Codename Prague (20 page)

…crawls a 100-foot Powers Boothe zombie wearing a 5,000 gallon hat. He stomps on the Ironside monster & dares the motherfucking shiteater to…

*

TSM metamorphosed into a DK. Its uniform burst into shreds as it inflated
& changed color & grew scales fangs claws & contracted an oviparous physiology…
The result stood higher than the BLF’s tallest Ferris wheel. Like the acorn from which it sprouted, it was a crossbreed. The stegosaural spikes that ran the length of its spine reminisced Godzilla, but it lacked a tail in favor of Krakenesque tentacles and Cloverlike external esophagi, & it possessed the head of a Howdy Doody ventriloquist doll with round Mothraic eyes & a long Rodanian beak.

Dragoncoasters corkscrewed overhead, emitting signature BL grunts, squawks & hiyaaaas!

The TSM
→
DK howled when it reached full size and saw CNP. Metamorphic steam hissed from between the cracks of its scales.

The tides turned, and the Chased became the Chaser…

*

Preclimax

A BL screamed & his face melted. A BL screamed & his head exploded. A BL screamed & the fruit salad of his innards exited his body from infinite unchoreographed serrations.

*

…rather than crush CNP in his fist, the TSM
→
DK decided to eat him, chewing only hard enough to break a few bones & leaving the rest to the acid pool of its stomach. CNP countered the move with his briefcase, which he rammed into the TSM
→
DK’s mouth. The briefcase expanded into a surfboard and pierced the TSM
→
DK’s chin. The monster shrieked in pain…and shrunk…

CNP fell from the TSM
→
DK’s grasp onto a waterslide at the bottom of which BLs & DKs awaited him. An additional/extended scikungfi fight unfolded.

*

Climax

They fired a Double-H (Heinlein + Hubbard) bomb at CNP from the crow’s nest of a Sky Swat. A silent, B&W mushroom cloud of canned hypermasculinity knocked him off his feet & threw him into a chickenwire fence, but he was man enough to survive the ordeal, & he retaliated as his exoskeleton deionized all traces of radiation, firing a blowforce projectile at the crow’s nest from a bazooka. His targets exploded like frogs slung against a brick wall. He turned the bazooka on other targets, i.e., everybody became a target, BLs & DKS & funpark staff alike, & he did flips & 360s & helicopters through the air, blowing shit up, blowing heads & appendages off, demolishing rides & buildings & DKs & tiki bars & french-fry kiosks, & he landed on the irimoya of The Big Boss building, & he cast the bazooka aside & flexed the transanthropoid muscles of his organic exoskeleton as the world beneath him continued to explode & smolder & burn…Smoke cleared in patches & CNP spotted TSM a short distance from his perch. He leapt off the irimoya & descended on the monster in the yellow dusk…

TSM lay on its back, naked, breathless, coughing blood. “This smoke hurts my lungs,” it wheezed. “Is this normal smoke or something else?
Scheiße
.”

“I think it’s normal smoke,” said CNP, tearing a steel trashcan from the concrete. “But normal is a relative term. Technology these days. Not to mention different body types react to chemicals in different ways.” He pressed the trashcan over his head.

TSM raised a hand & spread out all the fingers. “I’m just a robot,” it said.

“I’m just a man,” CNP replied.

“Different species.”

“One & the same.”

The echoic caw of an Arabian Ostrich preceded the smashing of TSM’s skull beneath the authorial weight of the trashcan. The assassination was succeeded by a long, Gullyfoylesque speech given to the residue of BLs & DKs in CNP’s vicinity as to how they should “learn themselves” to be better hosts & more intellectually-oriented hominids.

*

Anticlimax

“Watch this.”

He clipped the noodle vendor with a flying kick.

“I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass,” he said. “And I’m all out of Donkey Kong.”
^[18]

He jammed a stick of Doublemint into his mouth, then hopped over a turnstile & strode towards the ocean…

48

There Is a Hole Here
Where Something Else Used to Be

51

The Resistance of Memory

Cliché-within-a-cliché: a family of boneless clocks hanging from randomly assorted inanimate objects…The sundry spatial vastnesses of Mr Dali’s paintings have been associated with the female genitalia by critics as well as by the Catalan artist himself. “It is a vagina,” said Mr Dali, pointing a lean finger at the landscape of
The Persistence of Memory
, “and anything that intrudes upon that space”—pointing at a distant stone now—“is a cock. Vaginas describe and rule the diegetic irrealities of my canvases like interstitial neurastheniacs. They expose themselves—nothing more—and the spectrum of war and peace and all that lies in between is relegated to the cult of little men. There is nothing more dangerous than a little man. Remember—”

The Nowhere Man looked like he had gotten into a fight with a cheap sheet of wallpaper. His crinkled cape and hood exhibited a faded mushroom pattern that changed shape and color in synch with his mood. His limbs were thin, sticklike, possibly arthropodal. A black hole had swallowed his face. Sometimes, in certain lights, a discernable human visage emerged from the hole. The visage was all angles, scars, sharp edges
—
a blotch of glinting razorblades within which pulsed two yellow asterisks.

[The Nowhere Man’s appearance on-page is always accompanied by a low, distorted screech that rises in intensity and pitch…]

Lackluster hysteria that goes: “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…”

…When Codename Vincent Prague was born, his parents resolved to name him Pail. They told everybody that’s what they were going to name him as his mother’s stomach inflated like a niggling statistic.

“Pale, like, without color?” inquired family, friends, and strangers.

“Pale does not denote something
without
color,” said Father Prague, “but rather something
deficient
in color. But that’s not the Pail we mean. We mean the Pail you put things in.” To demonstrate, he placed a small object into a receptacle. His audience clapped…

“Father scarred me deeply. See?” Prague peeled off the brown skin of his forehead and exposed the frontal lobe. Sparks rolled across brain tissue in waves…

“Nothing’s changed. Being a black man in a meta-pulp science fictional diegesis is no different than being a black man in agrarian Amerika. Even when you’re the protagonist. Every day is White Boy Day.”

[…mnemonic vestiges of Hitler and Keats overlapped spliced vivisected stitched together…Hitler in the Bunker. Keats on the Death Bed…Close-up on Jean-Claude Van Damme’s wen.]

“[Dialogue],” said The Nowhere Man over a crescendo of distortion……

After Reality, mad scientism became a normative condition. It was not limited to whimsical, diabolical and/or compensatory monster making and purple people eating. Simply burning one’s toast might be characterized as an instance of mad scientism. In effekt, all AR subjects had, by default, gone insane, and all of them had contracted a certain evil genius and pseudotechnological fetish
—
viz., everybody became a stock character or a caricature of a stock character in a pulp sci-fi diegesis.

…When Doktor Hermann Teufelsdröckh was born, his parents resolved to name him Doktor. They told everybody that’s what they were going to name him as his mother’s stomach inflamed like a nacreous welt.

“What if he becomes a doktor when he grows up?” inquired family, friends, and strangers.

“Then he will be a doktor twice over,” said Father Teufelsdröckh, “and his identity will be doubly reinforced.”

“Actually his ‘identity,’ per se, will only be
reinforced
,” said a Nowhere Man. “The first doktor won’t count. Do you understand?”

Remote heat lightning.

They strapped Special Agent Prague into an anti-suicide smock. They realized they had made a mistake and strapped him into a suicide smock. They realized they had made another mistake.

“Do you want me dead or alive?” asked Prague.

“Either way works for us,” they replied. “Which is to say, we can’t decide.”

…the impossibility of memory/history. Hence the impossibility of narrative/identity. Authorial direction. Authorial oppression. The Third Little Pig used barcodes instead of bricks. The result: a house that the Big Bad Wolf tried to purchase for $29.95 in three easy installments…

56

Amerikan Hemorrhage Dictionary of Scikungfi

Hi-def digital pastiche of screaming mouths from Hong Kong action flix (emphasis on Bruce Lee, Sonny Chiba, Kwan Tak Hing and Siu-Lung Leung) interspersed with bits of costumed derring-do and
henshin
(trans. from Japanese “to change or transform the body”) wuxia sequences. The last shot belongs to
Inframan
(1975; tagline: “The Man Beyond Bionics”) in which protagonist Rayma/Inframan (actor Danny Lee a.k.a. Li Hsiu Hsien) metamorphoses into a
daikaiju
and performs a
tomoe-nage
judo throw on an orange,
daikaiju
-sized Tarantula Man (actor unknown), then hits him with a flying double-punch, then tosses him into an energy plant. The Tarantula Man shrinks. Begin credits. Before we fade out to black, the scene returns and Inframan steps on the Tarantula Man with a giant white boot. Ketchup and mustard spurt from the creature’s flattened corpse.

1007

Short Fable

A man’s
shadow
elected to cast the man. The
shadow
peeled itself off the street, stretched out its arms, leapt onto the man’s shoulders, and stomped him into place. Then the sun went down.

1008

Long Fable

Two people hack off their arms and spray each other with their innards to prove who’s more fashionable. They bleed out. A waiter drags them into a reanimation booth…What is the role of Gary, Indiana? To supply citizens with a preview of Hell before the Big Plunge. Sprawling neoindustrial badlands—so ugly they’re beautiful. Further down the yella brick road: spatial anxiety…In Gary, Indiana, there are always Beetles’ songs in air. I mean the band before they grew long hair and got hooked on chronic and gin and juice…This is the arena in which subjects have wired their bodies to die in creative ways. Death as the end of creativity. Death as the only act of imagination after reality…Penetrate history. The deeper the thrust, the deeper the shit. But there are clearly demarcated signposts. One signpost reads:

THIS IS THE MOMENT IN TIME
WHERE POP AESTHETICS SWALLOWED/DIGESTED/MULCHED/VAPORIZED

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF HUMAN
RELATIONS/EXISTENCE/LANGUAGE/EXPERIENCE/
CONSCIOUSNESS

Other signposts note the birth of the sandwich, the midlife crisis of a haunted house, the death of Doktor Hermann Teufelsdröchk…Old age means too much memory, too many photo stills and movies crammed onto the un/pre/conscious mind’s screen. An old bastard needs to start from scratch, even if he may not want to. Remember the last days of reality? Heads spontaneously exploding on every street corner and rooftop? Celluloid oozed from the neck holes like the Beverly Hillbillies’ bubblin’ crude…

There is a sculpture of a man with a fist for a head that throws its voice from one knuckle to another. His arms dangle comfortably at his sides. He stands upright. He rises to a height of over 500 feet and houses thousands of tenants. Through the windows of his flesh
—
the windows that have not been painted black
—
the attentive viewer may behold a crossword puzzle of strange, muted sex acts. Who is this man?