Today Ain't Nothing New. You Could See It Coming In A Cave Painting
I Particularly Like The Part Where Paul Bare Loses A Piece Of His Ear For Not Paying Attention To Sam And Dave
Chapter 28
The discomfort one experiences from not knowing exactly where anything is in the Palace differs greatly from the disorientation which arises when one confronts the Life Protector’s portrait in the Civic Auditorium. That portrait achieves its disquieting impact through the artist’s precise and intentional displacement of several disparate elements. Not knowing who or why or where one is…well, that’s not quite the same.
This grim history was to be supplemented by a pocket atlas. The reader would thus be able to locate the Palace landmarks mentioned along the way as easily as preglacial travellers could make their way from Pittsboro, North Carolina, to Idiotville, Oregon—or vice versa—without prior knowledge of either place.
Yet, how could anyone have foreseen the unfortunate victualization of Ollie Oxenfree? Surely, the reader never expected the Palace’s cartographer to be loving converted into tete de femme farcies by Idi Amin. Ollie himself expressed awesome surprise as preparation began.
Graphic depictions of important statistics were also to leap from the VDT when curious visitors had questions, explaining ever more clearly than mere words what a catastrophe had visited mankind. Consider the impact of a bar graph detailing figures which indicate the total global population had plummeted from nearly 5,000,000,000 to little more than four score in seven years. But Yolanda Dortch shot herself a month ago, and the author has been without the services of a trained electronic illustrator since November 29th.
Therefore, this dictated view of the roadmap of human civilization must suffice: The Palace’s 256 cubic miles of living space currently open to the public appear to represent a meticulous miniaturization of Fort Hill and surrounding area ten to fifteen years before the curtain rose on the current ice age.
A map of Oconee County is available in the Hall of Records.
***
Two distinctly different Palaces were designed, one of them, in fact, by Paul Bare. Paul’s spherical complex of subterranean yurts was barely brushed across Eagle II’s scanner before being filed with the Hershey wrappers, discarded memos, and other Bare proposals deemed neither aesthetically appropriate nor economically feasible.
According to information in the Hall of Records, the yurt survived until August 17th alongside numerous equally unappealingly efficient architectures. It was but one of many preglacial reminders of what man’s first reward for selflessness actually was.
This grim history here alludes to an early myth in which, according to Materex, God cast an innocent child and its unfortunate mother out of heaven in a fit of godly rage.
“You worthless bitch!” God exclaimed, “What do you do all day? Sit around and eat fruit while I’m out trying to keep the universe from dissolving, that’s what! And here I come home to supper, and you’ve gone and farted out This Kid. Have you no shame?”
This Kid’s name in this myth can only be translated from Godish into English as the clumsy construction: “Another Goddamned Mouth To Feed.” Most scholars preferred This Kid’s nickname: Technology.
The significance of the original myth had grown muddled by the time the Ethiopians were frogged by the sons of Abraham. Most people who believed in the Myth of Technology, even the ancients, chose to ignore the dubious circumstances leading to the homeless situation in which Technology and its hapless mother found themselves. They focused instead on how mankind had saved the poor child and its persecuted mum from either a life of deprivation or death by starvation.
Meanwhile, God continued his rant: “Here I am fighting against death, day in, day out. There’s no hope in this. I realize that. Consciousness cannot last forever. But why you go and bring This Kid right into the living room is beyond my capacity for patience. I don’t need this,” he shouted, tossing mother and child, a hideously mangled mutant who was both blind and irrational, out into the endless dark of the cosmic night.
After billions of years, they landed on Earth.
A social worker discovered them shivering under a pile of discarded all-weather radial ties in an alley in Valparaiso. It was later reported both mother and child could be traced back to royalty. Donations deluged newspaper, radio, and television offices all over the world.
A solid and vocal minority lobbied to have civilization adopt the goddess and her offspring. It couldn’t hurt business, and the pair was so stupid, ugly, and powerless, it was a risk-free promotional opportunity.
Noted plagiarist Herman Saul, digressing in a review of the Prime Rib Players’ production of Major Barbara in The Rutledge Times/Courier Dispatch, suggested that if there was a moral to be found in the Myth of Technology, there was a message as well:
Be Good!
it went
Whatever That Is!
For there was some question about whether saving This Kid and His Mom was really all that good an idea. After all, no one else in the universe would offer even disaster assistance for these freaks, not even the God of the Gods Themselves. In fact, opinion was unquestionably divided between those who expected great blessings from God for what they’d done and those who were waiting for The Bomb.
On the other hand, there is a version of the myth in which the child’s name translates as Another Ax To Grind. This account dates from the era of Socrates and in it, God misplaced his keys, his socks, and his favorite goddess and child during a godly revel during the World Cup.
God loved them both deeply, and He was more than a little upset His drinking had led to this, but now He didn’t have a clue where to begin searching for them. Oh, they’d be mad, He was sure. Hell, He’d be mad if somebody lost Him on a good drunk.
The universe is immense, familiar reader, but even the Ethiopians had a word for it: “The joint is the joint,” an Ethiopian might say, gesturing vaguely at the empty air all around him, “And the universe is this joint.”
Technology and Mom were on Earth, of course, where they died slowly and painfully in research labs because no one had ever seen such ugly people in all their lives: They might carry some disease. Their cells might have something to teach us.
Luckily for mankind, this interpretation was lost before God found out what had happened, but surely the reader has gotten the point of this story ages ago.
***
In yet another anecdote, man’s first reward in the life hereafter was an affordable mobile home. For additional reading on the subject, the curious reader is directed to the Hall of Records.
Editor’s Note: Many of the more outrageous statements in this grim history have been drafted to comply with the agreement between Dias the Mechanic and Materex to secure the author’s release from the Palace Intensive Care Unit.
The yurt originated in Mongolia. The virtues of the circle it extolled in common with the Eskimo Igloo and the American Tipi were apparent to anyone with half a head up his ass. Even the Great Free Statesmen lived in yurts.
The word yurt, ironically, does not occur in Ethiopian, although their homes were dismantled, moved, and reassembled every 48 to 72 hours. The Ethiopians called their yurts “black holes,” which translates into English as the verb “to be.”
Some architectural historians claimed the yurt was the most efficient container for the living ever imagined and perhaps the second greatest gift the Mongols gave to mankind. The first, of course, was yogurt. The whole culture of human culture could be summed up in six letters, although the author no longer remembers which letters that are, were, or shall be.
Paul Bare no doubt chose to embellish the basic yurt in designing his Palace for sardonic reasons. The yurt, after all, was a mobile home. It was meant to wander up and down the face of Earth, like Job, following the whims of its nomadic owners. Bare indulged himself in this fanciful conceit only after the President of the United States had returned from a discussion with Eagle II, the exact nature of which remains unclear. Eagle II was the computer that ran the United States.
“Listen,” the President told Eagle II, “I talked with Bare, and Bare said to talk to you. He’s pretty tricky. That’s the impression I get. I don’t know what to do. I could flay him, put him on the rack, but it would be wrong. What do you think I should do?”
“Do whatever Bare tells you,” Eagle II replied.
“What are you crazy? Bare could be dangerous,” the President huffed. “He doesn’t think like us.”
“How could I be crazy?” Eagle II responded. “I’m a goddamned machine.”
***
Consequently, the President of the United States imprisoned Paul Bare in a small office in the basement of the White House usually reserved for covert operation after-parties. The office contained only a studio, a recording system, and a firing range. Sam and Dave unlocked the handcuffs and pushed Bare through the doorway.
“Okay, you ofay motherfucker,” Sam said, “This here room be set so’s at rabid interfalls between zeero-eight-hunnert hours and sebbenteen-hunnert hours the whole entire perimeter wooden a ten-foot ratio aroundt yo desk gone catch a saturate of small alms far. An iffen you honkey ass doan be working when the iron starts flying, yo ass ain be worth shit.”
Bare lost the lobe of his right ear and a plug out of his elbow approximately eight minutes later.
***
According to Materex, the Palace was built around Eagle II, which later became Materex. The Palace was designed by Materex itself and is patterned after the Fayetteville Mall, a terrifying edifice created and built by friends of the President of the United States. The basic unit of construction, therefore, is the box. The word “box” in the language of the Ethiopians means “to savage,” and only the most barbaric of cultures have embraced it since the very beginning of time.
What the Army Corps of Engineers and civilian contractors did was enlarge upon the fundamental mall structure by combining an as-yet-undetermined number of identical boxes into one enormous box whose actual dimensions are a closely guarded military secret. At least they were. It is possible no one guards the secret now that the military is frozen across the surface of the planet like a burst bag of Krystal Klear Party-Time Ice.
***
Living in the Palace is a little like being a vole trapped in a pallet in back of a preglacial supermarket. The discovery of sectors on the frontier (previously uncharted in the magnanimous memory of Materex) by the commandos and the purely adventurous has increased speculation that the Palace is buried much deeper beneath the surface of southwestern Missouri than initially presumed.
When asked why the discrepancy between the number of structural units catalogued in the Hall of Records and the constantly burgeoning list of recently acquired and previously unmapped territories on the doors of the Civic auditorium, Materex only replies: “You wouldn’t happen to have a toothpick, would you?”
These happen to be the last words spoken by Alfred Jarry, the man who created the man Gottlieb Goforth imagined he should be.
***
According to a most unimpeachable source, Jarry began the meticulous mapping of his interminable departure from our miserable plane about the same time he began work on King Ubu, his most enduring, if not endearing, character.
Near the end of his suicide, Jarry had not been seen for several days, according to some reports — for more than a year, according to others. Few people missed him and many, quite frankly, were quite happy with his absence. Which also suited Jarry just fine, since he, by then, preferred to drink absinthe and sniff ether in the privacy of his half-floor hovel.
The ceiling was so low even a dwarf had to stoop over to shuffle around in it. Fortunately, Jarry was barely four feet tall, so he was little bothered by his cramped confines. He had already lost control of his legs. Occasionally he scurried over the filthy floor, pulling himself along with bloody fingertips, scattering pages of history and myth as he frantically scribbled a few notes in a margin here, detailed a line drawing there.
Most of the time, Jarry lay on a ticking stuffed with grass he had gathered at a nearby park before he forgot how to walk and regularly vomited all over himself.
One dark and dismal Tuesday after lunch, a messenger arrived from England with a bill for a Mr. Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke.
“Nobody here by that name,” Jarry called out.
“I’m perfectly aware of that, sir. It’s an alias, it is, a pseudonym, Mr. Jarry. A fake name,” the messenger shouted.
“A fake name, is it?” Jarry wondered, “Well, we have no doubt he’s given you a fake address as well.”
“No doubt at all about that either, Mr. Jarry,” the courier called back. “A fake name. A fake address. Wouldn’t be surprised to find I’m delivering a fake bill. It’s all the same to me. I’ve got a job to do. And that’s deliver this bill.”
“But it isn’t ours,” Jarry argued.
“Nobody said it was, Mr. Jarry,” the bearer stressed, “but do open up and let us have a look see. If you’re not who I think you are and aren’t who you say you’re not, the truth will soon enough be out then, won’t it? I’ll be off for England and you can return to whatever you were doing. I’ll not be bothering you again. Just open up.”
“But we can’t move,” Jarry croaked.
“What’s that you say?”
“We can’t move. We can’t move. Hence, we are unable to open the door.”
“So you’re not going to let me in, is it?” the herald huffed.
“Of course we’re not going to let you in, by our green candle! We can’t move, you horn’s ass. We haven’t been able to move for more than a week. We can’t even scribble.“ Jarry replied.
“I’ll have to call the constable, of course, you realize?” the messenger shouted.
“Whatever for?”
“To break down the door, you nit. It’ll all end up a mighty mess I’m sure, but I have come an awful far piece, and I do not intend to leave without bringing Mr. Comberbacke to be held accountable of some reckoning.”
“But we are not Mr. Comberbacke, you meddling emissary you. We are Father Ubu, King of the Polish People. We have been all over hell and half of Georgia, and our door is always open. Why ever would you break it down?”
The stench which greeted the messenger as he pushed open the door to Alfred Jarry’s half-floor cavern defies elaboration. Jarry himself sprawled on the straw-filled ticking on the far side of the room directly opposite the door. His swollen tongue pulsed in the left side of his mouth like a blue slug, a blob of mucousy vomit sliding along the piping of his chin and dribbling down his neck.
He had repeatedly soiled himself since paralysis set in and several of the sores on his legs had gone gangrenous. Aside from the rotting mat on which Jarry was dying, the only piece of furniture was a sculpted phallus, three-and-a-half feet tall, with a sword driven through the glans. It stood on the mantel above the ashless fireplace.
“Good God, Mr. Jarry!” the courier cried, rushing to the hideously perfected masterpiece of Alfred Jarry, “Let me help you.”
“Help us what, pray tell?” Jarry asked. “We’ve already done quite enough ourselves.”
“All this is a ghastly mistake, Mr. Jarry. I’m so embarrassed. There now, how does that feel?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a toothpick, would you?” Jarry asked, smiling. And died.
***
To accommodate 161 occupants and their Malthusianly inevitable offspring, the Army Corps of Engineers incorporated a Holiday Inn into every sixth box. (The odds notwithstanding, only Wanda is officially pregnant at this late date. There are fifty-six survivors, mostly female.)
Four boxes are currently open to the public, and these four boxes together are twice the length and twice the width of a single box, since the present palatial predicament is confined to a single plane.
Here, one can live one’s life in two dimensions, figuratively speaking, without ever having to climb or descend a single flight of stairs. And yet the commandos insist on living in three dimensions and demand five or six others in which to relax and recreate.
The Palace is assumed to be composed of numerous identical boxes, each equal in volume to the Fayetteville Mall. And yet, in one burst of boldface on its VDT of a face, Materex informed the author the sound to which he awakens in the room above his chambers does not occur in a room at all. There isn’t any room above the author’s chambers. Just unimaginable tons of dark earth between his white tiled ceiling and the icy air that sweeps across the once fertile farmland of Southwestern Missouri.
A moment later, however, Ella Emma Anna Pei is informed that the midnight sounds to which she awakens in the room beneath her chambers do not take place in a room at all. There is no room beneath her room. Just unaccountable tons of dark earth between the Palace and the Earth’s cooling core.
Either Materex is lying about the location of the four boxes in which the nation’s most valuable species is secreted, or the fact that Sir Isaac Newton discovered two things couldn’t be in the same place at the same time doesn’t necessarily imply that one thing can’t be in two places simultaneously, and Materex never lies.
The author rarely staggers from his room to discover what all the noise is about. He’s drunk again, and he assumes any reader who has gotten this far has had quite enough himself. Those who believe it important will find the Hall of Records eventually. This presumes, of course, as both author and reader must, that the first thing to be uncovered and deciphered in this future dig is this grim history and its bleak conclusion.
***
“You think I am a coward because I am short,” Amin shouted savagely. He was blasted, having bummed two pitchers off Pablo Juan Caracas while detailing his plan to contaminate the Michelin Tire plant. He wanted to make the French to pay for that faulty condom. They’d wish they’d never occupied Algeria in the first place, even if they had withdrawn a long time ago as the Americans kept telling him.
“Then where are they now if they’re not in Algeria?” Amin demanded. He was pointing at Adam Dveulph.
“They’re in Paris. Where else would they be?” Adam replied.
“Paris don’t count. That’s like Americans being in New York…”
“New York?” asked Wayne, “Isn’t that what they turned…”
“Will you shut the fuck up?”
“Jesus Christos!” Pablo suddenly gasped. “Madre mia!” as if he had made an important discovery. “I can see his point. The dwarf. He has a point. The French are in Sandy Springs.”
“You see! What did I tell you?” Amin chortled. “First it was Algeria. Now it is Sandy Springs. Tomorrow they’ll be in Walhalla. Before you can say jackshit in your shoes to Wayne, the kids in Pumpkintown will be calling each other mon ami. Mark my words. We must strike tonight. Allah be praised!”
“You’re nuts, brillo-head,“ Adam said. “You can’t get in there. They got guns and shit. It’s like breaking into Oconee.”
“You think I don’t know that? I am no fool. We are guerilla warriors, my comrades and I,” Amin said, slinging his arm around Pablo’s shoulder. Pablo was so drunk he smiled.
“We have reliable intelligence. We have plenty of time,” the ranting Arab continued, “And we have Allah on our side, not some cock-skinning God who murders his own son.
“Americans are so ridiculous. You hire people you couldn’t care if they lived or died to work with your poisons. So any time a person you couldn’t care whether he lived or died drives up and says he’s come to pick up the dangerous shit, right away Americans fork over all the corruption the law allows and usually a little extra.
“Thirty thousand pounds of radioactive waste makes it unnecessary to breach security at Michelin, don’t you think?”
“You’re full of shit,” Adam huffed. “Where you gonna age 15 tons of nuke puke? Nobody could get away with…” Adam said, but Amin interrupted by shouting: “You think I am a coward because I am short,” waving his fist in Adam’s face, “But you are a stupid Jew with big shoulders and no brains. You may have money and power, but I have thirty thousand pounds of fallout parked in front of the Clemson Police Station. That makes me brave.”
Adam Dveulph stepped back, straightened to his full 6'2", and stared at the drunken Libyan midget for a stunned moment. Then he reached out and grabbed Amin firmly by the collar, spinning him into the booth at which Gottlieb Goforth and Cindy Gnomoure were finishing their fifth pitcher of Old Milwaukee. Adam said: “You’d be a coward, even if you weren’t a dwarf.”
“What did he say?” Cindy asked.
“He simply stated it doesn’t matter how small you are if your heart and mind are already smaller, our mumbling stumblebuns,” Gottlieb replied, getting up for a refill. As he pushed the pitcher across the counter, Rapid Ray asked him: “Hey Gottlieb, you hear the latest about Idi Amin?”
“Of course we have, you dithering dullard,” Gottlieb answered, “but we have sworn our kingly secrecy of honor not to mouthe a mention of our tyrannical Ugandan ally’s ludicrous exploits. Of course, if you were to ask us the same question three times in succession we would be obliged to reveal what we know of this latest cunning subterfuge.
“As a result, equally of course, we would be obligated to stick a shithook through your throat for having in your possession in the very presence of the King of Poland classified information which only we and the President for Life of a morbidly entertaining African nation are permitted knowledge. Therefore, unraveled Ray, surely there is something else you prefer we should speak about.”
***
Gottlieb Goforth and Cindy Gnomoure were transformed into pure energy during a struggle with Paul Bare for possession of the Aldo Ray. Many residents believe the two weirdest Palace inhabitants are dead. Others argue for a dimensional displacement theory, but all anyone knows for certain is that Gottlieb and Cindy were last seen in scuffle with Paul Bare, and no one uses the present tense when talking about them anymore.
Fast Ed the Bartender had turned into a crackling trying to get the Aldo Ray some hours earlier in the Heart of Materex (which still stank from the August 22nd massacre). Wanda and her commandos gained admittance to the super-secret sensitive chambers by prying the grate off a ventilator shaft in the north wall of Materex’s Heart.
The commandos had embarked on this mission only after Gottlieb Goforth informed the insurrectionists that Materex possessed a weapon of incredible power, which gave it the right and responsibility to annihilate any threat to the Palace, no matter how remote.
The Aldo Ray could reduce the entire planet to a fine dust of cosmic debris quicker that a cat’s fart could kill a philodendron.
***
In fact, shortly before making effective examples of several recalcitrant citizens on August 22nd, Materex apparently used the Aldo Ray to obliterate the moon. “Just watch this,” Materex’s VDT flashed.
Unfortunately, no one in the Heart of Materex got the actual opportunity to see the moon disappear from the night sky for good due to the windowless nature of palatial existence, although fifteen people did look up. Wayne was one of those people.
That’s the kind of guy Wayne was.
***
The Aldo Ray was the only weapon available to Wanda and her commandos with the capability to wipe out the malignant memory of Materex itself.
“You mean if we got hold of this Aldo Ray we might stand a chance of winning?” asked Fast Ed the Bartender.
“Oh no, Fleet Edward. We won’t be tricked into making crass categorical statements. We are more regal than to weasel with the odds. To stand any chance at all, one must first decide whatever one hopes to accomplish. One must also decide what one will stand on, for, or against. We dare say you won’t stand a measured decision.
“What did you say?” asked Cindy.
“Nothing,” Gottlieb smiled. “Absolutely nothing.”
Nevertheless, following a voice vote confirming their intention to wrestle the Aldo Ray from the Heart of Materex, the commandos determined Fast Eddie should lead the daring daylight raid, although there isn’t any daylight in the Palace.
Fast Ed the Bartender had taken his B.A. from Clemson with a major in English and a minor in Business Administration. Like countless other English majors struggling in the real world just before the wholesale cultural collapse brought on by the current ice age, Fast Ed was a civilized misfit who only worked to keep himself alive long enough to read the Great American Novel, if he could ever locate it, before his drinking finally killed him.
As a result, Fast Ed, like so many other English majors, was forced to make a decision between joining millions of other Americans with similar societal defects as part of the consumer slave force. Or he could hide out among those same hopeless millions as a jackanapes.
Ed knew he wouldn’t ever put himself in sound enough financial and familial condition to sit back and detach his retinas like Milton while an accountant took care of the bills. He couldn’t even give away free subscriptions to Screw, and he always felt guilty when anyone asked him a question. Even something as innocuous as: “Why did you take this job?”
Therefore, Ed drifted along, hoping nobody noticed how unconnected he really was. Fast Ed the Bartender was the kind of guy Benton Enden should have been.
Having earned a degree which prepared him for nothing and over-educated him for everything else, Fast Ed had taken a correspondence course in computer maintenance. This led to a CETA position with IBM in Greenville, which Ed took on in addition to his job at the bar.
Nevertheless, Fast Ed’s skill in the operation of computers was simply no match for the fail-safe complexity of Materex, and Fast Ed had no sooner completed the sequence to run his diagnostics than the Heart of Materex filled with thick black smoke and an odor combining ozone with charbroiled meat.
***
Fast Ed fizzled like the filament in an incandescent bulb when a small hole is poked in the glass.
***
The first commando to break the awesome silence which followed Fast Ed’s horrific demise was Gottlieb Goforth.
“How unfortunate,” he said, “But we did warn you this affair would not be without considerable cost.”
“You said there was no other way,” snapped Harriet Tupperells.
“Oh that’s the same thing, our dotable pate-rater,” Gottlieb said, “Surely you can see that. What it means is ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ quite a common sentiment. If there is a way, it’s never the only way. We didn’t say there is one way or this is the one way or even that there need be any way. If there is a way, there must needs always be another way.”
“What are you talking about?” snarled Paul Bare, approaching Gottlieb with much menace in his lope, “You mean Fast Eddie didn’t have to die?”
“Of course not. He’s dead, isn’t he?” Gottlieb replied. “Why rail against the blind indifference of the facts. Everybody has to die, our asinine architect. Admittedly, he didn’t have to die just this minute in front of our kingly eyes, filling our ears with his sickening scream, plugging our nostrils with the soot of his awful stink, but…”
“You mean we’re not doomed?” asked Harriet.
“Whatever is the matter with you pissant peasants. Everyone is doomed, our theocratic tester jester,“ Gottlieb shouted, “Even ourselves are doomed…”
“But we can still get the Aldo Ray, right?” asked Cindy. “Isn’t that what you said?”
“Now why should we ever want to do that, our busiful bunsaloaf?” Gottlieb impolitely answered with a question of his own. “Didn’t you see what happened to Fast Ed?”
—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