Untitled (35 page)

    You get the idea.

    Of course, you've fgured out by now that this was the Mickey, recently of my laptop, now a citizen of—whatever this green place was.

    More light-creatures joined the third fgure on the hillside.

    As they dimmed down, I could see wings on their tiny shoulders, big baroque irridescent things, reminiscent of dragonfies, butterfies, angels.

    I'd seen these guys before!

    They looked almost exactly the same as the winged diety above the bar in Topeka.

    As the frst one approached, Nick and Ledelei fell to their knees, and bowed their heads.

    I was impressed. I was wondering whether or not to follow their cue, when the little guy spoke.

    "Gene," it said, in a voice something like gravel. He had a face that looked kind of like gravel too. This guy had obviously done a lot of living. He pulled out something that looked remarkably like a cigar, lit it magically, and puffed on it.

    "Yeah?" I said, dazed.

    "We are the Burzee. We made this place."

    "No kidding."

    At which point, Aurora elbowed me in the ribs, and whispered to me to quit being a jerk.

    He hawked, and spit a respectable fairy-lugee on the ground. "Anyway, we got distracted, forgot to look in on things for a few thousand years. Your friend, who until recently lived in your machine, came to fnd us. With the help of Glinda, and a young gifted alchemist in the Emerald City, we were able to subdue the invader. Happily, Ralph Dudley was inspired to cut off its power source and in the end, we were able to send it back to where it came from. Oz won't be bothered by it again. For this, we will always be grateful to you."

    "Me? But, really, I didn't do anything." I wasn't being self-deprecating; I really didn't feel like I'd done anything. I'd been stumbling from one situation to the next since I'd gotten here, trying desperately to just stay alive, or at least out of the way.

    The Burzee waved his fnger back and forth. "Shut up and don't argue with me. If you hadn't shown up, it might have been a very different situation. The Burzee are at your service." And then this little Charles Bukowski of Fairies bowed, and so did the other two, and all the little lights in the sky winked for a second.

    Then he straightened up, puffed a little more, and called out, "Alphonse Guttierrez! Arise!"

    And then he did a bunch of hocus-pocus moves in the air with his hand.

    I thought it pretty unlikely that Guttierrez would do any arising of any kind, but sure enough, the head foated a few inches above the ground, started to lose its gray-green pallor and began looking rosy again. The ragged bottom of the neck began to fap, and little tendrils of pink skin began to grow from the edges. In no time, there was a little naked baby-body underneath the head. He ended up on his new back, and his new little legs and arms kicked around like an infant's would.

    The voice that came out of Guittierez' freshly-attached head was weak, but decidedly more robust. "I don't mean to sound ungrateful," he said, "but what the hell is this?"

    The fairy coughed, and shrugged. "Best we could do. Listen, you'll grow into it, I promise. It's just gonna take thirty years or so. That's nothing. So you're a Babyman for a little while. Better than being a old rotten head, isn't it?"

    Alphonse had to agree with that, and that ended the discussion.

    Not too long after this, the six Humvees came screaming over the hills, horns blaring. They pulled to a stop, and ceased their beep ing. Ralph was in the back seat of the lead Hummer, sound asleep. He looked bruised and bloodied, like he'd been banged around quite a bit, but was pretty much intact.

    The Bukowski fairy fapped over to the window of the Hummer and waved his hands around at Ralph.

    "What was that?" I asked him.

    "A healing," he said. "Scrapes, bruises, hangover remedy. Least I could do."

    Ledelei had fallen asleep, also. She was lying next to Babyman Guttierrez, curled up in a fetal position. Later I found out she'd been dividing her time between me, Nick and Ralph, looking out for one, then running out to help another, then to the third, then back again. To her, it had looked almost like we were standing still. That explained the lack of time between the last couple of dishes blowing up. She'd been helping. She'd tried to help me in the trailer, get at the Hollow Man, but whatever power had me glued to the chair had prevented her from getting close to him.

    Unfortunately, her subjective time had been about four days— four days in which her augmented state had made it impossible for her to sleep. Luckily, for her and for Guttierrez, the Powder of Life was small potatoes to the Burzee.

    But I doubted Ledelei would be shoving anything up her nose anytime soon.

Dear me,

    Tonight, the piggels sleep, and I'm totally for that. I'm loading the last of my notebook entries into Gene's computer, for posterity's sake; and though I'm a fairly speedy typist, the heat is most defnitely on.

    Gene is scheduled to leave tomorrow—they're throwing him a big party, down at Topeka—and much as I'd love to be there, there are a few things that remain to be said. If I do it expeditiously enough, I might still get some serious dancing in. But frst things frst.

    I can't even describe what it was like to foat around in Burzee Land, experience it in Skyrrla-Scope. All I can say is: the consciousness that devised the guys that devised Oz is the place to be, even if you're just a scattered mass of sentient subatomic particles. Any malingering fears of death I might have had were slaughtered in that moment, and painlessly. Discorporation is cool; you can take that to the bank.

    All the same—as one who'd pretty much kissed this mortal coil goodbye—it was really fun to have my body back again. Materializing with Gene and Nick and Fonzie and the rest of the gang was religious in itself; knowing that we'd actually won was like the world's best frosting, liberally annointed on the world's best cake.

    Thanks to the Burzee, the trip back to Emerald took about as long as the trip to Bhjennigh's: i.e., a couple of seconds, tops. No slogging through the battlefeld. No hours for bitter refection. Just that wild divine dissembling, followed by that soaring jolt, followed by reappearance in Ozma's courtyard, to the cheering of the multitudes who had actually survived.

    And there were lots and lots of them: a surprising number, all things considered. More and more poured out of the woodwork, as news of our victory spread. The damage was astounding, and the casualties were cruel; as we gathered together, the dead were still splayed out all around us, most of them just as they had fallen. At the same time, the triumphant glow of the Burzee was a glorious euphoriant, impossible to deny. As such, we were bound together— the maimed and the unscathed alike—in an odd blend of horror and joy.

    Then Ozma emerged from the castle with Glinda, and behind them came valiant Lion and Tiger. They all looked hammered to shit by the confict, yet remarkably hale, and the applause was thunderous. But for all the surges of noisy love that ensued, the hugest had to be when, moments later, Dorothy came out with Toto in hand, and a fully-reconstituted Scarecrow on her other arm. (For those of us who had considered him dead—and evidently, that was all of us—there was no sight in all of Oz more rewarding than to see him, beautifully sewn back together, dancing and prancing and grinning that unmistakable painted-on grin.)

    A whole slew of big speeches ensued: poignant as hell, but you had to be there. The point is that we buried and revered our dead, then partied our asses off for days. Every single act of heroism, however small, got not just a toast but a whole reception; and every less-thanheroic deed, born out of fear or helplessness, was more than forgiven. It was redeemed.

    As you can imagine, this was a full-time gig; and after a couple of days of this, I found myself itching to break away, start writing some of this shit down. Gene felt it, too. That compulsive itch to get it right: clearly remembered, and properly said. We'd catch each other's gaze, over and over, but we wouldn't talk. It was like, I don't eve
n
want to hear what happened until you write it down
.

    So we started breaking away, retreating to our corners. I mostly wrote at my apartment. Gene mostly wrote at Leidelei's. He was kind of shacking up with her, although she was hardly ever there, and she had no patience for his documentarian rigor. It wasn't a relationship built to last, but it had all the makings of a splendid fing; from the sheepish grin he often wore when we met to exchange pages, I'm guessing that she still found the time to fuck his little brains out. She didn't much care for me, of course. Not only were Gene and I real close, but Mikio and I were now totally in love. I'm gonna take a cue from Gene here, and leave out the squishy details; but suffce it to say that I could write another whole book just about us in bed. (At the very least, I'm flling up a whole 'nother notebook. And you don't get to read it.)

    Ah, well. Long story short: the more we wrote, and the more we showed it to each other, the more clear it became that this was a story Earth needed to read. I wasn't sure if it was the Pentagon Papers, exactly—we were, after all, in another dimension—but in its transgeopolitical implications, it seemed like exactly the kind of behindthe-scenes shit that I know I've always enjoyed.

    Gene, of course, was skeptical. "It's just a bunch of dumb stuff that happened to us. Nobody's ever cared before. Why should they care now?"

    "Well, look at where we are!" I exclaimed. "Look at what happened! We're taking the exact same skills we used as fucking zinemongers, and the next thing you know, we're war correspondents, in the most exotic location you can imagine!"

    "Well, yeah..."

    "And, on top of that, we've got the inside scoop! You were actually there when Bhjennigh came apart! I was actually part of the beam that took him out! You can't get more fucking intimate than that!"

    "Stop yelling," he said.

    "I'M NOT YELLING!" I screamed, dragging out the last word until he started laughing. "And I'm also not saying, '"Hey! We'r
e
gonna get rich!'' Cuz, frankly, that means nothing to me. Earth mon
ey means less than nothing here. And I'm never going back.

    "You, on the other hand, could make out like a bandit. Or get yourself killed. Or both."

    "What do you mean?" Gene said.

    "I mean that I'm really scared for you," I told him. "Really. I think about it all the time."

     "Aw, come on," Gene said. "Suppose I post this, on some Internet news group or other. So, like, maybe a million people read it..."

    "Or maybe ffty million..."

     "Or maybe just ffty. So what? Do you really think anyone's

gonna believe it?"

"Why wouldn't they?"

"Why should they? It's crazy!"

"Well, yeah! But that doesn't mean it's not true...!"

    We went back and forth like that a lot. Basically, Gene believed that he could just go back and resume his normal life. That, publish or not, it made no difference. I asked him if he'd talked to Ralph about this, and he said that, actually, he'd been kind of afraid to.

    Ralph, as it turned out, had no such illusions. He knew what was waiting for him back there, and it wasn't pretty. He'd saved the day, yes; but only by erring on the side of conscience, and breaking every order he had ever been given. Back in the good ol' U. S. of A., treason was still punishable by death; whereas, in Oz, they were throwing him parties. So, basically, he was staying put, if Ozma would let him. And, of course, she said yes.

    Ralph thought that publishing our memoirs was a great idea. "Give 'em hell!" he said. "Stupid bastards. It's no sweat off my ass." But he agreed with me that Gene was a little fucking naive if he thought he could just waltz back in, blow a whistle of that size, and then return to business as usual. "At the very least," Ralph said, "you'll be under a lot of scrutiny, both public and clandestine. At the very most, they'll tie you down, peel your skin off, squirt you with lemons, and leave you for the bugs."

    All of this made Gene feel pretty weird. He started having second thoughts about releasing it at all. "Great," I said. "Then all anyone will hear is the offcial story, which is total bullshit. And no one will ever know."

    To which Gene groaned, "I know, I know," and made a miserable face. It wasn't that he was a big dumb knucklehead lummox who was doomed to be turned into dogfood or anything; he just hadn't thought things through.

    But for me, the icing on the tumor came when I fnally sat down with Fonzie: a bonafde casualty of U.S. and multinational corporate policy, who'd been lucky enough to get a new lease on life. I'd been putting it off, because it was so weird to see him like that, and plus he kept trying to get me to nurse him. But the fact was that he was awfully cuddly now, with his pink little baby skin, and I needed to know what really happened. Why they'd whopped off his head, and so on.

    Once we established that he could snuggle at my bosom, but that

he was not getting nipple, we got down to business. And the story, as it turns out, was this:

    Fonzie had been contacted by Rokoko—who, incidentally, melt
ed in the Skyrrla-glow, along with Skeerak and the jellyfsh and the
rest of Bhjennigh's gang; sorry I forgot to mention that—a coupl
e months before his death. The fabulous C. Scott Rung, from Meaty Meat, was also in attendance. They had informed him of an offer that could make him an extremely wealthy and powerful man, both here and back on Earth.