Doctor Flesh- Director's Cut

by Alex Johnson

  There had to be some clue to the exits. He scanned the sky, which blinked back at him, a calm blue suffused with the subtle lineaments of his own eye sockets, his own retina. He was staring back at himself staring back at himself with the blinking cursor light at the edge of the retinal scan sprouting a question mark: Where exits?

  This was not an exit. This was not an entrance. This was a dream of drowning.

  But his hands were the same. His feet were the same. If he could find a mirror, Bilge was pretty sure his face would be the same as well. His nicely manicured goatee, the black-rimmed glasses, the trendy shaved head. And, admittedly, the paunch that rose beneath; but he’d always been big-boned, and he loved those potato chips.

  ***

  Okay, first of all, this was not her idea of a good time. She was a special girl with special needs—wait, that made her sound like a fucktard. Where was the reset symbol when you needed to click on it?

  Tiffany Tiffany prided herself on having a clue, and for once in her life, she was clueless. Her environment had sorted itself out around her, and rather than it being a product of her—like in that movie with Jack Nicholson—she was a product of it. Regardless, if she’d known she was going to have to act in a movie she would have passed on the ticket. This was bullshit. Her hair was all wrong, her clothes were all wrong, she would need to lose at least 30 pounds and maybe just get a complete makeover plus a layer of synthetic skin.

  It was too late to binge and purge. Was she on camera now? How could you be inside a movie anyway? She wished she had paid attention to what the domme-dyke had said about, what was it, biofilm, and how the movie was a living organism that changed according to the mind of the viewer, their deepest wishes and fears…not that she minded complicated, but this was nerd-complicated, and if she wanted to stress over something dense, she would rather it be not boring, and lame. All of which this movie idea was, and then some.

  But it was too late now.

  What if the movie turned her into a lesbian? Or worse—one of those chicks with dicks? What if she gained weight, not like a small salad that didn’t really add anything, but actual weight…and she couldn’t find a toilet? Would she have to blow chunks in the street? In this filthy, disgusting, unpaved street, where—she shuddered—homeless non-blonds and un-Americans were free to wander around at will? What if she encountered foreigners? Or terrorists? Or Europeans—and not the awesome couture kind, but people—she guessed you had to call them that, because you couldn’t shoot them, much—people of, what was the term, difference?

  And her cell was not working. She couldn’t get bars. She couldn’t click her heels and say “There’s no place like home,” because she wasn’t wearing heels. And even if she were, they wouldn’t work with the dirt road and the tarpaper shacks and the weed smokers…she could distinctly smell that hateful substance. Stoners were just so gross. And completely rude.

  ***

  Dr. Flesh slipped down through the soft meat of the darkfield until she hit the jungle floor. It was then that she spotted them.

  Doppelgangers.

  A few were hiding behind the thick leaves of the enormous trees that rose until they shut out the sky. Others stirred her peripheral vision like soup.

  “Oh hell no,” she said. And then she remembered Solare’s warning when she began to incubate the eggs in the medium of her own cloned brain tissue. “Some of those things are gonna become little tiny Viola Fleshes.” For a mindless slave, Solare had flashes of insight that shocked and scared her at times. Where did she pick up these tidbits of information? As it happened, Solare was right—again.

  When she moved, they moved. When she reached for her cinegun, they did likewise. The cinegun spat its charge. And Tiffany Tiffany toppled from her perch and tumbled to the ground. Dr. Flesh heard the doubles chattering. The things they were saying about her were not pleasant. An echo chamber of her doubts and insecurities redoubled unto infinity.

  Her only hope to thwart the doubles lay in the narrative flux governor she had built into the darkfield early in the production of the Reality Stack. But that meant introducing an element of sheer chaos into the story stream. Suddenly, she heard movement behind her. A watery, slushy noise. She squatted quickly down as the semen jet splashed over Tiffany Tiffany’s prone body, webbing it in goo.

  This did not belong to the plan either.

  ***

  “Your Jello is ready, Mistress,” said Solare.

  “Silence, Worm,” responded Dr. Flesh.

  “Please stop saying that,” pleaded Solare. “One of these days you’re really going to hurt my feelings.”

  “And the problem with that scenario would be…” Dr. Flesh let the question resonate in the stillness of the lab.

  Solare smiled thoughtfully. “I’d rather you hurt my body,” it said.

  “I know, but hurt feelings last longer.”

  The Jello had been hard-won. She had at last decided upon cherry as the appropriate flavor for Tiffany Tiffany’s clit-mold, considering how she had plucked so many fresh sufferings from the girl. It was probably hard for her to even conceive, in the Whitey White suburban bastion of Sugar Valley, how many things could go wrong for a blonde.

  Like losing her pussy to an insane transsexual film director slash medical deviant. At first, Dr. Flesh had attempted to cultivate the clit-mold without damaging the guinea pig, but the girl’s excessive wriggling, screaming and bad attitude had made that approach impossible. It was all her fault, after all, that the mold couldn’t be obtained without bodily harm. First of all, said the Hypocritical Oath, do much harm. Or was it, do harm until the concept of harm itself became a permeable membrane through which an entire battalion of harms could be gleefully shoved? But that was theory. The praxis was another thing.

  And sometimes praxis got sloppy. Dr. Flesh thought of Louis Pasteur and his filthy lab. Without slop, there would be no antibiotics. Without pain, there could be no pleasure. Without removing the entire vajay, there could be no cherry-flavored clit Jello.

  She plucked one at leisure from the tray. A little sprinkling of angel dust made the Jello so much more than it already was, a model for the sheer mutability of matter. What had Heraclitus said about not stepping in the same river twice? With just a soupcon of PCP, every clit-mold became its own universe, a chance to disappear briefly from the scene.

  She was happy to have conceived the notion of directing the movie from inside. As the biofilm was a more or less literal simulacrum of her desire, every guinea pig whose consciousness informed the Reality Stack would also become a director. In essence, there were many movies jostling to be made within a loose organic structure that was itself alive.

  The whitey white girl’s clit—and the vajay—floated in sterile solution in the main fridge. Casually popping another cherry-flavored cosmos of hallucinogenic flavor, Dr. Flesh eased open the fridge door and examined the pussy itself. Aside from ragged cuts at the edges, unavoidable considering the guinea pig’s refusal to stay still, it was a piece of perfection. She strapped on sterile gloves, reached into the fridge and placed the pussy on the operating table.

  Marvelous. A true work of art.

  She reached into the jar, pulled out the organ and placed it in the collagen base. She thumbed it, spread it open and inhaled deeply. For a girl with such an ugly spirit, she had a remarkably savory vajay.

  She pondered the question of eating it raw, or cooking it. Yes, she would definitely cook it, slow-simmered in its own juices, and garnished with its own cherry-flavored clit, reproduced endlessly around the borders.

  Maybe she would serve it to the girl, make her eat it. Eat her own pussy. That was a thought.

  These questions made her moist. Such conundrums, such complex reflections, such sweet Epicurean agony.

  She clicked on the monitor in the girl’s room, wondering how she was holding up after the cauterization.

  Not well, evidently. Tiffany Tiffany was banging about the walls of the padded cell, screaming about giant
spiders. Had she gone completely sideways? Then Viola remembered about the infusions, the drug cocktails. Ah yes, whitey-white girl would be suffering from horrible hallucinations right about now.

  “Let’s tune in and watch,” murmured the Directress to herself. It had been relatively easy to plug the biosoft vector directly into the girl’s brain, so she could watch the progress of her molting reality.

  VII.

  Where in the name of fuck was she? Back in her bedroom at last, it would appear, the comforting all-pink Princess theme décor, her posters of boy bands, the sketch of the ass-tat she wanted so badly, that would make her exactly the same as that Brittany bitch. No, better, because Brittany’s ass-tat read “For Daddy Only” and that was just gross. Tiffany Tiffany hoped she had better taste.

  She turned on the lamp next to her bed, which worked; she clicked it on and off again several times just to be sure. Upstairs she could hear her mom and one of her many rich, handsome boyfriends going at it, which struck just the right note of realism but made her gorge rise and not in the good, thinning way. Plaster flakes drifted from the ceiling like the “dried maggot skin” episode of the Carpathians or that awful story her grandmother told the 9th Grade campers about “Necro Fanny.” Her mom sounded like a hyena being sodomized with a jackhammer. It was so wrong. But at least it was home.

  She frantically sought her iPod, which was right where she’d left it, and thumbed the volume just in time to catch the first chords of the new Baylor Twit song, which expressed everything Tiffany Tiffany desired in her life: a hot guy to buy her stuff, and how amazing she would look at the Senior Prom, and how he would marry her but leave her alone too so she could explore her options. She’d read an article in Cosmology on exactly that subject: “You’re Mega-hot, so Why Settle For Just One Guy?”

  To which Tiffany Tiffany had responded “exactly,” and underscored many of the paragraphs with yellow HiLiter. The non-so-hot, the slightly-less-hot and the butt-reekingly gross would just have to rely on their personalities or whatever. She had something better than that. Her body.

  Just to be sure that nothing funny had happened to that prized commodity in the interim, she decided to check herself out in the full-length mirror next to the closet.

  At first she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, then she believed, and then she understood, and then she wept. She had hoped it was all a dream—the hermaphrothingy thing, the yellow ticket, the skuzzy theater, the skanky dyke-hag saying all those things that made no sense, and then winding up on this unpaved dirt road surrounded by non-blonds who were checking her out—as if—listening to that ganga stoner music and surrounding her like some kind of wolf pack.

  Then there was a sudden piercing sensation between her shoulderblades, dreams thick with the smell of bleach, waking up bound, gagged and being transported through a jungle, slung upside down from a pole, while the same non-blond dudes a weird song that was definitely not “Hakuna Matata” and she was pretty sure translated into “Gang-fuck the white bitch.” They were the kind to do it, too.

  ***

  Next to the mirror stood another mirror, and this mirror had a mate, and on and on, until Tiffany Tiffany found herself in a vast hall of mirrors, each of which depicted her in a slightly different way.

  Just in case this was a dream and she really would wake up, she pinched herself. “Ow,” she said, her fingers sinking right to the bone. That was a good thing, right—zero percent body fat? So why did she look like a raggedy ass skeleton bitch who’d been subsisting on small salads for most of her pretty hot life?

  Her skeletal reflection grinned, and Tiffany Tiffany wept with horror.

  To the immediate right of this mirror, she beheld another image, the exact opposite, which was straight out of that Cosmology article titled “Why Nobody Loves Your Fat Ass: 10 Easy Steps to Starvation.” The “before” picture.

  Tiffany screamed.

  And screamed.

  The images screamed back. The skeleton bitch did that face like that painting she’d never quite understood, with that howling guy on the bridge and the weird, ugly color scheme. The “before” picture shot her the finger.

  The third image was a relief. In this reflection, she was back to her usual self, the one she’d modeled on the article “How to Tease Boys into Getting You Stuff.” The tweaked eyebrows, the wide-eyed, virginal stare, straight into the camera; the mild pout with big swelling raspberry pouty lips, with her hands modestly placed over her naughty parts.

  Yes, thought Tiffany Tiffany, it had been a dream, or a nightmare, before. This was the real her. The one who only put out for Daddy.

  No, wait, that wasn’t her at all. That was Brittany. It was in fact a reflection of her nemesis, the detested ass-tat girl.

  She stamped her pretty little foot, which usually summoned a whole horde of buffed-out guys. But nobody came. It was too late to do anything about it, but Tiffany Tiffany was sure of one thing: if she ever got out of this lame movie, and talked to her daddy, who would talk to his high-powered attorney, the bitch would regret every last second of the day she was born, and probably other stuff too.

  Being suspended upside down in a cage while brutal non-blonds poked at her with sharpened sticks was not her idea of a good time. And not only had Dr. Flesh denied her the small salads that sustained her, she had laid out a hideous spread thick with carbs. Tiffany Tiffany choked down the image and pushed it deep into her subconscious mind. Never, never again would she take the small salads for granted. But first there was the matter of denial.

  Find your happy place, her counselor had told her. So what was her happy place? It certainly did not involve being forced to deep-throat a spiked strap-on dildo till her lips were raggedy clumps of flesh. Among other things the bitch would pay for, Tiffany Tiffany’s extensive reconstructive cosmetic plastic surgery stood at the very top of the list. Maybe this was a good thing, then, because according to the Hot Fox, there was no such thing as being too hot, looking too good, or having enough authentic bling.

  Tiffany Tiffany tried to smile, but she couldn’t feel her face. Could that be her happy place, then—all eyes upon her as she strode to the stage, modestly denying all the compliments thrown her way, as she accepted the trophy for, what, best-looking, most blonde, blingiest?

  It wasn’t easy using her own mind to think of stuff. She usually relied on the Hot Fox for that, or her smart but not-so-hot friends, or her counselor at Sugar Valley High. She didn’t like to admit she saw a counselor, because that made her a girl with problems, like those wretched creeps with bad hair and skin who hung out at the Drama Club talking about, she didn’t know what, but it was lame. But her counselor usually told her things that made sense.

  And what was that horrible music? Dr. Flesh must be operating again. No, no, don’t think of that. Think of something happy and nice. With sugar on top. No, no sugar, that turned into fat, and fat turned into something she didn’t even want to think about. Being unpopular.

  And somebody was poking her with a sharp stick—again!

  ***

  “DRUGS! I MUST HAVE DRUGS!” screamed Dr. Flesh.

  Dragging one foot behind itself, Solare lurched into the operating room. “Lives, lives for the mawstah,” it droned in a thick cockney accent.

  “SOLARE! THE NEEDLE!”

  “You might want to take off the caps lock,” said Solare.

  “SILENCE, WORM! I MADE YOU, AND I CAN UNMAKE YOU.”

  “True,” said Solare. Viola had an excellent point. The makings and the unmakings had been several, many of them truly barbaric and nasty. At one point Solare had sported three cocks, one springing from its forehead. Dr. Flesh had used it roughly before throwing it away wet, and Solare had to comfort itself with a Karpathians marathon, Chunky Monkey and Kleenex. It could still feel the slime that clung to its body after the session. Fortunately, Dr. Flesh had relented, excised the second and third cock and turned the first one inside out, which was easier on Solare. It liked having a pussy. It
disliked being a thing. It wanted to have a normal life.

  VIII.

  Gooch could swear he recognized some of the faces on the masks: Columbus Lincoln, for example, who had liberated the indigenous people of the Americas from their reliance on natural resources and given them useful jobs involving gardening shears and leafblowers. He swelled up with blond pride just to think of his forebear’s great legacy.

  And then there was, of course, Reagan Hoover, who prosecuted the secret war against the commie gorillas in the jungles of San Nicaragua, and peacefully brought an end to the sufferings of the good Christian people of that country, who only wanted to sign treaties with the U.S. that would give them access to jobs making tennis shoes for people like him—Gooch.

  His mind raced. Could it be that all of this was a good-natured prank from Sugar Valley’s rivals, Muhammad X. Bin Laden High? A gentle poking in response to the hilarious cross-burnings, hangings in effigy, the “Die, Jungle Bunnies” graffiti that appeared one night on all the school’s buildings? He smiled. Of course they must have had help, blond help, because he couldn’t imagine those Napster-headed ho’s coming up with such an elaborate plot on their own.

  “I’m sorry about Strange Fruit Theme Day,” he said. “But you gotta admit, the Peachanaorange was pretty strange fruit. Not that I would know what strange fruit is. Look, guys, can’t we be white about all this? Forgive and forget, huh? Guys? Bros?”

  Columbus Lincoln was nearly on top of him before Gooch realized his mistake. They were not all just going to get along. They had hostile intentions. He could tell they were hostile because of the deep rumble of voodoo drums all around him, the circle closing in, the misshapen masks glowering over him, as they poked him with long spears and chanted something in a primal jungle language.