“It helps me get by.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Look. For example—”
The Cathead cuts him off, “Who was that just walked by?”
She snakes her head around to look. The crowd has been ebbing and flowing behind them.
“What do you mean who was that just walked by?”
“I know that someone walked by.”
“Weren’t you looking?”
“No, you were looking.”
“So how could you know someone passed by?”
“I felt our heart beating faster.” The Cathead emphasizes the point by slapping their chest.
“Nonsense.”
“You can’t fool me. It was the rabbit, wasn’t it?”
“Of course not.”
“Who are you trying to play? Our pulse quickens every time Maphroditee walks by.”
“Well, maybe you’re the one who likes hem.”
“Of course I’m not the one who likes hem. Clear as water. If I’m looking out the gap in the tent, and Maphro walks by, nothing happens, but whenever you see hem, next thing I know our ass banjo plucks off its cobwebs and stirs to life.”
“I deny this bark—bark—barkusation.”
“Another thing. This refusal to masturbate you have. It’s evil not to masturbate.”
“How do you know that?”
“Fact. From the old brain cells,” the Cathead says, tapping her head for emphasis.
“I don’t trust your brain cells.”
“Well, since there is no longer a history of right and wrong, you are just going to have to.”
“How do you know what truth is when there is nothing written down to tell you?” asks the Doghead, pointing his finger at Cathead’s face.
“While I agree with your underlying premise that if we found a written sheaf of historical writing it would, by definition, be true. However, since we have none to introspect, the sole alternative we have, which you neglect, which we have, is our intuition. Our instinct.”
“What then when intuitions disagree?”
“What, disagree?”
“Yes. Disagree,” the Doghead says with a significant nod.
“Well, that’s an unfortunate set of circumstances, but in those cases a battle of the wills occurs and the one more powerful wins.”
“More powerful, eh?”
“Yes, the one who controls the facts, the story.”
“The one who is physically stronger.”
“Indeed, like us.”
“That’s right, and I’m stronger, so when intuitions disagree, I decide.”
“Well, it’s not fair.”
“I don’t care about fair. I call the shots.”
“This non-masturbation, this is driving me CRAZY!”
“Tough. I won’t allow it.”
“Frightened little power monger.”
“Shut up or I’ll slap you.”
The Doghead-side hand lifts up, palm toward the Cathead for a slap, but it’s shaking.
“You slap me, and you’ll feel it, and you know it,” declares the Cathead.
“Well, that’s fine, but less than you will.”
Their hand drops.
“What I don’t understand is why you don’t just invite hem to have sex with us. I mean, certainly Maphro would have sex with anything that moves. Or doesn’t move, for that matter.”
“I can’t.”
“Why the witch not?”
“Because they’d be your genitals, of course.”
“They’re your genitals, too, you know.”
“Well, I know that, but the idea of you getting as much pleasure from it as I do destroys the intimacy of the experience,” says the Doghead petulantly.
“Firstly, if you’re looking for intimacy, you’re barking up the wrong penis-vagina. Secondarily, we excrete out of the same bunghole, so what kind of intimacy could you possibly be looking for? Meow be honest. Maphro’s not my type. You know I’m strictly a vagina man. I don’t mind a penis every once in a while, but that penis is a dollop too significant for my taste. In addition, my lovers need to have it up here”—the left hand taps the Cathead’s forehead—“not just down here,” points at their crotch.
I notice they’re wearing black shorts with a small red pocket in the front.
“What are you going on about? You’ve never had a penis or a vagina,” snorts the Doghead.
“Certainly I have. In my dreameows. However, that’s not the point. The point is, I’d be willing to put up with the gargantuan penis and hyperactive vagina for your satisfaction, despite the fact … that hem … has the brain … of a tent peg!”
“Oh, well, that’s awfully Pure of you, but no thanks. I’ll wait ’til G’Nesh separates us.”
“Is that so? ROWR do you know the witch will separate us?”
“The witch gets bored after a while and switches kinkers around to create new acts. Every time we cycle through the towns.”
“That may be true, but how do you know that the witch won’t change Maphro at the same time and make hem different? And you different so you don’t even want hem anymore.”
“Well, if that happens … I won’t want hem anymore so it will be okay.”
“But you will have missed your chance!”
“So?”
“I don’t understand what holds you back,” says the Cathead, their left hand clenching and unclenching in frustration.
“My moral principals.”
“By the witch, man. I cannot believe you haven’t abandoned those relics by now. Do you know how much fun they’ve kept us from having?”
“My moral principals have kept me from choking the life out of you.”
“Now, well, that’s not moral principals, that’s just common courtesy. I mean, you can’t go around murdering other creatures. It’s just rude. And besides, if you killed me, that would be suicide and you know it.”
“I do what I think is right.”
“You do what you want, to get what you want.”
“No I don’t.”
“You’re just scared of freedom. You’re just worried about losing control. You want conformity, fixity … immortality. What you’re afraid of is death, that’s why you won’t masturbate,” says the Cathead with a firm nod.
“Just shut up. You know I can stop you from touching our penis if I want to.”
“You think I like being stuck with you? You’re stubborn and afraid. The witch surely spent a lot more time on my brain than yours.”
“And how do you explain that difference?”
“Genetic, ah you win. We were created like this. You are a congenitally ignorant asshole, and I’m an intellectual wimp.”
The right hand goes for the Cathead but seizes mid-swipe. A titanic inner struggle occurs. They bite down, scrunch up their faces.
“Rrrrrrr … you … meow … woof … rrrrrr … fssss.” And they’re rolling around in a cloud of arms and legs, a ball of teeth and claws. “Ow, ow, ow.” And it’s over, them wheezing on the floor.
“Check, please,” I mutter to myself.
“Mess yer, moe your billy appendates this-a-way. Yonder hither. They’ll be busy momentillo.”
The tortoise was speaking to me. His long, agéd neck juts toward me, veins ridged. His little turtle beak moves as if he’s chewing air.
“Sit. Sit. Join us,” he says. I walk to the table between Fennec Boy and Dolphzee. “Pull up a stool.”
I do. My legs feel an incredible rush of relief. Forgot the feeling of resting.
“Thank you for sitting with us. So fragile. I see that in you.” His eyes are clear black circles rimmed in gold. My stomach growls.
“Hunger? Hum, let’s see, fishgrass down there.” He gestures to a gilded trough with juicy tubular plants in it. “Yes, lubricious-ligamental gluten plants, a handful by gumming.”
I hesitate.
“Go aheadward. Anywho.”
I go to it and shove as many as I can into my mouth.
I take two handfuls back to the table and ask, “What do you do here?” while stuffing my face.
“In the Zirk?”
“Yes.”
“I’m juggled.”
“Oh.”
“One of eight.”
“Oh.”
“And your bodice? How does it integrate into said establishmentarianism?”
His mouth. His small mouth. It shouldn’t be opening and closing with words coming out. I’m standing before a small table glowing white. To my left, a ginger-furred fox with big ears and a human body sits cross-legged on a stool. To my right, a creature with a blue-grey dolphin’s body and an impeccable chimpanzee head (thin lips pursed as if for a smooch) stands on caterpillar legs across a stool and half the table. In the background: beings posed like brightly colored plastic action figures from the collection of a mad child scientist. The turtle’s little open mouth: an iota, a punctuation mark that sucks my thoughts into the opening; my brain shrinks, then expands into a new and delirious place. His mouth closes.
I can speak now. “Eh, well, I don’t seem to have a place. I’m waiting to find out. I’m not sure what I’m doing here, I might be looking for a woman who can fly that might hold the key to my past. She might remember me better than I do. I’m hoping. But … that could also be wishful thinking. Being in this room. Right now. I feel … a whole lot safer than I have in as long as I can … I have memories, maybe memories … impressions of things that may or may not have happened to me. And many of them are frightening.”
“Ah, yes. The vagaries ad memoriam. I’ve pondered many imponderables here, young blunderbuss. Wondered about the beeg peekture of exit tense. What tare the curves, the forces that shape our exist stance? We?” Oui.
He flips up, landing so that his rear feet and the lower rim of his shell hold him upright like a tripod. He rubs his two little hands together in front of his vulnerable chest.
“I ponder if there is a past, and if so what of it? I think these things because I am very lucky. I need so little. Food, water. Therefore, I can spend most of my time thinking. I myself have some confabulous stories. One particular tale to tell you peripatactically. I’ve dubbed it the Story of Cremation, and so mote it be. Would you care to in-one, out-one?”
“Sure?”
“Let us visit the imaginarium. Picture a family of hums. I play one o’ dem. Our days were spent working and eating. Periodically, the male master edufacted us with a Videx nomenclated The Cliff. Ex-sample: Wealth is a blessing for the desserting, and the poor are prone to the animals. And: Leap off The Cliff in your hearts, which seems like nonsensification because the heart is muscle. But you don’t scat back to the one that supplies comestibles perspecially when you’re mid-War as was so. Each nation babbling to achieve chromosuperiority by advancing genechnology. Unleash the chromospears on the unleashed, perfect the form at home, and sling weapons of mass conversion to stupefy those in terrorist A-bomb-nations. The Cliff said animalia serve man, so once you’re crossed, yer crossed off. Rehabibliotation is not in the notebook. Staying Pure is man-daughtery, dah cur, to be heavened parce que animals got nae soul, ah, tee, doe. I didn’t think this was nice, but I didn’t say anything, edible resources being necessories and so forth. Subsequently my clearest rememorabilia: a news-head in the room, our male master there on the couch, the back of his head obscured by the projection, and the news-head he regrets to report that some of the damnéd terrorist half-breeds had infiltrated codebombs concurrently and responded in kindness tumultaneously. I stepped closer, scrutinizing the back of my master’s head and realizing what I was seeing (hypodermically) was shrinking into itself, wrinkling, turning grey, hair disappearing, his back swelling; the clock turned counterclockwise, my master turned his head clockwise, eyes bulging and charybdis in their sockets hooded in grey, his nose just a hole and his mouth a grey beak, open and shut, open and shut, click click click. Vellicating and sibilant, I fell down, my body overwhelms me, and I pull my legs and head inside. It was dark, and I ger-shnapped.” He snapped two tiny fingers, meaning vanished?
“Is that what actually happened to you? I have no story to tell except … incoherence. I need a story. Is it too late? What if it’s not true?”
“’Tis a story amongst googols.” He gestures toward Fenny and Dolphzee, “Avec mes amis, I have been pontificabulating about history’s erasure. Factules replaced by opinion-haze. Convincercize yoself. Perpetuate yer mythogontologies. Does it satisfy? Feel right in your poin garden? Consequences con not be adjudicated by the past so the prop up gander wins as the most herd rhetoric. It comes down to repetition. Thoughts are energy that sum based on amplitude and frequency. Bigger and oftener wins the mindgame.”
“What’s that got to do with—is that connected to how civilization got so fucked? Is magic real?”
“Fucked. That’s a repeat theme. How do you critique lust? I’m not babulating vis-à-vis morality. What I wonder is, is lust complete shrivelscorch? Pusillanimous obsessionale brainwashery? Do you commodify?”
“Eh.”
“Sort it, I’m perambulating about the objectification of lust vis-à-vis desire. ’Tis one forktangular of desire, which is the root of suffering. Supplementally, starvation rules out peace. Desires and starvation. By my definition. In addition, torture. Desires. Starvation. And torture. What think you?”
What do I think? Shit. It’s all shit. Lust. Does lust control me? Not constantly. Only when I … meet attractive living things. Or when they aren’t around. Meh.
“I haven’t thought about it … that I can say. Lust seems … somehow … like it’s desirable. I used the word ‘desirable.’ Uhh. I guess … I feel like … if I imagine myself in calmer circumstances, I want to be lusted after more than I want … I want to be the object, not the subject. If that makes sense. But … uhm … okay … how about … if nothing is hurt then lust isn’t wrong?” My voice has risen a little in volume.
“Let us hypotenusize. What if there was ala modality to separate lust from desire, hipso fuckto … make lust life giving?” he asks pensively. “But I wonder … suffering is life,” rubbing his hands again and interlacing his fingers across his flat, burnt-orange plastron. “Certainly, but suffering can be induced, hmmh.”
What if lust were … the desire to connect? “What if,” I’m saying, “to unite with any existing thing other than your self, it’s, uh … a metaphor … an attempt to connect?”
“Or the delusion of. Well, well. A thought afield. Yet I remain skeptical. Desire not to be alone, i.e.g. the desire to avoid suffering is what drives the jackdaws out there, the merciless, desperate to avoid suffering, they climb higher ever fearful of a slapdash down. How are your gustables?”
“Uh. It’s pretty good. I’m glad to eat.” Filling, tasty, chewy blandness. Like soft white cheese.
“Good. I could see you were hunger possessed. I have a string theo-ary relevant to our discussion.”
“Uh, okay. Go ahead.”
“Ahem. My Emotional String Theo-ary. Every emotional interaction transmits a string of Emotive Particles to and fro. Forces that drive it are curled up in other dimensions like cats that scratch through the surface. Present but invisible. Fur of reality.
“There are three emotional fields. The gravity of desire. The strong force of love. The electromagnetique force of fear. Desire is autonomatically attractive, requires the bringing of another into one’s orbit. Fear is both attractive and repulsive, driving objects apart or together. Currently (and I use that term ectomagnetically), the global forces of fear and desire are macrotically powerful, while the exclusionary force of love functions over subtle distances enclosing limited bodies. How do you do, good, sir? Accordion, to pluck the strings in the fourth through tenth and possibly eleventieth dimensions would alter the rules of emotiodynamics. So we play this upper-dimensional string and alter the force of emotion. Do you have any idea how to do that?”
Othe
r dimensions. “Uh. No. Take drugs?”
Turtleneck claps his hands. “You have heard this before?”
“I was just guessing. But … I think I can say categorically … that drugs can do just about anything.”
“Mayhap!” He was excited now. “I will suggest, you see, that the equation is reflexive, reflective on itself. Thus conscious. Thus, to alter the emotions themselves will tug on the curled-up dimensions of emotional laws and alliteratively alter the laws of the emoti-verse. After all, in the higher dimensions, all thoughtspace is connected. Thus, what we can do is expand the compass of love and compassion—as they become stronger and broader, they will make fear and desire insignificant.”
“Thinker,” Fenney raises his hand, and Thinker nods. “Howz we expand these forces?”
“Ah, a key and vital gluten. And the simpleton answers. Most beings exertize love-compassion minutely toward those who support them, a genetic cohabitatant, or their troupe, individual results may vary. We need to expand our radius of love-compassion. Ourselves, our lovers, our show partners and workers, catapult into the audience, the cities—seek out beings that we don’t know to express love-compassion for them, with them. But we fight against forces that pull us inward. So. The mind can be expanded via certain psychedelica that have the ability to smash your ’ighness, along with—” I-ness? “—a regimen of mediotation, the reaction is irresistible, and the emotional strings will syncopate toward a harmonic conjugation.”
“I shink yr sheery holds vater,” replies Dolphzee, moving his feet up and down.
“Yes. Yes, it does. Yes,” says Fennec Boy.
“Listen, excuse me, but … I’m really thirsty. I gotta—”
“Go to Sarasephi at the bar. She’ll provide you an excellent beverage.”
“Okay, thanks.”
As I turn, he says, “Let us begin.”
I step toward the bar through a profusion of oddly shaped limbs and dangling modifiers. Flab and muscle, feathers and fur and bark, dense and distended, dull grey to vibrant red. The four-armed goddess is cleaning: holding up one mug, spraying down the inside of it, holding up another mug, rubbing the inside with a rag; her attention is on her work, and she doesn’t look up when I approach. I hesitate, dazzled by her. She is tall. Her eyelashes long and black, her skin butterscotch and radiant; around each of her muscular arms is a metal armband of a snake swallowing its own tail.
A Greater Monster Page 20