by Alex Johnson
He picked up the megaphone again and barked: “we’re going to try this scene once again, and this time, please try to control the flow of walrus gravy to the punk rock muppets. Drizzle lightly, do not dump. Got it? All right, Take 3.”
Shreck’s wrist had begun to ache at the point he’d severed his hand. A dam of repression broke, returning “Dr. Fuzzly,” the Burp Me Melmo puppet, the bizarre lab accident, a hirsute red antagonist, a life and death struggle. The phone call brought it all back. Now the hand was a simple form-fitted prosthesis, but then—then, it was an adversary. For the past 18 years, Shreck had struggled to put Sugar Valley and Operation True Blonde in some deep pocket of his unconscious, but the whole ugly scene had begun to brim over the sides again. And all because of that reality show. The Karpathians.
Of course he’d seen the episode the duck priest had alluded to, in which Karsten Karpathian had a complete “blondeover” on a set recalling the high points of German Expressionist film, heavy on Caligari and Metropolis. Apparently, this was sufficient to spark memories in the women Shreck had impregnated through the offices of his heavy metal Frankenstein monster, memories that threatened to rip the social fabric of Sugar Valley a brave new one. For Shreck, it was over and done with ages ago, but for these women, the nightmare had only begun. Why the duck priest had become involved, and the extent of Shreck’s current responsibility towards the elite enclave, were mysteries that eluded him. He refocused on the scene, or tried to.
Only one aspect of the job he’d done in Sugar Valley still bothered him. An aspect that had several facets, all troubling. After weeks of trial and error to rival Thomas Alva Edison and his fucking filaments, Shreck had taken advantage of the discovery of Italian scientists—free-form DNA—which he then injected his stud monster with. The stud monster had forthwith impregnated the brood mares of the True Blonde Cohort, and as far as Shreck knew, the results had been successful. The women had borne mindless twats, conservative, greedy and ultra-shallow in the cradle and ready now at the age of 18 or thereabouts to receive their own treatments. Shreck had left that to his successor, apparently the duck priest.
But—and this one contingent fact made his megaphone shake in his hands and his voice quiver—the beta tests he’d run, the living sims created just to see the entire life cycle of the TBC, uncovered an alarming flaw. Over time, the free-form DNA grew unstable. The blondes would physically degenerate, to the point of meltdown or outright explosion. Their remains, alive in some horrible way, held the capacity to animate nonsentient life, as well as recombining to produce new creatures. Contact with the blondes during their life cycle transmitted this flaw through osmosis, a kind of high-tech vampirism. Furthermore, the terminal stage of transmission created the ultimate horror: clowns. That, more than anything else, gave Shreck the Nervous Fear.
***
The dream descends on the women of Sugar Valley like the slow drift of coke flakes in a glass globe. Grim, monotonous, inexorable, a thing of horrors and wonders. They are herded past exit signs and urged forth with cattle prods, naked, shaking, traumatized past the point where endurance expires and madness rears its toothy grin.
“This girl looks downright anemic,” snarls Dr. Shreck to his trembling nurse. “Start an IV, use the gokkun bowls. She needs some spunk in her veins. No wonder she keeps yammering away like a baby with a cookie jones.”
“But Doctor…are you sure?”
“Spunk and only spunk will cure what ails her,” says Shreck. “Step aside, I’ll do it myself.” He spanks the recalcitrant arm, looking for a good vein. “Looks like I’ll need to vein-douse.”
Taking up an instrument familiar to the Spanish Inquisition, Dr. Shreck prods and pokes the arm until a vein stands up like an earthworm. “Sometimes you gotta go medieval on these people, it’s the only way.” He rams the butterfly IV in the vein, stepping back as bright arterial blood splashes his scrubs.
“Why is this patient asleep? She needs to experience this. I think we all need to experience this…radical invasive surgery without full awareness is just butchery,” says Shreck under his breath. “All the great ones knew this. Nurse,” he says, raising his voice, “I want you to mix some gore candy. You know, the acid, tranks, a bit of Dexedrine, a full cocktail. And keep it coming.”
He steps back from the leaking patient. More blood slops on the floor. “And bring a mop. How do you expect me to work under these conditions?”
“Yes Doctor,” says the nurse, bug-eyed with terror. “Anything else?”
“The puppet. I’ll need the puppet.”
“But the puppet is already attached.”
“Oh yes, I forgot. How convenient.” Dr. Shreck recalls the bizarre lab accident in which the Burp Me Melmo puppet became grafted to his left hand. “Well, then, bring Dr. Fuzzly his instruments. And an enema bag. Hop to it!”
“Who is Dr. Fuzzly?”
Shreck waved the hand-puppet imperiously. “This is Dr. Fuzzly. Or have you forgotten already?”
“I cannot countenance any of this,” said Dr. Fuzzly. “Dr. Shreck, I will expose you and your nefarious practices. Your name will become a cautionary tale in the annals of medicine.”
Shreck roared with laughter. “You dare lecture me on medical practice? You participated in the butt puppet protocols. Don’t tell me you’re having regrets now.”
“Barrels of half-butt puppets tossed into vats brimming with radioactive slop,” retorted Fuzzly, “is not science. It’s insanity. You must end this now!”
“We are joined at the wrist,” said Shreck, bringing Fuzzly up to his face. Fuzzly shrank at the sight of Shreck’s rolling, bloodshot eyes, the foam gathered at the corner of his lips. “Our destinies are united!”
“Please don’t spit on me,” said Fuzzly.
“Spit on you? Oh, now you object to good, clean saliva? I’ve got half a mind to teach you some manners. Why don’t we take a trip to the toilet and talk this through? I feel a fat, steaming shit coming on.”
“Please, no, anything but that,” shrieked Fuzzly. “I promise, I’ll assist you. I’ll be a good colleague. Anything. But don’t stuff me up there and use my head like a dildo—please. I’ll be nice. I’ll change. I don’t want to wind up like Turkish Burp Me Melmo.”
“I don’t need your excuses or your pleas,” said Shreck. “You’ll do what I say or I’ll cut you off. I don’t care how much it hurts. I will have a cooperative assistant or I will make one. Nurse, bring the micro-kit. It’s time to go balls deep.”
“Couldn’t you at least hypnotize me first?” begged Fuzzly. “For old times?”
“We go way back, don’t we?” said Shreck, softening. “Remember the first time I wiped my ass with your head? Your soft, tender, fuzzy head. You gained the power of speech then.”
“I was just a puppet until you came along,” said Fuzzly. “Your sweet chocolate custard gifted me with consciousness.”
Fuzzly remembered the rank horror of his first moments of awareness, his head encased in Shreck’s asshole, his tongue plunged in feces as a steady shit-stream rained down on his head. He had determined then and there to be more than a butt-puppet. He would work nights and catch his sleep on the fly, if it meant putting himself through puppet medical school by night and hiring out his aperture by day to any hand with wallet access.
Shreck’s appendage vaguely recalled his days as a Burp Me Melmo hand puppet, but that era was long gone. A bizarre lab accident, impromptu grafting, and the burps were history. So, he would become a scientist in his own right. Maybe, over time, he could convince Shreck of the error of his ways. They were, after all, joined at the wrist.
“This is no time for nostalgia!” spat Shreck. “Nurse, where are those micro-instruments?”
“No hypnosis?”
“No hypnosis, no treats, no gore candy. Colleagues, remember?” He shook the erstwhile puppet till it cried. “Medical warriors, wading in guts and blood with vigor and abandon. We do what needs to be done. We take risks the mundane practitio
ners never suspected existed. Risks born of the passion, the fever—for new limbs, new physiology, a whole new pathway to human. And you, my little butt-puppet, will cooperate.”
“Ok, but please stop spitting on me.”
III.
Gretchen Fassbinder paused over her notepad. “So you say you have had the dreams again?”
“What?” Victoria D’Allessandro yawned. “Oh yeah, sorry, I think I must have that virus that’s going around.”
“Perhaps that is significant. What does the word ‘virus’ make you think of—your father, for example.”
“I need to blow my nose,” said Victoria.
“Jawohl” said Dr. Fassbinder, writing furiously. “You know that the nose is a phallic symbol. Perhaps your desire to ‘blow it,’ as you say, represents a hidden wish-fulfillment fantasy involving your buried memories of incest.”
“Huh? No, I have the sniffles.”
It was the coke, of course, but there was no point in bringing that up. Not around Fassbinder, at any rate. The woman was like a trauma-seeking missile. She would tell her that the coke was a heap of white transference…or something…she really didn’t understand what the woman saying half the time, and it wasn’t just the thick Peruvian accent or whatever.
But Mr. D’Allessandro had figured out a way to cover all her appointment with the shrink, and what the hell, he was probably fucking his secretary anyway, anyway she didn’t feel the slightest tinge of conscience where her husband was concerned. And while Fassbinder’s inane probing never really got to the heart of the matter, at least she was good for sedative scripts. Which she needed, because the latest batch of coke was a little too speedy for her taste, and now she was jumpy all the time. No wonder her husband liked his secretary more. Besides, she was so much younger. She even looked a little like Victoria had—back in high school.
“Bastard.”
“So, you dreamt that you were nearly aborted, and that brought back your anxiety complex related to your desire to suck your father’s big, throbbing, cheese-caked testes…” Fassbinder took a small square of pink fabric from her top desk drawer and cleaned her horned-rim glasses, which had misted over.
“Ok, I’ll tell you what I dreamed about,” said Victoria, suddenly remembering the full gram she’d left in her Gooshy Fruit bag and shoved in the closet after the party with Manuel the poolboy and his freaky friends, who had taken turns and left her at the end of the night with memories, rope marks and enough spunk to make her bangs stand up on their own.
“It was funny, because all this happened years ago. I was about 17, 18. Me and some friends of mine from school got fake I.D.’s and we went to this club—the Paradise Bar and Grille, on Sundown. It’s a place where a lot of rockers hang out, heavy metal guys. I was really into that at the time. There was this one singer I thought was really hot. I thought I saw him at the bar, but when I said his name, he turned around and it was someone else.”
“Your father, perhaps?”
“Yes, my father.” Victoria sighed, noting that sarcasm was lost on the therapist. “No, it was this guy I used to date. But that isn’t part of the dream. Or maybe it is. Well, we had some drinks, and I was getting hammered. Man, I used to party back then. This was of course long before I met the Mister. I was throwing them back and pretty soon I couldn’t stand up.
“That’s when this guy came up to me. He was older, I mean, way older, and no, nothing like my father. He said he was a record producer and he liked my look. I told him to buzz off. I mean, he was creepy. He was like some kind of fucking…lizard, you know?
“But then he said he had some stuff, I don’t know what it was, but I was a bit of a…coke fiend at the time. I didn’t have a habit, I just liked it. Reptile Dude said this was even better than blow. I didn’t really believe him, but I was up for anything, young and stupid as the saying goes. Ha ha. So we went back to this kind of V.I.P. room and he said he would be back with the shit, but he sort of disappeared. Then this other dude came up, I guess he’d been there the entire time but I wasn’t really paying any attention because I wanted to get high. And find a way to stand up straight, you know? He just grabbed me by the arm like he…like he fucking owned me.
“He had this metal bracelet, I remember, with a pentagram on it. And he looked like he’d been in a lot of fights. Bruised, beat up, scars. His tattoos had tattoos over them, like when the old tattoos are fading out and the new ones don’t match the old ones. But it was weird, because the scars were around his wrists and his neck, like that old Frankenstein movie. I was surprised he didn’t have bolts coming out of his head, you know? I thought great, first time with my fake I.D. and I’m gonna get used and abused by the Frankenstein monster. Metal Frankenstein. Wow.”
“And all of this happened in your dream?”
“Yes. I was so high that I thought, whatever, you know, I’ve had worse. Like the time the Death Ball team kidnapped me and took me to this outhouse in the woods. Anyway, this weird light started flashing, like a strobe light. I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew I was strapped to some kind of table. There were all these sharp instruments in a metal tray, rolls of gauze, some Magic Markers. The monster guy was drawing on me. And he was laughing like a crazed fucking…ghoul. Maybe he was writing ‘Slut’ on my forehead, I don’t know. I don’t mind though, ‘cause that happens. It does! Okay, maybe not to you, but what-evs, as the kids say. The freaky producer was there too, and another guy—Smegma, I think his name was. He was kind of the background the entire time the monster was doing his business.”
“And by ‘his business,’ you mean…sexually debauching you?”
“I guess. I’d been pretty much debauched by then. I remember it so clearly now, clearly but muted, far away and near at the same time. Like that movie with Nasty Kinky. He was dangling his thing over my mouth, and it was scarred up too, right around the base. He made me…suck it…and he forced it into the back of my throat.
“Then there was something about a half butt-puppet and radioactive rainwater in a bucket. That was Smegma. He kept coming into the room, or operating theater, whatever, with a camcorder, jacked off on the monster guy’s ass—I don’t think he even noticed—and then went back into another room. I was trying to take the monster’s cock wherever he chose to put it, you know, being a good girl, but it was tough, it was bigger even than the Death Ball guys, and they’re pretty ginormous. The record producer dude kept saying things like ‘this is a sausage fest, where’s the gash,’ and I was like hello, girl alert. Maybe he was just trying to piss me off. Whatever. So the monster dude finishes, big money shot, then I hear this whip coming down. Hard. The record producer was wailing on the monster and the monster was sobbing and saying he deserved it or some shit! When I woke up the next day I was in my bedroom and it was like nothing had happened. My mom was unusually cheerful, for her I mean. She actually asked me what I wanted for breakfast—usually the maid took care of those things. I thought it was a little strange of her because she usually freaked out if I came home late or she knew I was fucked up. But she was humming this little song, making eggs and bacon, singing along to this sappy shit on the radio. Whatever it was, I kept thinking of Patsy Cline singing ‘Crazy.’ Maybe that’s just me.”
“So in your dream, you wake up in your own bedroom, after this night of sodomy with the Frankenstein monster, the record producer, and…Smegma?”
“That wasn’t his real name, it was something like Shriek, I didn’t really get it. When the monster was doing me I could see myself on this monitor they had over the lab table. The guy kept doing these zoom shots, made me dizzy looking at myself and trying to blow the monster and then the monster left, he got off and rolled off me, and there were these cartoons on the screen. Anime, I think.”
“It’s very interesting what you say, Victoria, because in some way your dream seems to be connected with a reconciliation with your mother. You two had become…alienated, nicht wahr? Probably as a result of your Cassandra complex and yo
ur obsession with your daddy’s pendulous, throbbing balls. With the big purple veins. Did he ever beat you? Did you want him to, perhaps?”
“What? No, no, no.” Dr. Fassbinder’s questions, as usual, focused around her own issues. Victoria tried to steer the therapist towards the question of pharmaceuticals.
“You haff, how do we say in English, med-seeking look in eyes.” Fassbinder smiled, removed her glasses and gazed deeply and searchingly at her patient.
“W-what? No, what makes you think that?”
“You are bluffing. Is okay. Why I speak in pidgin English now is because of hot arousal in loins, ja? Constricting blood flow to brain. You have something I want, and I have something, perhaps, you can use?”
Victoria blanched. “I-I could use a little pick-me-up, now that you mention it.”
“Your problems with your suppressed trauma mit mommy und daddy will require much more than ‘little pick me up,’ as you put it in charming American phrase. But sometimes, at least I haff read in medical literature, blockages may be unstopped by…how do we put it, girl on girl action?”
“Okay, okay,” said Victoria. “But no anal whippets.”
***
Courtney Steele did her best to shut out the chorus to “The Clown Dies At the End” by Bozokill, on constant mental replay since the previous night’s concert. She had only half-unwillingly allowed her daughter to drag her to the show, pleased that even in her cougarish dotage she out-hottied most of the young flesh on display. Maybe they had firmer real tits, but Courtney had class, and experience. Even if she couldn’t pass the pencil test without extensive help from a plastic surgeon.
But it was the Patriarch’s turn to claim her attention now. Father Mallardy was pacing up and down Steele’s living room, thumping his rod and staff on her plush carpet.