Codename Prague

by D. Harlan Wilson

City City, State 83

  USAmerika

  [1]   An abbreviation that, according to The Encyclopedia of Johnny Mnemonics, simultaneously denotes “After Reality” and “Alpha Ricardo.” This revision of the temporal calendar from the former AD (Anno Domini) commenced the year after the death of Mexican-born actor Ricardo Montalbán, who, after being resuscitated from his first death in 2009, lived to be 312 years old and for most of his life was widely perceived as a messiah and an enthusiastic violator of the laws of reality. Despite his eventual final death at the hands of an extremist cult of Urban-Amerikan Bushman, the star of renowned television series Fantasy Island (1978-84; 2030-39; 2167-2232) maintained a firm grip on the collective consciousness and incited new ways of perceiving the human condition and achieving new metaphysical heights.

  10

  Tranzatlanticism

  Vincent Prague placed a razor on his cheek and considered the prospect of being a hole. A black hole.

  “Is there any other kind?” said a voice in his head.

  He entertained a mental soliloquy on the nature of holes. How they provide access. How they function as entryways and exits. One can vanish into a hole. One can crawl out of it, or stay inside. Bodies are made of holes (i.e. pores). Bodies come from holes (i.e. vaginas) and return to holes (i.e. graves). The earth is full of holes (i.e. gorges, basins, canyons, chasms, ravines, etc.). The universe itself is full of holes, howling gaps of nothingness carved into the empty fabric of space, time and psyche. The universe, as a matter of fact, is one great hole. And we’re all inside of it. Any desire to be a hole is rendered null and void by dint of this cold, hard reality (i.e. I am already a hole). The question, then, is not: To be or not to be a hole? The question is: Have I ever been anything but a hole? No, that’s not the question. The question is: To what degree am I a hole (i.e. what is the severity or paucity of my holehood, i.e., my hole-I-ness)?

  The vidphone rang. He shaved his face in six broad strokes. The vidphone hung up and rang again. He listened to it. It hung up and rang again four more times.

  He went into the kitchen and touched a miniscreen. “I am a hole where something else used to be,” he said.

  “Grow up, wiseass,” said the visage of Foghorn Leghorn in a thick Southern drawl. “Quit piddling, I say. Get down here now, boy. Pronto. I say, I do say now, we’re waiting for you at Slingpad 7-2521 on Rooftop 1984 of MAP Spacescraper D-503. Look here.”

  Prague thought Yosemite Sam would be a more adequate representation of Administrator Wichita’s persona than Foghorn Leghorn. Was the vidphone on the fritz? Then again, he didn’t know the director that well. His only sustained interaction with him had been a pep talk he received before the now legendary scikungfi fight with the Nowhere Man; otherwise he had only communicated with Wichita over the vidphone. And yet Prague possessed an almost extraterrestrial ability to read people. It only took a few interlocutions for him to determine if somebody was an asshole or not so much of an asshole—the only two possible states of existence for a human being and most simulacra.

  “I know where you’re waiting for me,” replied Prague. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  He showed up at Slingpad 7-2521 three days later.

  A long line of wilburies spiraled around the slingatron as bodies fell out of the sky into colossal pillows. Sometimes they missed the pillows and splattered against the concrete like bugs on a windshield. Misfired arrivals with sufficient funds were IDed, scraped up, and ushered into reanimation booths. Plebs, proles and other non-Fredersons were squeegeed into gutter holes.

  Multicolored spotlights illuminated the slingpad in a hot frenzy. An orchestra of Victorian mannequins played Black Lodge melodia. Tall, beetlelike sentinels fished new arrivals out of the landing pillows and ushered them into glitzy Duty Free shops. Anyone who resisted or refused a shopping spree was arrested or executed on the spot.

  Flanked by two SAMSAs, Administrator Wichita gesticulated wildly. “Vincent Prague!” he exclaimed, delirious with fatigue and angst.

  “That’s Mr Anvil-in-Chief to you.” For no particular reason, Prague roundhoused one of the SAMSAs with maximum force, cracking his neck. An arthropodal leg burst from his suit coat like a clock spring and the SAMSA collapsed. The other SAMSA hoisted the body over a shoulder and carried him away. “Nice work, fellas,” said Prague, putting down his briefcase. He eyed Wichita. “That’s what I call efficiency. Guess you’ll have to put my seatbelt on.”

  “Come back here! Goddamn functionaries. They get more schized every day.” Wichita prodded Prague with a finger. “General Assistant Managerial Choreographer of Mortal Affairs for the Department of Anthropologism Commodore Rabelais will hear about this,” he said indignantly. He began typing into the palmscreen of his vidglove. “This is going in my report.”

  Prague made a farting noise with his lips. “Put that in your report, too.”

  Administrator Wichita typed with added urgency. Maybe Prague had been wrong about his vidphone; with protracted neck, hardened potbelly, beaklike nose and sonorous voice, the Administrator rivaled Foghorn Leghorn rather well. He wasn’t certain about the Administrator’s affinity for troublemaking, though, a staple of the patriarchal, anthropomorphous rooster’s day-to-day conduct. At any rate, Prague roundhoused his superior, softly, but hard enough to knock him cold, then flashed his badge and cut in line, signing the bare minimum of autographs without conveying a sense of excessive egomania…

  In the long, fetid, gruesome tailwind of sky-fetishized terrorism, and in an effort to be environmentally chic and high-minded, kamikaze SAMSA pilots flew all of Amerika’s airliners in a single file line across the Atlantic ocean and, one at a time, nosedived into select Scottish lochs, some of which measured up to four miles deep at their spines, until the airliners were officially extinct. Thereafter the Amerikan government “encouraged” the rest of the world to imitate the same destructive praxis at risk of “having the southern-fried Jesus nuked out of them” according to an out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouthism spoken by Amerikan President Grimley Bogue to his No. 2 bodyguard that was picked up by a puff of nanoscopic tabloid dust.

  As an alternative to traditional, jet-propelled methods of long distance flight, the science fictionalized world turned to late French author Jules Verne, a forefather of the genre-cum-reality, although widely regarded as less imaginative and dynamic than contemporary and fellow forefather H. G. Wells, a prolific British didact whose scientific romances often violated the guile of cause and effekt. It was determined that Verne’s ideas would be easier to bring to fruition. In his novel De la terre à la lune (trans. From the Earth to the Moon), Verne posited a gigantic columbiad, viz., a muzzle-loading cannon souped up in such a way that it could fire his protagonists onto the lunar surface. Pre-MAP decision-makers had reservations about the feasibility of the device, at least in terms of space travel; penetrating the earth’s atmosphere required more propulsion than the average joehead realized. But there was no reason why it couldn’t be manufactured and employed for strict terrestrial purposes, especially in the wake of the Great Loch Death Dive, not to mention the death of reality. Moreover, why use a cannon? Cannons required gunpowder. Cannons had to be smelted, rust-proofed, ignited and sponge-cleaned. Slingshots, on the other hand, could be composed of entirely non-volatile, eco-friendly materials. No deafening bang sound either. Strapped into the appropriate lounge chair, one would hardly notice the catapultic transition from ground to air…

  “Ticket, please,” droned the flight attendant as a new tranzbubble ballooned from a fissure in the slingpad. At full capacity the exterior of the tranzbubble solidified while a viscous lounge chair and a montage of gel-screens formed on the interior.

  “Ticket, please,” the flight attendant repeated. Prague scowled at his pillbox hat and said, “Tickets don’t exist. Tickets haven’t existed for thousands of years.”

  “Yessir.” The flight attendant scanned his eyes. “Name: Vincent Prague. Codename: Vincent Prague. Title: Special A
gent Anvil-in-Chief. Race: Noir Amerikan. Gender: Meta Male. Height: 6 Feet 8 Inches. Date of Birth: Unspecified. Eye Color: Transparent. Destination City: Prague, Former Czech Republik. Destination Slingpad: Prague Orange-45x. Tranzbubble Flavor: Extra Spicy Chicken Wings with Extra Blue Cheese and No Celery. Tranzbubble Blood Type: 18-Year-Old Single Malt Isle of Skye.” Registering the flavor and blood type, the tranzbubble modified itself accordingly. “Did you know your name plagiarizes your destination? May I ask why you’re going to Prague? What’s in Prague that you can’t find here?”

  A bellowing arrival flew overhead and crashed into a knot of razorsharp antennae. Flourish of strings and percussion…The Anvil-in-Chief smiled. “I’m on a quest narrative, but I anticipate deviating from traditional quest patterns. I’ve already experienced several curious deviations. In any case, I’m the anti-hero. Protagonist and antagonist. Man and doppelgänger. One and the same.”

  The flight attendant made a sour face. “No reason to get smart, Mr Prague. Or literal, for that matter. I was only making small talk. Have you flown with us before?”

  “Just aim this fucker and throw me across the pond. Don’t forget my briefcase. Do the right thing, Mookie. Kill me and I’m coming back to getcha.” A door in the tranzbubble irised open, he climbed in, and the door irised closed. The flight attendant retrieved his briefcase and placed it against the skin of the tranzbubble, which assimilated it. Then he scurried behind the slingatron’s main control panel. He punched a big button. He fiddled with joysticks. He manipulated a plume of holographic image-swathes, locking the tranzbubble into place. He confirmed and reconfirmed the destination coordinates. And he crossed his fingers for luck.

  Smell of vulcanized rubber. Sound of an elastic grunt, of a clanking trebuchet…

  …of the wind in the willows…

  …In the air, Prague watched six movies simultaneously on amoebic gel-screens while eating the inner walls of the tranzbubble and drinking its blood from an aortic valve. Like all movies, they fell headlong into the scikungfi genre, deploying other genres in small amounts either for artistic effekts or to (unsuccessfully) convey a sense of narrative depth. One movie in particular caught his eye, a remake of a stage adaptation of a commercial in which an artiste wearing an aluminum Vincent Prague mask loomed over a box of sentient detergent that emptied itself into a washing machine and set the timer. “You don’t need Vincent Prague to wash your clothes,” said the voice-over. “Speckled Enzymes will do it for you.” Featured on the box cover was the image of another artiste in a Prague mask. He leaned against a ninety-sixth generation Camaro with an ostentatious whale fin. It was this whale fin that became a focal character in the subsequent stage adaptation of the commercial. Directed by the late method playwright Lofton Gitt in the early “Shiny Demon” period of his career, the play’s title underwent a torturous evolution as a result of Gitt’s chronic indecisiveness, but also because whenever producers decided they liked a title, he considered it a Tier One order of business to fuck with their sense of complacency. Whale Fin Goes Hogwild!!! was the final title authorized by Gitt during his lifetime, although it was posthumously revised on numerous occasions (Whale Fin Goes Extremely Hogwild!!!, Whale Fin Fucking Kills the Whole Goddamned World!!!, Whale Fin vs. Special Agent Prague, Vrooom!!!, The Queequeg Factor, W Is for Whale Fin, etc.) by the playwright’s many offspring and heirs. The script of the stageplay remained fixed, however, until its appropriation by the machinery of Hollywood cinema. Pop filmmaker Buddy Napoleon went in a different direction, shifting the focus away from the antagonism of the Camaro’s whale fin to that of an impish vigilante (a.k.a. The Undeniable Essence) hired to kill Vincent Prague by the Ministry of Applied Pressure. Napoleon reduced the whale fin’s role to a thirty second symbolic encounter with a “Walrus Man” who attempted to sexually abuse the automotive accessory but was apprehended by the BILWM (Bureau of Investigators against Lascivious “Walrus Men”) before any serious damage could be done. But the scene that the Anvil-in-Chief now watched had nothing to do with whale fins, “Walrus Men,” the BILWM, a vigilante, or even Prague himself. It was a conversation between an alien with an exobrain in a bubble helmet and a Julie Andrews simulacrum whose apparel and personality fluctuated between Mary Poppins, Maria Von Trapp, and Victoria Grant.

  “I come in peace,” synthesized the alien.

  “Like in that Dolph Lundgren film?” asked Maria Von Trapp. “Who names a film I Come in Peace? That’s an assertion, not a title.”

  “What is Dolph Lundgren?”

  “Only, like, the biggest badass that ever lived,” said Mary Poppins.

  “He’s hot as balls, too,” added Victoria Grant.

  The alien removed its bubble and began to cough. For a moment it appeared as if it would suffocate, but it acclimatized. “What species of balls heat up to the degree that they are worthy of being deployed in the aforementioned simile?”

  “What simile?” asked Maria Von Trapp.

  “The one you used in that sentence. That one.”

  “Dolph Lundgren is a simile?” wondered Victoria Grant.

  “Of a sort, I suppose,” said Mary Poppins. “The Amerikan Heretic Dictionary of Exegesized Poltergeists explains that a simile is ‘an instance of one thing representing (i.e. standing for) another thing, as in the context of a literary work.’ That’s the first definition, mind you. Whatever the case, we must think about this issue in terms of representation, i.e., what is it that Mr Lundgren stands for? Swedish pride? Cold War dick-swinging? Aryan wish-fulfillment? Mankind in general? All this is assuming Mr Lundgren is preceded by a like or as. Otherwise the man is sheer metaphor.”

  Electricity skimmed across the cerebral cortex of the alien’s exobrain. “According to our records, Dolph Lundgren has been dead for over 8,000 years.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?” asked Maria Von Trapp.

  “Is that question intended for me or one of your other personalities?” replied the alien.

  “Spit spot.”

  A troupe of burlesques poured onto the gel-screen and everybody danced the Time Warp. Then the Julie Andrews simulacrum attacked the alien with a Xingyiquan crotch shot. It chased the move with an earsplitting Kwisatz Haderach weirding word. The alien’s head exploded like a corn stalk, tendrils of gore spraying from its neck…

  Prague sighed. The Julie Andrews didn’t work for him—a poorly written character, he thought, and miscast to the hilt. Regarding the movie as a whole, it wasn’t the first shitty cinematic depiction of his life, and it wouldn’t be the last: at least 100 shitty Vincent Prague-inspired movies had been made in the last five years alone.

  He waved a hand and the wall assimilated the gel-screens. He drank the tranzbubble’s alcoholic blood in silence until it knocked him out.

  He awoke to the sound of the flight attendant’s voice: “Mr Prague. Wake up, Mr Prague. I might have tossed you a little to the left. Please don’t be angry. Please don’t come back from the dead and hurt me…”

  11

  Araby (Re)viz[it]ed

  The anguish and anger that marked its gaze fluctuated with its vision.

  —I’ll fix it, said the monster’s companion. I promise.

  —My prototypes weren’t blind, replied the monster. There are no lilies on my brow. Scheiße!

  —You’re not blind. You’re just not working properly. But you’re new. Give yourself time to adjust.

  A man with no arms and legs crawled out of a hole in the wall. He said:

  —Welcome to Araby. My name’s Rardion! But most citizens call me Mike.

  The greeter came closer, moving across the floor on his stomach like an inchworm. He wore a striped onesie.

  —Can I be of service? May I assist you in some peculiar way?

  The monster flinched and said:

  —Pee-culiar.

  —Don’t be afraid, said the monster’s companion, squeezing its elbow. This is normal. When you enter a bazaar, you must expect to be accosted. You must expect to be accosted
when you enter anything, anywhere. Granted, the greeter lacks extremities. But that’s not unheard of. People have lacked extremities for eons.

  The monster’s companion removed his sungoggles.

  —Ah! chirped the greeter. He rolled onto his back. Dr Teufelsdröchk! I didn’t recognize you!

  —It’s bright out.

  —Willkommen zurück! We’ve just received a fresh batch of artichokes, I’m told. Straight from Algiers!

  —Extraordinary. This is my monster. It is a psychocoporeal fusion of John Keats and Adolph Hitler. I call it The Sans Merci. It’s a working title. But I suspect the title may stick.

  The greeter rolled his head and frowned at The Sans Merci.

  —Pardon us.

  The doktor sidestepped the greeter, shepherded the monster through a security gate…and experienced an epiphany.

  —I know the function of bald people, he said. They signify what planets look like from afar. Thus they symbolize the distance between A and B. Hence they are unceasing reminders of cosmic vastness and the certainty of Blank Space.

  Illogical epiphanies were chronic phenomena in Araby, the owners of which had rigged the bazaar with ceiling fans that continually sprinkled Total Rekall dust onto shoppers, prompting them to either remember fond but forgotten experiences or, more commonly, extract meaning from nothingness. The owners sought to manufacture an illusory sense of intelligence and imagination in shoppers. This, in turn, would lead to a heightened sense of selfhood. And a heightened sense of selfhood would generate a greater desire to consume Araby’s various wares. It worked, for the most part, although sometimes shoppers devolved into mere artiste-like creatures, fleeing the bazaar in order to construct their own unrealized self-portraits on the canvas of life. But once a shopper left the premises, s/he ceased to fetishize Künstlerroman narratives and exhibit Joycean conduct.