And so, the men behind the bench who determined my sentence were even uglier than I am. Their faces, and indeed all visible skin, was a mangled map of stitches and sutures, made that much more jarring by their ornate robes and luxurious wigs. The Jury of Injury is the only unit of disgraced Ignobles who were able to regain positions of political power after the schism. They are known only for ugliness and excessively punitive punishments.
The trial was coming to a close, and naturally I was looking for some creative means to kill myself. Death is a beautiful angel, and only a fool would suffer punishment at the hands of these vengeful sadists. They had taken my machete, fire arms, and drugs. The windows were reinforced, so making a break for a doom-jump was out of the question. I had no tie with which to hang myself.
“Forrest G. Cromwell—we find you guilty of grievous assault against a sentient creature and conspiracy to influence the outcome of a public sporting event.” The bailiff was too far away for me to try to reach the revolver in his holster. “We sentence you to one month of intensive treatment at Weeping Willows Asylum.”
I blinked in disbelief. I turned to my court-appointed lawyer. “That’s all?” I asked hoarsely. “I felt for sure they were going to mutilate my genitals.”
“No case of true madness should be wasted.” The Chief Justice said, evidently overhearing my whisper to the public defender. “It is the position of this court that your experimental value to the psychiatric community outweighs the moral imperative of your punishment.”
The judges rose and exited. In a rare flash of mirth, I saw one of them mime a lobotomy by making a poking and twisting motion at his ruined face. His colleague suppressed a chuckle.
“SONGS OF THE DEMENTED”
1
I have a tendency to delight in each renewed proof that karma doesn’t exist. The system had gone soft—they were sending a three-hundred and thirty-three time loser like me to a cushy asylum in the rural plains of Plenty Burrows instead of chopping my nuts off and sending me to back-breaking labor in the Eunuch Gulags or the Neurosis penal colonies where everyone is a monster on the inside or outside or both.
At least, I kept trying to tell myself that this was another beautiful farce at the expense of justice. That lobotomy jive the judge made gave me a bad feeling. I was in handcuffs and the loose white jumpsuit of a Weeping Willows inmate, riding on a van bound for the Asylum. The van made me uneasy because it was too clean. The windows were made from something clear and unbreakable, and there was nothing to do but watch miles of bucolic countryside roll by. It was like hell. When it got dark, I could see my own barky reflection superimposed against the backdrop of this pastoral utopia. Even the Gods-damned peasants looked well-educated and happy.
I was the only passenger in the van, and the driver parked and ushered me towards the main building. My eyes roved the grounds. I could make out high brick walls and gates bearing the Asylum’s trademark double W. Fat as he was, the driver was not to be fucked with—there was something about his gait, his silent glower and willingness to drive through all that boring countryside without so much as touching the radio that dampened my impulse to fight. He grabbed me above my elbow and hustled me towards the main building’s entrance. I would have started shit with him anyway, but he was clearly wearing a sidearm. I held my peace.
The grounds were dotted with buildings connected by neat walkways, more of a campus than a compound. It was trying too hard to be friendly, with inviting lights glowing in what I assumed to be the rooms of patients.
“I’m here to check in Forrest Cromwell, Patient T1257009.” A receptionist shuffled some papers and stamped my hand. I was amused to see that the ink barely took against the bark.
“Make sure he gets up to floor six.” She said. Fat boy nodded curtly, then returned to pulling me along. I was getting tired of walking without my feet touching the ground.
“You can let go; I won’t try anything.” I lied. The guard ignored me. Apparently, this fellow didn’t believe in elevators, or was interested in working off some pounds. We took four flights of stairs, then started heading down a hallway. I was in observation mode, looking for the soft spots so I could knock my way out of this hellhole. The floors were sterile and polished, incongruously reflecting lights that were chosen for their friendliness and cheer. This place felt like a cross between a library and an organ chop shop. I passed an honest-to-the-Gods padded cell before we came to more stairs.
More guards were pushing inmates around. I saw two patients who looked absolutely vacant, drool congealed around their mouths. Their eyes were like those of porcelain dolls. A third one was giving the guards hell. They had wrapped him up like a tortilla, which I took for an upgrade of the classic straightjacket.
I was pushed into what looked like a dentist’s office, seated forcibly in a chair with restraints. The guard vanished and I waited for what must have been at least two years. I wondered if I would starve to death here. When I leaned my head back against the chair in despair, I noticed that there was a relaxing beach photograph mounted on the ceiling and gently backlit. It made me Gods-damned nervous. I invented every hateful thing I could think of while I had my eyes glued to that beach. I pretended that it was a black site where the Feds made politicals stare out at the water before blowing their brains out. I imagined grotesque monsters to populate its darkest depths, things with teeth in their stomachs and tongues instead of eyes. I dreamt up nuclear testing that gave radiation poisoning to everyone who waded into the ocean.
The door opened and I did what any sane person would do who had been wrongly incarcerated in this madhouse—I started speaking in tongues. “Vishnash-kalaa-manbatanah-fanshugoom-eh-la-tah!” The hope was that I could trick the enemy into thinking I knew a dangerous incantation.
“That won’t work.” The doctor said. “I’ve seen Black Paladin. Television tricks don’t work in real life.” I couldn’t put my eyes to him. He was behind the chair, futzing with some sort of console.
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Relax.”
“Give it to me straight doc—is it a lobotomy?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Lobotomies are illegal.” This nimrod had clearly never read any of my work. I broke a story about a year ago about Prince Theodore’s secret lobotomy. I guess some people would say that if the royals find it embarrassing, it never happened. “Harvests, however, are not illegal, so that’s what we’re going to do.”
“Harvest? Speak sense, man.”
“Have you heard of brain imprints?” The doctor said, hedging my question. “I did my undergraduate work on them. Very early procedure performed in the infancy of Provisian psychiatry. More spell than tech, really. The idea was to take a mold of the mind of a great thinker before he passed on. Take intelligence in the IQ sense and turn it into an intelligence in the occult sense. In every case, it was a miserable failure. Shorn of their physical bodies, our greatest minds did nothing but beg to be destroyed. The transcripts are the stuff of nightmares.”
“What the hell is your point?”
“A mind isn’t a terrible thing to waste; it’s a terrible thing, period. The only thing that makes consciousness bearable is the physical sensations that distract us from it. So I want that to be the last thing you keep in mind as I harvest you. It’s a gift. Not having a mind is a blessing.”
I was getting the howling were-flaffs from all this. I trembled against the restraints. They were a thick, unforgiving leather, and there was no chance that I could break through them with bark and muscle. Bark is less sensitive than skin, and it dulls the world of pleasure and pain to the point where some days you’re desperate to feel anything. But now I felt the world too strongly. Everything was too real. “A person’s brain,” he continued “Is a wonder. It’s a marvelous network of neurons and synapses and myelin sheathes. It’s a wonder that it can cause someone like you so much pain. But the microsurgery will eliminate your suffering. And the pieces we take will help someone with a lot of mo
ney be whole again.”
I felt him fastening nodes of something to my temples. His head loomed between the illuminated beach; nothing but a pair of glasses and a surgical mask. “You’ll never be bad again.” He assured me. Something sharp and cold bit into a vein; I’ve had docs peel my bark and draw blood from me before, but this guy went about it like he was tapping a tree for sap. The pain was intense, but then I could feel my bloodstream fill with love. They were doping me with something strong, so strong that I thought I was dying, finally caressing the beautiful angel of Death.
My life did not flash before my eyes. Impending Brain Death, unlike her sister regular Death, does not use that kind of foreplay. Instead, snapshots of my past resurfaced as a kind of Collected Works and Letters of Forrest G. Cromwell, complete with context and biographical notes. I couldn’t see the things I had done, the people I have loved and loathed, but I could read them.
2
Query Letter to Wolfram-Zurmoc Books:
(Forrest hoped that his novel, Anthems of Armageddon, would bring him a measure of financial security and ease the monetary uncertainties that go with being a freelance Outlaw-Journalist.)
Gentlemen:
It has come to my attention that your publishing house is in desperate need of a decent novel. A brief study of the tepid swill on your ‘list’ is like a cry for help from a troubled adolescent. Honestly! The Template? The Jubilee Pilgrimage? Don’t even get me started on the fucking Rabbit Mysteries cycle. Though I’m sure that your readers are clamoring for more gender warfare, debt peonage, and hard-boiled anthropomorphic detectives, it’s frankly a wonder that you were able to sell even two copies of the above-mentioned titles. Your YA series The Misadventures of Tibbin Fleet would have honestly driven me to suicide had I read them in my formative years.
Fortunately, the Gods have sent me to save you from destitution and oblivion. I have written the long-awaited Great Provisian Novel. And it’s a fantasy, so your fanatical, masturbating clientele will eat it up. Complete at 110,000 words, Anthems of Armageddon follows hard-drinking journalist Homefly Morbid on a series of assignments that lead him closer and closer to the truth about his realm.
I imagine that by this time, you are already drawing up generous terms for the book deal. Believe me—you’re not being generous enough. This novel is the last thing that could possibly save your enterprise. I’ll be awaiting the contract, and we can negotiate licensing and movie rights in our future correspondence.
Valorously,
Forrest G. Cromwell
Reply from Wolfram-Zurmoc Books
(Sir Robert Wolfram, son of the publishing scion Lord Heinrich Wolfram, and later a brief partner and then a long-standing rival to Forrest in his journalistic endeavors, wrote an extended reply to Mr. Cromwell’s query.)
Mr. Cromwell,
Ordinarily, I dismiss crank letters by reading a sentence from their execrable unsolicited manuscripts and replying with a boilerplate form telling them that their work is not quite right for our list. You, however, have gone out of your way to insult and belittle our publishing house in your letter. Your correspondence was so uncouth and unprofessional that I felt no choice but to reply personally rather than with a response that would permit you to preserve the featherbed artifice of your delusions of literary grandeur by whining about the unfeeling charlatans who control the publishing industry.
I wanted to give you specific feedback, though of course actually reading the fetid Trash Junction landfill that is Anthems of Armageddon was out of the question. I used a comprehension spell to warp it into my consciousness all at once, and I was then violently sick into a basket of proofs. Far from shattering the paradigms of fantasy fiction--your obvious yet pretentiously unspoken intention--your novel fails to achieve anything aside from giving great offense to everyone from the Church of Provisian Saints to fantasy genre enthusiasts.
You attempt to shock your reader through the disclosure that the world of the story is really ‘Postvisia,’ a reconstituted version of our own world. But I ask you this—what else could it have been all along? A good fantasy novel like A Song of Grit and Mire works because it is separate from the world of the reader. The characters can speak Provisian without exciting comment. Those who play nicely within the rules of the fantasy genre can be forgiven for obeying conventions at the expense of realism. But you use the Provisian language and then expect us to be surprised that the story really took place in Provisia all along. You use words like ‘filch’ from our ‘filch parasite.’ In a ‘true’ fantasy world, there wouldn’t be any such word as ‘filch’ because there would be other loathsome creatures, but not filch parasites. It would not matter if you were trying to write genre fiction, but your erroneous erudite shock odyssey falls apart because it is built on its own contradictions. Another example: why do you have Provisian days of the week in your story, if the whole point is that Provisia has forgotten what it is? Why does Homefly Morbid (a character named by a cretin) stumble around stoned on a Jeffersday and wake up in a gutter with a hangover on a Lockesday? Wouldn’t time itself be measured differently?
I was appalled by the dazzling sophistry of your metaplot. That Homefly Morbid would write a book about the fictional realm of Interimnia (a thinly-veiled vehicle for your rants about Provisia) is too much to bear. Reading it is like having a time paradox stuck in your colon.
But all of this is really subordinate to the gaping flaw that ruins everything—the fact that the shadowy cabal that supposedly rules the drivel-world of your novel is somehow able to coordinate all their malevolent plans secretly over vast distances. Are we really meant to believe that carrier pigeons and couriers have delivered the correspondence composed by the hidden hand’s typewriters?
Provisia may be a land cut off from the atrocities of its past and oblivious to the horrors of its future, but I doubt it. And if it is, you are not the man to bring us the truth. I know journalism. I write from time to time for the Vocal Villager. But you are not a journalist. You are not a truth-teller, and neither is Homefly Morbid. Your “novel” isn’t worth the costs of paying the apprentices to set the type.
In other words, we’re sorry, but your novel is not quite the right fit for our list, though writing is a subjective craft and we encourage you to continue to pursue publication elsewhere.
Regurgitatingly,
Sir Robert Wolfram
Response to the Fuckers at Wolfram-Zurmoc Books
(Outraged by Wolfram’s condescending rejection letter, Mr. Cromwell mailed a biting reply.)
“Sir” Robert Wolfram,
Your snide, pompous letter was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I was in the square when they blew Selectman West’s head off, spattering his brains on his children. You talk to me about truth-tellers and journalism. But it’s “people” like you that make Anthems of Armageddon so necessary. No one does honest journalism in Provisia anymore. There’s nothing but fawning diatribes written by losers and waterheads who think rehashing royalist press releases with a furrowed brow is a revolutionary act. I don’t know what’s worse—people like you--counterfeit liberals with titles and a feverish urge to compensate for their intellectual and sexual inadequacy—or the raving militia zealots who shit bricks every day because they think the Dry Men are trying to poison their milk.
Do you take me for one of those tin patriots? Your lines about a “shadowy cabal” and a “hidden hand” seem to indicate as much. But what you fail to grasp is that power can exist without it being some golem conjured from a hellbroth of jingoistic fever dreams.
As for your critique of my novel’s refusal to “play nice” within the confines of the fantasy genre, I’m sure that I could understand it if I were flexible enough to go spelunking in my own bowels. You’re upset that the novel is written in Provisian? I suppose I can’t be surprised, as one could reasonably expect a simpering dolt like you to have been disappointed that the novel wouldn’t be printed in some totally unrecognizable alien language. That would sure cr
eate a buzz in the trade journals. You wouldn’t even need to use apprentice type-setters. Just have a bunch of imbecile toddlers string a series of custom rune tiles together and hump it right to press.
The fact is, you’re looking at the whole genre through the wrong end of the telescope, or more likely down the barrel of the shotgun you’re pointing at yourself in the hopes that you can end the dickless misery of your existence. “True” fantasy, as you put it, doesn’t need to flee every vestige of familiarity or dither in an ass-dance of obscurity. A fantasy novel ought to be thought of as an artifact from elsewhere, translated into language that we can understand the same way you might translate a text from Kargivian or Orcish. The days of the week thing shouldn’t matter worth the shit in your tweed undies. Either it’s a fantasy novel translated from its world into ours, or their days are the same as ours because their realm is Postvisia, what we’ll become if we don’t rid ourselves of punks, greedheads, and snide powertrippers for whom responding to a “crank letter” provides a temporary release from sexual frustration. The reader goes in believing they’re reading one and comes out understanding that it’s the other. I suppose this minor flip is too complex for you. Maybe you should read more Tibbin Fleet while you spin the propeller on your beanie.
Fables of Failure Page 4