An Epic Journey Always Includes A Few Hearty Farts
"What The Fuck Is Going On Here?" The Author Wondered
Chapter 32
The Gizmo had a tail like a tadpole. An inch and a half of dull gray wire dangled from one bulbous end of the bloody latex pinto bean, a filament so thin and pliable the author at first mistook it for a strand from his diminishing forelock.
“What the fuck is going on here?” the author thought, instinctively reaching up to stroke his troubled forehead. But it only thudded its presence into his brain at the slap of his heady hand, and the plastic Gizmo bean skittered across the octagonal ceramic tile. His hand recoiled as if it had touched a lit stove. He discovered his hand was covered with blood.
“God,” he thought, “I’ve finally gone and done it,” staggering to his feet. He teetered in front of the mirror, still quite queasy, actually quite drunk, rocking unsteadily like the sand-weighted inflatable clown in front of the door to the restroom down the hall from the Life Protector’s office. It had a sign around its neck that said:
Please Don’t Hit Me
I Can’t Feel Anything
It staggered the author to realize this was his own bruised face squinting back at him, its uncovered right eye on the left side of its face, in direct defiance of Palace regulations. He looked quite silly, he thought, but not so bad as the hideous metallic grin of Howdy Doody. There was a gouge as big as a bottle cap missing in the deep purple bruise where the had expected to find his aching aluminum forehead.
The author’s shock was so conventional in its slack-jawed, open-mouthed display that he fully forgot his elaborate ritual of gasping and swallowing to keep mind over matter, and with one jarring kick from his diaphragm, the author’s body reminded him just how tenuous his grasp on consciousness and reality actually was.
Mustering all the muscular pretense it could, the author’s mind jerked his head to the right as his mouth launched a bitter geyser of brownish liquid in the general direction of the grime-encrusted American Standard commode. Just before the first globules of vomit shattered the calm surface, the author had time to recognize the inevitable grin of his mask beaming up at him through the pink untroubled water of his toilet.
***
Wayne was the kind of guy who was struck by lightning on 29 different oc-casions, sitting in exactly the same spot, reading the exact same word in the only book he ever tried to read. But since Wayne was never hit on three consecutive days, Wayne never worried about lightning, and he never finished The Brothers Karamazov.
***
One day while the author sat at the bar not talking to anyone and the bar filled up and emptied again, during one of the filled up periods, Wayne staggered in and plopped down next to Wanda, saying, “Hi. Anybody sitting here?”
“How the fuck should I know?” said Wanda Japan.
The day before it had snowed and melted and snowed and melted seven times. Clemson got a total accumulation of 27 inches, according to an amateur meteorologist who was 87-years-old and couldn’t remember having ever seen such weather in his lifetime.
“My great-great-grandma, though,” Randall Fleet Force offered, “used to tell a story about how her great-great-aunt’s second cousin used to say how her people have lived here since they was elephants in Carolina, and that’s a might long time, you ask me. That’s the last time this state’s seen this much snow.”
You would have had a difficult time convincing anyone who hadn’t been there that it had indeed snowed 27 inches in Clemson the day before, especially since it was the 5th of June.
As Wanda said “How the fuck should I know?” It was 85 degrees. If Wayne had been walking down the street instead of collapsing onto the stool beside Wanda, he might have said: “Some weather we’re having.”
“What is it with that guy?” someone asked, “Is he a fag or what?”
“Who?” the author impolitely answered.
“That guy over there,” someone replied, “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t look. You’ll embarrass me.”
“Who are we talking about?” the author snapped.
“The guy with the questions,” someone said. “Every time I come in here he’s asking if I’ve got any roommates.”
“Oh, you mean Wayne,” the author returned, shaking his head, “The insurance salesman.
***
According to Materex, Idi Amin poses no threat to the security of the Palace or its population, but you’d have a hard time proving that to the survivors, in spite of the fact Materex is never wrong.
Even the normal inhabitants have nightmares starring Amin. Reconnaissance reports filter into the Life Protector’s office hourly which contain the latest soundings of Marshall Dada’s insane laughter rumbling out of the air shafts or down some momentarily darkened corridor.
Materex made it plain from the start that Idi Amin was probably more dangerous to the commandos that to Moon Unit Dillydally or Priscilla Else, both exemplary citizens to their respective days of disappearance, seeing as both he and Wanda’s deranged band prowl the same fringes of palatial existence, the extreme edges of civilized technocracy.
Idi kills only to eat, and as rotten as the Life President’s minimalist mind is, he could never be so muddled as to attempt to prepare escallops de ris le palais a l’ancienne. The Palace, to paraphrase another of Newton’s numerous laws, is an inedible object unworthy of notice by the chief glutton’s irreproducible farts.
***
Later on the day Fast Ed metamorphosed into a burnt marshmallow, after Paul Bare had hit the poet in the face so hard no one ever saw the poet again, while the commandos slouched against the conduit walls somewhere in the bowels of the Palace, Harriet Tupperells finally asked: “Well, what are we going to do now?”
Sean Locke became Woody Allen and said: “How about I tell you about my pet ant, Spot?”
“This isn’t any time for Jewish jokes, Allen,” Bare scowled.
“Jokes? Heavens forbid,” Woody stammered, “Who wants to hear jokes at a time like this?”
“You may all be crazy,” Wanda announced, “And you may always be crazy, but you’ll never be dull. You must promise you will never be dull.”
“How could we ever,” said Gottlieb Goforth, “When we have the Aldo Ray?”
“Now wait a goddamn second,” said Sean Locke, momentarily slipping back into himself, “What the fuck you mean we’ve got the Aldo Ray?”
“We’ve had it all along,” Gottlieb flourished, pulling a rumpled rolled copy of the National Lampoon from his knickers pocket, “And I got it for a penny at a Goodwill Store.”
***
The particular issue in Gottlieb’s possession, “The Strange Beliefs” issue to be exact, contained a story in which a preglacial cab driver got invited back to his hometown for a class reunion only to discover everyone he knew has been trans-formed into a monstrous insect from the waist down.
When the cabbie was captured by the aliens, they mistook him for a nuclear physicist who had invented the Aldo Ray, a weapon so incredibly cruel and efficiently debilitating it could only have been dreamed of by an American.
Hoping to trick his way to freedom, the cabbie created a plan for the Aldo Ray by cutting paragraphs out of a cookbook, an encyclopedia of sports trivia, Peterson’s Guide to Home Electronics, a Japanese toaster repair manual, the Bible, and a box of Star Wars trading cards.
Unfortunately, this bizarre compilation of nonsense turned out to indeed produce the Aldo Ray, and the cabbie was set free to return to New York City and await the end of human civilization.
“What is that?” Paul Bare shouted, “Is that the goddamned National Lampoon?”
“Leave him alone, you big bully,” Cindy said, banging on Paul’s back with her fists.
Witnesses to the episode are unclear exactly what happened next, but most agree that at the moment Paul managed to wrest the magazine from Gottlieb’s grasp,
SCHLOCK!
Gottlieb Goforth and Cindy Gnomoure vanished and haven’t been seen since. Two small halos of dust were found on the floor of the conduit where they were standing.
“Jesus Christ,” Paul muttered, his jaw slack. Looking at the smoking end of the magazine, he shook his head and said: “I don’t believe this.”
***
One night while Wayne sat at the bar not talking to anyone while the bar inhaled and exhaled, during one of the exhalations, a very short person came in wearing a button which said:
Progress Means Everyone Pushing
In The Same Direction
There were five stools available: two on either side of Gottlieb and Cindy and one between Wayne and the keg cooler, which is the one the dwarf took.
“Hi,” the dwarf said, taking a seat, “Anybody sitting here?”
***
When the author finally stopped spewing mucousy vomit out his nose like a drunken walrus, he lurched back to the mirror over his vanity. Steadying himself with one hand and leaning within an inch of the mirror, he probed the oozing hole over his nose. There was great pain issuing from the wound, but the bleeding was slow, thin, almost transparent, a liquid amber.
Once the author realized he was not dying, he stumbled out of the bathroom and into his study, where he found a pint bottle of King James in his fridge. He drew a mouthful down and sat on the edge of his bed, breathing deeply, thinking nothing.
Were the author ever to write an epitaph, he could barely have come up with a more appropriate six word summation of his life than this:
He Breathed Deeply
And Thought
Nothing
He let his head sag forward into his hands. He rested his elbows on his thighs. And he wept.
Later, he took a bath. He ran the hot water and stretched himself out in the tub. Simultaneous with his own realization he’d neglected to refasten his mask, Wanda crashed into the room with something she’d remembered about Sean Locke…
***
On the afternoon of August 22nd, less than an eighth of the Palace population actually fizzled out during a demonstration of Materex’s power. But it was horrible. Horrible.
The author’s earlier euphemistic rendering of the carnage which left bloody bits and clumps of 12 American carcasses splattered over the walls, ceiling, and floor should not diminish the inhumanity of what really happened.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Life Protector said, “We need a few volunteers. Let’s see a show of hands.”
Not a single hand went up. Few fools had been admitted to the Palace, the fervent dreams and aspirations of the President of the United States not withstanding.
Not that it mattered.
***
Fumbling in his medicine cabinet, the author located tweezers and a pair of scissors. Wetting a cotton pad with alcohol, he dabbed at his forehead until he had an unobstructed view of the extent of the damage. He hadn’t cracked the bone, and no major blood vessels were cut. A wispy length of wire hung out of the hole and darted into an eyebrow like a grass snake.
Grasping this filament with the tweezers, he clipped it off against the bone-white wall of his skull. The hole in the author’s forehead was so complete it resembled a mine shaft through red clay that ran smack up against a solid stratum of chalk.
Finally, he pinched the edges of the wound together and applied four flame-straps to hold it closed. Then he leaned back and poured mercurochrome on his forehead.
***
Bending down to retrieve his mask from the commode, he spotted the Gizmo on the floor in the corner where it had come to rest. With his mask in one hand and Gizmo in the other, he wandered into his study.
The VDT was smashed. Reels of recording tape streamed from the curtain rods. The curtains were in tatters. There was a butterfly-shaped pool of puke on the floor at the foot of his bed. A coffee clown was shattered near the door…
***
The center of the universe had been pinpointed just prior to the current ice age in the constellation of Sagittarius. This was also the alleged sign of Wanda Japan. In almost every culture there were myths dealing with the stars. Stars are those tiny dots of light which stud the night sky, which no one in the Palace gives a fat rat’s booty about, since no one expects ever to see one again in his or her life.
For all his scientific knowledge and religious belief, preglacial man was still closer to a clam than an eagle, like it or not. He was fond of saying: “Me? I just sit on my ass and vegetate,” when asked what he did, whereas he actually sat in a chair and occasionally choked to death on pieces of beefsteak the size of cantaloupes. He believed everything was equally important and therefore bothered to learn very little about anything.
The names of the twelve constellations, the planets, and the stars also stood for various gods from various religions and obsolete civilizations which had been wiped out by more sophisticated civilizations with less complex philosophies and more efficient devises.
Soon, even the numbers with which the Great Free Statesman of Ethiopia had played were made to measure wealth and power. The old names became the months and days, so that even now, here in the Palace, man continues to tell time in words and figures he doesn’t understand.
According to Materex, there were originally thirteen constellations in the Zodiac, and the reduction by one made it impossible for anyone to have any ideas what sign he had been born under without the assistance of a computer.
Wayne was an orphan so he claimed he didn’t have a sign at all.
“What do you mean you ain’t got no sign?” Rapid Ray chuckled, “Everybody’s got a sign.”
“Not really?” said Wayne.
***
No one knows how Black Jackrack made it nearly 2,000 miles across the frozen wasteland of what used to be called the Backbone of America. Since the death of Wayne Trout, no one but Wanda is able to come close to Black Jack. Wanda and Jackrack are able to communicate as easily as this grim history to the reader.
Amin believed Jack E. Black was an avatar.
Field Marshall Dada thought Jack was the Fearsome Feline of Foreign Debt. When Materex isn’t singing “Hail to the Chief,” it conspires with the rats to hunt Jack down. The entire Palace is on orders to boggle Wayne’s cat on sight.
***
It is dark. Darker than anyone ever imagined. It is dimmer than blind. Someone has just become a ghost while trying to reprogram Materex. That scream will echo in the walls of the Palace for months. With the aid of a stethoscope, thousands of years from now, the interested reader may acknowledge the original ferocity of that agony, echoing still.
The author is trembling on the floor beside his bed. It’s not the noise or the thought of being eaten alive that frightens him. It is all of this, this cacophonous darkness, this endless dullness leading further away than either birth or death. This dark coldness, this numbness and blackness in which somewhere Dias the Mechanic is stumbling with a flashlight. To find the right switch to flip. And let there be light again, instead of this silence and cynical darkness where no one answers, and no one knows where anything is.
***
The author sat alone in his chambers attempting to describe the mockingbird of death upon which, with every beat of its strong gray wings, the author would climb toward the surface of the Earth in southwestern Missouri, toward the future of the nation’s most valuable species, toward the end, at last, of his tale. Then there came a lazy knocking at his chamber door.
“Come in,” the author said.
***
The day Wayne left Wanda to search out and render Idi Amin inoperable, Black Jackrack was stalking a mockingbird in the tall brown wind-burned grass beside a slab-sided barn in southwestern Missouri. The mockingbird flew up and perched on the edge of the roof above Jack and squawked, rankled, and pestered him.
“Caw-wacka-cat, cat, cat. Paw-fucking cat. Ass-licking candy-assed paw-fucking cat,” the mockingbird taunted, while Jack cleaned himself in the stiff brown sawgrass up close to the weathered barn where the glacial winds had swept the ground clear of drifting snow.
Jack paid no attention to the mockingbird, pausing as he raked his right front paw down over his eye from behind his ear and licked the pad with his raspy tongue, but Jackrack was stalking that mockingbird just the same.
He had learned to carry his grudges a long, long way. When time came for the kill, Jack would marvel at how the mockingbird, for all its bluster and pecking and picking and flapping and yelling and shitting on Jack’s head from the edge of the roof, could so completely have forgotten how war has a way of never ending, is all-consuming.
And the mockingbird experienced this war itself when Jackrack crossed under the fence at the side of a buckled pavement near a sign that said:
Paving the Way
For a Better Tomorrow
and hopped over the frozen carcass of a birddog, heading west. If the mockingbird hadn’t flown over from the Blizzard Construction company building to nettle him, Jack would have continued at his remorseless pace toward his destination, but abruptly there was a blunder of wings and screeched obscenities, and Jack was pissed.
When the end came, the mockingbird was indeed surprised to discover itself in Jack’s strong jaws, one black paw crushing its fine gray plumage against the frozen soil of southwestern Missouri.
“Hey, cat, hey,” the mockingbird begged, “Give a bird a break,” which is precisely what Jack did, snapping off its head.
***
When all that was left of the bird was a small splash of gray and white feathers with a sprinkling of crystalline blood among the tall brown sticks of dead grass, Jack lifted his left leg high over his head and starting cleaning his tail.
He farted.
“Trout, trout,” the fart went.
***
Shortly before the initial slap of the current ice age, no one could see anything funny about Idi Amin. No one had yet seen anything funny with Adolph Hitler or Richard Nixon either, men who, at least according to information in the Hall of Records, liked a good joke as much as the next madman.
***
From where Black Jackrack sat cleaning mockingbird guts from his coal-black whiskers, the phony well at the bottom of which the entrance to the Palace was hidden was three-tenths of a mile north-northeast, and Jack stared at it in the distance.
Once he finished chewing between his toes and licking his ass, Jack stood and stretched, hiking his rear up and raking at the frozen earth with his front paws. That’s when he heard the scuffling to his right.
Peering around the end of a broken board in the barn at ground level, Blackjack spied a possum rustling under the edge of a pile of hay. Jack watched for a while, then looked back at the well, back at the rustling beast who was busy at his final task, unaware of the offense Jack was taking at his continued existence.
Jack had somehow oozed into the barn itself and could no longer see anything except the long hairless tail of his prey protruding from a pulsating pile of straw.
By the time Jack began slamming his own thick tail against the clay floor of the barn, an American marsupial life was lost. Jack lunged, his cruel jaws fastening on the neck of a possum half again his own size. It was at this point Jack realized he was falling.
“Wacka wacka?” he asked as he plummeted down an airshaft, the possum shrieking away from Jack’s opened jaws in the darkness, trying to catch hold on the smooth metal walls, as they both tumbled sloppily toward the Palace.
***
On the day Wayne Trout sampled his own intestines, said “Jack would have loved this,” and died, the last sound he ever heard was wacka wacka, for at the moment of Wayne’s unconventional last supper, Black Jackrack crashed through a ventilator cover less than fifteen feet from where Wayne expired and tumbled into the frozen meat pie display case.
“Wacka wacka?” Jack repeated, staring at Amin.
“Allah be praised,” the Field Marshall gasped as he slipped in a bit of Wayne’s blood and fell on his boning knife.
Jack stood still for a moment, then picked his way to the edge of the display case, licked two quick swipes down his back, jumped to the floor and strode over to where Idi Amin’s last blood pumped out onto the Bi-Lo’s tile. Jack lapped up a tablespoon of the viscous red goo and then stood stiffly, craning his neck and sniffing the air.
Atop the manager’s desk was a plate of human food, Jack realized, and he leapt onto the gray rubber top of the desk and padded over to the unfinished plate of tripes de truites.
Jack stuck his nose up in the air again. Like Amin, he hated the French. Turning toward the cooling carcass of Wayne Bo Trout, Jack called: “Wacka wacka?” He stretched and padded over to curl up on Wayne’s still chest. From under Jack’s tail came a brisk: “Trout, trout.”
“Ezekiel!” a voice shouted. The voice belonged, of course, to Wanda Japan.
***
“Need anything?” Bambina asked, standing in the doorway with one hand in the hollow of her supple hip, her left holding a fresh clown of coffee.
“As a matter of fact,” the author said, “I would like to get your opinion on something I find quite unusual.”
“What is it?” Bambina asked.
“That’s what I want to find out,” he answered, “Come take a look.”
Bambina crossed from the door to the author’s VDT, saying: “What a goddamned mess. It’s like a pig lives here.”
“It’s down there,” the author said, pointing to a pile of papers under his desk.
“This better be good,” Bambina said as she stooped, and the author knocked her unconscious.
—30—
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