by Garrett Cook
Not stable. Pathetic. Deviant. I wish Bernard liked me, but I just wasn’t his kind of guy. When the Church of Authorial Intent went public after years of being a secret society, I felt like I could change that. Most people snickered, thinking Narrativists had a collective screw loose. Silly Calvino bullshit. Mad, careening postmodern cluelessness. But, I read the pamphlets. After looking them over, I brought them down to Bernard’s “room” in the basement to share a secret. From what I knew of Garrett Cook (little though it was, as he was not a frequently published writer) from the excerpts and the Authorial Intent lectures, I discovered that Bernard was quite likely the Protagonist. A lonely, quiet, mentally ill young man possessing godlike psychic potential had to be it. Bernard didn’t buy it. I told him that if he wanted to, he could fix all of this and get us out of here safe and sound, but he didn’t buy it.
“Why would anybody do this to me?” he asked from behind the plexiglass.
As a perpetual test subject, Bernard permanently existed in a fog of self pity. I hoped that he would be able to emerge from it, for if he didn’t, why then… then… then…
I scanned the Authorial Intent pamphlets and came out with no answers about Bernard save the standard 9th grade English/ John Gardner’s Art of Fiction explanation. Conflict would cause Bernard to develop. One would think that being Sagramore’s guinea pig for twenty four years would be sufficient conflict to develop Bernard. Being allowed upstairs only for his bowl of Vitaboom and his trip to the community pool should have been conflict, which should have been, according to door-to-door Campbellians, his call to adventure. This wasn’t enough for Bernard. I might have doubted that Bernard was the protagonist at all had it not been for the things that Authorial Intent had taught me about Garrett Cook. Garrett Cook suffered from claustrophobia, a wounded animus, dubious sense of self and intense positive and negative reinforcement alike during his school years. Bernard carried a sense of self pity that Authorial Intent would refuse to attribute to Garrett Cook, but was clearly present in some of his collected online art community blogs from his early twenties. It made me wish I could have sent out for a better author. Maybe one with a bigger, more mainstream audience to reign in the gore and explicit sexuality that the sadistic young pervert splattered all over his work. It’s not that I dislike sex and violence, it’s just that I worry about cannibal hookers and deadly sex droids. How could I feel safe?
One time I tried to talk to my father about Authorial Intent. It was the day after I first told Bernard he might be the Protagonist and he gave his very disappointing reaction.
“What’s going on, Clyde?” my father asked, seeing that I was a picture of concern. I named myself Clyde because Garrett Cook did not give me a name. I think it was because of the orangutans and a Clint Eastwood movie the author once saw. It was floating out there and I simply grabbed it and claimed it for my own. I may have named myself after a monkey, but we live in a world of many, many monkeys.
“I think Bernard might be the Protagonist.”
His eyes lit up, which was peculiar, because my father’s eyes do not light up often.
“Ah, Authorial Intent! Plot preserve!”
“Plot preserve.”
“I considered raising you boys as Narrativists, but your mother wouldn’t have it.”
Garrett Cook simply forgot outright to create our mother, although he knew that she was something of a fussbudget. My mother, as a result, had no distinguishing features other than an apron she occasionally wore to bake things. Throughout my life, there was no sign of her, more or less, since she either died or divorced my father due to his godless experiments on Bernard.
My father put his hand on his chin and lit his pipe.
“So, you’re saying that Bernard’s the Protagonist?”
“Yes.” My heart felt like loaf of stale bread as I said it.
“No. I don’t think it’s likely. No author would bother to make something so wretched and unimpressive as Bernard the protagonist of a book, even a short one. It’s not really done. Bernard’s just a test subject, though I must admit I have been grooming him for Antagonism. He has great psychic potential and I imagine all sorts of awful neuroses from being locked in the basement like that.”
“I don’t think he’s got Antagonism in him.”
“Well, he’s definitely not a suitable protagonist. I imagine he wants nothing more than—”
So, I laid it on the table.
“I think perhaps we should treat him better.”
“That’s not like you. Just yesterday you did his injections yourself!”
“I was jealous.”
My father puffed harder on his pipe. My father did nothing but smoke his pipe and oversee the injections. Unlike me and certain others, my father never aspired to a life outside the narrative.
“As well you should be if this halfbaked theory of yours turns out to be true. Something pretty incredible would have to happen for him to make our lives any better and I feel no distinct urge to let him try. Although that might just be because that’s what the narrative wants from me. After all, something incredible must happen. As a Narrativist, I must have faith in such things. There will be a Protagonist someday, I assure you, and he’ll be tough and redemptive with lots of real answers. Maybe Bernard’s some sort of pathetic lab monkey sidekick he’s supposed to rescue.”
I abandoned the conversation, letting my father continue with his lung melting idleness and the crushing boredom that he endured between injections. It would be particularly hard on him now since Bernard had already had his injections for the day.
Later that day, Bernard began speaking through the bedside table. My father was ecstatic, knowing that the boy was starting to experience Objectivity. If successfully harnessed, Bernard’s Objectivity had no end of viable corporate and scientific uses. The capacity to speak to nuclear missiles and tell them to go back home, for one thing, would change warfare forever. This made me even more jealous of Bernard.
That day, as I mixed the raptor poison and sold off the remainder of the tank, I had to wonder whether I was part of the problem or not. I dismissed my doubts, and yet I still gave those kids twenty percent off. I was somewhat of a nice guy. I had lobbied for Bernard’s comfort and I had helped the inner city’s economic squeeze. Later on, I did wince at the irony that three of those children, high on raptor gas, wandered into the street and were devoured by raptors. Life in this city was tough. We needed a hero and our hero was possibly locked in my basement.
As many people do when a crisis of conscience comes around, I attended church for the first time. The sermon was on proper behavior for extras in a bar fight scene, which raised many a question: How many should beset the Protagonist at once? Was it fair for the bartender to reach for his shotgun before the hero had knocked down half of the assailants coming at him? Was it fair for the biggest guy in the room to throw a sucker punch? Could more than one person in the bar fight pull nunchaku, whips or similar exotic weapons to add tension and the illusion of expertise? The Reverend John Calvin Jenkins addressed these points one at a time, going over the Narrativist relevance of each one more meticulously than the last. The sermon lasted four and a half hours and somehow I was captivated by every minute of it. I never watched a John Wayne movie the same way after that (not that I watched John Wayne movies very often as Westerns had a tendency to have viruses in the liquifilm and it wasn’t a risk I felt was worth taking).
As the crowd thinned out, I approached the Reverend and introduced myself. He said nothing to me, but he did lead me into his office.
“You’re Bernard’s brother,” said the Reverend, polishing the gold semicolon around his neck as he spoke, “there are theories.”
“There are theories? So I’m not the only one then?”
“As a Narrativist, you should know that almost no ideas are original. Of course you’re not the only one to have thought of Bernard as a possible Protagonist. But I don’t think it’s likely. I don’t know Bernard myself, but I�
��ve heard he just sits in a tiny cell in the basement being poked and prodded and experimented. Nothing special about a guy like that. Too damaged. Too frayed. Too pessimistic. We live in a better world than that.”
I had heard this argument before, and didn’t feel like having any part of it. I was a man who mixed raptor poison for a living, making money on the side by selling drugs to monkeys on a nearby rooftop. We lived in a huge city defended only by enormous malls on all sides, plagued by dinosaurs, jungle cats, snakes and unruly apes. We needed automated police cruisers and triceratops to keep our streets even close to clean. The suburbs were full of oozing, green hallucinogenic mud that turned all its citizens into maladjusted homicidal maniacs, and god knows what was beyond the suburbs. We live in a better world than that? I felt like spitting in his face for saying it, but the sermon showed he understood the flow somewhat. The deep cosmic awareness he had shown must have been tainted by an unnecessary optimism. He needed something to take the edge off the existential bleakness native to Authorial Intent. That something was the thing that bothers me about every religion and I guess the best thing about them: faith. I had a backhanded, cynical sort of faith in my brother.
“Considering what I see every time I walk down the street, I don’t know if I can say that this is too good of a world for Bernard. Seems like you haven’t been paying any attention.”
The reverend was deathly silent. He reached into the pocket of his red, silk priest robe for a comb, which he ran through his thick, Einstein hairdo. He removed his pink shades so he could look me straight in the eyes, which he did with a passion and venom that I had seen in very few men indeed. But, I stood my ground. At this point, most people would have walked out of the office and gone home. I’m rude and stubborn, though. One of those traits was written into me, the other I developed to survive.
“Reverend, Bernard is the Protagonist.”
“You’re deluding yourself. It makes no sense.”
“If Bernard is the protagonist, is there anything I can do for him?”
“If Bernard is the protagonist, we’re all completely and utterly fucked.”
“But what should I do?”
The Reverend didn’t want to think about it, but he did ponder the situation.
“For starters, Bernard is locked in your basement. You might want to start there, since I don’t think he’s capable of much heroism where he is. But, I’m not sure you’re relevant enough to rescue him, which gives me even less faith in him as a candidate.”
I seethed. I ached. My body trembled with the urge to bite, scratch and pound him and, by doing so, to show him just how relevant I could be. By the virtue of surviving I would be the more important of our violent tussle. I hated his words even more, because I had seen how right he was, and seen the people on the streets, shuffling back and forth, waiting to get either eaten or rescued from being eaten. The Narrativists did this fairly often, developing hobbies and ways of life that contributed to the plot and milieu without disrupting it. They had made themselves relevant by building colorful saloons, gaudy nightclubs and shops that sold things like shotguns and exorcism manuals which would be useful to the protagonist of a Cook novel. They created homey little restaurants where other Narrativists hung out solely for atmosphere, desperate actors martyring themselves to their elaborate sets. I went on with my life after finding out about Authorial Intent and it gnawed at me, devoured my soul. I would be defined only by my dealings with the protagonist and if that were Bernard, then I would have to do something really meaningful and let him out into the world to change it.
“He’s developing Objectivity.”
“It happens.” The Reverend shrugged, confused that I was still in his office.
“What if it goes further?”
“That would be something. Deep Objectivity is incredibly rare. Almost never happens. There’s no way it could be him then. Considering Bernard’s inoculations and Sagramore’s experiments and whatnot… well, if he develops Deep Objectivity, then there are possibilities. A person with Deep Objectivity and such a high Maya tolerance… but, there’s no way he could develop Deep Objectivity. It’s a complicated, silly and trite condition.”
The Reverend’s trembling hands showed me his resolve was not impenetrable. He almost burned himself lighting the cigarette he must have needed to calm his nerves. The thought that I was onto something frazzled him. The realization was too much of a threat to the things he believed, too much of a threat to Authorial Intent at large. He was thinking, but he didn’t want to be thinking. It’s always seemed to me that if a guy’s got faith, he shouldn’t have to think so much. Maybe this guy didn’t have much faith for a Reverend or maybe his Protagonist was too much of an ideal. He wanted a man to topple the towers of the law, a violent, epic superhero type, not a basement baby whose greatest accolade would be drifting out of selfhood.
“Garrett Cook hasn’t written him out of that cell you know,” the Reverend’s voice wagged a finger at me on the surface, but I knew it for more of a childish taunt than an arch theological argument.
“What if Garrett Cook can’t write him out of there?”
The Reverend almost burned himself yet again. I had asked the exact wrong question and I knew it. But, every author had unfinished novels, stories they couldn’t tell. If this world was one of them, then life would be outright meaningless, especially for a man like the Reverend John Calvin Jenkins. Plot would not preserve, no matter how hard we tried to move with it or to inspire.
“Don’t talk like that.”
I walked out on the Reverend John Calvin Jenkins and Authorial Intent. I went home and I burnt the pamphlets and the manuscript fragments of this Garrett Cook who would not write my world ahead. Something more than this was necessary. Something drastic. Sneaking into my father’s study, I looked up everything I could regarding the mud. My eyes lit up when I realized how I could make Bernard’s strange ascension happen.
My father happily obliged when I offered to give Bernard his injections. He being poorly drawn and not particularly bright assumed this must have meant that I had gotten all of this ridiculous protagonist business out of my head and that would be better for everyone. I winked at Bernard as I plunged the syringe, mixed with ordinary tap water, into his arm. His eyes widened and his mouth gaped. A less enlightened individual might have thought his soul was trying to escape. A less enlightened individual might actually be right on this count.
“Clyde?” asked the dresser.
“Clyde?” asked Bernard.
“Clyde?” asked the pillows.
“Clyde?” asked the sheets.
“Clyde?” asked the plexiglass.
“Clyde?” asked my right shoe.
“Clyde?” asked Bernard.
And then Bernard was gone. I had done my work.
I traded the Henderson orangs a crate of bananas for two high caliber handguns, a sniper rifle, ten hand grenades, a gas mask and a shotgun. Though a monkey could fire a gun, they certainly had no notion of the retail value of one. It was all set, I just had to fend off my father, Sagramore and their attack dinosaurs, get Bernard (after figuring out who or what he was) out of there and let my neglected brother reach his destiny. Jealousy and contempt still raged in me, but I had acknowledged my brother’s place in the world, while nobody else had. That must count for something, right? It doesn’t. Didn’t.
Boils my fucking blood to this day.
III
Bernard had been Objective for four days before he saw Archelon Ranch and his longing for freedom, once just an aching emptiness, was now an incendiary passion. He hadn’t thought too much of freedom as a possibility before he became the rhamphorhyncus, longed for it more when he became a hat and now would die for it but he still didn’t know how to get it. In the morning, his taunting asshole brother, who had devoted his life to selling raptor poison and tormenting him, would come and give him a second, secret injection. The tests and proddings of his father were bad enough and now his brother compound
ed their sadism. It made him want out even worse. He wanted to tear the house to shreds and do the same to everyone in it. If he could learn to control and focus his fits of Objectivity, maybe he could do it.
But there was no controlling the Objectivity. Over the past day, it had become paradoxically more frequent and more difficult to manage the more he thought of freedom. He tried to fly out of the city as a pterosaur, but his wings were shot off by a rooftop sniper looking for some lunch and he was caught. He was half alive, but not far from the dust tunnel as the sniper and his wife began to cut him up and serve him. When Bernard came back from this misadventure, he vowed to stop eating meat, which surprised his father, but not Professor Sagramore.
“Objectives get very fussy about their fellow creatures. Very sensitive. “
Bernard was getting a good deal more than “very sensitive”. The thoughts and imperatives of his fellow beings grew louder around him each time he went Objective. He had to be extremely careful, since he understood that complete Objectivity would prove worst than fatal. Total Objectivity was like befriending every snowflake in a blizzard and making sure you didn’t forget any of their birthdays. Total Objectivity was the worst kind of unbeing, which made him grateful for the security of the basement in the past, maybe now a bit grateful that he wasn’t a pterosaur being gutted and stuffed for dinner, or the knife that had to bathe in the guts or the cutting board whose sole purpose was to lie back as food was lain out, soaking with bacteria. Best not to think about the things he was glad he wasn’t, as they were quite numerous. The person part of Bernard was beginning to hate the basement and could think of many things that he would rather be, so was developing a better relationship with Objectivity, in spite of the all consuming threat of omnipresence. He was prevented from thinking of these things by an unfortunate three minutes as a margarita and then some time as a fire hydrant.