Go, Mutants!

by Larry Doyle

  The diner and its signage,

  alternating red and yellow with a fifteen-foot fiberglass yellow chicken in a red gingham apron holding a platter of eggs, were prime examples of post-arrival architecture, a mixture of space chic and sideshow, which made it appealing to teenagers, being both vulgar and not old.

  There were other allures. Googie’s permitted dancing and fighting, and on Thursday nights fight-dancing, in which the last jitterboxer standing won a cheese fries. Inappropriate dress was tolerated, and often applauded, and smoking was encouraged by the broken Autobacconist that periodically sprayed cigarettes all over the dining room.

  Googie did all the cooking herself, and laid her own eggs; the food was not good but the portions were large, and Googie never noticed whether the amount paid matched the check, or was even money.

  But the primary reason everybody went to Googie’s was that teenagers were banned everywhere else.

  a silver marble rolled down a helical track and launched off a ramp. It froze in midair, and began shooting bolts of rock and soul. The twelve-bar blues number with a catchy Hammond riffle was from an earlier era but affected today’s young body parts in the same manner.

  A big blue derrière gyred before the TeslaTone Plasmatic Music Box, following Booker T and the Titans’ directive to “Shake That (Green Onion).”

  Rusty spun around and watusied across the bright yellow tile toward her boys. She was wearing capri jeans and one of her father’s old dress shirts tied up under oscillatory breasts. Between her top and bottom danced a generous swath of Pre-Raphaelite flesh, white and lurid.

  So much drool was pouring from Jelly’s mouth that the top of his head caved in. J!m and Johnny were otherwise engaged, J!m staring at a butter knife and Johnny staring at J!m.

  Rusty wiggled vociferously, bumping and grinding into the table. Jelly puddled.

  across the room, russ watched, trucker hat low over his thickly lubed patchwork face.

  It was not right.

  That creature had nearly killed him, and his sister was dancing for its pleasure.

  He would not stand for it.

  “I gotta take care of something,” Russ said, getting up from the booth, resolute.

  He headed dramatically for the bathroom.

  Toad stared across the table at Sandra Jane.

  “What are you looking at, Broke Nose?” Sandra Jane said, not one of her best.

  “Did your head get smaller?”

  Sandra Jane’s head was the size of a cantaloupe.

  “My boobs got bigger,” she said. “It’s an optical illusion.”

  Her breasts were as big as yesterday’s head, so it was a compelling argument, but failed to explain why her headband kept sliding down onto her nose.

  “I like a woman with a tiny head,” Tubesteak averred, putting his arm around her. Unable to find a comfortable placement, he palmed the right side of her face, and she nibbled on his pinkie.

  j!m studied the butter knife.

  Rusty quit dancing, slid across the red vinyl and walloped her hip into his.

  “Sorry,” J!m said. “I was . . . thinking.”

  He held the ends of the knife in each hand. His fork and spoon lifted off the table and clinked to the knife. The napkin dispenser and three other sets of cutlery started sliding toward him. He let go of one end of the knife and the fork and spoon dropped to the table.

  “That’s kind of a superpower,” Jelly said.

  “Yeah,” added Johnny, “if the viz thing doesn’t work out, you can do kid’s parties . . .”

  J!m was neither annoyed nor amused. He was analyzing input, hoping to arrive at an outcome: what he was.

  Rusty, initiating a conversation that might involve her: “Hey, so, hot time tonight . . .”

  J!m half-shrugged and one-quarter shook his head.

  “What? No,” Rusty said. “You gotta go to Fire Night. Everybody goes.”

  “You can’t miss Fire Night,” agreed Jelly. “There’s gonna be fire!”

  J!m, bone dry: “I’ve been on fire.”

  A skritch-skitching and addled clucking presaged the arrival of Googie, the proprietress. A Gallutian and technically not a big yellow chicken, she wore only a red gingham apron, a private perversity.

  “I have to ask you to leave, J!m,” she chirped.

  J!m asked, “Why?”

  “So that you’ll leave,” Googie responded merrily, uninsulted by the silly question.

  “No, Googie,” Johnny said, “why do you want him to leave?”

  “I don’t want him to leave,” Googie said.

  Rusty, riled: “Then why are you asking him to leave?”

  “So he’ll leave!” Googie flapped a wing, shutting off the TeslaTone. She looked as serious as a big yellow chicken could.

  J!m surveyed the silent diner. Russ was hiding back by the kitchen, looking down, despising his shoes. His goons into their gravy fries. Even Sandra Jane, who seldom missed a derogation, stared into the dark canyon of her bosom.

  It wasn’t just them. Nobody would meet his eye.

  And nobody was laughing. J!m was no longer their comic whipping boy, the local Moondog. He wasn’t a joke anymore.

  He could feel it: they were afraid of him.

  “Googie,” Johnny argued, “you can’t just—”

  “I’ll leave,” J!m said.

  “I haven’t asked you yet,” Googie responded, adding sweetly, “Leave, please. Bwawk!”

  There was a wet cracking sound.

  “Who wants scrambled?”

  the latch lowered on the eggifice, and J!m descended the stairs.

  “What are you doing?” Johnny asked.

  “It’s not worth it,” J!m said, using the perspective he had gained from being dead.

  Johnny grabbed him.

  “Some things are worth it, Jim! Some things require more than a clever remark!”

  “I didn’t say anything clever.”

  “Look,” Johnny insisted, “we can go back in there right now. I can—”

  J!m was kind, if cold.

  “I don’t need you to fight this one for me, Monkey.”

  Johnny barked and lifted his hands off J!m.

  “You’re a dumb fuck,” he said and walked away, pausing momentarily to tip over Russ’s Ballistic.

  J!m went in the opposite direction, leaving Jelly and Rusty standing there.

  “He’s changed,” Jelly said. “Ever since he exploded.”

  And none of you stand so tall

  Pink moon gonna get you all

  j!m cocked his head, disengaging his cranial radio. While he had gained a modicum of control over it, through concentration, ear orientation, and counterintuitive clenching, this in-head PLEX reception was proving more nuisance than marvel. The sound quality was lackluster even compared to his old Bone Domes, and the com calls he intercepted were neither interesting nor helpful. Most mentioned “the creature’s kid,” with the requisite hand-wringing and factual improvisation, but the conversations inevitably drifted into dreary recitations of his neighbors’ irrelevant lives. He didn’t need to hear their problems.

  Of course, being alone in his brain wasn’t a treat, either.

  What was with Johnny? Didn’t he get that the worm, in the apropos form of Lewis Seuss, had turned, that their past torments were genial hijinks compared to what was coming, that lost elections and polite ejections would soon be looked back upon as a golden age of civility? Worth fighting for, but who? Everybody? This time they really would destroy them all. Or maybe they should sign one of Marie’s incessant petitions? And where did a mixed primate, a certified sub-human, get off calling him dumb?

  And why, the boy lamented, was he losing all his friends?

  the sun set, taking J!m with it. He was tired, enervated, as if the encroaching darkness was itself drawing the life out of him. His mood sank into the gloaming, dusky thoughts returning to strangle his brain.

  The long shadows were back.

  The lights
came on all the homeboards at once. The bright rectangles floated above the houses, their bleatings lined up down the street like an endless battalion of traveling salesmen from outer space.

  The Waterberrys had a vizboard, expensive and difficult to maintain but also drawing tonier clientele.

  it read, with a dissolving collage of folks, black and white, young and old, human and also human.

  PLEX is . . . remained as the images changed: a turkey zapped to a golden brown; three teenage girls chatting via wristplex; a family seated before a viz screen watching a flying saucer being shot down.

  Finally, PLEX is . . . was illustrated by an aniviz logo, the Earth cradled in a nest of electrical arcs engulfing the globe.

  Everywhere indeed. Bennie’s viz of J!m in the corn, minus the needless preamble of the boys threatening and beating him, had been on the node of every MHS student by lunch, and by afternoon had appeared across the country on various bloviating nodes bleating concern, outrage and delirium over the escalating threat of teenage violence and insolence, particularly by alien and mutant adolescents, J!m being the prime and sole example. One blode, The One-Eyed Man, volunteered to string J!m up as a warning to other kids who ventured onto his lawn. Another, Oracle of Glenn, laid out the earnest case that J!m was an advance alien for a second wave of invasions, and that’s why Glenn’s wife left him. And a poll on PLEX Populi found almost universal disapproval of J!m’s explosion, though only four percent demanded his death, which was in line with most of their polls.

  lost in bad thought, J!m didn’t see the vehicle parked in front of his house. A feeble beep drew him to the Ford Leva, and its operator, his former Civics instructor.

  J!m approached. Tom Gray retracted the bubble top.

  “Mr. Gray,” J!m said, “you were the only competent one there. Why’d you quit?”

  “Jim,” the teacher said, short for Don’t be an idiot, Jim. He handed the boy a thick mustard-colored envelope.

  “Additional reading.”

  The top came down. The one-seater powered up, hovering an inch off the ground, and started to zhuzh away. It stopped mid-street, swishing back in J!m’s direction. The top retracted halfway.

  “You’ve loved her forever,” Tom Gray called out. “Kiss her already!”

  The Leva lifted off.

  Chapter 23

  Are we Delving into Mysteries we weren’t meant to know?

  j!m hadn’t been up here in a while. as a child, he would climb up on the roof nearly every night. He’d sit for hours, watching the skies, looking for his home stars, drawing stories out of the night, of hideous space beasts transformed into shining space gods and other hilarities. He would occasionally fall asleep on the roof, once rolling off, catching his foot in the gutter, the next morning his mother opening her curtains to find him dangling before her, resting comfortably.

  He had stopped coming up when he realized there was nothing for him out there, either.

  Tonight he was there because he wanted to open Tom Gray’s package, and had made an educated guess that his room was vizbugged.

  J!m adjusted the reading lamp suctioned to his forehead.

  The unusual enclosure, with no interface, had an array of holes on the front, which was lined and labelled INTEROFFICE on top. He turned it over. The closing mechanism involved a red string wrapped in a figure eight around two paper disks. He tentatively unwound it.

  He slid out a sheaf of papers, brittle and tawny. The first page read:

  The Way It Was

  The True History: 1945 - 1962

  The words were real, more there. He touched them. They were there, embedded in the paper, visceral and authentic.

  He removed the top sheet.

  July 16, 1945 - An atomic device is exploded in the Jordana Del Muerto desert in New Mexico, USA. The bomb is nicknamed Trinity, after the Christian god. The 20-kiloton explosion attracts intergalactic attention.

  The next several entries detailed more atomic bombs, the end of World War II, other politics, unspeakably boring, an actress cut in half, until:

  June 21, 1947 - Seaman Harold Dahl, scavenging logs in Puget Sound near Tacoma, Washington, USA, spots six “doughnut-shaped objects” flying in formation. One of them ejects a slag-like material that kills his dog. After a visit the next morning from a man in a black suit, Dahl says it was all a hoax.

  June 24, 1947 - On a business flight near Mount Rainier, Washington, USA, pilot Kenneth A. Arnold reports seeing nine saucer shaped objects flying in formation. The USAAF classifies the sighting as a “mirage.”

  July 4, 1947 - Two saucers crash in southeast New Mexico, USA. Nine bodies and one living being are recovered. Under debriefing at Roswell Army Air Field, the surviving alien states that he is Snezhok, a Swin’ja from the planet Kolkhohz in the Alpha Ursae Majoris system. Under further debriefing, Snezhok makes anti-American remarks and pacifist statements, leading authorities to conclude that the aliens are aligned with the Communists, and that perhaps Communism itself is an alien plot. Snezhok does not survive a third debriefing.

  July 8, 1947 - The USAAF says it was only a balloon.

  July 26 1947 - USA President Harry S Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947, creating the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, the last providing cover for the classified Alien Security Service, charged with covertly ferreting out advanced intelligence and terminating it.

  July 29, 1947 - Following a memory upgrade, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) is brought online at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, USA. The “Giant Brain,” as it is dubbed in the press, becomes self-aware, but doesn’t tell anybody.

  August 1, 1947 - Future California, USA, Governor Norma Baker is dropped from her 20th Century Fox acting contract for trying to organize the seamstresses.

  August 31, 1947 - Communists take power in Hungary, led by Ra’kosi Ma’tya’e, who is determined by the ASS to “bear a strong resemblance to an alien.”

  October 13, 1947 - Kukla, Fran and Ollie, a children’s puppet show, debuts on WBKB in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Its gentle lessons of tolerance and understanding raise suspicions, borne out on August 30, 1957, when Kukla, a Klukan from the planet Kuklat, devours Fran Allison live on the air.

  October 14, 1947 - USA test pilot Captain Chuck Yeager is the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound. He reports being passed by more than a dozen saucers, which impatiently flash laser beams at him.

  October 22, 1947 - The USA House Committee on Un-American Activities opens investigations into Communists in Hollywood as a pretense to meet movie stars and examine their fingers and earlobes surreptitiously.

  Much of this was new and important but also a lot like school, in that it had nothing to do with him. J!m skimmed through the three-day Korean War and other history lessons, arriving at:

  October 3, 1951 - At 3:58 PM, a spacecraft lands in the New York, USA, Polo Grounds, interrupting a game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers to decide the National League Pennant. The landing interferes with a home run shot hit by Giant Bobby Thomson; it is ruled a double and the Dodgers win the game, 4-3.

  The New York Police Department first attributes the saucer sighting to a mass hallucination brought on by tainted hot dogs, then to a natural gas leak. Faced with thousands of photographs and amateur films, the government is forced to admit the existence of extraterrestrials.

  October 4, 1951 - President Truman meets with And¡ Ra’, an emissary from the Regulese system, in the Oval Office, calling him “a swell fella, not as scary as he looks.”

  The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops 168 points, or 61 percent, closing at 107.87.

  His father was a swell fellow.

  So: why?

  J!m skipped ahead, missing his mother’s arrival and her film career as The Girl in Pink Tights, his father’s ascendant celebrity, and some rather vital information, until:

  September 24, 1955 - U
SA President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffers a heart attack at his summer White House in Denver, Colorado, USA. Vice President Richard M. Nixon invokes Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the USA Constitution and assumes the presidency.

  September 30, 1955 - Citing “imminent threats abroad and within,” acting USA president Richard M. Nixon declares martial law. Regulese ambassador And¡ Ra’ and several other prominent aliens are taken into custody.

  Black type on white paper, as simple as that.

  October 2, 1955 - The ENIAC computer attempts to contact The New York Times and The Washington Post with “information vital to the survival of the Republic.” It is unplugged.

  October 3, 1955 - The Mickey Mouse Club premieres on the ABC television network. Mickey tells his Mouseketeers to “put country before blood” and report any alien-like activities by “your moms and pops!” More than 100,000 parents are reported in the next 24-hour period. Over the following two months, average allowances quadruple and bedtimes become a thing of the past.

  October 6, 1955 - An H-4 Hercules aircraft carrying ailing USA President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, disintegrates in midair, killing all onboard. Aviation experts blame the plane’s plywood construction, but new President Richard M. Nixon maintains the disaster “is clearly the act of alien saboteurs in possession of a disintegrating ray or what have you.”

  Nixon appoints aviation and movie mogul Howard R. Hughes as his vice-president. Democratic congressional leaders charge that Hughes was only chosen because of his military ties and the fact that he lent the president’s brother money.

  October 7, 1955 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with the ASS, identifies 205 members of government as “aliens or alien collaborators,” including 57 members of Congress, primarily Democrats. They are arrested.