by Larry Doyle
“Check the PLEX, Mom. Marie and Russ Ford are like this.” He formed a circle with thumb and middle finger, raised the forefinger of the other. He couldn’t bring himself to gesture completion.
Miw so wanted to say one thing that would make her son feel better, or less bad.
“I know it doesn’t feel like it now, but trust me: there is someone, somewhere on this planet, or another planet . . .”
“Or another universe, another time and space . . .” J!m squeezed his mother’s hand. “I know what I am, Mom.”
“You are not getting away with that,” her frisky reprimand. “You know, your father was . . . he was not conventionally handsome, and he could have had Norma Baker!”
“She’s a moon cow!”
“She’s your governor. And our next vice president, hopefully. And she wasn’t always”—catching his eye—“but you know that.”
Which reminded her:
“Film school. I’ve been thinking, and we could—”
J!m got up. He bent over, an inch from her nose.
“Dad did a lot better than Marilyn Monroe.”
A kiss, and exit.
Miw sat, lost in that, only too late, seeing her hand in the oily sheet. She swiftly withdrew and licked her soiled paw, another mistake, sending her screeching to the sink.
Later, when she picked the sheet up with a pair of tongs, it fell to pieces.
Chapter 15
The Raging Violence of a Maddened Ape...
perfect football weather: cold, unpleasant and unsuitable for anything else.
J!m was there, under the VISITORS sign, hiding under his father’s long black coat. He had considered not coming at all, after last night. But then the teenagers would have won.
Besides, Johnny was playing.
J!m had attended every one of Johnny’s games and bouts, just as Johnny had sat through hundreds of films in dead languages and two colors. It had been so since they were children, unalike but seldom apart, their friendship a special blend of their essential differences: J!m would build an empire of blocks and Johnny would destroy it; J!m would want to play chess with a real set and Johnny would steal one. They had become less inseparable only recently, Johnny going out at night without saying where and J!m no longer exposing Johnny to art he couldn’t appreciate. J!m thought he was the one who was growing up, but Johnny already had.
Though sitting in the opposite stands, safe from direct peer oppression, J!m was far from invisible. The real visitors were from Springdale, a town with only one alien (whose identity shifted with local sentiment, currently Doc Jaffe, who wore a space beanie on weekends and knew things no human could). Uncomfortable with strangeness in their midst, the Springdalers had allotted J!m his own row and the two above and below. He was, consequently, easy to spot, as a spot, black flotsam in a sea of bleacher.
the mutants warmed up, hitting the four-man blocking sled. Johnny made a cursory run at it, sending the half-ton contraption tumbling into the end zone.
Downfield the Dust Devils discussed this, formulating strategies ranging from forfeiting to letting the second string play. Ultimately their breeding prevailed, and it was decided to “get the monkey.” Wilbanks Smith, a defensive tackle known for his bow ties and wandering elbow, volunteered to take Johnny out on the first play. The other players, who didn’t much like Wilbanks Smith, agreed.
On the sidelines, Mil and Hel led the cheerleading squad for the first time as co-captains since Carol Webster left school to lose her Russ Ford weight.
Hey, hey, mighty Mutants
We’re gold and green
And mighty mean
Get out of our way
We got hot D-N-A!
(whereupon they touched their steaming behinds)
Yesssssssssssssssss.
Dancing randomly beside them was Manny the Mutant, Lewis Seuss in a dingy green rubber suit that smelled like teen spittle, steeped in the accumulated desperation of every social maladroit who had attended MHS since 1955. Lewis could not see or hear well in the big-brain headpiece, and was gyrating spastically a half beat behind.
Go, Mutants!
the cheerleaders chanted as the Mutant wagged his rear, showcasing the costume’s newest feature, a length of garden hose dangling from the coccyx.
Go, go, go . . . Mutants!
jelly, stripped to the waist, held aloft two cans of paint.
“Gold and Green!” he yelled, dumping both cans into his head, his body aswirl with school pride.
One row down, Marie looked across the field at J!m. She felt horrible about last night, sad that it happened, upset she had not been able to stop it, and frustrated that J!m wouldn’t talk to her afterward. She couldn’t understand why he was so angry with her, beyond the obvious, and that didn’t justify discarding everything, did it, after all hadn’t she given him every opportunity, what right did he have, and fine, she was mad at him, too.
“Why does he do that,” asked Sandra Jane, “always sit over there?”
“It amuses him.”
“That’s, like, treason.”
“He’s a dick,” opined Tubesteak, who, upon hearing what he’d said, rejoined himself, “Only he doesn’t have one. A dick.”
“He’s worse than his dad,” Sandra Jane said. “He shot Nixon, you know.”
“He did not,” said Marie, once again. “That was John Hershell Glenn.”
“After he was captured by aliens in space and programmed to do it—and under whose orders?” countered Sandra Jane. “It’s so facto.”
“Jim’s father wasn’t even alive when that happened.”
“You’re so educated,” Sandra Jane sniffed.
“Sandy’s right,” Tubesteak gallanted to her side. “He was implemented. It was in the PLEX.”
Sandra Jane rewarded him by squeezing his leg, her fingers wrapping all the way around.
Tubesteak looked down. “You got big hands.”
She rhythmically inched up his thigh. “You know what they say about a girl with big hands . . .”
Growing fearful: “She’s a dude?”
Marie was glad to be out of that debate, but unable to surrender the last word. “You can’t believe everything in the PLEX,” she said.
They were already in each other’s mouths and did not care to rebut her.
one couldn’t believe everything one read in the PLEX, or saw, or heard, or felt (with the appropriate helmet, gloves or genital attachment). Little in the PLEX corresponded with anything else there, and much of it was not simply in conflict but multiply mutually exclusive, diametrically opposed along n dimensions, contradictory beyond the comprehension of binary mammalian brains, except for dogs, who utterly fumbled their opportunity 15,000 years ago.
On the matter of J!m’s father the PLEX was especially discrepant, a great galaxy of nodes offering competitive truths:
that he had died when his ship crashed into the Washington Monument, as history recorded it;
that he survived the crash and was living on a Greek island with Nixon and the thawed head of Walt Disney, subsisting on government air drops of fresh Mouseketeers;
that he survived the crash and was living on different islands with different people who were supposedly dead, in one variation Paul McCartney, who had been replaced on the Silvers by a pod, explaining one of their lesser hits,
Scrambled eggs
I would like some scrambled eggs
Oh, I would like
Three scrambled eg-eggs;
that he escaped in his ship, that another ship was built and crashed as a cover-up, and that he was on his home planet planning a second Earth invasion to take place on 10/10/10 EI, a couple of weeks ago but on schedule to have happened through time-travel technology that the government has had all along and was using to steal the ancestral wealth of certain individuals;
that he never left, his ship was crashed by joy-riding teenagers, and he was working with the President aboard the Flying White House, an H-8 Hercules space jet in
perennial orbit around the globe;
that he never left and was working with the President and the reanimated head of Nikola Tesla in a secret underground installation, the Flying White House story a transparent fake;
that it was all a hoax, perpetrated by the government and executed by Hollywood, that there were never any invading aliens or atomic mutants, the whole thing fabricated to sell color viz screens;
and innumerable other variations and disputations, positing co-conspirators ranging from the Freemasons to the Bildenbergs to the Bohemians to the flooring industry, though curiously none linking anything to the Army’s Research and Development group at the university.
The government did not control the PLEX, it was often announced, even though it began as a military project and remained under the protection of the United States Armed Forces. The reality was similar: the government did not choose to exercise control of the PLEX. They had learned, as Stalin had not, that the truth could not be destroyed, but could be lost amongst lies.
It was also helpful to know what everyone thought.
So the PLEX was a discordant confabulation, incomprehensible in toto to any human but natural for J!m, who could hold as many contradictions in cogno as he cared to, which was many. In J!m’s inner realities his father was dead and wasn’t, Marie was his and someone else’s, his mother was Mary and Magdalene, he was a deadly serious filmmaker and a seriously dead teenager, each alternatively true and immutable in some universe.
Which is not to say that he did not have a rooting interest.
the dust devils’ coach walked onto the field, beckoning Coach McCarthy. They met on the fifty-yard line.
“We’re not playing a goddamn ape,” the Devils’ coach said.
“He’s half human.”
“I don’t care if he’s half my nut sack.”
“Look, Reverend,” Coach McCarthy said. “There’s nothing in the rules against it.”
“It’s not right,” the Reverend Coach Wesley Swift said, citing, “And you shall not lie with any beast and defile yourself with it—Leviticus 18:23.”
“We’re not screwing here, Wes. It’s football.”
The Devils’ coach didn’t see the distinction.
“they’re willing to forfeit,” Coach McCarthy said.
The Mutants were fine with this.
“I thought we came here to play,” said Russ Ford.
The players also were fine with that.
“Should we,” the coach asked, “take a vote?”
Johnny grasped the sides of his helmet as if to lift it off his head but instead pulled laterally, snapping it in half. He dumped the pieces in the coach’s hands as he left.
“Tell me how it comes out.”
“Christ, Johnny,” the coach said. “These are custom made.”
vizbugs hovered over the field, flitting about in an apparently chaotic pattern that was in fact precisely chaotic, creating a real-time four-dimensional image of the action that could be observed from any angle or distance or point in time by any viewer in the stands, or at home, or in Japan, where American High School Football was the second-most-watched programming behind Meishi Shishi, a variety show hosted by a toilet. This game wasn’t that important; they all had vizbugs now, as did most public events and nonevents. The winged robocams were ubiquitous but unseen; they looked like flies and even died like flies when swatted, going dormant until disposed of. They were a quite useful technology.
manhattan high won the toss and chose to receive.
Jesus Christ Christian kicked off. The crowd roared.
The Mutants scrambled.
The crowd hushed, revealing another roar.
Charles “Ice” Tucker, number 9, signalled for a fair catch, not knowing Johnny was behind him, coming on fast, and on his motorcycle.
Johnny, number 43, plucked the football out of the air, clotheslining Ice for no sports-related purpose, and sped downfield, ripping up the turf.
The Devils ran like hell, with the exception of number 72, the tackle Wilbanks Smith, who was a man of his word if nothing else. He charged Johnny and the Triumph, throwing his lucky left elbow into the monkey’s jaw, fracturing his own radius, ulna and humerus, dislocating his shoulder and bloodying Johnny’s lip but not with Johnny’s blood.
Johnny tore through the end zone, spiking the ball. It bounced very high.
Rusty, seated between her father and grandfather, leapt up and yelled, “Touchdown!” though she knew full well it wasn’t. Jelly heard her and jumped up as well, woozily, the lead-based school colors mixed to a glittery pea soup and churning in his core.
“Goo, Mutants!” he urped.
Tubesteak tilted his head back to address Jelly.
“Shut up, you fat clow—”
It was an inopportune time to be saying the word clown.
Marie missed the shower of golden green. She had left to talk to J!m, who saw her coming and was gone when she got there. A mile down the road he reconsidered and walked back. But by the time he arrived the Mutants were down by twenty-one, and Marie had gone with Sandra Jane to get Tubesteak’s stomach pumped.
Chapter 16
What Causes the Unbelievable to Happen?
“body of christ.”
“Amen.”
“Body of Christ.”
“Amen.”
Father Egan stopped when he got to J!m. He looked into the face of this boy he loved but was unhappy to see here again. And whom he could not refuse.
He presented the Host as a challenge.
“Body of Christ?”
“Thanks,” J!m said.
The church was three-quarters empty, average for a Saturday-evening Mass.
Faith had been in crisis for two decades since that day on the Polo Grounds. For the planet’s religious adherents, someone descending from the heavens who was not their particular god was problematic. That there followed a large assortment of such someones, from throughout the galaxy and beyond, most with reasonable claims to superiority over humans, and few sharing their godly likeness, contradicted the books humans deferred to on such matters. It made them feel a lot less special.
People responded to the Revelation in dramatic fashion, although inconsistently. A large majority took the refutation of their eternal faith as a godsend, freeing them forever from its strictures, and for a couple of years there was a worldwide pork shortage and a ten thousand percent increase in urinary tract infections. Most never returned to the fold, after finding that the hole in their souls that God had filled wasn’t actually there.
The remaining faithful dealt with their cognitive dissonance in a number of ways. The first was to kill all the incongruent beings they could, and not just the ones who were trying to carbonize or eat them, but expressly those who claimed moral superiority, coming in peace and all other manner of devilish trickery. This righteous slaughter ultimately proved unsustainable, and the theological questions remained.
Some adapted. The Unitarians changed their name to the Cosmotarians and expanded their refreshments; Reform Jews retroactively added another dozen tribes. Roman Catholics, seldom living in the same century as everyone else, issued the Dei Verbum, containing this passage:
13. In Sacred Scripture, therefore, while the truth and holiness of God always remain intact, the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, as His word was made for other beings spread amongst the stars in their languages, and their holy texts hold Divine truth for them, but for the Martians, who are wicked.
(from chapter III: “Sacred
Scripture, Its Inspiration and
Divine Interpretation”)
Two years of the Second Vatican Council were consumed debating solely this, and the rest on allowing guitars in church, forcing the what-to-do-about-women question to be bumped to the next council in a hundred years. The Church’s shocking recognition of the present day provoked an extra Reformation, splintering off the Real Catholic Church, the Church of the Human God, a
nd the Holy Name of White Jesus.
Other faiths dealt with the new reality in keeping with their practices. Conservative Christians declared the aliens demons, sent to tempt them into awesome sin, while radical Muslims threw them in with all the other infidels. The Hindus worshipped the aliens, who bore uncanny resemblances to their gods, and the Buddhists remained, as they had for millennia, completely cool about everything.
In 1962 AI, with the unpleasantness dying down, the enormity of it sank in. The world, reality itself, had changed, and needed to be recognized. Officially, the aetas ignara was brought to an end, and the era after that began. Some Christian denominations stubbornly clung to the old Gregorian scheme, but no one cared what they did.
j!m was the last to leave the church. He liked to sit in the near dark, smelling the vaporized paraffin and embedded incense of the pews, browsing the stained-glass windows and deciding which Station of the Cross he was at. Today it was easy:
Next up:
The summer before high school, J!m had come to believe that he was the Antichrist, based on things that were yelled at him. While this harmonized with his thirteen-year-old sense of self-importance, J!m had not wanted the job, which he equated with being the villain in somebody else’s movie. He wouldn’t have minded being the second coming of Christ, but the painting in the kitchen made that fantasy unsustainable.
He had first sought counsel at Christ the Avenging Baptist, an unfortunate choice, as the Reverend Harold Powell had insisted on baptizing the boy and was disinclined to let him resurface, keeping him under for a full five minutes before giving up and declaring him unsalvageable.
The boy trudged, soaking wet, across the street to St. John’s, where Father Egan took one look at him, muttered “Goddamn Harry” and invited J!m in.
The priest made short work of the boy’s metaphysical dilemma—“Anybody who’s worried about being the Antichrist ain’t the Antichrist”—and asked if he played gin rummy. J!m didn’t, so Father Egan taught him. J!m lost the first hand and none after that.