALZBERG! You insidious Jew! You thought your African underlings killed me, did you? But Allah has declared my mission will succeed, and no force on earth can subvert His will.”

  He bounds into the theater. The floor trembles. He’s unstoppable…

  “I will remove the fat of the Troubadour from your friend Trotmann’s corpse. You will come to envy him his easy death. Your body contains hundreds of bones, and I will reduce each to jelly in its turn.”

  He’s towering over me now, blocking all light. He keeps coming back and back, like an indestructible movie monster, like The Terminator or the killer from Halloween…

  Oh. Of course. Of course.

  I make him hunch his shoulders and leer like Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. For good measure, I give him horn-rim glasses and a set of outsized buck teeth. As a good Frenchman, I’m sure he appreciates the homage to one of his country’s greatest cinema idols.

  My hands feel for the helmet I’m still wearing. My brain, like a bee’s stinger after it stings and detaches, has kept pumping away, injecting my senses with scenarios from my nightmares. I remove the spidery contraption. The Ottoman disappears.

  I suppose his embassy will retrieve him, either from the hospital or the morgue. I should visit his grave or bedside someday, honor him for the quest he inadvertently sparked, for what he has given me.

  McNaley and Kelvin have fled. The theater is quiet, apart from the weakening moans of the wounded. I walk over to Trotmann, hunched over in his wheelchair. He’s gone cold, but he’s done a good job protecting the Elvis from harm. The glass vacuum jar isn’t even scratched. You’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers, Shmalzberg. That’s something he would’ve said. Now I do exactly that.

  I need to know what happened to Joseph. He could’ve been controlling the RM system from a distant site, but I’m betting the control facilities are inside the theater. I stumble toward the far side of the auditorium, to where the wall is lined with curtains. Something is broken inside me. I peel away the red velvet curtains. Sure enough, there’s a whole other room back here, filled with control boards.