Apeshit

by Bill Olver

  so come on now, throw everything at me.

  Come on, you armored beetles, you dark shapes on the horizon.

  Come on, you spitting bees.

  I can swat you from sky with a single swipe

  —do your worst.

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  David S. Briggs (Empire Statement) has previously been published in the Paterson Literary Review and U.S. 1 Worksheets.

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  KONG, STILL CONSCIOUS, REFLECTS ON HIS VISIT TO NEW YORK

  by Jimmy Grist

  for the poet William Trowbridge

  I lay, as I am prone to lying, motionless—for a time.

  In my ears was a sort of murk, through which blunted sounds echoed from nowhere and everywhere. I heard their whining sirens, their murmuring crowds, and something pithy about beauty from he who brought me here; here to this continent, to this city, careening eventually to this unnatural flat earth. I let my eyes remain shut, as some perspectives were not worth taking, though a part of me feared blindness. Tears had been beaten from me by the impact, and they could have just as easily been my jellied vitreous.

  My body was certainly crushed, as were those beneath mine. It was an inauspicious place to be crippled. The tower, that wasp-ridden peak I’d failed to conquer and the axis of their phallocentrism, cast a cold shadow over my form. Extrasensorily, I could perceive their wee flashbulbs and vehicles, and the ripples of their voices. The voices particularly, incessantly.

  I had cratered the asphalt in my own image, and my figure in their stone was nearly a place I could belong. I like to think this the real reason I lay for so long. No one had gifted me persuasion or occasion to rise. No one was going to do so.

  I had never contemplated my own end, it seeming distant and irrelevant as the storms that form over the sea off my island. Yet in spite of my reluctance, there it was. The end hovered overhead, billowing with menace, stirring up my figurative beaches and eroding the face of my mountain. Without a cave in which to skulk, I was forced to think away the rain.

  This seemed the first fitting time in my life for an introspective discussion of what would come next. Without intention, I had outrun instinct to find that I had no plans, per se, for the hereafter. But try as I might, a satisfying statement about death could not be had—for every valid thought dissipated when pursued, and every supposition was discredited by experience. On the cynical hand, should this be the end end—by which I mean the end of all me—I should hardly call myself satisfied. Much to the contrary, with due respect to all I had known and tasted in life.

  At home in the tropics it was readily apparent, but even in their megalopolis it was true: there had always been an element of the prelapsarian to my existence. Like the pastoral literature favored among those urbanites, but with bone piercings and tyrannosaurs. Alas, what savage ceremonials were held in my honor. What skirmishes I waged with those rival king lizards. These people professing science should have understood the relativity of an act like grazing. For some it involved idylls, flour mills, rumination. For others it involved the wet snickety-snap that comes from unscrewing a dinosaur’s head.

  It’s apparent to me now that these cultured little apes didn’t see the similarities. In their bookishness, they delineated a false dichotomy—the bucolic and the exotic. And of the latter, I was a grotesque example. My arrival was not, it turns out, as a wonder of the natural world; but as a horror thereof. Something to be prodded and cajoled onto a boat, then maligned and instigated onstage. Shackled. Berated. The biggest of all, belittled. These lesser simians had it in them to know me, own me, and name me.

  The dunces. I have no shortage of names for them. Rubes. Spatherdabs. Jackanapes.

  At first, they seemed to me not so far removed from the people of my island. But where my islandfolk had reverence, these cityfolk had gall. Where my islanders saw me with humbling religiosity, these citizens saw crimson exploitation. Where my people called me king, these people called me—!

  I could not utter it, for the very phonetics insulted. The raw sound of it was a slur, vile and monosyllabic.

  It was here, fixated on their debasing language, that the vine of my thought snagged. But where my intellect stuck, my vehemence flourished. I seethed at them and their wilted winter, and seething kept my spirit ablaze. Even while the heat floated up from my body, my furor was my phlogiston. And as I lay beyond time in my capsule of combustible hatred, they attached machines to my inanimate corpus for its removal. I had been shackled in life, and so it seemed was to be shackled in death.

  They lassoed my wrists and ankles with fat cords. The restraints terminated at the tip of stilted machines, laughable cranes wheeled rather than winged, as un-avian as could be imagined. Constructs singing songs of blackest smoke. Yet though the cables were resilient and the engines unreal, they overprided themselves and the products of their hands. My physicality was indisputable. It was my freight, after all, that had done the damage of my fall—not their bi-winged annoyances. My mass shuddered the creaking motors and their grumbling operators. Their whole endeavor was unnerved. And despite their efforts to the opposite, I lay undisturbed.

  With the treatment of my corpse, I was finally given insight as to what awaited in the hereafter. Here was a disrespected end, bland and mechanical like the world that produced such pale, sunless people. And with body discrete from mind, I felt I had no preoccupation to keep me from waiting. My bulk had won me a paltry, momentary victory. But they would remove me somehow, even if it meant letting me succumb to slow rot and carting my bones from their city. For someone still inexplicably conscious, as I was, I need not explain this idea’s lack of appeal.

  But for now, their engines retreated. After some minutes unapproached, my fears did the same. I thought then with ambivalence of my unwilling companion: the fair one, the canary-headed friend. She had been a fixation of mine, admittedly, from the moment I parted the treetops and saw her bound at my altar. If I had known then the sensation of being shackled, would I have acted differently? Would I still have palmed her, as a possession, and carried her around like the shiniest shell? But then I meant only to protect, certainly, from the local brutes and the foreign pests.

  Oh, she was like a drop of sun. Musa paradisiaca, a genuine plantain. In a sense I’ve not had, she gave me companionship there in the mountains. She saw that I was gentle, if provokable, and she understood. Even as I was subdued by their trickery, there was something apologetic in her hairless face. For what more could a great ape ask?

  Freed temporarily—and pursued—I only sought her out in their city because I knew not where else to turn. Was it foolish for me to seek aid from one who had already proven powerless against their greed and disrespect? Undoubtedly. But I was a sucker, to borrow their term, one who sucks. A sucker for the romantic. I believed…

  Well, I can’t say what I believed.

  Perhaps that too, in a roundabout way, was my present existential dilemma.

  It had occurred to me more than once before my fall that I could have expired already, and that this American life had been the beginning of an unacknowledged afterlife. What was she if not heavenly muse, seraphim? What was their gray sprawl if not soulless absolution, a paved purgatorio? Without realizing it, I could be lying in a ravine back home, on my island, having slipped on moss and broken my neck or been caught unawares by a coordinated tyrannosaur strike. Certain vines had looked notably weak of late, and it was none too farfetched to imagine one giving way as I trusted to its swing.

  Other possibilities arose. Perchance I had ventured into the sea and wound up speared on a coral reef, drowned in the undertow, or sucked into the abyss by a chill leviathan. Could an affliction have ravaged me? Something foodborne? Stemming from the possibility that I had been long dead, it followed naturally that I may in fact still be alive. What assurance did I have that this misadventure was not just a fever dream, and that my mind was not just flitting madly about within itsel
f while my physical form lay snoozing in a nest of leaves?

  It was with impeccable dramatic timing that the humans began a new activity. Unable to move me wholesale, they took it upon themselves to hack me into more manageable bits. As one would expect, the corporeal sensation of bodily mutilation poked any number of irreparable holes into my “It was all a dream” hypothesis.

  With the same carelessness characteristic of their tongues, they began the prolonged and arduous effort of dismantling me. At several of my joints, I felt the itching bite of their tools: clawlike adzes, noisy pneumatic pokers, and long warbling sheets of metal that two men would tug back and forth, back and forth, tidal. Above my ankles they cut. Into my inner elbows and thighs. Against the grain of my hairy throat. My dermis peeled back before them, and the tenacious hair was sucked into the cuts and clotted, tinted red. Their teeth snagged on my muscle, became lodged, and even fresh laborers found themselves unable to continue the motion. All this without reaching my bone.

  With little delay they roped me again. This time, there was unmasked brutality in the bonds they attached: graceless chains with links the size of coconuts. Two or three men at a time looped rings around my limbs, wedging them down into the saw wounds. And then they retrieved their engines. Not the tall, ill-balanced cranes—but the trucks and tanks and others for towing. They ran the chains to hitches and cleared the street. My brain must have been slowing significantly, for it was only as I felt a deep-seated tug from all directions that I realized: their intent was to draw me.

  It was one of their most sinister modes of execution. Anchored force would be exerted by their vehicles, measured in units of equine power. And with enough application my arms and legs were to tear from their sockets and be dragged, disjointed, across their abrasive concrete to the city’s limits. It was possible my torso would continue to thwart them, and I could will my blood to flow torrential on their busy city streets. But being drawn as planned, I would be the more powerless—stripped of limbs to shackle.

  So though my body could do naught, I consolidated my consciousness against the rumble of their machines. Should I be rent asunder, my mind would remain concerted. The chains tightened and yanked, and cut to the quick my exposed tissue. My arms and legs were cranked. Something in my spine cracked, and my cranium jumped out the distance of one vertebrae. The power of their engines rattled through me, shaking loose the meat withheld by their taut metal. Bodily death felt as an inverted birth—slow molecular growth rivaled by the curtest shredding of all that was—and I doubted my quasi-survival.

  Yet somehow, against their exertions I kept my bodily tenacity.

  The humans were not done. They allowed me a brief respite for their deliberation. I knew what would come next. I had not spent long in their world, the realm of mustard gas and gunpowder, but I had seen enough to understand the extent of their technology. For all intents and purposes, I was an unwanted mountain amid their avenues. And they had a way of moving mountains.

  It was a clumsy way. Unpredictable. Unadulterated. The only thing between trinitrotoluene’s employer and giblets was a mid-length fuse, and I imagined their street and structures would sustain collateral damage. But my obduracy demanded dynamite.

  They were a long time clearing the streets of civilians. The sunrise that saw me felled had swooped around the sky and disappeared behind their skyscrapers. But the sidewalks eventually emptied, leaving only a smattering of experts—demolitions men, civil engineers, custodial crew. They were much quicker in establishing barriers of stone and sand.

  They bore into my side with a mammoth drill and inserted a bundle of explosives. A pair in gleaming hardhats carefully unraveled the gossamer fuse, then skittered around a building corner with the plunger in tow. This moment may very well have been the most ignoble treatment of all. I had been gored beneath the arm and plugged up with a log of dynamite; and rather than the fiercely intimate contact of saws and labor, there was only a thin impersonal line trailing from me to my demolisher, who hid behind artifice. I wanted to groan, but couldn’t find it in such deflated lungs. To return to my earlier analogy of death as typhoon—I felt then as if I had been stationed all along in its calm, unnerving eye. But now the cyclone shifted, and I was in the storm’s path.

  The blast was like a thunder clap behind my ribcage, nearer to earth than ever it should be. The flash popped and lifted my right half off the ground. The sound reverberated between the walls, bouncing up and stirring the low clouds. Gravel and grit burst from the prick in my side, splattering surfaces and shattering windows. The coagulation liquefied anew. That patch of hair turned to dust. The skin cracked and disintegrated. My body lurched, collapsed, and smoked from this newfound, charred hole.

  Thus it went. They blew me to their proverbial smithereens, to their ironical kingdom come. Every failed severance became an entry point for their endless stream of concussive fire, their chemical twigs snapping with such unbridled force. And then they returned with their hands, and finely detailed my demise. An explosion here and there, then a little off the top. The foreman barked orders like a four-legged feral. Just saw through that hank of curling flesh. Take a sledge to the ulna. Drop a wrecking ball on that damnable patella.

  I entered a state of anti-bodily shock. Paradoxically, I was not present for my burial preparation. As my mass dissolved, so did their difficulty. Smaller units of me were thrust into dump trucks, tethered onto flatbeds, and lugged to their trainyard. I filled all the cars of a freight train, my body parsed out linearly. My center was gone. Here was a parade of nullified ferocity: muscles without might—eyes without sight—indeterminate wads of cauterized meat—a petrified snarl, hardly intelligible and obscenely fanged.

  The grisly transport found its way to a landfill beyond the city’s limits. It was their idea of the natural world, flat and dry and without canopy. The falsest representation of what I knew to be true. In great pits, they stowed me like the ruins of a past best forgotten. The evidence of a past ancestry, or—the more disheartening for them—of past fealty.

  There I lay, just as I did after my fall, only buried and disaggregate and neutralized. But still motionless, oh so motionless, for a time.

  It seemed as if that would be my end. Finally, for all the wondering, here my questions were answered. The end was to be a continuation of laying motionless, undisturbed. After the things the humans had done, a part of me cannot say it was disappointed for whatever solace—even were it void of rectitude.

  But another part of me still, still refused to accept this as the point of termination. How obtuse an ending. How poorly wrought, I thought.

  It had happened that way before. When they surrounded me with their fiery slings, I groped for a handhold and used it to rise wrathful from their earth. I scaled their steepest peak, rooted myself at the top, and roared a disruption of their entire civilization. My proudest moment yet, wherein I towered over their tower, and they were them but I was me. Defiant. Ruling. Though when they pelted me with their glowing brambles, their toxic words and tracer rounds, I succumbed.

  That was all to be expected.

  But given another chance—though who was I to assume another chance? A regent, that’s who. A bloody vengeful monarch. I didn’t need to be given another go. I took what I wanted, always in balance, and what in their bastardized nation-state gave them the right to overcome my decree? This time—nothing hypothetical about it—this time would be different. They would buzz around me once more, gnatlings that they are—yet their infinite bites would be rendered infinitesimal. I had seen the end they feared. I had breathed the very loam they loathed and to which they were doomed to return. And I knew my limits, had seen them violated, and finally knew with dark certainty that the limits of life and death did not exist. The body they thought broken could break no further. The spirit they thought departed was too enlarged, too embittered. My might had not expired. The humans would be hard pressed to deter me. They would be unable to cut me down. What was my goal? I no longer had any es
cape to make, any thing to protect. This time, I had palmed nothing and no one to stop me.

  Or nothing to distract me. There was only rage. Rage filled me, rabid rage. It was rage that stoked the fires of my soul. Rage—a guttural growl of a word, a majestically expressive onomatopoeia of incontestable anger. The horned rage of one unjustly punished; the smoldering rage of one abducted; the haunted rage of one betrayed. Rage had freed me from their shackles once before. Rage would free me from death’s pernicious bosom.

  With quiet attrition, I reinstated governance over my ligaments. Those unsevered bowed in servitude. Though my veins had gone stagnant and clotted thick, I had no want of them. They became in my limbs like branches, and my muscle wiggled and squirmed and clung all at once to two skeletons.

  Dirt crumbled from my reconstituted bulk as, for the second time, I rose enraged from their earth. I pounded my undying chest in the moonlight, and the beat of my fist echoed in halls once filled by a heart.

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  Jimmy Grist (Kong, Still Conscious, Reflects on His Visit to New York) draws comics and writes stories. You can read Dinosaur Kid, a webcomic in watercolors, online at www.jimmygrist.net.

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  MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE LAB

  by John Grey

  Mad scientist in the windmill down the street

  still uses guinea pigs in his experiments.

  With his wild grey hair, wire lab coat,

  frenzied speech including references to “being God”,

  he’s such a Universal Pictures cliché.

  He injects them with his “Fountain of Youth” serum.

  Excuse me if I don’t go gaga at the prospect