Codename Prague
Page 16
The assistant monsters shot him again. One shot hit him in the navel and his stomach and intestines sprayed out of his back onto the cooking range. The other shot blew off half of his head.
Dr Teufelsdröchk didn’t fall down. He sort of marched in place, gesticulating with the spatula and making crude choking noises. An eyeball hung onto his cheek like a dead treefrog. Again and again he tried to push the eyeball back into its socket with his free hand. But the socket wasn’t there.
[Continue to describe the gory details of Dr T’s murder. The assistant monsters shoot him a few more times. Finally Dr T falls onto the range and catches fire. The fire spreads throughout the kitchen, etc. FINAL MISE EN SCÈNE: The assistant monsters exit the smoking entrance of Dr T’s “lair,” amble across a vast prairie and vanish into a distant bed of sunflowers.]
[19] From “Lepus and the Colliding Planets featuring Buzz Crandall of the Space Patrol,” by Fletcher Hanks (as Bob Jordan), Planet Comics, Issue 7, 1940. Dialogue spoken by a lava-skinned madman known as “Lepus the Fiend” from “his scientific stronghold on an undiscovered star.”
66.799
The Nowhere Incident
Nobody seemed to know who Vincent Prague was anymore. Nobody had asked him for an autograph in…how long? So long he had almost forgotten his name. He touched his face to make sure he wasn’t wearing a mask.
He recalled the incident that made him famous…
[FLASHBACK: Dialogue between CNP and The Nowhere Man (TNM). Prelude to the climactic/originary scikungfi fight in the novel.]
[TNM as a distant relative of Mister Nobody (see pg. 208 of The DC Comics Encyclopedia). Explain…TNM has the unique ability to exist nowhere and everywhere at once, i.e., he can project his psyche (nowhere) onto the spatial plane of reality (everywhere)…TNM as a wax figure (see 2nd entry in Passagenwerk chapter). Whenever he appears, speaks, etc., there is a dull screeching sound in the background…Show how CNP’s preoccupation with the impossibility of the assassination of TNM pathologizes him. He is haunted by TNM’s semiotic ghost.]
They discussed the possibility of chess to settle the score. Then they discarded the idea. Both Prague and The Nowhere Man could see thousands of moves into the future. They might be playing for years.
[FIGHT: Each martial artist brandishes a flashy sci-fi weapon, says he doesn’t need it, and tosses it aside. They do this for hours before engaging in hand-to-hand combat, which only lasts for half a minute before they revert to weaponry. Long stylized scikungfi battle. At one point TNM dares CNP to fight him with a savage, large-breasted woman slung over his shoulder. He returns the dare. The fight continues…pause. The combatants retire to the bushes. They emerge twenty or so minutes later smoking cigars. Resume fight…Then, unexpectedly, CNP beats TNM via a strong grip on TNM’s wrist (ref. Beowulf)…How does TNM die?]
[Metanarrational elements. Something about science fiction. Mention Gernsback and/or Campbell?]
[How do I account for the chapter being a negative number?]
[Cram chapter with authorial notes in brackets. And yet keep the chapter under 500 words.]
[End w/anecdotal fragment: “In an alternate diegesis, CNP was a town crier, which is to say, he was the only person in the town who could cry because everybody else’s tear ducts had dried out. He stood in the town square, weeping, and the villagers worshipped his false sorrow like a true deity…]
#
Codename Prague
Commodore Rabelais faded onto the screen in monochrome stop-motion animation. He stood in his office with hands folded. Behind him, beside him—the corpses of SAMSAs and janitors.
“Narrative of the Life of Codename Prague,” he said. “There should have been more sex scenes in this narrative. There was only one, by my reckoning. It was an anal sex scene, and that’s a step in the right direction. But it’s one measly step.”
Gray bolts of static moved up and down the screen. Prague rapped his knuckles against the console. The static disappeared, then came back twice as strong.
“Where the hell are you, Vinnie?” said Rabelais. “I can barely see you.”
“You know where I am. I’m in outer space. I’m in a spaceship. Zero gravity, motherfucker.” Prague’s voice echoed for miles, bouncing down the corridor of the unmanned freighter he had stowed away on. He didn’t know where the freighter was going. The nearest black hole, for all he cared. He needed a vacation. A terminal vacation. The Ides of Misanthropy commanded it. He had no hard feelings. Live long enough, and one of two things killed you: cancer or the hatred of mankind.
“I can see that much,” replied Rabelais as Prague floated onscreen, offscreen, onscreen, offscreen…
“What’s with the dead meat?”
Rabelais peered around the office. He stomped on a body that wouldn’t surrender its reflexes. “I ran out of androids. I’m waiting for the MAP to replenish my supply. Sometimes they take awhile. Elend ist ich. But it’s not the end of the world.”
Long pause. Prague floated counterclockwise until he was upside-down in the corridor. Rabelais smirked.
“One day,” Prague whispered, “I shall make all the universe wild and primitive. I shall destroy all the civilized planets.”[20]
“What? What? I can’t hear you.”
“I think I deserve an explanation.”
“Explanation? I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific, Vinnie. Spell it out for me. Treat me like a child.”
“I always do.” He closed his eyes, listening to the flow of Victory martini juice through his veins. If only he could afford Hammer blood. Things might have turned out differently…He opened his eyes. “Why did you torture me?”
“Torture you? The MAP tortures everybody, young man. Being employed by the MAP doesn’t exempt you from being abused by the MAP. That goes for any legitimate Amerikan bizwax. It’s common sense. How long have you been in space? How long have you been alone? Outer space and a lonesome dove—not a good combination.”
Prague put a gun to his head. “What was the purpose of my mission?”
“Purpose of your mission? That’s none of your business. That’s nobody’s business. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Tell me again.”
A SAMSA shuffled onscreen. He looked innocently at Prague, then at the stiffs, then at Rabelais. “You, uh, wanted to see me, sir?” he said.
Rabaleis jumped on the SAMSA and strangled him to death, screaming, “Let me strangle you! Let me strangle you! Let me strangle you!” The SAMSA let him.
Rabelais stood and brushed off his suit. He undid his tie and gripped each end. “The purpose of your mission was to send you on a wild goose chase,” he announced. “Period. At the same time, the purpose of your mission was not to send you on a wild goose chase, which is to say, your mission was to take certain premeditated actions that resulted in certain inevitable effekts. Either way the mission tells a story. In the end, that’s all that matters. That’s all people are interested in. Narrative. The fiction of everyday life.”
Prague floated rightside-up. He didn’t say anything. He pulled the trigger of the gun. Click…click…click…click…click…
“Fine. Be that way. Here is another ‘explanation.’” Cdre Rabelais paced back and forth, moving between sharp fits of slowtime and fasttime. He produced a kind of sign language that looked like the motions of a marionette puppeteer with his balls in a sling. Then he returned to a position of semi-attention. Static continued to garble the screens on both parties’ ends.
“Do you understand now?” said Rabelais.
…click…click…click…
The Commodore used thumbs and fingers to make an O-shape through which he peered at Prague with one eye. “What about now?”
…click…click…
“Most unfortunate. Well. Let me put it to you this way…It was revealed to the Ministry of Applied Pressure that you possessed a code capable of inciting the next evolutionary stage of postreal mankind. The MAP had been searching for t
his code for decades. We found it in your toilet one night on a routine check of your feces. We crack open everybody’s toilets, every night, and check their feces when they sleep. The code had never appeared in your physiology before. Was it something you ate? Had you been bitten by an alien or a vampire? Had you injected yourself with experimental cleaning products? No matter. There was the code. Now we had to unlock it.”
…click………click…
“Based on research performed by some of the top Phildickian minds in the Amerikanized world, we inserted you into carefully prescribed and constructed social and spatial matrices. It was hoped that over time your interaction within these matrices would release the code inside of you and set mankind on a new and improved track. Hence your visit to Prague, etc. That the names of these matrices coincided with your own name was as coincidental as it was inevitable. The MAP is still determining if the mission succeeded, failed, or both. Desire and the socius are still being assessed. There were setbacks. Cats and your sudden and irrational preoccupation with ekphrasis—we foresaw these eventualities with perfect clarity. And we knew you would chase that monster to Hong Kong. But some of your actions were completely unexpected. The postcard you purchased in Deutschtown, for instance. The breakfast you ate on your sixth day in Singapore. Losing your briefcase. Brushing your teeth for an extra sixteen seconds on the evening of August 14. The dream about the yak. A lethargic rate of blinking on at least four occasions. So forth. You truly baffled us, Vincent, especially when we discovered the multivalence of your code, or rather, your unbridled selfhood. Moreover, the utter randomness of your actions was a shock to the Department of Precognition and Mythopoetic Inscription; layoffs have been rampant since the proverbial sleeper has awakened. You know how it is. Our surveillance systems are four dimensional. We perceive every citizen as a spacetime worm—the slithering pathway of your life from birth to death. But no spacetime worm is an island. There are margins of error. Glitches and aberrations invariably crop up. We can see you and we know what you’ve done and what you’ll do…more or less. Sometimes a sound of thunder cracks open the sky and a butterfly effekt fucks everything up. What can I say? Chaos is a dirty bitch. In any event, I hope this brief exegesis has provided you with at least a modicum of comfort. Any chance you’ll come back to earth and turn yourself in for decognitive estrangement? The MAP would prefer to lick this plate clean. Rest assured, your code has been extracted and projected to the far corners of existence, but one likes to be sure that there are no residual kernels in the cornhusk. Some codes are like livers: leave a piece behind after you rip the sonofobitch out and it grows right back.”
Prague stopped firing the gun.
He let go of the gun and it floated away.
Cdre Rabelais nodded. “I didn’t think so. Well. I suppose if we really wanted you to come home, we’d zip out there and put you in a sack. But you’ve been through enough. For now.”
Crackle of static. Hum of turbines.
“My Ab-Crab® is dead,” blurted Prague. He pulled up his shirt.
“Yes,” said Rabelais.
“I’m going to let the corpse decompose inside of me.” He touched the soft brown skin of his stomach.
“That’s a good idea,” said Rabelais.
“Eventually the sordid flakes of the apparatus will disappear into my flesh.”
“Or you’ll crap it out. Everything comes out in the wash.”
Prague said, “Expletive.”
Rabelais clutched his chest and staggered backwards. He smiled. “Do you know what your problem is? Do you, Mr Prague? You’re too sane. Excessive sanity is not a handsome trait. Nor is it utilitarian. One’s psyche needs to be off kilter in order to survive and excel in this world. Pull that stick of logic and causality out of your ass. You’ll feel better. That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? You feel sad. You feel dejected and oppressed. Wildman. Nomad. You feel…human.”
“Sir, you wanted to see me?” Another SAMSA appeared. Rabelais set him on fire with a spray can and a Zippo. A gored janitor crawled from beneath a pile of bodies and started to clean the office. Screaming, Rabelais stomped on him…
The line went dead.
Prague kicked the screen away, then closed his eyes and let himself glide down the corridor as the freighter moved closer and closer to nowhere.
[20] See note 19.
CODENAME PRAGUE
About the Author
D. Harlan Wilson is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, literary critic, screenwriter, editor and English professor. Codename Prague marks the second installment of the scikungfi trilogy, the first of which is Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia, recipient of the Wonderland Book Award in 2008. Visit Wilson online at www.dharlanwilson.com and dharlanwilson.blogspot.com.