by David Ohle
Moldenke's knees began to buckle, his head to sag. "That's all, folks. I'm out of breath and hurting all over. Good night."
Ophelia applauded generously and finished her third Jake. Nodding with sleep, she decided it was time to return to the hostel. Her vacated pedal set was quickly claimed by a waiting customer. The Doolittle girl was to perform at twelve and the crowd was swelling.
On her way back to the hostel, Ophelia stopped by Hobson's to see if her imp might need more water. There were three other imps tied to the stable's posts and three rough riders talking, drinking Jake, and smoking urpflanz.
"Evening Miss," one of them said. "You in town for Coward's Day?"
"No, just passing through. On my way home, just on the other side of Pisstown. I'll get there tomorrow."
"Where you stayin' the night?"
"At Hostel 210."
"We just saw a bunch of cowards checking in there. We'll give them yellowbacks heck in the morning. Don't be surprised if some eggs break on your window."
"I just stopped here to check on my imp. Is Mr. Hobson around?"
"Last time we saw him, he was walking an imp down to the abattoir. Reckon it might be yours. Said he'd made a deal, the imp for that Q-ped out back."
"There was no deal."
"Too late to do nothin' I 'spect. There's a meat shortage, you know. Imps ain't worth much on the hoof no more. You gotta guard them close."
Ophelia walked to the back of the stable. By moonlight, the Q-ped looked promising. There were no corroded welds, the chains were recently oiled, the tires solid and well-aired, the pedals barely worn. Perhaps the deal with Hobson was fair after all. She was getting tired of trying to satisfy the imp's needs as well as her own. A working Q-ped would be a lot less needy and would get her places much faster.
She rode the machine back to the hostel and rang the bell three times. The clerk opened a small portal in the door. "Oh, say, that's a nice Q-ped."
"Yes, I just took it in trade."
"What can I do for you?"
"My room. I have a room. I've been down at the Flamingo. The name is Ophelia."
"You a coward?"
"No."
"Sorry, we're full up. There's even some yellow-bellies sleeping on the roof."
"I've already registered. I was here earlier. I have a room reserved."
"Take a look at me, lady." He framed as much of his face as he could in the portal. "Do I look like the guy you talked to?"
"No, it was someone else."
"That's right. I just came on duty ten minutes ago. Whatever transpired between you and him is none of my business. He's gone home and gone to bed."
"Didn't he make a note of it? I paid him a buck."
"Tomorrow's C-Day, lady. Every room in town is taken. I'm so busy I could scream. Please, just move on. Get out of town. It won't be a pretty day tomorrow. It might get chaotic."
Resigned now to a night without sleep, Ophelia strapped herself into one of the Q-ped's pedal sets and rolled past the stable, past the darkened abattoir, the derelict ice house, and through a large encampment of cowards near a Hookerite shrine, before she broke into the open space and pedaled toward home.
Twelve.
Scientists say the stinker body is a mechanism made up of unnumbered parasites, in the brain, the nerves, the lowly bum gut, the blood, and all major organs. It may be likened to a human city, where everyone is engaged in legitimate work-the journalists, the mule drivers, the starch vendors, the candlemakers, the pedal cab drivers and the physicians. Each one is a party to this end on his own behalf. The parasites that make up the stinker body work the same way. Their characteristics are discernable to a certain extent with the aid of a microscope. Of course it is possible there are parasites of life and life functions that we may not examine this way because of their extremely minute size, but they undoubtedly have the same work to perform. As a body, and in classes, they strive for the preservation of law and order within the stinker's bodily metropolis.
In parasites, the germ ofgeneration never dies. Stinkers have parasites in them that are perhaps thousands of years old That is why they are able to do things we never dreamed we could do, undergo changes and hardships we thought impossible.
With unemployment among third-stage stinkers at record levels, the Reverend has offered a plan: A galvanic spark applied to the tissue of the hypothalamus, along with proper use of my Electric Belt and Suspensory Unit, will make them once again into productive workers. This I promise to all "
Parasites are sometimes slow of defense, but they are always on the defensive. Put someone who has become accustomed to hot weather in a cold zone and, until the parasites acclimate, that person will suffer all manner of quivering, chills and discomfort. But the parasites will finally accept the change. Put one who has lazed unproductively along in life in a position which requires hard work, such as mule driving, and that person's parasites will likewise rebel, then accept the altered condition.
The skin of an imp peels off the skull like birch bark. Should you cut open the head, you'd find its interior spaces filled with a spongelike material, a pale shade of yellow, as thin and dry as pre-edible paper. In the very center of this spongy mass sits the brain, which scientists say is not really a brain but a bio-botanic neural nexus capable only of rudimentary cognition.
Cooked any way at alh or raw, the taste of an imp brain has been compared to that of the legendary truf ffle. For some just the smell of one slackens their jaws. They flock to restaurants in defiance of the curfew, then come careening out, faces puffy and distended, giggling like children, filled to the gills on imp brain.
Stinker children on the dark side of Bum Bay have tented old City Moons into dunce caps and are running the streets like pixies, firing their little spiked teetotums at the ankles of bystanders, often leaving lacerations, then poking them in the ribs with sticks, and in general annoying everyone. Many would like to see them taken away and sent to Permanganate. Adults, they say have gone therefor lesser offenses.
There has been another scare in Pisstown's Hooker Park area. The residents were stirred and excited over incidents that have occurred in that portion of Pisstown. For the past weeks, knife-wielding stinkers in frightening costumes have made themselves conspicuous there, inspiring terror among women and children and in some instances putting male adults to precipitous flight. These visitations have become so numerous that Hookerite Guards have been sent to the site of the disturbances, but without unearthing the secret of the stinkers' hiding places.
It was reported today in the City Moon that Carleton Manson, the notorious `father of thousands, " was laid to rest in a Fertile Crescent pauper's field. It is estimated that during his thirteen-year insemination spree, Manson impregnated more than ten thousand females with his semen in suppository form. Approximately half of those pregnancies resulted in live births. It is not known how many have survived until today Manson's death, it has been reported was caused by a bursting of the abdomen brought on by a severe infestation of parasites. Manson once confessed that a genital deformity lay behind his criminal urges, the exact nature of which has never been disclosed.
After a mile or two of walking, Roe came to a field of ripening urpflanz. His eyes blinked in the brilliant sun. He saw in the near distance a wooden machine as large as the largest house in Bum Bay. It rolled along on tall, steel wheels, ten of them, and moved at a fair clip across the field, harvesting grain and grasshoppers as it went. Underwear and rags hung along its wrought iron balconies. Stinkers stood by the third-story railing and waved at him. "Welcome, stranger," one of them shouted through a bullhorn. "Jump on as we pass. There's no way in hell to slow this thing down."
Through upper-level windows, Roe saw stinker males stacking sacks of grain in the attic space while stinker females made grasshopper pies in the galley below. In an even lower room, young first-stage males pedaled the heavy, cumbersome machine along. For each of the ten wheels, twenty or thirty pedalers were required to keep up mo
mentum, even on ground that appeared to be as flat and featureless as a skillet.
Roe felt a sense of purpose here, a recognition that important experiences lay ahead. An inner voice revealed that a job awaited him and that he would have to get to a city of some size to find it.
Over glasses of Jake, a table of third-stage stinkers welcomed him aboard and saluted him with cries of, "Sharife!"
Roe repeated the cry without knowing what it meant, then gargled his Jake before swallowing, as the elders were doing.
"I'm Roe Balls. I just arrived. I don't know much about what goes on here."
"There's nothing much to know about."
"I have the sense that a job awaits me in a city around here. I think my experience may be in the service sector. I can't say for sure. Where is the nearest city?"
"That would be Pisstown. When we get to the end of this field, get off and head south by southwest."
A female brought him a slice of grasshopper pie, freshly made and piping hot.
"I don't have a compass, or a sense of direction. The terrain is unfamiliar."
"Look at the leaves, the way they blow. Prevailing winds are out of the north by northeast. The leaves will point southwest. Once you have been in the city and found your job, you will begin to see why we do things the way we do, how we make the best of what the Reverend gives us. We work with what we have."
Without warning, the great harvester bounced into and through a land-subsidence. The jolt made Roe reach out to catch his bottle of Jake before it tumbled off the table.
"These sinkholes give off gas," one of the stinkers said, "sometimes with a hellish odor and capable of killing. That one has weak gas. When we reach speed again, the wind will take it away."
The air filled with a sulfur-scented gas. Roe pinched his nose closed. Stinker females opened windows and placed stops under doors as the harvester sped along in front of a strong tailwind.
When the edge of the vast field approached, the pedalers slowed down as much as momentum would allow, giving Roe the opportunity to jump without breaking bones. He landed feet-first, then tumbled into a bramble thicket. By the time he made his way out, only his face and hands were cockleburfree. A passerby would have thought he was wearing a suit of thorns.
It was a long, prickly walk to Pisstown, which was busy, noisy, and very congested. They were letting imps run in the streets and a festival was going on, a celebration of some kind. When Roe asked, he was told it was Coward's Day, an annual event to honor those who refused service during the first Chaos. Hundreds were in parade mode, males and females together, marching half-clothed up the boulevard with their backs painted yellow.
The mayor addressed the crowd by saying, "Cowards die many times before their death, you know, and the valiant only taste it once. In the stinker mind, cowards, having suffered most, deserve a day and a parade. As to the Chaos, not a soul remembered a thing about it. It was long gone and best forgotten. There is an old pharmacy in the Heritage Area, though, nicely preserved, which historians believe was the site of Hooker's arrest for stealing a tube of unguent cream."
When the speech was over and the awards were handed out, Roe went directly to the first employment office he saw and was immediately given a job serving Reverend Hooker, who, while his Templex underwent renovation, was staying at a seedy boarding house across the way as workers made perfunctory, lazy progress on the Templex.
Scaffolds had been erected and a few workers puttered about the premises. A pair of architects sat at a table under a persimmon tree, studying blueprints, sipping Jake and nibbling pickled roots. It wasn't a bombed-out look the Templex had, but one of neglect, of a plantation house gone to wrack and ruin.
In the early days Roe's duties began with giving Hooker his morning enema and seeing that he took his willy. Starching and ironing his shirts came next, then keeping his nails trimmed and polished, shaving, trimming his van Dyke and, if it was desired, masturbate him over the sink.
When Hooker learned of Roe's saw-playing gifts, he insisted on hearing it three or four times a day. "What a mournful sound it is," he observed. "It resonates with the soul."
On a typical morning, after playing his saw at Hooker's bedside to wake him, Roe would say. "I am very glad to serve you this morning. What would please you for breakfast, sir?"
Most often it would be a simple one of urpflanz tea, grasshopper pie, and an imp steak. Sometimes he would forget about all the shortages and request cocoa spiced with vanilla and marzipan, too. Roe would have to remind him. "It's the Chaos sir. Those sorts of things won't be coming over from the Crescent, or so they tell me."
"Listen to me, Roe. Out of the Chaos will come a future of abundance and joy. We'll be swimming in cocoa, choking on marzipan and singing praises to you know who."
"Yes, indeed, sir."
In his bathrobe, Hooker would open his day's first bottle of Jake and hobble unsteadily to the grimy window, crank it open, and air his first thought of the day, most often a complaint, a curse or a gripe. "When are they going to finish with that renovation, when I die and start stinking?"
When spring came, Hooker coated himself in scented oil to prevent sunburn and ventured out to his garden plot behind the hotel. Here he demonstrated to Roe the principle behind a National Socialist garden. "You see, you dig it in the shape of a swastika. Can you think of a better way to lay out a garden? Every part can easily be reached with a hoe, without having to step in any dirt."
Hooker's temporary office and quarters in the Tunney penthouse became a scene of remarkable squalor and disarray. Roe offered many times to bring in the cleaning crew and have the place cleaned, but Hooker stubbornly forbade it. "I own ten imp farms," he said each time. "I've learned the pleasure of wallowing."
There were stacks of newspapers rising from the floor in waist-high columns. Imp bones and Jake bottles were strewn about. One of the flags that flanked his desk was partially burned. The Reverend had set it ablaze one day with a cigar. Roe had put it out by urinating into a jar, then dousing the flames with it.
The windows were boarded over, the floor covered with newspapers. A five-gallon slop bucket sat in the corner with a cloud of blackflies buzzing over it. A large nail had been driven directly into the plaster wall to hold a roll of wiping paper, a rare and expensive commodity during a Chaos, always in short supply otherwise.
There were bullet holes in the wall, falling plaster, spider webs. The Reverend kept saying to Roe, "This is a big country. Its inhabitants have never lived in walled cities or had to defend themselves against warring princes in neighboring states. After the first Chaos this country was so sparsely populated that neighbors were something to be longed for and were not fenced out. A new face or new arrival was a cause for rejoicing."
Most mornings found Hooker passed out at his desk, looking sorrowfully un-Reverend-like, his head, arms and shoulders buried in the desktop clutter, a bottle of Jake sitting near his fisted hand. Day and night there was a light film of perspiration on his balding head. Even though he looked puffy and ill, he was never without a fat urpflanz cigar, handrolled, which he pinched between two fingers, held at a distance and never puffed on or brought near his lips. He let them burn until they were almost spent, then spat on the burning tip, or doused it in Jake, and ate the butt.
His hands were beat-up, dirty, average size, somewhat simian, the fingers unusually short, the nails unusually long, thick and dirty. As if playing a tiny piano, these fingers moved in time to music only he could hear.
What was left of his hair was wild, dirty and knotted. His flesh, tinged yellow, had broken out in rashes and welts. There was dried vomit down the front of his filthy, terrycloth robe, which bore on the pocket the seal of the Reverend. And around the desk were the sometimes fresh, sometimes old and crusted, results of his unpredictable and incontinent "accidents." He sometimes stepped in them and tracked feces everywhere. If there was enough water, he bathed once a week.
An irreversible neurological syndrome caus
ed by the prolonged drinking of Jake afflicted him. Its characteristic features were involuntary movements of the face and mouth and of the forehead, eyebrows, cheeks, legs and arms. He frowned, blinked and grimaced. He smiled, pouted, puckered and smacked his lips. He clenched his teeth, bit his lip, and his tongue protruded unnaturally.
He said to Roe one day, "I'm going to put up an artificial moon. My scientists tell me it can be done. It will be a medically significant moon, intended to cleanse the atmosphere of airborne bacilli for all time."
"Fascinating," Roe said.
"I've always thought the moon was the source of the parasites. By some little-understood means, they made their way here. That will be at the heart of my next sermon."
"Exciting and informative," Roe said.
"One more promise I'll make to the people. Jake will sell for a buck a bottle and be standardized. The quality will improve dramatically."
"Standards are what we live by, sir."
"I feel I need an enema, Roe. I feel full."
"I'll warm up the bathroom right away, sir, and get the enema bag ready."
Once Roe had firmly inserted the hose, the Reverent sat on the pot and closed his eyes. "There, that's it, Roe. It's in well enough."
"Shall I leave you alone now, sir?"
"No. Don't leave. Let me sermonize a little. I'll tell you a story, a story with a lesson. In the days when all men were good, they had miraculous power. Lions, mountains, whales, jellyfish, hagfish, birds, rocks, clouds, seas, moved quietly from place to place, just as men ordered them at their whim and fancy. But the human race at last lost its miraculous powers through the laziness of a single man. He was a woodman in the Fertile Crescent. One morning he went into the forest to cut firewood for his master's hearth. He sawed and split all day, until he had a considerable stack of hickory and oak. Then he stood before the pile and said, 'Now, march off home!' The great bundle of wood at once got up and began to walk, and the woodman tramped on behind it. But he was a very lazy man. Now, why shouldn't I ride instead of galloping along this dusty road, he said to himself, and jumped up on the bundle of wood as it was walking in front of him and sat down on top of it. As soon as he did, the wood refused to go. The woodman got angry and began to strike it fiercely with his axe, all in vain. Still the wood refused to go. And from that time the human race had lost its power."
