Absentmindedly, he reached down to scratch his crotch, as he was wont to do of a morning.
There was nothing there.
Very, very slowly, Ken lifted up the sheet and looked.
The visuals confirmed what his hand had first uncannily conveyed.
His crotch was as empty as that of his namesake, Barbie’s boyfriend.
Ken looked wildly around for Mona J. She was nowhere to be seen. He clambered quickly out of bed.
“Mona J.!” he yelled. “Come quick! My cock’s gone!”
Ken realized even as he said it that such a bizarre proclamation was hardly calculated to lure help. He doubted if he himself would respond to such an insane announcement. But apparently Mona J. was a more daring or compassionate person than he. There was the sound of footsteps approaching from the front room.
In the door appeared the actress Ali McGraw. She was naked. Like Ken, her smooth pudendum was completely unadorned with any trace of functioning equipment.
Then Ken noticed the mood ring on Ali s finger.
“Mona J.?”
“Ken?”
“You’ve changed!”
“You too!”
Ken knew that something more was implied than the absence of his genitalia. He looked in the mirror across the room.
Ryan O’Neal looked back.
Ken sat down wearily on the bed. He held his head in his hands. “I don’t believe this. Why would you do such a thing, Mona J.?”
“Me? What are you talking about? I didn’t misplace our private parts. When I went to sleep they were right where we left them when we were done using them. And as for our new faces—how could I do such a thing?”
Ken explained.
A look Ken did not like came over Ali’s—Mona J.’s— face.
“You mean to tell me that when I woke up this morning, the world instantly remade itself according to my secret perceptions?”
Ken groaned. “You did it, Mona J.. You turned us into actor and actress dolls. I gave you the chance to have anything you wanted, and this is what you picked.”
“I guess I must’ve really absorbed the Ratings Code standards while I was in Hollywood. You know, like no full frontal nudity? Despite what goes on in the dressing rooms, you never see any real fooling around on the screen. And the love scenes always stop below the waist. But anyhow, what’s so bad about it? I mean, sex is great, but glamour is even better. Haven’t you always wanted to be a star? I sure have. I always hated my looks. That nose, those lips—too ethnic! Now think of all the parts I’ll get!”
“Mona J.”
“Yeah?”
“What about everyone else?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you look like Ali McGraw, and I look like Ryan O’Neal—”
“You mean everyone in the world looks like a star now too?”
“I would assume so.”
Mona J. started grabbing her clothes off the floor. She slipped into her earth shoes, immediately assuming her familiar backwards-sloping stance.
“C’mon, get dressed! We have to go into town!”
“Mona J., don’t you think you’d like to take that ring off now…?”
“Screw that! You gave me this shot at making a new life for myself, and I’m going to use it!”
Even more so than usual, Ken was not inclined to argue. He had no idea what would happen anyhow if Mona J. doffed the ring. Would the world revert—or would it vanish? It might be wise to postpone the experiment.
He forced himself to try to look on the bright side. This new arrangement simplified a lot of things. Take dating and remembering to buy toilet paper, just for two.…
Ken’s underwear fit funny. In the end, he discarded it and simply drew his pants on over his lack.
The car Ken used for personal errands was an ex-Checker Cab painted a permanent matte black with primer in expectation of a final coat that never came. He and Mona J. climbed in and tooled off down the tree-lined drive.
“Ken, look at those great squirrels—”
On a branch, a trio of extremely alert squirrels was stacking nuts in a perfect pyramid. The pyramid reached the point of instability and fell apart. The squirrels all did perfect double-takes, flipping end over end and chattering a mile a minute. Ken could almost hear the narration by the “aw-shucks” announcer:
“Those little critters plumb bit off more’n they could chew this time.…”
“Mona J., you’ve even disneyfied the wildlife!”
“I think they’re cuter that way!”
“But it’s not natural!”
“What is nowadays? Is lurex natural? Are the Eagles natural? And what about those horrid Fish Stix you eat?”
Ken made no reply.
On the road to Rockville, the Saturday morning traffic was light. Only three cars passed them. One was driven by George C. Scott in full Patton rig; one was steered by John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn; the third was piloted by Dirty Harry.
“I always knew Rockville was full of male chauvinist pigs,” said Mona J.
“They didn’t seem too upset by their new identities,” said Ken. “I wonder why.…”
“It could be that only nearness to the mood ring lets us realize anything’s different,” ventured Mona J.
“I think you’re right.”
Main Street forked from Route One. Soon they were in what passed for downtown Rockville.
Marlon Brando was sweeping the sidewalk in front of Whiteman’s Drugstore. Faye Dunaway was lowering the awning at Ford’s Dress Emporium. A1 Pacino was chatting up Barbra Streisand as he pumped gas into her Chevy. Woody Allen—looking very Fielding Mellish—was mounting a “Whip Inflation Now” poster in the window of his meat market. A whole pack of John Travoltas (one of Kotter’s Sweathogs) ogled a herd of Farrah Fawcett-Majors (star of the TV movie The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped).
The sight of the assorted stars calmly imitating the stolid citizens of Rockville was too much for Ken. It was as if the pods from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers had been manufactured in California instead of deep space. He pulled into one of the parking spaces that slanted out from the sidewalk and rested his forehead on the steering wheel.
“I can’t drive any further.”
“Let’s walk then. I want to talk to some of these people. If they don’t realize they look like stars, then I’ve got a lock on all the casting calls.”
They got out of the cab. Approaching them down the sidewalk was a couple walking arm in arm: Henry Winkler and Penny Marshall: the Fonz and Laverne.
“It’s Chuck and Bonnie,” said Ken.
“How can you tell?”
“Even without balls, nobody swaggers like Chuck.”
Sure enough, the man hailed them in familiar fashion.
“Hey, Monkey! What brings you and the chick into town? I thought you’d be in bed all day. Didn’t I say that, Bonnie? That they’d be pumping away all weekend? What’s the matter—the well go dry?”
Chuck and Bonnie crossed an invisible line that plainly marked the sphere of perceptive immunity conferred by the mood ring. They stopped dead in their tracks, looking with shock and horror as they suddenly realized that Ken and Mona J. had been transformed into the protagonists of Love Story.
Relishing their discomposure, Ken gestured toward a plate glass window. Bonnie and Chuck saw their own reflections.
“Oh my god!” squealed Bonnie. “I look like that ignorant De Fazio tramp on television!”
“Who the fuck messed with my good looks?” Chuck demanded. Suddenly sensing what else had been changed, Chuck made a desperate grab at his fly. “My dick! Holy fucking Christ! Somebody’s made off with my pecker! Who did it? Come on, cough it up!”
“A vivid image, Chuck,” Ken commented. “But we don’t have your pitiful willy handy.”
With a minimum of details, Ken tried to explain what had happened. As he talked, the sour scowl on Chuck’s borrowed face grew more and more pronounced, until finally he was wearing a look
of total disgust.
“You know, none of this would ever have happened if Nixon was still in office. I’ve said it a hundred fucking times: this country has been going to fucking hell in a bucket from the second the fucking Democrats blew up a minor prank to the size of the goddamn Goodyear blimp! Watergate my ass! All this crazy stuff is a direct result of disrespect for our elected leader!”
Ken tried to reason with Chuck. “Don’t be ridiculous, Chuck. This magic STP juice was sitting on Reese’s shelf since 1954—”
“Reese was probably responsible for Nixon losing in ’60!”
Bonnie/Laverne had been swivelling her attention all this time from her own reflection to Mona J.’s altered face. Now she spoke.
“Why do you get to be Ali McGraw while I have to be Penny Marshall?”
Mona J. slipped a hank of her long dark hair coyly behind one ear. “Face it, girl. I was always better looking than you.”
“Better looking! Hah! Maybe if your idea of good-looking is a frizzy-headed, thick-lipped, big-boobed Italian slob!”
Mona J.’s face suffused with blood. She raised her hand bearing the ring. “You’d better be careful what you say, Bonita Coney.…”
“I don’t care what you look like now. I know you’ve really got hips wide as a Mack truck!”
“That did it! You don’t like being Laverne? It’s not glamorous enough for you? Try this!”
Where Laverne/Bonnie had been now stood Jean Stapleton.
Edith Bunker.
Mona J. broke into wild laughter. Chuck staggered back in terror. Bonnie turned to catch her image in the plate-glass. With a wild shriek, she hurled herself on Mona J. The two women tumbled into the street.
Ken moved to help Mona J. He found himself pinioned by Chuck.
“I don’t know what Bonnie’s got in mind, but I aim to let her try it. Anything’s better than being stuck with the Dingbat for a girlfriend.”
Bonnie’s greater weight and ferocity soon prevailed in the catfight. Kneeling on Mona J.’s arms, the Queens housewife fastened her grip on the mood ring.
She pulled it off and triumphantly slid it onto her own finger.
4. The Silent Majority
The sky above the Skye household was the color of a TV tuned to The Brady Bunch.
In fact, the sky was a TV tuned to The Brady Bunch.
Florence Henderson’s hemispherically distorted face stretched for miles across the titanic dome that formed the celestial ceiling. Far off in the west, a bit of Ann Davis’s enormous nose poked into view. In the background was the out-of-focus Brady kitchen, tangerine walls and avocado table. It was like the Northern Lights, twenty-four hours a day.
The Skye family—Ken, Mona J., Ken Junior, Mona J. Junior, and their unnamed halfling—outside in their quarter-acre backyard, did not, however, pay any attention to the spectacle. So familiar was the overhead display from years of viewing that it had become invisible to them. Instead, happy parents Ken and Mona J. watched as their two-and-a-half children played in the approved manner.
Ken was dressed in his official Saturday Suit: chinos, loafers, madras shirt. Protruding from his mouth was his Father’s Pipe, emitting a fragrant cloud of maple-ly smoke that competed with his Old Spice aftershave. Ken sat in a plastic-webbed lawnchair. Beside him sat “the little woman.”
Mona J.’s hair was set into an enormous beehive do— much like First Lady Priscilla Presley wore on her wedding day—frozen in place with coats of lacquer. On her cheeks were two perfect circles of rosy makeup, while her lips were blood-red. She was dressed in ruffles and lace, pinafores and plackets. Her eyes appeared to be filled with liquid Valium, some of which was leaking out.
A few feet away, Ken Junior and Mona J. Junior—dressed like pint-sized versions of their parents—were enacting Play Scenario One Hundred and Fifty-Six. Ken Junior’s G.I. Joe doll had knocked Mona J. Junior’s Chatty Cathy to the ground and was now burrowing under the doll’s dress. “Hold still, dammit!” said Ken Junior. Mona J. Junior emitted realistic shrieks on behalf of Chatty Cathy, whose built-in tape was on the fritz.
The Skye halfling, meanwhile, who had been kicking a soccer ball around, had gotten stuck in a corner of the lot, where the white picket fence met at right angles, separating the Skye yard from the thousands of identical ones that made up the town of Rockville.
Seeing the halfling’s plight, Father Ken got up to help.
The halfling wore a pair of belted shorts, sox and sneakers. It did not need a shirt, because it had no upper half. This statistical necessity—one per family, always born after the allotted son and daughter—terminated in a hard hairy carapace just above the waist. Each halfling looked rather like an ambulatory footstool.
The Skye halfling was struggling blindly against the fence in vain pursuit of the soccer ball, which had squirted away behind it. Ken picked his half-child up and turned it around, then set the ball in front of it. The halfling felt around tentatively with its foot, found the ball and gave it a kick, cantering awkwardly after it.
Ken returned to his seat. He grabbed Mona J.’s hand and squeezed. Chuckling, he said, “What a little rascal!”
Mona J. made the obligatory reply. “A regular roughneck!”
“Not a big eater though, that’s for sure!”
The fond parents chuckled appreciatively for a while. Then, puffing out a big cloud of aromatic smoke, Ken said, “Boy oh boy, it sure is nice relaxing with the family on the weekend. I can hardly wait for tomorrow, so we can go to church.”
“Life is good,” said Mona J., somewhat wearily. Ken gave her a cautionary glare, until she visibly perked up. (Though there was a tic at one corner of her smile.)
Ken was suddenly moved to look at his watch. “Holy Cow, it’s almost time to go to the beach!” He clapped his hands, which garnered the attention of his son and daughter, but did nothing to stop the earless halfling in the senseless pursuit of its ball.
“Ken Junior, Mona J. Junior—pack up your toys and get your swimsuits on. Its time for the beach.”
“Awww, do we hafta, Dad?”
“Yes, you ‘hafta.’ Now, scoot!”
The children rushed obediently indoors. Ken retrieved the halfling, carrying it under one arm like a keg of beer, and he and Mona J. followed.
Inside, Ken began to assemble the Family Outing Setup: the Cooler, stocked with Twinkies and Oscar Meyer Lunchmeats; the Coppertone, the Wetnaps (“Your Folded Fingerbowl”), the Thermos of Kool-Aid, the Striped Umbrella.…
As he was taking down some towels from a high shelf in the linen closet, something hard and heavy fell and bonked him on the head, making him see stars.
“Dangblasted frazzle-brazzle dadratted so-and-so!” swore Ken.
“Father!” admonished Mona J. “Watch your language!”
“Sorry, Mother.”
Ken stooped to recover the item that had conked him. It was a single shoe. But the shoe was the strangest one he had ever seen. Big and clunky, it seemed to have a negative slope toward the heel.…
“Mother, do you recognize this?”
Mona J.’s eyes grew wide when she saw the shoe. “Nuh-no, I duh-don’t. It’s nothing I ever wore, I swear it. I wear only high heels around the house during the day, or mules in the bedroom, or flip-flops at the beach. I swear it!”
“No need to get so excited, Mother. I believe you. Well, into the trash it goes then.”
Ken tossed the shoe into the kitchen garbage pail. Mona J. opened her mouth to say something, but seemed to think better of it.
In a few minutes, the whole family was in the loaded car and ready to go. And just in time! Already the streets were filling up with cars from every other household, all heading toward the beach.
Ken inched the nose of his auto out of the driveway. His next door neighbor obligingly paused to let Ken join the cavalcade, and they were off!
On the way to the beach, they sang along with the all-Captain-and-Tennille AM radio station.
“Love will keep us
together.…”
Traffic slowed to a crawl at the entrance to the beachside parking lot, and the kids grew fidgety Ken Junior gave Mona J. Junior an “Indian sunburn,” and she retaliated by ripping his comic book in half.
“Dad!” wailed Ken Junior. “Look what she did to my copy of Young Elvis, DEA Agent!”
Ken picked up issue 516 of the comic which detailed the heroic early adventures of the nation’s President. “You must admit you deserved it, son. But don’t worry, next week’s issue will be out soon.”
Even the Skye halfling was not immune to the boredom. It began to fidget and kick, and its older siblings ganged up to tickle it into a better humor.
Soon the car was parked, and the Skye family, loaded down with beach apparatus, crossed the hot sands like a miniature caravan to stake out an empty spot on the crowded shore.
Once established, Ken announced that it was time to “slather on the ol’ suntan lotion.”
“I don’t know why we bother with this silly chore,” complained Mona J., even as she applied Coppertone to the halfling’s bare legs. “We haven’t seen that filthy sun in years. And God knows that even this close we’re not going to get a burn from the Heavenly Screen.”
Ken cast his eyes upward, to where the Eternal Sitcom played. Father Brady, Robert Reed, was delivering a lecture to his assembled brood. Ken’s eyes slid down, down, down, to where illuminated sky met the sea. At this artificial horizon, exactly three miles out, the skydome plunged into the ocean, sealing off the country—God’s chosen nation—from the hostile and inexplicable world at large.
It was true, what Mother had said. Lit only by the comforting glow of the Cathode Sky, they stood no chance of getting a sunburn. Still, it was best to do things the Old Way when possible. Tradition, that’s what kept the nation strong.…
When they were all properly coated, Ken and Mona J. lay back to look at the sky, while the kids began to build a sand-castle. The halfling was left to its own devices, whereupon it mysteriously gravitated to a knot of its fellows. The clump of swimsuited halflings stood in eerie mute communication. Occasionally, two would lie down flat in the sand, top to top, and, digging their heels in, rub their hairy endplates together in some kind of ritual.
Fractal Paisleys Page 20
