by Larry Doyle
“I just don’t want him squirting away his competitive advantage,” the general said, forking in a pork chop.
The sheriff, redirecting: “Russ, I hear you had a run-in with Jim Anderson this morning.”
“Andy’s boy?” asked the general.
Russ rubbed his forearm. “It was nothing.”
Rusty, through mashed potato: “You disfigured him!”
“He was trying to steal my car!” And turning bitterly to his father, “Why are you taking his side?”
The general pushed peas onto his fork. “Deserves what he gets. His father near destroyed the planet.”
“Jim’s not like that,” insisted Rusty, a bit too insistently.
Russ waggled his tongue at her, sliding it from side to side. Rusty crossed her fingers and twisted them, an allusion to a Kaman sex act that paralyzed dozens of overcurious teens every year.
“The iniquity of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons,” the general said with a grim chortle. “God said that.”
“In this town,” the sheriff said, “everybody gets a fair shake. I don’t care who they are.”
“People are human beings,” agreed Rusty, “even if they aren’t.”
The general coughed into his napkin. “You wouldn’t say that, Kitten, if you saw a Venusian Succubix slurp the marrow out of a man’s spine.”
Russ couldn’t believe he missed that one on the test. “Right.”
Nick Ford put down his fork.
“I think we’re done here, Ethyl.”
“Rights away, Missah Nick,” said EThL, an out-of-warranty nedroid, buzzling in and removing plates, dropping every third one.
Rusty moaned, “Can we please get her upgraded?”
the pig stood alone, and if it knew anything about setting or story or ominous orchestration, it would not have kept standing there.
A deep purple tendril entered.
The pig squealed, and was unceremoniously dragged across the field and out of view.
A few feet away, two soldiers were in the bed of an Army truck, throwing pigs, sheep and goats off the back at a rate exceeding the operation’s protocols, in an effort to stay ahead of the mammoth gelatinous mass that was devouring everything in their direction.
The crapulous goo had eaten a dozen beloved family pets, seven less-liked pets, a hobo, a bunch of nuns, a sassy waitress and a blowhard who said he wasn’t afraid of any grape jelly, all in the eight hours since it had first appeared on the MU campus, another harebrained experiment, folks thought, of those mad scientists working at that Army lab.
“Wait,” Larry interrupted his father’s evocative tale. “I thought it was unleashed by J!m’s dad.”
“Is that what they teach you at school?”
“The viz said.”
“Well, then I’m sure that’s right,” his father conceded, before continuing.
The goo chortled as it gobbled down the line of farm animals leading to Bessie, a low-yield device painted black and white in a Holstein pattern, a fresh cow’s head mounted on the nose. A large bottle of milk was strapped underneath the payload, a baby calf suckling from it.
The goo splooged forward.
“It ate a baby calf?” asked Larry, distressed and between meals.
“The calf got away,” his father said, “if you want.”
“Let your father finish the story,” his mother said. “We’re tired.”
From the safety of a hardened underground bunker, General Walter Ford gave the order to Dr. Buck Roberts, who gravely delivered the cow de grâce.
The goo’s contented look turned to one of extreme indigestion.
All across Manhattan, families gathered on their lawns, facing east, though they had been warned to stay inside with their windows closed. At the first flash, a few put on sunglasses.
A 15-kiloton fireball bloomed on the horizon, much larger than forecast, or perhaps closer. Children cheered.
Tom and Frances Sweeney watched from their porch with stern sobriety. She held his arm as the hot wind hit them.
splut.
Tom wiped off his cheek, and was about to shake the effluvia into the roses when something made Frances stop him.
Cupped in his palm was a glop of lavender gelatin, bearing an approximation of a baby’s face. It began to cry.
Mr. Sweeney finished there. He and the missus sat on a couch opposite Jelly, hands clasped together, prepared for any questions he might have.
“What happened to it?” Larry asked.
“Well, son,” his father said patiently, “we couldn’t have children of our own . . .”
“I had so many abortions when I was young,” his mother explained.
His father patted the back of his mother’s hand.
“. . . so we decided to raise you as our own.”
“And we raised you to be a good boy.”
Larry absorbed the information, losing surface tension as the shock spread to his exterior cells, creating a pooling effect on the carpet.
“Posture, Larry.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He pulled himself together.
“it’s fascinating,” dr. rand said, sticking the Rand Autotine Dynatwirl into his spaghetti. The five-pound fork spun laboriously, revolving once a second with a loud cha-CHUNK. “This could completely change our understanding of Regulese anatomy, or should I say architecture.”
He chuckled drolly at his taxonomy gag. At the other end of the needlessly long table, his wife’s head mimicked his laugh, minus the self-regard.
Marie, equidistant between them, didn’t understand. “You think Jim is a robot?”
“If I brought this to the university, they would just call me insane, again.” He snorted. “Narcissistic personality disorder? I think not.”
He hoisted the mechanical fork to his mouth, its autotines dynatwirling, lashing sauce into his eyes, which he pretended wasn’t happening.
“Dad . . .”
Marie pointed down, where a roast chicken was slowly moving across the floor.
“Damn you,” Dr. Rand cursed the chicken. He stuck it with his fork and lifted it up, exposing a belly swarming with nanoänts, the robots he had so accurately programmed that instead of infiltrating and destroying the colony, they had joined it.
He scraped the cybugs back onto the floor and began stomping them, each snapping like a cap, leaving charred marks on the parquet.
“I . . . gave . . . you . . . specific . . . instructions!”
His wife was laughing sincerely now. “Howard,” she said, “you’re hopeless.”
“The ants were getting in your tray,” he reminded her with increasing volume. “Crawling in your wiring. Attracted,” he had her, “by the smell of fermented fruit!”
“For Godsakes, Howard, you’re covered in sauce.”
Dr. Rand opened his mouth, closed it and sat down.
Marie shut her eyes, trying to block out the slow seething to her right and hostile bubbling to her left.
The car horn was loud, and welcome.
“That’s Russ,” Marie said, rising.
Mrs. Rand’s dish pivoted toward her daughter.
“You were going to do my hair tonight.”
“I don’t . . .” and Marie would have remembered that. “We didn’t . . .”
“Look at me! I’m a skunk!” She was, too, a white forelock splitting her otherwise black hair like lightning at midnight.
“I think it’s pretty,” Marie said.
“Sexy,” Dr. Rand uttered involuntarily.
Mrs. Rand swivelled back to her husband. “Shouldn’t you be out finding me a body?”
“Now, Susan, you know it is not as simple as that.”
“For you.”
“Right,” getting defensive. “Let’s get your father on this immediately. He’s got all those Nobel Prizes . . .”
Marie was already at the door when Russ hit his horn a second time.
“Let’s see: Physics, Peace, Biology . . . Oh, wait, not
Biology. It appears that your famous father has no biology background whatsoever.”
The last Marie heard was her mother’s testicle-withering cackle, propelling her into Russ’s car.
Chapter 11
Temper-Hot Tensions...
in quite another part of town, the pits, on a street where chunks of sidewalk floated uneasily on the terra unfirma and the lawns were brown and gassy, Arthur Ghroth, a tiny salesman from Planet X, trudged home in a boy’s Communion suit, a toy fedora atop his space helmet, his briefcase full of unsold spatulas, whistling and beeping his sad, sad song.
He passed a two-room shotgun shack with no chrome whatsoever, no sign of the past twenty years save a modest state-supplied PLEX receptor. Two of its three windows were broken and boarded, its screen door half off the hinges and descreened, the structure sloping to the rear as it sank slowly into a pocket of tar the developer said was not there, or had been put there by hooligans.
At least Arthur didn’t live in the Monkey House, he thought, modulating his tune to only singularly sad.
Johnny was in the commode, raking coconut oil into his hair. He wiped the excess across his chest, rubbing it to a high shine. With the edge of the comb, he freed a thick curl from his pomp and nudged it back and forth on his forehead until it achieved insouciance. He bared his teeth, checking for insects.
The soaring score in the next room told him the planes had arrived. He would have to hurry if he wanted to get out of there.
His mother was propped up on a foldout couch that had never been folded in, wearing that nightdress, her black, gray and white hair a chaos, down to her waist and out beyond her shoulders. She was eating ancient Chinese, mouth over the box, noodles streaming in and out.
Pushed against the bottom edge of the bed was an old bulbous screen made by the Zenith Radio Company, out of business for a decade, after one of its Space Command remotes inadvertently broadcast launch codes, resulting in the sinking of Cuba and that whole foofaraw. A converter orb allowed the tube to receive billions of PLEX viz, though it only ever played one.
King Kong swung from the dirigible mooring mast, swatting at biplanes, as Johnny snuck in and started to roll his cycle out of the house.
His mother patted the bed.
“Sit with me.”
“I gotta get to work, Ma.”
“Jojo.”
Mortally wounded, Kong fell.
Johnny sat with his mother, staying on his side of the bed. His mother slid over, leaning her head on him.
Carl Denham broke through the crowd that gathered around Kong. “Well, Denham,” a cop said, “the airplanes got him.”
“It wasn’t the airplanes. . . .” Johnny’s mother mouthed the words along with Denham. “It was Beauty killed the Beast.”
The movie music swelled. Johnny’s mother beamed at her son and petted his arm. Johnny wanted to return the affection, but couldn’t look directly at her, that nightdress so soiled and threadbare, torn in all the wrong places.
“Ma, why don’t you wear that new gown I got you?”
“You know, Jojo,” she cuddled against him. “I wore this on my honeymoon.”
“It wasn’t a goddamn—”
“Shush!” his mother cut him off. “I raised you better than to blaspheme.”
they hummed down route 66 in a black and silver Big Daddy Buzzer, so named because the floor-to-roof split-bubble front gave it the appearance of fly eyes, a resemblance reinforced by the flying buttress tail fins and the sound the electric motor made, causing people it passed to swat at their ears involuntarily. The three-wheeled two-seater was tiny, poky and exceedingly unshiny, but it was all Miw could afford.
“Henry Kissinger returned from Arkansas today with welcome news in the War on Shmoo,” Kelly Lange informed on the car’s viz screen. “The long-running campaign against the tasty but evil creatures from Cygnus X-3 may be winding down, the National Security Enforcer told PIN.”
Miw looked over at her son, crammed into the passenger seat, his knees against the windshield. She didn’t need to be an empath to tell something was wrong; she could see, for example, that his hand had been torn off. He hadn’t mentioned it, or anything, which is how she knew it must be bad.
“Peace is at hand,” intoned Kissinger in his Teutonic bass, resplendent in a golden uniform of his own conception. “The Shmoo will soon all be dead.”
Miw turned off the viz.
“Want to talk about it?”
J!m inspected his nearly regenerated fingers. He wanted to talk about all kinds of its: his hand, his head, his heart, his father, the future. But he was punishing his mother, for loving him.
“There’s no it,” he said.
The air around them ozoned as the Buzzer passed a PLEX pole, picking up an arc. Miw horripilated, her fur on end, making it difficult to take her seriously.
“Well, if there’s ever an it . . .”
J!m scratched his knee.
“Problem at school . . . or with a girl . . . or your body, a change or . . .” Cursing her parental impotence: “I wish your father was here.”
“Worked out so amazing last time.”
His mother’s ears went flat.
J!m reached across her and switched on the aud. Peter Gabriel sang,
His is a world alone
No world is his own . . .
dorothy love, Dodie, was a freshman in Christian anthropology at MU when she met Johnny’s father, whose presence on campus can be explained very easily, but not at the moment. The 400-pound radioactive ape swept her off her feet, and after a very brief honeymoon in the woods, he caught fire somehow and fell into the Groom Lagoon, where his body was claimed by one of the other things in there. He was therefore not present eight and a half months later for the birth of his son at a top-secret military research facility based at the university. Dodie thought she was having twins, but when the nurses insisted there was only one, she was relieved.
Johnny’s mother called him Jojo, after his father’s circus name. Other people did not call him Jojo.
Dodie did the best she could to raise Johnny alone, through a series of exotic illnesses, including dental tumors and cancer of the perinoos, a theretofore undiscovered organ thought to regulate love, religion and other gullibilities. She kept getting sick and being miraculously cured; doctors theorized that gestating a radioactive ape had caused the malignancies, which were subsequently treated by Johnny’s sleeping beside her every night. He was killing her and keeping her alive.
The settlement from the military lab at the university, which admitted no fault or its existence, had run out long ago, spent on gin and bananas. Dodie had not had a drink in years—Johnny made sure of that—but had gained a few hundred pounds lately and no longer went out, even to her AAA meetings, where she had taken pleasure in lording her abduction over the other women, most of whom had been only probed, and not even in the vagina.
Johnny hated to see her like this, taking up so much of the bed.
“Ma,” he said, “you gotta stop. You gotta get out of the house, live a life, maybe . . .” swallowing, “. . . meet someone.”
“Oh, Jojo, don’t you know?” She took her son’s paw and kneaded it with both hands. “Your father ruined me for other men.”
Johnny did not broach this subject often, and this was why.
“He ruined my,” gravidly, “heart.”
Johnny gently groomed his mother’s hair. He plucked something, nibbled it. He would be here until she fell asleep; he might as well make a meal of it.
harked the celestial-themed marquee, promoting tonight’s double feature,
They hadn’t spoken in a while.
Miw pushed in the steering column, bringing the Buzzer to a stop in front of the drive-in entrance. She turned to her son, guiding his chin to look at her.
“That was not your father,” she said. “The one they talk about.”
“And have all those visuals of.”
“Don’t believe your eyes.”
>
There was so much she could tell him, but could not tell him, for his own good, and more than that. Perhaps there would come a time, and a place, but this was neither. She took another approach.
“You’re my son, too, you know.”
J!m’s brain was quicker than his heart.
“That’s colossal,” he said. “I’m half monster and half pussy.”
Miw’s whiskers trembled.
She slapped him.
The scratches across J!m’s cheek welled with indigo blood. It didn’t hurt.
He knew this would:
“Blow ’em away at work, Mom.”
The passenger bubble popped and J!m stepped out. The vehicle rotated 180 degrees and buzzed off, kicking a dry cloud around his feet.
He started to raise his hand to call for his mother, but she wouldn’t have heard him anyhow.
Chapter 12
Back Seat Dating
“surrender, earthling,” j!m said, the silver emperor’s robe adding alien menace, undercut by the glitter-ball antennae bopping about his head.
He aimed his raygun and fired.
A red laser beam hit the young soldier in the eye. It swept across his iris.
The soldier, identified as Pfc. Roy Haskell, sat in his car with his date, a local thirteen-year-old named Dolly or Lolly.
“Warning,” J!m recited, “this program may cause heart tremor, night sweats and demented dreams. Free nitroglycerin tablets with every large popcorn. Watch the Skies!”
The Ford Atmos pulled away from the ticket booth, headed for a spot on the periphery of the lot, but not across state lines.
J!m drooped, his glitter balls dangling glumly.
“Jimmy!”
A brawny hand smacked J!m on the back, whipping his balls into his eyes.
“What’s the gate?” boomed Bill Schloss, who boomed everything, a remnant from his days as busker for the sideshow attraction Trudie’s Bigg Topp—ENTRANCE RESTRICTED TO SERIOUS STUDENTS OF MEDICAL ANOMALIES.
“Forty-nine.”
Schloss chomped his unlit cigar, squinted, his whole face crinkling. His skin was crispy brown, his hair ermine white, his nose, his chest, his arms, everything about him big. He was what J!m imagined a movie producer to be, which Schloss had been, as well as writer, director and sometime co-star of such arty fare as Nudie Trudie, the western Nudie Trudie Rides a Horse and science-fiction epic Trudie, Queen of the Nude Planet, left unfinished when he lost Trudie in the divorce. Now all he had was this drive-in, and six girlfriends.