Doctor Flesh- Director's Cut

by Alex Johnson

  The Bilges of the world, their impotent rage at the truly talented transformed into web-based vomit. The cutesy, ever-so-normal girls so nice they named her twice. Tiffany Tiffany St. Lopez. Or Brittany—god she adored it—Brittany Lapierre. These guinea pigs were chosen by a piece of software Flesh had built herself, a heat-seeking missile for plastic girls and cardboard men.

  Such as Matt Gooch, the Death Ball hero of Sugar Valley High, with his rippling abs, his sneer of deprecation for anybody who didn’t fit his narrow standards, his steroid-induced ferocity belied by a coward’s heart. The man with the pee stream for non-blonds, golden showers for golden girls, and steaming piss for blood.

  Dr. Flesh is unaware who made who. Ultimately, the not-her has replaced her. Cell by cell. Molecule by molecule. Unwittingly, she has collaborated with her deadliest enemies. Unknowingly, she has become the thing she hates.

  IV.

  In all of Sugar Valley, one school dominated.

  J. Edgar Reagan High, known familiarly as Sugar Valley High, was the cynosure of all eyes. Its scholars went to the Ivy Leagues in packed limousines, its athletes waded in gore, its young women were prized for their beauty, taste in fashion and fastidious diets, and its nerds were tolerated for the prestige they brought the school—but just barely.

  The most dominant in a heavy-hitting pack, Matt Gooch littered the Death Ball field with bloody corpses, his trademark ‘Berzerker cry’ carried to the top of the bleachers and echoed by his many fans.

  His entire being itched with the need to twist the nerd’s head around until it almost snapped, smear him with his own dribbled feces and make him perform oral in a non-gay way, when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Oh, Mr. Kriege, I was just helping this poor, unfortunate scholar. Someone must have attacked him and perpetrated terrible acts on his person. I hate to see that happen.”

  But it wasn’t Mr. Kriege. It was an eight-foot hermaphrodite with a hellbilly pompadour.

  “Huh?”

  Solare thrust two tickets into his hands and strode off.

  Gooch examined the tickets, muttering “what the fuck?” They were yellow, 3” by 4,” with a picture of some kind of monster superimposed on a metallic background. The monster’s eye-holes were punched through. In very small letters at the bottom read “Reality Stack: One Night Only. No passes or substitutions.”

  He was about the throw it away when he remembered what the blog had said. Psychogremlin.com was a must-read for Gooch and his pack. Always a kick to read what the nerds had to say about their weird-ass obsessions.

  Had Bilge known that his most avid readers consisted of a group of beef-pumped jocks who would probably kick his ass on sight, chances are he would opt for another vocation. But as often he opined in his multisyllabic, snarky way on whatever fanboy product came down the pike, Gooch and his pack gathered in garages over beer kegs and ridiculed his pronouncements. Half the time they didn’t understood what the freak he was going on about, which was half the fun of reading him. Supernerd Bilge had devoted his last column to this new movie, known only as “Reality Stack,” which was being sneak-previewed to a randomly-chosen audience.

  There were two tickets, so he could invite someone. A girl. Obviously, because he wasn’t a queer, and only took it in the ass once, purely by accident, in the showers. Gooch prided himself on his heterosexuality. He’d fucked 85% of the female population of the school, the remainder being those considered Not So Hot. Essentially, he was a stud. A guy’s guy.

  “This ticket’s for Brittany,” he decided immediately. Yes, definitely. The rush he got from thinking about Brittany was so intense that he forgot all about the nerd, who had stopped breathing anyway. Let the groundskeeper find him, thought Gooch. Didn’t Spanish people love twisted corpses anyway?

  The date Gooch had set his sights on was one of five Brittany’s registered at Sugar Valley High, but the only one he hadn’t plowed with his 12-inch wood. Brittany Lapierre and Tiffany Tiffany St. Tropez vied for the title of Hottest Babe at Sugar Valley, but Lapierre was considered slightly hotter because of her ass tattoo. Which also marked her as Sluttiest Ho at Sugar Valley. Not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you were blonde.

  He could just see it: Gooch, Lapierre, a darkened screening room, his hand on her thigh, her purring, his hand creeping up her skirt, her little cry of surprise, his fingers plucking the elastic of her panties, seeking and stroking her shaved vajay, as some nerd shit played on the screen. As far as he knew, Lapierre wasn’t exactly a fangirl, and knew as much about art cinema as the groundskeeper, Lopez. Which couldn’t be much.

  “Oh my gosh,” gushed Brittany. “Really? You thought of me? I don’t know, I have to check my calendar. Hold on one teensy little sec, ok? Here we go. I have an app for appointments, all I have to do is text myself and it works it all out for me, and then I get a special ring tone an hour before. What’s it called? What day? Reality Snack—that sounds lame. But whatever. You say it’s good? What’s it about?”

  Gooch maintained his masculine silence as Brittany babbled to herself for another ten minutes. “Ok,” she said finally, looking up. “I can do it. Pick me up at 7:00?”

  “Sure thing,” said Gooch.

  “Yes,” he whooped as soon as he was out of earshot. “I am so going to score. Thanks for the tickets, Assface.”

  ***

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gooch. “Looks like a rough neighborhood. But don’t worry, babe. I can protect you.”

  “Wha…?” asked Brittany. “Sorry, I’ve gotta take this. Hello? Yeah, Wonder Boy has driven us off the map. It’s all like gross and sketchy here. And I could swear I just saw a homeless—no, wait, it’s just some old clothes. But whatever.”

  Gooch had to admit they were far from home. These were not the manicured lawns of Sugar Valley. There were a lot of tattered and graffiti-tagged billboards for an off brand of malt liquor. And though he wasn’t positive, and no way he was telling Brittany, he was pretty sure he just saw the old clothes scratch themselves as they shuffled down the boulevard.

  “Don’t you have like a GPS on this thing?” she asked, making a face. “And I can’t get bars on this piece of crap.” She shook her cell phone, but it was just going crazy on her. She put it up to her ear again. “Hello? Crap! I should have stayed home and read 500 Shades of Man Gravy. It was getting really good. Dorian had these, like, special balls you put in your vajay…”

  “It’s gonna be okay,” said Gooch, who wished to Bob he’d never seen that he/she/it with the weirdo tickets, had trusted his guts and told the eight-foot-tall boygirl to fuck the fuck off. And he was missing his favorite show, The Karpathians. Muffy Karpathian was pregnant by the Fresh Prince of Darkness and she was about to give birth to the Spawn, and Missy was getting her nails done.

  “I guess as long as we’re here, we might as well make the best of it,” said Brittany primly. She had learned this deep philosophy from the Hot Fox News. “Right? You agree with me. Right?”

  “Sure, Brittany,” said Gooch, wishing he had asked Tiffany Tiffany instead. Who, granted, didn’t have the ass tattoo, but he had a feeling he was going to see that tonight anyway. He wished he was home watching that new 3D Just Quim Beaver video, the one where he took off his pants. Slowly. If you slowed it down frame by frame, you could see Beaver’s cock.

  ***

  Viola slips her gloved hand into the murk at the bottom of the tank and her body is bathed in the violet light from clusters of bulbs that line the top and sides. The leathery sacs are squirming at the bottom and about to deliver their payload. They resemble fried eggs, or, alternatively, eyeballs. From the pupil-like center a squirt of jet black ink emerges as from a squid. The squirts of ink form tiny balls the size and consistency of the tapioca balls in Japanese novelty drinks. She pulls a handful of the balls—seeds—out of the tank, opens up a chute behind the hulking mass of the bio-digital conversion machine and carefully places them in a row, t
hen slams the chute home. In 24 hours the seeds will hatch into characters to populate the Reality Stack.

  V.

  Dr. Flesh dreams herself into the narrative.

  Her essence, evaporated and streamed into a play of photons, charges the screen from one of the Camjector lenses. It is then scooped up, remixed and mingled with the dreams, hopes and fears of the audience. Below the twin lenses lies a jagged mouth, the entry point for chaos.

  The mouth belches forth lies and mystifications.

  The Eyeball Bondage set adheres to the one who wears it. It, like the Camjector and its film, is a live thing. At first one dons the set like a pair of 3D glasses and prepares for the usual thrill ride. But the EB set meanwhile does a retinal scan, then a brain scan, dividing the cerebral cortex into slices that it copies and twists. A mindfuck in multiple dimensions.

  Like the clockwork god of the Deists, Dr. Flesh sets a universe in motion; unlike that god, she is present always in multiple forms, but powerless to change the outcome. She has placed a replica of herself within the movie itself, directing the movie from within. But the audience has also been gifted with the powers of the auteur. At any point the narrative may switch tracks. At any terminus in the tracks, rogue ganglia may upset the stage and deliver the outcome.

  Axons become axes, synapses fuse and dissolve into golden idols. The movie hacks itself, now dominant, now submissive. The audience is diffused, eyeballs slipped through eyeshooks as minds shrink to primitive lenses.

  Concussive blow of a new splatter metaphysics.

  The mouth yawns: jagged teeth crunch the props cum scenery cum audience cum narrative. There are no governors as the biofilm is edited from within and without, protease clippers moving with the precision of a factory of amok fleshbots. Now we see that the landscape has been poured and the scenarios prepped, as Flesh’s beta crew, her test bunnies, take their places.

  And deliver their lines.

  A storm of lights pour off the Marquee De Sade and genuflect at her feet, batting away her protests. “It’s all for you,” say the lights. “It’s all for you, this magnificent dream, these radiating signals, these patterns of murder, this orifice of sucking energy, the parade of pink shells undulating down the streets of dream.”

  The audience leans in and sees that she is made of billions and billions of tiny stories. Each story generates another, which is the seed of an entirely fresh creation. As she reads, the audience will reformat spontaneously. Goons are placed at all exits with orders to shoot heretics on sight with magic foaming bullets.

  Dr. Flesh clears her throat and gulps from the manuscript. She complains that the light hurts her eyes. She drinks a glass of water which is full of eyeballs. She spears one of the eyeballs with a toothpick and places it between her pretty lips.

  There is rapt silence. She pops the eyeball like a cherry tomato and thanks you for your patience.

  “The text you are about to see has no precedent and spontaneously recreates itself in your image. Criticism based on a stable and not fluctuating narrative—at least insofar as the narrative does not change based on your biostreams, lights, dashes, colors and wandering virus—is an ancient remedy to an old disease. The ways of our ancestors were largely ponderous and stuck in ruts. We suggest that you jettison now any preconceived ideas about what a narrative is, should be, could be or might be. This film is impossible to analyze as it ripples through your mind like a prism and throws off new, spontaneous narrative like shrugged viral seeds. Any attempt to become the host will result in becoming the parasite your mothers warned you about. And as we all know, that ain’t a pretty sight for sore eyes.”

  She paused to laugh at her own cryptic joke. A large man in a rumpled Lakers T-shirt made for one of the exits but was taken down by Syd Field’s screenplay formula and a phalanx of Joseph Campbell clones wearing the masks of Greek tragedy.

  “Orderlies are positioned at all X/Y coordinate points of the theater in case of green goo, lightning strikes, Lovecraftian incursions, Phil K. Dickian revelations or the sudden manifestation of three-eyed crablike creatures from non-Euclidean spacetime. This theater may contain multiple manifolds with protease enzymes carefully calibrated to digest you like a vitamin pill. Spontaneous body melts are not uncommon.

  “Once the film passes the projector head it is automatically knit with your thoughts, emotions, feelings, power, powerlessness, wretchedness and sense of doom and/or immortality and/or immorality. Fashion sense is not an option, although if you wait in the lobby area some will be provided to you in return for your skin and another, random tissue sample.

  “The movie has been so designed with engines of loving craft that as you watch it, you will be helplessly sucked into a powerful story of two lovers, light-beings from beyond the parameters of this universe, who occasionally manifest as toys, fishlights, reptiles, green goo and the monolithic dome. Also as unmotivated bodies from which the liquid has been drained spontaneous. All X/Y coordinate points of the theater have been swabbed for your protection. Small children may suddenly emerge as robotic savants and hit the ground ruining. Architects of the abyss are standing by with peyote rays and machineguns that shoot viral vision. There will be Christmas on Earth. I now present the fabulous opera.”

  The audience adjusts Eyeball Bondage headgear that came of age in Samoa. The headgear inserts a hypodermic needle directly into the retina and replaces eyeball fluid with the Dream Liquid. Once the Dream Liquid has circulated through all micropores, the audience is instant jelly and amenable to the darkest of propaganda. Although Dr. Flesh is not a sadist, she exults in this precise moment, as the audience has self-selected, itself a guinea pig, the genuine article. Masochists have special attachments to their genitalia that lance them with prismatic splatter should they project too much.

  She carefully threads the biofilm into the projector, a Cyclopean mass of green moss-choked headstone from Easter Island graves. The projector masticates the biofilm and sweats furiously, little oily droplets trickling down and forming a river between the aisles.

  The EB headgear allows the audience to see the islands in this river as they fluctuate and pop in and out of focus. Dr. Flesh may now directly interact with the unconscious. She watches as the biofilm squirts its toxic byproducts into the rivers which have become choked with leaves and bits of brainstem.

  VI.

  Gooch had seen virgin beaches like this in the movies, but now he was in one. For real.

  He dipped his hand in the wet sand and brushed it on his cheek. “That freaky doctor chick was right,” he said. “We are so there.” Since it was only a movie, he was pretty sure he could fuck both of the girls. They’d have to let him. And there were no worries about getting pregnant, because the freaky doctor chick said it was…he hadn’t exactly tracked what she said. And then they’d had to sign that form, which he hadn’t exactly tracked either, although he’d caught something about the chance of sudden death and had to fill in the names of his next of kin.

  But Gooch was not one to dwell on the negatives. No, as an avid fan of Dr. Grue Ponsky on the Hot Fox, he knew that the way to health, wealth and hot ass was to always see the sunny side of things. “Keep looking towards the sun,” Dr. Grue would remind his viewers. Gooch was pretty sure he didn’t mean that literally.

  “So how about that three-way?” he asked. Getting no reply, he turned around.

  He was completely alone on the beach. No girls, no three-way, just miles and miles of white sand.

  ***

  Bilge wonders if he should take a break, set down the headset and maybe get some popcorn. He can’t remember whether there was a concession stand, and the entrance to the screening room itself shuffles in his mind like a deck of cards. At first he was standing before a flight of stairs that he presumed led directly into the room, and could hear what sounded like previews for upcoming productions.

  He has already confirmed in his own mind the terrible review he will give the movie, assured that his pronouncements on the thin
g will curdle any appetite to fork out hard-earned cash to see the bloody thing.

  “Another Grim Enigma from the Mind of Dr. Flesh” is the title he has settled on.

  But the headset is nowhere to be found. And neither is the theater.

  Bilge is somewhat impressed. However flawed Flesh’s concepts, however bewildering and overly complicated her storylines, she—or an army of molecular biologists—have truly delivered on the promise of a new film technology. If only someone else held the reins. Someone like Bilge himself, perhaps.

  Bilge had originally wanted to become a filmmaker himself, but none of his projects got off the ground. He suspected that they were too radical, because too much smacking of original genius, for the dull-brained titans that controlled the purse strings of Hollyweird. Nobody wanted new anymore: they wanted proven, they wanted nostalgia tweaked slightly for a new generation. They wanted asses in seats and sealed mouths, they wanted an audience whipped through a tunnel of sinister wonders and rendered like sausage, just as the movies were links packed with the meat derived from other movies, ad nauseum sayeth the Lard.

  Which is why, instead of standing at the helm of his own project, his own Reality Stack—which he would never title Reality Stack, that was stupid—he was preparing to grind out a formulaic response to a movie he did not intend to watch all the way through. If he could just find his way out of the movie.

  Flesh had said something in her introduction about exits that fluctuated with the audience’s perceived capacity for suffering, whatever the fuck that meant. Bilge felt he had already suffered plenty, and thus had proved himself worthy of an exit, a quick escape to the parking lot, a hop on the freeway and a return to his bachelor quarters, the Mac stack, the spank mags, the popcorn and the power seat.

  But that fucking Thing had taken him off the power seat and made him one of her lab subjects. Worst of all, he had stepped right into it.