Codename Prague

by D. Harlan Wilson

  “I’m not pissy. I’m cool. I’m calm. I’m Jack and the beanstalk.”

  Rabelais nodded. “OK. Not sure what beanstalks have to do with the price of beans. Solid fairy tale, though. Same thing goes for fairy tales as for Shakespeare, by the way. All literature, really.”

  “Thanks for the tip. Ibid, fuck you.“

  “More pissiness. Where does it end?”

  The chair’s arm reached up and gripped Prague by the elbow. He ripped off the arm, then turned and destroyed the chair with a fusillade of stomps.

  “You’re paying for that,” said Rabelais.

  Prague replied, “If you say so. I’ll be in touch. Maybe I’ll oblige the MAP after all—killing that chair brings back memories.”

  As he left, the wall birthed a mob of xenophobic, sadistic Karen Carpenters and one occupant of interplanetary flesh…

  04

  The Scorsese Boys

  After receiving his assignment, Anvil-in-Chief Vincent Prague went straight to the zoo and stole a crocodile. “People usually try to stay clear of crocs,” said the zookeeper when he watched the tape of the theft. “They don’t befriend them.”

  Prague put a leash on the crocodile and took it on a walk through the park. It devoured two dogs. It attacked a toddler in a stroller.

  Prague apologized to the toddler’s mother. He apologized to the crocodile before putting it down with a gyrostabilized submachine gun. “You’re riding high in April,” he told a reporter, “shot down in May.” He signed a few autographs, then went home to pack. He wouldn’t tell Rabelais that he planned on taking the job until later. Maybe he wouldn’t tell him at all.

  On the gondola ride, he put on a halo and skimmed the editorials that spiraled around his head. The other passengers did likewise, sitting at attention in hoverchairs, backs straight, hands on knees, with lips granulated like scar tissue…Beyond the gondola, the lights of City City slashed the night into long strips of chemical darkness…

  Prague ran into trouble outside the entranceway to his building. It set in motion a sequence of troubling events that encompassed nearly two decades of his life.

  The Scorsese Boys.

  They included the meanest, craziest and most vicious of director Martin Scorsese’s anti-heros: Casino’s Nicky Santoro, Gangs of New York’s Bill the Butcher, Cape Fear’s Max Cady, GoodFellas Tommy DeVito, The Departed’s Francis Costello, and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. All of the androids were easily recognizable by their roles and the actors who played them. Prague was well-versed in Scorsese cinema and had scrapped with the gangsters before. The MAP unleashed them whenever they suspected an agent of insubordination, even if the act of insubordination had not yet occurred, and even if the probability of it occurring was a shot in the dark.

  The Scorsese Boys annoyed Prague on multiple levels. The shithawking terrorism they wreaked annoyed him, of course, but so did the fact that DeVito and Santoro, both of which had originally been portrayed by Joe Pesci, looked almost exactly alike except for discrepancies in fashion. Prague liked to be able to tell the difference between things. Additionally, the Scorsese Boys all wanted to be Travis Bickle and resented the fact that they weren’t. Every non-Bickle android tried to talk and act like the taxi driver, despite being inhibited by its own pre-programmed accent and mannerisms. Prague had a low tolerance for that sort of flâneury. Even from a robot.

  “Who let this rat motherfucker in my town?” said the Costello. “Somebody says you gotta Jones wit da Man.”

  “Jones?” said Prague. “You mean I wanna smoke the Man?”

  “You talkin’ to me?” the Bickle responded, glancing over its shoulders. The rest of the Scorsese Boys mimicked the dialogue and gesture.

  “That’s original,” Prague huffed. “Look, can we just pretend you robosapiens got the shit kicked outta you and get on with our lives? You know that’s how it’s gonna go down.”

  The Butcher said, “You ain’t got the dash, you goddamned monkey.”

  The Cady said something in Pentecostal tongues.

  The DeVito said, “You only exist in this city becuza ME!”

  The Santoro said, “That’s my line,” and kicked dirt on the DeVito’s pants.

  Prague saw that his shoelace had come loose and told his shoe to tie it. The laces threaded together into a perfect bow. He gave the Scorsese Boys a once over and hung his head. “Fine. Bring it.”

  The Butcher’s hands metamorphosed into two giant hams. “When I close my hands,” it seethed, “they become fists.”

  The Bickle ran its fingers along the ridge of a Mohawk and threw out its arm. A glinting .25 caliber sprung into its grip from inside the sleeve of its army jacket. The Santoro, DeVito and Costello followed suit. The Cady, in contrast, pulled a .44 magnum from the crotch of its chino deck pants and said, “I’m gonna make you learn about loss,” in an overclocked southern drawl.

  They fired.

  Prague lunged into the street and somersaulted behind a parked Model T+. He clicked together the titanium rings on his thumbs and middle fingers and two Videodrome flesh-cannons burrowed out of his palms and engulfed his hands. Pushing himself off the car, he darted forward across the sidewalk, ran two steps up a brick wall, and flipped backwards…In mid-air he dodged bullets and returned the Scorsese Boys’ fire, shooting them full of holes in a dizzying fit of hyperstylized Gun Kata maneuvers.

  He landed on one knee with a loud boom, cracking the asphalt beneath him.

  He stood.

  He flexed his wrists and the Videodrome guns disappeared into his skin. Smoke hissed and oozed into the gutters.

  The Scorsese Boys were badly damaged. The Costello’s head had been blown in half. It lay prostrate on the hood of a Model T+, blood erupting from the wound in a seemingly endless cascade. Like all android blood, it was real…

  The Bickle’s coat was on fire. It tried to put it out, but the flames got larger the more it slapped them. It staggered down the street moaning and signaling taxis that weren’t there. The Cady, DeVito and Santoro were veritable archery targets, their aerated bodies spurting blood. None of them expired, though, and they sized up the Anvil-in-Chief with renewed determination. So did the Butcher, who went unscathed. Prague saw to it. You don’t gotta gun, you don’t get the gun.

  Small teams of wannabe indie filmmakers clambered out of the shadows and started jostling for footage.

  Prague checked his watch. Nightly reruns of The A-Team began in fifteen minutes and he needed to have a shit first. Best wrap this shindig up.

  The Butcher’s ham-fists glistened with toxic juices that dripped onto the street in corrosive, smoking pools. Its stovepipe hat was a Leaning Tower of Pisa that seemed on the edge of collapse. The handles of its mustache quivered. “End a the line for you, you unholy sack a shit. No sprat fucks with the Butchah. I’m an Amerikan.”

  “Them’s fightin’ words, Bill,” yawned Prague. Still, the taunt worked. Prague despised the Butcher’s arrogance, even if it was coded into its system. This codedness, in fact, reinforced his enmity. He had dished out Hard Goodbyes to more than ten Bill the Butcher androids in the past few years. Didn’t matter how effektively. The moment its clockwork stopped ticking, a flatline signal transmitted to one of the MAP’s many Culture Factories and a new Butcher was taken off a warehouse shelf like a toy in a department store.

  Prague let the android get real close. He even let it give him a whack in the chops with its acidic mitts.

  He grinned like a lizard as ham juice singed his cheek and mixed with martini blood. “It burns,” he said…and executed one of his many token moves, the Horrorshow Splirt, a simple but devastating sleight of hand in which a Jungian psychogenetic implant allowed him to harness all of the repressed desire in his unconscious and unleash it in one mystical act of hatchetry. Contingent upon the success of the move were the retractable vibroblades implanted into the blades of his hands…

  The problem with the Splirt was the imperiling fatigue that followed its execution. But
Prague figured he had wounded the other Scorsese Boys sufficiently. By the time they rallied—if they rallied at all—he would be up and running again.

  Reality slipped into slowtime as Prague sprung into the air, clapped his hands together, and swung down with all his strength…

  The Butcher came apart like a chopped log, flying into two symmetrical halves that each exploded with purple gore. The filmmakers shouted in triumph as they devoured the imagery.

  Prague collapsed.

  And the DeVito and Santoro sprang to attention. Despite grave wounds, they weren’t as moribund as they had let on, whereas the Cady had bled out. They bickered with each other in affected, high-pitched voices as they flipped Prague onto his stomach, hogtied him by the wrists and ankles, and dumped him into the trunk of a postvorticist Lincoln Town Car.

  In the stale darkness, Prague passed out and dreamt of a twelve-foot green monster with one brown shoe who he conjured into existence by sheer imaginative will and dexterity. At first their relationship was guarded, unsteady, and in some cases volatile. Things changed over time, and the monster evolved into an avuncular figure, teaching Prague how to do his taxes, ice fish, make beer from scratch, treat women properly, write coherent argumentative essays…One day Prague couldn’t find the green monster. He searched everywhere and finally discovered it in a forest of Bonsai trees. The monster looked up at him sadly from inside the heel of its shoe. “I shrunk!” it exclaimed. “Why did you forget about me, Marshall?”

  “Marshall?” said Prague, and was assaulted by a disorderly militia of men with goat heads…

  Prague snorted awake as the trunk opened and the two Pesci simulacra stabbed him repeatedly with anxiety ionizers packing enough umph to mellow out a hyperactive elephant. He slipped back into dreamland…and woke up to a stainless steel rat licking his face with a dry synthetic tongue. He grabbed the rat and squeezed it until it burst in an electric plume of tinsel and clock springs.

  He touched the cheek that the Bill the Butcher had punched. No scar. It had been fixed.

  He had been fixed.

  05

  Cirque de Socius

  Question Mark Circus was Dr Teufelsdröckh’s cirque de preference. Unlike the hundreds of other circuses that popped their tents within the borders of the city, he felt a sense of camaraderie here. He wasn’t quite sure why—the other circuses were more or less the same jamboree with the exception of a few added scikungfi extravaganzas. Something about the place just felt like home. And the circus was a far better alternative than church or a discotheque.

  Dr Teufelsdröckh purchased a small bag of caramel corn and a Shasta from an organ grinder’s Grape Ape, then hunted for a seat. He wouldn’t touch the caramel corn; buying it was a good faith formality he practiced whenever he attended the circus. Shasta, on the other hand, was his favorite soda. He sipped it through a straw in powerful, overjoyed bursts.

  Question Mark Circus’s seats had been divided into sections based on viewer identity and desire. There was a BOURGEOISIE section. There was a MEATEATERS section. There was an ESKIMOS section. There was a PLAQUEDEMICS section. There was an I © ROWDY RODDY PIPER section. There was a BAD HAIRDOS and a BLACK BELTS and a THUMBTACK CONNOISSEURS and a PEOPLE WITH METASTASIZED EYEBALLS section…Failure to emulate the title of one’s section of choice resulted in punishments ranging from small fines to public floggings and immolation.

  Dr Teufelsdröckh selected an empty seat in the SINGLES (ENGLISH-SPEAKING) section.

  …It took him nearly ten minutes to work up the nerve to talk to her. She was just his type. Big eyes. Big hairdo. Big ass. Lots of makeup. And a certain abused quality.

  In the center of the ring, a nervous-looking group of lion tamers dressed in cheap tuxes waited in line to have their heads bitten off, one at a time, by a Nephilimic lion standing on its hind legs. The lion disposed of the heads in a giant brass spittoon at its side. Each lion tamer’s body gushed the same blood from its neck hole.

  “They’re talented individuals,” said the doktor, leaning towards the woman. She didn’t respond. “They sure are talented.” He pointed at the lion tamers.

  The woman glared at him. “Did you say something?”

  “Yes.”

  “I swear I heard somebody say something. Was it you?”

  “Yes. It was me.”

  “I could have sworn somebody said something.”

  “They did. I did.”

  “Did you hear that? There it was again.”

  “I said it.”

  “Probably my sinuses. When they get clogged I hear all kinds of crazy shit.”

  She looked away, massaging her nose.

  The lion bit off a head and exclaimed, “That’s for all you sucker MCs perpetrating a fraud,” in Czech-German.

  The woman clapped. “That was exciting. I wonder what he said.” She turned to him. “Do you know what the lion said?”

  Dr Teufelsdröckh’s mouth went dry. He spoke Czech-German fluently, but he didn’t know what a sucker MC was. He deflected the question with another question: “Care for some caramel corn?” He tipped the bag towards her.

  She scowled at him. He smiled. She squinted at him, as if he might be standing at a distance, as if to bring his contours into focus, as if to lift the rubbery flap of his selfhood and reveal the shrieking insecurities beneath…He diverted his gaze, unable to look into any woman’s eyes for more than a few seconds at a time. He had trouble looking into people’s eyes in general, regardless of gender, affixing his line of vision on ears, chins, hairlines, cheekbones, background scenery, anything but the eyes…

  “No thank you,” she said disinterestedly. “What’s your name?”

  He couldn’t remember…then bleated, “Dr Teufelsdröckh!” He mechanically stuck out his hand. She put her fingers in it. He squeezed the fingers and moved them up and down. He waited for her to give him her name. She didn’t.

  A hunchbacked Cyclops stumbled into the ring and tackled the lion. It grabbed the beast’s jaws and tore it in half like a piece of cloth from mouth to anus. Then it attacked the lion tamers.

  “You’re a doktor?” said the woman. “What of?”

  Again his memory failed him. Her breasts made him nervous. If he were to reach out and touch one of them, he might die. They were so nice-looking. So big and nice-looking…“I don’t recall,” he replied. “I acquired my Ph.D. long ago. But I do things. Doktor things. And I have a Ph.D. I procured it from Stick Figure University under the esteemed guidance of one Professor JP Timecrash. I remember that much. Are you familiar with Professor Timecrash’s scholarship?”

  “What’s a stick figure?”

  “Excuse me.” A security guard placed his meathook on Dr Teufelsdröckh’s shoulder. “Proof of singlehood please?”

  “Yes, sir.” Distressed, Dr Teufelsdröckh rifled through his pockets, the guard’s long mustache brushing against his head like a dead snake.

  He found the ID. He handed it to the guard.

  The guard ran a fingertip over the ID and stopped on a small pink box in the lower right-hand corner. The words in the box read:

  DESPERATELY

  SEEKING SUSAN

  “Thank you.” The guard gave the ID back to Dr Teufelsdröckh, then leaned over and gave the woman a long, loud kiss. She complied, more or less, struggling half-heartedly. Dr Teufelsdröckh observed the kiss like a car crash on the roadside.

  A flock of ironclad trapeze artists swung overhead. A flock of acrobats in winged Alligator People costumes pursued them. The trapeze artists eluded their antagonists for half a minute before pulling out cartoon Buster swords. The Alligator People impressionists countered with ray-guns. In seconds, a full-throttle wuxia pan battle royal erupted…

  The woman dabbed her lips with a napkin. “Strangers take advantage of me.”

  A clump of burnt flesh landed on Dr Teufelsdröckh’s knee. He slapped it off. “They do?” He didn’t know what else to say to her. The security guard derailed his nerves. Authority figures
always had that effekt. “That seems normal enough, I suppose.”

  Stand up and leave, he told himself. Get up. Sofort. Do it.…But he couldn’t do it. He tried to place his thoughts elsewhere, to breathe in and out, to anaesthetize his mental core, to think about food, the perfect gourmet meal, a utopian spread, a French spread, herb pâté for an appetizer, a frisée salad with goat cheese and balsamic syrup, a main course of Épaule d’agneau aux anchois, and for dessert, hmm, what the hell would he eat for dessert?…

  Her gaze moved up and down his body and settled on his lower region. Was she staring at his love handles? Couldn’t be. He was wearing a Blubsucker. He had only bought the shirt last week, an anti-love handle apparatus that constricted flab at the waist and redistributed it to the groin. Was the shirt defective? Did he still have the receipt? If not, would the department store from which he purchased the shirt refund his money? Would the store refund his money in any case?

  “I’m building a monster!” he blurted, eyeballing a freak in a spiked cage. Outside the cage, a clown with a spear stabbed at the freak and forced it to impale itself on the spikes, which faced inwards.

  “What’s a monster?” She put her hand on his leg.

  His heart skipped a beat. “What’s a monster?” He contemplated the question as the freak hemorrhaged impossible quantities of celluloid from multiple wounds…He said: “The OED describes a monster as a mythical creature that exhibits both animal and human qualities or combines elements of one or more animal forms. Frequently this creature is of great size and ferocious appearance. That’s an antiquated notion, however. Contemporary perspectives of the monster reveal an imaginary creature that may be large, ugly, or frightening. For the record, my monster won’t be large, per se. It will, however, be equipped with the capacity to transform into a daikaiju.”

  “What’s a OED? What’s a ferocious appearance? What’s a contemporary perspectives? What’s a dai…dai…?” She moved her hand up his thigh. Cries of agony overhead, below, everywhere…