“It’s all under control, Ozzie. The last run-through was perfect.”
Oswaldo appeared slightly mollified, though still dubious. “You’d better be right. A lot is depending on this. And I won’t be here to supervise every minute of the production.”
“You won’t be? I thought this spectacle was going to be your shining moment. Where are you going?”
The pudgy genius realized he had revealed something secret, and showed a second’s rare disconcertment. “None of your business.”
Oswaldo Vasterling turned away from Tug, then suddenly swung back, exhibiting the most emotion Tug had yet witnessed in the enigmatic fellow.
“Gingerella, do you like this world?”
Tug’s turn to feel nonplussed. “Do I like this world? Well, yeah, I guess so…. It’s a pretty decent place. Things don’t always fall out in my favour, or the way I’d wish. I lost my job and my home just a month ago. But everyone has ups and downs, right? And besides, what choice do I have?”
Oswaldo stared intently at Tug. “I don’t think you really do care for this universe. I think you’re like me. You see, I know this world for what it is—a fallen place, a botch, an imperfect reflection of a higher reality and a better place. And as for choices—well, time will tell.”
On that note, Oswaldo Vasterling scuttled off like Professor T. E. Wogglebug in Baum’s The Vizier of Cockaigne.
Tug shook his head in puzzlement at this Gnostic Gnonsense, then checked his watch. He had time for one last curtain-parting peek out front.
The well-lighted auditorium was about a third full, with lots more people flowing in. Ozzie might make his nut after all, allowing him to continue with his crazy experiments….
Hey, a bunch of Tug’s old crowd! Pete, Pavel, Olive—essentially, everyone who had helped him move out of The Wyandot. Accidental manifestation, or solidarity with their old pal?
Wow, that move seemed ages ago. Tug experienced a momentary twinge of guilt. He really needed to reconnect with them all. That mass o-mail telling them he was okay and not to worry had been pretty bush league. But the Tom Pudding experience had utterly superseded his old life, as if he had moved to another country, leaving the patterns of decades to evanesce like phantoms upon the dawn…
Tug recognized Lee Smolin in another section of seats, surrounded by a claque of bearded nerds. The physicist’s phiz was familiar, the man having attained a certain public profile with his CBC documentaries such as The Universal Elegance…
The voice of Harmon Frawley, director-in-chief, rang out, “Places, everyone!”
Tug hastened back to his boards.
He found Sukey Damirscotta waiting there. She wore purple tights and leotard over bountiful curves. Tug’s knees weakened.
“Doing that bee-dee together this afternoon was lots of fun, Tug. Let’s keep at it! Now wish me luck! I’ve never portrayed a membrane before!”
Sukey planted a kiss on Tug’s cheek, then bounced off.
Glowing brighter than any floodlight, Tug turned to his controls. He tilted the monitor that showed him the stage to a better viewing angle.
And then “Mystery Mother and Her Magic Membranes” was underway.
Under blood-red spotlights Pudding person Pristina Immaculata appeared, raised from below through a trap, an immense waterfall of artificial hair concealing her otherwise abundant naked charms, Eve-style. Pristina’s magnificent voice, Tug had come to learn, made Yma Sumac’s seem a primitive instrument.
Warbling up and down the scale, Pristina intoned with hieratic fervour, “In the beginning was the Steinhardt-Turok model, and the dimensions were eleven…”
A rear-projection screen at the back of the stage lit up with one of Franchot Galliard’s B&W stag films, the infamous orgy scene from Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, involving Irish McCalla, Julie Newmar, Judy Holliday and Carole Landis.
Low-hanging clouds of dry-ice fog filled the stage. Tug’s hands played over his controls, evoking an empyrean purple realm. A dozen women cartwheeled across the boards. The imperturbable South-Pacifican Tatang wheeled out on a unicycle, bare-chested and juggling three machetes.
“I shift among loop gravity, vacuum fluctuations, and supergravity forever!”
After that, things got weird.
Tug was so busy at his boards that he paid little heed to the audience reaction, insofar as it even penetrated his remove. Retrospectively, he recalled hearing clapping, some catcalls, whistles and shouts of approval. All good reactions.
But then, at the start of the second hour, the riot began.
What triggered it seemed inconsequential to Tug: some bit of abstruse physics jargon, recited and then pantomimed by a bevy of dancers wearing fractal-patterned tights. But the combined assertion of their words and actions outraged Lee Smolin and his clan. No doubt Oswaldo Vasterling had penned the speech with just this result in mind.
On his monitor, Tug saw the performance come to a confused halt. He abandoned his station and raced out front.
The staff of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics had jumped to their feet and were shaking their fists at the stage, hollering insults.
Others in the audience told the dissenters to shut up and sit down. This enraged the unruly scientists further. Some bumrushed the stage, while others engaged in fisticuffs with the shushers. Gee, those guys could sure punch surprisingly hard for a bunch of electron-pushers.
The brawl spiralled outward from the principled nucleus, but without rhyme or reason. Soon the whole auditorium was churning with fighters and flighters.
Turk Vanson rushed onstage followed by his stalwart ocarina players. “We’ve got a fever, and my prescription is—more ocarina! Blow, guys, blow!”
The musicians launched into “Simple Gifts,” practically the nation’s second anthem ever since the tenure of Shaker Vice-President Thomas McCarthy during President Webster’s second term. But the revered music had no effect.
Someone uncorked a fire extinguisher or three, and Tug caught a blast of foam in the face.
Tug cleared his vision just in time to dodge a flying bottle that clipped Vanson’s head and sent him reeling, the projectile then tearing through the movie screen and passing right through the image of Bunny Yeager’s split beaver.
A woman collided with Tug and they both went smashing down. Sukey? No? Where was she? Was she okay… ?
Tatang rode over Tug’s legs with his unicycle, causing him to grunt in pain and to forget anything else.
Sirens obtruded over the screams….
At the adamant urging of Ozzie, Franchot Galliard reluctantly posted bail for all the Tom Pudding arrestees the next morning.
Tug met Sukey outside the police station. She had sheltered on a catwalk during the worst of the fracas, dropping sandbags on rogue quantum theoreticians.
Back on the barge, Tug took a shower, then went to one of the galleys to rustle up some breakfast.
A copy of that morning’s Whig-Chronicle lay on the table. The main headline, natch, concerned the debacle at the Vawter.
But buried inside the paper lurked an even more intriguing lede:
“Authorities report a break-in last night at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics….”
10. AMERICAN SPLENDOUR
Tug and Sukey worked on their bee-dee throughout December. Projected as an anthology of several tales, some just a page, some many pages, the nascent book chronicled a bare handful of anecdotes from Tug’s colourful years in Carrollboro. Events and characters came welling up from memory in a prodigious rush, producing laughter and incredulous head-shaking from his collaborator. He knew he had enough material for years of such books. And things always went on happening to him, too.
“You’ve led quite a life, Tug.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I have.”
Tug had never been happier, or felt more creative. He blessed the day miserable bastard Narcisse Godbout had kicked him out of his comfortable rut, the day Pete had pointed him toward the To
m Pudding, the night alluring Pellenera had approached him, and the day he had impulsively snatched Sukey’s sketchpad.
The cartooning team paused in their intense work only long enough to celebrate the birthday of Roger Williams on December 21st, along with the rest of the nation. Watching the traditional televised parades with Sukey, with their cheesy floats celebrating what had come to be known and worshipped as the Williams Creed, in all its archaically glorious phrasing—“No red man to be kept from our hearths and bedchambers; no black man to be imported to these shores against his will; no gods above the minds and hearts of mankind”—Tug experienced a simple national pride he had not felt in many years.
During these weeks, Tug and the rest of the barge’s crazyquilt crew braced themselves for some new manifestation of Oswaldo Vasterling’s brane-buster. The day after the catastrophic chautauqua, Ozzie had radiated a certain smug self-satisfaction at odds with his usual semblance of lordly indifference. Whatever he had purloined from the PITP must have promised immediate success. He immured himself in his lab, and the power levels aboard the craft wavered erratically, as evidenced by flickering brownouts from time to time, accompanied by noises and stinks.
But there had ensued no visible breakthroughs, no spontaneous generation of a second Pellenera, for instance, and Ozzie, when he finally showed himself to his followers, radiated a stony sense of humiliation and defeat.
By the end of January, Tug and Sukey had something they felt worthy of submission to a publisher. Tug found the contact info for an editor at Drawn & Quarterly, an imprint of the global Harmsworth Publishing empire. After querying, he received permission to submit, and off the package went, Sukey’s powerful black and white art deliberately left uncoloured.
Nothing to do but wait, now.
Deep into the bowels of one February night, Tug was awakened by distant music from beyond the spheres. Blanket wrapped haphazardly around himself, he stumbled up onto the frosted deck, finding himself surprisingly alone, as if the rest of the ship had been ensorcelled into fairytale somnolence.
Moonlight silvered the whole world. Pellenera—piping, argent eidolon—loomed atop the bank of the feeder canal. Tug shivered. Did she herald the arrival of a new recruit? Where was the guy?
But no newcomer emerged from among the winter-bare branches. Pellenera seemed intent merely on bleeding out her heart through the ocarina, as if seeking to convey an urgent message to someone.
Tug’s mind drowned in the music. He seemed to be seeing the world through Pellenera’s eyes, gazing down at himself on the deck. Was she tapping his optic nerves, seeing herself on the shore? That music—
Tug had a sudden vision of the Nubian woman, dancing naked save for—
—a skirt fashioned of bananas?
The music stopped. Pellenera vanished.
What the hell had all that been about?
An o-mail response from Drawn & Quarterly came in March, just as spring arrived.
Tug rushed back to the Tom Pudding with an o-café printout of the message.
Sukey Damariscotta was playing a videogame with Janey Vogelsang when Tug tracked her down: Spores of Myst. He hustled her away from Janey, to a quiet corner, then bade her read the printout.
“Oh, Tug, this is wonderful! We’ve done it!”
“I can’t believe it!”
“Me neither!”
Tug grabbed Sukey, hugged her close, kissed her passionately and wildly lips to lips.
Hands on Tug’s chest, Sukey pushed back, broke his embrace.
“What are you doing?”
“Sukey, I— You’ve gotta know by now—”
“Know what?” Her face registered distaste, as if she had been handed a slimy slug. “Oh, no, Tug, you can’t imagine us hooking up, can you? I like you, sure, a lot. I respect your talent. But you’re way too old….”
Time must’ve crept along somehow in its monotonous, purposeless, sempiternal fashion, although Tug couldn’t have testified to that reality. All he knew was that in some manner he had crossed blocks of Carrollboro to stand outside The Wyandot. His old residence of thirty years’ habitation was garlanded with scaffolding, its plastic-membraned windows so many blank, unseeing eyes, unbreachable passages to a vanished era, a lost youth.
In the end, he returned to the Tom Pudding.
What choice did he have in this fallen, inhospitable world?
Sukey acted friendly toward him, even somewhat intimate. But Tug knew that they would never relate the same way again, and that their collaboration was over, whatever the fate of their one and only book.
The voice of Ozzie Vasterling, when broadcast through the intercom system of the Tom Pudding—a system no one prior to this moment had even suspected was still active—resembled that of the Vizier of Cockaigne in the 1939 film version of that classic, as rendered by the imperious Charles Coburn.
“Attention, attention! Everyone report to my lab—on the double!”
Some folks were missing, ashore on their individual business. But Ozzie’s lab soon filled up with two dozen souls, Tug among them.
Weeks ago, Tug might have been as excited as the others gathered here. But since Sukey’s rebuff, life had lost its savour. What miracle could restore that burnish? None…
But yet—
Pellenera stood before the brane-buster, looking as out-of-place as a black panther in a taxi. Imagine a continent full of such creatures! Ozzie sat behind the keys of his harmonium. The brane-buster hummed and sparkled.
Ozzie could hardly speak. “Vibrations! It’s all the way the invisible strings vibrate! I only had to pay attention to her! Watch!”
He nodded to the Nubian, and she began to play her ocarina, as Ozzie pumped the harmonium attachment.
In the cabinet of the brane-buster, what could only be paradoxically described as a coruscating static vortex blossomed. Gasps from the watchers—even from sulky Tug.
With a joyous primal yawp, Pellenera hurled herself into the cabinet, still playing, and was no more.
The vortex lapsed into non-being as well.
Someone asked, “Is that the end?”
“Ha! Do you think I’m an idiot! I recorded every last note!”
Pellenera’s looped song started up again, and the vortex resumed.
Everyone waited.
Time stretched like the silent heist scene in Hitchcock’s Rififi.
Pellenera popped out of the cabinet, carrying something concealed in the crook of her arm, but naked as water herself.
Even from the edge of the crowd, Tug noticed that her naked back was inexplicably criss-crossed with a latticework of long antique gnarly scars, and he winced.
Revealed, her burden was one perfect golden Cavendish banana.
She smiled, and took several steps forward, the spectators parting before her like grasses beneath a breeze, until she came face to face with Tug.
And she handed the banana to him.
A PARTIAL AND CONJECTURAL HISTORY OF DR. MUELLER’S PANOPTICAL CARTOON ENGINE
My first contact with that fabled and archaic humour-generating contraption known as Dr. Mueller’s Panoptical Cartoon Engine occurred some years ago at a rural auction in Chepachet, Rhode Island. (The literary minded among my readers will surely recall that Chepachet particularly impressed the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft as redolent of the most “antient” New England vibes. But I make no explicit links between Lovecraft’s subjective characterization of the queer village and my discovery of Dr. Mueller’s device there.)
In the dim and dusty barn where the auction was taking place that autumn day, I began poking around among an odd lot of machinery: strange agricultural and household implements of another century. I could discern plausible uses for most of the equipment—save for one device.
An oblong, scuffed wooden case composed of several segments lovingly sealed and decorated with various brass fittings, and featuring three knurled wheels and a protruding crescent disc bearing raised letters and numbers and punctuation around i
ts rim—all frozen with rust and age—and various slots and oval display windows (were those isinglass panels over nacre backdrops?).
The weird little device, resonant with some forgotten technological mana, called out to me, raising all sorts of curious feelings.
I felt I had to have this object, and so I bid for the whole lot, taking it at fairly high cost, forced to contend against the real collectors of old farm tools. The rest of the items meant nothing to me, and I have been selling them off sporadically ever since, trying to recoup my expenditure. (In fact, if any reader wishes to purchase a corn flail, breast plough, barley hummelor or sugar devil for a reasonable price, please write to me in care of this site.)
Over the weeks following my impulsive purchase, I carefully disassembled, cleaned and repaired the machine as best as I was able. Its innards were an unintelligible concatenation of gears, levers, springs, ratchets, pawls, padded balsa wood fingers, cylinder drums, and bellows. There was a central unit that resembled the archaic toy known as a “Jacob’s Ladder,” a series of re-conformable blocks connected by cloth panels, their faces hidden. And a component like the guts of a complex music box also featured vitally.
When I had finished, the three wheels could each turn independently with a satisfying click, bringing up printed words in an antique font in their associated windows, and the crescent protrusion revolved as well. But even after crafting a missing hand-crank to provide motive power and depressing a spring-loaded button labelled GENERATE, I could achieve no visible results. That is, until I got the notion of feeding a piece of paper through one of the slots.
This time after I pressed GENERATE, the machine sucked in the paper, ka-chunked and ka-chinged, and then extruded the altered foolscap.
There, impressed in the faintest of time-dried sepia inks, was a cartoon.
The densely scribed image, so far as I could unriddle it, depicted a pampered, contented cat and its mistress sitting on a couch, while a male suitor looked on jealously. A line of dialogue at the bottom delivered this import, after much perusal:
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