Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  But he hadn’t yet become a Ronald, then. He had been a different kind of human. No, not human, either. A man, maybe, but not human. He’d been a mere scraping beast. A herd man. Kenny the flabby herd man.

  Seeing the Ronalds in action, he’d seen not their liberation from mediocrity, but only the dirt clinging to their faces, the blood and grime ground into the fabric of their costumes, the dung clinging to their floppy red shoes. They’d been liberated from the trap of ego and identity, and attained McMoksha, but through the thickening haze of the gas bombs they’d set off, he’d stared into their eyes behind their gas-masks and seen only one thing: crazy.

  Little had he known, as he’d stumbled out the side door, through the parking lot, coughing and sputtering on the fumes, that he was the crazy one. He’d staggered past the rear bumper of his second-hand jalopy of a truck, its bumper crusted in consumers’ rights bumper stickers with blinking mottoes like: “Hands off my fried chicken!” and, “My lard, my life.”

  He’d burned the last reserves of his energy hoisting himself up into the seat of his truck, squeezing in sideways, getting his foot onto the gas pedal. Still choking and coughing, he’d started the pickup truck’s engine, and, not bothering with the seat-belt—it didn’t fit him anyway—he’d slammed his foot down onto the accelerator.

  He’d managed to cling to consciousness long enough to get down the road and slam his truck into a traffic-light pole in front of a gas station. Someone had already called 911 by then, and when the ambulance had shown up, they’d just given him an injection and a coffee and made him sit by the gas station and wait for the cops to come and take his statement. They’d even let him drive himself home an hour or two later.

  His truck had been seriously dented, but his mind had been damaged far worse. The attack had hit him harder than the last international foreign terrorist attacks all rolled into one. It took him a week before he went to a burger joint again.

  No other week in his life had ever felt as much like forever.

  “My dear, brave Ronnies!” Guru Deepak declared to the eager assembly of the faithful.

  They paused, setting their preparations aside, and turned to face their guru, settling on their backsides in the hot sand. White face-paint set off the black crusts beneath their fingernails, and excited gap-toothed smiles lit up their pimpled, scarred faces.

  “Today, we launch a very important assault,” Guru Deepak declared, his head wobbling side to side insistently. “All our past struggles have led up to this. Yes, this is very-very important! Today, we end our endless attacks on the lowest levels of the death chains. The world has heard our message, and had many chances to heed it. The willing have already joined us.”

  “And those who have chosen to ignore us . . . it is a tragedy, my Ronnies. It is heartbreaking. Every one of you knows what it was like to be a carnivore, to feast on the blood and bodies of poor animals. Every one of you, until you joined us, turned a deaf ear to the screams of murdered beasts suffering in your own flabby bellies. You thought you were punished for it, when being fat was almost a crime, but no punishment ever stopped you. Who aided you? Yes, I did . . . in Gandhari’s name.”

  Ronald felt a tear in his eye. It all came back to him now, the people had stared at him. Their hissing whispers, as he’d gone by, echoed in his tortured soul. He remembered catching eyes with other fat people, obese women who’d looked at him with those wide, sorrowful eyes. I know, their looks had said, and he’d avoided their gaze. He hated those looks. Pious, hopeful pity. He had pitied those women back, who were surely as lonely as he was, but nonetheless he’d seen them as bulbous hags he would never stoop to touching. He’d never made one fat friend, ever. He’d hated fat people with a passion most people never experience in their happy, healthy lives.

  And now, he looked down at himself, and he could see the bones within his arms; he could bend and touch his toes without any trouble; he hadn’t had a backache in months, though his muscles still twitched and shuddered every once in a while, and some of his teeth were coming loose. He never felt lonely anymore, though he didn’t feel the opposite of lonely, either. He wasn’t sure, even, what the opposite of lonely was.

  “It was no sin. Being fat was a symptom. Not of your glands, my Ronnies, for none of you is fat now, and we have not changed your glands. Not of symptom of weakness: you are not weak people, and the world shudders when we attack. It was a symptom of your society. We know what it was a symptom of, don’t we?”

  Then the Ronnies began to recite the mantra together, Ron’s voice one of dozens. They chanted this mantra together whenever a craving for fries or a burger hit one of their group:

  Ravenous mouths, ravenous heads,

  Devouring bodies and the earth,

  The sickness of the living dead,

  Eternal death, empty rebirth.

  They repeated it over and over, faces turned skyward and eyes closed heavenward. After three, maybe four dozen repetitions, Ron felt a firm hand on his shoulder.

  He opened his eyes, and standing above him was Guru Deepak. The Indian gestured with his eyes toward the center of the crowd, from where he’d been speaking, and whispered, “Come on.”

  Ron rose on wobbly legs and followed him to the elevated platform at the crowd’s center, and just as he reached it, a few Ronalds—those in Deepak’s inner circle, clown-masked female eunuchs who went about with their beautiful bodies nude, clean and smooth and white as a millionaire’s finest dishplates—led a blotchy-coated, thin brown cow out onto the platform. Deepak tried to keep Ron distracted, but he glimpsed a muzzle on her nose, holding her mouth shut. The eunuchs slid it off quickly once they got her onto the platform, and after a few moments, she let out a loud, insistent moo.

  The chanting stopped. Eyes bloomed slowly open, heads nodded downward from blind sky-gazing, and they caught sight of the cow.

  “It is Gandhari!” Deepak hollered, and the Ronalds howled back with ecstatic joy. The cow flicked her tail listlessly, and farted. “She has chosen a Ronald to lead the mission!” he cried out, and Ron felt the guru’s hand clap him on the shoulder.

  The joyous screams grew louder still as the Ronalds surged toward him and the cow. Their tattooed red mouths and noses, their teary eyes, blurred before Ron, and he turned to the cow. With all his might, he fought the ghostly poison of Kenny’s illusions, and willed himself to see not the sickly Jersey cow before him, but instead the true, beautiful, utter Gandhari.

  And then it was effortless, seeing ultimate reality: she was standing right there before him, eyes burning with divine love as she chewed her timeless, life-giving cud. She exuded holiness, contentment. The cow radiated ineffable hope.

  Ron felt a boundless joy he’d never felt before.

  The meeting had been held in a small room in the downtown Fort Worth YMCA. Corpulent men and women had sat in a circle, talking about their addictions. A.A. for the Obese, the counselor had said. It was the only way the hospital had let him go, after he’d failed to kill himself with painkillers one Sunday afternoon.

  Ron had found the rules were insulting. A higher power? You had to believe in God to stop pigging out? Ten steps, twelve steps . . . whatever. That last night at the Y, he’d made up his mind not to come back.

  But at the end of the meeting, the counselor, a gaunt Yankee with a shaved head and some kind of certificate from a nothing college in Vermont, had caught his arm and said his name softly. “Kenny,” he’d said.

  “Yeah?” Kenny had said, trying not to let on that he’d given up on the support group.

  “I can see what you’re thinking. That this group isn’t going to help you.”

  “Naw, it ain’t that.” Kenny had been like that, then—so terrified of the truth: frightened to say it, frightened even to acknowledge it. “I’m just having an off day, and . . . ”

  “No, you’re right to think it. This group isn’t going to help you. But I know someone who can. I know someone who can free you. You know, I used to be . . . ” He
paused, a droplet of sweat on his brow sliding softly down in the harsh fluorescent light.

  “What?”

  The group facilitator had reached into his wallet, and pulled out a picture of an enormous man. A man so heavy it was difficult to imagine him walking, seated at a cheap diner table with a burger meal set in front of him, smiling.

  “That’s what I look like five years ago,” he’d said.

  “Well, lucky you,” Kenny had said, eager to flee his chance at liberation. “So for you it was just diet. Not glandular, or . . . ”

  Kenny had tried to push past him, but the man had stopped him, and said, “You know, people have glandular problems all over the world. But there is nobody this fat in Myanmar. There’s almost nobody this fat in Uzbekistan, either.” He lowered his voice when he said the names of those countries, looking around anxiously. What, was he paranoid too? As if any government department—even Homeland Security—would plant someone in a fatties’ support group! “It’s an excuse, and you know it.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  The guy lowered his voice a lot, then, practically to a whisper, as he suggested, “Why not come with me and find out?”

  Kenny had noticed a few locks from the red wig in the backseat of the man’s car, just barely peeking out from under a magazine, but he hadn’t put two and two together until much later. He’d been too busy feeling mortified at how the car’s seatbelt hadn’t fit around his torso.

  “Don’t worry,” his counselor had said, nodding in that encouraging way he always did. “I’ve been there myself. It’ll get better. I promise,” he’d whispered, turning his head to scan the parking lot one more time. Then they’d pulled out just a little too fast and sped off into the night.

  “What are you doing here?” the man in the suit screamed.

  Ron smiled silently, crossing the room slowly and carefully while the man scrambled with the drawers of his desk. Glass crunched beneath his feet, and somewhere in the building, an alarm wailed. He could hear the fluttering of bodies in motion, and terrified cries outside the man’s office. Fools, resisting the Ronalds who were trying to save them. He ignored all of that, and stared into the man’s eyes.

  This was the right guy. His face had been burned into Ron’s mind during his last meditation session, within Gandhari’s womb. Ron raised his taser.

  The man drew a pistol out from a drawer, and had it halfway up to Ron’s face when the needles slammed into his chest, through his fine tailored shirt.

  “Don’t,” Ron said, a tiny smile curving within the thick red smile tattooed into the skin of his face.

  The man pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He’d panicked, forgotten about the safety. That was enough time for Ron. He thumbed a button, and pain swept down the taser wires, through the needles and into the man.

  Who then howled.

  “Drop it,” Ron ordered him.

  The man didn’t obey. His clumsy hands fiddled with the gun, and then he tried to raise it toward Ron again.

  Ron increased the voltage, and the man howled again, louder, dropping the gun involuntarily. Ron’s heart flooded with sorrow and sympathy. That such a powerful minion of the death-chains could fall to the ground and suffer, writhing pathetically—he needed to be liberated as much as anyone.

  Ron slipped a paper bag over the man’s head and hauled him up, still shivering, to his unsteady feet.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve just been rescued.”

  The back of the van was crammed with people, their ruddy-cheeked faces terrified. They weren’t fat, like the death-eaters Ron had seen walking the streets earlier in the day, on the way to the offices. These were kind of people whose daily schedules allowed for an exercise regimen, for occasional liposuction when necessary, for dietary restrictions. They could afford to eat well, and . . .

  Ron sighed. He had to admit it to himself: they probably were not addicted as he had been, when his name had been Kenny. They would be almost impossible to liberate. They liked living in this evil, awful world they’d built.

  “Where are we going?” shouted the CEO from under his paper bag.

  “This is just routine inspection procedure, sir,” Ron said. “We want to see the state of your cattle.”

  “You’re crazy! You asshole! We can’t go to every . . . ”

  “We don’t need to,” snapped Ron. “Y’all got an indoor ranch set up under San Marcos, don’t you?”

  “What? How do you . . . ?” One of the men reached for the paper bag on his head.

  The wiry, half-Japanese Ronald chick from Oklahoma slapped his hand, and in her high-pitched voice, she said, “Don’t even try it, Mac!” All the other Ronnies burst out into laughter at her clever pun.

  “You’d be surprised how much we know, Mr. Dalton,” Ron said once they had stopped guffawing. He let the man stew in that the rest of the way out to San Marcos.

  If you want to imagine the future they want to build, Guru Deepak had preached once, imagine a boot stamping on a cow’s face, forever. Ron could see the boot before him, a big black industrial jackboot made from cow’s leather. It was stomping and stomping, brutal and incessant.

  He comforted himself with another Guru Deepak’s teachings: I am a cow. You are a cow. We are all cows. We have been, and will again be, cows. We shall graze on green fields, and somewhere, sometime else, we are cows and bulls grazing on green fields. There is a calm and beautiful cow within every one of us. Namasté: the cow within me greets and salutes the cow within you.

  That was the message of Guru Deepak, the whole of it, the heart and soul of it, and it comforted Ron as the van rolled out along the highway towards horrors unimaginable.

  The people had met him with smiles and encouraging looks.

  “My name is Kenny, and I’m a fast-food addict,” he’d said. They’d all sat there quietly, listening to his story. Which had been nothing special, just extra portions and aunts and uncles telling him to finish this or that so they wouldn’t have to take it home. School dances sat skipped out on, and the looming threat of diabetes. Bottles of cola every day, and the antidepressant effects of fries, burgers, desserts, and more burgers. How he’d finally tried to kill himself, and found he was too fat to die on a mere half-bottle of painkillers.

  They’d smiled and nodded, listened generously. He’d felt weird telling them this, all these slim people, but they’d looked at him with what had felt, for the first time in years, like genuine respect.

  “So,” he’d finished off, “I’m looking at all of you, and you’re all so slim. Skinny, even. I kinda can’t believe that y’all used to be big like me. But that gives me hope. I can change, you know?”

  They’d clapped, and one of them, an Indian wearing a long golden shirt, had nodded as the clapping petered out and the others had looked at him. Dude looks like Gandhi, Kenny thought to himself for a moment. But with muscles and more hair.

  “Oh, yes, Kenny,” he’d said with a wide, reassuring smile, his head nodding sideways. “I can help you change yourself. If you want it badly enough. But changing yourself isn’t enough. If we want to change ourselves, we must also change the world.”

  Kenny had remembered, then the image he’d seen in the mirror a few days before, puke all down his undershirt, on that day he’d tried to die. Sagging man-tits under his thin yellow-stained undershirt, useless nipples as wide as silver dollars. All those eyes on him, the years and years of eyes focusing the way they do when people look at lizards and snakes. Then there had risen ache inside him, deep down at his core. He’d wanted to sleep with someone before he died. Someone real. Someone shaped like a woman—like a cello, not a pear or a watermelon. He’d wanted to run again, in this life.

  “Sign me up,” Kenny had said, and then he noticed that one of them was fidgeting with a hypodermic needle in her hand.

  Ron inhaled deeply. The bovoid stench was incredible, like a million tons of rank milk and blood and the faintest hint of corn-syrup in the air. Sweet,
not disgusting the way he’d expected.

  The hairless thing’s meters-long torso hung in a tickle-harness, for all the world like an immense caterpillar shuddering reflexively from the automated stimulation. Dozens of “legs” hung floppily from its side, squirming occasionally. They looked more like enormous fins of boneless meat, each bearing only a tiny black nail—the vestige of a hoof—at its tip. Stumps of other legs, still regenerating from the last meat-harvest, were visible.

  Food and waste plumbing penetrated every natural orifice and a few artificial ones, as well. A series of udders, a dozen at least, hung from its underside, through the netting of the harness that suspended it. Pipe-feeds attached to each one. Ron could not tell whether the end he was looking at was the mouth or the ass, because the heads had been engineered out of these beasts. Superfluous, brains and faces. Not even eyes. Just tubes going in one end and out the other.

  “This isn’t a cow,” Ron said. “It shits liquid fuel and it pisses sugar water and secretes two hundred liters of milk a day. It regrows its . . . legs . . . a hundred times before they give out. It has, what, sixteen or twenty wombs? And not one brain. This thing is not a cow.”

  “Yes it is,” Mr. Dalton said, his dull eyes defiant. “According to the FDA . . . ”

  “Fuck the FDA! Screw ‘em in the throat with a chainsaw!” Ron howled. “Look at that thing . . . it doesn’t even look like a land animal!”

  “What the hell do you think you look like?” Dalton snapped, and then winced in sudden fear.

  Ron wiggled the tip of his tattooed-red nose and jammed one finger of his grimy white-gloved hand into Dalton’s chest. “Look who’s talking,” he said.

  From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a movement. A ranch worker had lunged at him with a rifle. The gunshot blast sent all the hostages flat to the floor, Dalton included, but a thick, white-gloved hand clubbed the rancher flat onto the floor, unconscious.