Dyscountopia

by Niccolo Grovinci

  DR. ZAYUS: I see. Go on.

  ALBERT: Well, I figured I must have ended up in a different solar system. I couldn’t figure out how – I don’t know a lot about space travel, but I know it takes a long, long time to get anywhere. But there’s a perfectly plausible explanation. It all became clear to me, after I crash landed on the planet Pog.

  DR. ZAYUS: …of course.

  ALBERT: So, I’m floating around inside my space capsule, still pretty shocked by the whole thing, looking at that red sun – and then I start to wonder. Am I still hurtling through space at a thousand miles per hour? Or am I just drifting? I’m in space, so it’s hard to tell. Then I see something outside my porthole. It’s a little green dot, just ahead, the only thing I see anywhere around me except for stars and that sun. The dot keeps getting bigger and bigger and pretty quickly I start to realize that it’s moving toward me. Only it isn’t moving toward me, at all, you see. I’m moving toward it. It’s another planet, and I’m headed right for it. Of course I wasn’t very excited about it at the time. I was pretty sure I’d splatter on its surface like a bug on a windshield or, even if I didn’t, that I’d get there and find that there was nothing to breath but poisonous gas. But I was wrong about that….

  DR. ZAYUS: This … really crazy shit….. write a whole paper on this wacko….

  ALBERT: What?

  DR. ZAYUS: Nothing. I talk to myself when I take notes. Keep going.

  ALBERT: Well, like I was saying, it turns out that the atmosphere on Pog is mostly oxygen, and I hit the surface at a good angle in a soft, grassy prairie, which I can’t take any credit for, since I wasn’t really steering. Still, I must have carved a trench at least a mile long. I lost consciousness again on impact – by that time I had an enormous headache -- and I didn’t wake up until I heard knocking on the capsule door. Good thing I was wearing my safety belt.

  DR. ZAYUS: Wait – you said you heard knocking?

  ALBERT: Yes. Lucy was knocking.

  DR. ZAYUS: No shit? Who’s Lucy?

  ALBERT: I’m getting to that. Like I said, I heard knocking, and when I looked out through the porthole I saw a small, furry face with whiskers, like a sea otter or a prairie dog. I don’t know if I mentioned it, but there wasn’t a handle on the inside of the capsule door, so I was pretty much trapped. But the door suddenly opened and the fresh oxygen poured in, and I realized that the creature outside opened it. Now I could see that the creature looked exactly like a prairie dog, from the tip of her twitchy nose to the end of her fuzzy little tail. I immediately thought that she must be somehow related to Earth prairie dogs, but it turns out it’s all just a big cosmic coincidence. Pogs are entirely indigenous to the planet Pog.

  DR. ZAYUS: Naturally…

  ALBERT: Well, the first thing she said to me was, “Ooobie ooobie goo?” which was complete gibberish to me. And I just stood there looking at her with my jaw hanging open. She had a really pretty coat of fur, too; honey blonde and real immaculate – you could tell she took care of it. Anyway, the next thing she tried saying to me was, “Geeebrak toobrak garoo,” which also, of course, didn’t register.

  So I said, “Hello, my name is Albert Zim of Omega-Mart.” And that didn’t seem quite enough for man’s first historic encounter with an extraterrestrial, so I added, “Take me to your leader.” Kinda dumb, I know, but it seemed like the right thing at the time. And then you know what she said? She said, in perfect Chinese this time, “Hello Babbert Zim. My name is Lucy. Lucy with a ‘Y’, and I welcome you to the planet Pog. Care for a gooma smoothie?”

  Of course, I didn’t know anything about gooma fruits at the time, so I took what she offered me, a slushy little beverage served in half a giant nut shell, and I took a great big gulp. It turned out to be a mistake, because gooma fruit is a powerful, powerful hallucinogen. I was completely convinced that my body had exploded into a million molecules and reassembled into a kangaroo. It gets a little hazy from there, but I remember bounding out of my space capsule, picking up what I thought was my baby and sticking her into my pouch, then hopping like mad through the prairie with the little joey giggling like crazy against my stomach. I woke up three days later in a hole with Lucy down the front of my pants.

  DR. ZAYUS: Man, I’ve been there….

  ALBERT: And I was entirely surrounded by Pogs now. They were all around me, huddled inside my jacket, under my armpits, up my sleeves, all sleeping soundly – purring, kind of. Which was strange, because I could see the red sun out through the top of the hole, and it was well past noon. I eventually learned that Pogs are very lethargic creatures. Their metabolism can really accelerate when they’re interested in something, but most of the time they’re asleep, and they only wake up two or three times a day to chase their tails and eat massive quantities of gooma.

  What’s more, Pogs lack any desire to innovate or to improve on themselves. They have absolutely no technology, they don’t read or write, and they really don’t have any formal language. But they’re innately clever, you see. Extremely clever, on a level that you and I can’t even begin to understand. Every day, each one of them makes up their own language, an entire language with nouns and verbs and predicates and what-have-you, and they just start speaking it. And everyone understands them perfectly after hearing only three words. Just three words. Because Pogs can triangulate any language. After hearing three words, they’re instantly able to speak and understand it. That’s why, after I greeted her, Lucy could speak such good Chinese.

  Over the next several weeks, I watched the Pogs carefully and learned everything I could about them. We had long conversations about art and music and physics and biology; each one of them was like a walking encyclopedia on any subject you can imagine, even though I’d never seen one paint a picture, or do any kind of scientific calculation. They just had a natural ability to figure things out very quickly. And they also had this way of, just when you were in the middle of a sentence, standing up on their hind legs and looking around, like they thought something might be sneaking up on them at any moment; which was a ridiculous notion because there weren’t any predators on the planet Pog – the Pogs were the only living things there apart from gooma trees. I found that kind of behavior distracting at first, but I got used to it. I don’t think they even knew they were doing it.

  Well, the Pogs took to me very quickly. They were always eager to talk to me and snuggle up next to me and tell me how wonderful they thought I was. They seemed to genuinely love me after only knowing me a few days. Then Lucy explained to me why – I was the only one tall enough to reach the tallest branches of the gooma trees, where all of the biggest and best fruits were, and that made me immensely popular. Also, in comparison to the average Pog, I generated an enormous amount of body warmth, something highly sought after in their nap-centered society. As far as the gooma trees went, I asked Lucy why the Pogs never bothered to build a ladder – it was an easy enough thing for their clever brains to figure out. Every time I suggested it, she said that maybe they would do it tomorrow, but they never did.

  The more I talked to Lucy, the more I learned about the Pog concept of love. You see, the amount that people love you in a Pog community is directly related to how much you contribute to the collective. The ones who can make you laugh or tell a good story are the most loved, while the ones who are only good for holding your basket while you pick gooma fruit, or for saving your napping spot when you get up to pee, are loved quite a bit less. They have unconditional love too, of course, but it’s viewed in much the opposite way as it is here on Omega-Mart. On Omega-Mart, unconditional love is the purest form of love, you might say, like the love a mother has for her child. But on Pog, unconditional love is the most common sort of love, even a bit pathetic – the kind of love you get if you’re not much good for anything else.

  There’s also the kind of love you have between a male Pog and a female Pog, but I never learned a lot about that. Sure, I spent a lot of time with Lucy, and we had a lot of great conversations. I’ll bet no
t a single moment went by that we weren’t doing something together, either napping side-by-side or sharing gooma fruits (something I learned to eat slowly and sparingly). But, at the end of the day, Lucy and I both knew that nothing could work out between us. After all, I was married, and as far as Lucy was concerned, I lacked the appropriate scent glands to make me a viable mate.

  Even so, those were wonderful weeks spent on Pog, sitting quietly and watching the red sunsets, taking naps that lasted six hours or more, and eating small, regular portions of hallucinogenic fruit. I began to consider myself lucky after the whole shock of being fired wore off, and I was honestly content to live out my remaining years amongst the Pogs. Then, one day, I was sitting on a hill, holding Lucy’s hand and watching the last crimson sliver of the sun disappear beneath the prairie, and I felt an overwhelming sense of peace wash over me. I felt for a moment that my mind had left my body, that I was floating over the land on a blanket of clouds. It felt like freedom. Pure freedom. Freedom from anxiety. Freedom from doubt. Freedom from responsibility.

  And then it hit me – God’s Plan. The Meaning of Life. The Blueprint of the Universe. It had been there in my brain all along, rattling around, but I’d never been able to tune it in until that exact moment. It was like a tiny little radio antenna was activated in my mind; one that wasn’t getting a strong signal before, but, now that I was on Pog, was finally receiving the message loud and clear. In that moment, Doctor, I knew everything. Everything that was, everything that is, everything that will be. I finally understood. Truly and completely. And that’s when I realized I had to go back to Omega-Mart, to share that message with all humankind.

  So, after that, it didn’t take me long to get back here on the roof. The Pogs were extremely helpful about fixing my space capsule, after I bribed them with the large gooma fruits from the highest tree branches, and they easily figured out the exact trajectory to fire me back into space so that I could return to the spot I’d left from. It seems that I’d traveled through some kind of time-space flux, or rift, or something – a hole in outer space that made immediate travel possible between our two worlds. The Pogs said it was a one in a trillion chance that I hit it on my way over, but now that they knew where it was they wouldn’t have any trouble firing me back through. Can’t remember all the details, but they made it sound simple enough. Like I said, they were clever.

  Anyway, it was an awkward farewell, because there are at least 1000 words in any given Pog language for ‘nap’, but not a single word for ‘good-bye’. The closest I could come to was ‘see you later’, so they’re probably still waiting for me to come back.

  I built them a little ladder out of gooma branches before I left, so that they could still get the high fruits after I was gone – they really seemed to like that. Then I crawled inside the space capsule and they fired me back through the rift. And here I am, easy as pie.” END OF INTERVIEW

  DOCTOR’S NOTE: FURTHER OBSERVATION REQUIRED BEFORE FINAL DIAGNOSIS. PRELIMINARY PATIENT ASSESSMENT – NUTTY AS A SQUIRREL.

  ****

  Albert sat waiting for the Doctor to say something. “Well?”

  “........” The Doctor stared back at him.

  “Well!?”

  Zayus flipped erratically through his notes, awkwardly clearing his throat. “Ummm… okay, lemme see – what happened after the voices told you to leave this planet … er … Pog?”

  Albert shook his head. “There weren’t any voices.”

  The Doctor scratched his chin. “Hmmm…. Interesting. What happened to them?”

  “To what?”

  “The voices.”

  “There never were any voices,” Albert shouted. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?”

  The Doctor’s face turned gravely serious. “Yes, I have been listening, Albert. And it’s very clear what’s going on here – you have deep sexual feelings for your mother.”

  “What?!?!”

  The Doctor smiled. “Heh-heh, I’m just screwing with you, Zim. This isn’t about your mother. Not really. Your problem goes a lot deeper than that. You’re probably schizophrenic or something. That’s real bad shit, Zim. Real bad shit.”

  Albert leapt up from his chair. “I’m not crazy. I saw what I saw and I went where I went.”

  “Nobody’s saying you’re crazy, Zim,” the Doctor assured him. “But the mind can play funny tricks on you. This one time, when I was on peyote, I swore that I was Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, and I was magically transported back in time where I had to sit through the entire play, Our American Cousin, on Honest Abe’s head, all the while knowing he was gonna be shot – and I couldn’t do a thing about it because I was just a fuckin’ hat. Let me tell you, Zim. Three hours of hell.”

  Albert shook his head. “What’s wrong with you? Haven’t you been listening at all? I’m not talking about three hours of sitting on a dead president’s head. I was up there for months – you said so yourself. Where do you think I was?”

  The Doctor shrugged. “I dunno. Floating around unconscious in space?”

  “Without any food or water?”

  The Doctor considered Albert’s ample stomach. “I’m starting to see your point.”

  “Look,” said Albert sternly. “I have a message for the people of Omega-Mart, an important message, and I have to get back down there, and you have to help me!”

  The Doctor looked doubtful.

  “You promised!”

  Albert’s gaze bore a hole into the Doctor’s forehead as the other man shifted uncomfortably, trying to avoid eye contact. But Albert refused to waver.

  The Doctor sighed. “Alright, Zim. I might be a shrink but I enjoy a good hallucination as much as anybody. Go ahead and indulge your delusions.”

  “You’ll help me?”

  The Doctor nodded reluctantly.

  “Then how do we get back inside?”

  The Doctor shrugged. “Secret passageway.”

  “Bullshit.” Albert searched the Doctor’s face. It showed no hint of humor. “Seriously?”

  “Serious as a heart-attack,” the Doctor replied. “Not many know about it – but I know people who know people who know things. Know what I mean?”

  Albert nodded.

  “But I can’t just skip out like that.” The Doctor attempted to snap his fingers and failed. “I have things to take care of – business associates that rely on me. I can’t just leave them in the lurch. Preparations have to be made.” He lifted the flap of his hut. “Now, I have a very important meeting with a very important man, and I’m already late. Make yourself at home until I get back.” He paused. “Come to think of it, why don’t you come along? Maybe you’ll learn something.”

  Outside, the sun had risen higher overhead, and the aroma of the baking streets spiked Albert in the face like a volleyball. Rooftown had clearly been designed with no care for drainage or sewage, a fact that immediately occurred to him as he tread through a pile of filth that brought on dry heaves. He searched frantically for a clean spot to scrape his shoe and, finding none, hurried to catch up with the Doctor, who was now a good distance ahead of him.

  “Who are we going to see?” he asked, jogging to the doctor’s shoulder.

  “Eh? Oh, nobody you’d know – just a friend. Have to make a quick transaction. Won’t take any time at all.”

  The Doctor was barely listening to Albert, deeply engrossed in a small paper book that he’d produced from his back pocket. He never looked up, but never faltered as he meandered through the city’s narrow streets, navigating from memory, using some bat-like sense to avoid collision with oncoming foot traffic. The painstaking scrutiny with which the Doctor studied the book made Albert feel suddenly alone. And jealous, as if the Doctor had abandoned him for a new best friend.

  “What sort of book is that?” he asked.

  “Huh? Postelwaithe’s,” Dr. Zayus grunted, licked his index finger and flipped the page.

  “Whose?”

  “Postelwaithe’s Guide.”<
br />
  “Oh, I see.” It was clear that the strain of walking and reading was more than enough to occupy the Doctor’s brain, and that he was in no need of distraction, but Albert couldn’t help asking, “Guide to what?”

  The Doctor realized with grudging acceptance that Albert wouldn’t be ignored, and that, like a curious child, he would have to be placated with some answers. He stopped in his tracks

  “This,” said the Doctor, flapping the book in his face. “Is Postelwaithe’s Guide to Nearly Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Nearly,” said the Doctor. “This may come as a surprise to your civilized sensibilities, Zim, but there isn’t any currency on the roof. All those dollars in your pocket are useless, just so much toilet paper. But on the roof, everything is worth something, especially toilet paper. Which is actually pretty hard to find. So maybe those dollars are worth something….”

  The Doctor seemed to have faded into a trance.

  “Postelwaithe’s Guide?” Albert prompted.

  “Hmmmm? Oh, yes. Everything on the roof is worth something, Zim, and everything can be bartered for something else, assuming you have enough of them. See, here.” He pointed at a random page. “Five broken axe handles can be traded for one wheel-barrow, minus the wheel, which can in turn be swapped for one medium-sized, slightly used party piñata, which is exactly equivalent in value, more or less, to half a loaf of moldy wheat bread. It’s all here, in the Guide. See?”

  Albert squinted at the page. “But it’s all just junk.”

  “Right,” snorted the Doctor. “Junk. I see. Well, try smearing a little peanut butter on those dollars and eating them, why don’t you, Zim? Or better yet, try filling them with candy and bringing them to your kid’s birthday party, letting him whack them around with a broken axe handle, and see what kind of thrill he gets.” The Doctor stuffed the book back into his back pocket and pushed on.