Doctor Flesh- Director's Cut

by Alex Johnson

  Then it started talking murder.

  “Look, you’re perfectly free to come out any time,” said Dr. Flesh. “The coffin is unbolted. In fact, why don’t you take a walk, get some fresh air, or make yourself useful. Have your cookies. Or get some more cookies.

  “Here’s some money”—she tossed a handful of bills towards the upright coffin. “But let me work in peace. Please. That’s all I ask.”

  “You don’t love me anymore,” came the voice through a mouthful of cookie mush.

  “Of course I love you,” said Viola. “I am trying to concentrate on this ending. Where I wrap up the movie and ride into the sunset. Or we could put you in a sidecar like Easy Rider. Any helpful suggestions?”

  “Gumballs,” said Solare.

  “Cookies, gumballs, murder, which is it?” said Viola. “We’ve discussed this. You can’t just go out and randomly kill people.”

  “I can’t?”

  “No. I have to give you an order first. Then you specifically target certain people. People who have pissed me off or otherwise messed with my mix. I thought you were in a hypnotic trance?”

  “It wore (munch, munch, chomp) off.”

  “Can’t you just have a wank or something?”

  “No porn.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You demanded hermaphrodite porn or you were going to make my life a living hell, and devastate the earth for generations.”

  “I will be with you on your wedding night,” said Solare.

  “It’s been fucking done!” said Dr. Flesh. “Get some original material.”

  Twas not always thus. They had met three years earlier, at the Hipster’s Got a Brand New Sandwich Lotion Bar in Altendale. A transsexual, a hermaphrodite, an ironic mustache-shaped sandwich, and truly awful poetry to seal their affection.

  “I stand here like railroad tracks,” Solare had been drunkenly intoning from the stage, “and I’ll kick your fucking ass if you don’t applaud my poetry.”

  The reading had been going on for about three hours when Dr. Flesh walked in. There was something about an eight-foot gender-ambiguous thing in platform heels, glitter makeup and a rockabilly pompadour that was magic, especially when it was swaying back and forth and belting out bad Bukowski imitations.

  Viola had been mesmerized by the sheer inverted genius of Solare’s poems. They were so godawful they went beyond the realm of merely talentless drunken spew and briefly scraped the sublime. And retreated, and returned to spew, and resolved into a pathetic but oddly touching spectacle.

  But that was years ago. Their period of domestic bliss had faded into a perpetual whine-fest. The thrill of sending Solare out to wreak terrible vengeance on her enemies had waned long ago. Only a small vestige of affection remained between them. Dr. Flesh kept to her work, and Solare sent out a lengthy litany of complaints from its coffin. The honeymoon was over, and the vibrations in the lab were increasingly fraught with overtones of homicide.

  ***

  Tiffany Tiffany St. Tropez descended cautiously from the train, clutching the shoulder strap of her Gooshy Fruit bag. She was carrying a lot of bling today, and was afraid that some of it might wind up in the hands of terrorists.

  What she couldn’t figure out was what use the bling would serve them after they’d blown themselves up in a desperate act of Gee Hod. Maybe they’d give it to their virgin concubines? Whatever a concubine was.

  Ms. St. Tropez was frequently bedeviled with questions of this nature. As an avid viewer of the Hot Fox News, she daily learned of developments that distressed her and made her stomach growl even more than usual.

  Still, she was still hotter than most, and a steady intake of small salads was guaranteed to maintain the hotness. At least according to HFN.

  The platform was deserted. She wondered what had happened to all the other passengers that got off with her. It was as if they’d been swallowed up.

  Again, what-evs. Most of them were badly dressed and looked like they could stand an exclusively small salad diet themselves. And a few of them smelled bad.

  Convinced finally that no Gee Hodist Satanic lesbians lurked in the shadows with pink umbrellas, she walked resolutely towards the Noe Street Exit. She tried to ignore the footsteps for as long as possible. Just deny it’s happening, they said on the Hot Fox News. Pretend it’s a movie. She took comfort in that advice until the eight-foot hermaphrodite in platform heels and glam rock makeup tapped her on the shoulder.

  “What do you want?” she squealed, brandishing her pepper spray. “I’ve been trained, I know how to use this,” she said, trying to recover her composure.

  “You’ve got the spray pointed towards yourself,” said the hermaphrodite in a deep, mellow voice. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I just thought I might interest you in a spectacle for the ages.”

  “Spectacles for the aged?” asked Tiffany. “Look, I already gave to charity last week, and I could barely afford this bag.” She brandished the Gooshy Fruit in its face.

  “That’s a nice bag,” said the hermaphrodite. “Very blingy. No, I said ‘spectacle for the ages.’ Would you like to see it?”

  “As long as I don’t have to like, rub shoulders with old people,” said Tiffany primly. “Old people have diseases. It’s a proven medical fact. I saw it on the HFN.”

  “I can assure you that the spectacle has very little to do with old people,” said the hermaphrodite. “It’s made for young, hot people like yourself. I have some tickets here for the show. Would you like one?”

  Tiffany squinted at the proffered ticket. “Uh, I guess. Ok. As long as it’s not horror. I hate horror.”

  The hermaphrodite was silent on this point.

  “Is it funny?”

  “Oh yes, very funny.” Solare attempted a laugh.

  “Okay, ‘cause…I guess if it’s free, and there aren’t any gross old people, and it’s not horror, and it’s funny, I’ll take a ticket.”

  The hermaphrodite gave her the ticket.

  “Thanks,” said Tiffany. But the creature had vanished.

  Tiffany shook her head. “Weird!” she said to no one in particular. And stepped out onto the street.

  ***

  Nathan Hale Bilge was not a happy camper. In fact, he hated that moronic phrase to begin with. So why had it automatically popped into his head? Bilge prided himself in his ability with the language, popping the bubble of cliché to make his critiques stylish and interesting, with fresh, happy phrases that exactly coincided with his meaning. Maybe he hadn’t had enough sleep, or been hitting the Nyquil too hard—he also hated the term “abusing” when it applied to judicious use of over-the-counter medications for ends not intended by the manufacturer.

  The entire setup reminded Bilge of that godawful book he’d eviscerated for all time on his blog. What was the title, Blood Moon or Death ‘Stroid, something lame and moronic. As he recalled, it was a spin-off of a franchise he practically worshiped to distraction, and the author, Johansen, had actually made fun of his favorite monster character, Mason Borknees. Bilge had always secretly identified with the monster, who was kind of a Momma’s boy who got kicked around a good deal and drowned when the camp counselors were off having a good time. When Mason took up the machete in the sequel to the original movie, Bilge had felt it down to his toes. Johansen had used all these words that he had either made up or taken straight from a thesaurus, because nobody actually used those words in a novel. Or anywhere.

  Johansen was lucky to get two stars on Warrior.com. Especially from Bilge. He had a reputation to uphold, after all. So-called novelists who messed with continuity and made fun of Borknees deserved to be slowly dipped in sulfuric acid, starting with the toes. Worst of all, nobody had asked him, Nathan Hale Bilge, to write a book. Which was why he had to content himself with the blog.

  ***

  The movie you are about to read conceives itself through you. You are the host and it is the organism. By turns, you may be expected to carry that weight.

  In case o
f spontaneous ectoplasm, heat rash, dereliction of the body map or other extremes, orderlies are placed at the exits to assist. They have been designed in a superior lab by experts in Doom and thus cannot be taken except with an injection of the Dream Liquid straight to the retina.

  Dr. Flesh is a luminous being who shapes her contours from your dreams. She stands at the top of a ladder placing huge letters into slots on the Marquee de Sade. She is wearing your favorite fetish gear.

  From now on you will be free to design her, provided she has access to all of your files and their Lords.

  III.

  Viola had spent hours and hours in the warehouse laboratory to no effect. The attempt to create a Dream Liquid—a medium by which the minds of her audience would partake of, recreate and alter the movie from within—had so far proved futile. She felt like a mutant, postmodern Edison, her lab table cluttered with filaments and soaked with 90% perspiration.

  Fucking Edison. She hated that guy, yet trial and error had produced a few rare, if useless, triumphs. Gerbil Man still cycled endlessly; the Self-Serve apparatus for auto-cannibalism had been a surprising hit with the local German community. And Fart Box worked even better than expected, enhanced with Reichian orgones—a tonic blast of pure flatulence always changed one’s perspective.

  Until she arrived at a solution—quite literally.

  Impatient with bodily functions, Viola had taken to peeing in a bucket rather than leaving the lab to heed the call of nature. Tired, her overtaxed mind teeming with artfully constructed neon squiggles, she once accidentally squatted over a beaker instead.

  The beaker was prepped with radiated recombinant DNA from a wolverine in heat. So far, the DNA had not adhered to the salamander genes or the tight Levi’s 501’s. Until now.

  As she hastily rose from the squatting position, impatient lest she miss a single second of the process, she observed the love match of the pee, the wolverine cells and the genetic material she’d cloned from the dream-state of celebrities and tossed together in a loving salad.

  The pee molecules bound themselves in loving harmony with the others; the solution glowed bright yellow. Then the liquid began to circulate through the pipes, resolving in a thick, steady drip from the nozzle hooked over the basin at the end of the long steel workbench.

  It looked and acted like Dream Liquid. All that was missing was a test subject.

  “Solare,” she yelled, “I’ve got something for you.”

  “Yes Mistress?”

  “Remember Mistress’s attempts to create a medium for the Reality Stack?”

  “Yes Mistress,” said Solare, recalling with supreme horror the many tortures it had experienced as a beta tester for Dr. Flesh. The rack, the screws, the vibrating pumpkin, an exceedingly hollow feeling in the guts, and the replacement of that hollow feeling with a painful fullness.

  ***

  She was a long way from home—Oklahoma, the “Okay State,” where concepts like genderfuck and forced feminization barely registered. Like a comforting mother, the Church and its doctrines had always been there, relieving her doubts and answering her anxious questions with simple, unqualified dogma: Life begins at conception. Birth control is frowned upon. Never question the priest, even when he pulls down your underwear and puts something hard and painful back there.

  Viola had been born into a world on fire, a time of change and unrest. Back in the Summer of ’69, Oklahoma City first discovered hippies, free love and the fresh, disturbing notion that women and other minorities might not be as happy with second-class citizenship as formerly anticipated.

  The social and cultural changes were matched by changes in the urban landscape. When Viola was born, the Crosstown Expressway had just been built for I-40, which only went as far as El Reno. At Oklahoma State, minor tear gas was expressed and a few long-haired students carried signs around the cafeteria in protest of Vietnam.

  Fortunately for the greater good, the bane of drug use was limited to squalid quarters where lonely hipsters, alienated from good society for experimenting with mind-bending loco weed, tried to cultivate a taste for cocktails.

  Despite these developments, however, certain things remained the same. Things that would never be okay in the Okay State.

  Being gay was one of them. Using multisyllabic words was another. And never, under any circumstances, was a sex change permissible. Such a concept revolted against God, Christ, the Creator’s law.

  At 13, Viola—then Bob Simpson—had a revelation. Bob had begged to be excused from church due to a violent, hacking cough, and his parents had begrudgingly accepted his absence from Sunday services. As soon as he heard the station wagon pull out of the driveway, Bob rolled out of bed, already fully dressed, and walked next door to where his neighbors were having a garage sale.

  These neighbors had never been popular, and after a few months of trying to make peace with the stolid citizens of Nichols Hills, the young couple had finally decided to pack their bags and go west.

  Bob had always liked the couple. They were young, well-spoken, educated and, most important, accepted him the way he was. On the few occasions he’d spent time with them, when his parents were off doing church-related social activities, the Corsos made Bob feel welcome, inviting him into their house to listen to music, talk about art, politics, science and philosophy. They were passionate about ideas, about changing the world. Nobody else in Bob’s life had the slightest interest in changing anything, except maybe the wallpaper.

  He couldn’t believe they were letting go of all these books, magazines and records for a handful of change. But moving was expensive, and the Corsos needed whatever cash they could scrape together. Which meant leaving behind such treasures as Alladin Sane by David Bowie, a complete chemistry set, books on anatomy, physiology and general biology, and five years’ worth of Rolling Stone and Famous Monsters.

  Stowing these finds away in his closet and under his bed underneath the more socially acceptable baseball equipment, Bob conceived a plan. He would follow the Corsos west, taste the worlds that beckoned from the pages of the books and magazines, that called to him from the grooves of the Bowie record.

  At 17, after saving up some money from odd jobs, Bob took a Greyhound. Away from constrictions, away from prejudice, away from small minds and dogma, to the big, bad West Coast, where entire neighborhoods, whole cities, were devoted to acts that filled him with mingled desire and horror. Sodom and Gomorrah was his new home.

  After Sweden and the sex change, Bob had his name legally changed to Viola Flesh, the new moniker arising spontaneously from a marathon showing of Andy Warhol movies and the erotic nightmares that beset him afterwards. Medical school and film school followed swiftly. Then came the bizarre synthesis, the experiments, the rerouting of synaptic connections in the service of new appetites.

  What drove Viola, had driven her since she was a boy in Oklahoma City, was a will to transgression. The very idea of givens, universal laws, infuriated her. She had wrestled with the thorniest challenges of philosophy and theology, grappled head-on with such matters as the existence of good and evil, the possibility of a universe driven by pure chance, the conditions under which life became possible, and further—the nature of life itself, and its relationship to unlife (she hated the idea of death, it seemed to her prosaic and lacking in imagination). She had a Faustian heart, but without the old alchemist’s weakness and vacillation.

  Viola was unimpressed by limits. Even the greatest thinkers admitted a point where knowledge was impossible. That, to Viola, lessened their stature. Moderation, conservatism, such values she suspected to be concessions, and thus flawed. If there was a point to it all, she wanted to know. If there was no point, she wanted to know. But more and more she suspected that the posing of limits derived from fear, whether of social opprobrium or a starker, metaphysical terror: madness and its hinterlands.

  Dr. Flesh was comfortable with madness, in love with horror, and thus, at least within herself, had come to terms with ideas consider
ed diabolic, sick, evil and wrong to most of the human bacteria crawling the planet. They were stuck with a fundamental defect of reasoning; in Western logical structure, things were either one way or the complete opposite. Dialectics informed the limits of the possible. Things were either true or false, right or wrong. Hybridity, fluidity, the leaking of substance from one conceptual category to another, was disallowed.

  ***

  At first, she believed that the pain, intolerance and prejudice she encountered was part of the not-her. With all her might, she built a barrier between Her and Them. Even as Bob Simpson, she had thought of it that way: a personal Berlin Wall.

  But silently, secretly and inexorably, the not-her had found a way in. Worming through the chinks in her psyche. Testing fissures, weak areas, points of entry. And slowly, inevitably, the not-her set up shop in her soul, and started making demands.

  Kill for me, it said.

  Destroy.

  The not-her had power, composed of the internalized hate, envy, jealousy and projection of all the others. It was a monster. An impossibly idealized form, what they themselves could not achieve, a monster of sex and allure, with wolverine claws and a studied, sculpted smile.

  It was perfectly hideous. But it was perfect.

  Viola Flesh was the first complete and successful creation of Dr. Flesh. Who, working through Bob’s body, tore out the human heart and replaced it with an exact duplicate, cold, efficient and deadly. This duplicate heart would never again hammer hotly at insult. It would not experience the pain, merely process it and send it directly to the command and control center.

  A metal heart that could never die.

  As they had not recognized or nurtured his gentleness and openness, She was sealed to their humanity as well.

  As they had spurned him, she would make them suffer. Endlessly.