Codename Prague (14 page)

The bouncer said, “I know who you are. Piss off, meathead.”

Before Mädchen could stop him, Prague trimmed the bouncer like a T-bone steak with a divining machete, the blade of which was electromagnetically attracted to fat cells…

They rode the wave of glitterati into the Delova Prague.

“Where there is cause there is effekt,” said Mädchen over the robosyncretic cacophony of the discotheque. Lasers and bullets whizzed everywhere. “This is not Amerika. This is only Amerikana. You do not kill strangers here unless you have a good reason or unless you make it look like an accident. The Former Czech Republik is no place for futuristic gunslingers, swashbucklers, or knife throwers. Scikungfi is encouraged in theory but frowned upon in actuality.”

Prague fingered his cuff links.

A woman walked towards them from the dance floor. She could have been Mädchen’s twin except for certain physiognomic vagaries that Prague couldn’t quite discern. The vagaries bewildered him to such a degree that he decided she looked nothing at all like Mädchen. What was wrong with him? First the hotel room, now this broad. Was he losing the ability to perceive life’s small details? It worried him. Life’s small details were all that mattered…

She wore a long Charmeuse bridal gown with a steam-ironed Morticia Addams hairdo parted down the middle. Like Mädchen, she had stylized herself in black-and-white. She introduced herself as Sindie Switch, kissed Mädchen on the lips, and gave Prague a small wooden box. “Open it,” she said in a deep, deep tenor.

“It’s locked.”

“It is an ersatz lock. Purely decorative.”

He opened the box.

Inside was a small assortment of strings. Bits of strings. Some of them had frayed ends. Some of them didn’t.

“Either they are outmoded, or they are too short. They are mostly too short. The waste products of other strings. Residua.
Nachgeburt
. I can’t find a use for them. I can’t even tie them into knots. And yet I can’t bring myself to throw them away.”

She snatched the box. Before Prague could respond, she nibbled her lip and said, “I have lava in my veins.”

“Bullshit,” said Prague.

She slit her wrist. Steaming orange lava flowed out, dripped onto the floor and burnt a hole in it. The wound cauterized and scabbed over. She picked the scab off. She gave the scab to Mädchen along with the box and the items vanished into Mädchen’s cleavage.

Prague nodded. “Nice trick. Is recess over yet? Let’s get this road on the show.”

And they fell on him, and they kissed and scratched and bit him, and they were dancing, and somebody wrenched Prague’s penis from the shell of his pants…Strobe lights. Clove cigarettes. Technologized desire and a cyclone of neon voyeurism…Pushing air from his lips, Prague thought about dress ties as the femme fatales had their way with him. Not the paltry, winged nub beneath his Adam’s apple, but the real things. Why did they exist? More importantly, how did they come into existence? MAP literature claimed they evolved from the French cravat. Ludicrous. At some point, deep in the graveyard of history, a man hung a strip of fabric from his neck, walked out into the world and called himself a man among lesser men, inciting a massive, masculine fashion craze. Neckties became a staple of everyday patriarchal life. And they served no purpose. They hung down the sunken chest of humanity like dead serpents waiting for somebody to bury them…

16

Pragensia St Cagney

They took an escalator to the casino. It was four miles long and moved at a rate of approximately 5 mph. Prague stole another nap on the way down. He slept standing up. When he awoke…

A door irised open. They walked inside.

He doubletaked the giant head of a smiling, round-faced professor with pince nez and a gold-tasseled graduation cap. It was ES Lowe—founder and poster boy of Yahtzee. Hanging from the ceiling like an obese piñata, the head stared down at the crowd with archetypal panoptic efficiency…

“Yahtzee is a game of skill,” said a Zero Punctuation Expobot. In addition to various anti-utilitarian James Cagney androids, ZPEs had been strategically positioned throughout Pragensia St Cagney. “To play Yahtzee one throws the dice and accomplishes Three-of-a-Kind or Four-of-a-Kind or a Full House or a Small Straight or a Large Straight or Chance or Yahtzee that’s Five-of-a-Kind one may acquire as many Yahtzees as one wants in thirteen rounds but one may only acquire one of the aforementioned combinations and one must keep one’s hands to oneself at all times if you require further exposition feel free to exposition and additionally exposition exposition thank you,” said the ZPE.

Prague walked across the gambling floor of Pragensia St Cagney, reluctantly, flanked by his black-and-white escorts. They had nearly broken his stronghold of patience. But he would endure them for a little longer, at least until he received directions from somebody, or he got the hint that the gig was another MAP-sanctioned scam at his expense.

In Pragensia St Cagney, there were no roulette wheels. There were no craps or blackjack or Texas Hold’em tables. There weren’t even slot machines. Stone coffins ran the length and breadth of the casino. Hunched over the coffins were the dried but sharp-dressed husks of the Elderly and the Plutocratic. Amid the cooperative chatter of Expobots, the shaking, the sliding, the clicking and the clacking of thousands of die…

“Who’s in the coffins?” asked Prague.

“The fathers of reality,” said Mädchen.

Emaciated pastel strippers in shadow boxes lined the walls. Only the Cagneys paid attention to them. Everybody else fixated on their respective Games of Skill.

“This way,” said Sindie, gesturing across the casino. He followed the gesture’s line of flight…and saw nothing.

Prague sidestepped the girls and pulled aside a Cagney. “Pragensia St Cagney. Why’d they name this place after you?”

“Why’d they name you after this city?”

“You know who I am?”

“Everybody knows who you are, sir. This is the world.”

“Do you have something to tell me?”

“Dunno. Stay in school?”

“No. I mean, do you have a message for me?”

“Every spoken word is a message, Mr Prague. Inevitably my answer is yes. However, I believe you are looking for something else, or rather, an addendum, viz., something embedded within the already resonant topography of my discourse—a message within a message, as it were.”

“Shh!” said a player at the table next to them. He threw the die and turned up Four-of-a-Kind in sixes. But he had recorded Four-of-a-Kind in threes five turns ago. And he had used his Chance throw two turns ago. He passed the cup to the next player and put a Walther to his head.

“Get wise on your own time.” The Cagney slapped the Walther out of his hand. It flew over three tables into the hands of another Cagney who confiscated it.

Prague lost his patience. He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted, “The name is Prague! Codename Prague! Who’s got words for me! Heads up, shitforbrains! Daddy needs a new pair a shoes!”

At the exclamation, all of the shadow boxes swung open and, like equines from the starting gate, the strippers leapt out and converged on him. There were 80 or so of them and Mädchen and Sindie joined in the blitzkrieg…

“You crazy bitches,” Prague exclaimed. “What am I, a one-eyed jack factory?”

A long scikungfi fight lapsed into sexual catastrophe. Prague tried to be a good sport about it even though he had only packed two spare sets of genitals…. …DEFIBRILLATION…homeostatis interrupted by visceral anarchy…cross-section of kidneys filtering and secreting metabolites in fasttime…collective moan à la Ecstasy/Dread/Power…NOWHERE MATRIX dissolved into Moth Man evolved into
daikaiju…
flailing limbs and tentacles…more tentacles…stench of open holes…collage of hardcore still shots—Vincent Prague exposed in unforgettable contortions of defense and subjugation…devolutionary grunt, masculinized aural fetishism…sensory deprivation/overload…Burroughsian scat…“exposition exposition exposition”…one-liner…“Yahtzee!”…coffin tipped over and out spilled…

The strippers retreated to their shadow boxes. Prague didn’t bother picking up the scraps of his tux—it was destroyed. Naked and used, he delivered a sharp crowdstare to the room’s many antagonists.

“Nice abs,” chirped a Cagney…

He punched out Mädchen and Sindie. The strippers blitzed him again and he punched them out, too…Unblinking, unsmiling, the gamblers rolled the Yahtzee die…

In the end, Vincent Prague made the bad decision to flout his orders from that point on. He had done what Cdre Rabelais told him to do. Nothing panned out. He wasn’t waiting there forever. He had things to do. He had a life. Being the Anvil-in-Chief didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself from time to time. (Actually being any echelon of MAP-employed citizen meant that your ass was “not your own, ever, under any circumstance, imaginable or unimaginable, possible or impossible,” as stipulated by the MAP’s
How to Be a Person Manual
, which was slammed onto the desktop of every new hire on Day 1. Nevertheless—Prague would do as he pleased. Despite setbacks, he always did as he pleased. He was Vincent Prague, celebrity, superstar, esquire, equerry, chevalier, jonkheer, vicar, anti-Tirthankar, Ali Baba, architect of sociotechnicity, primate
extraordinaire
, etc.…And while visiting his metropolitan namesake he would catch a show. At one point theater had been like second nature to him. He had attended at least 5,000 Andrew Lloyd Weber productions alone.
Jesus Christ Superstar
,
Phantom
and especially
Cats
were his favorites. He always cried when Grizabella sang “Memory.” When had he last seen
Cats
? And why had it been so long ago? He suspected it had to do with exposition exposition exposition expo…)…

429

AR

After reality, roaring helicopters peel the skin from the sky like a grapefruit and reveal the pulp of outer space. The helicopters appear indiscriminately, dumping WMDs and cat-eyed David Bowie simulacra in equal measures onto the pale earth…

After reality, there will be no exposition, i.e., no exorcism of the ghosts from the narrative of the Body Dildonic…Lincoln Hawk beats Bully Hurly? Life as a spectacle of one armwrestling match after another set to the music-in-the-heavens of Kenny Loggins? Only in reality. After reality, Mr Hurly will rise up and over the top like a chunk of foam in the Dead Sea. Life jackets, however, will only be distributed on a need-to-float basis…

Crazy sentence here with a big period at the end of it<<<
.
>>>

FACT: Anything can happen anytime. Anybody is capable of anything.

FICTION: Nobody can exist nowhere. Nothing assumes the existence of something.

FICTION (REVISED): <<<
.
>>>

ELEVATOR PITCH: Michael Jackson kills and cryogenically freezes himself, unable to bear further vilification from the Papanazi. In his will he donates the remains of the Elephant Man (a.k.a. Joseph Merrick) to the United Arab Emirates, the governing powers of which have always detected mystical powers in Merrick’s calamitous deformity. Somehow they will harness those powers and become the world’s next Global Hegemon. The remains are stolen en route, however, by a mad scientist with a figurative cleft palate who has contracted a PT Barnum fetish. [Briefly contextualize Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus]. Long scikungfi fight here. Then the scientist reanimates the hideous corpse and hangs it on a hook in his laboratory, Leatherface-style. It squirms there for three weeks. Enter love interest. At first she’s hesitant but eventually she loosens up and goes down on him and [Mad Lib]. After two weeks she dies of IFIEM (Irrational Fear of Impaled Elephant Men). Three weeks later Merrick squirms loose, eats the scientist’s brains, and staggers to the North Pole, searching for the King of Pop. Secret agent men chase him. Vague selections from the
Bad
album emanate from distant icebergs. The secret agent men fall into the water and drown. The zombified Merrick presses on and disappears in an arctic gust of
qanuk
.

Fin.

“
Hajime!
” screeches a sensei. Tori administers a spine-shattering
tiatoshi
to his uke, then stabs him with a kodachi sword. Geyser of Hammer blood…

…irregular world without regulation. Diegesis of negative capability and the clockwork of truth.

17

The Sans Merci vs. Macavity the Master Criminal

A flickering, pale green stripe passed across the screen of existence…

“Cats don’t have nine lives,” said the Truth/Untruth monster. “It’s imprudent to think they do. Strangle a cat, if you don’t believe me. It’ll die. Once.”

The Beauty/Ugly monster made a sad face. “I like cats.”

…lights blinked on and off, on and off. Theatergoers scarfed down ice cream treats and located their seats.

Idle conversation petered into jaded whispers petered into primordial silence. The slot machines cleared their aluminum throats and donned silencers. “Tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk,” went the maestro’s baton.

Darkness.

A squad of naked globetrotters dribbled overinflated neon cat’s eyes across the proscenium stage.

Silence.

Mischievous instruments: flutes, cymbals, synthesizers—their song allegorizing
a cornfield at night. Every ear of corn an alive, angry
cobb dentata
…