Codename Prague (4 page)

“Goddamn it!”

“What’s the problem?” The other detectives joined him at the grill and fiddled with its many useless knobs.

Curiosity dwindled sharply into boredom. “Can you rozzes tell me where Commodore Rabelais’s office is?” Prague said. “It used to be in here. Where’s the fucker at?”

The detectives looked over their shoulders at him as if he were a stranger. “Rabelais?” said one of them. “The General Assistant Managerial Choreographer of Mortal Affairs for the Ministry of Applied Pressure’s Department of Anthropologism? He’s a Klamm. He doesn’t work in this slaughterhouse. This slaughterhouse’s nothing but Lowrys. Always has been, far as I know. Isn’t that right?” He looked at his colleagues. Oblivious, they returned to the grill.

Thanking the detectives, Prague adjusted the F/X pistol to the seventh, highest setting (a.k.a. the ROSHWALD notch) and fired it at the sheep’s mangled body. A surge of radioactive green flames consumed the body and its flesh decayed in a vivid, putrid timelapse that featured prehistoric grub worms, eighteen gallons of spurting auxiliary blood, and a bevy of internal organs that screamed from random improvised orifices. The residual skeleton looked spit-shined; it glowed in the muted light of the interrogation room. The detectives, on the other hand, were barely perceptible beneath the thick swathes of gore that caked them from fedora to flatfeet…

02

The Case of the Errant Bottle of Carbonated Olive Oil

All stories begin with a first sentence. This story is just like all the others…

Doktor Hermann Teufelsdröckh opened a bottle of olive oil. It fizzed and exploded like a shook up beer.

He read the label…
Carbonated
olive oil?

He growled for the assistants.

Hadn’t he told them to buy non-carbonated olive oil? Yes. Of course he had. Why would he ask them to buy carbonated olive oil? Under no conceivable circumstance would he employ it. The fact that carbonated olive oil even existed was stupid. Other than a novelty item, it had no rationale. And what was really so novel about it? People had been carbonating things for ages. Just because somebody carbonated something that didn’t deserve to be carbonated made it unique?
Stierscheiße
. They might as well have carbonated chicken noodle soup. Or chicken, for that matter. Or a shoe. The modern world was a practical joke. Dr Teufelsdröckh realized this sad fact of life more and more every day. Yet all he could do was play along. That’s all anybody could do.

The assistants didn’t respond to him. He looked around the kitchen. He was sure he had just seen them two minutes ago. What had they been doing? Dicing vegetables. No, emptying the dishwasher. No, stomping on light bulbs. No, playing Monopoly…Did he send them back to the grocery store already? For what? He sent them to the grocery store on several occasions every day. Sometimes it was difficult to keep track why. What had he sent them out for earlier? Sun-dried tomatoes. Then, a few minutes later, leeks. Then, minutes later, tofu. Then dill weed. Then bulghur pilaf. Then a turnip. Then farfalline pasta. Then taglliatelle pasta. Then gnocchetti sardi pasta. Then wasabe. Then sage. Then poi. Then artichoke relish. Then ostrich egg yolks. Then sauvignon blanc. Then Gerolsteiner. Then jicama. Then portabella mushrooms. Then chili peppers. Then scallions. Then tea leaves…Was that all?

“Truth! Beauty!”

They blustered into the kitchen, fighting over a bag of parsnips.

The assistants were pathological effekts of a failed allegory. Dr Teufelsdröckh
hired them two years ago when his old assistants realized they could make more than minimum wage in healthier professions. To avoid another episode of identity-assertion, he included stipulations in the new assistants’ contracts mandating that they change their names to Truth and Beauty and consequently emulate these notions in terms of image, fashion, conduct, and ideally psyche (although determining if the assistants consistently represented their names in their respective mental diegeses was a nearly impossible task in the absence of quality psychoforensics equipment). Essentially they were an experiment in Keatsian sociopoetics to see if the assistants would function as identical organisms on multiple plateaus of existence and prove that, as Keats claimed in his poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Needless to say, the experiment failed, and their contracts had to be rewritten. The assistants were as different as two different people strapped into a difference engine. They had no manners either, regardless of being forced to view and review
My Fair Lady
(for examples of proper conduct) and the Sergio Leone canon (for examples of improper conduct). In addition, Truth was not truthful. He was a goddamn liar. And Beauty was ugly. Still, they remained in Dr Teufelsdröckh’s service under the auspices of despicable wages as well as absurdist demands and expectations. Despite himself, he couldn’t complain.

Truth kicked Beauty between the legs. Beauty keeled over. Truth caught the parsnips before they hit the floor and ran them over to Dr Teufelsdröckh.

“Thank you, Truth.” He took the parsnips. “But that wasn’t very friendly. Your partner is your comrade. Your comrade is your cohort. Your cohort is your right hand man. Your right hand man is your co-worker. Your co-worker is your colleague. You can arrange those terms any way you like. They all mean the same thing.”

Truth nodded. “I understand,” he lied.

Dr Teufelsdröckh knew he was lying. He let it pass. “Fine. Now give Beauty a hand, please. It’s one thing to crack a man in the nuts. It’s quite another thing to leave him in your dust.”

Confused, Truth placed a finger on his chin in an attempt to look contemplative. He maintained this stance as Beauty got up, staggered across the kitchen, and sidled next to him, massaging his groin.

“Well done, Beauty.” Dr Teufelsdröckh sighed and shook his head. A general air of unsightliness marked Beauty’s character in the form of outsized facial features (big nose, big ears, big cheeks, big Adam’s apple) and a round-shouldered, undernourished physique. Two features, however, stood out and undermined his would-be vocational name. First, a set of chapped lips. They were hard and cracked and seemed to have been overcooked by a desert sun, and when he spoke, the lips rubbed together like little chunks of asphalt. The second feature, his eyebrows—they were even more irksome. Complete opposites, one eyebrow, which resembled an obese caterpillar, appeared to be the doppelgänger of the other, which was pencil-thin. Dr Teufelsdröckh often accused Beauty of manicuring the pencil-thin eyebrow, secretively whittling it down from its originary bulk. But Beauty claimed the eyebrow was a natural formation. Whatever the case, the doktor sent the assistant to physiognomic detox his first day on the job. His entire face was reconstructed in the pristine, well-groomed, utopian image of John Keats himself. The surgery didn’t take, however, and Beauty’s face devolved back to its primal form in a matter of weeks, as if laughing at Dr Teufelsdröckh for trying to do away with it. Beauty himself never smiled, let alone laughed. But his face told another story.

Dr Teufelsdröckh opened the bag and sniffed the parsnips. They smelled vaguely unripe. Not to their detriment, though. They would do.

He set the parsnips aside. “Right. Now to the matter at hand. Now, I say, to the matter of carbonated olive oil…”

Beauty remained silent during the subsequent invective, partly because he focused on nursing his genitals back to health, mostly because he thought he deserved the invective. Truth, on the other hand, butted in. “The thing is,” he kept saying. Every time he said it, Dr Teufelsdröckh waited for him to go on, but he never did. Dr Teufelsdröckh could have brought the issue to light, but that’s precisely what Truth wanted, he suspected, so he permitted the interruptions, clearing his throat and wetting his lips with his tongue whenever they occurred. He would not give in to Truth. Unlike his fellow assistant, looking at him was not a distasteful experience, even though he was equally diminutive, but diminution, as the doktor saw it, whether physical or psychological (usually both), was the
cri du coeur
of any assistant’s
Dasein
. Not to say that Truth wasn’t distasteful. Virtually everything he did made his employer want to flog him with an incineration rod. He couldn’t even tolerate being in the same room with Truth. Yet he tolerated Truth. All the time. And that’s another reason why he didn’t fire him. Truth reliably put Dr Teufelsdröckh’s patience to the test, challenging the strength of his social character. It was a challenge he both valued and needed inasmuch as he believed the insignia of a fully developed gentleman, above all else, consisted of an unfaltering ability to negotiate horseshit and assholery at every turn.

Dr Teufelsdröckh’s voice began to crackle and skip as he continued to reprimand the assistants and cope with Truth’s stoppages. He poured himself a tall glass of table wine and paused to take sips and grease his larynx. It wasn’t long before the sips overtook his dialogue. Soon he had washed down two glasses and was halfway through a third, swishing the wine around his mouth, checking the legs on the bulb of the glass, rubbing his tongue across his hard palate, meditating on the different flavors he detected in the wine…

Silence.

Truth said, “You told us to buy carbonated olive oil.”

No visible response at first. Then Dr Teufelsdröckh convulsed. “What’s that you say?” he blubbered.

“He said you told us to buy carbonated olive oil,” said Beauty.

Dr Teufelsdröckh spit a mouthful of wine into the sink. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.” He swallowed the remainder of wine in the glass and, pouring himself another glass, said, “But let’s assume that what you say is true. Let’s assume it. For the sake of argument. You say—
both
of you say—that I told you to buy carbonated olive oil. Fine. That’s what you say. That’s what you’re telling me that I told you to do, and you do what I tell you to do, because I tell you to do it, and because I pay you to do it. In short, that is the nature of your occupation, or, as it were, your
job
. Now then. Here is the question I want to pose and, if you will, problematize. Why would I ask you to purchase carbonated olive oil? That’s the question. That’s the question I’m talking about. Here’s another one: What can a man do with carbonated olive oil? What can anyone do with it? Why does it even exist, is the thing I really want to know. Have you ever heard of a meal of any genre, class or ethnicity that features carbonated olive oil as a requisite ingredient? Have you ever even heard of anybody dipping a piece of bread into carbonated olive oil for the sake of a pleasurable tasting experience? Don’t say you have, because you haven’t—because nobody has.”

“The thing is,” said Truth.

The doktor took a sharp sip of wine. “As far as I know, the only thing you can do with carbonated olive oil is drink it straight from the bottle. Do you know what else you can drink straight from a bottle? Milk. Piss. Hemlock. Whatever you damn well want. But you don’t use it to cook a meal! Hence my point. Thus and so. You understand, yes? But let’s pretend you don’t understand. Which you clearly don’t. In which case we won’t be pretending anything. On the contrary, we will be operating within the confines of
reality
, per se. Which is to say, reality is performative by
nature
. Which is to say, whatever we accomplish here, whatever we
do
, be it known that our actions are not natural or free-spirited, as some Nerf mongers would have it. An action is an
act
, after all, as in
to act
, as in
to play a role
. Man is a histrionic, technological animal. And nature is the theater of technology.” Sip of wine. “At this point I’d like to revert back to my thesis. What was I talking about, for Christ’s sake?” Sip of wine. Sip of wine…

Beauty started to nod off. Truth killed a ladybug that landed on his arm.

Dr Teufelsdröckh chewed a fingernail. “Yes, olive oil. Meals. I’m making a meal, you see. This is the point. I’m making a meal, and it calls for olive oil,
not
carbonated olive oil, which is an atrocity, which is something that could only exist in a shitty pulp novel or B-movie, and yet here I sit in my kitchen, and over there, sitting on the countertop, is a gigantic bottle of carbonated olive oil. I realize that olive oil, carbonated or not, is still olive oil. But when one says olive oil, when one
thinks
olive oil, the last thing that comes to mind is carbonation. So here’s the score. Either we are all characters in a shitty pulp novel or B-movie, or else you, my assistants, have committed an act of idiocy. I hope you can hear me. Am I making myself clear?”

Truth handed Dr Teufelsdröckh a slip of paper.

“What’s this?” He snatched the paper. Scribbled on it were the items he had asked his assistants to purchase for him that day…Sun-dried tomatoes. Leeks. Tofu. Dill weed. Bulgur pilaf. A turnip. One pasta after another…The last item on the list was, apropos, a bottle of
CARBONATED
olive oil, beneath which hung a subcategory listing acceptable brands.

Truth said, “I thought it was an odd request.”

Beauty said, “An odd request.”

Truth said, “That’s what I say. So I made sure to underline the word
carbonated
and put it in bold print and capital letters on my grocery list. That way, when we got to the grocery store, I wouldn’t rethink what you may or may not have told us to buy. What I mean is, I wouldn’t think that what I wrote down might have been a mistake, even though I only write down what you tell me and I’ve never made a mistake before. But you never know.”