Codename Prague
Page 11
“Who’s in the coffins?” asked Prague.
“The fathers of reality,” said Mädchen.
Emaciated pastel strippers in shadow boxes lined the walls. Only the Cagneys paid attention to them. Everybody else fixated on their respective Games of Skill.
“This way,” said Sindie, gesturing across the casino. He followed the gesture’s line of flight…and saw nothing.
Prague sidestepped the girls and pulled aside a Cagney. “Pragensia St Cagney. Why’d they name this place after you?”
“Why’d they name you after this city?”
“You know who I am?”
“Everybody knows who you are, sir. This is the world.”
“Do you have something to tell me?”
“Dunno. Stay in school?”
“No. I mean, do you have a message for me?”
“Every spoken word is a message, Mr Prague. Inevitably my answer is yes. However, I believe you are looking for something else, or rather, an addendum, viz., something embedded within the already resonant topography of my discourse—a message within a message, as it were.”
“Shh!” said a player at the table next to them. He threw the die and turned up Four-of-a-Kind in sixes. But he had recorded Four-of-a-Kind in threes five turns ago. And he had used his Chance throw two turns ago. He passed the cup to the next player and put a Walther to his head.
“Get wise on your own time.” The Cagney slapped the Walther out of his hand. It flew over three tables into the hands of another Cagney who confiscated it.
Prague lost his patience. He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted, “The name is Prague! Codename Prague! Who’s got words for me! Heads up, shitforbrains! Daddy needs a new pair a shoes!”
At the exclamation, all of the shadow boxes swung open and, like equines from the starting gate, the strippers leapt out and converged on him. There were 80 or so of them and Mädchen and Sindie joined in the blitzkrieg…
“You crazy bitches,” Prague exclaimed. “What am I, a one-eyed jack factory?”
A long scikungfi fight lapsed into sexual catastrophe. Prague tried to be a good sport about it even though he had only packed two spare sets of genitals…. …DEFIBRILLATION…homeostatis interrupted by visceral anarchy…cross-section of kidneys filtering and secreting metabolites in fasttime…collective moan à la Ecstasy/Dread/Power…NOWHERE MATRIX dissolved into Moth Man evolved into daikaiju…flailing limbs and tentacles…more tentacles…stench of open holes…collage of hardcore still shots—Vincent Prague exposed in unforgettable contortions of defense and subjugation…devolutionary grunt, masculinized aural fetishism…sensory deprivation/overload…Burroughsian scat…“exposition exposition exposition”…one-liner…“Yahtzee!”…coffin tipped over and out spilled…
The strippers retreated to their shadow boxes. Prague didn’t bother picking up the scraps of his tux—it was destroyed. Naked and used, he delivered a sharp crowdstare to the room’s many antagonists.
“Nice abs,” chirped a Cagney…
He punched out Mädchen and Sindie. The strippers blitzed him again and he punched them out, too…Unblinking, unsmiling, the gamblers rolled the Yahtzee die…
In the end, Vincent Prague made the bad decision to flout his orders from that point on. He had done what Cdre Rabelais told him to do. Nothing panned out. He wasn’t waiting there forever. He had things to do. He had a life. Being the Anvil-in-Chief didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself from time to time. (Actually being any echelon of MAP-employed citizen meant that your ass was “not your own, ever, under any circumstance, imaginable or unimaginable, possible or impossible,” as stipulated by the MAP’s How to Be a Person Manual, which was slammed onto the desktop of every new hire on Day 1. Nevertheless—Prague would do as he pleased. Despite setbacks, he always did as he pleased. He was Vincent Prague, celebrity, superstar, esquire, equerry, chevalier, jonkheer, vicar, anti-Tirthankar, Ali Baba, architect of sociotechnicity, primate extraordinaire, etc.…And while visiting his metropolitan namesake he would catch a show. At one point theater had been like second nature to him. He had attended at least 5,000 Andrew Lloyd Weber productions alone. Jesus Christ Superstar, Phantom and especially Cats were his favorites. He always cried when Grizabella sang “Memory.” When had he last seen Cats? And why had it been so long ago? He suspected it had to do with exposition exposition exposition expo…)…
429
AR
After reality, roaring helicopters peel the skin from the sky like a grapefruit and reveal the pulp of outer space. The helicopters appear indiscriminately, dumping WMDs and cat-eyed David Bowie simulacra in equal measures onto the pale earth…
After reality, there will be no exposition, i.e., no exorcism of the ghosts from the narrative of the Body Dildonic…Lincoln Hawk beats Bully Hurly? Life as a spectacle of one armwrestling match after another set to the music-in-the-heavens of Kenny Loggins? Only in reality. After reality, Mr Hurly will rise up and over the top like a chunk of foam in the Dead Sea. Life jackets, however, will only be distributed on a need-to-float basis…
Crazy sentence here with a big period at the end of it<<<.>>>
FACT: Anything can happen anytime. Anybody is capable of anything.
FICTION: Nobody can exist nowhere. Nothing assumes the existence of something.
FICTION (REVISED): <<<.>>>
ELEVATOR PITCH: Michael Jackson kills and cryogenically freezes himself, unable to bear further vilification from the Papanazi. In his will he donates the remains of the Elephant Man (a.k.a. Joseph Merrick) to the United Arab Emirates, the governing powers of which have always detected mystical powers in Merrick’s calamitous deformity. Somehow they will harness those powers and become the world’s next Global Hegemon. The remains are stolen en route, however, by a mad scientist with a figurative cleft palate who has contracted a PT Barnum fetish. [Briefly contextualize Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus]. Long scikungfi fight here. Then the scientist reanimates the hideous corpse and hangs it on a hook in his laboratory, Leatherface-style. It squirms there for three weeks. Enter love interest. At first she’s hesitant but eventually she loosens up and goes down on him and [Mad Lib]. After two weeks she dies of IFIEM (Irrational Fear of Impaled Elephant Men). Three weeks later Merrick squirms loose, eats the scientist’s brains, and staggers to the North Pole, searching for the King of Pop. Secret agent men chase him. Vague selections from the Bad album emanate from distant icebergs. The secret agent men fall into the water and drown. The zombified Merrick presses on and disappears in an arctic gust of qanuk.
Fin.
“Hajime!” screeches a sensei. Tori administers a spine-shattering tiatoshi to his uke, then stabs him with a kodachi sword. Geyser of Hammer blood…
…irregular world without regulation. Diegesis of negative capability and the clockwork of truth.
17
The Sans Merci vs. Macavity the Master Criminal
A flickering, pale green stripe passed across the screen of existence…
“Cats don’t have nine lives,” said the Truth/Untruth monster. “It’s imprudent to think they do. Strangle a cat, if you don’t believe me. It’ll die. Once.”
The Beauty/Ugly monster made a sad face. “I like cats.”
…lights blinked on and off, on and off. Theatergoers scarfed down ice cream treats and located their seats.
Idle conversation petered into jaded whispers petered into primordial silence. The slot machines cleared their aluminum throats and donned silencers. “Tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk,” went the maestro’s baton.
Darkness.
A squad of naked globetrotters dribbled overinflated neon cat’s eyes across the proscenium stage.
Silence.
Mischievous instruments: flutes, cymbals, synthesizers—their song allegorizing a cornfield at night. Every ear of corn an alive, angry cobb dentata…
The moon. The stars. Powerful blasts of catnip…
ACT I: When Cats Are Maddened by the Midnight Dance…During the first n
umber, “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” the players flooded the stage, strutting, prancing, shadow-clawing, hitting low and high notes with varying degrees of success. They looked the same as always, just as they did BAR (Before After Reality)—ballerinas and Cooper Nielsens in tights and overdone cat makeup—with the exception of a giant TS Eliot robot and scores of vibrating Bolshevik scythes and giraffe cannons. Spawn armor encased the cats’ flesh as they attacked the robot and reduced it to a heap of molten shit. The Eliot killed a few of the players during the battle, and the audience clicked fingers as the Deceased’s stark red blood flowed across the stage into the orchestra pit, stifling the jovial blurts of tubas, saxophones and French horns.
Humans had been barred from stage acting long ago by FCR Law. The government never specified why. Nobody cared—except for a handful of out-of-work actors who found employment in the Theater of Postblanketyblank Life.
…The Naming of Cats. The Invitation to the Jellicle Ball. The Old Gumbie Cat. The Rum Tug Tugger.
The Ugly/Beauty monster whispered, “Rum Tug Tugger’s hogging the dance floor. He’s too much! He keeps sticking out his tongue. He’s, like, Dr Frank-N-Fürter or something.”
“Shh!” said the Truth/Untruth monster.
…Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer. Old Deuteronomy. The Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles.
…“What’s a Pollicle?”
“Shhhhhhhhhhh!”…
During intermission, the casino games and slots fired up and a janitorial crew hosed the gore off the stage. They had goat heads.
ACT II: Why Will the Summer Day Delay—When Will Time Flow Away?…The Moments of Happiness. Gus: The Theater Cat. Growltiger’s Last Stand. Dr Moreau’s Vivisectional Romp (Recently Added Song & Flimflam/Scikungfi Dance) in which Mr Mistoffelees’ Machinic Assistant Removes his Facial Tissue with a Scalpel & Sprays Glistening Hairballs from a Gash in his Navel…
Macavity “The Master Criminal” Cat. It appeared only for a moment. It bore resemblance to an old glamrocker with teased mane, impossible eyeshadow, crotchrocket glitterslacks, Holy Diver chest hair, and throbbing erect tail. “Achtung, muthafuckaaaaaahs!” it bellowed, ejaculating from multiple orifices, and then disappeared in an explosion of dead rodents. A herd of pussycat-strippers sashayed onstage. They tore off fans and folds and fishnets of lingerie and performed a series of synchronized splits and contortions and sex acts while singing about the dastardliness of Macavity Cat.
Halfway through the number a stranger wandered onto the stage. Clearly not part of the show. No makeup, with ghostwhite skin in the carbuncular light of the theater. Medals that dinged like wind chimes hung from a black, skintight suit. A lean mustache punctuated the stranger’s overlip.
Bouncers retaliated with exigency. They leapt at the stranger from offstage, descended on the stranger from the rafters, lunged at the stranger from trap doors. The stranger dealt with each bouncer in turn, breaking backs, legs, necks with hammer-fast punches and kicks.
Suddenly the stranger was center stage. The music stopped. The pussycat-strippers stopped.
Silence.
Somebody said, “Is that Jean-Claude Van Damme?”
“Where did Macavity go?” the stranger asked the audience in an affected accent. “I empathize deeply with this character.”
“Psst,” said a voice from the foot of the main aisle. “Get the hell off of there. Sofort!”
The stranger glanced down. “I’m not leaving this stage until I talk to Macavity Cat, Dr Teufelsdröchk.”
Dr Teufelsdröchk peered over his shoulder and giggled nervously at the audience. He eyeballed The Sans Merci and motioned it offstage with an exaggerated jerk of his head.
The Sans Merci folded arms across chest. Another bouncer attacked it. The Sans Merci clean-pressed the bouncer over its head and ripped him in half. Tic Tacs tinkled across the stage.
Fingers clicked.
Dr Teufelsdröchk rolled a program into a cone, put it to his mouth and said, “I knew it was a bad idea to take you to the theater. This is what I get for trying to enculture a friend. Grief. Absurdist grief.”
“Is this part of the show?” asked the Ugly/Beauty monster. The monster’s companion rolled a program into a cone, put it to its mouth and said, “No.”
Nobody spoke for a long time. The Sans Merci and Dr Teufelsdröchk stared defiantly at each other as the machinic cat people cleaned hands and feet with tongues and the spectators buried their noses in paperback novels with dynamic cover illustrations and large black dots on every page…Finally Macavity Cat slouched onstage gripping a bottle of Jim Beam by the neck. It had skinned Old Deuteronomy and draped the patriarch’s blood-spattered pelt over its shoulders.
“Hello,” said The Sans Merci. “I am The Sans Merci.”
Macavity took a swig of bourbon and slurred, “What’s a Sans Merci?”
Dramatic pause….….….“It is why I sojourn here,” the monster replied, “alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing.”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Macavity. “Look. Beat it, weirdo. We’re in the middle of a goddamn musical.”
The Sans Merci sucked in its cheeks. “I thought we might talk a little. I am a fine conversationalist. I can talk about anything. Incidentally I can do anything. I can write poems, and I can commit genocide. And I can do everything in between. Which is in fact everything, is it not? Existence as the gulf that divides a poem from a holocaust—that is my philosophy, my ideology, my ontology.”
“Are you retarded? Somebody get this retard off my stage!” Macavity gesticulated at the production manager. Helpless, the production manager gesticulated back at him from behind the curtain.
“He’s not disabled,” proclaimed Dr Teufelsdröchk. “He’s home schooled. Don’t be so hard on him. He’s only been alive for a few days.”
“My queen!” bellowed The Sans Merci.
“Queen my ass.” Macavity smashed the whiskey bottle against the head of Skimbleshanks, who was standing next to it. A computerized meow escaped Skimbleshanks and the cat hit the stage like a bag of snooker balls. Macavity pointed the jagged bottleneck at The Sans Merci and made a clumsy cutting motion.
Dr Teufelsdröchk said, “Leave him alone! You’re drunk!”
“Please desist, sir,” whispered the maestro to the doktor from the orchestra pit. “Never aggravate an actor.”
The audience turned the pages of their paperbacks from one black dot to another.
“Aggravate who? Macavity? He’s not the one you should worry about aggravating.”
“Your fly is open, sir.”
Dr Teufelsdröchk blushed and zipped up his pants.
“I’m going to the lavatory,” said the Ugly/Beauty monster, getting up from its seat. The Truth/Untruth monster stopped it.
“You’re an android,” it said. “Androids don’t use the lavatory.”
“I can use the lavatory if I want to. There are all kinds of things you can do in the lavatory.”
“Who calls a lavatory a lavatory? It’s the toilet. It’s the loo. It’s the water closet. It’s the vay-say. It’s the restroom. It’s the shitter. It’s the head…”
“…Please, Mr Macavity. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to be friends with you,” said The Sans Merci.
“Hurt me? Do you know how many nicknames I have? The Mystery Cat. The Not There Cat. The Un-Cat Cat. The Hidden Paw. The Napoleon of Crime. Sherlock’s Anus. The Sasquatch of Irk. Lord of the Chicken Dance. Diddly Do-Wrong. Eliot’s Id. Prufrock’s Suplex. Boo-Yah of the Waste Land. The Illusory Fairy Rebuke. The Screaming Raw Dog. Kiss of the Barbed Wire Fist. Bizarro Mike. Eurotrash Jack. Overbaked Vampire Penetration. Seventy-Thousand Grasshoppers’ Unfathomable Collective Hangnail Fury. The Well-Moistened Crabgrass Stomper…Get the picture? Nobody hurts a cunt with that many nicknames. I hurt you, see? I am the Way the World Ends. Not with a bang, not with a whimper—but with a cliché. Translation: Blow it out your ass.�
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“No more swearing!” insisted the production director. “Especially the c-word. It’s misogynist!”
“Representation as critique,” epiphanized Codename Vincent Prague. The Anvil-in-Chief sat ten rows behind Dr Teufelsdröchk’s assistants’ monsters and remained one of the few spectators who had not surrogated boredom with a plotless, wordless novel. In his periphery, ushers did wind sprints up and down the aisles, timing themselves with stopwatches, passing off flashlights like batons…
The Sans Merci made every effort to befriend Macavity Cat, even as Macavity stabbed at the android with the bottleneck. The scene transcended ridiculousness. Then, parrying a blow, The Sans Merci accidentally struck Macavity Cat on the forearm with the blade of its hand in such a way that Macavity’s elbow and wrist exploded and its radius and ulna shot out of the forearm in opposite directions like two possessed chopsticks. The radius skewered a stagehand. The ulna smashed a Tiffany lamp offstage.
Macavity’s forearm dangled from the ramparts of its elbow like a dirty sock. It ogled the hideous wound. It ogled The Sans Merci. “You think this means something?” it spat. “You think you’ve won? I don’t give a shit about this!”
“That’s the problem,” breathed The Sans Merci. “Apathy. An epidemic of apathy. And a deprivation of camaraderie.”
Dr Teufelsdröchk said, “Don’t fancify your discourse. Be more colloquial, i.e., instead of saying ‘a deprivation of camaraderie,’ say, ‘nobody likes one another.’ But it’s simply not true. People like people. Some do. I like you, for instance. I’m your comrade. I care about things, too.”
“You only care about two things: the perpetration of food, and your lack of acclaim for the perpetration of food. And you’re not my comrade. You’re my master. You’re my maker.”