by Brian Hodge
Bobby's mind fragmented beneath the weight of all of this cyber-stimulation like a fumbled Faberge egg. A messenger boy with roller skates and mercury wings on his heels eyed Bobby warily from the far seat.
"I have a message. I have a message," the boy repeated.
"Get yourself a horse, message boy," Anansi heckled. "We get the message. You go get a life. Who are you staring at anyway?"
The messenger boy hastily looked in the other direction, still announcing his undelivered message.
"He doesn't have anything we need to hear," Anansi said. "He's the deliverer of lost e-mails, those messages that cannot get through, the bounced and the buggered and the hopelessly banned."
Anansi raised his head up from out of Bobby's shadow. "Hey bus driver, speed up a little bit."
Bobby blinked.
He couldn't understand what was going on.
"Do you know that one? I love the old classics." Anansi asked. "How about One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall?"
The bus began to move in reverse.
"Where are we going?" Bobby asked.
"We're just backing up. The bus has to do this every now and then in order to remember which way it was going."
"How is this helping Maggie?"
Bobby thought about Maggie as he said this. The thoughts passed quickly through his mind, a scamper of random impressions. He thought about her laugh. He thought about her eyes. He thought about her mouth.
"Shh, story man. How does anything help anybody? You're dead anyway, aren't you? Your blood has long been spilled out onto the blue-stained carpet of your blue-stained office. This entire experience is nothing more than a post-death delusion. What does it really matter what we do?"
Bobby listened, but he was thinking about having sex with his wife. It seemed the natural root after thinking about her laugh and her eyes and her mouth. A part of him was wondering if that would ever happen again. A part of him was worrying about her. And another part of him was swinging his club and dreaming of the cave and just enjoying the fantasy ride.
"Oh hell," Anansi said. "You're thinking about sex, aren't you?"
Bobby took a deep breath and was surprised to catch the unmistakable trace of a distinctly feminine odor.
"Now you done it," Anansi said. "We've ricocheted straight through the dirty mind of a porn site."
Four pairs of fish net stockings swam their tightly woven mesh up Anansi's octet of legs. Bobby felt the buttons of his bloodstained shirt slowly undoing by themselves. The wheels of the bus took on the steady squeaking sounds of a well used set of bed springs and behind that sound Bobby heard the joyous panting of a woman nearing an explosive orgasm.
"Hang on story man," Anansi said. "We're heading into a hardcore sex drive. Turn on and turn it up."
"Is that bad?" Bobby asked.
"It's just sex. There's no good or bad about it. Kingdom come, baby, kingdom come. From here on out we go long and deep."
Bobby closed his eyes and crossed his fingers for luck, hanging on for the hard long ride.
* 8 *
The banjo music kept getting louder, like elevator muzak bleeding through Maggie's ears and into the open wound of her lower cerebellum. The monkey plunked on his tail, madly onwards.
It was surprisingly easy for Maggie to get her shopping cart caravan out of the mall's parking lot and onto the main highway. Aside from the two security guards who gave up chasing her after she'd run over the third security guard and whipped him into a finely mowed puree, there was very little interference.
Maggie rolled on her merry way, clattering and rattling like a herd of chrome plated buffalo. It was like something out of a Smokey and the Bandit movie. Maggie could hear the sounds of the bluegrass banjo monkey tail cheekily plucking away and she swore that the monkey on her shoulder had sprouted a Burt Reynolds moustache.
This isn't real, she told herself. I'm going to wake up any minute, and the nice men will fit me for a brand new extra-long sleeved straight jacket. How could this be happening? How could the ride on mower run without gasoline?
She watched as sparks of blue lightning flashed from the wheels, stretching out into long straight bolts that ran out in front of the lawn mower like a set of railroad rails running out from beneath the grinding wheels of a loco locomotive.
"You got to make a getaway, honey," the monkey said in a perfect imitation of Jimmy Cagney. "Take it on the lam, the boys in blue are in hot pursuit."
"Kiss my ass, you dirty rat," Maggie snarled back.
It wasn't easy making a retort. The monkey kept a pretty tight rein on her thoughts. It felt a little as if she were a Chihuahua tugging in vain on a pit bull sized leash.
A truck, she thought. I need a truck. Isn't that what they do in all of those heist movies? Roll the car right up in back of a big old eighteen wheeler? Instant invisibility, that's what she craved, but there were no friendly eighteen wheelers in sight.
She pulled up by a payphone. Miraculously, the yellow pages were still intact. They opened up at her touch, like a stroke of magic.
"Let your fingers do the talking," the monkey ordered.
Maggie thumbed through the yellow pages. She wondered briefly how many other thumbs had run through these pages in just such a fashion. She wondered if any of them had been Howdy-Doody puppet mastered by a funky blue monkey.
"T for truck," she whispered to herself, free-associating for dear life. "I need to find me a T for truck."
She found the number, but then she couldn't find a quarter.
Fortunately the monkey pulled a quarter from out behind her ear. The quarter was only slightly stained with ear wax and slid in nicely.
"That's a pretty good trick," Maggie said. "Why don't you disappear up your own asshole and be done with it?"
The monkey cheekily flung another chunk of blue dung. It spattered against the telephone.
The change return slot opened like a mouth and began to talk.
"Aaaaaaaaah," the change slot screamed.
Maggie closed her eyes, not wanting to look, but the monkey made her open them wide.
* 9 *
Bobby looked up and everything had changed.
The Magic Bus was driving into the world's largest vaginal canal. The walls about the bus were pink and folded and moaned softly as the bus passed through. A tinny sounding synthesizer soundtrack of seventies music worked its way scuzzily through the bus's static-ridden speakers. It was an incredible journey down the funnel-tunnel of love.
"Not love, story man," Anansi piped up. "This is the heart and home of honest lust. Need, greed, feed and seed - the prime motivation of all creation. Once you see something you've just got to have you some of it. Invade and procreate, that's all that any of us are all about."
Bobby felt the hair on the back of his neck rise up. Something else had risen, as well. The fabric of his trousers totem poled alarmingly. The bus hummed with raw sexual current. Some of the passengers were taking part, dropping drawers and furtively or openly masturbating.
"You see? We reap what we sow, and we so love to sow," Anansi busily fiddled with something in the part of a spider that you might call a lap.
Bobby looked closer. The spider was making something out of a web. Bobby saw three silver needles in the hooks of the spider, making tight fine stitches.
"Everybody is life's greatest spectator," Anansi went on. "The world carousels around each of us and we all want to watch our own piece of the action."
The faces of all the anonymous computer geekazoids stared through the window screens of the bus, their mouths hung open slack and gaping, the voyeur's flaccid panting kiss.
"Look at that one over there, boy," Anansi said, pointing with one spare leg. "All that meat and no potatoes."
A leggy blonde Marilyn Monroe clone danced a hootchie kootchie slow dance wearing an ankle length cardigan stitched together with a fiber composed of the half remembered wet dream-frustrations of a thousand celibate monks, sprouting clusters of pitcher plant
s and tangerine bubbles clumping out from beneath her florid falsetto armpits.
"That's the wonder of desire," Anansi said. "There is something for every unspoken need. Every twisted fantasy can be twisted just a little more."
A teenager of indeterminate gender, with skin the color of gold dust and flash powder and a smile that went off like a Roman candle sunrise leaned against a sticky candy cane lamppost, singing of torches and starlight and the burning candle flame of regret.
"All you have to do is take a look and you will find it," Anansi said. "Want, need, it's the heartbeat of all of creation."
A pudgy man with skin the color of rancid cottage cheese peered through a pair of Technicolor binoculars that projected through the mirror of his eyes and flashed a panoramic reflection across the drive-in movie of his skull. A solid gold telescope erected itself between the fork of his flaccid thighs. He kept fidgeting with the focus and mouthing anagrammatically convoluted Lithuanian obscenities.
And through the grand unraveling tapestry of all of this Sodom and Gomorrah sensurround spectacle, all Bobby could think of was his Maggie.
"I don't want any part of this madness," he said.
"Ah, but you are a part of this, story man. We all are, ever since Eve fell for that length of shiny snakeskin. Simultaneous stimulation and temptation, face it, you can't avoid it. Sex is a constant in this life. The rich man, the poor man, the beggar and the thief. All men want it. In good times and in bad; in recession and boom. It never changes. Everyone wants a little sex. And we think about it all of the time."
"I don't. I love Maggie."
"So you don't have sex with her?"
"That's different. We're married."
"Ah, but isn't marriage nothing more than a legally and scripturally imposed social make-out? The world tells you that you have to get married, have to raise kids, go forth and multiply two by two, I-do and I-do-se-do."
"It was different for us," Bobby argued. "We were special."
"Everyone's special," Anansi snapped back. "What makes you think you were all that different?"
Bobby didn't have an answer.
"What was the first thing you noticed about her?"
Bobby thought about it. "Her mouth. She had a fine square frank kind of mouth," I said. "The kind of mouth that could say go to hell just as easily as she could say I love you."
"Tell me more about her," Anansi commanded, working and weaving on something in his web. "Tell it to me the way that you remember it."
Bobby smiled. Even caught up in this fever dreamed stream of conscious phantasmagoria, the thought of Maggie made him grin.
"From the moment I first met Maggie I knew that she was someone I could spend the rest of my life talking with."
He said it like he meant it, because he did.
"With or at?" Anansi asked.
"Cynic."
"Romantic."
"Prick."
"Myopic."
Bobby had had enough.
"Listen eight-legs. I believe that there is someone for everyone. Like pieces of an enormous once-in-a-lifetime jigsaw puzzle. Each piece unique, fitting together with only one other piece."
And then the effigy of Maggie bloomed up from out of the muddle of mad weaving that Anansi had been busy working on.
"Look, Pygmalion," Anansi said, holding the form of what he'd been working on out towards Bobby. "Here is your Galatea!"
Bobby looked. He had to. It was Maggie, or something that looked very close to her, standing before him on a halfshell of cobwebs and hope.
Bobby looked at the effigy. She was perfect. Better than perfect.
It was lust at first sight.
* 10 *
Bobby knew it was some kind of a crazy dream. He had read and written enough stories to know that she would disappear just as soon as he reached for her.
So he reached carefully.
"How long does this last?" he asked Anansi. "I know this is a dream. A hallucination. I don't care. I don't want it to end."
"Who says there ever has to be an end?"
"Every story has one."
"Maybe you're breaking new ground?"
"How long will it last?
"How long does it ever last? If you ask any man he will tell you it lasts for hours. If you ask any women she can give you her answer in minutes. It lasts as long as it has to. Aren't you aroused?"
She was Maggie. Of course he was aroused. He could see her face, mounted on a bipod of the world's longest set of legs. He embraced her legs,
pulling them closer, feeling them spread around him. He smelled the scent of female arousal. It was Maggie. He knew her scent. He licked his lips and stared resolutely straight ahead.
"Can you hold onto her?" Anansi asked. "Love is such a slippery dope."
Bobby felt the fantasy legs closing around his head. They were Maggie's legs. He couldn't see beyond that thought. It was Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. He felt her invisible thighs pressuring about his ears.
He pushed closer.
"I don't believe this," he said.
"You're lying to yourself," Anansi said.
"I didn't ask for any of this. I'm here to save Maggie, that's all."
"You hit enter. We're in it now. The rose is stemmed for sure. Pollination is in progress. Hold fast, there's no pulling back. Stand by to ram, stand by to ram!"
The bus picked up speed. Bobby felt something soft and wet and furry pressing against his face. The fantasy Maggie shook in sudden gentle climax, like a flower opening before the rain. Her juices ran invisibly down his chin. He felt them slither. It felt as if he were being assaulted by a platoon of skydiving phantom lukewarm snails landing and crawling down his welcoming face.
"Brace your self story man," Anansi warned.
"What's happening?"
"Here comes the ram."
Bobby looked out of the front window, just in time to see a great fluorescent electronic big horn mountain sheep coming straight at the bus.
"What the hell is that?" Bobby asked.
"That's the ram. Everyone needs a kick in the ass every now and then. Call it motivation, call it a threat, call it a stick to beat your carrot with. What ever you want to call it, it's still nothing more than a good honest ram."
The bus turned upwards, rising and twisting in a perfect Immelman. The ram was quicker. It jinked sideways, back and upwards simultaneously in some sort of bizarre sixteenth dimensional multi-maneuver - and then it rammed the bus, in true corn-hole-kamikaze style.
"Hang on tight," Anansi warned.
Bobby took one deep breath and buried his face into the fantasy Maggie's vagina, as if it were the world's softest and wettest airbag, praying fervently that the real Maggie would find it in her heart to forgive him, or better yet that she not find out at all.
Whereever she was.
* 11 *
The real Maggie was sitting in a truck, waiting for a light to change.
The truck had a driver. The truck driver's name was Manuel. He had a wife on both sides of the border, and a practical look at life. Never pass up on a good thing was his overriding motto.
"Mientras dura, vida y dulzura," was what his grandfather taught him. "While life yet lasts, laughter and molasses." As far as Manuel was concerned, it meant grab the sweet stuff while you can.
She had found his name in the yellow pages. Manuel received a lot of work that way. His company name, AAAAAAAAAH TRUCKING, pretty well guaranteed that Manuel would be listed first in any telephone directory. When people asked him what the name meant, he told them it was the sigh of satisfaction they would make when their goods were moved.
"Aaaaaaaaah," Manuel sighed, placing the accent precisely on the appropriate number of vowels.
He had taken the name from an old girlfriend who had suggested the idea. Women were good with ideas. It was what they usually had to offer. They did not have muscles for work, so they supplied ideas instead. Unfortunately, reasoning like that was one of the reasons why Manuel's old gir
lfriend soon became his ex-girlfriend.
Perhaps, he told himself, he had one too many wives.
Manuel wore a leather necklace cord about his neck; strung with with three large chunks of turquoise. Two of the chunks were nearly the size of eggs. The third was about the size of Manuel's fist. His grandmother had given him this necklace. She swore to him that it would protect him from all evil spirits. Manuel was not so certain, but he knew one thing for sure. The women loved it. They thought it made him look primitive. Manuel was not primitive, but he understood that a woman would offer much so long as she believed she was getting what was offered to her. Love was always a kind of barter and in any kind of barter one could expect a few lies.
They had been to three shopping malls since she had called him on the pay telephone to pick her up with her three shopping carts and one very messy ride on lawn mower.
Manuel had asked no questions.
An open purse can close many a mouth.
The truck was now full of good things. This woman obviously understood molasses and laughter. She grabbed for what was sweet.
Three color televisions.
A refrigerator and sixteen cases of imported beer.
Sixty-eight boxes of shoes.
Manuel was not so sure about the shoes. He thought perhaps they were making more shoes as he drove. He imagined he could hear them back there, the sandals making babies with the high heeled pumps, tongue and sole intertwined.
He did not why she needed so many good things. It was like some kind of a spell or maybe a stew. All of these random pieces thrown together into a pot that somehow came together and equaled the good life.
Manuel loaded the good things into the strange woman's apartment. It was heavy work. He didn't mind. He had a good body and was not afraid to show it off.
The woman was not afraid of work as well. That was a good thing. That was one way that women and men were alike. They both needed to get used to working hard, because the gods put men and women upon this earth to work hard. Being gods, the gods did no work of their own, of course. Why should they bother?