Codename Prague (7 page)

The problem with the Splirt was the imperiling fatigue that followed its execution. But Prague figured he had wounded the other Scorsese Boys sufficiently. By the time they rallied—if they rallied at all—he would be up and running again.

Reality slipped into slowtime as Prague sprung into the air, clapped his hands together, and swung down with all his strength…

The Butcher came apart like a chopped log, flying into two symmetrical halves that each exploded with purple gore. The filmmakers shouted in triumph as they devoured the imagery.

Prague collapsed.

And the DeVito and Santoro sprang to attention. Despite grave wounds, they weren’t as moribund as they had let on, whereas the Cady had bled out. They bickered with each other in affected, high-pitched voices as they flipped Prague onto his stomach, hogtied him by the wrists and ankles, and dumped him into the trunk of a postvorticist Lincoln Town Car.

In the stale darkness, Prague passed out and dreamt of a twelve-foot green monster with one brown shoe who he conjured into existence by sheer imaginative will and dexterity. At first their relationship was guarded, unsteady, and in some cases volatile. Things changed over time, and the monster evolved into an avuncular figure, teaching Prague how to do his taxes, ice fish, make beer from scratch, treat women properly, write coherent argumentative essays…One day Prague couldn’t find the green monster. He searched everywhere and finally discovered it in a forest of Bonsai trees. The monster looked up at him sadly from inside the heel of its shoe. “I shrunk!” it exclaimed. “Why did you forget about me, Marshall?”

“Marshall?” said Prague, and was assaulted by a disorderly militia of men with goat heads…

Prague snorted awake as the trunk opened and the two Pesci simulacra stabbed him repeatedly with anxiety ionizers packing enough umph to mellow out a hyperactive elephant. He slipped back into dreamland…and woke up to a stainless steel rat licking his face with a dry synthetic tongue. He grabbed the rat and squeezed it until it burst in an electric plume of tinsel and clock springs.

He touched the cheek that the Bill the Butcher had punched. No scar. It had been fixed.

He had been fixed.

05

Cirque de Socius

Question Mark Circus was Dr Teufelsdröckh’s
cirque de preference
. Unlike the hundreds of other circuses that popped their tents within the borders of the city, he felt a sense of camaraderie here. He wasn’t quite sure why—the other circuses were more or less the same jamboree with the exception of a few added scikungfi extravaganzas. Something about the place just felt like home. And the circus was a far better alternative than church or a discotheque.

Dr Teufelsdröckh purchased a small bag of caramel corn and a Shasta from an organ grinder’s Grape Ape, then hunted for a seat. He wouldn’t touch the caramel corn; buying it was a good faith formality he practiced whenever he attended the circus. Shasta, on the other hand, was his favorite soda. He sipped it through a straw in powerful, overjoyed bursts.

Question Mark Circus’s seats had been divided into sections based on viewer identity and desire. There was a BOURGEOISIE section. There was a MEATEATERS section. There was an ESKIMOS section. There was a PLAQUEDEMICS
section. There was an I
©
ROWDY RODDY PIPER section.
There was a BAD HAIRDOS and a
BLACK BELTS and a THUMBTACK CONNOISSEURS and a PEOPLE WITH METASTASIZED EYEBALLS section…Failure to emulate the title of one’s section of choice resulted in punishments ranging from small fines to public floggings and immolation.

Dr Teufelsdröckh selected an empty seat in the SINGLES (ENGLISH-SPEAKING) section.

…It took him nearly ten minutes to work up the nerve to talk to her. She was just his type. Big eyes. Big hairdo. Big ass. Lots of makeup. And a certain abused quality.

In the center of the ring, a nervous-looking group of lion tamers dressed in cheap tuxes waited in line to have their heads bitten off, one at a time, by a Nephilimic lion standing on its hind legs. The lion disposed of the heads in a giant brass spittoon at its side. Each lion tamer’s body gushed the same blood from its neck hole.

“They’re talented individuals,” said the doktor, leaning towards the woman. She didn’t respond. “They sure are talented.” He pointed at the lion tamers.

The woman glared at him. “Did you say something?”

“Yes.”

“I swear I heard somebody say something. Was it you?”

“Yes. It was me.”

“I could have sworn somebody said something.”

“They did. I did.”

“Did you hear that? There it was again.”

“I said it.”

“Probably my sinuses. When they get clogged I hear all kinds of crazy shit.”

She looked away, massaging her nose.

The lion bit off a head and exclaimed, “That’s for all you sucker MCs perpetrating a fraud,” in Czech-German.

The woman clapped. “That was exciting. I wonder what he said.” She turned to him. “Do you know what the lion said?”

Dr Teufelsdröckh’s mouth went dry. He spoke Czech-German fluently, but he didn’t know what a sucker MC was. He deflected the question with another question: “Care for some caramel corn?” He tipped the bag towards her.

She scowled at him. He smiled. She squinted at him, as if he might be standing at a distance, as if to bring his contours into focus, as if to lift the rubbery flap of his selfhood and reveal the shrieking insecurities beneath…He diverted his gaze, unable to look into any woman’s eyes for more than a few seconds at a time. He had trouble looking into people’s eyes in general, regardless of gender, affixing his line of vision on ears, chins, hairlines, cheekbones, background scenery, anything but the eyes…

“No thank you,” she said disinterestedly. “What’s your name?”

He couldn’t remember…then bleated, “Dr Teufelsdröckh!” He mechanically stuck out his hand. She put her fingers in it. He squeezed the fingers and moved them up and down. He waited for her to give him her name. She didn’t.

A hunchbacked Cyclops stumbled into the ring and tackled the lion. It grabbed the beast’s jaws and tore it in half like a piece of cloth from mouth to anus. Then it attacked the lion tamers.

“You’re a doktor?” said the woman. “What of?”

Again his memory failed him. Her breasts made him nervous. If he were to reach out and touch one of them, he might die. They were so nice-looking. So big and nice-looking…“I don’t recall,” he replied. “I acquired my Ph.D. long ago. But I do things.
Doktor
things. And I have a Ph.D. I procured it from Stick Figure University under the esteemed guidance of one Professor JP Timecrash. I remember that much. Are you familiar with Professor Timecrash’s scholarship?”

“What’s a stick figure?”

“Excuse me.” A security guard placed his meathook on Dr Teufelsdröckh’s shoulder. “Proof of singlehood please?”

“Yes, sir.” Distressed, Dr Teufelsdröckh rifled through his pockets, the guard’s long mustache brushing against his head like a dead snake.

He found the ID. He handed it to the guard.

The guard ran a fingertip over the ID and stopped on a small pink box in the lower right-hand corner. The words in the box read:

DESPERATELY
SEEKING SUSAN

“Thank you.” The guard gave the ID back to Dr Teufelsdröckh, then leaned over and gave the woman a long, loud kiss. She complied, more or less, struggling half-heartedly. Dr Teufelsdröckh observed the kiss like a car crash on the roadside.

A flock of ironclad trapeze artists swung overhead. A flock of acrobats in winged Alligator People costumes pursued them. The trapeze artists eluded their antagonists for half a minute before pulling out cartoon Buster swords. The Alligator People impressionists countered with ray-guns. In seconds, a full-throttle wuxia pan battle royal erupted…

The woman dabbed her lips with a napkin. “Strangers take advantage of me.”

A clump of burnt flesh landed on Dr Teufelsdröckh’s knee. He slapped it off. “They do?” He didn’t know what else to say to her. The security guard derailed his nerves. Authority figures always had that effekt. “That seems normal enough, I suppose.”

Stand up and leave, he told himself. Get up.
Sofort
. Do it.…But he couldn’t do it.
 
He tried to place his thoughts elsewhere, to breathe in and out, to anaesthetize his mental core, to think about food, the perfect gourmet meal, a utopian spread, a French spread, herb p
âté
for an appetizer, a frisée salad with goat cheese and balsamic syrup, a main course of
Épaule d’agneau aux anchois
, and for dessert, hmm, what the hell would he eat for dessert?…

Her gaze moved up and down his body and settled on his lower region. Was she staring at his love handles? Couldn’t be. He was wearing a Blubsucker. He had only bought the shirt last week, an anti-love handle apparatus that constricted flab at the waist and redistributed it to the groin. Was the shirt defective? Did he still have the receipt? If not, would the department store from which he purchased the shirt refund his money? Would the store refund his money in any case?

“I’m building a monster!” he blurted, eyeballing a freak in a spiked cage. Outside the cage, a clown with a spear stabbed at the freak and forced it to impale itself on the spikes, which faced inwards.

“What’s a monster?” She put her hand on his leg.

His heart skipped a beat. “What’s a monster?” He contemplated the question as the freak hemorrhaged impossible quantities of celluloid from multiple wounds…He said: “The OED describes a monster as a mythical creature that exhibits both animal and human qualities or combines elements of one or more animal forms. Frequently this creature is of great size and ferocious appearance. That’s an antiquated notion, however. Contemporary perspectives of the monster reveal an imaginary creature that may be large, ugly, or frightening. For the record, my monster won’t be
large
, per se. It will, however, be equipped with the capacity to transform into a
daikaiju
.”

“What’s a OED? What’s a ferocious appearance? What’s a contemporary perspectives? What’s a
dai
…
dai
…?” She moved her hand up his thigh. Cries of agony overhead, below, everywhere…

As each sentence exited his mouth, he sat up straighter in his seat, gaining confidence, becoming more passionate and electric. He was in his element now. “It will appear human. All too human. It will be a crossbreed. A
Mischling,
if you please. Nobody has done it before. Monsters have been made, no doubt, but not of this caliber. Certainly not of this imaginative
Größe
. I will give the world what it needs, what it desires. What it despises. And when the sun sets on humanity, people will glance over their shoulders on the long walk to oblivion and say, ‘Teufelsdröckh!’ Nothing can stop me. The future is now. The future is
me
. I am going to splice together the personages of Adolph Hitler and John Keats!”

He leapt out of his seat as he cried out.

The singles behind him shouted obscenities, complaining that his love handles were blocking their view. He sat back down.

The woman said, “My name’s Delilah Jive,” as if Dr Teufelsdröckh had just sat down next to her for the first time. He ignored the introduction. He had slipped into a dimension of sheer subjectivity and egoism. All he could hear, all he could speak was the Dialogue of the Self. “One might ask why I elect these figures. Allow me a small degree of persiflage. The choice of Hitler seems obvious enough: despite a healthy assortment of raw, evil-spirited shortcomings, the Führer was a genius. He merely lacked the capacity to flourish as an
artiste
. He wanted to be a painter, you see. But he wasn’t very good at painting, and everybody told him so. Sublimation resulted. He redirected the flows of his desire into politics, a realm in which he excelled, albeit through a proverbial glass darkly. Hence the transformation of a Fuck All You Bastards sentiment into an art form, namely in the shape of genocide, world domination, public speaking, and funny-looking modes of walking forward
en masse
, i.e., the goose-step. Moral: don’t asphyxiate a would-be creative mind, however competent or inadequate. At any rate, John Keats is a less likely candidate, perhaps. He died before his time at the age of twenty-five in 1821. Tuberculosis, of course. His artistry emerged in the form of poems. Epics the likes of ‘Hyperion,’ ‘Endymion’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ are the most widely regarded crowdpleasers, as are the various odes, namely ‘Grecian Urn,’ ‘Nightingale,’ ‘Psyche’ and ‘Melancholy.’ Personally I prefer the boy’s shorter pieces ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,’ but I have a relatively short attention span, and that’s my problem. What intrigues me most about Keats is his theory of negative capability, which essentially posits that a man can take comfort in human uncertainties and the inaccessible nature of reality if only that man puts his mind to it. In this fashion, then, Keats deploys a potentially crippling pessimism as a springboard for a terrifically powerful optimism that echoes across hills and valleys. Here’s the rub: unlike Hitler, Keats was a successful
artiste
. He had many contemporary critics, but today his work is perceived as among the finest in the corpus of British literature. I believe John Keats will provide me with the imaginative and stylistic mettle I need to create an Adolph Hitler of epidemic proportions. I will, in short, inject Hitler with Keats and thus render him the
artiste
he never was and always wanted to be. And, of course, I will sprinkle a pinch of
daikaiju
on the finished product. Through the vehicle of this Portrait of an
Artiste
as a Young Man, I will distinguish myself as an
artiste
myself. The ultimate
artiste
. An
artist
e for the end of the world! End exposition.”