Dr. Identity (16 page)

Achtung 66.799 finger-saluted the umpire as he turned the corner. He lumbered through another set of swinging doors and entered the main room of the saloon. Behind him the umpire called another Id safe.

Crowded here. Shoulder-to-shoulder in some areas. Genital-to-genital in others. Powerful, high-paced banjo Melodrome ripped through the joint like a tornado, occasionally knocking bodies off of their feet. The Schizoverse was a playspace and most of the saloon’s occupants were human save the odd ’gänger. In the past androids couldn’t lawfully enter the Schizoverse. At one point it was collectively referred to as the Last Human Frontier. Eventually people became disinterested in recreation, however, and started to send their ’gängers in to play for them.

Ironically ’gängers’ Ids and feminIds looked perfectly human except for their big white eyes. Human Ids and feminIds, on the other hand, retained the shadow of their basic appearance, but they looked more like stock EBEs with hairless gray skin, thin limbs, sharp black eyes, pointy chins, and bald bulbous heads. This assumed one wasn’t in costume. Most costumes were incredibly lifelike and ranged from giant insects and vermin to cartoon characters to mythical beasts to talk show hosts and movie stars. Achtung 66.799 noticed a surplus of Voss Winkenweirder lookalikes. He knew Dr. ——— and Dr. Identity would be disguised. He just hoped they weren’t disguised beyond recognition.

He spotted the plaquedemics despite a layered haze of smoke and steam that rose from the floor to the ceiling. Dr. ——— gave them away. He was naked and slouched over an enormous martini at a table on the far side of the saloon. He sipped the martini with a straw and stared at his lap. Achtung 66.799 fluttered his eyes until he had zoomed in to an extreme close-up on the plaquedemic’s faceggggNo expression save a subtle frown and a bead of liquid flowing down his chin. He snapped a photo, zoomed back out. And closed in…

Voss Winkenweirder sat across from Dr. ———. Had to be Dr. Identity. It dressed in a zoot suit whose fabric was a patchwork of handheld and compact mirrors. Penny-sized mirrorshades covered its eyes. Its neoElvis hairdo was a lard-laden wall that rose out of its forehead and seemed to dare people to try and knock it over. Its facemask contained the trademark Winkenweirder chin, distinguished by a trilogy of bullethole dimples, as well as the movie star’s celebrated wingtip cheekbones, which had won four Hackademy Awards for Best Facial Feature. Unlike its companion, the android sat erect, smoking a long, sentient cigar. The cigar squeaked and squirmed in agony upon each inhalation. Achtung 66.799 zoomed, snapped…Now if he could get Dr. Identity to take off its mask…

He bypassed lion tamers and disco dancers. He ducked flying shuriken and shrunken heads. He stepped over the thrashing limbs of orgiastics. Stench of raw sex. Taste of dry ice…

Achtung 66.799 wondered why the plaquedemics retreated into the Schizoverse. To conceal themselves? If so, why wasn’t Dr. ——— incognito? It didn’t make sense.

He stopped in his tracks. What if the Ids didn’t belong to the plaquedemics at all? Maybe the Id that resembled Dr. ——— was just another Id dressed up as Dr. ———’s Id. It was possible. The massacre at Corndog University had only occurred that morning. But incalculable paraphernalia created in both plaquedemics’ images were already for sale. T-shirts, action figures, cereals, jetpacks, keychains, cigarettes, cologne, hairdos, jewelry, paper goods, weapons, press-on eyelashes and fingernails, household cleaners and appliances—all products carried the plaquedemics’ brand name. No reason why the plaquedemics’ Ids wouldn’t be for sale, too. At the same time, Achtung 66.799 didn’t see any other Dr. ———s. Nor did he see any Dr. Identities. The absence worried him. But it probably meant that the doctors were authentic.

He moved forward again, sidestepping an angry, musclebound feminId that tried to karate chop him. She muttered something in Schizospeak. Her dialect was a polylinguistic stream of technojargon and rhizomatics. Achtung 66.799 only understood bits and pieces of it.

He smiled innocently at her.

The feminId flexed her pectoral muscles and growled a metallic growl. Her nippleless fake breasts leapt to stony attention. Throbbing black veins consumed the surface of her ashen skin. A few of the veins burst. Spurting, gushing cords thrashed in the wounds. She got even madder.

He squeaked at her.

She said something else in Schizospeak, this time totally unintelligible.

Somebody elbowed Achtung 66.799 in the back. He looked behind him.

The Id was a replica of President-thing Grimley Bogue and stared at him as if in a trance.

“Yes?”

The Id broke out of his trance, frowned as if insulted, and disappeared into a large cluster of Fruit-of-the-Loom characters and feminIds in flapperwear.

Flustered, Achtung 66.799 looked at his antagonist.

She had nabbed another passerby and put him in a headlock. The Id’s face was purple, almost black from suffocation. When the head snapped off, it burst into confetti and his body melted and frothed away.

The feminId emitted a Tarzan hogcall.

For a moment Achtung 66.799 thought about pretending she wasn’t there. Maybe she wasn’t there in the first place. Maybe she was a hallucination. Hallucinations were common phenomena in the Schizoverse experienced regularly by nearly forty percent of users. This further problematized the Papanazi’s ultimate objective: the plaquedemics might not be there either. But if he started questioning the metaphysical validity of everything, how could he function? He had to assume the worst, which is to say, he had to assume that even potential fictions were real.

He said, “Pardon me, ma’am. I’m sorry if I offended you. I have to use the toilet. Excuse me.” He took off like a road runner…

…and went down like Wile E. Coyote.

14

EXCERPT FROM "THE POST(POST)/POST-POST+POSTMODERN ICKLYOPHOBE: ULTRA/COUNTER\HYPER-NIHILISM IN FIONA BIRDWATER'S MEGAANTI-MICRONOVEL, THE YPSILANTI FACTOR" – 1ST PERSON ('BLAH)

…elided a dialogically problematized ludic that Gretle and her entourage of xenophobes entirely lacked the psychocratic ability to cognize. This figuration of conjugated subjectivity not only produces a detached awareness of molecularized perception in the fictional characters of the novel’s post(post)/post-post+postmodern diegetic megahyperreality, it produces a detached awareness of molarized perception in the creative nonfictional characters of the novel’s (post)/post-post+postmodern readers, whose actually acute megahyperreality is thus retroactively transfigured into a figurative scarecrow whose “spitshined phalanges gleam in the light of the winking, winedark moon” (Cantaloupe 294).

[9,341] This dynamic references a point I made earlier in regard to the function of Xanadu Booberry and her interpellation into the icklyophobic system of ethics to which I have subjected my decidedly polygonal hermeneutic of suspicion.
The Ypsilanti Factor
underscores a much deeper mediumessage than that which is suggested by the former reinscription of Big Bad White (She)Male syndrome. Booberry’s “desire to reclaim a sense of multiperspectival selfhood” is a mere simulated emotive mechanism whereby protagonist #16 conveys a particular mechanized image of its beep-beep subjectivity in the eyes of the Department of Infocojack as much as its own dereconstructed self (Legume 35). Hence the appearance of the kitschy Julio Iglesias simulacrum in the 403rd chapter. Recall the simulacrum’s physiognomy, namely its indexical jawline, joint-action nose and monological eyeballs, all of which reflect the very logocentric fertilizer that Booberry discharges from virtually every orifice. The metaphysics of presence effectuated by this instance of “renegade, mitochondriacal behavior” elicits a more perfunctory (albeit performative) rule of “Tommygun” thumb at work in the novel, that is, the
lebenswelt
of protagonist #8 and #29 that I discussed in paragraph 220 is likewise inscribed upon the social and ideological body of the “doppelgängster” in question (Artichoke 67, 101). I will return to this digression in paragraph 10,035. For now, let us focus on the character of Birdwater herself as she manifests in the form of a sentient tomato who Booberry must slice, salt and consume.

[9,342] Birdwater as tomato is a flaming law of contradiction in which an analog communication erupts like a fistful of aporia. The general hermeneutics of this embodiment are as palpable as a slap in the face on a cold, wet morning. Doubtless Birdwater is revising the curious nature of tomatohood by reconfiguring its global misperception. The characters that populate the matrix of
The Ypsilanti Factor
mistakenly regard the fictional Birdwater, a tomato, to be a fruit when in fact she is a vegetable, unlike the characters that populate our own diegetic reality—that is, unlike me and you—who, broadly speaking, categorize the tomato as a vegetable when it is in fact a fruit. All this is unbalanced by the personification of the tomato in the novel—especially when we consider this act of personification as an act of persecution. The matter is further problematized in that the personified/persecuted tomato does not move, talk, sing, or indicate in any way that it is an organism possessing intellect, emotion, and other so-called humanlike qualities. Indeed there is a terribly real chance the tomato that is a fictional representation of Fiona Birdwater is not sentient at all but rather a “vegetable” the likes of which one might find in the grocery store socializing with other dirt-born provisions. Thus any ethnomethodology of the “vegetable” in question invokes a logical paradox and, interpreted from a schizopatriarchal gaze, has the capacity to wield a revolutionary ideoverse by dint of the nature of such an apodictic truth. Whatever the genuine pseudonature of the tomato (or tomatoes in general), however, Booberry must confront the “veritable Martian,” as it were, and subject it to a partial ontological erasure (Birdwater 889). It is only when Booberry accomplishes this erasure that an operable borderzone (albeit not in a Lyotardian sense) is partially armageddoned. Consider the following passage:

He walks into the kitchen and turns on the lights. He yawns. There is a tomato sitting on the edge of the counter. He shuffles across the floor and picks up the tomato. He looks at it. He places it on a cutting board.

“Xanadu?” says a voice from another room. “Tomorrow is Wednesday.”

He nods in dark understanding. He removes a knife from a drawer. He slices the tomato in half. It bleeds Spaghetti sauce. Pressing together his lips, he reaches for the salt. (59)

The autopoetic unity visible in this sequence is the pathological product of its structural coupling. One gleans a sense of patterned jello here that hints at a mere post+postmodern aesthetic. This is canny subterfuge on Birdwater’s part, particularly in light of the koinonia that exists between Booberry, the tomato and the voice. Note how the voice lacks a body. The voice is furthermore discharged “from another room.” Such a disjunction is both intended to derange readers
[1]
18,021 while figuratively reifying the triangulation that classifies this work not as a post+postmodern phenomenon, but as a post-post+postmodern and post(post)/post-post+postmodern phenomenon at one and the same time.

[9,343] Thus far my theoretical blitzkrieg has focused mainly on establishing an operational definition of the paramodal narrative technique that distinguishes
The Ypsilanti Factor
. I have also attempted to demarcate the coordinates of this novel within the
commedia del foul
genre considering the frequency with which its protagonists endeavor to woo and marry chickens. However, I have yet to broach the ultra/counter\nihilistic vibrations that distinguish the novel as a postpositivist, unilateral instance of catachresis that challenges the acausal principles of the inscribing socius and calls for the death of language in general. I hope to accomplish this feat by the end of this essay. If the feat is not accomplished, I officially reserve the right to do so in another essay that I shall tentatively entitle “The Post(post)/post-post+postmodern Icklyophobe: Ultra/counter\hyper-nihilism in Fiona Birdwater‘s Megaanti-micronovel, The Ypsilanti Factor—The Sequel.” In the meantime, I want to revert to the critically acclaimed Hillbilly Scatman Goes To Lunch scene in which there is a “periodizing (mis)disaf(in)fect(a)tion” of “immanent, hamburgler temporality” on the “specters of the (megahyper)diaperreal” and their impact on the “historiographic sublimation of the abyss of reversal’s informatic penchant for apocalypticism and ethical cybernetymology.”118,0
[2]
2 Prior to the injection of this scene into Birdwater’s textual flesh, said flesh is a mere tapestry of whale blubber onto which has been imprinted only the vague likeness of some form of semantic use-value. In other words, the novel fails to transcend its jejune
Dasein
, relegating itself to an oligophrenic, isomorphic, rasorial and above all limaceous vapulation with a bad case of cardialgia that promulgates a gongoozling, idiotropic battology at best.118,02
[3]

[9,344] Patrique O’Darkness has argued that the general character and social performativation of Hillbilly Scatman is “a retroFreudian symptom of a sociosymboeconomic homosexual desire for the Names-of-the-Father in a literal sense. This would explain why the Hillbilly consistently scribbles his step-father’s real name and aliases on pieces of scrap paper and ejaculates on them. These closet spectacles of would-be
jouissance
are often followed by moments of extreme public defecation that are particularly curious and revealing” (67). Jean-Claude Biff and Antoine Formaldehyde take a less direct approach, claiming Scatman is a product of “the stalwart functionalism that typifies his daily life. He produces semen because he is a producing-machine. He produces excrement for the same reason. It’s not complicated, folks” (
Fungulations
444n). Others attribute this behavior to the fact that he was not spanked as a child but rather forced to endure a surplus of time-outs. The latter is the most popular view. My view is an altogether divergent animal. What critics have failed to recognize is that Hillbilly Scatman is a bivalent mechanical alien created and inserted into the social matrix by actual aliens from the planet Mowgli. If one were to peel him like a grapefruit, one would not encounter something juicy and pink beneath the surface but rather something more like the guts of a flybike. Put differently, he is not a man. Or, if he is a man, indeed, it is only insofar as his ideology operates under the aegis of a Nietzschean
joie de vivre
and
fin de siècle
technosocioeconomic attitude. Some might argue that this
de rigueur
claim is a natural, potentially ecological corollary to my staunch
bête noire façon de vivre
. They might say it is a
dernier cri
on my part to salvage an
à la carte
argument that relies solely on
trompe l’oeil
and that may or may not be
entrée dans le shitter
, if you will. After all, Nietzsche did explain early in
Ecce Homo
, his penultimate work, that he was, while anthropomorphous, “more akin to a stick of dynamite than a human being.”118,02
[4]
In any event, Scatman is a heterotopic freak of (in)human anti-nature that imbricates the laws of rationality and coerces readers to rethink the anti-nature of (in)human paralogical utterances.