I hit the water with both toes screaming jet-stream melodies in my damaged ears. Time stops. The water is crystalline now and I break off a big chunk of whitewater foam and take a bite. Frozen sound echoes silently through the still air; the beginning of the big splunge I'm about to fake as I hit the surface of the frothing water snake. It's Monday.
I remember maps and milkshakes from my cubist period; maps which covered the walls and ceiling and doorknob. Mother had died. I was a lutheran priest. A nondescript hot dog flies by, flapping its leathery wings and humming a pretty tune ... I think it's a gymnopede but I'm not sure because of the doppler effect and the bloodstained apron I'm obliged to wear. April flies in with the rest of the smoke particles and small insects I inhale as I bend a particularly bluesy D flat on a disheveled blues harp and I can remember snatches of my name.
The Story of Barky and Zooploxo It was a dank, rusty Someday and a soft brain was calling as lisping scrubbers outlined the bold city sheets. Barky was hitting in a tall cafe where a sporadic dog felt out penumbras and owningly scoffed red meat from the sky. Disc brakes unhinged their souls in carefully typset press releases to the unwilling passers-by whose cats reminded Barky of a lonely soft parade from Terre Haute, Indiana. He scoffed and lapsed into StereoVision. A Stereo waiter flooped mazily up to Barky's cable. "Would, sir," the waiter mapped, "If sir would like, sir, to have some more, perhaps, sir, if sir would, sir --" but he slopped with a wave of Barky's eclectic MegaHand. "No, sir," Barky made answer, manhandling archless toadstools of wit. Hats collided in the midnight air. "I'm still waiting." It all becomes fear to the waiter and he masks Barky with a royal bunch clump. "I dig," he sunk to himself, "It's the dark side. No cash flow there." And he disappeared through the lifeless porthole of the soul, leaving behind only an infinite series of quiet regenerations booming in Barky's stereo field. Clocks. Flocks of clocks. Flocks of clock sox. Boom! Now it's slow-mo time. Slow birds land slowly on slow branches as the slow rain slowly trickles onto the slow ground. Barky slowly checks the slow umbrella at his slow table to see if, perhaps, water is slowly leaking through. Five years pass. "Where is my croissant?" explodes the soggy old man who has occupied the adjacent table for the previous two. Clouds pass by slowly underneath. The old man's question is much like the one Barky has been asking himself lately. Slow toadstools slowly rake slow white flowers which have slowly been growing on Barky's slow head, which contains a slow brain and several slow eyeballs. Barky slowly eyes the cashier, who he's noticed is quite attractive. She's one of those Japanese paintings with curly waves and calligraphic signatures which old oriental men paint slowly by the side of gigantic yellow rivers and ginko trees and huge electronics conglomorates somewhere over the slow, curly ocean. Barky eyes her again, slowly noting the chalkboard menu behind her which contains mostly Spam and the occasional diet soda. Barky coughs slowly, letting out small tea-leaves which had been in the harmonica and which jumped a ride into his throat on the back of a small wood shaving that had gotten caught in it when the old blues harp was resting quietly in his pocket, waiting for the light of day to poke through and for groping hands to waft it towards the giant, bluesy lips which shape the air that plays it. A bird dies and slowly falls off its perch. The oriental waitress is slowly wiping the menu off the chalkboard with her kimono and replacing it with Friday's health-food offerings. Cars ooze by. Zooploxo was, of course, occupied at that time with a number of urgent matters. Life, death, love, hate, etc. He was almost two minute slate when he slid noiselessly up to the vertical rug we call life. Folds of elegant vortexes flux maximally into Roland's saxophone, which is full of water by now anyway so that when Zoo casually depresses the octave key as he hoovers into the coffee, a stream of acid water emits. Time stops. "Well, well, well, well, well, well, well," Zoo boxed twice as he scared at the potionless figure in front of him. A cow exploded in the distance. "It's Barky!" Echoes shot fleeing pigeons out of the air and the breathless dog arched sporadically, unable to stop Barking. |
... let me tell you a little bit about Zappo Capri. Zappo Capri and I went to stork academy together in the early twenties. I baked chisels and he drew mangoes, it was an iambic symbiosis of synergy that left me wondering where my left ear and all its disciples had gone for almost two minutes before I realized that critical mass was just an emotion and that psychological counseling could completely eliminate the need for nuclear holocaust.
So the minutes passed by as I crouched on the ledge on the side of the wuthering building, the growling, seething doom building where employees of Doom, Inc. worked behind desks day and night towards the impending end of all life on this planet. I was searching the CEO's office, face and nose pressed hard against the one-way glass so I could see. The moon made lazy circles around the building at blinding speed, polarizing my peppermint patty glasses and neon surface rods which clung helplessly to the building, deprived of the right to vote or to speak freely. The CEO was eating what was to be his last lunch as he sat visualizing the data terminal in front of him. I was straining to read the display from my angle, but I could make out a few words. "It," "He," "They," all pronouns. How was I supposed to get a job done when they only used pronouns? I edged slowly around the corner, making sure not to buy any products made by companies who invested in South Africa. Trees began to grow beneath the building, reaching for me. I could finally read what was on the screen of the CEO's DoomTerminal. It was the following:
|
Once the Stock Market crashes, the world economy is sure to collapse. Only a few minor interventions will be necessary to insure an ensuing World War. Once the World War stars, we here at Doom can interfere with diplomacy and use terrorism to pit sides against each other, thus assuring the destruction of every race on the planet Earth . |
Genocide. I cringed and looked slowly over my shoulder to see a vine curl around my outstretched leg, which, I thought quickly, contained my strap-on knife. I reached to pull it from its restraining sheath, but grasping vines held my arms while vigorous ferns clutched the knife and used it to slice through my neon building grasper, which heaved a sigh of well-earned relief at the thought of its new freedom before it was suddenly matabolized and photosynthesized by a greedy elm tree. Reflected in the various buildings, I could see hordes of marauding foliage creep up all around me as I was wrenched free of my perch by the CEO's Doom office, where he laughed with a slow, evil grin at the thought of total socioeconomic collapse. I realized that I was entering plant Hell; probably a failed experiment left over from Doom's early days as a genetic engineering company which planned to take over the earth by creating a master race of robot-like monkeys capable of designing labor-saving machines twelve times faster than any human which would soon dominate all manufacturing and finally the entire political and economic structure of the planet after which point they would kill everyone slowly, one by one, until there was no one left.
Plants ripped my clothes off and removed my wallet, searching it for photosynthesizable material, before I even hit the dirty, plant-ridden ground. Flowers painted my face war colors and ripped out my hair to use as support wires for the gigantic jungle forest which was springing up around me. "What now?" I thought, barely able to maintain my balance as I was thrown up and down by playful, evil plants whose names sounded like computer languages and whose stalks reminded me of lazy days in the company of people I didn't know very well. I drank a wine cooler and relaxed suddenly, disregarding the trees, who were passing me along towards the central tree legislature where I would be questioned and tortured by nasty, cruel dandilions and sharp stalks of corn. I decided to think about the larger questions of life. Why are we born? Why aren't we born for so long before we're born? Why can't we pick what color we are? Are we really here or are we just creating the idea of "here" so that we can think of ourselves as "here"? And why do cigarettes cost more than gas? I was thinking these questions without really answering them when a knock came on my door. "Come in." I exuded. Zooploxo dripped through the mail slot.
"Hey, baby," he said loudly and threw me on the ground, pinning me to the persian rug (which was woven by Fred Ghandi, the least known son of the famous Ghandi brothers, a vaudeville act which my grandfather used to manage. He once spent five hours describing the elaborate bookeeping techniques he used to manage their meager income. Fred used to weave rugs for everyone. Especially jews) and licking my face heartily. I ripped his bangs out and hit him on the head -- lightly, mind you -- with a spanner. He blacked out and I lay there, unable to move, for almost five days. He indicated the kitchen table, so I showed him where it was and he made toast over and over again until he could no longer find the toaster because the room was full of heavily buttered slices of all kinds of bread, toasted to perfection and served on elegant oriental plates by my fat negro cook, Bertha. I laughed into the room but the toast absorbed the sound.
"What have you been up to?" I asked Zooploxo after a quick shower and several good days' sleep.
"Very very little," he answered, quaffing a little scotch and gazing into the neon circle which arched around my non-digital analog clock. It was three. "I've been reading." There was a long pause during which civilizations died and came to life and I got a glass of milk out of the refrigerator. I strained to remember what he had said, but it was no use.
"What?" I asked, feeling sheepishly wrong in my conviction that there should be no executive branch in the republican system of government.
"I've been reading," he said with the same abstracted glow of boredom.
"What have you been reading?" I asked silently. He didn't hear me.
"Oh, lots of things," he said. A plane flew by and he unbuttoned his shirt.
By this time I was well into the twisty maze of passages which formed the entrace to the plant questioning room. Thorns behind me pressed me onwards through branches in branches and spirals of crazy decision-paths, too numerous to memorize. Then, suddenly, I reached the center. Vines wrapped around my limbs, pinning me to the wall. I closed my eyes but all I saw was wax and neon. When I opened them, Zorthon the wonder carrot was standing in front of me. I was so frightened that my legs fell off.
"YOU FILTHY SCUM OF A RAT!" he screamed into my ears. "I'M ALMOST GLAD YOU'RE HERE SO THAT I CAN SUBJECT YOU TO THE MOST PAINFUL AND HUMILIATING TORTURES KNOWN TO PLANTS! I BET YOU DON'T HAVE EVEN THE FAINTEST IDEA OF THE AMOUNT OF PAIN YOU'RE GOING TO GO THROUGH REALLY SOON! AND I MEAN THAT! SO YOU'RE GOING TO TELL ME EVERYTHING NOW. AND I MEAN NOW! WHAT DID I SAY?"
He poked an orange finger at me and all I could say was "Now."
"THAT'S RIGHT, KID. NOW TALK."
I talked. I told them everything. So they released me onto the streets of night.
* * *
I waited on the balcony for five minutes, wheezing lifeless melodies and carefully checking the elevators on each side for defects in manufacturing and workmanship. Art surrounded me. Little sculptures rested quietly and artfully on my shoulders, full of creativity, vitality, and energy. Giant cubes of granite romped on the lawn below. A tired, wise-looking curator paced the halls, hands clasped behind his dark-red suit jacket with white trim and a name tag. Red clouds slid by.
She came, after another five minutes, with Zappo Capri at her side. They came out of opposite elevators, so I had to clone my head to look at both of them. Zappo strobed happily. "Spap" we all called to each other, and I took her by the arm. The red clouds slid by again. I noticed that Zappo was wearing several belts of ammunition and some sort of gun. I questioned him as to the nature of this weaponry, but he just said that it was the latest fashion. Then we decided to go home. The problem was to decide which elevator to take. If we took the left elevator, it would be exactly the same for Zappo, who had taken the left elevator before; but it we took the right elevator, it would be exactly the same for her. Now, we couldn't take both elevators, because then two of us would have to go in one and one of us would have to go in the other, thus creating a structural imbalance which would cause the entire museum to collapse and roll into the gorge. No, we couldn't go one by one, because we would still have to favor one elevator over the other, being an odd number of people. We thought of asking the curator if he would like to be a fourth person, thus giving each elevator an equal share, but Zappo pointed out that he would have to take one of the elevators back up, thus reestablishing favoritism, which would make the elevators jealous of each other to the extent that it might impair their proper functioning. Perhaps, the gracious, beautiful woman beside me offered, we could take the stairs. No, I politely declared, that would make both elevators angry and then we would always have to take the stairs because they would refuse to open their doors to us. But, she replied, wouldn't the stairs feel left out too, if we didn't take them? I carefully explained to her, trying not to be insulting, that of course stairs have no feelings at all and couldn't possibly be upset by anything. So we were stuck with the dilemma: who should take which elevator when? And how many people should take each elevator when they take it? I suggested that we take the elevators up and down so many times that they would become overwhelmed with glee and satisfaction to the extent that they would overlook any slight discrepancies in the number of times we took each one. The gentleman and the lady agreed. So she and I took the left elevator while he took the right.
"I'm going to close now," the elevator door told us politely as it slid shut and gave a little electronic ring. We began to lurch downward but the quick-witted woman beside me punched the STOP button and brought the elevator to a screeching, squealing halt. Before I could ask her why, she was pressing herself against me, biting my neck and sternum, reaching down for the button on my denim armor and undoing it as a cat burglar undoes a safe. I wondered, as I always did, what she spent her time doing when I wasn't around. I imagined her editing a radical left-wing newspaper in France, dedicated to the cause of promoting social democracy in Western Europe. I imagined her as a contended house wife, living in a T.V. family which was regularly videotaped and used as a sitcom. I imagined her as a lonely, struggling jockey, yearning to win the next race, and the next one, and the next one, until the Kentucky derby was hers. She likes making things hers, I thought as she kneeled in front of me, thinking silent prayers to the river god she worshipped. She whispered something which I didn't catch through the haze of the droning elevator music and took an enormous toothless bite of my rock-hard jello organ, pushing me almost painfully into the imitation-wood railing as I pulsed into oblivion. There was a brief power outage and the lights went out so I couldn't see her jump and throw me to the floor where she brutalized me and impaled herself joyously on my well-seasoned lightning rod, whispering something about the sun or Jerry Lewis or about how she had missed me while I was in training as she threw her head back in the darkness. She said something I almost heard just before I exploded and a heat wave shot up through the building, indicating that yes, the place was on fire and yes, this was going to be a heck of a night. I thought of Zappo.
Zappo tells me that at that time he had gotten to the bottom floor and saw the men actually setting off the fire. In any case, he began shooting with his stylish gun for whatever reason, causing bullets to rapidly tear through the tiny works of art which clung helplessly to display racks and pedestals. Unfortunately, the art police were close by and charged him with a Class A felony, revoking his artistic license and throwing him into art prison for life. His lovely, voluptuous companion and I reached the bottom floor just as he was led away and just as the flames reached the "Sculpture made with Kerosene Bottles" by the American artist Andy Warhol. It was very hot for a while, and I woke up burnt in art court. Unfortunately, art court was running in fast-forward and the entire trial went by before I could press STOP. The defense and the prosecution argued endlessly for about three seconds in ultra-fast, squeaky voices until it was decided (rather hastily) that I was guilty of Conspiracy to Destroy Art and that I was sentenced to life in art prison. In what seemed like no time at all, I was sitting in a rather artfully designed cell with Zappo Capri, eating curds and whey from a microwave T.V. dinner plate and studying a matisse print as part of my rehabilitation program.
"Hey," he said, instead of "Hi."
"Right, yeah," I speculated, pulling at strands of foot-long hair which was wet with dew. "What happened?"
"I don't know," he answered, covering up the rest of his naked body with a tattered towel which had a Rembrandt on each side, "I think we took the wrong elevator."