Codename Prague

by D. Harlan Wilson

  08

  Houses of If

  It was a simulacrum of Edmond Dantès’ cell in the island prison Château d’If in Alexandre Dumas’ French adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Prague knew because of the inscription on the stone wall. Which read: THIS IS A SIMULACRUM OF EDMOND DANTÈS’ CELL IN THE ISLAND PRISON CHTEAU D’IF IN ALEXANDRE DUMAS’ FRENCH ADVENTURE NOVEL THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO.

  He ran a fingertip over the words. “If…”

  The first year was the hardest. It took a long time to relegate the pangs of hunger, physically and psychologically; he had always possessed a vicious appetite and a speedy metabolism to keep him nice and trim. A rusty metal slot in the cell door opened three times a day and somebody tossed in a tin plate of goulash or soup or gruel. Bad things ensued. He was accustomed to overeating and his body took revenge by way of frequent diarrhea, nausea, hives, cold shakes, brainfreeze, and other unpleasant symptoms of excess-deprived withdrawal. Additionally, a man in an iron blowtorch mask tortured him on a regular basis. The man never used a blowtorch. He used a magnifying glass, burning holes in Prague’s skin with the aid of a portable fusion-powered sun, but usually the man beat him with blunt, Lo-Tech weapons (e.g. clubs, maces, logs, chains, pipes, baseball bats, bones, candlesticks, broomsticks, hardcover books, stones, bricks, icicles, chair legs, medicine balls, T-squares, hippopotamus whips, shower nozzles, flashlights, knobkieries, sally rods, wrenches, bamboo, etc.). He only tortured Prague once with surgical instruments, cutting off most of his fingers and toes as well as a pound of flesh here and there and the majority of his upper lip. Whatever the case, Prague oscillated between screaming, giggling and snoring, unable to retaliate given the steady influx of sleeping and laughing gases into his cell.

  After awhile, Prague adapted to the routine. Even defecating in a bucket wasn’t unbearable. Nor was having his veins artlessly replenished with fresh Victory gin and vermouth whenever it went bad. His only real complaint was the constant draft he felt on his upper row of teeth; he realized the grave degree to which he had taken his lip for granted. He even befriended his torturer, who, while continuing to bruise, burn and break him, developed a high regard for the celebrity/g-man/prisoner, telling him jokes and, once, bringing him a slice of cherry pie.

  One day the torturer entered the cell and began to cry. Prague asked him why. He took off his blowtorch mask, revealing the surgically reconstructed face of Vincent Prague sans défaut, and said, “Seven years have passed. That’s seven tenths of a decade.” He fell to his knees, sobbing.

  Behind the torturer appeared a replica of Armand Dorleac, the prison warden of Château d’If in an early twentieth century film version of The Count of Monte Cristo. He placed a hand on the torturer’s shoulder. “Pardon the poor fool. Upon your incarceration, he had his face recreated in your image and has become quite attached to you, I’m afraid. Now we’ll have to burn the visage to ashes. Alas.”

  Prague lifted a trembling arm and pointed at the warden. “You look familiar. Didn’t you play bad guys in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and The Crow? Strange Days, I think, too.”

  “Amazing, Mr Prague,” said the warden. “How do you speak so well in the absence of your upper lip? Bilabials are an impossible feat of articulation in your condition.”

  “Ventriloquism runs in my family.”

  “Ah yes. Of course. What doesn’t run in your family? Well, you’re free to go. You’ve paid your debt.”

  “Debt? Fuck did I do?”

  “You know the MAP. Existence itself is grounds for punishment. Thus and so. By the way may I have your autograph? My kids love your work.” He held out a sheet of parchment paper and a fountain pen.

  Prague took the pen and threw it aside. He blew his nose onto the paper and gave it back to the warden.

  Bound in shackles at the neck, wrists and ankles, he shuffled up and down and across countless stairways and corridors and planks, pausing only to be flogged by malicious escorts…

  A doktor stood at the front gate of Château d’If. He wore a stethoscope and monocle and pale green OR uniform. “Hmm,” he said at the sight of Prague, and took his pulse. “I see. Take him to the madhouse, please. This man is insane in the membrane.”

  “Insane in the brain,” droned the diminutive assistant at the doktor’s side.

  An escort clubbed Prague in the back of the head. Before losing conscious-ness, he felt somebody tear another chunk from his thigh.

  Next: Another seven years elapsed…

  Prague awoke in a straightjacket and muzzle gag. His cell looked roughly the same size as the one in Château d’If. It was much taller, though, and the walls were padded. And instead of an inscription that read THIS IS A SIMULACRUM OF EDMOND DANTÈS’ CELL IN THE ISLAND PRISON CHTEAU D’IF IN ALEXANDRE DUMAS’ FRENCH ADVENTURE NOVEL THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, there was a flickering neon sign that read KILROY WAS HERE. In the background, rock opera band Styx’s song “Mr Roboto” played over and over and over. Prague hung from the ceiling, upside-down, by a long copper wire…

  “We want you to get better,” said hospital director Doktor Ray B Flechsig on Day 1 through a yellow, bearded grin.

  “What’s wrong with me?” wheezed Prague.

  Flechsig punched him in the balls. “Your nuts hurt, for one. But that’s neither here nor there. Nurse?”

  A bleached blond wearing a peephole leather bra, fishnet stockings and fishbowl pumps appeared at Flechsig’s side. The doktor pointed at Prague’s crotch. Smiling, the nurse stomped on his crotch with her heels and reduced his genitals to stir-fry.

  By Day 563, Prague felt settled in. He had gotten used to hanging upside down, more or less, envisioning himself as an elderly bat who just wanted to stay in his cave, and “Mr Roboto” no longer ailed him; he had exorcized the song of all clandestine messages, references and innuendo. He could barely hear the song, even though half a year ago somebody turned the volume on full blast.

  Six times a day, Doktor Flechsig sent in the nurse to feed and sedate him. She removed his muzzle gag, shoved a spoonful of goo into his mouth, and chased the goo with a pill. Sometimes she cradled his head and emptied a shot of shitty scotch into his throat. Sometimes she clutched his hair and kissed him. Her lips felt like tarantula legs. Her tongue felt like leather.

  On Day 1,241, they cut Prague down and unleashed him into the general population. It took 100+ days to get used to standing and walking upright.

  Patients weren’t allowed to wear clothes. Orderlies shaved them from head to toe with dull straight razors every day. A mechanical pharmacist stalked them constantly, machinegunning pills that were absorbed into the skin on impact. Patients had to sleep two per single cot. Prague’s bedmate was a cannibal. Every morning he woke up bleeding martini juice, chunks of flesh torn from his limbs, abdomen and back, and he had to visit the medical ward, which was owned and operated by cannibal sympathizers who reluctantly sewed Prague up, although not without serving him a fair share of pro-cannibal propaganda. Soon the hospital ran out of Victory gin and vermouth and they filled Prague’s veins with cow spit. At this point he truly went insane. He believed he was a robot. He walked like a robot. He talked like a robot. He made robotic gestures and signals and tics. Then he recovered. He slept, dreaming again and again of the Nowhere Man. One night Doktor Flechsig shook him awake. “I love you,” he said, and molested Prague.

  500+ days later, a man draped in a bed sheet served the Anvil-in-Chief walking papers.

  Prague had been eaten so badly over the years he looked more like a turkey bone than a human being. The twilight zone of modern science and technology permitted him to function, however, as did the power of ventriloquism, his bedmate having devoured his lower lip and equipped him with a permanent rictus grin.

  This state of extreme deformity excited Doktor Flechsig. He hugged Prague tightly on his way out of the ward, rubbing genitals against his leg, whispering, “I never want to let go.” But he did let go. And it wasn’t until Prague skulked down
an interminable hallway into an elevator that he encountered further difficulty.

  “What floor, sir?” said an aged elevator operator.

  “The one with the cafeteria.”

  “Certainly.” The doors closed and the elevator went down. “Say, don’t I know you? I think you were in a bad dream I had last night.”

  “Boo.”

  He pushed the emergency stop button and faced Prague. “Seriously. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? Sir, I think I’ve seen you.”

  Prague lost his cool and tried to strangle the elevator operator. Years of sedation and loss of flesh rendered him pitiably weak and forlorn, and the incensed elevator operator, who may have been in his early 90s, manhandled him like a scarecrow, slamming him against the walls and then kneeing him in the groin. Prague crumpled. The elevator operator kicked him until the elevator sighed to a stop, the bell went ding, and the doors slid open.

  The police awaited him.

  The next four years transpired in a semi-conscious blur as Prague was transported from clink to clink…They beat him with billy clubs for three weeks, working in shifts. They pinned him to a wall and threw ripe bananas at him for over a month. They cooked him for thirty seconds at a time in a walk-in microwave oven. They snipped off the rest of his fingers and toes. They starved him, fed him, starved him. They sequestered halfass dentists to enact Knievelesque surgical procedures, sans anesthesia, on his molars. They threw him into a pool of cybernetic leeches and dared him to swim out. They castrated him. They boiled him. They plucked him. They opened a door and told him to go. Prague slumped towards freedom. They slammed shut the door just before he reached it and kicked the shit out of him. They performed this routine 120,346 times…They locked him in a House of Usher haunted by belligerent Edgar Allen Poe ghosts. The ghosts leapt into Prague’s body, engaging it in precarious sexual acts and forcing it to sign incalculable quantities of autographs. Prague moaned. He shrieked. He gurgled and vomited and passed out and dreamt and awoke and growled and croaked and cramped and exploded with rage and enmity and imploded with fear and apathy and went delirious from the pain the pain THE PAIN…They locked him in a mausoleum constructed entirely out of telescreens (walls, ceilings, floors, sarcophagi) that broadcast footage of Vincent Prague’s former public arrests, car chases, scikungfi fights, barista beatings, snake charmings, stand-up routines, assassinations, etc. At this point Prague was a mere quivering lump of flesh that could have easily been mistaken for a pile of elephant shit with a hairdo. But he was alive. They made certain to keep him on the razor’s edge of Life at all times.

  At last a farmhand entered the mausoleum, shoveled Prague into a wheelbarrow and ferried him outside. Sunlight stung his exposed eyeballs. Welcome pain. Another week of self-infested screenlight would have cooked him to the bone…

  …solarized flashbulbs of agony as they poured his body into a re-animator drum and sang:

  Oh Mr Johnny Verbeck how could you be so mean?

  I told you you’d be sorry for inventing that machine.

  Now all the neighbors cats and dogs will never more be seen.

  They’ll all be ground to sausages in Johnny Verbeck’s machine. Hey!

  But by the time they had finished the last chorus, he had regained his body, lock, stock and barrel, without a scratch, although he was almost two decades older now, and the Victory martini they siphoned into his veins contained too much olive juice…

  “Good morning, Mr Prague,” said a maître d’. “Observe, if you will, the mechanism. She’s Wellsian through and through. This glittering metallic framework is a state-of-the-art apparatus. Its singularly askew transparent crystalline substance commands the attention of any passerby with half a defragmented brain. Note the mechanism’s twinkling, brilliantly illuminated appearance. Need I mention the ivory fixtures? The brass candlesticks are certainly a nice touch, too, wouldn’t you say? All for the reasonable price of $9,999.99. That’s for one ride. That includes a bag of popcorn, I might add. Portions of soda start at $800 per Dixie cup.”

  Prague paid with a thumbprint, climbed into the saddle of the time machine, and put on his seat belt.

  Half a minute later he stood in Commodore Rabelais’s office.

  “Welcome back, Mr Anvil-in-Chief.” Rabelais scraped his incisor with a toothpick. “I say that to your conscious as much as to your corporeal self. The year is Ticky Tacky 8.4. I just spoke to you three hours ago. You just spoke to me eighteen years and three hours ago. Here.” He slid a box of cigarettes across the desk. “Smoke these. Each cigarette will return to your body one year of its life, plus two additional years, if you elect to smoke the entire pack. Time, time, time—have you seen what’s become of you? You’re a wrinkled mess. You’re fit for the grave. And you’re only fifty-one years old, technically speaking. I’d guess you were ninety-one, if I looked at you askance. But I rarely look at people askance.” He flicked the toothpick across the office. A mechanical hand reached out of a trash can and claimed it before it struck the floor. “We may want to do something about your memory, though. Torture isn’t a pleasant thing to reflect on, particularly that which has been enacted by your loving employer. Another pack of cigarettes will take care of any mnemonic turbulence. Well. On behalf of the MAP, I assure you this little diversion has all been proffered in the name of character development. I hope you’ve learned your lesson and are ready and willing to do your duty.”

  Prague opened the cigarette box, took one out and lit it. He inhaled deeply and swallowed the smoke.

  09

  Untitled Teufelsdröckh Rejektion Letter

  (on Cooking Channel Letterhead)

  1 January 10,023 AR[1]

  Dr Hermann Teufelsdrˆckh, Ph.D.

  1-2X Das Schlofl

  Kount Westwest Prachtstrafle

  843 227853 Prague

  Former Czech Republik

  Dear Dr Teufelsdrˆckh:

  Thank you for your recent submission to The Cooking Channel for the position of Associate Celebrity of Gourmevangelism®. We received your varied follow-up letters and apologize for the delayed response. A six year turnaround, however, is not an unreasonable stretch of time considering the vast number of submissions we receive on a daily basis. At any rate, we thank you for your patience and hope to find you in good health.

  While we enjoyed your video footage, we regret to inform you that we have decided to pass on your candidacy as host of our upcoming show, Chuka Ichiban Inframan, which will debut on 22 March 10,025 AR. Don’t forget to tune in! We would also like to take this opportunity to discourage you from further submissions. Rest assured, we will keep your footage on file in the event that a suitable TCC Irreality TV venue comes to fruition. We understand how difficult this must be for you. We recommend comfort food the likes of which you might find on virtually every one of our shows, including reruns, spoofs, spinoffs and hypermelodramatizations.

  “The mass of men lead lives of quixotic douchebaggery.” Are you familiar with this timeless apothegm? We hope it might give you some degree of solace in your time of need and perdition. We apologize for this impersonal form letter. If you require further service, please contact us at our head office in Prague. Bear in mind, we do not possess hard communications technology of any kind, or, if we do, we are unauthorized to inform you as to its numeric and linguistic stature. If you wish to contact us, you must do so in person. The waiting room is in the basement.

  In the meantime, we leave you with the following story, which, alongside the aforementioned apothegm, is intended to lift your spirits: There was a man who kept a manhole, and he enjoyed the manhole as much as he enjoyed the sun, wary of their differences and eccentricities. One morning he lost the capacity to tell the difference between the two circular-shaped articles. He suspected the sun had been a manhole all along. Troubled, he ate breakfast without the assistance of utensils…and suddenly everything fell into place. The man put on sunglasses, crawled into the sun and went to sleep. And the manhole closed like a bank vaul
t.

  The end.

  Sincerely,

  Jav

  Mr Javier Flankeater, Chef-in-Chief

  The Cooking Channel

  c/o Stick Figure Incorporated

  c/o/o MAP Home-Ek Department

  1145 Gud Food Street