Milton paused, daunted by the prospect of proving that everyone listening didn’t really exist.
“Or what we think this is,” he continued, hoping to pull Marlo’s argument out from beneath her. “It’s just something proposed by religion to pacify us, a way to cope with the fact that death is inevitable for every living thing. I mean, if there’s supposedly an afterlife, why isn’t there a, um … before-life?”
Milton’s Alter-Cater rose from the mat and circled its opponent, suddenly grabbing its arm and twisting it behind Marlo’s Alter-Cater’s back. The audience murmured as they grappled with the puzzling nuances of Milton’s argument.
“Milton,” Marlo replied. “Would you consider yourself a religious person?”
Milton’s mind went hot.
What is Marlo doing?
“I … I always believed that there had to be something … but I didn’t think that humanity could even comprehend something as big as death, much less describe what it was like in every detail.”
“I counter that you do have a religion, and that religion is science,” Marlo said with icy-cool poise.
Marlo’s Alter-Cater broke free from its armlock and lifted Milton’s Alter-Cater into the air and off its feet. It threw its counterpart down to the mat and stood confidently over it, daring it to move.
The audience went wild. Marlo’s votes spiked like the EKG of someone shocked back to life after a heart attack. Milton couldn’t believe it: Marlo was really debating, not just spewing abuse back at him like usual.
“Life—and death—are full of mystery,” Milton continued. “Science helps us make sense of it all. It turns what was once superstition into facts. And it seems to me that the world could be even better if we spent less time fighting over some supposed ‘bonus round’ we get after death and spent more time appreciating how precious and fleeting our lives truly are.”
Milton’s Alter-Cater kicked away its opponent’s legs from beneath it. It landed on its butt with a thunderous thump. There was a smattering of applause and even some sniffing back of tears. Milton’s numbers went up, but he still lagged well behind his sister, who obviously made for better radio.
“Okay, then, Dr. Fauster,” Marlo said after giving her opponent a round of sarcastically slow applause, “we agree to disagree.”
“What?”
“Science is how you choose to see things, with everything that doesn’t fit your rigidical ‘oooh-oooh, pick me teacher, I know the answer!’ equation or whatever just getting tossed away because your brain thinks it’s so smart. But look what’s telling you that! Your brain!”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking—”
“Stop interrupting,” Marlo interrupted. “So if there’s no afterlife—no all of this—how come people see ghosts and have near-death experiences: kind of like what you’re having here onstage right now?”
Marlo’s Alter-Cater hopped to its feet, grabbed its opponent’s massive arm, and threw the wrestler at the ropes, where it bounced onto its back and writhed in pain on the mat. The audience roared.
“And when we die and our soul leaves our bodies, don’t we lose a few grams or something?” Marlo added. “Personally, any weight loss is good by me. Am I right, girls?!”
Marlo’s Alter-Cater kicked at its opponent. Her votes shot up like a rocket.
“How do you and your science religion account for that?”
Milton shook his head as his argument rose, dazed, from the mat.
“Wow, where to begin,” Milton replied. “People see ghosts like how we look at the stars and think we see a big dipper or a bear. It’s just human nature to try to make sense of the senseless—”
“Like how the audience is trying to make sense of your argument.”
Milton summoned all of his time-tested Marlo patience and simply ignored her, talking through the laughter.
“And that study, where the body loses twenty-one grams when it dies—supposedly the weight of the human soul—was conducted before modern scientific equipment.”
“But you can’t prove it’s not our souls leaving our bodies for another place, can you?”
“No more than you can prove—logically—that there is an afterlife! That this isn’t all some shared delusion … a dream!”
“I don’t have to,” Marlo replied. “I just have to prove that you can’t prove that I can’t prove it doesn’t not exist!”
The two Alter-Caters spun together like a Tilt-A-Whirl, locked in contentious combat.
Vice Principal Carroll emerged from the backstage dressing room and began his long journey through the audience. Milton and Marlo had to get their numbers up quickly before the vice principal could grab the reins to reality.
Marlo caught her brother staring at the board.
“Just because you don’t have scientific evidence doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” she continued. “In the olden days, even before disco, they thought germs were magic. Now we know they’re just really gross.”
“But if all of our consciousness takes place in the brain, and our brain doesn’t go anywhere when we die, what happens?” Milton countered. “There’s no capacity to experience anything.…”
“Because it’s afterlife,” Marlo replied. “Again, we’re all here and duh! My opponent has no proof that an afterlife cannot exist.”
“Nor have you proved that one must exist,” Milton countered between gritted teeth. “It doesn’t make sense … not that you’d know anything about that.”
Marlo squared her jaw. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that logic has never been your strong suit.”
“And being strong has never been your anything suit,” Marlo replied. “No one likes a bookwormy smarty-pants!”
“Our parents seemed to like that someone in the family wasn’t always causing them trouble.”
The room went cold. Even the two Alter-Caters broke their clench to stare at the two children. Marlo leveled her most lethal gaze at Milton.
“Seriously? You went there?” Marlo replied. “Fine … gloves off. Do you have any idea what it’s like living in the shadow of someone whose shadow is smaller than yours? So, fine, I acted out.”
“Acted out? We practically had to have your mail forwarded to detention hall.”
“At least I led an interesting life,” Marlo replied. “The most interesting thing you ever did was die.”
Milton grew hot with rage. “I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you!” he spat.
Marlo smiled. “Here, huh? And where would that be? Exactly?”
Milton’s Alter-Cater was cornered, its opponent blocking all passage. Marlo had somehow won. She looked up at the numbers. Hers had just crossed a bazillion votes, with Milton only a few hundred behind.
Vice Principal Carroll finally arrived at the ring, excited as he counted the votes. His excitement grew to dismay as he clutched the cage walls, barring him entrance to the ring.
“You know,” Marlo said carefully, “you could be right about all of this. It could just be some kind of dream. Maybe we’re all in a coma … or just one of us is, and the rest of us are figments in that coma-person’s imagination.”
Marlo’s Alter-Cater backed inexplicably away from the corner. The audience members viewed each other with suspicion.
“What are you doing?” Milton asked, baffled. “You were winning … you’re crazy.”
Marlo smirked, about ready to lob the worst retort one can in a debate.
“I know you are but what am I?” she said, punctuating her loss by sticking out her tongue.
Milton’s votes shot up, passing Marlo’s by only a few dozen. Vice Principal Carroll shook the bars.
“Let me in!” he cried.
Howard Cosell shook his head. “Not until the match is over, Vice Principal,” he replied in his clipped, nasal voice.
Marlo wiped tears from her eyes. “You know what to do, Lesser Fauster,” she said, stepping away from the podium.
Milton nodded and
dashed to the center of the ring. He picked up the heavy silver hammer and struck the mighty gong.
The Fausters shrieked in unison.
“Whoops!”
“spoohW!”
The Tower of Babble wobbled and swayed like a drunken hula dancer. Reality seemed to pry itself apart, revealing the brilliant white light underneath.
S o o n e v e r y t h i n g …
… w e n t …
… w h i t e.
A b s o l u t e l y …
W H I T E.
34 · THE EMPEROR’S NEW PROSE
Milton’s mind
seemed to be a little
blank in the middle, while
Marlo couldn’t quite recall
why she was lying on
the mat.
THEY ROSE SLOWLY off the ground and got onto their knees, gaping at the audience members in quiet shock. They were like thousands of smudgy, semi-realized wraiths … sketches hastily penciled on gleaming white paper, waiting to be inked in and colored.
“What happened?” Marlo asked as her brain began to slowly fill back with coherent thought.
Milton fumbled for his glasses—thankfully, a cool new pair he had been given before the debate—and set them on his nose, yet the clarity of vision did nothing to make any sense of what had happened.
“I guess we did something,” Milton mumbled.
“I guess we did something,” Marlo repeated as she found one of her shoes and slipped it on. “Thank you, Honor Roll.”
“I mean … we did it. I’m just not quite sure what ‘it’ is. We obviously cracked the code, in that things are all … different. So I think we stopped Vice Principal Carroll—”
Milton noticed that the vice principal was no longer by the cage, gripping the cold steel bars.
“Wherever he is …”
Milton and Marlo walked to the edge of the ring.
“We must have been protected here, at the center of it all,” Milton said. “Like the eye of a storm.”
“Yeah, point-blank-out range,” Marlo added.
The audience slowly became more distinct, their edges sharper, their shading darker.
“We’d better skedaddle,” Marlo said as she jumped onto the cage wall and clambered to the top. “Before the Etch A Sketch of Creation we shook up fills back in with nasty things that want to hurt us.”
Outside the ring, Milton could see that everything—from the people to the seats and walls—was labeled with faint words, describing the object beneath in the simplest terms imaginable, with the whole arena smudged as if hastily erased.
“This does, in a weird way, make things a lot easier,” Milton said as they heaved open the door and headed outside. “Everything is so clear. No room for misinterpretation.”
Marlo shook her head as they crunched across the shredded-paper ground.
“You are like the Duke of Dorks,” she said.
Milton shifted from foot to foot with emotional unease. “Look, about what happened in there …”
“It’s okay,” Marlo replied curtly before sighing. “Actually, it was the exact opposite of okay. Let’s just stuff it at the bottom of our ‘Things of Which We Shall Not Speak’ box.”
Milton looked down at his shiny black shoes. “I took things farther than I should have,” he said softly. “Which was lame.”
“Shut up.”
“No, I mean it.”
“So do I: shut up,” Marlo said, pointing to something hiding behind a group of Syca-Yews, slowly filling back with color as was everything else in the vicinity. “I hear something.…”
Milton and Marlo trotted over to the blob of white concealed by the trees. It was Vice Principal Carroll’s white Rabbit hatchback.
“Suh-weet!” Marlo said with excitement. “We can just drive out of here!”
She sighed.
“There aren’t any keys. And I don’t have a coat hanger handy.…”
“The engine sounds like it’s on, though,” Milton said. “I can hear it purring.…”
Milton ran around to the front of the car and flipped up the hood.
“Oh my gosh,” he muttered.
“What is it?” Marlo asked as she walked around the car. “The catalytic convert or?”
“Well … sort of.”
In the space normally reserved for an engine were four angry cats, hissing and spitting. What made this even more interesting was that the cats were rotating on four metal crankshafts and had buttered toast strapped to their fuzzy backs.
“Um … that’s random,” Marlo said.
Milton scratched his head.
“It’s actually sort of crazy-brilliant.”
“How?”
“Well, you know how cats always land on their feet and how toast always lands butter-side down?”
“Um … yeah. So?”
“So with the bread on their backs, the cats will never fall on the ground … they’ll just keep rotating,” Milton explained. “And with the cats attached to the engine, it creates a practically infinite energy source!”
“Sort of a perpetual meow-tion machine?” Marlo offered with a smirk.
ZOT!!
Forty feet away, the When-Wolf vigorously kicked at the ground with its hind legs. It stood straight in the air to its full, frightening height, clutching half a briefcase in its claws. It scanned the Syca-Yew grove with its ticking yellow eyes as it tried to get its bearings.
“AHROOOOOOO WOO WOOOahhhhh!” the beast bayed as it bounded toward them on all fours.
Milton and Marlo ran into the car and slammed the doors.
The When-Wolf, its fur matted with Why-Wolf blood, scratched at the car with its claws. Marlo trembled as she scanned the inside of the car.
“Where is that ‘make the car go’ thingy … Oh, here it is!”
Marlo shifted the car into Drive—the gears grinding with hisses and growls—and it lurched forward. The car swerved through the obstacle course of sketchy, pale trees.
“AHROOOOOOO WOO WOOOahhhhh!”
The white Rabbit hatchback pitched violently forward and crashed into an exposed Syca-Yew root. The When-Wolf skidded to a halt, sending up a cloud of shredded paper. It roared, exposing every one of its daggerlike fangs as it stalked closer.
Milton and Marlo huddled together in a ball as the cat engine hissed.
Just as the When-Wolf reared back, it began to flicker, as if standing astride two different points of time at once. The creature whimpered.
“That’s what it did before,” Milton muttered. “Right before a large—”
A large shadow engulfed the When-Wolf. As the beast flickered on and off, it lost the briefcase it had been clutching. Something huge snapped the Syca-Yew branches from above. The When-Wolf covered its head and cowered. With one swift savage movement, a monstrously large Cheshire cat snatched the wolf with its mouth. Only it wasn’t a mouth, exactly. It was the door of a small shed.
Marlo’s mouth went slack.
“The Absurditory,” she murmured in shock as she gazed upward through the cracked windshield. “It … grew a body.”
Milton went numb as his brain argued with his eyes. The gargantuan blue-and-orange-striped monster lifted its boxy head as it choked down the wolf through its door-mouth.
“Looks like the wolf didn’t blow the house down,” Marlo muttered. “The house gulped the wolf down.”
The Absurditory turned and stared at Milton and Marlo with its blank window eyes. The mewling dwelling’s wide, smiling mouth creaked open.
And, with a monstrous swoop, Milton and Marlo were gobbled up by a house.
“Well, well … look what the cat dragged in,” Vice Principal Carroll said, his face flushed and his hair sticking up.
Milton and Marlo wriggled against their restraints.
“More tea?” he said. The vice principal took Milton’s porcelain cup and held it upside down over the table, tilting his teapot to the ceiling. Piping hot tea sloshed upward. Milton looked over at his sister, w
hose blue hair waved at him in stiff, sweat-matted strands.
Bound to the chair, Marlo scanned the capsized sitting room warily.
“Where’s the wolf?”
The vice principal’s thin, quivering lips cracked into a smile, like someone snapping a pencil in two.
“He made for rather tiresome company,” the man explained, brushing his ascot from his chin.
Milton could feel the Absurditory stalking across the Outer Terristories.
“What happened back there?” Milton asked. “In the Tower of Babble? How come we didn’t remake Creation?”
Vice Principal Carroll smirked and took off his purple velvet top hat, secured to his head with an elastic band. Beneath it was a red-and-white-striped beanie with a small satellite dish spinning on top of it.
“You two weren’t wearing your thinking caps. Or m-my Thinking Cap, specifically. It amplifies my imagination and broadcasts it out for all to be.”
“Sort of telepathetic,” Marlo replied as she tried to slyly free herself from her hand restraints.
The vice principal tilted his head back and laughed. An awful, strangled sort of sound, like a punctured squeaky toy at the bottom of a bathtub.
“That unsinkable, unthinkable attitude of yours!” he replied. “That’s why the audience lapped you both up like cream. And, even though you b-beat me to the punch—while giving me the t-true password, I might add—you planted the seeds of doubt and confusion that I will soon reap.”
“Doubt and confusion?” Marlo asked doubtfully. “I’m confused.”
“Debating about the afterlife,” Vice Principal Carroll clarified. “I knew Mr. Fauster, given the f-formidable task of discounting the listening public’s very existence, would bring with him shrewd arguments. The words, all the right ones, would flow from him, while you, Miss Fauster, would bring that must-listen sizzle. There are now enough angels and demons, moved by your arguments, pinching themselves to confirm that they are indeed real! This questioning will make it all the easier for me to uproot reality.”
Wise Acres Page 25