Codename Prague

by D. Harlan Wilson

  “Per my instructions,” said Henrí Prague, “your closet has been fully loaded with fashion statements from several time periods and measures of quality control. We are an affirmative action institution here at the Hotel Prague and emphasize diversity at every turn. I know you understand.” He led the Anvil-in-Chief into the closet and walked him in a circle. Prague knelt on the floor, opened his briefcase and inspected its contents. Spare body parts seemed to be in order. He closed the briefcase and slid it under a biomechanical Nosferatu robe. They returned to the main antechamber.

  A woman stood in the orange light of a lamp. She looked like Henrí Prague and possessed the same distended torso. Unlike Henrí, however, she wore a corset, garter belt and stiletto boots. Her breasts threatened to leap at any moment from asphyxiating binds. Her colorful, writhing hair fell over one shoulder in a plait of coral snakes. Prague wondered if they were real.

  “They’re artificial,” said the woman. Prague wrinkled his lips. Was she a telepath? Did telepaths exist in the real world or only in books and films? Sometimes he forgot.

  She ran a fingernail across the bulging arc of her breasts. “I had them filled with low-sodium peanut butter. You like?”

  “I like peanut butter,” said Prague.

  Henrí Prague cleared his throat. “May I introduce my sister, Mädchen ‘The Prague’ Prague.”

  Her hips swung like a pendulum as she walked towards Prague and extended her wrist. He observed the wrist. “Why the hell’s everybody named Prague? What the hell’s going on over here?”

  “We are in Prague,” said the bellhop, puzzled.

  “So everybody in Prague’s named Prague? I don’t think so.”

  “Your name is Prague as well,” said the bellhop’s sister, raising the fingers of her outstretched wrist and studying her nails. “How do you account for this absurdity?” Her voice was deep, masculine.

  “It’s not absurd. It’s my parents’ surname.”

  “As it is our parents’ surname,” she replied. “And our grandparents’ surname. And our great grandparents’ surname. Und so weiter.” Her brother nodded with raised eyebrows, then excused himself.

  “What’s a Prague?” said Prague.

  Mädchen smirked. “A Prague?”

  “Your codename is ‘The Prague.’ What is it?”

  She ran her hands up her thighs and made a noise that fell somewhere between contemplation and orgasm. “A chess piece?” She smiled like a horse. Her front tooth had a circular nicotine stain on it.

  “You’re asking me? That’d be a pawn, toots. Not a Prague.”

  Her smile disappeared. “You are so very aggressive. But that is what you Amerikans do. I like. Enough talk Mr Anvil Man. Walk this way.”

  He followed her into the bathroom, watching her ass go back and forth. As Cdre Rabelais promised before his excursion to the Former Czech Republik, Mädchen “The Prague” Prague served him breakfast (continental) at a side table and ran him a bath. She even washed his back, feet, cock, balls and asshole. A sentient towel dried him, scampering across his body, into his groin and armpits, sponging up every last bead of moisture; it concluded by scrubbing his hair dry and then wrapping itself around his head like a turban.

  Mädchen took him by the penis and led him to the bed. He stiffened in her grip. With the stilettos she was about his height. She was thin, but strong; in the right light Prague could see muscular striations in her limbs. She clutched his neck and yanked back on his hair, calling his Adam’s apple to attention. She licked the Adam’s apple. She licked his chin, his lips. “I only let strangers fuck me in the ass,” she rasped. “My cunt belongs to the city.”

  …She kissed him with eyes wide open. Her eyes grew wider and wider as the kiss deepened and Mädchen extracted payment for services-about-to-be-rendered. Prague let it happen. Sexual activity was the one thing the MAP comped…She pushed him onto the bed. He did an accidental somersault, coming face to face with his genitals, then smacked into the headboard. Pain. Vertigo. Things went dark. He saw Mädchen’s tits emerge from behind a curtain. He caught a glimpse of her snatch, shaved, with a tattoo arched over the garage that read: VAGINA…He noticed for the first time a dumbwaiter in the wall. The rope squeaked as the carriage lowered and lowered and came into view and the door of the carriage irised open and twenty liters of roaches spilled into the Galactic Pot-Healer Suite. The carriage irised closed on the corroded head of the Nowhere Man…Mädchen comforted Prague with catlike purrs, stroking his limbs, his temples, ensuring his penis remained tumescent with martini juice.

  “There was a man who fell asleep,” he said, and turned over to fall asleep. She kidney-punched him. Crying out, he rolled off the bed, hit the floor with a loud thump.

  “Be quiet up there!” said the tenants in the room beneath them, whacking their ceiling with a broomstick. “Our children are trying to sleep!”

  Prague stood and answered the complaint with a series of stomps that cracked the floorboards. Mädchen leapt off the bed and rammed him with her shoulder. His legs kicked up and over his head and he landed on his back and lost his wind. Mädchen dragged him to the bed and poured a bottle of turpentine on his face. Prague choked, coughed, sobered. But his vision failed him: the head on her body oscillated between “The Prague” and the Nowhere Man, the latter of which melted like wax every time it materialized.

  “I killed you,” said Prague.

  “Killed who?” said “The Prague.”

  “The Nowhere Man.”

  “I know dah-ling. Everybody knows.”

  “Nobody can kill Nowhere. It’s impossible.”

  “The world is an endless lagoon of impossibilities.” She rolled onto her stomach and grabbed the cheeks of her ass. “Now get to work.”

  He tarried. She hit him with a log.

  “Where’d you get that log? Where’d that log come from?”

  She hit him again and he slumped onto his back and she climbed on top of him and wedged the log between his chin and clavicle and shoved her ass onto his cock. The lights dimmed by themselves…

  15

  The Delova Prague

  He looked in the mirror and flexed his abs. The rumblestrip 8-pack was fantastic, hyperreal—an anatomical marvel resulting from a healthy combination of hard work and harder technology. Still, the abs were ill-defined in places; he counted four bloated nooks and one area with medium-intensity ripples. Nobody else would have noticed the glitches unless they had been underscored and explained. But he noticed, and that’s what counted.

  “Open Sesame.” A slit formed beneath the sharp, clean ridge of his pectoral muscles. Wincing, he eased his fingers into the slit, fished around, and removed the Ab-Crab® inside. He scrutinized the expiration date. Two days to sour milk. Good timing. He tied its cords into a knot and threw it away. From his briefcase he removed another Ab-Crab® bound in bright gold packaging. He tore open the packaging and the Ab-Crab® leapt out. It landed on the bathroom counter, tripped and fell into the sink. Its anterior tendril terminated in a set of Rocky Horror lips. The lips squeaked, “Help me! Help meeee!” as the Ab-Crab®’s sclerites clicked against the porcelain like spilled marbles.

  He picked the creature up by one of its legs. “Relax.” The Ab-Crab® thanked him and asked about the weather. Then it began to take deep, controlled, overdramatic breaths, as if practicing yoga.

  He stuffed the Ab-Crab® into the slit…

  The slit sealed over. He doubled over.

  Punches and kicks projected from his stomach. Alien screams rolled up his throat. He gripped the edge of the counter and tried not to vomit. He vomited. He punched the mirror. Cracks emanated from his fist in a burst of slow lightning.

  His knuckles drooled blue…

  It took the Ab-Crab® three or so minutes to settle in. Longer than usual. But eventually its pincers found purchase and his flesh shrinkwrapped against its exoskeleton. He admired the finished product in the mirror’s fragments.

  “I shoulda had a V8,” said
Codename Prague…

  Before accompanying Mädchen “The Prague” Prague to The Delova Prague discotheque, he wanted to squeeze in a quick workout. He did 1,000 pushups on his thumbs and 500 index finger pullups. Then he undressed, put on a suit of medieval armor standing in the closet, clanked down the hallway and took an elevator to the hotel swimming pool. On the way he reconnoitered his mission…What was it? Rabelais had told him to go to Pragensia St Cagney, the casino beneath The Delova Prague, and await further instructions. From who? What about? Would he have to fight, torture or kill anybody? Who? How? Where? No doubt the whole mission would turn into the usual assfuck. His instructions would be to go somewhere else to get more instructions, and those instructions would instruct him to get instructions elsewhere, and the instructions he got elsewhere would point him in another direction, and so on until he was 1,000 years old, at which point Rabelais would summon him back to Amerika, tell him the mission was either a practical joke or a test of his allegiance, and present him with another carton of voodoo cigarettes. Whatever. He could take anything the MAP could dish out. He had prevailed before; he would prevail again.

  The pool was empty except for a few overweight Arabs in keffiyehs and bikini briefs eating cheese and drinking absinthe at a corner table. He stood at the edge of the pool. He stared into the neon green water. A pale-skinned Culkin wearing a giant Hawaiian bathing suit appeared next to him. It looked up at the Anvil-in-Chief as if trying to see somebody on the top of a building.

  “Hey mister.”

  Prague flipped open his eye shield. He rotated and angled down his torso. “Yes?” he said.

  “Where’d you get that suit?”

  “Compliments of the house.”

  The Culkin tapped his leg. It echoed.

  Frightened, the Culkin ran away.

  “Good boy.”

  Prague dove in the pool and did fifty lethargic laps, toes dragging against the bottom. Afterwards he did two shots of absinthe with the Arabs, then went back to his room and swapped the armor for a tux.

  Mädchen appeared at his side. Now she wore a black Breakfast at Tiffany’s cocktail dress with elbow-length gloves. Her hair lay atop her head like a sleeping cat; the snakes were gone. She had sprayed herself with black-and-white aerosol and resembled a silent film cutout. She smoked a long hashish pipe.

  Prague offered her his arm. She took it. “Where’ve you been?” he said.

  She blew smoke in his face. “I have been here. I have been there. What do you care, Mr Anvil Man?”

  “Good point.”

  In the elevator, a man dressed as a cardboard letter P stared at them. “I’m the letter P,” he said. “Guess what I stand for?” He whispered something in Mädchen’s ear. She maintained a straight face.

  A street zeppelin took them to the Delova Prague.

  Vincent Prague rested his cheekbone against the window. Night fell and the manholes swallowed the day’s smog. The city pulsed with meaning and energy. The cogs and sprockets and levers and girders of Purpose Engines spun and whirred and wooshed and clanked up and down the streets…They drove through Little Amerika. Sidewalks teemed with mummies and werewolves and toxic avengers and Lobster Men and Scarlett O’Haras and Richard Nixons and Jay Gatsbys and other B-film creatures and the zeppelin had to weave through a pinball playfield of corndog and hamburger and ice cream cone stands. Lizard music on the radio—bebop jazz with a dash of pickled electronika…Then they drove through Little Hong Kong and the zeppelin had to weave through Godzillas trying to stomp on them and shoot fireballs at them and hurl fistfuls of kamikaze Bruce Lees at them. Prague fell asleep…When he awoke Mädchen was unzipping his pants with a pliers. She froze…She fed the pliers to her cleavage.

  “We’re here,” she said pointedly.

  Prague got out of the vehicle, zipped up his pants and signed the windshield with a bar of soap.

  Ignoring Mädchen, he strode towards the discotheque.

  A line of glitterati circled the building twice over. A few of them noticed Prague, but nobody asked for his autograph. He went to the front of the line.

  An anabolic bouncer with a square head and Asimovian sideburns poked him in the chest. “I don’t think so, sonny,” it said in an out-of-order drone.

  “Behave yourself,” said Prague. He moved past the bouncer. The bouncer grabbed him by the shoulder and hurled him into the street.

  Prague somersaulted through the air like a ragdoll…He landed on his hands, cartwheeled onto his feet. Instantly he was back in the bouncer’s face. The glitterati behind him stirred and began to polish their guns.

  He adjusted his bowtie. “Daddy used to toss me around like that.” He scratched his temple with a thumbnail. “I fed him to the fuckin’ pigs.”

  The bouncer said, “I know who you are. Piss off, meathead.”

  Before Mädchen could stop him, Prague trimmed the bouncer like a T-bone steak with a divining machete, the blade of which was electromagnetically attracted to fat cells…

  They rode the wave of glitterati into the Delova Prague.

  “Where there is cause there is effekt,” said Mädchen over the robosyncretic cacophony of the discotheque. Lasers and bullets whizzed everywhere. “This is not Amerika. This is only Amerikana. You do not kill strangers here unless you have a good reason or unless you make it look like an accident. The Former Czech Republik is no place for futuristic gunslingers, swashbucklers, or knife throwers. Scikungfi is encouraged in theory but frowned upon in actuality.”

  Prague fingered his cuff links.

  A woman walked towards them from the dance floor. She could have been Mädchen’s twin except for certain physiognomic vagaries that Prague couldn’t quite discern. The vagaries bewildered him to such a degree that he decided she looked nothing at all like Mädchen. What was wrong with him? First the hotel room, now this broad. Was he losing the ability to perceive life’s small details? It worried him. Life’s small details were all that mattered…

  She wore a long Charmeuse bridal gown with a steam-ironed Morticia Addams hairdo parted down the middle. Like Mädchen, she had stylized herself in black-and-white. She introduced herself as Sindie Switch, kissed Mädchen on the lips, and gave Prague a small wooden box. “Open it,” she said in a deep, deep tenor.

  “It’s locked.”

  “It is an ersatz lock. Purely decorative.”

  He opened the box.

  Inside was a small assortment of strings. Bits of strings. Some of them had frayed ends. Some of them didn’t.

  “Either they are outmoded, or they are too short. They are mostly too short. The waste products of other strings. Residua. Nachgeburt. I can’t find a use for them. I can’t even tie them into knots. And yet I can’t bring myself to throw them away.”

  She snatched the box. Before Prague could respond, she nibbled her lip and said, “I have lava in my veins.”

  “Bullshit,” said Prague.

  She slit her wrist. Steaming orange lava flowed out, dripped onto the floor and burnt a hole in it. The wound cauterized and scabbed over. She picked the scab off. She gave the scab to Mädchen along with the box and the items vanished into Mädchen’s cleavage.

  Prague nodded. “Nice trick. Is recess over yet? Let’s get this road on the show.”

  And they fell on him, and they kissed and scratched and bit him, and they were dancing, and somebody wrenched Prague’s penis from the shell of his pants…Strobe lights. Clove cigarettes. Technologized desire and a cyclone of neon voyeurism…Pushing air from his lips, Prague thought about dress ties as the femme fatales had their way with him. Not the paltry, winged nub beneath his Adam’s apple, but the real things. Why did they exist? More importantly, how did they come into existence? MAP literature claimed they evolved from the French cravat. Ludicrous. At some point, deep in the graveyard of history, a man hung a strip of fabric from his neck, walked out into the world and called himself a man among lesser men, inciting a massive, masculine fashion craze. Neckties became a staple of everyda
y patriarchal life. And they served no purpose. They hung down the sunken chest of humanity like dead serpents waiting for somebody to bury them…

  16

  Pragensia St Cagney

  They took an escalator to the casino. It was four miles long and moved at a rate of approximately 5 mph. Prague stole another nap on the way down. He slept standing up. When he awoke…

  A door irised open. They walked inside.

  He doubletaked the giant head of a smiling, round-faced professor with pince nez and a gold-tasseled graduation cap. It was ES Lowe—founder and poster boy of Yahtzee. Hanging from the ceiling like an obese piñata, the head stared down at the crowd with archetypal panoptic efficiency…

  “Yahtzee is a game of skill,” said a Zero Punctuation Expobot. In addition to various anti-utilitarian James Cagney androids, ZPEs had been strategically positioned throughout Pragensia St Cagney. “To play Yahtzee one throws the dice and accomplishes Three-of-a-Kind or Four-of-a-Kind or a Full House or a Small Straight or a Large Straight or Chance or Yahtzee that’s Five-of-a-Kind one may acquire as many Yahtzees as one wants in thirteen rounds but one may only acquire one of the aforementioned combinations and one must keep one’s hands to oneself at all times if you require further exposition feel free to exposition and additionally exposition exposition thank you,” said the ZPE.

  Prague walked across the gambling floor of Pragensia St Cagney, reluctantly, flanked by his black-and-white escorts. They had nearly broken his stronghold of patience. But he would endure them for a little longer, at least until he received directions from somebody, or he got the hint that the gig was another MAP-sanctioned scam at his expense.

  In Pragensia St Cagney, there were no roulette wheels. There were no craps or blackjack or Texas Hold’em tables. There weren’t even slot machines. Stone coffins ran the length and breadth of the casino. Hunched over the coffins were the dried but sharp-dressed husks of the Elderly and the Plutocratic. Amid the cooperative chatter of Expobots, the shaking, the sliding, the clicking and the clacking of thousands of die…