Dragoncoasters corkscrewed overhead, emitting signature BL grunts, squawks & hiyaaaas!
The TSM→DK howled when it reached full size and saw CNP. Metamorphic steam hissed from between the cracks of its scales.
The tides turned, and the Chased became the Chaser…
*
Preclimax
A BL screamed & his face melted. A BL screamed & his head exploded. A BL screamed & the fruit salad of his innards exited his body from infinite unchoreographed serrations.
*
…rather than crush CNP in his fist, the TSM→DK decided to eat him, chewing only hard enough to break a few bones & leaving the rest to the acid pool of its stomach. CNP countered the move with his briefcase, which he rammed into the TSM→DK’s mouth. The briefcase expanded into a surfboard and pierced the TSM→DK’s chin. The monster shrieked in pain…and shrunk…
CNP fell from the TSM→DK’s grasp onto a waterslide at the bottom of which BLs & DKs awaited him. An additional/extended scikungfi fight unfolded.
*
Climax
They fired a Double-H (Heinlein + Hubbard) bomb at CNP from the crow’s nest of a Sky Swat. A silent, B&W mushroom cloud of canned hypermasculinity knocked him off his feet & threw him into a chickenwire fence, but he was man enough to survive the ordeal, & he retaliated as his exoskeleton deionized all traces of radiation, firing a blowforce projectile at the crow’s nest from a bazooka. His targets exploded like frogs slung against a brick wall. He turned the bazooka on other targets, i.e., everybody became a target, BLs & DKS & funpark staff alike, & he did flips & 360s & helicopters through the air, blowing shit up, blowing heads & appendages off, demolishing rides & buildings & DKs & tiki bars & french-fry kiosks, & he landed on the irimoya of The Big Boss building, & he cast the bazooka aside & flexed the transanthropoid muscles of his organic exoskeleton as the world beneath him continued to explode & smolder & burn…Smoke cleared in patches & CNP spotted TSM a short distance from his perch. He leapt off the irimoya & descended on the monster in the yellow dusk…
TSM lay on its back, naked, breathless, coughing blood. “This smoke hurts my lungs,” it wheezed. “Is this normal smoke or something else? Scheiße.”
“I think it’s normal smoke,” said CNP, tearing a steel trashcan from the concrete. “But normal is a relative term. Technology these days. Not to mention different body types react to chemicals in different ways.” He pressed the trashcan over his head.
TSM raised a hand & spread out all the fingers. “I’m just a robot,” it said.
“I’m just a man,” CNP replied.
“Different species.”
“One & the same.”
The echoic caw of an Arabian Ostrich preceded the smashing of TSM’s skull beneath the authorial weight of the trashcan. The assassination was succeeded by a long, Gullyfoylesque speech given to the residue of BLs & DKs in CNP’s vicinity as to how they should “learn themselves” to be better hosts & more intellectually-oriented hominids.
*
Anticlimax
“Watch this.”
He clipped the noodle vendor with a flying kick.
“I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass,” he said. “And I’m all out of Donkey Kong.”[18]
He jammed a stick of Doublemint into his mouth, then hopped over a turnstile & strode towards the ocean…
[17] Screen name of BL impersonator Ho Chung Tao, who also worked as a stuntman under the pseudonym James Ho. Weary of production constraints to replicate BL at every turn, Li gave up acting in the early 1980s after a run of over thirty films. He owned and operated a Taiwanese gymnasium for years afterwards prior to his accidental death by rogue throwing star. For more on his biography, refer to Elmore Petite’s Three Bruces in a Pod: The Interstitial Abductions of B. Springsteen, B. Campbell, and B. Li.
[18] “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubble gum.” Rowdy Roddy Piper as Nada, They Live (1988). Subsequently Nada blasts a policeman with a “1957 cheese dip” or “formaldehyde” face that he is able to visualize with the aid of special sunglasses. He goes on to blast several other human and non-human inhabitants of the bank in which the scene is set.
48
There Is a Hole Here
Where Something Else Used to Be
51
The Resistance of Memory
Cliché-within-a-cliché: a family of boneless clocks hanging from randomly assorted inanimate objects…The sundry spatial vastnesses of Mr Dali’s paintings have been associated with the female genitalia by critics as well as by the Catalan artist himself. “It is a vagina,” said Mr Dali, pointing a lean finger at the landscape of The Persistence of Memory, “and anything that intrudes upon that space”—pointing at a distant stone now—“is a cock. Vaginas describe and rule the diegetic irrealities of my canvases like interstitial neurastheniacs. They expose themselves—nothing more—and the spectrum of war and peace and all that lies in between is relegated to the cult of little men. There is nothing more dangerous than a little man. Remember—”
The Nowhere Man looked like he had gotten into a fight with a cheap sheet of wallpaper. His crinkled cape and hood exhibited a faded mushroom pattern that changed shape and color in synch with his mood. His limbs were thin, sticklike, possibly arthropodal. A black hole had swallowed his face. Sometimes, in certain lights, a discernable human visage emerged from the hole. The visage was all angles, scars, sharp edges—a blotch of glinting razorblades within which pulsed two yellow asterisks.
[The Nowhere Man’s appearance on-page is always accompanied by a low, distorted screech that rises in intensity and pitch…]
Lackluster hysteria that goes: “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…”
…When Codename Vincent Prague was born, his parents resolved to name him Pail. They told everybody that’s what they were going to name him as his mother’s stomach inflated like a niggling statistic.
“Pale, like, without color?” inquired family, friends, and strangers.
“Pale does not denote something without color,” said Father Prague, “but rather something deficient in color. But that’s not the Pail we mean. We mean the Pail you put things in.” To demonstrate, he placed a small object into a receptacle. His audience clapped…
“Father scarred me deeply. See?” Prague peeled off the brown skin of his forehead and exposed the frontal lobe. Sparks rolled across brain tissue in waves…
“Nothing’s changed. Being a black man in a meta-pulp science fictional diegesis is no different than being a black man in agrarian Amerika. Even when you’re the protagonist. Every day is White Boy Day.”
[…mnemonic vestiges of Hitler and Keats overlapped spliced vivisected stitched together…Hitler in the Bunker. Keats on the Death Bed…Close-up on Jean-Claude Van Damme’s wen.]
“[Dialogue],” said The Nowhere Man over a crescendo of distortion……
After Reality, mad scientism became a normative condition. It was not limited to whimsical, diabolical and/or compensatory monster making and purple people eating. Simply burning one’s toast might be characterized as an instance of mad scientism. In effekt, all AR subjects had, by default, gone insane, and all of them had contracted a certain evil genius and pseudotechnological fetish—viz., everybody became a stock character or a caricature of a stock character in a pulp sci-fi diegesis.
…When Doktor Hermann Teufelsdröckh was born, his parents resolved to name him Doktor. They told everybody that’s what they were going to name him as his mother’s stomach inflamed like a nacreous welt.
“What if he becomes a doktor when he grows up?” inquired family, friends, and strangers.
“Then he will be a doktor twice over,” said Father Teufelsdröckh, “and his identity will be doubly reinforced.”
“Actually his ‘identity,’ per se, will only be reinforced,” said a Nowhere Man. “The first doktor won’t count. Do you understand?”
They strapped Special Agent Prague into an anti-suicide smock. They realized they had made a mistake and strapped him into a suicide smock. They realized they had made another mistake.
“Do you want me dead or alive?” asked Prague.
“Either way works for us,” they replied. “Which is to say, we can’t decide.”
…the impossibility of memory/history. Hence the impossibility of narrative/identity. Authorial direction. Authorial oppression. The Third Little Pig used barcodes instead of bricks. The result: a house that the Big Bad Wolf tried to purchase for $29.95 in three easy installments…
56
Amerikan Hemorrhage Dictionary of Scikungfi
Hi-def digital pastiche of screaming mouths from Hong Kong action flix (emphasis on Bruce Lee, Sonny Chiba, Kwan Tak Hing and Siu-Lung Leung) interspersed with bits of costumed derring-do and henshin (trans. from Japanese “to change or transform the body”) wuxia sequences. The last shot belongs to Inframan (1975; tagline: “The Man Beyond Bionics”) in which protagonist Rayma/Inframan (actor Danny Lee a.k.a. Li Hsiu Hsien) metamorphoses into a daikaiju and performs a tomoe-nage judo throw on an orange, daikaiju-sized Tarantula Man (actor unknown), then hits him with a flying double-punch, then tosses him into an energy plant. The Tarantula Man shrinks. Begin credits. Before we fade out to black, the scene returns and Inframan steps on the Tarantula Man with a giant white boot. Ketchup and mustard spurt from the creature’s flattened corpse.
1007
Short Fable
A man’s shadow elected to cast the man. The shadow peeled itself off the street, stretched out its arms, leapt onto the man’s shoulders, and stomped him into place. Then the sun went down.
1008
Long Fable
Two people hack off their arms and spray each other with their innards to prove who’s more fashionable. They bleed out. A waiter drags them into a reanimation booth…What is the role of Gary, Indiana? To supply citizens with a preview of Hell before the Big Plunge. Sprawling neoindustrial badlands—so ugly they’re beautiful. Further down the yella brick road: spatial anxiety…In Gary, Indiana, there are always Beetles’ songs in air. I mean the band before they grew long hair and got hooked on chronic and gin and juice…This is the arena in which subjects have wired their bodies to die in creative ways. Death as the end of creativity. Death as the only act of imagination after reality…Penetrate history. The deeper the thrust, the deeper the shit. But there are clearly demarcated signposts. One signpost reads:
THIS IS THE MOMENT IN TIME
WHERE POP AESTHETICS SWALLOWED/DIGESTED/MULCHED/VAPORIZED
THE ICONOGRAPHY OF HUMAN
RELATIONS/EXISTENCE/LANGUAGE/EXPERIENCE/
CONSCIOUSNESS
Other signposts note the birth of the sandwich, the midlife crisis of a haunted house, the death of Doktor Hermann Teufelsdröchk…Old age means too much memory, too many photo stills and movies crammed onto the un/pre/conscious mind’s screen. An old bastard needs to start from scratch, even if he may not want to. Remember the last days of reality? Heads spontaneously exploding on every street corner and rooftop? Celluloid oozed from the neck holes like the Beverly Hillbillies’ bubblin’ crude…
There is a sculpture of a man with a fist for a head that throws its voice from one knuckle to another. His arms dangle comfortably at his sides. He stands upright. He rises to a height of over 500 feet and houses thousands of tenants. Through the windows of his flesh—the windows that have not been painted black—the attentive viewer may behold a crossword puzzle of strange, muted sex acts. Who is this man?
Ekphrasis. Translation: representation. Translation: something that stands for something else.
Translation: code.
To name a code is to further encode a code. A code needs to be The Unnamable. The disappearance of identity and the self is the first step to decoding the code. The ensuing steps progress in an infinite regression.
Somewhere beyond the spacetime continuum, the actions of one man will contain the code of the postreal, postfuturistic, posthuman condition. That man will not be an everyman. Nor will he be a superman. Nor will the code that his actions contain be the stuff of legend.
1111
Untitled Prague Rejektion Letter
(on Marvin the Martian Letterhead)
[Address]
Dear Mr Anvil-in-Chief Vincent “Codename” Prague:
We have spoken to the producers of Cats in the Former Czech Republik and collectively decided to liquidate your position as Anvil-in-Chief. At your earliest convenience, please turn in your body to the nearest MAP way station for processing and (dis)integration. As of the present moment—i.e. the moment you lay eyes on this document (i.e. right now)—you no longer exist. Please do not mistake this abrupt transition to nonexistence as a figurative reality. I assure you that it is a literal reality. You are neither here nor there. We certainly do not know, acknowledge, or regard you as a person, robot, alien, black man, or inanimate object. Thus this letter does not exist because one cannot write something to a nonexistent person, etc.
On behalf of the MAP, we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your service, hard work, etc. Best of luck to you. Keep in touch!
Yours,
Ron
Commodore Ronald Rabelais
General Assistant Managerial Choreographer of Mortal Affairs
Department of Anthropologism
Ministry of Applied Pressure
Klamm Central
Slaughterhouse $#@%?*&!
P.O. Box •
City City, State 83
USAmerika
1517
The Death of Doktor Hermann Teufelsdröchk
“One day—I shall make all the universe wild and primitive! I shall destroy all the civilized planets![19]…Did I say that? Am I the man who said that thing? Or am I just a medium through which some liminal patriarch has articulated his ultimate desire? This makes sense. Nobody says shall anymore…But no. I am not a medium. I am a plagiarist. I am plagiarism incarnate.”
Dr Teufelsdröchk sprinkled a pinch of garlic salt on his tongue. He closed his mouth. The taste of the garlic salt slowly disappeared into his tongue-flesh as he reflected on and measured the content of his dialogue.
The Ugly and Untruth monsters lifted their guns and blew two holes in Dr Teufelsdröchk’s chest.
<<
[Another extended description of Dr T’s laboratory. Focus on various Spencer’s Gifts items (e.g. plasma spheres). Background melody: Freddy Mercury megamix or incidental music from Snoop Doggy Dogg’s “Doggy Dogg World.” Dr T = Rotwang ~ Loss of Hel + Failure to Become Top Chef. He hunches over a futuristic-looking gas range preparing comfort food. Enter Ugly and Untruth monsters. They startle him. Dress them like the assassins at the end of Kafka’s The Trial. Ref. the introductory paragraph to the last chapter, “The End”: “On the evening before K’s thirty-first birthday—it was about nine o’clock, the time when a hush falls on the streets—two men came to his lodging. In frock coats, pallid and plump, with top hats that were apparently irremovable” (223).]
“Where are my assistants?” said the doktor. He wore an old velvet robe with his initials stitched onto the lapel.
“Are we our brothers’ keepers?” said the monsters in unison.
“They’re not your brothers, Cain. They’re your makers. They’re your parents.”
“My father was an etc. etc. etc.,” said the Untruth monster. “Ergo:—” It ran a palm across its face and produced a vacant expression.
Dr Teufelsdröchk stirred a pan of chopped morels and scallions with a spatula, then added a bowl of shredded [???]. He worked the [???] around the pan…dash of spices…splash of white wine. He took a long sip from the bottle. “Gewürztraminer. Not a bad year. But I can tell that somebody has shit on the grapes. Just a hint of shit, mind you. But I can taste it. Never trust a German grape stomper.”
“We have com
e here to murder you,” said the Untruth monster.
“We have come here to murder you,” repeated the Ugly monster.
“Where are my assistants?” repeated the doktor.
[Smartassed remark here that rivals the tone of Billy Zane’s ultrabourgeois alpha male in Titanic.]
Dr Teufelsdröchk turned around. He loosened his robe and exposed himself. “Very well.” [Image of Leo DiCaprio whooping at the fore of the ship.] “So my beloved Truth and Beauty have effekted greener pastures. God bless them.”
The assistant monsters traded vacant expressions.
[Repeat the first three paragraphs of the chapter.]
“Ah, that hurts me, sirs,” said Dr Teufelsdröchk in a detached French accent. “Well. You got me, as they say. There’s certainly no question about it. Indeed no.” Dull red mud emptied from the wounds in a stream of claymation. He made no effort to plug them. “It’s better this way. I am not an old man. But I have never wanted to be an old man. Thank you dearly for fulfilling my wildest desire. Ha!” He looked at his wounds and outlined them with trembling fingers. His robe slipped off his shoulders.
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