All Great Imaginary Civilizations Must End By Banging A Whimpering Sofa

If Only We Had Understood How Good Things Were In The Peanut Gallery

Chapter 33

Three years have passed since the author last hit the Enter key to input information toward the bleak conclusion of this grim history. There has not been much to write about. No news is good news, as someone used to say. The weather remains pretty much the same, despite all else that has gone wrong with Materex.

There are currently seven children in and around the Palace, one of whom can already count to eight. Just a few minutes ago, in fact, little Wanda “Cookie” Trout bounced through the door and hopped onto Bambina’s lap saying: “Hi. Anybody sitting here?”

“Well, hello there,” Bambina bubbled, poking her hands under Cookie’s tiny arms and tossing her into the air like a kitten, “You’re looking more like your father everyday.”

“Really?” asked Cookie, poking Bambina in the nose with her fat little fist.

***

Wanda tried to talk Paul Bare out of leaving the Palace, but it did no good. “This is something I’ve got to do,” Paul said. This silly response had become his reason for everything. In reality, nobody has ever had to do anything about anything. The Bible proved that.

He was putting the finishing touches on a yurt constructed entirely from light-weight plastic and fabric he scrounged up in Dog Mall. Paul Bare was about to do a very crazy thing. He was going to climb back to the surface, carrying his yurt, and walk completely around the planet.

It’s been 18 months since he left, but few still doubt he’ll reappear one day. After all, as Bambina Broccoli stresses, when Magellan set out to prove he could sail around the planet, it took three years before any member of his expedition returned home.

Few residents would dared point out to Bambina how Magellan himself was killed by natives in the Philippines and never completed the journey. After all, Paul Bare stands a foot taller than Ferdinand Magellan, and the Philippines are covered by 36 feet of ice.

***

Wanda and Cookie often visit the surface with Black Jackrack. Wanda usually carries a bouquet of petunias picked from Astroturf National Park on these trips to place at the base of the sign which reads:

Paving The Way

For A Better Tomorrow

Your Tax Dollars At Work

No one knows the significance of this ritual, and Wanda has not spoken with the author for months. But Harriet sometimes visits with Bambina bringing news of the far-flung concerns of the burgeoning population.

It is as if Idi Amin never roamed the Palace with his knife and fork. Within recent weeks, however, the following graffiti has appeared in the public restrooms. “What ever happened,” it asks, “to Idi Gourmet?”

Sometimes, late at night, the author bolts upright in bed to the sound of maniacal Kris Krinklean laughter rumbling up from out of the Palace’s very bowels.

“Did you hear that?” he stutters, “What was that?”

“Go back to sleep, silly,” Bambina yawns, “You’re still imagining things.”

Bambina believes all the terrible things he has written in his grim history are products of a warped and twisted imagination. “If everyone listened to what you say and thought like you do,” Bambina sometimes fumes, “the whole fucking world would be crazy.”

The author refrains from pointing out how the whole fucking world was already crazy long before the current ice age, considering how little was left of the world thanks to its senseless arrival, especially since the quirks of the Palace and its program no longer disturb the other inhabitants, which is beyond the author’s comprehension. Only the author seems ill at ease with having lost hold of the past.

***

Dias died in his arms last year, and now what little is left of civilization is once again subject to normal wear and tear. Yet death, perhaps, isn’t the proper concept to evoke when describing how Dias took leave of his acquaintances in the Palace. Dias’s body glowed, his hair fizzled, he lurched out of bed and bounced and spun like an off-balance gyroscope, careening off the walls, his eyes exploding like overripe tomatoes. Dias burned to a cinder while the author attempted to smother the flames with a blanket.

As he knelt on the floor with the smoldering remains of Dias hot and heavy in his blistered arms, the author rocked backed and forth on his heels, tears in his eyes, staring at the ceiling.

***

When the author left off with this grim history by smashing Bambina Broccoli with his own mask, he was convinced he was the first Palace inhabitant to discover the implantation of the Gizmo in his head. Therefore, he was stunned when he examined the incision he made in Bambina’s forehead and found a frayed bit of wire. Bambina’s Gizmo had already been removed.

It wasn’t until after Bambina Broccoli recovered from his vicious invasion of her privacy that the author first saw the funniest thing, and only his sense of decency and embarrassment keep him from revealing it now.

***

“Mind if I sit here?” little Wanda asked from the floor near the author’s chair.

“Do whatever you want,” the author answered gruffly. “Play in traffic for all I care.” He was trying to reduce Paradise Lost to a series of four-frame episodes of Gil Thorp to be beamed on a daily basis to the extraterrestrials.

“You going to school now?”

***

While fiddling around in the memory of Materex, the author came across the formula for the Aldo Ray. It remains as devastating as ever. While playing with it, he inadvertently obliterated Mars. All Materex said about the accident was: “Damned good shot.”

Fortunately, the tons of dark earth between the Palace and the cold night sky keep the others from knowing Mars has become another asteroid belt, or the author would never hear the end of it.

***

The author spent the past three years in the Hall of Records. In old microfilmed issues of the National Geographic, he learned how the study of primitive cultures all over the world by representatives of sophisticated cultures trying to discover keys to unlock the mysteries of their own pasts were being unintentionally annihilated by the seemingly innocuous act of observation.

The called it The Heisenberg Principle. The author called it Poetic Justice.

If technological man had been content with an occasional appearance beyond the frontiers of his machinery and simply made his golden glittering presence known like a nomad, he would have lived on in primitive myth as an addition to the pantheon of gods who had visited before him.

Unfortunately, he stayed on and on, entrenched by his own homelessness, attracting industry and disease to support his research, until the primitive people he had originally intended to study became impoverished dependents upon a system they couldn’t begin to understand.

They had always lived continuous with their past and future, but one day they awoke to find themselves subject to governments, which petitioned other governments to provide them with aid to establish and preserve their national identity.

By then, the researchers had grown old and reactionary, having lost their youthful romanticism, but many lived on in comfortable retirements.

If the truth be told, Idi Amin was not unique among the emerging stone-age body politic. In fact, he was the rule.

***

The author read how preglacial scientists had discovered spark plugs encased in geodes more than a million years old. No one know how they got there. Air travel had become obsolete in ancient Egypt thousands of years before the birth of Christ. Pakistanis who couldn’t even feed themselves and all froze like one huge throw rug in the early hours of the current ice age had been using 12-volt dry-cell batteries even before the Egyptian technology surpassed the airplane.

Some scientists believe these technological relics, coupled with the discovery of several hot spots of radioactive contamination in Asia and Africa, pointed to a gradual and complete decline in prehistoric civilization from some dim age when a nuclear catastrophe signaled an abrupt end to abundant cheap electrical power.

None of these scientists bothered to define “prehistoric” as meaning “prior to modern written records,” although Dr. Wendell Eden did suggest civilization had ended at least thrice before in ice.

***

The author doesn’t know who he is. Seriously. He is lost. His research has been for naught. The bleak conclusion to this grim history is just that.

It was as if the American Way was a drug which enabled him to laugh at the shithook, since even without his Gizmo he still had a medicine cabinet crammed with pills to make the pain go away.

Still, the author’s situation was not so bleak as Dias’s. Deadeye was forced to participate in the design of a crossword he was unable to solve. The author, on the other hand, still maintains certain hopes. There are many things he would like to say. Last night he dreamt again that he was Lazlo Stroud, son of the last wild Indian, the last janitor at Berkeley, but that’s another story.

He is a bit embarrassed that he was the very last surviving American citizen to remove his Gizmo. Rapid Ray was the first.

Some weeks prior to his butchering, Ella Emma Pei had taken offense to Rapid Ray’s tone as he reached across the bar and tweaked her right breast, so she smashed an empty mug on his head. The blow knocked off his mask and opened a hole above the bridge of his nose which required fifteen stitches to close.

Upon coming to in the Palace Intensive Care Unit, Ray discovered that his pain did not diminish when he stroked his forehead, although the urge to touch his skull in times of stress or physical discomfort seemed almost involuntary. In fact, he observed disturbingly similar behavior in his visitors and nurses. Whenever a moment of doubt arose, people rubbed their foreheads and abruptly changed the subject.

***

Ray personally removed Gizmos from Mia Culpepper and Joy Division. By the time Gottlieb and Cindy disappeared from the Palace, only the author still carried his Gizmo unmolested behind the soft spot in his Howdy Doody mask. Joel Costyu, Mia Culpepper, and their daughter Salter had already moved into a remodeled farmhouse on the surface.

And as if everyone didn’t already have enough to worry about, Materex began malfunctioning. The author became desperate. He had only the most honorable of intentions when he popped Bambina on the noggin.

***

After all this, what more could the author say? He no longer remembers the funniest thing he ever saw, only when and that he saw it. He had his eyes closed when he saw it. The funniest thing he ever saw took place within his own peculiar darkness.

By the time Bambina Broccoli recovered from his meddling, the author wasn’t at all surprised when she opened her eyes and said: “Could you please tell me what the fuck’s going on around here?”

“Bambina Brocolli,” the author replied, uttering his most enduring statement: “You’re not going to believe a word of this.”

—fini—

Epilog In Media Res

It occurs to me that some straggler might want to read all of Trout’s Tale in its God-given order, assuming I live long enough to publish all of it. I guess I could start another stack and publish it in order there, but where’s the fun in that?

Instead, what I’ve currently decided to do is add this epilog as an index to previous posts in the order in which they were not written, but in the most recent order they have appeared in the Hall of Records. Links will become active as new URLs are generated.

Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.

Trout’s Tale thus far…

Frontal Matter And Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33