Emperor of Gondwanaland

by Paul Di Filippo

  That day in the laundromat we were talking about this book called The Abolition of Work.

  I guess we got pretty loud and excitable. The next thing we knew, this woman was standing over us.

  She wore a backwards baseball cap, overalls with one strap dangling across a thermal undershirt, and the inevitable Doc Martens. She had red hair shorter than mine, too much purple lipstick, and six studs in one ear, each one a different fake gem.

  A pin on her bib said: anarchy won’t work? that’s an indictment of work, not anarchy.

  Her voice was roughened by smoke and drink. “Have you guys read Hakim Bey?”

  “Who?”

  She told us about this mysterious Arab and his theory of “poetic anarchy.” It sounded intriguing.

  So we read him.

  Burr and I started hanging out with Fiona. We found out a little about her.

  She worked a phone-sex line, and hated it. But she couldn’t stand any other job, either. She shared a crummy apartment with a junkie girlfriend on welfare. And somewhere back in her past, she must’ve been really hurt by some guy.

  This part we more or less deduced by her determined stoniness to advances from either of us.

  Her life was like a Lou Reed outtake. Easy to poke fun at. Except that it was all too real for her.

  A few months after we met Fiona, Uncle Karl died of a heart attack.

  So much for retirement.

  We were amazed as hell to learn he had willed his old house to Burr, along with a few thousand dollars.

  Fiona helped us move our junk in the Ranger.

  When we had carried in the last box, it somehow didn’t surprise me when Burr said, “Now we’ll go for your stuff.”

  “Okay,” said Fiona.

  That night, over dinner, Fiona said, “You know, we’re pretty lucky. A roof over our heads, food, money … Let’s have a toast to Uncle Karl!”

  We clinked our glasses, full of cheap jug wine.

  “We’d be pretty irresponsible,” Fiona continued solemnly, “if we didn’t take advantage of our good fortune.” Burr smiled as if he knew exactly what she meant. I realized with a start that I kinda did, too.

  “Meaning …?”

  “Meaning that the time for talk is over. Now it’s time for action.”

  “Poetic?” Burr said.

  “Creative?” I asked.

  “Anarchistic!” Fiona replied.

  I pulled up in front of an unmarked steel door at the rear of the mall and put the Toyota in park, leaving the engine running. Odors of french fries and plastic clothing seeped in.

  I turned to look at Fiona. She was sitting primly in the passenger seat, knees together, clutching a patent-leather purse in her lap by its gold chain. Sodium light lit her from overhead. I burst out laughing.

  Fiona wore a teased and frosted wig. Her face was made up so she looked like Tammy Faye Bakker’s slightly more sophisticated sister. A frilly blouse, madras skirt, opaque pantyhose, and pumps completed her outfit.

  “Who’s your husband again?”

  Fiona’s rough voice had somehow been transformed into that of a pampered suburban hausfrau. All that phone sex, I guessed.

  “Councilman Danvers. And he’s going to be so worried unless we find little Jennifer right now!”

  Her voice had escalated into a kind of peremptory hysteria on the final phrase, and I found myself utterly convinced, even though I had helped write the script.

  “Great. Buy us half an hour, and then we’ll pick you up right here.”

  Fiona locked gazes with me then, only her pirate eyes familiar in her strange face. “Don’t forget me in there,” she urged in her normal rasp.

  I was taken aback by her intensity. I couldn’t think of what to say, so I reached for her hand.

  The mall door opened, and someone hissed.

  “Okay, you guys—hurry!”

  The weird moment ended. Fiona jacked open the car door and hustled inside the mall. Burr took her place.

  “No one will see her come in without little Jenny,” Burr chortled. “There’s nothing down that corridor but the rest rooms, and that’ll be her excuse out.”

  I was kind of irritated that Burr had chosen just then to break up whatever might have been about to happen between Fiona and me, even as I told myself I shouldn’t be. “I know all that, man. We’ve been over the plan a hundred times.”

  Burr looked hurt. “Hey, chill out. I’m as nervous as you, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Let’s get to it, then.”

  I drove around to the front of the mall. The immense parking lot was three quarters full. Saturday night at Consumerville. Nail painting and arcade action, digitized portrait T-shirts that read world’s greatest dad. Slurpees, burgers, and six screens of Hollywood entertainment. Who’d ever want to leave?

  Tonight we’d find out.

  We spotted the security guard’s Suzuki Samurai parked in the shadows near the closed bank branch. Almost as soon as I killed our engine, he wheeled off toward the mall.

  The search for missing little Jennifer was on. I could almost hear Fiona’s desperate supplications.

  Burr and I emerged. We each wore zippered belly-packs containing fifty tubes of Krazy Glue, their tips already presnipped and recapped. Now we took out one apiece.

  Burr held his up like a sword. “For Duty and Humanity!”

  “Duty and Humanity!”

  We took up our positions on opposite sides of the random first car, Burr on the left and me on the right.

  Like some bizarre precision skating duo, we inserted our tube tips into the car’s keyholes and squeezed.

  “All right!” exclaimed Burr.

  “No time for gloating. Five seconds per car, remember?”

  “Gotcha.”

  We started trotting, sneakers digging into the tarmac.

  Finger the keyhole, insert, squeeze. Jog, jog, jog. Finger, insert, squeeze. Jog, jog, jog

  Our first tubes sufficed for twenty cars, all in a little over a minute and a half. We wouldn’t quite finish the fifty tubes in the time allotted, unless we picked up the pace.

  “Are you game for speeding things up?”

  “Lead on, MacDuffer!”

  We began to seriously haul some ass.

  After about the two hundredth car, Burr began to chant a eulogy for the dead with every hit.

  “Inner cities! Downtown theaters! Vanished wetlands!”

  I joined in. “Country roads! Independent bookstores! Public transit!”

  “Clean air! Mom ’n’ pop markets! Pushcart vendors!”

  We had to quit chanting as we began to breathe harder. We were squirting locks shut about every three seconds. Security was still nowhere in sight. Hardly any mall patrons had emerged either. They were probably all gawping at Fiona’s simulated distress.

  At a bit under the halfway mark by our watches we reversed direction, heading back toward the Toyota, down another aisle.

  “Shit! A keypad!”

  “Cement the fucking wipers!”

  We arrived back at our car almost breathless.

  “We crack a thousand?”

  “Think so. C’mon, Fiona’ll be waiting.” We pulled up outside the emergency exit. “—four, three, two, one!”

  No Fiona.

  A minute crawled by like a slug on ’ludes.

  Burr began to mutter. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, you beautiful crazy bitch. Don’t blow it—”

  The door burst open, and Fiona dashed out.

  I peeled out as soon as she had one leg and half her body in the car.

  Beneath the absurd makeup, her face was pale. “They sent a lady cop to the john with me. I had to slug her.”

  “With what?”

  Fiona cracked her purse. Inside was a brick.

  “Remember Shepherd’s Department Store, down on Main? They knocked it down last year—?”

  “Way to go, girl!”

  All the local stations had remote crews at the mall for the eleven o�
�clock news. The mayor of Malltown was ranting about harsh justice for the perpetrators of this “outrage against all decent consumers.” Approximately fifteen hundred very fussy and irate people were stranded. Every tow truck in the state was lined up to haul their useless vehicles away. Cops earning copious overtime juggled the wreckers with the incoming rescuers: family members in second cars, as well as several hastily commissioned school buses for those without extra wheels. The mall management had coerced several restaurants into dispensing free refreshments to quell the indignant bitching. Liability suits were expected to total several millions.

  Fiona wiggled her sore toes atop the hassock, her face pink from scrubbing. She raised a glass to the television.

  “Shop till you drop, folks!”

  The SPCA lay low for a few weeks after that.

  Not that we were totally inactive. Just that our activities were a tad less high-profile.

  One day we ambled down to the courthouse. The sun was bright as a brass button, the wind scented with maritime odors off the bay. Our bellies were full of sausage sandwiches and draft beer, and it was a wonderful day to be alive.

  We strolled through the parking lot reserved for judges. Burr had a notebook and a pencil out. For every Saab, BMW, Mercedes, and Volvo in a judge’s space, he copied down the tags and specs.

  Almost finished, we were approached by an antiquated rent-a-cop.

  “Hey, what’re you guys doing?”

  “This is our cousin from France, sir. Fiona, say hello to the nice man.”

  “Bonjour.”

  “She’s a bit simple. Her hobby is collecting license plate numbers from around the world, and we were just providing a few local samples for her. Tell the man ‘Thank you,’ dear.”

  “Mangez merde, cochon.”

  “Well, okay, I guess.”

  Our friend Mister Jimmy worked at the registry. From him, we got the names of the judges and their phone numbers. Then we took out a classified ad for each car, identical except for model specs:

  1991 Volvo, red, automatic, low-mileage, one owner. Must sell cheap & quick to finance messy divorce. Call 555-2222, days or nights till 1 a.m.

  The newspaper—a monopolistic, jingoistic tyrant—ended up settling out of court for several thousand dollars per judge. A wise move, considering.

  We bought a fax machine and a directory of public fax numbers. Several deserving corporations—GE, Dow, Martin Marietta, the usual suspects—received continuous-loop transmissions overnight via “borrowed” phone lines. The images we sent varied, from starving kids to war-torn cities. A fine use of corporate toner and paper.

  This reminded Burr of something he had read, about automatic dialers. You can tie up a whole exchange for days with one. It makes thousands of calls per day, to listed and unlisted numbers alike, mindlessly cycling through all possible combinations.

  With a part of Uncle Karl’s inheritance we purchased such a machine and paid the rent on a studio apartment for a month. Using a fake name, we had the phone company install a line. The message we recorded was a portion of Dali’s autobiography. It took the phone company three weeks to track down the rogue machine. Reports were that a Nynex employee grabbed the ax from a nearby fireman’s hand and callously murdered the innocent dialer.

  Such simple yet satisfying misdeeds kept us busy while we hatched a more ambitious scheme. Neither did Burr and I neglect our landscaping business. Just because we were intent on introducing some fruitful chaos into society did not mean that people’s grass stopped growing. Fiona, after being left home alone and bored for a few days, began to accompany us, pulling full weight with the landscaping chores. It was mighty pleasant to have her sweaty self working beside us.

  At last we felt ready to embark on perhaps our most daring escapade yet.

  “It’s about time, too,” said Burr forcefully. “I was starting to think we were going to go out with a whimper instead of a bang.”

  “You’re saying this is our last prank?” Fiona asked.

  “It’s just an expression.”

  “Well, don’t jinx us.”

  Once all the details were fixed, we set a date.

  Late on the night before the big day someone knocked at my bedroom door. I was still awake.

  “Come in.”

  Fiona closed the door softly behind her.

  “Ever since Burr said that dumb thing, I’ve felt real freaky about this,” she said.

  It was important to keep breathing normally, as when a shy deer approaches, so I concentrated hard. “Nothing to worry about. All the bases are covered.”

  “Could I just—I mean, would you mind if I asked you a question?”

  Not as long as I can kiss you afterward, I thought, but only said, “Course not.”

  “Sometimes I feel ugly. Do you think I’m ugly?”

  My answer was the kiss.

  We slept through the alarm. Burr had to knock on my door.

  He jumped back an inch or two when Fiona came out and brushed past him on the way to the toilet.

  But he didn’t say anything.

  More goddamn self-control than I would’ve shown, for sure.

  Around the corner from Pleasant View Elementary School, I pulled the stolen Lincoln up to the curb. It was the mother of all understatements to say I felt like we could all benefit from a sincere heart-to-heart talk.

  We sat three abreast, Fiona in the middle. When she had climbed in up front, Burr pushed in after her.

  “Hey,” I said weakly, “this isn’t the way we planned it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  So I drove off.

  Now I tried to think what to say to make things like they used to be.

  It was hard to read Burr’s frozen face behind his G-man shades. In that conservative suit, his hair slicked back, a suspicious bulge beneath one armpit, he looked too alien. Fiona too, in that stupid staid nurse’s getup, winged hat, white stockings, and orthopedic shoes. I watched her chew noncommittally on a nonexistent hangnail.

  I figured I looked equally weird to my friends, in my lab coat with its pocket full of nerd-tools, clipboard lying in my lap.

  Suddenly I realized that the masks we had donned were now armor separating us, and I couldn’t summon up any words to pierce them.

  “Look,” I temporized, “can we put aside icky personal stuff while we’re trying to topple civilization as we know it? After—if there is an after—we can all roll around on the floor, gnashing our teeth and pulling our hair and similar emotional stuff. Okay?”

  Fiona ceased chewing. “I’m up for it.”

  “Burr?”

  Burr mumbled something.

  “What? Speak up, for Christ’s sake!”

  “I said, ‘Truce time.’”

  A strange kind of achy sad nostalgia washed over me then. I remembered Burr and me playing war as kids, calling out “Truce time!” to each other.

  I also remembered all the times the little shit had broken it.

  I took the offer at face value, though. “Okey-doke. Can we assume dignified positions, please?”

  Burr got out and let Fiona get in back. He resumed the front passenger seat, as far away from me as possible. I drove around the block.

  Pleasant View Elementary faced a raised portion of the interstate that had bisected the neighborhood thirty years ago. That was why we had picked it.

  As we had planned, no classes were in the schoolyard when we arrived. I parked in front of the main door. We all got out. Burr carried a crackling walkie-talkie, and Fiona a doctor’s satchel. I held an army-surplus Geiger counter.

  Inside, the fluorescent lights and crayon-disinfectant smells and even the color of the tiles intensified my earlier sense of déjà vu. I felt disoriented, and had to give myself a mental shake.

  The principal’s secretary was an old lady with violet-tinted hair and architectural eyeglasses.

  “We need to see Principal Crumley immediately,” I told her.

  Plainly taken aback by our admit
tedly bizarre outfits, she hesitated. “Who … who shall I say is calling?”

  Burr stepped forward and flashed his fake ID. “Government business, ma’am.”

  “Step this way.”

  Principal Crumley was a plump, middle-aged guy with a bad wig that I was sure the kids had a dozen derisive terms for. He rose awkwardly to greet us.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Principal Crumley, my name is Doctor Andy Breton. My companions are Agent Naranja and Nurse Danvers. We’re here because there’s been a terrible accident.”

  Principal Crumley sat limply down. Sweat sprang from his brow. “Not Miss Angell’s field trip—?”

  “No, not that I know of. It’s a trifle more complicated than that. You see, a truck carrying radioactive wastes over our interstate highways system—in full compliance with all federal regulations, of course—just had a serious accident not long ago, about half a mile upwind of your school.”

  “Good Lord!”

  “Don’t panic, Principal Crumley. Panic is the last thing we need now. That’s why there’s been no broadcast of this disaster over the media. Emergency response teams like ours are circulating quietly through the affected area even as we speak, attempting to deal with the situation. May I?”

  I gestured with the Geiger counter. Principal Crumley nodded When I clicked it on, the jammed circuits went wild with clicking. Principal Crumley turned the color of arithmetic paper.

  “What … what are we going to do?”

  “The very first thing is to tend to the children. With their smaller masses, they’re much more vulnerable. Luckily, we’ve come prepared. Principal Crumley, do you have plenty of orange juice?”

  “Orange juice?”

  “We’ve got to administer potassium iodide right away. It’s in pill form.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, of course, we’ve got lots of juice.”

  “Very well, then. Can you assemble all the children in the gym?”

  “Right away!”

  Principal Crumley got on the speakers. Shortly after, we were heading toward the gym, just slightiy in advance of the noisy, excited kids.

  “I’ll leave it to you to brief your staff, principal. Please stress the need for absolute compliance with our orders, and the need to maintain a closed environment here, at least until the blocking agents have been administered.”