The Kyoto Man (The SciKungFi Trilogy)
Page 5
. . . voice of Ira Überstein squelches in the Distance:
—We can do better than that! That’s shitty fucking writing. How about some goddamn melody, for fuck’s sake? And what’s this shit with Mengele? That doesn’t have anything to do with anything. There has to be a story, at least, with a beginning and a middle and an end. Like the real world. Like life. People are born and they live and they fuck and act like assholes and then they die. Narrative needs to function that way, too. You can’t go in different directions and you can’t go backwards or sideways or whatever. And you can’t just stick a Nazi up the plot’s ass. Figure it out, dipshits. Otherwise this picture’s gonna tank. Otherwise . . .
It was the twenty-sixth through the 170th time he turned into Kyoto.
THE 257TH TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO
CRITERION PROSE
Applying the dominant styles of Michael Jai White, Dr. Gradgrind’s favorite actor, they moved through sequences of Shotokan, Goju-ryu, Tang Soo Do, Kyokushin (the actor’s most accomplished style), Kobudo (weapons incl. nunchucks, knuckledusters, and canoe oars), Blaxploitiatoshi Taekwondo, Iaido, and Wushu Kung-Fu.
Dr. Gradgrind struck his opponent in the windpipe with the blade of his hand and brought the fight to an abrupt conclusion.
“Arigato, ‘Sid,’” said the doktor, making quote signs with his fingers.
“Sid” choked and passed out. Dr. Gradgrind wondered if he had injured him. Quickfire diagnosis: “Sid” is fucked . . .
Paramedics were summoned; they enacted hazardous procedures with unsanitized instruments . . . An orderly caressed his esophagus until he awoke. He pretended to return to consciousness slowly, eyes creasing open, so that he could admire the orderly’s cleavage.
“My name isn’t ‘Sid,’” he whispered. “It’s ‘Sam.’”
Escorting the orderly to the door, Dr. Gradgrind replied: “‘Sam,’ ‘Sid’—it’s all the same. Both signatures begin with the letter ‘S.’ Both contain three letters—a consonant followed by a vowel followed by another consonant. Both are monosyllabic.”
“All true. All invalid.”
“As is language. Let’s get wet.”
Dr. Gradgrind and “Sid” took a shower. They soaped up their extremities with careful gestures, wary of leaving portions of skin unclean. “Sid” couldn’t take his eyes off of the doktor’s chiseled-from-stone chest. He depressed the nipples to test the equipment’s authenticity . . . Near the end, “Sid” applied eucalyptus-scented exfoliating cream to his palms, elbows, knees and heels . . .
They sat in their respective chairs.
“I swear,” said Dr. Gradgrind, “the older I get, the more hair I grow.” He ran a cupped palm from hairline to neckline. “What’s the opposite of going bald? Going hairy? Hirsute—that’s a more technical term. I’m going hirsute.”
“I don’t feel well,” said “Sid.”
“Hard times. That’s why you’re here.”
“I know. I know why I’m here. I mean I don’t feel well today. Lately. Ever. I have never felt well.”
The doktor flicked lint from his sleeve. “Have you ever been happy? Ever?”
“Sid” snared his lips. Dr. Gradgrind made his hands into a thoughtful teepee.
“Sid” said, “There was a time when I was happy. I remember. I was in the third grade. I went to a wave pool with my friend Andy Conklin. Do you know what a wave pool is?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“It’s a pool that artificially generates its own waves. The generator is located in the wall of the deep end. It’s a kind of accordion device that hurls waves across the surface of the pool to a canal in the shallow end that then reroutes the excess water back to the deep end.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“The sun felt so good that day. I can remember exactly how it felt if I concentrate hard enough.” He concentrated. “I have never experienced anything like the sensation of the cool water against my soft young skin on that summer afternoon. I felt pure and natural and alive and clean. I was happy.”
“Happy,” ricocheted Dr. Gradgrind. He smiled.
“Sid” smiled. “Comes to mind I was happy on another occasion. It was another summer afternoon and I was eating an ice cream cone. I can’t remember what flavor. But there was a gumball at the bottom of the cone. I was happy.”
“That’s very nice.” The doktor collapsed the teepee of his hands and began to exercise his fingers.
“That reminds me of another time I was happy. I guess I’ve been happy a lot. There was this field of rye. A bunch of kids were playing in it and I was standing on this crazy cliff. If the kids got too near the cliff, I would catch them in a big leather mitt so that they didn’t fall over. Every time I caught one, I felt good. I felt happy.”
Dr. Gradgrind cleared his throat. “That’s from The Catcher in the Rye.”
“The what?” said “Sid.”
“The Catcher in the Rye. You know. The business about the children and the cliff. That’s a compensatory wish-fulfillment fantasy à la Holden Caulfield, the tormented, adolescent, spiteful protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s novel. In the end, you always spiral into some kind of Holden Caulfield-related pity party. That’s natural enough. Most of my clients do that.”
“You have other clients? I thought I was the only one.”
The doktor observed him.
“Sid” observed his lap.
“I think I’m a serial killer,” said “Sid.”
“Oh,” said Dr. Gradgrind. “What makes you think that?”
“I’ve been killing people. I think.”
“You think.”
“I’ve been traveling through time and space, too. I don’t know if I’m psychotic or it’s the TCZs.” “Sid” eyeballed Dr. Gradgrind, taking a deep breath.
“TCZs,” remarked Dr. Gradgrind with a pale frown.
He exhaled. “Yeah. It might be real. It might be irreal. It might be nothing.”
“Is ‘irreal’ a word? I believe that’s a Portuguese word. Used properly—a Portuguese irregular verb.”
Long silence. “Sid” reclined on the chaise. Then, in a kind of subterranean voice: “I am a superior person suffering from a nervous breakdown. Or I am an ordinary man facing everyday life. Either way, I’m fucked. We’re all fucked.”
“That’s an exciting perspective. Say more. In your normal voice, please. Remember: nothing impresses me, nothing distresses me. Say more now.”
“Sid” snorted. “Haven’t I said enough?”
The doktor shrugged. “To speak is to fight. Human violence knows no boundaries—it leaps into the atmosphere and charges across the cosmos. Hajime.”
“Sid” carried on in a regular tone. “Anyway, in the last chapter . . . uhm, last week, I mean, or maybe yesterday, or Thursday, very possibly Thursday . . . Vellum. Papyrus . . . Anyway, I was in the distant future, near the end of the world, and there were these creatures jumping all over the beach. I assumed they were devolved humans and dispatched them. I don’t know why. I felt like it. And yet the experience gave me no pleasure. Then I found myself in the past, or the present, or somewhere, goddamn it, and I dispatched that Nazi doktor, Whatshisname, the one who keeps showing up in my dreams, which is to say, in my reality.”
“Yes. Dreams belong to antiquity. There is only reality. There is only the cold granite of reality.”
“I know, I know. Fuck. So then I dispatched a contingent of Huns who had ransacked a small village—I felt like Steve McQueen in Bullitt—the sky, the surf, the wind in my hair . . . Then, somewhere else, a novel I think, or a B-movie maybe—not the real world, anyhow, but a fictional diegesis that I accidentally slipped into—I dispatched a fair share of zombies in a mall. I was black. I was a policeman. In the distance, a fat woman screamed. You know that scream fat women make? She was alone. Then I remember a Victrola set up in the corner of a vast waiting room with dull green walls and Old Person chandeliers. Music from the Jazz Age emanated from the Victrola’s fleur-de-lis. I felt like
Nick Carraway at a Gatsby party: inadequate, awkward, destitute, useless, ugly, out-of-shape, dumb. I used a sledgehammer to dispatch the Victrola, and I also dispatched various sculptures and paintings, and I treated the Old Person chandeliers like piñatas . . . I dispatched hundreds of other people and things, in other spatial and temporal and narrational contexts. Thousands, really. And that doesn’t even account for the hundreds of thousands of people I have dispatched by way of metamorphosing into the city of Kyoto. Even you are among my victims. I turned into Kyoto and dispatched you. Only you had a different name. But I dispatched you.”
“And yet here I sit,” said Dr. Gradgrind, chewing a fingernail.
“So you say,” said “Sid.”
“You fight well, young man.”
“I’m older than you. Don’t call me that.”
“You don’t like to be called anything. Are you aware of this?”
“I like to be called things that are true. Truth is the thing.”
Dr. Gradgrind traced the parameters of his beard with his thumb. “I am at least fifteen years your senior.”
Sucking in his cheeks, “Sid” counted something out with his fingers.
“That’s enough,” said the doktor. “Now then. I’m curious about this excessive use of the term dispatch. You employed the term at least fifty times in your last monologue.”
“Fifty times? That’s crazy. I barely used fifty words.”
“Dispatch. Why this term? What does it mean to you?”
“I want to talk about . . . Isn’t it strange that I . . . Isn’t it strange that I think I dis . . . killed you? Isn’t everything I’ve told you, like, fucked up? What about Kyoto? Why Kyoto? I don’t know shit about Kyoto.”
“All you want to talk about is Kyoto.” Dr. Gradgrind sighed. “It’s redundant. It’s not helping the process. The issue has run its course.” He leveled his gaze. “Dispatch.”
“Sid” contemplated fleeing the session. He swung his legs to the floor and placed hands on knees as if to thrust himself onto his feet and march out the door. He had done it before . . . possibly. Sometimes he remembered doing it before . . . But he couldn’t be certain. He wasn’t even certain about the identity of Dr. Gradgrind. He was nominally aware of visiting him, on a regular basis, for years. At the same time, something told him that the therapist was a complete stranger. Or worse—an imposter.
“Do I know you?” Immediately “Sid” couldn’t remember if he had spoken the question in his head or aloud.
Dr. Gradgrind’s lips mouthed the word: “DIS-PATCH.”
“I don’t know,” groaned “Sid.” “I guess dispatch sounds better than kill or murder. Less pedestrian. I don’t know why. Dispatch is more technical or scientific or something. Ok? Fuck.”
Dr. Gradgrind snapped his fingers lightly, rhythmically, with drama. “I’m satisfied. Was that so hard?”
“No.”
“Yes. Yes. What next? We’ve settled ‘The Dispatch Matter,’ as I will refer to it in my notes.” He wrote the title down on a thick pad of faded hemp paper and put a check next to it. “Tell me about your sex life.”
“Sex life?” “Sid” shook his head in disbelief. “I’m a virgin. You know I’m a virgin. We talk about it all the time—far more than Kyoto. I suspect that’s why you indulge me.”
“‘The Virgin Matter’ is why I indulge you?”
“Fuck you.”
“Be nice. Respect your sensei. It’s ok. You say you’re a virgin.”
“Born-again.”
“You’re not religious. You are in fact as nihilistic as a French reine de drame nibbling dry baguettes and sipping cold coffee in a chintzy Algerian café. Seulement, of course.”
“You don’t need to be religious to be a born-again virgin.”
“By that logic one can be a born-again anything. I can be a born-again Yakety Yak or a born-again Something-or-other—anything I used to be, from the first glimmer of consciousness, before an action”—snatching at the air—“robbed me of it. Very well. But you recognize that this born-again sleight-of-hand is the most embarrassing variety of horseshit conceived by civilized humankind. One is born once. Then one dies. Anybody who professes to be a born-again Yahoo does so for a single reason: to reclaim something lost or stolen from the past. So. Let’s start by discussing the last time you made love to a woman. Spare no details. I will know if you leave out the details. Life is nothing without minutia. Tell me everything.”
“Fuck off.”
Minutes later, “Sid” told him everything. He included all details, attended to all of the five senses.
“Brrrrzzzzrrrr,” replied Dr. Gradgrind. “This is what we need to flesh out. Your deepest desire. Do you know what it is?”
“I just told you what it is,” said “Sid.” “I repeated it over and over. You keep asking me to repeat it.”
“I’m asking you again. One last time.”
“You said ‘one last time’ last time.”
“I really mean it this time. Really—this is the last time.”
“Sid” flexed his jaw. “Before I tell you again, I want you to know that I know that this isn’t the last time you will ask me what my deepest desire is. I want you to know that I know that.”
Dr. Gradgrind shut his eyes and bobbed his head.
“My deepest desire, since childhood, has always been for people to look at me and say: ‘Nobody can fuck with that cunt.’”
The doktor observed him.
“I’m getting up.” “Sid” stood. “I’m going to walk around. My ass hurts.” He paced back and forth. Dr. Gradgrind watched him like a wild animal that had wandered into the office.
“I think somebody’s chasing me,” said “Sid.”
“Yes, you mentioned that,” said Dr. Gradgrind.
“I’m mentioning it again, fucker . . . Sorry. I’m sure somebody is chasing me. At least one man. A bounty hunter. But maybe more than him. Sometimes I feel like the entire human race is chasing me. How do I escape the human race? There’s nowhere to hide.”
“Mars,” the doktor muttered.
“What?”
“Delusions of persecution,” the doktor muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing,” the doktor muttered.
Two minutes passed.
“When metaphor dies,” said “Sid,” “what’s left?”
Dr. Gradgrind grinned a sadist’s grin. “The surface.”
“The surface of what?”
“Everything. And nothing.”
“That’s a copout.”
“You are a copout.”
Two minutes passed.
“What’s your deepest desire?” asked Dr. Gradgrind.
“Sid” walked to a point in the office that he considered to be as far away from the therapist as possible. “To exist,” he said.
“Precisely. But existence isn’t enough. Ergo.” He held out his left palm and walked across it with the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He did this carefully, as if the fingers were made of glass and might break.
Two minutes passed.
“What’s your deepest desire?” asked Dr. Gradgrind.
“Are you familiar with the concept of scikungfi?” replied “Sid.” “It is a purely linguistic formation.”
“You are a linguistic formation.”
“What does that mean?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
. . . conversation experienced a breakdown/breakthrough. Sound of a lone red blip marching across a dark mindscreen. Exegesis of telos. An infinite regression of flipflops preceded an endless precession of theses and antitheses . . . Theophany. Timecrashes and stickfigures and posthuman subterfuge . . . God said: There Is No Posthuman. Humanity Has Been Defined By Technology Since The First Infinitely Hot & Dense Nucleosyntheschiz. There Is Low Technology & There Is High Technology. Now Fuck Off . . . counterthesis . . . not enough secondary sources. Not enough graphic fornica
tion. I cannot play to Infinity. My arm hangs from my torso like tenderized London Broil, torn and bloody, gnawed on by a rogue mammal. The other arm is gone. Vanished. Vaporized. In its place: a cone of ekphrasis wrapped in chickenwire . . . What came first, the beard or the high forehead? One of them will have to testify for the defense in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Technomasculine Desire . . . Dance sequence. Lavish description here set to a dull synthesizer . . . No matter what one does, no matter where one goes, one accomplishes the terminus of the same acronym: BFD (Big Fucking Deal). This is the price one must pay for the growlhound of narrative. Narrative extends from Donovan’s brain throughout the universe, tethered to the fiery assholes of insect-shaped spaceships . . . Media technologies explode implode explode etc. Big Bang Big Crunch etc. A boy stands alone on a beach. His mother died in a bugswarm. He hangs his head. The surf splashes onto his feet. It’s quiet. He can’t comprehend it. He imagines the Unnamable. He hears the theme song for Super Mario Bros. The sun claps off like a floodlight.
Fistfight. Orgasm.
It ended there. With a period. BFD.
Two minutes passed.
“Sid” said, “I have a picture. A photograph.” He opened a wallet and removed an old, crinkled Polaroid. He studied it for a moment, then gave it to the doktor. “Take it. Look at it.”
This is what Dr. Gradgrind saw:
[IMAGE OF SMILING YOUNG BOY]
He nodded and gave the Polaroid back to “Sid.” “Sid” put it away. “It keeps appearing in my wallet,” he admitted. “Every time I find it, I throw it in the garbage. Then I find it in my wallet again.”
“Curious. Who is it?”
“I don’t know. Me? I don’t know. I think—”
Dr. Gradgrind tapped his watch and cleared his throat. “Let me stop you, if I may . . . just a moment . . . just a moment . . . yes . . . one moment . . . all right . . . let me stop you . . . right . . . there.”
Pause. “Ok,” said “Sid.”
“Our time is up for today,” said Dr. Gradgrind.
Pause. “Ok.”