by Larry Doyle
A FIGURE behind the milky shower curtain.
The Creature, unsuspecting, massages its neck.
A hand RIPS back the curtain.
MUSIC: SLASHING VIOLINS
It’s only THE GIRL, wearing a sly smile.
The Creature lowers its gaze, to her bare shoulders, to:
HER BREASTS, crowned with two pairs of dark plump lips.
NIPPLE LIPS
Jim?
The Creature is overcome with very strange desire.
The mammary lips part fully, flashing row upon row of slavering fangs.
The Creature opens its mouth to scream.
MUSIC: SLASHING AND SLASHING VIOLINS
INTERCUT ravenous biting, impotent thrashing, etc., edited into artful horror.
The Creature slides down the tile, grabbing the shower curtain as it goes.
Water laced with black fluid circles the drain.
j!m’s eye, sapphire in a silver setting, slid open.
He awoke, discombobulated, unsure how far back went the dream.
He smelled smoke.
His sheets were singed, and there were scorch marks on the wall behind him.
We’re just a hunk,
a hunka burnin’ love
the presley brothers sang, in conjoined harmony.
J!m stepped into the cool blue day. His red jacket, extremely square across his shoulders, ended a little above his waist. His jeans were tight and damp, stretched to their denim limits.
Just a hunk
A hunka burnin’ love . . .
The twins faded away, and into the jabber jockey: “Elvis and Jesse, still shaking that pelvis after all these years. . . .”
As J!m neared the autoped, it began moving, hesitating in a shy, servile way. J!m noted the change but walked alongside.
“Hey, and what the hunka burning what was that on Saturday night?”
The infocast had mentioned the incident as well, characterizing it as “an alleged alien attack” that was “under investigation.”
“But, listen, creatures,” the jockey taking it down to nearly conversational level. “Us aliens aren’t all flaming spaceholes. Take it from Marshall the Martian and . . . the Silvers.”
John, Paul, George and Norman, their females and celebrity friends, all chanted:
She got
Pink skin, brown skin,
Gray skin, green skin,
Earth skin, fur skin,
Gold skin, Mole skin . . .
Then Lennon, in tremulous falsetto:
Skin is skin
Is what it is
Skin it is
The sunlight tingled on J!m’s face, a ridiculous feeling his old self would have mocked as shallow and dangerous, facile commodified emotion replacing true sensation (which was always pain), another sign of the creeping puppyfication of the populace.
And yet: it tingled.
And put a bounce in his step. An actual bounce, a springing up and down as he walked, as if gravity had loosened and time had quickened. My, what the J!m of Friday would have had to say about this Monday-morning J!m, tingling and prancing without a care in the world, while the world around him rushed to its conclusion.
He had the same problems he had last week, and a couple more; his overthoughts zinged and zanged around his brain, in and out of alternate futures, as usual but more cleanly than before, without the muddy buzz that made them so mad and saddening. His mind was energized and expanding, not torqued into tighter and tighter circles. He remained confused but not confounded.
He felt . . .
. . . lighter . . .
was exactly the right word.
The beautiful people chanted:
He got
Toes and fingers
Claws and stingers
Wrists and ankles
Writhin’ tentacles
Tazhi Spai, sans the Moondog dialect, howled achingly:
Parts are parts
Are what they are,
Only parts
A heavy-browed, snouted female looked out from a homeboard, sporting an unlikely brunette flip.
the copy read.
He would apologize to Marie, for whatever, and try to arrange a truce with Russ, perhaps easier now that J!m could crush him.
Everybody sang:
All people are people
From below or from above
All beings are people
And all people need lo—
Severe static, then: “He’s out there.”
J!m took off his domes to examine them.
He heard the frightened woman again. “He doesn’t look dead,” the voice originating midway between his ears.
J!m deduced, nearly correctly, that he was acting as a PLEX receptor. He searched for its source.
“He’s right in front of my house!”
Mrs. Van Buren was peeking out from behind her front room curtains, talking on a com.
“My God, he looks exactly like his—”
She saw J!m seeing her.
“No,” she gasped, ducking out of his view before hanging up on his head.
The music resumed.
All creatures are people
And all people need love . . .
J!m stared into his hand, at the two white hemispheres lying there.
“do you want to see it again?” Sheriff Ford asked.
She didn’t but assented. They were in the kitchen, which Miw had already apologized for, and for the unstoppable PLEX Information Network, currently doing a segment on Halloween costume sales as a predictor of the following week’s presidential election. A last-minute uptick in Gojira costumes was seen as favoring the Democrats.
The sheriff replayed the viz, dim and unsteady. It started as Bennie Scott blundered through the corn, thinking he was turning his torch on, a muffled Charles Tucker saying, “Let’s just kill him. It’s not illegal.”
Sheriff Ford sighed, again. Miw, again, reacted as if they were about to kill her son.
The camera, with Bennie, entered the clearing as Russ Ford said, “A beating will do.” The sheriff blinked methodically.
Miw watched, distraught, as Lee Hopper yanked J!m up for his beating, though she knew how it would come out.
“Now, where were we?”
“That thing I said about your mother, abandoning, never loving you. . . .”
The sheriff and the mother both looked away.
Next was the mistaken-urine sequence, which they both would have rather zoomed through, followed by Russ being splattered by J!m’s metamorphic fuel, and the abdominal punch.
J!m’s retaliatory pulse knocked out the wristplex temporarily, and the next visuals were, from several feet away, of bolts shooting from J!m’s fingers, a cyclone of light picking Russ up and hurling him into the dark, and more corn as Bennie ran.
Sheriff Ford thumbed off the viz. “It’s hard to say . . .” he began. “The boys were up to no good, and I can’t excuse what they did, but from what Dr. Rand told me, that this event was part of Jim’s, uh, maturation, then they didn’t do it—although, obviously, J!m did nothing wrong, and Russ was clearly, he’s always been . . .”
Miw took his hand, gratis.
“I’m sorry about your son,” she said.
Nick squeezed her fingers, and she felt all his regret.
“A boy needs a mother,” he said.
“And a father,” she said.
There were two ways this conversation could have gone, and while one would have led to a far more comical situation, with J!m and Russ bunking together, and Rusty dealing with steplust, and the general making hilariously inappropriate remarks, and EThL the nedroid dispensing sassy folk wisdom, it went the other way.
“Have you ever thought about,” Miw asked, “talking to her?”
“Do you really think she’d”—almost hopeful, but—“The last time I saw her . . .” His leg trembled in memory.
“Maybe you’re right,” Miw said.
They continued to hold h
ands, which was darling but wholly inappropriate.
“And in other news, Republican vice presidential candidate Phyllis Schlafly challenged Senator John Kennedy, the Democratic presidential contender, to prove he is a natural human and not an Illuminati, the primeval race of reptilian shape-shifters that have allegedly controlled mankind’s destiny and promoted sodomy for centuries. Speaking from the Smoking Hole of Houston . . .”
the music in j!m’s head went in and out for a minute before ceasing altogether. He couldn’t decide if this new brain feature would prove useful or damnable, when the answer, of course, was both. “With great power comes great responsibility,” as the philosopher-poet Stanley Leiber once wrote.
J!m reached Marie’s house and astonished himself by not hiding. He felt only minor discomfort as he approached her door, even though he had not obsessively practiced what he was going to say, reasoning it was never what he ended up saying anyhow.
He lifted the Rand Dynasonic Electroknocker and the opening herald from Wagner’s Walkürenritt played, at operatic volume but variable speed.
“Jim!” said Dr. Rand, wearing a bathrobe over his suit and tie. “So you’re functioning in your new chassis. Any anomalies to report?”
“I’m here for Marie.”
“She left an hour ago,” Dr. Rand crushed him cheerfully. “Practicing her big speech, the election, you know.”
J!m had forgotten.
“Though heaven knows why she’s trying so hard. She’s a shoo-in. That Lewis Seuss is a Poindexter, as you kids say.”
“We don’t say that.”
Mrs. Rand called from inside: “Come back here and finish what you started!”
“See you in class,” Dr. Rand said, shutting the door.
Chapter 21
Vicious and Venomous!
“you’re like a rock,” gushed rusty, hanging off J!m like an ornament, or rather wearing him like one, parading down the hallway showing her boy bauble off.
“He’s made of diamonds,” Jelly said, trying to keep close on Rusty’s other side, even as she drifted over, steering him into the wall.
“Something like diamonds,” J!m said, with the caveat, “according to Dr. Rand.”
Jelly saw the water fountain coming and, in lieu of going around, went through, acquiring three pieces of chewing gum and a string of saliva laced with citrus, possibly orange juice.
Rusty ogled J!m. “Have you gotten taller?”
“And dreamier?” aped Johnny, a few feet behind.
“Jealous?”
They approached a knot of girls, in deep and heated chitter. Rusty adopted an air of recent sexual satisfaction and show-coughed.
Kathleen Hughes saw them first and managed to gasp “It!” alerting the others, who swallowed screams and scattered in as many directions leading away from J!m as possible. Julie Adams went down in the melee and crawled frantically all the way to the stairwell, making tiny animal sounds.
Johnny barked sarcastically. “I guess they’re just shy.”
“Christ,” J!m said, regarding a separate but related matter.
Two of Marie’s three campaign posters were torn down the middle, glitching the viz, her face halves twitching like a potato with too much swine chromo. The remaining VOTE MARIE was altered with a red marker, adding workmanlike horns, dripping razor teeth and spiral eyes. VOTE had been struck, and below MARIE was scrawled EATS CREETURE. The penmanship was atrocious.
Things were less better than J!m had thought.
Rusty, publicly appalled: “Who would do something like this?”
“Someone who can’t spell creature,” Johnny said.
Jelly whispered, “It could be anybody!”
the auditorium was packed, because attendance was mandatory, these school elections being a vital civics lesson in democracy and how little it mattered who was elected.
Principal Brooks had pre-admonished the crowd to behave like citizens, perhaps not the best word choice. Marie, who had agreed to go first when it appeared as if Lewis Seuss would connipt if he had to go first, approached the podium. Behind her, Lewis revelled in his spazz gambit, while in front there was enough murmuring that the principal had to stand up and stare very hard.
Marie opened with general pleasantries and a joke no one knew was a joke so it couldn’t be said to have failed, and launched into a plethora of unnecessary details.
“My first act as president will be to meet with Principal Brooks to ensure that Manhattan High’s bathrooms are accessible to all of our students, regardless of their eliminatory organs—”
“Hey! Eliminate my organ!”
Tubesteak sat back, proud of constructing a comeback out of words he had heard. Russ was beside him, his face glistening grimly.
“That’s detention, Morrow,” said Principal Brooks.
Marie, shaken, swiped her finger at the vizprompt, scrolling ahead in her speech.
“And I believe we should add more extraterrestrial choices to the lunch menu, like traditional Kanamit Shaved Skin Soup . . .”
This proposal proved unpopular.
“. . . or Bovonian Cud Nuggets.”
Clara Cowley excitedly clopped her hooves together, until she heard all the groans and boos.
Marie nervously scanned the vizprompt. Her next topic: “Alien Arts Curriculum.”
Out of the dark came a voice, disguised but definitely Russ.
“Freak Meat.”
Marie had not heard that term, an indelicate variant of Creature Crone and Space Wench, in quite some time, and never applied to herself. She had once defended Russ’s sister from that very slur, saying it was offensive to both women and nonhumans and that Rusty should be proud of her diverse friendships, which was easy to argue in the abstract.
Laughter mixed with jeers throughout the auditorium, an odd cacophony that highlighted the cruelty of each.
“Thank you,” Marie whispered, swiftly returning to her chair.
Lewis Seuss geeked to the podium like the arrogant twit he was.
“My name is Lewis Seuss,” he proclaimed, “and I am a human being!”
The crowd cheered, given what they wanted: an affirmation of their fragile superiority.
J!m, Johnny, Rusty and Jelly sat in the top row, with successively lessening awareness of what this meant for them.
“Seuss, really?” Jelly said. “Isn’t he a nerd? I thought everybody hated him. I’m so behind.”
J!m watched Marie, sitting there, hands in her lap, forcing a smile. He wanted to run down there and hug her, but had already caused her enough trouble.
marie was not there.
J!m focused on that, rather than the fact that his Civics teacher was also not in his Civics class.
“Tom Gray has decided to leave teaching,” Principal Brooks announced. With a wave, the cool teacher’s name disappeared from the board. “You’ll have a new instructor shortly,” she said. “For today, you’re watching a viz. And I’ll be watching you,” pointing vaguely, “as always.”
The principal dimmed the lights as she left.
it was animated by United Productions of America, a commercial cartoon maker until the company was shut down over Mr. Magoo, which then-president Nixon had become convinced was about him. Under new all-human management, the company employed the same radical modernist style but in the service of more socially responsible messages.
A machine gear rolled out to center screen and opened its eyes, situated atop its upper teeth, making navigation all but impossible without grinding oculi, a queasy prospect that seemed to bother no one else.
“Hi,” it said, in the same voice as Buster the Management Mouse. “I’m a four-DP two-and-a-quarter-inch spur gear. But you can call me Cog.”
J!m watched Marie’s empty chair. He should have sought her out after assembly. He could have comforted her, and she could have seen how tall and hard he had become. He wished he knew where she was.
His desk lit up.
“Authorizing . . .” the screen a
dvised, scanning the hand resting on the screen.
A dossier appeared, for MARIE JUDITH RAND. In the upper right was a 3-D hologram of Marie, rotating slowly, her head then her body.
REMOVE CLOTHING?
blinked a prompt.
J!m had never seen anything like this. Nobody had, except for those who had, and they hadn’t, go ahead and ask them. The government was not in the business of keeping files on all its citizens; it was more of a hobby, really.
J!m shielded his desk from view and scanned the profile:
S/S: FEMALE HUMAN
DOB: DECEMBER 25, 1955 AI
EYES/HAIR: BLUE/GREEN/BLACK
H: 67”
W: 118 LB
KNOWN ASSOCIATES: J!M ANDERSON, DR. B. “BUCK” ROBERTS (MATERNAL GRANDFATHER).
CLASSIFICATION: DO-GOODER
THREAT LEVEL: UNDER REVIEW
NOTES: WELL-MEANING BUT MISGUIDED; POTENTIAL COLLABORATOR; CURRENTLY MENSTRUATING.
There were subnodes branching to academic and medical records, personal journals, art projects, and also this option:
OBSERVE NOW
J!m chose it.
The dossier opened into a viz, a disorienting fly-on-the-wall angle, of Marie lying on her bed, face in a pillow.
Was she crying?
In response to his unspoken question, the camera flew down, loosely serpentining, a buzz in the audio, until it alit on Marie’s pillow, zooming up into her cheek and eye.
J!m reached out to wipe away the tear.
He found himself fingering Walter Ford’s face, less grandfatherly and more militaristic-seeming with the red security lights flashing behind him.
The general wrangled his pipe to the side and scowled into the screen.
J!m ducked down. The general peered around, and the desk went black.
On the vizboard, Cog spun around inside an infinite machine, gamely singing:
I may be just a cog
In the machinery,
But I’m not just a part
Of the scenery!
Chapter 22
Hate and Horror Gave it Life!
everybody came to googie’s. the jumbo white egg structure, suspended by three parabolic chrome fins, held 150 safely and 200 most afternoons, jammed into booths lining the dramatic curved windows that ringed the shell. Another hundred or so could be accommodated curbside, served by female hops in red caps, yellow T-shirts and tap pants, darting around on jetpacks, inefficiently.