by Aidan Truhen
“No sir.”
“…Well that is just dandy I am being mocked and no one will do anything about it not even my hireling minion.”
“I’m not a minion.”
“But—”
“Nope. Do not minion. Non miniono. Ne minionibus meum.”
“You made those up.”
“Yep. No minion, no language lessons.”
“…”
“…”
“Fine then I am good with that cool cool onward and upward ahem ahem:
I looked up and / all I saw was black—
Her hair was long / her nails were red all down my back—
I felt the coldest metal onnnn my brrroooooowwwwww—
I fell for her and how I fell oooooohhhh hoooowwwww—”
“O God fuck boss lady I think I will die before we get there—”
“Silence I am making art—”
“SHUT UP—”
“BOTH OF YOU—”
“ROINK!”
“Whut—”
“What now—”
“Was that a—”
“Shush now please you are upsetting the pig.”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“Is there a pig in that bag?”
“Yes there was a slight issue in our final item for which obviously I had also prepared but still I do not wish to discuss it. It is all fine now.”
“I think maybe we need to discuss it just a little—”
So the slight issue goes a bit like this I do not know I was not at the Nordwandhüs:
Doc: “Knock knock man in house on day off we are Girl Scouts selling cookies.”
Target: “I am suspicious that is my job I am in security at a vaulty bank kindsa place.”
Doc: “Knock knock we shall sing for you we are you know undangerous females of conceptual virginity we are from the church we do not wish to kidnap you for immoral robbing purposes AT ALL this is pastoral cookie vending.”
Target: “You seem a little old for girl scouts also which church?”
Doc: “The totally religious one?”
Target: “Nope I am from the other one go away now strangers my suspicions are manly and erect.”
Doc: “Charlie show him how pure and girlish you are—”
Charlie: “I am pure and girlish open the fucking door—”
Lucille: “LUCILLE!”
Target: “CODE RED!”
Doc: “What the fuck is Lucille doing here in a dirndl—”
Charlie: “Helping?”
Doc: “I do not think that is what that is—”
Target: “CODE RED CODE RED CODE—”
The Neighborhood: “AAAAOOOOOGAH! FOREIGN INVASION BY SAVAGE FOREIGNS!”
Doc: “I hate fucking Switzerland—”
Lucille: “LUCILLE!”
Charlie: “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR OR I WILL BLOW YOUR FUCKING FOOT OFF—”
Target: “I FEAR NOTHING—”
Charlie: “Kewl pew pew pew—”
Doc: “Nooooooooooo—”
Target: “O gosh”
Doc: —oooOOOooOOoooo—
Charlie: “Pew pew PEW oh wait unpew unpew OH ALAS that does not work entropy—”
Target: “I can see God now he is calling me—”
Charlie: “Oopla?”
Doc: “Ooooo that should have an exclamation point and yet now it feels inappropriately delayed to the point of otiosity DID I NOT express myself with perfect clarity?”
Target: “I am dying of death and also bullets—”
Doc: “CHARLIE WAS I NOT CLEAR?”
Charlie: “Uh no?”
Doc: “…”
Charlie: “Yeah okay busted sorry Doc.”
Doc: “Shut up and get me the pig. And you Lucille—give me your sharpest fucking knife off that suit or you and I will have words and you will not like them I will make you cold sober and sane in half an hour and then I will fuck your shit up like Price cannot even imagine do you hear me?”
Lucille: “Knife for Doc lady yup yup yup sure.”
Doc: “Damn straight knife and now where is my emergency kit we are doing this. And you assholes you GLOVE THE FUCK UP MOFOS THIS IS EVIL SCIENCE TIME YOU ARE NURSES NOW BWAHAHAHA.”
Doc says that she is in no way that sort of outlaw scientist and she does not ever bwahahah but who are you going to believe here?
“Wait Doc so we do not have a guy to open the doors?”
“Were you not listening, of course not, Charlie shot him in the neck he is extinct—”
“I was AIMING for his foot I do not know how—”
“Well that is not good—”
“What we have is in many ways better we have a pig with a man’s eyeball stitched in to its head whacked-up on veterinary painkillers so that she is high as a weather balloon. So long as you do not sing, the system will read her transplanted eye as a happy human, so long as we can get her to the reader. She is not ideally proportioned for retinal scans.”
“…”
“…”
“…Charlie is that how it went down for reals?”
“Boss I can still smell pig blood and hear the sound of the saw do not make me answer that.”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“All right let’s rob this fucker.”
“Amen.”
* * *
—
And indeed it is time. Inge Desirée has sent a car and the Hermès lady to conduct me to the plateau this evening. I believe we will be the first bank robbers to be VIP chauffeured to their mark although this is hard to prove, as obviously we bank robbists do not much get to compare notes except in jail and I do not go there.
Also criminals, man, they lie all the time it is a thing with them.
Sit in the back of the limo with Doc and smell the leather. Lean over and smell Doc: her neck and her hair. This is a mammal thing and it is important. It is important when you do crimes that may kill you to remember that you are alive.
And it is important when you are going to kill people to remember the same thing so that you do not hesitate.
Driver’s name is Pierre. Pierre has many opinions about art. Charlie talks to him about them.
In the truck behind, Rex brings our gear with Lucille and Saul. I cannot imagine what they are talking about but it is almost certainly country and western related. No one knows what the pig is thinking she is in the back. Rex made her a little seat belt.
Rex is a rock, man.
* * *
—
We get to the cable car station. There is not room for Hermès lady so we ride by ourselves in the bubble car. Little armored bubble going up into the evening. Look along the valley to the lights of the city. Look back and see the night coming.
I smell Doc’s hair again.
* * *
—
Little cable car comes up over the rise and settles in the cradle. The Kircheisen plateau is very pretty in the almost dark and there are paper lanterns swinging in the breeze. It’s cold of course but there are braziers and fires and wurst stands and people milling about with phones and so on about three hundred people it’s a huge draw with plenty of press. There are artworks freestanding and board walls with pictures hanging on them sheltered under little awnings and a huge space in the middle for BANJO TELEMARK’S EVENT and—yes—there is a bulldozer right there in the middle and a throne like for bad guys. I have no idea how they got it up here maybe a helicopter that is just amazing I am SO flattered. I honestly have no idea what to do with it and that is fine that is everyone else’s problem now. There is my pl
aylist playing super-duper loud and people are dancing the very white dance of central European intelligentsia. It is somewhat like bad salsa and somewhat like a guy checking his shoes for gum. I have seen the Swiss dancing when they mean it and this is not it, but this is like a kind of exploratory thing where they make a note of who is prepared to really go for it and who is judging.
Next to the bulldozers there are steel plates from a train which I bought by accident when I was buying junk. They are heavy and enormous and I have had them stacked like playing cards and there are kids hiding and seeking underneath. This is totally safe because they are locked in place by their own vast mass. Inorite? I am the face of responsible crime. And that over there, that is some kind of bioplastic moss substrate that they use here to make helipads or something I got a bunch of it free with the bulldozer. There are a few cowbells and some door panels but not a fraction of what I paid for in a little circle.
Look at all this glorious crap in a stack man it is INSPIRING what people will do to facilitate popular art and if you also give them money.
I mean I don’t need it but it’s definitely focusing the mind and you can bet Eiger’s guys spent HOURS making sure there was no way to use it to crash the doors or whatever.
There isn’t.
But that will have made it tougher for them and in the meantime everything Doc was doing just slid on by because I was right there
waving
my
junk.
Yeah I know I’m cheap.
Or maybe there actually was a way I could have done something to the doors with all this I just didn’t find it and they did or maybe they didn’t and someone else will figure it out in the next twenty minutes and make it work. That would be hilarious.
But it won’t happen because there will be other stuff happening real soon now and it’s gonna be hella distracting.
We get off the cable car and Saul waves and disappears like switching off a light. Guy steps into a shadow and he’s just gone.
Mad skills is what he has and that is why I hired him.
We walk down to the plateau making nice all the way.
* * *
—
All the world is here very high very rich very society. Europe is here not just Switzerland and a few people from beyond it is that kind of party and somehow Banjo Telemark is at the center of it. There are other artists in little clumps and if I was really into this whole art thing it would bother me how much these guys hate me right now for coming out of nowhere and being the star of the show.
Not that a single one of them will admit to not having heard of me until last week. Hell no.
They cluster and wave. A meager little fuck in a robe thing puts out his hand Banjo hi hi it is Grover Linden we met in Auckland and of course of course Grover I love your work and now Grover is shiny and he will go back to his little clique to say I am a genius or maybe to laugh because I went for it and that does not matter at all.
None of it matters except the job. What happens next.
I’m going to change everything.
If it works.
In the meantime I am sophisti-fucking-qué up the wazoo.
I schmooze.
“Greetings!”
“Loved your Milan thing.”
“Enchanté this is my manager Crianza Regatta enchanté.”
“Saw your review you fuck I will cut you no I am joking of course hug me—”
Sophisti-fucking-qué. That is how I roll.
“I AM BANJO TELEMARK hallo hallo LOVE ME YES I AM YOUR GOD that is clearly a lie hello sir very nice to meet you THIS WORLD WILL END AND A NEW ONE WILL ARISE oh thank you no champagne just a juice of some sort would be—perfect—oh Madame Director such a pleasure is my equipment all in place—”
“Well some Banjo some I trust it will be acceptable we were not able to bring all of the scrap up to the plateau in time in fact I think perhaps half remains—”
“That is fine Madame Director that is perfect in fact the aspect of doubt the confusion PERFECT would you care to trigger the smoke?”
“What without announcing the EVENT Banjo people will—”
“Be confused? Miss the beginning?”
“Well—yes—”
“PRECISELY!”
“O o o yes the normal event parameters do not apply I see—”
“ROCK IT MADAME initiate this magnificence—”
And she does.
Purple smoke floods the plateau.
The fireworks start going off in all sorts of directions up above like a kind of air war and they are all pink and purple too and then the lanterns go dark as Rex trips the cutout, which means that the green clothes we are wearing all become remarkably hard to see.
All around, invisible, Saul has been dropping little doodads the size of croissants and all of these right now start hissing and letting off something Doc makes in a cauldron that she claims is an alembic but clearly that is a lie.
Ten seconds later people start to choke.
“OH BANJO THIS IS NOT GOOD AT ALL—”
“Trust me Madame Director you’re gonna love it.”
But I don’t honestly think she will.
* * *
—
People are choking and now they are scared and they are looking at me and I am smiling. The smoke is harmless but Doc’s brew is just a tiny bit caustic and right away everyone is assuming that the smoke is the issue because you can see it. In fact the gas is not going to do anything worse than give you a sore throat most especially on an open plateau but that doesn’t matter. The security team does not know that so they will go with their existing protocol and they will put on their gas masks. That is going to look absolutely motherfucking terrifying to the guests and they will assume it is either a terror attack or part of Banjo Telemark’s amazing art and that will make them considerably less biddable. Half of them will want to get the fuck out and half of them will want to find the best place to sit or test the limits of the scenario because: assholes. So someone will make nasty and get smacked down and the other guests will see that and that will take the whole is it a game or is it real thing up a notch and that will happen more and more as three more events occur, which are that they will stop coughing because there’s basically nothing wrong with the smoke, and then the next round of fireworks will start and then finally the security guys will start to fall over unconscious because—
“Charlie you can say it now.”
“I can really?”
“Yes Charlie but only once. Here have a microphone it will be really loud.”
Charlie says:
“I am root!”
But the sound system makes it loud enough to cause avalanches. Plural. It sounds like a jet landing.
“I AM ROOOOOOT!”
And she is. She is indeed.
She is root. And what that means is that when the security system booted up this morning it ordered everyone to replace the filters in their gas masks and the little hockey-puck things they put in were not like the ones they took out. Nooooo indeed. The new hockey pucks were sleepy pucks. Now if you put on a gas mask you will be asleep in two minutes. Less if you are doing exercise at altitude.
Of course that is just the guys out here. The rest of the security team guys are inside and now they know there is something happening and they have been waiting for it. They are even a little bit excited about it because Hans Eiger has been recruiting tough guys from around the world and you know everyone likes to do what they love.
* * *
—
The battleship doors are open because the rest of the fair is inside. There are lanterns in here too and more art including this thing that looks like a giant spoon. There’s a lifeguard’s chair and a row of canvases with nothing on them except white paint and a row of boards made
entirely of paint from which the canvas has been removed and—
We walk through the hall in silence between the arts. Many many arts. One of them is a figure in a big coat and Lucille immediately hugs it and there is a sound like metal on glass and the art collapses in on itself like Obi-Wan. Lucille looks down at the rubble and I swear he does that dog thing and scuffs his heels back on it a couple of times like yeah you had that coming art.
At the back of the hall there is an ordinary door with a keypad lock and Charlie blows through it in a half a second. Behind that there is a really nice office with high-energy modern furniture in orange and blue and a great view of the mountains. There’s still fireworks going off outside and a lot of people are just watching the show and drinking politely because although all the security guys have collapsed well yeah OF COURSE because they were promised ambiguous stuff and challenges to their sense of personal security THAT IS ART.
Art in the round I guess.
Behind the giant stripped pine desk which has been handmade and still has bark on the edges there is an expensive office chair and behind that there is the first of the real doors. The first X8.
We move toward the inner door.
Doc nods to Rex.
Rex gets the pig out of the bag.
She’s a very happy pig. You can tell she’s seeing things pigs in the normal context do not see. Art exhibits and fireworks are not the half of it that pig is way stoned. Which is a good thing because there’s a weird line stitched around her eye socket and a blue human eye staring out at the world from what looks to be an extensively adjusted skullhole possibly including a rubberized Ping-Pong ball clip. If she was not way stoned, she would almost certainly be screaming and that is not anything you ever want to hear. She also weighs maybe fifty kilos, which makes her in pig terms a tiddler, but it’s also not nothing and Rex grunts a bit as he lifts her face to the retinal scanner. The X8 hisses a little as he steps into close proximity and a red light comes on.
system armed.
Rex lifts her face onto the scan plate.
The pig’s eyes close very gently and she starts to snore.
