Voltaire's Adventures Before Candide

by Martin Gibbs

  "But you weren't there, either. I didn't know where to look after that

  "To my horror you were hanging from a pole and emaciated, as it says on my script. I rescued you. And now...now..."

  After ten minutes of dying breath, the old Wonkie-do from the land of Land GoBuyBye, she who had a degree in Tiki torch construction, and around which only a sliver of Voltaire's world did spin, died in the confines of Voltaire's craft.

  He kicked the body to the ground and sped off.

  When Voltaire left his young bride in death, his heart was happier, his life was full of meaning, and he smiled broadly.

  Finally, he thought, the old bat was gone. Now he was free to experiment with his big engine (the engine on the craft that is). Voltaire found the two wires that fueled propulsion—they were hanging from the steering wheel. Somehow our author crossed these wires and, with a jerk, the little craft went speeding through galaxy after galaxy at a speed that approached 10 times 10 times 10 times-some-really-big-ridiculous-number, times the speed of light.

  He then crashed into another asteroid—but he somehow survived. Yes, he had taken a lesson from a dummy. The spacecraft, however, was a total loss. Destroyed and destitute, our hero climbed onto the asteroid where it he noticed two green men were playing Ping-Pong with Astatine pellets.

  Voltaire was still carrying the cleaver, which he didn't have in 1484, and swiftly attacked the green men and took their Astatine pellets. In the confines of space, the Astatine did not react to anything except the hull of his destroyed craft, whereupon it ignited half of the asteroid. This left our hero alone on his big rock.

  He was not alone. The galactic communist conspiracy had spread throughout the universe and it was not long before Voltaire noticed miniscule stick-men arise from the rock and surround him.

  He swung the cleaver wildly and sent many of these communists to Big Blue Hell.

  Voltaire was very nervous at his point. He had killed the little communists, but was now very afraid. He became terrified, then, of giant beasts from the parallel universe attacking him.

  Our hero sat screaming upon the asteroid, waiting and hoping that the psychiatrists from Pluto would come and take him away. No one showed up, and Voltaire sobbed on the spinning ball of rock.

  Holding his nose as if were about to jump into a pool of water, he dove into space. He soon fell on a traveling space ship. The driver let him in and Voltaire started to thank his rescuer, but our hero halted. It was the priest from Mars, the strange man who had asked him to dance—the man Voltaire thought he had killed.

  "Well it is the admirable Cretin," spoke the religious man prodigiously.

  "Yes, it is I, the masked man."

  "Where are you going?" quizzed the priest.

  "To Zendor."

  "That is far."

  "The moon is full of pus."

  "But the order is wrong, you make no sense..."

  "Red bones taste of nitrogen."

  "None whatever..."

  "Old dogs sing operas."

  "Nor even going to Pluto..."

  "Fetishes for cats."

  "I remember the bow staff war..."

  "You lost."

  "It was heavy..."

  "I'm Rosencrantz."

  "No I am."

  "ATMs have hairy feet."

  "I hadn't died..."

  "Because pancakes need bacon."

  "I ran off to Zendor..."

  "She had no idea what class really was."

  "Your wife..."

  "So I took the dog back for a day."

  "A slave, working so hard..."

  "But I couldn't foresee the large hammer."

  "I helped her escape..."

  "When sausage was packed faster."

  "She lived because of me..."

  "And then the bac—" Voltaire broke off, his face filled with rage and he became coherent for the first time in his life:

  "You saved Wonkie-do? You son of some old hag on the dark side of Star 34! You swine from Hell! I cannot believe you, a man of God, would abuse justice and your authority in order to save a young woman's life! A woman, I might add, who was the daughter of ImponGeorge III, the terrible goat-sodomizer! I cannot believe that a priest would do such a dreadful, horrible thing! What possessed you? What demon, what serpent, what England took your brain? Never again! Never again shall you save the life of Wonkie-do again! Never! Because she's dead! Do you hear me? She is dead! Thank you God! Thank you so bloody much! SHE IS GONE!"

  The old priest seemed frightened, his face turned pale and he gasped. "What? I saved her life."

  "YOU BASTARD!" Voltaire leapt on the man and abused him with his eyes until the old priest lost his mind completely. Now you know how it feels, thought Voltaire, growling in his throat. Rather, he thought he growled, but it came off as a low-pitched, horrid, wet, gurgle.

  Our great author sped off to Pluto and left the priest with the psychiatrists. They were so intent on the strange man gurgling; they did not notice Voltaire inside of his mongoose costume. Smiling, he went screaming off for earth.

  Voltaire realized his position. He would now marry and have children with the Princess Tytou, the only character not yet introduced in this slushy book—it was Tytou we did not see sitting with Voltaire upon the asteroid (neither did he), it was Tytou who did not go swimming with Voltaire on Earth, it was Tytou who undermined the rebel uprising on Planet 45.8 (which Voltaire knew nothing about), and it was the lovely Tytou who secretly admired ImpotenGeorge III in 2345.

  Voltaire met his fiancée on Earth and they wed underneath the core, in some old cathedral that looked like the backside of Zendor's third mountain, just beneath the red cave, beside Mary's old well, and invisible to the rats with the limited vision. Their damaged vision was the result of scanners at over-priced yet dumpy grocery stores in stinking slums near Neptune.

  Voltaire and his bride, with the wealth acquired from the sacking of Troy, purchased a sleek new spacecraft. To the horror and disdain of Voltaire's third cousin's sister's younger friend, Mars close. Too close. Not as close, however, as a man on Zendor had once never said.

  Our author's bride suddenly became the victim of a horrible plot against her and the fringe group that looked like her.

  The man we once called Eddy Baby had, in 1285, began his massive campaign against 9th Generation yuppies. This undertaking was part of his effort to "free" the world of those people he liked to refer to as Cheese Log.

  In 1369, his task was almost completed and Eddy Baby faded into a clinical depression. When the sun set over Neptune's western mountains, Eddy Baby's heart stopped beating for a moment, his stomach ulcer exploded, his left ankle gave out, a bone spur on his femur bore into an artery, toe number eight was plucked off by marauding stick men from Macy's department store, his liver broke through the first layer of his epidermis, some demon from Beyond sucked out half his brain with a straw made of 92% non-recyclable Cesium, a little green man from Zendor did not appear, ships from Earth never set sail, a load of coal did not fall on him, his nose did not get broken by the Bounty hunters from Uranus, and he finally got that silly-looking stain off his shirt.

  Most important, however, was the fact that Eddy Baby had, through some bizarre and cruel trick, stared at a piece of lint on the tunic of an invalid 10,000 miles away for a length (or width) of 2,087 years before he realized that he did not in fact, have the right amount of fuel in his ultra-swift craft. Eddy Baby however did not have the psychological damage to his brain that most people did after the galactic nuclear meltdown. He knew this well and quickly got fuel for his vehicle at a local station.

  The year, he realized, was 3456 and he did not understand quite how much fuel cost in that day. He left the attendant a bundle of needles then went off to find Voltaire's bride.

  In a normal chain of events, this would have led Eddy Baby to Voltaire's wife, but this is no ordinary plot—this is the bizarre and freakish tale of a space adventure gone horrible astray.

  No,
quite to the contrary: these events led Eddy Baby to a distant star nearly four hundred light days away the Division Four Headquarters of the galactic communist conspiracy.

  Eddy Baby had no clue to where he was, for many reasons:

  1. He had fallen asleep for a day.

  2. A giant blotch of red appeared before his eyes.

  3. His left rudder had jammed.

  4. Somehow he had forgotten his name.

  Eddy Baby could not change what had been done, so he decided he would wail and moan for a few minutes.

  After an hour of accomplishing nothing, Eddy Baby put away his reading glasses—that he never used until 1484, when Voltaire did not have his cleaver. Eddy Baby then turned on his thrusters and pointed the bow of his craft toward Jupiter. He fell into a wormhole and wound up exactly where he intended to be—

  Tytou looked up and screamed. "Ah!"

  Eddy Baby appeared suddenly (How he did was a total surprise to me) and started a bizarre conversation with a dead man in the parallel universe. Voltaire looked on with bemused interest. Where had Eddy Baby come from? Who was he? Why was he dressed as a seventh-century drain fixer?

  "Well at least I'm still young," Eddy Baby said.

  "But soon I shall force blind people to pull out your toenails," spoke the voice from the parallel universe.

  "Why? Why not write threatening letters to long-dead Egyptian pharaohs?"

  Voltaire and Tytou listened to the conversation calmly, but their grips on the huge barrel organ tightened.

  "Listen Eddy Baby," said the Parallel Voice, "I am not your savior, do you understand? I will not rescue you from the lands of Zongo, leader of the lovely little men."

  "I ask not that you do, rather than what would happen if the stars began to weep and the toilets wanted to erupt when looked at in odd ways."

  "Oh, for the sake of Tahiti—"

  "I was there once, you know," Voltaire interrupted, "I left for the great island in the summer of my youth. I saw, I saw..."

  "Good for you. I don't care," said the Parallel Voice.

  Eddy Baby decided he would end this oddball scenario and grasped Voltaire's cleaver, which the author did not possess in 1484, and swung wildly.

  A groan bellowed out.

  Eddy Baby turned to Tytou and frowned, the great gash he received to the lip due to a sadistic garden gnome glared worse than a dead dog.

  Tytou was terrified.

  "What can it be?" said Voltaire.

  His bride shook with a seizure brought on by Eddy Baby and by the realization that she hadn't yet shaved off her beard.

  Eddy Baby spoke to her in a low, seductive, yet perverted voice. "I've come for you, cheese log."

  Tytou gasped.

  "Yes, old hag." A surprised Voltaire leaped up and howled—totally taken aback by what he had said. Having just married, he had hoped to avoid just an insult for at least a month.

  "Listen to me, lady," Eddy Baby said, "I've had a wide experience with hotels."

  Eddy Baby traveled too much, and the mental strain was showing. But he kept on speaking:

  "Is your veal...in her attaché case? Do you really believe, that even in your wildest dreams, I would understand those jellyfish lies you feed to me with my Kippers? Do you think that I could actually drink that chalk? Do you like me? Why is the room spinning...? ...Good...good...now I understand why the planet has wings...Ha! Ha! I love this game, don't you? Don't you like to eat those little cream puffs? Why not? YOU BASTARD!"

  Voltaire took advantage of the situation and ran the poor yet once rich and potato-filled psycho through with the cleaver that our hero did not possess in 1484.

  Episode 7

  Voltaire in London – We Don't Know When or Why

  Our great leader was looking in earnest for his bride, but he could not think of where Tytou could be—so he swerved wearily through the streets. He sang his great Cavalry songs, dreamed his little dreamy flight of fancy, and danced openly with a bridal dress he had acquired from a woman standing at the altar in a pub that did not exist in the days of glory and fear.

  It wasn't long before he stripped down and entered a pub. There men did things to dart boards and billiard tables that seemed rather odd, but which were quite normal to the Prefect of police in the imaginary town of Digne-3, near the badlands outside of the French garrisons that stank of garlic éclairs.

  Voltaire brought silence to the pubs, spewing out his tales and meaningless babble.

  "Listen, because I have been far."

  Men stuttered and spat.

  "Refrigeration of dead Chevy trucks takes a special hand, but it wasn't until Zendor fell to the galactic communist conspiracy that I decided to write a long letter to my mother. She was happy, singing and dancing, just before—" Voltaire stopped suddenly. He left the pub and looked outside, his gaze drifting up to the clear sky...and he smiled, like a broad-leaf herbicide.

  Tytou was there. He could see her. Her face beamed through the heavens, across the eons of time and distance, and it glowed like a beacon. A slightly grail-shaped beacon.

  Finding his craft, buried inside the bowels of a long bus underneath a coal pit that smelled of fermenting beetle blood, Voltaire started it up and erupted into space.

  They found Tytou on Pluto, taking the assets away from a giant potato factory, which Eddy Baby once thought of buying. She soon owned half of the planet and was on a stroll when Voltaire appeared.

  "My dear Voltaire!" she said loudly.

  "Darling!" said our hero as he ran toward his lovely little wife in hopes of embracing her.

  However, to their dismay, there was no hope. Tytou fell into a shaft that went to the center of Jupiter—a scene that would be too difficult to describe. Voltaire dove in after her and disappeared for a long period.

  While he was underneath the surface of Jupiter, Voltaire rescued Tytou without difficulty. But our great hero saw objects of the most interesting nature: Tires of molten lead, batteries seething with gangrene, CFCs electrified and crawling with lice, buried calves, telephone poles inserted into horses, tremendous fires, coal mines, dust bins, doors, violins, dark corners, his old socks, a cat strung from a tree singing Bellini's favorite overtures, numerous chickens with ropes on their legs dancing the ballet and complaining about the soup that was thick and muddy, and an old book that spoke of each detail ever to come in the universe that had not yet occurred unless it did in 1484.

  Voltaire became bored and took his bride back to Earth where they swam again with the fishes and the dolphins until a giant asteroid crashed upon the planet, killing off most of the top stories of the world apartments.

  Tytou and our hero, however, escaped to Mercury. Tytou saw the remains of Wonkie-do and had an unqualified nervous breakdown. She moaned and wailed upon the hot dust, crying out into the darkness, and all the while pretending she was still at home with her dolls.

  Voltaire left another bride. Both on the same planet. He did not really let the incident get to him, but he felt remorse, tracked down Eddy Baby, electrocuted the body, and brought the psycho back to life for conversational and emotional purposes.

  Eddy Baby continued the conversation from earlier. "So, how about the puffy balls? Don't you like them?"

  Voltaire shook his head. "I prefer old mold."

  "Ah, yes, the lawyers. They have the ingredients, don't you know? They found them buried beneath your mother in the back of the world before the end of the third century, just before the great leveling of the third empire of China, by the cold sea, in the end, of—"

  "Shut your hairy rat's nest." (This from the narrator.)

  Eddy Baby stiffened. His face contorted and he mewed. "What in the holy mother's name do you expect?"

  Voltaire smiled. "I want to find the key."

  "Ah, yes, it is with the cat."

  "And where is the cat?"

  "I'm not sure, perhaps Terry found the veal."

  "Answer me!"

  "No, do not leave the pigeons. They taste good.
"

  "Oh, for the love of your dead grandmother, will you please answer me?"

  Eddy Baby chuckled. "I think it was near the eighth or ninth symphony where I began to lacerate the arms of the chairs with curtain rods. They then came for me, running as fast as a star explodes when it has the right angle. Do you understand? Do you? I don't...I don't...well, anyway, it's been a lovely summer, don't you think?"

  "Indeed. Go to Pluto and get my cleaver."

  Eddy Baby lost his focus. "Well, where exactly on Pluto is your cleaver?"

  "You should know. Near the western mountain. Look hard or you'll never find it."

  "What if I don't want to find it?"

  "Then that is your own funeral, isn't it?"

  "What do you mean by that?" asked the mad Bulgarian.

  "I mean very simply that somehow we will never find the end of the days, or the end of the nights, or the end of my station wagon's antenna. But you can find the width of a snail's testicle if you use the correct amount of fuse."

  The Bulgarian wept. A new smell entered the craft and Eddy Baby's tears were rivers of sadness...."Why in the world would ImpotenGeorge III return?"

  He had. He stood behind Voltaire.

  Our hero jumped at the odor behind him. The giant man was now dressed in a kilt and was playing the bagpipes in a splendid tone.

  Voltaire wept, and then spoke in a choking voice. "That was truly marvelous. Now, let us return to Earth." He hefted the cleaver, which he did not have in 1484, and threw it skillfully against the wall of the spacecraft. It landed with a resonating thud and our hero smiled. "I've had just about enough of this."

  With those words, the great hero took his craft back to earth many years before the radio, sat at his desk, and composed Candide.

  THE END

  Final Word

  If you are still there, please remember that I wrote this at a time when I consumed far more caffeine than should be allowed by law. As I write this, my younger self is surely sneering at my half-empty bottle of Diet Sierra Mist, and wondering how I ever turned into an old fart. Well kids, it happens.

  As I look back through this tale (and make the necessary edits, of course), I realize that, as bizarre as it is, it was very therapeutic. Being young was fraught with imagined crises, fears that were unfounded, and wild hopes that I would grow up. Too bad I did not know then that those days were easy and free, and that supporting oneself is a hell of a lot of work.