Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies

by James Marshall

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  satin, silk, and lace

  After school, after Baby Doll15 and I break up, and after Sweetie Honey tells me he’s asking out Baby Doll15, my hot young female followers try to cheer me up. They’re dressed like wealthy librarians (that’s redundant— all librarians are wealthy. They’re communists—wealthy communists. Government-protected gangsters, stealing the products of the hard working poor and renting out those products to the crass unwashed masses for a salary the likes of which the peasants they exploit can only dream). The hot young girls wear designer pencil skirts and tailored blazers. Their hair is pulled back in tight buns. Horn-rimmed glasses complete the look.

  “Do you remember the time you put your manhood in a bowl of milk and asked us if we wanted some groin-ola?” asks one of them, laughing.

  I’m looking at their outfits, thinking about what’s underneath. I’m always thinking about what’s underneath. I never get to what I want. It’s always buried a little bit deeper. I’m tired of digging. There’s lingerie under these girls’ outfits. I don’t need to see it to know. Red, orange, and yellow. Black, grey, and white. Satin, silk, and lace. It reminds me of Baby Doll15. Baby dolls are a kind of lingerie. Baby Doll15 wears baby dolls. Why can’t I control my brain? If I can’t, who can? Who does?

  Would I give up this up (all of this), the money and the power, to have her back? Would I give it up for her? I know I should say, “No.” I feel I have to say, “Yes.”

  Emotion is a pirate. It takes everything. If it sees something it wants, emotion appropriates it. It buries it. It refuses to disclose the location of its treasure. Emotion stands on the prow (front part) of a ship, with wind blowing through its hair, with loud blueness crashing beneath its feet and whitely exploding up behind it, and it feels everything. The salt taste. The bite of the cold. The excitement of the crest and the fright of the trough.

  My hot young female followers offer themselves to me in the subtlest ways and the most explicit. Their words. Their looks. Their touches. I’m not interested. I haven’t been interested in them since that first night with Baby Doll15. I don’t know why.

  Reason is ninja. Reason is cold and precise. Reason doesn’t equivocate (mess around). Reason sneaks past your guards, slips through your electronic surveillance, and hides in the shadows. When you appear, reason is there, waiting for you. It covers your mouth and slits your throat. You understand exactly what’s happening and you know why. Reason doesn’t feel: guilt, fear, hope. Reason thinks, plots, and plans. Reason doesn’t want to escape. Reason just gets away.

  That first night with Baby Doll15, I thought I’d been taking something from her, but she’d been taking something from me.

  Mike Hawk keeps saying, “Why don’t you just call her? I’m sure you two can work it out.”

  York Hunt cries, “It can’t end like this! What you share with Baby Doll15 is too important!”

  My raven sits on my shoulder, loyally and, for the most part, silently. Every once in a while, it caws loudly, (pretty much) directly into my ear, and I jump. What does it want? Food? Water? Companionship? Every once in a while, it shakes itself, ruffling up its feathers, making itself look bigger than it is. Then, slowly, its feathers fall back into place.

  When my followers fail to engage me in sexual intercourse, they try the verbal variety. Ultimately, we have an esoteric conversation about the meaningless. There’s a brief disagreement over whether or not we are, in point of fact, having an esoteric conversation about the meaningless or a meaningless conversation about the esoteric, but then one of the girls wonders aloud, “Does it matter?” and most of us agree it doesn’t. It’s nice to sit around with my hot young female followers and have a discussion. They don’t mention Baby Doll15 once. They don’t criticize her. They don’t say they always knew she was wrong for me. And I never stop thinking about her, and feeling the loss of her, but it’s nice to see my hot young female followers care about me, or seem to, or can at least convince me they do, for a while.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  Watching Them make out makes me Want To Puke Copious amounts of Puke!

  The next day at school, as soon as I get around the corner and Baby Doll15 spots me, she throws her arms around Sweetie Honey and starts making out with him, right there, in front of me, in the hallway of nightmares. I stop dead. I don’t want to look but I can’t turn away. Baby Doll15 keeps her eyes open. I’m haunted by their ghostly grey, their promise of everlasting peace. She stares at me the whole time. When Sweetie tries to tip her head to the other side, she makes a little irritated face in the midst of their kiss, stays in the same position, and keeps staring at me. Obviously, she hates me now.

  I feel like I’m being attacked with a hatchet. Hacked to pieces. I feel like somebody is scattering the raw meat and bloody bits of me. Lighting them on fire. Somebody who hates me. God. I feel so broken and burning.

  Watching them make out makes me want to puke copious amounts of puke! But I don’t. I play it cool because I am. I lift my eyebrows at Baby Doll15 in a bored scholar way, indicating I’ve noticed but I’m not particularly interested, and I go to my locker. Once I get it open, a cigarette lit, and my bottle of whiskey open, Baby Doll15 stops kissing Sweetie Honey, and she says, “Oh hi, Guy Boy Man.” She wipes her baby blue lips with the back of her hand and smiles. “Sorry. We were carrying on a bit, weren’t we? We’re just so happy together.” She turns and beams at her new boyfriend. “Aren’t we, Sweetie?”

  “Very,” says Sweetie, nodding at me seriously. “Right on,” I say, indifferently. I take a drink of whiskey and look down the hall. “There’s a kid crawling on the ceiling over there. It’s kind of crazy.” I take another drink.

  “Sweetie and I are together now,” says Baby Doll15.

  “I see that,” I say, still looking away, down the hall. I stick my cigarette between my lips. I take a long drag. I exhale smoke into the freaky light show. “If that kid crawling on the ceiling comes over here, I’m probably going to shoot him.”

  “Sweetie and I are a couple,” explains Baby Doll15.

  “Of what?”

  “Sweetie Honey and I are dating,” clarifies Baby Doll15.

  “Each other,” adds Sweetie, helpfully.

  “Ah,” I say, feigning comprehension.

  “We’re making out all the time,” says Baby Doll15. “And having sex.”

  “I’m really giving it to her,” acknowledges Sweetie. “Almost all of it. Hard.”

  My relationship with Baby Doll15 is unaffected by this. It’s safely stowed away: in an air bubble in my blood stream. Everything that happened between us—when, where, and how it happened between us—is packed inside the bubble. She and I live in there, in the air bubble in my blood stream, and we don’t know anything has gone wrong. We don’t know where we are, or that there’s anything beyond the air bubble, and we’re together, and happy, and nothing can ever change that. For a moment, I fear it’ll kill me. I worry the air bubble will surge through my veins, to my heart, and arrest me for my crimes against inhumanity, but then I realize my heart is changed. It’s not broken or torn. It’s become a sculpture of dust. My circulatory system is dust, as well. The air bubble is stationary, floating clearly in its dust storm.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry! I never thought . . . !” It’s like Baby Doll15 is reading my thoughts, or seeing and hearing them, because they’re more like a movie than a book. Baby Doll15 pulls away from Sweetie, looks down, and fixes the front of her white baby doll. She’s dressed all in white today. So innocent. So pure. A white baby doll, white leggings, and white high heels. She’s even got a white headband in her pink hair. She’s so out of place here, in this hellish hallway, or then again, maybe she isn’t. “This must be very difficult for you,” she says, seemingly sympathetic. “Seeing your ex-girlfriend involved romantically, and of course sexually, with your best friend.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  Just then Oana, Iulia, Marta, and Agata come running up to me. The
four of them smother me with kisses.

  Baby Doll15 stares, speechlessly.

  “I called them first thing this morning,” I say, throwing my arms around them. “The four exotically beautiful, genetically engineered, behaviourally modified, Eastern European girls and I are dating now,” I explain to Baby Doll15. “That’s why I’m a little late. The girls and I had to do oral and have intercourse a bunch of times before school. Then I took a shower.”

  Baby Doll15’s baby-powder-white face pales even more. She grabs Sweetie Honey’s hand and pulls him away. I watch them go, suddenly worried about her. I can’t believe it. I’m concerned about her. Her feelings. I care, despite myself.

  “Forget about them,” says Oana, putting her hand on the side of my face and turning it toward her. She quickkisses my lips. “He can’t compare to you. Sure, he’s a ninja, skilled in the arts of stealth and killing—if those even are arts—and yes, he has an extraordinarily large penis”—the girls look at each other and nod in agreement—“but it’s not like he’s a pirate and a spiritual leader.”

  “That’s true,” I admit. “I’ve got that going for me.”

  The kid crawling on the ceiling down the hall is male. He looks like he’s about my age. Defying the law (or strongly worded suggestion) of gravity, he’s moving around the ceiling on his hands and knees, effortlessly. Quickly. He seems sped-up somehow. He’s scary because he’s different.

  “And you have us,” adds Oana.

  I look at the Eastern European girls, all of them, at how beautiful they are, how physically perfect they are, and at how there are four of them. But not one of them, or all of them together, is Baby Doll15. They’re not even close. I take a drink of whiskey.

  All of a sudden the kid on the ceiling quick-crawls over to us! When he’s right above us, on his hands and knees, his head turns a hundred-and-eighty degrees, so he’s looking right down at us! He smiles, insanely! I shoot him four times before I even realize I’m holding one of my guns! He collapses on the ceiling! I feel terribly, pointing one of my nines up at the dead kid and the fallen sky!

  I didn’t want to shoot the kid who crawled on the ceiling. He just scared me. I didn’t have time to ask him what he was doing. Maybe it was something really important. Maybe how I reacted was important. Maybe he was me and I’m doing all this to myself.

  Blood pools around him up there. It doesn’t drip down. On our upturned faces or our dirty hands. Over our heads, the kid relaxes, in death. I want him to be happy now, but I doubt he is. He’s probably just not unhappy anymore.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

  Plants are animals Too!

  A week later, it feels like years, but it’s been just a week. Every moment without Baby Doll15 is stretched out of all proportion, like the belly of a woman who’s very pregnant; the moments are weighty, unwieldy, awkward, uncomfortable, and frightening. I have only my faith to see me through these dark days, and since my faith is sort of dark too, I don’t really see much, but I keep going (like a polar bear swimming to an imaginary ice-cap), partly because I don’t have the courage to kill myself, and partly because I am, and always will be, a hero, intent upon ending human suffering. Okay, I won’t always be a hero intent on ending human suffering. I mean, when I end human suffering, I’ll stop trying to end it. If I don’t, it’ll be weird. People will be like, “It’s so sad; he doesn’t know it’s over.” But I won’t let that happen. When it’s over, I’ll stop trying to end it, and I’ll just kick back and relax with all the humans whose suffering I’ve ended. So I won’t always be a hero intent on ending human suffering. I’ll always be a hero, though.

  One black night in the inside day of my brightly lit gothic castle, as I sit in a sitting room, slumped into a dark red leather wingback chair, with a scowl on my face, my elbows on the armrests, and the tips of my fingers lightly playing against each other—touching, separating, and touching again—in a rhythmic way, echoing the cadence of my dust heart, still storming me, I’m considering things, various awesome things, stuff regular people wouldn’t understand, when one of my followers slinks in. She holds an open cell phone on her upraised palm, like it’s a tray of drinks.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Guy Boy Man,” she says. “It’s one of your lawyers.”

  “What does he want?” I ask, gruffly. “Not that a woman can’t be a lawyer.”

  “Actually, this particular lawyer is a woman.”

  “See? That’s great!” I exclaim, cheered. I sit up and lean forward. Immediately, I turn. I’m startled to find the four exotic Eastern European girls standing behind me. Apparently, they were rubbing my shoulders and neck and playing with my hair. I didn’t notice until, by sitting up and leaning forward, I moved out of their reach. I lift my chin at them like, hey, how’s it going? Then I turn back to the follower who came in with the phone. “Good for the female lawyer!” Suddenly, I become less enthusiastic. “What does she want?”

  “She says you’ve got to stop saying it’s okay to kill children aged three and younger and eat them.”

  I scrunch up my forehead. “Why? What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s incendiary.”

  “It won’t cause fires,” I say, dismissively. “I even made a point of mentioning you should follow all safety precautions while cooking the children. Although they’d probably be best served raw.” I turn and nod at the four Eastern European girls like, you know what I mean? and they smile and nod back at me.

  “I don’t want to speak for the female lawyer, but I think by ‘incendiary’ she meant more that you were encouraging violence.”

  “Hold on. I didn’t encourage anyone to kill children aged three and younger and eat them. I just said, if they did, it’d be okay with me.” I get serious with her, and through her, the female lawyer on the cell phone. “I heard on TV, which is a reliable source of accurate information, that a pig is as intelligent as a three-year-old child. We eat pigs, don’t we? So why can’t we kill children who’re three and younger and eat them? Is she arguing kids are smarter before they’re three and then dumber after they turn three? Because that’s ridiculous.”

  “I’m sorry, Guy Boy Man,” says my follower. “She’s adamant you’ve got to stop saying it’s okay to kill children aged three and younger and eat them.”

  “Is it the word ‘kill’? Should I say it’s okay to ‘slit the throat’ of children aged three and younger? ‘Stab repeatedly in the belly,’ maybe? ‘Drop from a significant height’? How can we work this so everybody is happy?”

  “She says parents are going crazy because you’re encouraging people to kill their kids.”

  “Just the little ones.”

  “But the little ones turn into big ones and, according to the precepts of your faith, zombies eat the big ones or turn them into more zombies.”

  “I know. That was kind of my point when I said it’s okay to kill children aged three and younger and eat them.”

  “Really?” says Oana, one of the four exotic Eastern European girls behind me. “Because when you said it was okay to eat them, and you brought in the whole pig IQ equivalence thing, I thought it was a metaphorical argument in favour of vegetarianism.”

  “Me too,” agrees Iulia.

  “Really?” I frown. “Wow. Not my intention at all. I hate vegetarians! They kill innocent defenceless plants just because plants don’t move fast enough or have faces. Vegetarians are racists! Not that plants constitute a race, exactly. I’m just saying. Plants are animals too! Don’t they strain toward the sun like the rest of us? How is that any different from a child, aged four or older, crying for its zombie mother, or from a religious zombie praying? Furthermore, plants are highly intelligent! They use osmosis! Can you use osmosis? No! Actually, you might be able to. I don’t know. But plants do all kinds of stuff with chlorophyll! It’s really scientific! They’re smart! Please! I’m begging you, really hot young girls, think about it! If you were a plant, would you rather keep growing and see what happens? Or would you like to be p
lucked from your native soil and used, all right, used to fuel some hairy-legged sandal-wearing dreadheaded loser who lives in a tent? I think the answer is obvious! God! It makes me so angry! You know what I love about plants, aside from their natural beauty and perfume, of course? They move slowly. They never sneak up on you and freak you out. They mind their own business, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for vegetarians, and just because plants don’t say anything, which I, for one, think is a pretty glaring indicator of intelligence—the wisest listen, and say the least—and just because they don’t have big dumb eyes like a cow—don’t even talk to me about cows, all right, because a cow will step on your foot and just stand there and not even move when you push on it— and so what if plants don’t have feathers? I’m (allegedly) the head of a big cock-fighting ring, okay? I can tell you for a fact that all roosters are rapists and murderers! Yet vegetarians defend them! Vegetarians defend rapists and murderers! So do I. I mean, I think it’s perfectly natural but I’m just saying. Vegetarians consume seeds! Innocent plant embryos! Vegetarians feast on the unborn! Vegetarians eat foetus! It’s barbaric! I think it’s okay too, but I’m just pointing out their hypocrisy. Also, plants produce oxygen! Why do vegetarians hate the environment? Why do they want us all to suffocate in an apocalyptic landscape devoid of plant life and breathable atmosphere? I mean, I want that too, because once we’re all dead, all the zombies will be destroyed too, but do you know what I mean? Why?”

  “I don’t know, Guy Boy Man,” admits my follower.

  “Vegetarians are reprehensible,” agrees Oana, behind me.

  “So what should I tell the female lawyer on the cell phone I’m still holding on my upturned palm like it’s a tray of drinks?” asks my follower.

  “You tell her I firmly believe it’s okay to kill children aged three and younger and eat them! I know I can’t remember anything from when I was three or younger. Therefore I wouldn’t have minded if my zombie mother or zombie father, or the two of them, working in conjugal zombie union, had smothered, or in some other way killed me, and ate me raw, or if they cooked me up and served me with some potatoes and assorted other delicious vegetables.”