Codename Prague (10 page)

At last a farmhand entered the mausoleum, shoveled Prague into a wheelbarrow and ferried him outside. Sunlight stung his exposed eyeballs. Welcome pain. Another week of self-infested screenlight would have cooked him to the bone…

…solarized flashbulbs of agony as they poured his body into a re-animator drum and sang:

Oh Mr Johnny Verbeck how could you be so mean?

I told you you’d be sorry for inventing that machine.

Now all the neighbors cats and dogs will never more be seen.

They’ll all be ground to sausages in Johnny Verbeck’s machine. Hey!

But by the time they had finished the last chorus, he had regained his body, lock, stock and barrel, without a scratch, although he was almost two decades older now, and the Victory martini they siphoned into his veins contained too much olive juice…

“Good morning, Mr Prague,” said a maître d’. “Observe, if you will, the mechanism. She’s Wellsian through and through. This glittering metallic framework is a state-of-the-art apparatus. Its singularly askew transparent crystalline substance commands the attention of any passerby with half a defragmented brain. Note the mechanism’s twinkling, brilliantly illuminated appearance. Need I mention the ivory fixtures? The brass candlesticks are certainly a nice touch, too, wouldn’t you say? All for the reasonable price of $9,999.99. That’s for one ride. That includes a bag of popcorn, I might add. Portions of soda start at $800 per Dixie cup.”

Prague paid with a thumbprint, climbed into the saddle of the time machine, and put on his seat belt.

Half a minute later he stood in Commodore Rabelais’s office.

“Welcome back, Mr Anvil-in-Chief.” Rabelais scraped his incisor with a toothpick. “I say that to your conscious as much as to your corporeal self. The year is Ticky Tacky 8.4. I just spoke to you three hours ago. You just spoke to me eighteen years and three hours ago. Here.” He slid a box of cigarettes across the desk. “Smoke these. Each cigarette will return to your body one year of its life, plus two additional years, if you elect to smoke the entire pack. Time, time, time—have you seen what’s become of you? You’re a wrinkled mess. You’re fit for the grave. And you’re only fifty-one years old, technically speaking. I’d guess you were ninety-one, if I looked at you askance. But I rarely look at people askance.” He flicked the toothpick across the office. A mechanical hand reached out of a trash can and claimed it before it struck the floor. “We may want to do something about your memory, though. Torture isn’t a pleasant thing to reflect on, particularly that which has been enacted by your loving employer. Another pack of cigarettes will take care of any mnemonic turbulence. Well. On behalf of the MAP, I assure you this little diversion has all been proffered in the name of character development. I hope you’ve learned your lesson and are ready and willing to do your duty.”

Prague opened the cigarette box, took one out and lit it. He inhaled deeply and swallowed the smoke.

09

Untitled Teufelsdröckh Rejektion Letter

(on Cooking Channel Letterhead)

1 January 10,023 AR
[1]

Dr Hermann Teufelsdrˆckh, Ph.D.

1-2X Das Schlofl

Kount Westwest Prachtstrafle

843 227853 Prague

Former Czech Republik

Dear Dr Teufelsdrˆckh:

Thank you for your recent submission to The Cooking Channel for the position of Associate Celebrity of Gourmevangelism®. We received your varied follow-up letters and apologize for the delayed response. A six year turnaround, however, is not an unreasonable stretch of time considering the vast number of submissions we receive on a daily basis. At any rate, we thank you for your patience and hope to find you in good health.

While we enjoyed your video footage, we regret to inform you that we have decided to pass on your candidacy as host of our upcoming show, Chuka Ichiban Inframan, which will debut on 22 March 10,025 AR. Don’t forget to tune in! We would also like to take this opportunity to discourage you from further submissions. Rest assured, we will keep your footage on file in the event that a suitable TCC Irreality TV venue comes to fruition. We understand how difficult this must be for you. We recommend comfort food the likes of which you might find on virtually every one of our shows, including reruns, spoofs, spinoffs and hypermelodramatizations.

“The mass of men lead lives of quixotic douchebaggery.” Are you familiar with this timeless apothegm? We hope it might give you some degree of solace in your time of need and perdition. We apologize for this impersonal form letter. If you require further service, please contact us at our head office in Prague. Bear in mind, we do not possess hard communications technology of any kind, or, if we do, we are unauthorized to inform you as to its numeric and linguistic stature. If you wish to contact us, you must do so in person. The waiting room is in the basement.

In the meantime, we leave you with the following story, which, alongside the aforementioned apothegm, is intended to lift your spirits: There was a man who kept a manhole, and he enjoyed the manhole as much as he enjoyed the sun, wary of their differences and eccentricities. One morning he lost the capacity to tell the difference between the two circular-shaped articles. He suspected the sun had been a manhole all along. Troubled, he ate breakfast without the assistance of utensils…and suddenly everything fell into place. The man put on sunglasses, crawled into the sun and went to sleep. And the manhole closed like a bank vault.

The end.

Sincerely,

Jav

Mr Javier Flankeater, Chef-in-Chief

The Cooking Channel

c/o Stick Figure Incorporated

c/o/o MAP Home-Ek Department

1145 Gud Food Street

City City, State 83

USAmerika

^[1]
  An abbreviation that, according to
The Encyclopedia of Johnny Mnemonics
, simultaneously denotes “After Reality” and “Alpha Ricardo.” This revision of the temporal calendar from the former AD (Anno Domini) commenced the year after the death of Mexican-born actor Ricardo Montalbán, who, after being resuscitated from his first death in 2009, lived to be 312 years old and for most of his life was widely perceived as a messiah and an enthusiastic violator of the laws of reality. Despite his eventual final death at the hands of an extremist cult of Urban-Amerikan Bushman, the star of renowned television series
Fantasy Island
(1978-84; 2030-39; 2167-2232) maintained a firm grip on the collective consciousness and incited new ways of perceiving the human condition and achieving new metaphysical heights.

10

Tranzatlanticism

Vincent Prague placed a razor on his cheek and considered the prospect of being a hole. A black hole.

“Is there any other kind?” said a voice in his head.

He entertained a mental soliloquy on the nature of holes. How they provide access. How they function as entryways and exits. One can vanish into a hole. One can crawl out of it, or stay inside. Bodies are made of holes (i.e. pores). Bodies come from holes (i.e. vaginas) and return to holes (i.e. graves). The earth is full of holes (i.e. gorges, basins, canyons, chasms, ravines, etc.). The universe itself is full of holes, howling gaps of nothingness carved into the empty fabric of space, time and psyche. The universe, as a matter of fact, is one great hole. And we’re all inside of it. Any desire to be a hole is rendered
null and void by dint of this cold, hard reality (i.e. I am already a hole). The question, then, is not: To be or not to be a hole? The question is: Have I ever been anything but a hole? No, that’s not the question. The question is: To what degree am I a hole (i.e. what is the severity or paucity of my holehood, i.e., my hole-
I
-ness)?

The vidphone rang. He shaved his face in six broad strokes. The vidphone hung up and rang again. He listened to it. It hung up and rang again four more times.

He went into the kitchen and touched a miniscreen. “I am a hole where something else used to be,” he said.

“Grow up, wiseass,” said the visage of Foghorn Leghorn in a thick Southern drawl. “Quit piddling, I say. Get down here now, boy. Pronto. I say, I do say now, we’re waiting for you at Slingpad 7-2521 on Rooftop 1984 of MAP Spacescraper D-503. Look here.”

Prague thought Yosemite Sam would be a more adequate representation of Administrator Wichita’s persona than Foghorn Leghorn. Was the vidphone on the fritz? Then again, he didn’t know the director that well. His only sustained interaction with him had been a pep talk he received before the now legendary scikungfi fight with the Nowhere Man; otherwise he had only communicated with Wichita over the vidphone. And yet Prague possessed an almost extraterrestrial ability to read people. It only took a few interlocutions for him to determine if somebody was an asshole or not so much of an asshole—the only two possible states of existence for a human being and most simulacra.

“I know where you’re waiting for me,” replied Prague. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

He showed up at Slingpad 7-2521 three days later.

A long line of wilburies spiraled around the slingatron as bodies fell out of the sky into colossal pillows. Sometimes they missed the pillows and splattered against the concrete like bugs on a windshield. Misfired arrivals with sufficient funds were IDed, scraped up, and ushered into reanimation booths. Plebs, proles and other non-Fredersons were squeegeed into gutter holes.

Multicolored spotlights illuminated the slingpad in a hot frenzy. An orchestra of Victorian mannequins played Black Lodge melodia. Tall, beetlelike sentinels fished new arrivals out of the landing pillows and ushered them into glitzy Duty Free shops. Anyone who resisted or refused a shopping spree was arrested or executed on the spot.

Flanked by two SAMSAs, Administrator Wichita gesticulated wildly. “Vincent Prague!” he exclaimed, delirious with fatigue and angst.

“That’s Mr Anvil-in-Chief to you.” For no particular reason, Prague roundhoused one of the SAMSAs with maximum force, cracking his neck. An arthropodal leg burst from his suit coat like a clock spring and the SAMSA collapsed. The other SAMSA hoisted the body over a shoulder and carried him away. “Nice work, fellas,” said Prague, putting down his briefcase. He eyed Wichita. “That’s what I call efficiency. Guess you’ll have to put my seatbelt on.”

“Come back here! Goddamn functionaries. They get more schized every day.” Wichita prodded Prague with a finger. “General Assistant Managerial Choreographer of Mortal Affairs for the Department of Anthropologism Commodore Rabelais will hear about this,” he said indignantly. He began typing into the palmscreen of his vidglove. “This is going in my report.”

Prague made a farting noise with his lips. “Put that in your report, too.”

Administrator Wichita typed with added urgency. Maybe Prague had been wrong about his vidphone; with protracted neck, hardened potbelly, beaklike nose and sonorous voice, the Administrator rivaled Foghorn Leghorn rather well. He wasn’t certain about the Administrator’s affinity for troublemaking, though, a staple of the patriarchal, anthropomorphous rooster’s day-to-day conduct. At any rate, Prague roundhoused his superior, softly, but hard enough to knock him cold, then flashed his badge and cut in line, signing the bare minimum of autographs without conveying a sense of excessive egomania…

In the long, fetid, gruesome tailwind of sky-fetishized terrorism, and in an effort to be environmentally chic and high-minded, kamikaze SAMSA pilots flew all of Amerika’s airliners in a single file line across the Atlantic ocean and, one at a time, nosedived into select Scottish lochs, some of which measured up to four miles deep at their spines, until the airliners were officially extinct. Thereafter the Amerikan government “encouraged” the rest of the world to imitate the same destructive praxis at risk of “having the southern-fried Jesus nuked out of them” according to an out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouthism spoken by Amerikan President Grimley Bogue to his No. 2 bodyguard that was picked up by a puff of nanoscopic tabloid dust.

As an alternative to traditional, jet-propelled methods of long distance flight, the science fictionalized world turned to late French author Jules Verne, a forefather of the genre-cum-reality, although widely regarded as less imaginative and dynamic than contemporary and fellow forefather H. G. Wells, a prolific British didact whose scientific romances often violated the guile of cause and effekt. It was determined that Verne’s ideas would be easier to bring to fruition. In his novel
De la terre à la lune
(trans.
From the Earth to the Moon
), Verne posited a gigantic columbiad, viz., a muzzle-loading cannon
souped up in such a way that it could fire his protagonists onto the lunar surface. Pre-MAP decision-makers had reservations about the feasibility of the device, at least in terms of space travel; penetrating the earth’s atmosphere required more propulsion than the average joehead realized. But there was no reason why it couldn’t be manufactured and employed for strict terrestrial purposes, especially in the wake of the Great Loch Death Dive, not to mention the death of reality. Moreover, why use a cannon? Cannons required gunpowder. Cannons had to be smelted, rust-proofed, ignited and sponge-cleaned. Slingshots, on the other hand, could be composed of entirely non-volatile, eco-friendly materials. No deafening bang sound either. Strapped into the appropriate lounge chair, one would hardly notice the catapultic transition from ground to air…