Dallas Pimiento, a novel in four volumes

This is the novel that I spent 2007 writing

DALLAS PIMIENTO
BOOK ONE:
BRONCO

PART ONE
I am a painter. No, I don’t paint in oils. I paint with acrylics. And as if that wasn’t bad enough in the eyes of many of you, I also paint with the cheapest of acrylic paints, the budget line from Dick Blick, those formulated for beginners. I build my own canvases, not with the expensive stretchers from the artists’ supply store, but with 2x2s.
“They’re crooked!” Claims my wife of the finished product.
I don’t think they are. And if they are, they certainly aren’t so crooked as to make them unviable as art. Hell, in this world where a man can package his own shit and call it marketable, or some anonymous jerk can paint stripes on lampshades and get accepted in an art contest that refused a lovely painting by me of two old guys on a bench, I hardly think it much matters what I do, especially since no one is paying me.
I work for myself, so I guess I’m self-employed to that extent. To put food on the table, however, I have to work at a little rat hole called the United States Postal Service. You may have heard of it.
Without patrons, the lottery remains my only hope.
My name is Dallas Pimiento. I am a painter, but as you can tell from these words I am also a writer. That’s a sideline, though. Something to do during my lunch and breaks at the post office so I don’t feel like the time spent there is a total waste. I could draw, and I do sometimes, but as a teenager it had been my avowed goal to be a writer, so to satisfy that part of me (as well as the hopes and injunctions of a dozen English teachers over the years), I write. Besides, I can’t draw worth a damn.
When I do draw, I draw crappy cartoons.
And that’s another source of frustration and guilt: I draw single panel things, totally random. I don’t draw what they call “sequential art,” that is, multi-panel comic strips or graphic novels.
“Hey, man, are you writing a comic book?” Somebody asked me here at the post office (that’s where I am as I write this), irritating me, not just because he spoke to me; that’s bad enough, but also because this guy brought up this great failure of mine, the failure to draw a comic book or graphic novel. I have failed to learn the saxophone and to speak German, Japanese, and French as well. These are all galling to me.
I don’t want all of this to give you the wrong impression about me. I’m not unhappy or discontented; it’s just that I am motivated to a great degree by guilt. You can throw in fear, too. Fear of having wasted my life and potential. Fear of other people looking down at me as a nobody who never did a damn thing. At least I’ve settled that question. I have done a great deal. I’m proud of my paintings. I’m proud of the fact that I have written several books, if not all that proud of the books themselves. They’re fairly disjointed and inconsistent. No plot, not much in the way of anything to express, hundreds of thin characters thrown up left and right like faces on a crowded sidewalk.
So here you have me in writer mode, even though I am a painter.

This book was begun on my first day back at work after two and a half weeks off. I’m getting old. Just that little amount of time away from the grind and my strength and endurance dissipate to the point where I’m weak and tired.

It remains now for me to write. Much as I would like to fuse painting and writing, it doesn’t seem to be possible. That would be moot if I could paint at work, but I can’t.
“But, Dallas,” I seem to hear you saying, “Drawing is a form of painting. Why not draw?”
Would that that was true. The farther along I get in my painting career, the more I do see the truth that drawing is (or should be) the foundation of painting, but I also see just how divergent the two are. In painting one can overcome one’s limitations as a draughtsman by covering over one’s mistakes. That’s not possible in drawing. But you don’t want to hear about something you can’t see, do you? You want to read something diverting. I’ll try to oblige, while also pleasing myself.
An elfin runaway, his hands scorned by the ladder he used to descend from the tower at the back of the scene before us, has little to do with anything, I suppose, yet as much as anything else does in this absurd world. My adventures may come into the following arrangement, but so may any damn thing at all, so be forewarned.
I can see all of this collapsing into the same kind of messy collection that litters my juvenilia. That’s OK; remember, I’m writing this primarily to please myself.
Fuck it, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m just wasting time. Wouldn’t it be more productive for me to be drawing crazy little cartoons? But then, if I do that, then in the morning as I head for the house I’ll feel guilty because I didn’t write anything.

The Recycling Dolphin

Tresh, a basic pleasure model, had in her keeping a locket inside of which was a scrap of paper.
“Look.” She told Crimsono, forcing the locket open with a thumbnail. “I don’t know what it means, but I’ve had it a long time.”
The man Crimsono, devil-may-care in his black jeans with the silver studs evenly spaced up the outside seams of the legs and the red roses embroidered on the sexy backside pockets, gestured for the female to wait a damn minute.
“Let me take off this sweater.” He begged. The sweater was gold and green, with black music symbols dotting the chest. Under the sweater he wore a simple white undershirt stained orange around the inside collar. He was ambivalent about the possibility of Tresh catching sight of this stain. I hope you truly understand what “ambivalent” means. It doesn’t mean “indifferent.” It means, essentially, having two divergent (if not opposing) views about something. It you didn’t already know that, forgive me for being so pedantic. If you did, then you can probably guess what Crimsono’s two views were.
Crimsono threw the sweater atop a couple of small pillows jammed into the right-hand corner of the sofa and made a “whew” sound with his mouth. It was a little warm in Tresh’s grandmother’s house. If he had had any authority at all with Tresh he would have insisted that the heat be turned down, explaining his demand on the grounds of the earth’s dying ability to sustain such human luxury. Given his lack of authority it was curious why Tresh should care about him seeing the long-hidden scrap of paper.
“How long have you had this?” Crimsono asked as he examined the paper and the curious message written thereon.
Tresh, eager to exploit her advantage now that she had the man’s attention, launched into an account of the passage of the locket from her great aunt Ladya to herself. As she spoke, Crimsono, only half-listening, studied the thick-lined symbol that followed the brief text of the message. Where had he seen a symbol like that before, he asked himself. Such was the distracting nature of Tresh’s babble that he nearly rejected out of hand the idea that the symbol looked very similar to that used by Sleeping Porch, that great Canadian band. How silly it would be if it was really intended to be the sigil of Sleeping Porch. He suddenly held up a tawny, muscular hand, evenly adorned with thin, brown hairs, interrupting Tresh’s cascade of subtly linked episodes.
“Hold it!” He cried with a wrinkling of his heavy brows. “I think this is the symbol for Sleeping Porch.”
“What’s Sleeping Porch?” Tresh thereby revealed her ignorance, as if her Dacron Three Little Pigs t-shirt and green plastic sandals were not proof enough.
“They’re a band.” Crimsono summed up. He could have gone into detail, but then Tresh’s mind would have wandered over a thousand non-musical items as he spoke, resulting in nothing more than wasted effort on his part. Still, he longed to tell her of their power and majesty, of their long and incident-crowded history.
Formed from the ruins of two minor early 70’s bands, the Temptors and Flaming Yawn, Sleeping Porch had produced twenty-two albums over the years, though fans of Crimsono’s caliber were inclined to discount the last four or five, as they came after a period of confusion during which a distressing number of the original members let and returned and left again. The pall of illegitimacy now hung over all.
Jack Flame, the current lead guitarist, who had replaced the replacement for original guitarist Ned Nash, was a source of particular contempt for a hardcore fan like Crimsono. Another person who hated what had happened to the band, if not Flame himself, was Wrenchless, a man more nearly equal in age to Nash than Crimsono, living in a house only three hundred yards away from Tresh’s grandmother’s house.

A Monopoly of Beefs

Wrenchless had seen something large, colored gray and pink, it seemed, moving through the thick stand of trees that separated his backyard from the backyard of Cotnia (otherwise known as Tresh’s grandmother). He squinted at the thing, trying to get it straight in his mind, but it was suddenly gone. He put down the two-hundred-year-old pistol he had been cleaning and opened the sliding glass door that led outside.
On Wrenchless’ concrete back porch was a ceramic frog about a foot tall. It wore a close-fitting sweater of black and brown, a white zig-zagging line running about its middle. It thrilled to the familiar touch of the white cat that approached after Wrenchless had descended from the porch to the backyard.
“Where do you suppose he’s off to?” She asked the frog as she put her hand on his shoulders from behind and leaned her head against his.
“Who cares?” The frog rhetorically admitted his indifference.
“Well, I do, or I wouldn’t have asked.” The cat, at one time well known in the local community for her left-wing views and her activism, was still sleepy from the unaccustomed activity of the night before. A troupe of itinerant thespians had put on a performance down at the small, so-called “Buddhist” pavilion next to the creek in the midst of the stand of trees. The cat had been there, enjoying every detail of it, and wishing that she could go with them when they moved on. To fight this desire she had ran away after the final scene and forced herself to miss the sight of the troupe’s wagon slowly rolling down the road.
Puncho, the leader of the troupe, abhorred redneck accents. That is probably why he did them so well. His reading of the redneck character was such that he felt free to insult them as much as possible, knowing that none would take offense, either because no true redneck (that is, one proud to be a redneck, and proud of having all the qualities associated with the appellation) would attend a performance or because, even should one somehow be present, so thoroughly authentic would be Puncho’s characterization, that the redneck in question would no realize that his stereotype was being mocked.
As the wagon rolled along, Puncho wondered if anyone among the previous night’s audience had been a redneck. He supposed not. From what he could tell they seemed a refined, if provincial lot. Of course, he usually didn’t mingle with the locals. Although he disapproved, thinking that it somehow sullied the purity of the art and the craft, he said nothing about those in the troupe who did enjoy meeting new people.
“What’s the point?” Puncho asked himself. “You’re never going to see any of them again.” In fact, Puncho felt a horror at the idea of running into dimly remembered acquaintances. What if he should not come across as the same fellow that they met before? He assumed a redneck accent for the benefit of the horse that pulled the wagon and whose reigns he held in his hands.
“Why, you’re nothing like what I thought you were!” He said.
“He’s talking to himself again.” Wyla, who specialized in evil woman roles, announced to her card-playing colleagues.

The pavilion by the creek was called the “Buddhist” pavilion because of its vaguely oriental or exotic design.
“It’s also very restful.” Explained Cotnia to a friend nearly as decrepit in appearance as herself.
“It wasn’t very restful for the Anderson boy.” Replied the friend. “Didn’t they find him murdered there a couple of years ago?”
“Well, yes.” Admitted Cotnia. “But now he is at rest.”
“Old fool.” Thought Cotnia’s friend. “No wonder they’ve confiscated your house and put you here in the loony bin.”
Now, if it had been Glenda, the friend in question, with a house that nice at stake, and still-functioning legs, she would have put up more of a fight. She would have barricaded herself indoors with a gun, perhaps Harold’s (her late husband) service revolver.
That used to be something of a cliché, the service revolver, oftentimes the only gun in the house, the only gun available to some decent, middle-class, law-abiding family.
“Asa! Where are you going with your old service revolver?!”
“Just to the secret meeting, Mary. Nothing to worry about.” He checks the cylinder. “Keep the doors bolted.”

No Fruit Juice, No Caffeine, Just Spicy Beans

Despite Jack Barron’s (Norman Spinrad) famous line, I have decided to sell out. This selling out takes the form of giving in to my cartoonish tendencies and impulses and painting on smaller canvases. The latter is something people have been begging me to do for years.

Nathan had had the advantage of being a scout in a large, well-financed, and organized troop in the city. When he began helping out with a rural troop run under the auspices of a small church, the pain was sometimes evident on his face. It must have been like a brain surgeon watching primitives perform trephination.
His mother, a nurse at one of the hospitals in the city, sympathized with him.
“I’m very proud of you.” She told him as she poured him a glass of milk. Did a flicker of concern cross her face as she watched her son drink? Recent studies she had been privy to suggested that milk might not be as good for you as people had thought. In fact, it might be downright deleterious. Already Nathan was getting a big, solid, squarish butt. And he had only made Eagle the year before. Where did he get that butt from? It certainly wasn’t from her. His father didn’t have a butt like that, nor that thickness to his legs. Was it from milk or products of a similar nature? Products long beloved of the American people, not yet suspected?
“Still, you’re not fat.” She said as she sipped her own milk.
“Who’re you talking to?” Nathan asked.
“Oh, no one.” She laughed, stunned that she had spoken aloud.
“Mom,” Nathan said in his joking, friendly manner which I never had with either of my parents. “Are those bitches at the hospital getting to you again?” He stood up, came around the counter, kissed his mother on the cheek, and took his glass to the sink to wash it out dutifully.
The small, ill-funded, rural scout troop continued for a couple more years after I left it. Those who stayed with it seemed to get something out of it, more than I did, apparently.
One of those who pursued his scouting goals wholeheartedly was Kevin Primo. In later years he was to point proudly at the framed display of his various badges, patches, and certificates when dealing with extra special customers at the car dealership where he was, sporadically, top salesman.
“It’s one more thing that assures the customer of my trustworthiness.” Primo explained to Briggson.
That afternoon Briggson returned to his home full of ideas. How could he show his trustworthiness to his customers? True, he didn’t have an office like Primo, but he did have a small cubicle that might accommodate… something.
With his wife irritated at his desperate rambling through the house, Briggson hunted for mementoes of his past. He found a receipt from the driver’s education course he had been forced to take in connection with his DUI several years ago. He looked at it with a smile. No, it would not do.
“Pam!” He called to his wife. “Didn’t I have a trophy around here somewhere?”
“What?” She demanded. She was sipping a beer and flipping through the paper.
Briggson repeated his query from the nearer position of the doorway to the dining room where his woman sat.
“You’ve got that best pig trophy your father won in high school.” She replied.
“No, no a trophy of mine!” Briggson cried, tearing through a box of Christmas tree ornaments.
“You don’t mean that perfect attendance award you got in third grade?”
Briggson looked up, a string of tinsel clutched in one fist.
“That’s it!”
Did he find it? No, I don’t think so. I think one of his kids used it in a diorama, after which it was thrown away, or semi-permanently enshrined on a shelf at the school. Would that there was something left of me at my old school. The Steely Dan song warns me against such sentimentality, especially given the deleterious effects my various schools had on me. But the one I have in mind probably had the most nearly benign effects. And now that my kids have gone there and moved on as well I wish there was something of them there forever, or semi-permanently.
The marks I made most nearly indelibly are the ones I made on people I’ve known. I know that’s true because the marks they all made on me are still here. I remember people more than I do places or things. Maybe that’s why I draw and paint almost exclusively people. Maybe not. It’s just as likely that I depict what I depict and how I depict it because of the influence of illustrative art prevalent at the time of my childhood. Remember the character “Jot” and the backgrounds he was in? Who can remember Colorforms? Simple toys. I haven’t bought my kids a video game system, something I’m sure they’ll curse me for one day, the way I cursed my parents for years because they wouldn’t take me to see Star Wars. All through 1977, as people around me discussed it endlessly, as they spoke of multiple viewings, paraded the toys connected with it, I sat ignorant, borderline psychotic. Finally, after everyone was sick of it, deep into 1978 or ’79, when the film had wound up at a drive-in, on the last night it was to play in town for twenty years, I got to see it. My parents fell asleep during it.
I imagine that one of the reasons we didn’t see it for so long was that my father was asking everybody,
“This Star Wars thing; any bad language in it?”
Years later, when we got our first VCR, we had no movies to watch on it. My aunt’s husband loaned us a shoebox full of tapes. My father thumbed through them suspiciously. What horrors might they contain? My sister finally pointed at one, John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing.
“I watched that at Amelia’s house. It’s good.” She said.
“Any bad language in it?”
“No. I don’t think so.” She stammered, unsure.
Ten minutes into the movie, after the sixth or seventh unacceptable word, my father turned around and glared at my sister.
“Caitlyn, this language is terrible!” He barked.
Out the tape went. I never found out if Kurt Russell killed “the thing” or not. Maybe that was another movie. They say he’s married to Goldie Hawn. Can’t believe her daughter divorced Chris Robinson. Is she crazy? Who is she going to find better than Chris Robinson? I would say “cooler,” but I’m sick of that word. Everything is “cool” now. I try to say “neat” when I can, but even that is worn out.

Frisgow, probably the leader (and I say that with a near-lascivious excitement in my voice), turned the volume knob on the radio down so that Bud Loop and His Orchestra were but a faint moaning and popping sound.
“What the hell are you listening to?” Jemima asked as she took a seat. “I took you for a real rocker and here I find you listening to some Big Band shit.”
“Well, never mind.” Said Frisgow as he placed the heavy valise on the coffee table and sat down facing Jemima. “Here’s the item.”
“What do you mean, ‘never mind?’ I don’t know if I can do business with somebody who I don’t really know.”
“But you’ll never really know me.” Frisgow protested.
“Oh, I don’t mean intimately, like your mental processes. I mean you represented yourself one way at Dirk’s party, and now I get here and everything’s retro and the music is some old shit.”
Frisgow looked at his own hands. He said evenly,
“Is the deal off?”
“Sorry.” Jemima said after a pause. “It’s just that I like to make my business a pleasure.”
Evidently she had said that line many times before. Frisgow let his mind play over the horrific idea that Jemima had intended a sexual liaison.
“Let’s see the merchandise.” She requested, relieving Frisgow considerably.
“Well, in a way,” he began. “The valise is the merchandise.”
“What do you mean?” Jemima’s face, never more than a twitch away from expressions of suspicion or outrage, flashed a warning.
“I mean the ‘merchandise,’ as you call it, is part of the valise.” Frisgow began to open the bag.
“Why do you keep saying ‘valise?’ What’s that?”
Frisgow jerked the flat-bottomed bag open, ignoring Jemima’s question, to reveal a human-like head, though cartoonishly distorted, in the midst of a mass of colorful wires, slowly turning stainless steel discs, and other mechanical miscellany to which it was connected.
“Oh my God!” Jemima croaked in her deep, Southern-accented voice.
Jemima’s god, an intermittently malevolent deity both patriarchal and at least as old as the Civil War, had shaved his beard and gotten a crew cut from some wing-footed, scissor-bearing attendant. He now glared at himself proudly in the perfectly reflective surface of planet Earth and its immediate surroundings, atmosphere, satellites, and distant, once-beloved sun.
“Let us make sure that Dallas Pimiento’s latest ploy for fans and self-employment come to naught!” He boomed, all his words echoing with the exclamation points of grim finality.


I don’t believe in an Ultimate Consciousness, certainly not one that gives a damn whether men have long hair or women have abortions, or children get circumcised or the whole lot of us live or die. I don’t believe in a soul or a spirit world. When you’re dead you’re dead, as this guy named Paul whom I used to work with at the university said. One day at work he wasn’t feeling too well, so on his lunch hour he went to the doctor and died. So, I guess he knows now, I can hear you saying. But he doesn’t. That’s the point. Death is the cessation of all perception, all consciousness. You don’t know if you’re dead. This is a completely mechanistic universe, and we are completely mechanistic ourselves.
“But, Dallas,” says the inevitable man in the middle of the auditorium. “What does that say about free will?”
It says there isn’t any such thing. We don’t have free will. What we have is something that feels like free will. You know why? Because we cannot see the future.
“Then why do we punish criminals?” Asks the inevitable man’s father-in-law.
Because we can. You’re still responsible, even if you couldn’t help it, because space and time aren’t two separate things, they’re the same, and you happen to be standing right where the responsible link in the chain of cause and effect is.

If you don’t agree with me that’s fine. I’m not here to convince you that I’m right. In fact, I hate preaching. I hate books that preach at you, ones where the hero is always right in his judgments of the other characters, full of good advice and righteous pronouncements on everything around him. We’re all hypocrites. When I start laying down the Word I tend to go too far. I eventually start talking about working in the salt mine for your turn at the computer-generated paradise. Spell check cannot keep up with the coinage of new words, capitalized or not.
All that to say I apologize if I go on too much, venturing into poorly-supported territory.

S. had great tits. Their texture, size, heft, weight, and shape, as well as coloration (like the upper surface of a Nabisco brand Nilla wafers) were perfect. Although I never saw them, I’m sure her nipples were equally delicious, pink like a rose, in al eagerly-anticipated probability. Her ass was perfect, too. In the crush of the hallway between classes I made sure that I seized the opportunity on one heart-pounding occasion to be right behind her to press the back of my hand against that soft, yielding ass.
A few years before this I slapped another girl’s ass as we all headed for the buses. Although there were no tangible repercussions from my act, it wasn’t too long before deeper insight showed me the embarrassing nature of my act and I have ever since felt ashamed. The reason I felt I could do this was that I saw James Garner do it in a movie. He received an immediate slap. Had I received one I might feel differently about the whole thing today. What I got, however, was the impression of confusion and some kind of subtle hurt on the part of the girl. My feelings on this were not helped by the fact that, needing to boast of the deed to someone, turned to my mother. She was about as supportive as the logical underpinnings of my theory of free will.

Double-O Heaven, Stairway To

Those watching will wonder at my return to the earlier procedure of consulting a little book I keep in my non-valise for a title. Although hundreds have been entered, used, and scratched out, confirming the procedure’s efficacy, I have of late been moving towards a more open plan regarding my writing, sometimes dispensing with titles altogether.
Anyone approaching my secluded booth to view the work will be disappointed, however, if they seek some rational or even demonstrable connection between the title and the words beneath. It is good that they are disappointed. They have no business coming near me in the first place.

Plural Noun is Ready

There are mathematical means of expressing the formation of sand dunes in the desert. At a certain level, sand in such great quantities acts like waves in an ocean of water. There are mathematical means of expressing the correlation between the waves in sand and the waves in water. I’m no mathematician (far from it), but I believe such a correlation would be an algorithm? Now, it seems to me that any great quantity of stuff, say for instance, a desert of small, green plastic soldiers, would act in the same way, given it was all the same kind of stuff. There would have to be mathematical formulae expressing the interactions of the landscape full of plastic soldiers, just as in the case of sand or water, and further, ones expressing the correlation between the movements of sand to soldiers, soldiers to water, water to sand, and even a larger algorithm (?) showing the relationships of all three taken together. Again, I’m no mathematician (far from it), but it seems to me that if you studied enough collections of stuff, and kept producing more and more comprehensive formulae, eventually you would reach something approaching an ultimate mathematical expression.
What I want to know is: is work of this nature being done, and, if no one has thought of this before now, can I get some sort of credit or recognition, even though I have not actually done any calculations?




Need to Sleep, But Settle for Blinking

From out of a dwelling constructed of glass soda pop bottles and adobe emerged a small man, perhaps midway between four and five feet tall, named Matrel. The ground he stepped onto, his front yard, was a sheet of plywood that sloped sharply down to the narrow stream below. The plywood (well, not really plywood, but a surface conforming in most respects to that prosaic material) was thinly populated by sexually dimorphous plants similar to sunflowers. Behind the man named Matrel’s consumer’s nightmare of a home was a flat, vertical wall that extended too far into the sky for anyone I know of to care where it ended. On it was painted a horizon, sky, and subtly smiling red sun, so that Matrel had a backyard, just one he could not corporeally enter. Actually, he had two such backyards, for inside the house in the window that faced the wall was inset a deep diorama that realistically portrayed the interior of a factory where one of the machines, loosed from its moorings, had begun terrorizing the unskilled laborers.
Matrel sat down facing the stream and glanced at his watch. The bishop had almost fully emerged from the pickle jar—the boat should be coming into view any moment now. Matrel’s view was obstructed to the right by the line of trees that separated his front yard from the egg tool foundry next door. To the left his view was obstructed by a line of trees that separated the yard from the graphite mine that stretched into infinity as far as anyone knew. It was to the right Matrel looked, however. This was upstream and the point at which the boat should first appear.
He began to wonder if he should have brought his book with him. The boat was taking longer than expected. The bishop was completely clear of the pickle jar and the tip of the Bear’s hat could now be seen above the opening. Matrel contemplated dashing back inside to grab the book. He was reading Stormfront Motivation, ostensibly a novel, but we’ll see. Had Matrel retrieved the book, instead of settling for an attempt at quiet contemplation of his surroundings, he would have picked up at this point:
…thereby achieving his ends, so the governing council of cosmetologists reckoned with increasingly bold analysis. For Turnblatt, however, the operation was not so much a milestone in the development of his own self-knowledge, as his father’s last chance for defeating the boredom of existence at the end of a long day of running from the obvious.
Meanwhile, Barbara, having cheated herself of the final installment of Guidon Umbilicus, drew a hot bath. Just as she was submerging her buttocks, Gary returned home.
“Barbara,” he called. “Are you here?”
“I’m in the tub.” She yelled, but not too loudly; her voice was still sore from the angry exchange with the neighbors.
Gary entered the bathroom. He immediately pulled a toy boat from his trousers pocket and placed it gently on the surface of the steaming water.
“Get that out of here.” Barbara commanded.
The boat suddenly entered the scene without the usual preliminary sound of rippling water Matrel expected. He stood up and looked eagerly for the back of the boat (the stern) to emerge. His guest should be there.

Decatyr slung his rucksack into a chair at the dining room table and began unknotting the blue bandanna about his neck.
“Have you ever noticed that in detective or men’s adventure series that if the hero hooks up with a woman by the end of the book, that in the next book the woman is gone? What happened to the first one?” He asked Matrel.
“And of course in the next book he’ll meet another woman and be in love with her by the end.” Matrel poured a glass of cold grape juice for his guest.
“Why do they always have women for clients?” Decatyr thanked his host and downed the glass in one gulp. He passed the glass back and Matrel refilled it.
“How was your journey?” Matrel asked.
“‘Journey?’ You make it sound so formal. It was a trip, how’s that?”
“Fine by me. Do you want to see your room now?”
“Might as well.”
Matrel led Decatyr to a room in the back of the house. Along the way they passed the diorama. The machine, having fashioned a crude crown for himself from industrial plate scrapings, now set about trying to awaken some of his fellows from their stationary servitude.
The workers in the factory had retreated to catwalks over the workroom floor, having been rebuffed in their efforts to occupy the offices. The management, although ineffective in their attempts to order their inferiors to attack the machine and get back to work, had been able to secure their offices for themselves and their families. Up on the catwalks Bronson, one of the nut fitters in operation 403, wondered if this forced segregation would lead to mutations in the genetics of the two groups.
“We’re all humans, after all.” He griped.
“Try telling that to those bastards wearing the ties.” Shouted Dolan as he looked down at the machine. “To them, we’re just smaller versions of King Clanky down there!”
If the king heard he did not respond. He busied himself fashioning a second arm for himself, one that he hoped would be able to turn the mounting bolts that kept his brothers (and future subjects) rooted to one spot.
“The room is more than adequate.” Decatyr smiled with his mouth turned down at the corners, musingly, as it were.
“I am gratified.” Matrel nodded.
“Plenty to read I see.” Decatyr commented. He examined the small but full bookshelf opposite the bed.
“I hoped there are some things there you have not seen before.”
“Ghost Dick is Swinging.” Decatyr read aloud one of the titles. “I’ve wanted to read that for some time.”
“I am gratified.” Matrel smiled.
“However, as I indicated in my letter of the twenty-second, this will be a working holiday. I may not have much time to read.”
“I wanted to ask you about that.” Said Matrel. “If you can give me some idea of your schedule, then I can be sure not to get in your way.”
“Well, I generally work at night. Sleep in the day. Any conflict there?”
“None at all. I sleep in the room on the opposite side of the house, so have no fear of disturbing me.” Matrel chewed an index finger as he considered what else to say.
“When is supper?” Decatyr asked.

“What I’ve in mind,” Decatyr paused while he chewed a mouthful of the broccoli and rotini Matrel had prepared. “Is something like a literary version of The Love Boat, but with illustrations. Sort of children’s coloring book type illustrations.”
“Yes?” Matrel urged Decatyr to continue, as the latter seemed to have drifted off into a reverie.
“Only it won’t be on a boat.” Decatyr suddenly returned to describing his projected work. He looked up at the ceiling. “And it won’t…” He seemed to be grasping for the right words.
“And this will be a series?” Matrel wanted it clarified.
“Yes.” Decatyr agreed, excited by Matrel’s understanding. “I love the idea of each installment bearing a different number, but uniform packaging. I also like the idea of each installment having definite parameters regarding word count. However, as they will each essentially be plotless…”
“Plotless?” Matrel interrupted. He seemed staggered by the idea.
“Yes. Plotless in the sense that there will be no objective, no resolution.

They broke me into a thousand pieces.


Ghost Dick is Swinging

The following day, clichés notwithstanding, verification of the mirage was rendered inert by the passing (some, mostly those affiliated with the Moisture Police, said feeding) of flawless maple boards; an expensive movie camera; and, I must admit, myself, feet first, through the machinery of the sub-sino miniature. The reason I never mentioned this before should be obvious to anyone who has studied one of my early paintings. For those for whom art is a painful distraction from sports, the reason is that sometimes what seemed like a good idea while profoundly, and, dare I say, spiritually stoned, seems penumbrously confused the next day. Alterations need to be made, all the while keeping in mind the “spirit” of what still has the merit of being the product of one’s own mind.
For alterations of this kind I go to a small room.

Soon the cookies will be finished.
“Why don’t you make use of your anger, Dallas?”
I used to want to. I got permission from John Lydon in the song “Rise, where he says “Anger is an energy.”
But I’m too old and cautious now
Two black girls in collusion deprive me of my seat. A minor thing, but my usual seat means that I can’t see the TV even if I were to try.
Luckily I brought cookies.
About that small room—it’s empty now.

Fire Made it Good

Somehow Dr. Tennis had survived the cataclysm. While others discussed their protein shakes and weight gain formulas, Tennis remained true to his nature, huddled in isolation behind a vending machine, and survived.
He glanced at his watch. A grotesquely distorted caricature of Paul Reubens had descended as far as his nose into the sleeping alcove. The left side of the watch was the intensive, the right the extensive.
Was ever any man so put upon, when consideration was made of the disparity between what his goals were and what his duties?
He kicked at a watermelon rind he came across after he had climbed out of the trash-filled pit. Dr. Tennis had specialized in the archeology of the outside world, as filtered into his own. No more. He figured, rightly, for he was a scientist, that he was now in the outside world.
“Excuse me,” he said, approaching two black girls engaged in conversation, “But I’m lost. How do I get downtown?”
They looked at him as if he was the ceiling. Finally, one pointed in a direction. Her “That way” was involuntary. A vestigial appendage that had no actual function. Dr. Tennis thanked them both and headed in the direction indicated. Behind him he heard an outburst of laughter, but he did not look back.

The Core of the Apple Had Turned to Gelatin

Fortunately for Aimwell, he got to the bus stop later than usual. It began to rain, but he didn’t get drenched. The bus arrived less than a minute after the first drops struck his suit of space age cardboard and rag fiber.
“It’s growing back, aint it?” The woman across the aisle from Aimwell grinned broadly and giggled. “Yeah.” She added.
Aimwell smiled in return and busied himself withdrawing a magazine from his satchel. The woman had referred to his hair, which Aimwell had himself trimmed extremely short for a reason that he now thought silly. Anger.
He longed to fish out his floppy hat from the satchel, but didn’t want the woman to make any further comments to him. Of course, he didn’t want to be rude either; that might lead to more of the same interaction he hated with strangers.

The magazine, Backache, had a circulation of about fifty. It had been started the year before by an acquaintance of Aimwell’s from his college days. That was long ago, wasn’t it, thought Aimwell as he examined a cartoon in the magazine. The signature in the lower right hand read “Bootheraggis.”
Aimwell got off the bus in Rameke Street. The ‘a’ in that name should have two dots over it, but I couldn’t figure out how to get my helper machine to make the two dots. These dots are called umlauts. The large man who sat behind the reception desk in the place of business Aimwell entered had two pink scars on top of his bald head as if he had had horns surgically removed. It did not cross Aimwell’s mind that these scars were like umlauts, possibly shifting one’s apprehension of the man (whose name was Cload) rather like the umlauts that are supposed to be in the name Rameke shift the ‘a’ to a hard sound like that in the word “ate.”
“Hi, Cload.” Aimwell forced himself to say as he passed the receptionist’s desk. Whatever Cload said in reply is irrelevant as Aimwell certainly didn’t dwell on it, having moved on even as he greeted the man with only the slightest eye contact.
Aimwell went directly to the half-flight of stairs that led to the raised platform where his desk was. Everyone knew by now that Aimwell did not make routine salutations to anyone outside his handful of borderline intimates among the employees. He would respond if greeted first, but rarely initiate an exchange.
There were six desks on the raised platform. Although not originally intended so, the desks on the platform had become prestigious, and were now occupied by the senior staffers of Pincher, Panther, Pilfer, Proofer, the company Aimwell worked for. No one knew what the platform’s original purpose had been. Some said that the building had once been a cotton market, the platform the place from where the bidding had been directed.
Lobar, the possessor of another of the supposedly coveted desks, approached Aimwell as the latter slung his satchel onto his disordered desk.
“You seen this?” Lobar thrust a sheet of paper under Aimwell’s nose.
“How can I have? I just got here.” Aimwell reached out for the paper, but Lobar snatched it away.
“No, no, you read your own.” He said.
“My own?”
Lobar pointed at a barely sealed envelope on top of a pile of books that sat on the edge of Aimwell’s desk.
“Thanks.” Aimwell said sarcastically. He sat down in the ancient chair that bore his name on the back and tore open the envelope.

Hagrum, the managing director of Pincher, Panther, Pilfer, Proofer, was sitting in his office when Aimwell burst in.
“Do you know how many people received one of those letters, Aimwell?” Hagrum growled as the first angry words emerged from Aimwell’s mouth.
“I don’t know as I care.” Aimwell stood across the desk (one much larger than his own) looking down at Hagrum.
“Everybody in the building, from Cload all the way up to me.”
“I won’t submit to brain analysis!” Aimwell shouted.
“For your information, every one of these letters is worded slightly different from each other.”
“Is this Thorbuldsen’s idea?”
“Probably.” Hagrum toyed with a thick black marker. He uncapped it. “His or his son’s.” He sniffed appreciatively at the marker fumes.
“How do these letters differ from each other?” Aimwell asked as if he suddenly realized what Hagrum had said earlier.
Hagrum pulled his own copy of the letter from inside a copy of The Beginner’s Guide to Moss Gardening. He unfolded it and held it up to Aimwell’s curiously amber-colored eyes.
“They each bear a different name at the top. See, mine says ‘H.D. Hagrum.’”
“How very philosophical.” More sarcasm from Aimwell.
“Nobody quits Pincher, Panther, Pilfer, Proofer.” Hagrum tucked the letter back into the book.
“I smell hot dogs cooking.” Aimwell’s eyelids closed half-way.

Would Aimwell submit to brain analysis despite his protest to the contrary? Hagrum assumed he would. After the former had left his office Hagrum reconsidered his storage of his letter in the moss gardening guide. The book was intended for his wife. A gift. She had been talking lately about wanting to start a moss garden. The first thing Hagrum did that day upon arriving at work was to rifle through the company’s extensive reference library until he found something appropriate. Then he ripped out anything identifying the book as company property. Now he shoved the letter in the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk where he kept his carbon paper and generic brand adhesive bandages. No sense in letting his wife see the letter. If he was lucky, she would never have to know that he had undergone brain analysis. If he was luckier still, he would somehow wriggle out of having the procedure done altogether.

On his lunch hour Aimwell gobbled down the dried papaya strips and small sandwich he had brought with him before he had even left his desk. Instead of his usual trek upstairs to the disused solarium where he either read or napped, Aimwell went outside. He walked a few blocks down to the offices of Kindergarten Anecdote, a gelatinous pinecone agency.
“May I help you?” Asked the nurse-like woman in horn-rimmed spectacles behind the front desk.
“Yes.” Affirmed Aimwell. “Is Ted Gomez in?”
“Yes he is. May I tell him who is asking for him?”
“Tell him it’s Rectus Aimwell. He knows me.”
The woman picked up a white phone (the old-fashioned rotary kind; cell phones and computerized singularity of stupidity have not yet been invented in the time this story takes place, and probably never will) and spoke with someone. After a brief exchange she recradled the phone and looked at Aimwell.
“Go on back. Through this door.” She indicated a door behind her on her right. There was another behind her on her left as well. “And all the way to the end of the hall.”
“Thank you.” Aimwell responded. He followed her instructions and found himself before yet another woman at a desk. This one was more librarian than nurse. She pointed Aimwell to a short sofa of chrome and orange vinyl and told him to wait. It would only be a few minutes, she said. Then she returned to the work she had been doing when he appeared before her, typing on an electric typewriter.
Aimwell wished he had brought the magazine he had been reading earlier with him. The choices laid out on the table beside him were unappealing. Macaroni and Cheese Journal, Devil May Fare, Progressive Ironmonger—Aimwell would feel embarrassed reading any of them. He looked around at the walls. There was a framed lithograph of a nineteenth century hunting scene hanging behind the secretary. It was not to Aimwell’s taste. Funny that Gomez would have chosen such a thing. Aimwell’s understanding was that Gomez was an aficionado of Abstract Expressionism. Maybe he didn’t really know the man at all.
The door to the left of the lithograph opened and a portly man emerged. Gomez followed this man. They were continuing their conversation from within.
“I’ll give you a call tomorrow morning and tell you how things stand.” Gomez had his hand on the portly man’s shoulder as he said this. Aimwell hoped he wouldn’t touch him when his turn came.
“Thank you, Ted.” The portly man said in a deep voice as he turned about to shake hands. His voice had a wet, gurgling quality, as if his cheek pouches were filled with cornbread and gravy.
As Portly exited Gomez nodded at Aimwell.
“Come on in, pal.” He said. He stood in the doorway holding the door open while Aimwell squeezed past.
In the office Aimwell saw the examples of Abstract Expressionism he had expected.
“So you keep them in here.” He said, pointing at the largest of the paintings, a field of orange in which the vaguest of figures in white and black floated.
“Yeah.” Gomez agreed. “I let Gloria do the lobby how she wants.” He moved behind his desk waving at a chair on the other side. “Have a seat.” He said.
“This is my idea of an office.” Aimwell enthused as he sat.
“Our aesthetics are in alignment.” Gomez mused.
“Yeah.” Aimwell grew somber.
“So what’s on your mind, pal?” Gomez wore no jacket. His white button-down had its sleeves rolled up. He was still shockingly good-looking despite his fifty years.
“You told me once that you might have a job for me.” Aimwell began.
“That was over two years ago.”
“The reason I bring it up is that I may have to quit Pincher, Panther, Pilfer, Proofer.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“They want everyone there to submit to brain analysis.”
“Really?” Gomez fingered his tan chin with his tan hand.
“I can’t, and won’t undergo such a procedure.” Aimwell was emphatic.
“No, I can see that.”
“And it isn’t just because my brain is different and they’ll spot it; I wouldn’t submit to brain analysis even if I had been born here.”
“I understand.”
“So naturally I’ve some to you. Even if you don’t have a job for me, maybe you can give me some good advice. You’re the only person who knows that I’m really Grover Tennis.” Aimwell made a slightly freer exhalation on the name, as if it gave him immense relief and satisfaction to say it.
Ted Gomez thought for a moment.
“Grover, I wasn’t stretching the truth when I expressed doubt about my finding you a position here. Things really aren’t going that well around here. But,” Gomez glanced at the door. “That man you saw leave just now may have something.”

“I don’t know what all this is.” Dallas Pimiento insisted.
“We think you do.” Agent Lorne countered.
“I didn’t write this tripe!” Pimiento spoke of the thick manuscript that lay on the table before him.
“It has your name on the cover.” Agent Greene, the third man in the small interrogation room, pointed out.
“That doesn’t mean anything.” Pimiento thumped the manuscript with his thumb and forefinger. “And, even if it did, so what? If I did write this so-called novel, what of it?”
“Mr. Pimiento, there are things in this manuscript, depictions of people, descriptions of events—things that if you wrote this book, you must have firsthand knowledge of, and yet, from our research, you shouldn’t have any knowledge of.” Agent Lorne explained.
“Does he always talk this way?” Pimiento asked Agent Greene.
“I guess you’d be an expert on proper syntax.” Greene replied.
“I know how to speak, and how to write, but that doesn’t make me a writer.”
“Then what are you?”
“I’m a painter! Ich bin ein maler! And however you say that in French as well.”
“Mr. Pimiento, we’ve seen some examples of your so-called work.” Agent Lorne put his foot up on the empty folding chair beside him.
“It’s garbage. We know for a fact that you’ve never sold a single painting.” Agent Greene added.
“That’s not true! I haven’t very many, but…”
“How many?” Lorne demanded.
“Oh, I’ll say…” Pimiento thought. “Four, five, no it’s more than that, say close to ten.”
“Ten?” Agent Lorne repeated. “You sold ten of those slapdash canvases?”
“Mr. Pimiento, it’s clear to us that your painting is nothing but a cover for your real work.” Greene leaned forward across the table.
“Writing?” Pimiento asked.
“That’s right.”
Pimiento looked from Greene to Lorne and back.
“Who exactly do you guys work for again?” He asked.

The Age of Mammals

It wasn’t understood clearly, a hundred years ago, just how the sand casters digested the bottle caps, fingernail clippers, lug nuts, and other metal refuse that formed the bulk of their diet, but then, these mysterious creatures were virtually unknown then. Now, with the rise of the space age, hard-working scientists like Bud Shank are edging ever closer to a fully comprehensive theory of not only sand casters, but of all things, including the human brain, that the status quo might be maintained indefinitely and ultimately all consciousness may be united and homogenized like milk.
“Remember the days when individual dairies had their own uniquely tasting milk?” Bud Shank’s friend Demum asked him as the two shared a table in the breakroom at Panscot Laboratories.
“Horrible. Just horrible.” Shank muttered.
“Never knew what you were going to get.” Demum leaned back in his chair.
“Back in my grandfather’s time, as an example of just this kind of practice, there were hundreds of different breweries each turning out its own unique beer.” Shank had long finished his honey bun. He debated purchasing another from the vending machine even as he ran his finger over the interior of the sticky packaging and began sucking his finger clean.
“Now you’ve got only, what—three major breweries?”
“Same thing with cars.” Shank got up from the table, reached in his pants pocket, and pulled out a fistful of change.
“What’re you going to get now?” Demum asked.
“Another honey bun.”
“Another one?”
“Yeah.” Shank demanded to know what was wrong with that.
“Do you know how many calories are in each one?”
“I don’t want to know.” Shank sighed, thrust his money back in his pocket, and forced himself to drink a big cup of water.

I have a condition known as “robot eyes.” For many years I had suspected that my vision was far better than the average person’s, but I never knew exactly how much better it was until I got my first look at high-definition TV. I had went to a store displaying one of the revolutionary new systems. A crowd was gathered around, watching a specially formatted copy of Jurassic Park III.
“It looks real!” One man yelled out.
“I’m scared!” A woman joked. “Those dinosauruses look real!”
“Don’t it look just like you’re looking through a window?” A man I found myself standing beside said to me.
“It just looks like TV to me.” I shrugged. Sure, the picture quality was superb and Sam Neill had never looked better, but “real?” No, it didn’t look real, nor as if I were looking through a window. Thank goodness, I thought. The last thing I needed was a technological nightmare of confusion over reality. I was still recovering from pot-induced paranoia, thank you very much.
“What do you mean?” The man demanded.
“I mean I don’t see what’s so great about it.” I said.
“Sir,” one of the costumed youths employed at the store addressed me. “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the store.”
“But, why?” I asked. “I still have a purchase to make.”
“Sir, please. Don’t force me to call security.”
“What for?” I said as I backed away, heading for the jazz section of the store. “I’m just going to get a CD and be on my way.”
“He’s probably going to get somethin’ old like Lawrence Welk!” The man I had been standing beside called out as the employee spoke into a wristband bearing the store’s logo.
“Security to hi-def display area.” Boomed out over the P.A.
As the stocky young men muscled me down the aisle toward the exit, I cried out,
“I want my Kenny Dorham CD!”
I thought I faintly heard someone say “Told you so” just before being thrust outside.
It was a doctor who late gave me the diagnosis of “robot eyes.”
“You were lucky to get out of there in one piece.” He told me after I had relayed to him the above events. “People don’t like it when others don’t or can’t appreciate the latest thing.”
“You can say that again.” I said.
“Why? Is something wrong with your hearing?”

A pointless redaction in the pinframe ratio convinced Molt Mannerly that he must make his dissatisfaction with the club known to the board of directors. At an appropriate hour he rose from his chair in the depository and made his way to the board’s suit of offices in the basement. He was shocked at how loud the TV in the lobby was.
“Can you concentrate with all this noise?” Mannerly asked the woman behind the desk.
“What noise?” She betrayed her defensiveness over every aspect of the lobby’s atmosphere.
“Never mind.” Mannerly shook his head. “I was wondering if I could see Mr. Thorpe.”
“Have a seat and I’ll check.” She glared at him as she got up from her chair.
“Do you mind if I turn this down?” Mannerly asked with his hand poised over the TV.
“I wish you wouldn’t.” She snapped.
“That’s two items I have to complain about now.” Mannerly said to himself.

Bootherignity

The first collection of drawings by the cartoonist calling himself Bootheraggis was called Bootherignity.
“Of course.” Sniffed Snad Willis, a critic.
The centerpiece of the book was a large work inspired by Nadar’s Pantheon, in which hundreds of personalities from the world of literature and the arts were caricatured.
“I don’t know whether to be relieved or insulted by the exclusion of my own image from the parade of luminaries.” Willis wrote in his one paragraph review of the book.

Afraid to Scratch

What went before was a baked potato of indolence compared to the surfeit of lethargy which now compelled the Romans to endow Hesculon and his band of mercenaries with plenipotentiary authority over the island territory of New Guam. Although others in my chosen field of study have suggested that it was not the fault of Sheed that Protein was forced to dance in this way (and indeed some, my old mentor Ambot among them, have gone so far as to put the onus of responsibility of the ultimate synthesis of watcher and watched upon Graviticus and his theaters), I have always maintained a measure of nostalgia about such demonization.

We Begin with a Haircut

At an old-fashioned barbershop it wasn’t necessary to tip. There aren’t any barber shops anymore; they’re all been combined with beauty parlor. Even if you can find one, the people who work there have been so corrupted by beauty parlor practices that they too expect a tip. I hate to tip, especially for something like a simple haircut. I’m afraid not to tip, because I’m afraid that if the hair styling personnel get to know me as a non-tipper, I’ll get my ear cut or, worse, a bad haircut. Getting my ears trimmed back wouldn’t be such a bad thing; I have bad childhood memories of the other children mocking my ears. I’ve spoken with my wife about gluing them back with Super Glue, but her immediate denunciation of the idea made me put the plan on hold.
I skip around from barber to barber because I don’t want them to get to know me too well. I never know if I have tipped sufficiently or too much. If I get my hair cut by one particular person at a shop two or more consecutive times then he begins to think of me as his property. I don’t want that. The tip thing plays a part in my reluctance, but I also don’t want some kind of relationship to develop. I don’t want to have to remember what I said the last time or make anything more than the most shallow of small talk, which I hate doing as well, but I guess one has to maintain some baseline of civility.
On the day my story begins I had been somewhat nervously awaiting my next haircut for two weeks. I had given myself the shortest of all possible crew cuts with an electric trimmer at home roughly two months before for reasons I won’t go into now, although in the past I have done the same thing to avoid barbers altogether or to make a symbolic break with the past. Now my hair, despite little necessary trims at home over the weeks to keep it in semblance of order, demanded the professional’s touch. Had I the money, I would send my wife to cosmetology school and buy her the needed implements to cut my hair at home. But she would probably set up a shop there, and then I would have to deal with her customers and that rancid smell of perm solution.
“I’m going to get a haircut today.” I told my wife. I suppose I expected some kind of analytic response or affirmation that my decision was the correct one, but all I got was “OK.”
Did I want her to come with me? That was a tough one. I wanted her company in the car; I didn’t want her criticism or less-than-enthusiastic acclaim of the result. I invited her along. She is my wife after all, even if she doesn’t understand my aesthetics.
You see, in this world of monolithic sexiness my aesthetic ideals are considered antiquated if not downright anachronistic. The Kennedy administration and its milieu sum it up to my satisfaction. That car that JFK got shot in, that’s my idea of a car. Concerning haircuts, it is not exactly to the late president that I turn for inspiration, but rather someone like Cary Grant as he was at that time. You add an Ivy League suit to that equation and you have the sharpest of looks.
All that to say that the haircut I was aiming for was bound to be too severe for my wife. Now, if I was to sport a classic Shaun Cassidy ‘do, affection and admiration would be mine.
My wife and I arrived at the Weltschmerz Barber Shop at a good time. The three chairs were full, but there were only two old men on line. I sat down and immediately took out the book I was reading, What Maisie Knew, by Henry James. Elsa, my wife, scrounged up an old copy of National Geographic from the magazines strewn over the bench.
Except for the women on duty and the unnecessarily audible radio tuned to the most banal of pop stations, the place reminded me of shops where I got my hair cut as a child. I climbed through a small hatch into the crawlspace under the bench and made contact with the robotic overlords.

Wriggled Back to Taper

Having no further use for coffee, I, Dallas Pimiento, stepped into oncoming traffic and shared my haircut with the world. The lining of my jacket, documented with fat men recumbent on sofas, spilled open and bore me to the third nearest hospital. It had to be that way. Recuperating and talkative, I spoke with Speke.
“How goes the world situation?” I asked. I wished we were playing chess, but I hadn’t the heart to impose myself on him.
“Worse and worse.” He said. I have known Speke for thirty years. We grew up within ten miles of each other; both of his parents and both of my parents worked for the post office; and we attended the same private fundamental Christian school. We both wound up working for the post office ourselves and have screwed at least one woman in common (obviously not at the same time. At least, that should be obvious).
“I was reading about Napoleon II the other day.” I began. “Apparently just before he died of phthisic amputeria he wrote a book about his ill-fated campaign to conquer Lumpritz. The book was lost for years, but recently a young couple in Dalmatia bought a house and while they were cleaning out the attic they found a copy.”
“Everybody is so lazy.” Speke nodded.
“And, everyone is convinced that he is the only one working hard.” I added, wincing at the pain once again rising through my legs.
“Mmm, that’s a little too relative for me.” Speke demurred.
“Don’t get me wrong,” How could anybody do that? “There are lazy asses, but then again, maybe everything is relative.” I put my hand over my eyes—my substitute for collapsing in tears when no tears would come.
Later, under the influence of dreams of Sinatra, bicycles, cornbread, ambulatory fish-heads, and gin rummy, I decided to abandon my pretense of identity and you to your fate. Not that I believe in fate; although, as an advocate of the theory that there is no free will I guess I really should. I guess it depends on whether one has control over one’s dreams. From here on out in this narrative, consider everything as dreams. But remember that I am dreaming them.

The Man with the Sheep

“She only has one tit,” confided the stranger, “But it’s a big one.”
“Is that so?” Muttered Mr. Funebre as he walked the stranger to his car.
“Well, I’ll be in touch.” The stranger said as he opened the door to his car. He extended his hand, which Funebre took. Funebre nodded one time by way of goodbye, the farthest he was willing to go in response to the stranger’s wave from inside the car. He did not watch the car as it moved down his long driveway.
“Another bust.” Funebre told his wife as he entered the house.
“He wasn’t interested?” Rebekeh asked as she toweled off a plate.
“More than not interested.” Said Funebre dropping into a chair. “He didn’t know what was supposed to interest him.”
Rebekeh started to make consoling remarks, but Funebre didn’t want to hear them. The subject was dropped.
A few hours later, just as the two of them had sat down to supper, a car drove up to the house. The heard it crunching over the gravel and Funebre was at the window before it stopped.
“Is it the same man?” Rebekeh asked.
“No, different car.” He husband answered. “Different man, too.” He added as the driver’s door swung opened and a tall man with a paunch stepped out.
“I’ll see what he wants.” Funebre said. By the time he was outside the newcomer had done nothing more than close the door to his car. He stood looking about the place with his hands on his waist.
“Hello, there!” The man called out when he caught sight of Funebre.
“Hello.” Funebre replied.
“Is it too late in the day for me to take a look at your sheep?” The man asked.
“No, not at all.” Funebre nearly smiled. “Come on with me.” He started walking towards the barn.
“My name’s Bodrum.” The man said, offering his hand in mid-stride. “Earl Bodrum.”
“I’m Paul Funebre.” Funebre said as they shook.
“I know. I heard about you and your sheep from a buddy of mine named Franks. Said he came by earlier today.”
“That’s right. He was here.” Franks had been the previous visitor’s name.
“What he said interested me.”
They had reached the barn. Funebre reached out for the door handle.
“Well, let’s see what you think.” He said.
A single dim bulb hung down from the rafters illuminating the immediate area inside the door.
“Can you see alright, or do you need me to open the big door?” Funebre asked.
“I can see alright.” Said Bodrum, scanning the interior.
“The first stall here on the left.” Directed Funebre. He stood before the chest-high door and made a ch-ch noise with his tongue behind his teeth. From the darkness at the rear of the stall came a response of movement.
“Ooh, it is a big one.” Bodrum commented.
The lone sheep came forward and put its muzzle over the top of the half-door. Its head was as big as a kitchen trash can. It stood taller than either Funebre or Bodrum. The latter put out his hand and felt the animal’s jowls. Funebre could see immediately that here was a man who knew something about sheep.
“And fully mechanical, I see.” Said Bodrum.
“That’s right.” Funebre affirmed.
“Man, I’d sure like to see him walk around. Haven’t you got a light over this stall?”
“No, but I can open the big door.” Funebre replied.
Inside the house Rebekeh waited for her husband for five minutes. She wouldn’t eat without him, so she decided to join him outside. When she reached the barn Mr. Funebre and Mr. Bodrum were discussing the terms of the sale.
“Of course, I can’t move her in my car.” Said Bodrum. “But, if you were willing to deliver her to my place, I’d be willing to pay a little extra.”
Funebre didn’t bother asking how much extra before he found out something else.
“Where do you live?” He asked.
“’bout twenty miles from here.”
As the two men spoke Rebekeh, perhaps inspired by the thought of never seeing the sheep again, began thinking about her sister Ruth. She had lost touch with her almost three years before and had no idea where she was.
In fact, Ruth was living in Atlanta in a tiny mobile home set up inside an old warehouse near a railroad switching yard. Her legs had been amputated at the knee and crudely fashioned regeneration fittings had been attached to the stumps. She was watching Holly Goliath, an old, syndicated drama on the TV when Suth Demum knocked on the door.
“Come in.” Ruth called out, lowering the volume on the TV with a remote control.
Demum opened the door a crack.
“Ruth, I’ve brought a colleague of mine along. Is it alright if he comes in also?” He asked through the crack.
“Sure.” Said Ruth. She straightened herself up as much as she could in a few seconds and put a pleasant look on her face.
Demum was followed by Bud Shank into the unit.
“How are you doing today, Ruth?” Demum asked.
“I’m very well, Dr. Demum.” She smiled as she spoke.
“Ruth, this is Dr. Bud Shank. He works with me at the lab. I’ve been telling him about you and your condition and he asked if he could meet you. Actually, I asked him.” Demum corrected himself. “I think he might be able to give me some insight into your treatment.”
“Why, is something wrong?” Ruth asked. Her eyes widened.
“Oh, nothing.” Demum assured her. “No, everything is proceeding quite nicely. It’s just that your treatment has historical implications. I’d like Dr. Shank to know what we’re doing here.” He looked at Shank for confirmation.
“Good morning, Ruth.” Shank said cheerfully. “It’s nice to meet you at last.”
“Good morning.” Ruth answered.
“Watching ol’ Holly Goliath, eh?” Shank glanced at the TV and asked.
“Yes.”
“I used to watch that every day after school.” He said with a wistful tone that seemed genuine. Then he bent over Ruth’s mangled legs as Demum began to explain certain details of the regeneration fittings and their application in as technical terminology as possible to avoid the risk of Ruth catching on that all of this was most unorthodox and, in truth, highly suspect. As Shank listened, however, part of his mind wandered over his memories of the TV program. He was glad the sound was down else he would surely remember exactly which episode this was. It was bad enough that certain scenes and pieces of dialogue were already bubbling up from the depths of his mind.
Holly Goliath concerned the adventures of a young woman who could transform from an average sized female to one of eight feet in a matter of a few seconds of screen time. This ability helped her to help others and solve crimes as she traveled the country seeking for the lost formula that would allow her to reclaim her place at the (fictitious) National Academy of Dance. In seasons one and two she had traveled in a VW bug, but by the third, and last, she had graduated to a custom van that held a mobile command center and living quarters. This last season was dismissed by many, including Bud Shank, not just because of the change of vehicles and the addition of Holly’s younger cousin Linda to the cast, but because the writing became much sloppier and jokier, the plots sillier and more contrived. Still, thought Shank, the episode about the corrupt politician allowing the small town to be exposed to toxic waste that turned their children into mutants all of the sake of money had been a good one, and it had been in season three.
As Shank and Demum walked through the warehouse away from the mobile home, having said their goodbyes to Ruth they discussed the case.
“Is that all she does?” asked Shank. “Watch TV all day?”
“I have a private nurse come by every day at noon and wheel her around the warehouse.” Demum explained.
“Who pays for that? You?”
“I’m the only one who can. This whole project is top secret.”
“And patently illegal.”
“Not really. Ruth signed away certain rights without realizing it when she submitted herself to my care.”
Closer to home (how I hate that strip!), I was readying myself for another weekend of painting and forced social interaction when I was summoned emotionally by the Bronco. Hard to define and harder still to contact of one’s volition, the Bronco is a mythical embodiment of a certain confidence that comes over me. They say that some people can predict earthquakes by a strange tone that sounds in their ear. I heard a tone as well from time to time, but not necessarily in conjunction with the arrival of the Bronco and, indeed, not necessarily corresponding to anything at all. The point is that I have this thing called the Bronco which doesn’t really exist outside my own imagination but stands for an otherworldly being or presence that is inexorably guiding me to triumph and glory before the snuffing out of the candle of my otherwise meaningless existence.
“How’s your haircut?” Elsa asked.
“I like it.” I answered suspiciously.
“Still think you need to go to the hospital?
We were eating breakfast together. The kids were at school and I had just gotten home from my night shift at the post office.
“That was just a joke.” I said wearily.

All Joking Aside

“Apparently, he has not only lost contact with the hidden world, but forgotten everything he ever knew about it.” Breakwood reported to his associates.
“What about this Dr. Tennis?” One of the other cloaked men asked. The light overhead was concentrated directly over their heads as they sat around the circular table, giving them a creepy, formidable appearance, which is exactly as they wanted to appear.
Breakwood conjured a small, semi-transparent figure beside him on the tabletop.
“This is the man.” He said. “You understand we have only anecdotal evidence that he escaped the collapse…”
One man, who had not spoken thus far in the meeting, interrupted.
“Find him.” He ordered.
Under a lone and massive oak standing in the middle of a sunny pasture sat a man and a woman.
“I’ll fight that bull for you if you want.” Said the man, named Todd. He was referring to an animal that could be seen on the other side of a fence separating the field in which they sat from the next.
“That’s not necessary.” Abilia, the woman, smirked.

Hammer Gatherer Indulges in Potatoes

I have aimed at simplicity, and found that people are insulted. More than that, they are offended at my steps towards a mastery of patience. I got a little grease on my drawing board, but that’s OK, even though I’m sick of that word. It’s not quite as annoying as “cool,” but still… The smell of oyster stew is in the air. It symbolizes something to me. Some kind of Alice in Wonderland connection or synchronicity. I wonder if Disney could sue me if I made a movie called Cinderella. I ought to make one called Disneyanna.
“How would you go about making such a movie? Hell, any movie at all?” This guy named Helmheitz wants to know.
“Fuck Disney!” I declare. I will bang my aging fists on the table and thrash about in my seat, deep in the rough sea of my depression.
Helmheitz lives in a tower in the woods. Not your suffocating, pine forest full of briars and rusted-through tricycles, but real woods, i.e., a planned estate full of calculated oaks and deliberate maples, the underbrush all placed there by design. Everything is so crappy that I have to look at and deal with; I wish I could live in a tower.
I wish many things. I wish I… oh, what’s the point in detailing my dissatisfaction? I have tried to get this book (“novel,” ha!) off the ground, but I’m so bored and have only the vaguest idea of what I want to do here. My last six books were all collections of one-page stories. I wanted to do something bigger and better than that, but it seems I’ll have to go back to that if I want to continue, which, who knows? Maybe I don’t want to. My life is so backwards. I checked out a book from the library this weekend that has all these modern cartoonists in it talking about what they do and why. One of them, Gary Panter, who isn’t all that great, if you ask me (and who actually would? Tell me that.), teaches art, apparently. Not only does he get paid for his work, but he teaches. I never received any training. In anything. I have to work at the BUGFUCK, RACIST, SHITHOLE United States Postal Service and squeeze in my totally untutored, primitive cartoons and writing on my lunches and breaks, and nobody gives a damn.
Submit something for publication, you suggest? Ha, that will never work, ‘cause I suck! No one will ever give me a living in exchange for my stuff.
Dallas Pimiento tore down the poster from the Pepsi machine. How were the delicious Pepsi products inside the machine to be properly marketed if the front of the machine was partially obscured by a poster.

PART TWO
Beautiful Skin
Dallas Pimiento examined the backs of his hands. He had beautiful skin. He knew it and was proud of it. His hands were especially beautiful. They were the hands of an artist.
He didn’t understand other people’s aesthetic likes and dislikes. At one time there had been a vogue for women’s hands to be small, slim, and pale, with each finger tapering to a point. Pimiento preferred women’s hands to be like his own: long, thin fingers and wide palms, veiny and strong. He didn’t understand women whose preference was for hairy men with blunt grippers for hands.
Pimiento was driving home from the grocery store as he contemplated his hands on the steering wheel. He had seen a fat couple, a man and woman at the store, and felt such contempt for them. He wondered if they understood just how revolting they were. No, it was impossible. In addition to being fat and ugly, they were patently stupid. They had been dithering over the various brands of margarine when Pimiento came upon them.
As Pimiento selected a quart of fat free milk (his wife’s orders, not his; if it were up to him, his household would do without milk altogether), he glanced back at the couple and wondered how their sexual intercourse was accomplished. In total ignorance, he decided. One inkling of insight on either’s side, but especially on the man’s, and the act could not go forward. Their skin was the color of white cheese, their hair fair and lank. The man’s head was going bald, something he had tried to remedy (or was it just his sense of style?) by keeping it in a crew cut and wearing a handlebar moustache. Dallas Pimiento’s skin was olive, and, although he no longer tanned, fearing cancer, would turn a delicious tone if he did.
Further contrasts suggested themselves to Pimiento, even as he began to remonstrate with himself for being so hateful. He was dressed in black loafers, chinos, and a light blue Oxford shirt tucked in. The other man wore “flip-flops,” jeans cut off just at the knee, and a faded t-shirt that had at one time sported transfer that read “SWAP DWELLER.” His mate was dressed the same except that her jeans dragged on the floor, and her t-shirt bore an image of a be-ribboned teddy bear.
Now on the way home looking at his hands on the steering wheel and getting a feeling of confidence from their pleasing appearance, Pimiento glanced at his eyes in the rear-view mirror. They were surrounded by wrinkles. He was looking increasingly like some of his more unappealing relatives. At least he didn’t dress or act like them.

A Compelling 13
The phone rang with thirteen staccato peals of its old-fashioned bell. This indicated to Dallas Pimiento that someone at LPM (the Loath Procurement Ministry, the secret organization that he secretly worked for) was trying to contact him. He answered using his code name.
“Bronco here.” He said in resonant, manly tones.
“Skip Flag, Bronco. Can you be here in twenty minutes?” Said a snappy, nasal voice.
“I’ll try.” Pimiento rolled his eyes towards the back of the house where he knew his wife was. She wouldn’t like him going out, especially if she suspected it was to the regional LPM headquarters.
After he hung up Pimiento decided to just tell her the truth and hope for the best. If she raised a big enough fuss, he would consider himself released from his obligation to go. Of course, some sort of signal to headquarters would be necessary, telling the executives there of his inability to obey the summons. Perhaps a rocket, but that was all conjectural: first he must tell the wife.

A Chicken Struts Through

In the midst of our chaotic narrative a chicken struts through. He is not, and was not, an ordinary bird, crossing the road for philosophically indeterminable reasons. He was a posterboard creature, three-toed and funky, dressed in his purple corduroy jacket and brown gabardine slacks.
“May I see the menu, please?” He asked Dallas Pimiento with an eyebrow cocked crazily over his left eye. The right-hand one remained down; for all his jauntiness, he yet kept something in reserve. Perhaps it was the plot.
Pimiento hesitated only a moment before pulling a folded piece of vinyl from a pigeonhole in his desk.
“Here you are.” He said, smiling for the first time in days.
The chicken’s beak moved up and down as he deliberated.
“Something simple?” Pimiento suggested.
“Yes.” The chicken decided, slapping the menu together and handing it back to Pimiento. “Something simple, like back on the farm.”
“And yet,” Pimiento drummed his long fingers across his face. “Not bland.”
“Oh no, never bland.” The chicken hastened to concur.
“If you will follow me, I will show you to a table.” Pimiento came out from behind the podium and started to thread his was through the throng of animatronic diners.
“I notice you don’t address me as ‘sir.’” The chicken said to him as he followed.
“I never call anyone ‘sir.’” Pimiento explained over his shoulder. “It’s a medieval word with no place in out society today.”
“It’s a sign of respect.” The chicken told Pimiento as the latter pulled out a chair for him.
“First, respect is earned, not offered like a sacrifice to an idol. Second, I show my respect in other ways.”
“Such as?”
“Such as not cooking you.” Pimiento wanted to say. But, as a vegetarian, he could not make such a joke with a stranger. As the organ music swelled up and the horns cut in, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a cinnamon honey bun still in its wrapper. He placed it with great ceremony before the chicken.

Watching a Cricket Match

Dallas Pimiento’s new acquaintance, Rectus Aimwell, took him to a cricket match.
“That’s the bowler there.” Aimwell discreetly pointed at a man holding the ball.
“Ah.” Pimiento confirmed his understanding with a nod. The two sat in silence for some minutes as play continued.
“I heard you were put through the wringer the other night.” Aimwell said softly.
“Yeah.” Pimiento replied. He sighed. “I don’t know how much more I can take.”
“I recently took a new job.” Aimwell told him.
“I don’t think a new job is the answer.”
“For me it was.” Aimwell applauded along with those around them at an apparently well-performed set of actions. Pimiento mimed clapping his hands.
“If you like,” continued Aimwell, “I can arrange a meeting between you and my employer.”
Pimiento glanced at Aimwell.
“What do you do?”
“I manipulate corn smut prices.” Aimwell answered.
“Corn smut prices.” Pimiento repeated.
Aimwell laughed. “Oh, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.” He said.
“Complicated” was not the word Dallas Pimiento had been thinking of.
Aimwell continued, “And I don’t actually have to handle any corn smut.” He paused. “You do know what corn smut is?”
“It’s a fungal growth on ears of corn. Considered a blight by most corn farmers, it is not only edible, but something of a delicacy by some people.” Pimiento revealed the breadth of his knowledge. It was not for nothing that those who knew him thought of him as an exemplary specimen of wasted potential.
“You surprise me.” Aimwell smiled. “Yes, and through various avenues of influence, I can affect the market price of corn smut.”
“And this is somehow advantageous to your employer?” Pimiento asked.
“Yes, you see…” Aimwell began. Someone on the pitch shouted “Look out!” just before the hard cricket ball struck Aimwell in the head. Dallas Pimiento took control of the situation, ordering people about and looking after wounded man, all the while wondering what Aimwell’s employer’s name was.

Carl Nielsen

“Do you like Carl Nielsen?” Dallas Pimiento asked Skip Flag, his liaison at the LPM.
“The guy from Cheap Trick?” Skip idly replied as he thumbed through an LPM publication called Beouf Deodorisant.
“No, that’s Rick Nielsen.” Pimiento sat in a chair by Skip’s desk in the small office Skip shared with two other Ministry men.
“Ozzie’s son? The country rock guy?”
“Skip, are you trying to be obtuse?” Pimiento asked. The phone on Skip’s desk rang.
“Yes?” Skip said into the mouthpiece. “He’s right here.” He looked at Pimiento. “We’ve been talking about music.” After a pause he said, “I’ll tell him.” He hung up, saying, “Thorpe’s ready for you.”
Pimiento got to his feet.
“Rick Nelson is Ozzie and Harriet’s kid. Carl Nielsen is a Swedish composer. I thought you might have heard of him.” He said.
“Is he good?” Skip asked.
“Yes. You should check him out. You like Mahler, right?”
“Yeah.”
Pimiento walked towards the door.
“Dallas,” Skip called to him.
Pimiento looked back.
“Have you ever thought how real life is a lot more like L’Avventura than some novel?” Skip asked.
“You mean full of incidents and conversations that don’t have any significance?” Pimiento smiled.
“Yeah.” Skip nodded.
“Or that don’t move the plot of our lives towards some great resolution?” He looked through the window on the far side of the room at the fake cityscape outside.
“Well, don’t get so maudlin.” Skip returned to his perusal of Beouf Deodorisant.
“Sorry, Skip, but when you’ve got Nielsen’s Second running through your brain, you tend to take everything so dramatically.”

Guided By Voices

Mr. Thorpe, the chief of Private Dissemination for the Loath Procurement Ministry, sat behind the heavy desk in his book-lined office. On the other side of the desk, sitting in one of the two chairs there, was an elderly man named Gravele.
“You say this man’s name is Dallas Pimiento?” The old ma asked as he took out an index card and a pen from his pocket.
“That’s right; spelled just as it sounds.” Said Thorpe.
Gravele eyed the name after he had written it down. “Good man?” He asked, looking up. He pocketed the card.
Mr. Thorpe studied leather surface of his desktop.
“In many ways this department could not exist without him.” He said.
“What is his… point of focus?” Gravele asked.
“He is a painter.”
“Of any repute?”
“Oh, Lord no.” Thorpe chuckled. “He wouldn’t be any use if he was famous. Besides which, his work is… outside the mainstream of the normally accepted or acceptable.”
“Is it his subject matter that is so outré?”
“No, his subject matter is actually quite boring. Men and women in rather conservative attire standing about as if at a party for the somnolescent.” Thorpe paused as he put his hands together, kneading his joints. “No, it is more a question of his execution.”
“His technique?”
“Yes, as you say, his technique.”
At that moment came the knock on the office door that could only be Dallas Pimiento. Thorpe pushed the button on his desk that allowed the door to be opened. The man Thorpe and Gravele saw enter was about an inch over six feet tall, a man who bore on his face signs of the painful effort it took him to keep his weight in check. Gravele was agog at the size of Pimiento’s ears and nose. As Pimiento took the seat beside Gravele at Thorpe’s invitation, little did the elderly man suspect that Pimiento was thinking about Alien Lanes. But Thorpe knew, even if he didn’t know the specifics, that Pimiento was always thinking something.

Hidden Electrical Socket

After Earl Bodrum had taken possession of the mechanical sheep, he discovered an electrical socket hidden inside the creature’s anus.
“I might have been killed,” he joked with his tiny wife Thelma, “If I wasn’t a man of deep moral convictions.”
“What do you mean, Earl?” Thelma looked up from the bowl of peas she was shelling to ask.
“Skip it.” Bodrum advised the little lady. He stood in the back door to the kitchen looking out the screen door at the distant barn where his new purchase was housed.
“What do you think that socket it for?” Thelma asked.
“Catching Hippies, I guess.” Bodrum mused.
“What do you mean, Earl?”
“Aw, skip it, Thelma. Skip it. No,” Bodrum began, turning away from the door. “It’s probably just a convenient place to have an outlet. It’s protected from the rain, anyway.” He chuckled.
“Do you mean that sheep can generate power?” Thelma asked. She had a grocery sack full of unshelled pea pods on the floor beside her chair on her left side, the bowl in her lap, and another grocery sack on her right where she dropped the empty shells.
“No, not generate it, but since it runs on electricity, you can draw off a little of it if you happen to need it.” Bodrum told her.
“But, Earl, what’s that sheep for?” Thelma demanded.
“Well, it’s a novelty, isn’t it? People’d pay a buck each to see that thing walk around.”
“Is that what it was made for?”
“No, I think it was made for keeping the grass cut.”
“You mean it eats grass?”
“How else do you think it gets the power to run?”
“I thought you said it was electric.”
“Yeah, it is. It converts grass into power.”
“Earl,” asked Thelma. “How does it pass its wastes?”
Bodrum looked at her with his mouth agape. She had stumped him.

Mountain of Power

The time for Ruth’s daily wheeling about the warehouse was long past. No one had come to see about her. She had known for a couple of days now that her legs were close to being fully regenerated. She hadn’t told either of the two assistants who she usually saw because she wanted to wait until she saw Dr. Demum again. She wondered if he already knew and if this was why everyone was late. As the time for the TV news approached, she turned it off and sat in silence for a few minutes. Curious, she scrabbled around until she could look out the window in the door of the little trailer. Her legs were still tethered by hoses and wires to the expensive-looking machinery that was helping her get better. It was difficult to position herself just so that she could see across the expanse of concrete floor. In her efforts, she somehow got tangled up and fell heavily against the door. It opened and Ruth fell partially out.
She tried to haul herself back up and inside, but she slowly fell farther and farther, until, just before she landed on the concrete, she lashed out with her new legs and found herself standing upright.
The sensation of standing unaided after so many months made her want to go to the toilet, but mixed in with that feeling was one of triumph and relief. A step or two convinced her that she could walk again, however shakily. She mounted she steps back into the trailer and made use of its facilities. Then, with no one around to help her or give her instructions, Ruth exited the trailer once again. She walked about delightedly, even breaking into a short jog. She was unused to exertion and soon became winded. Still, it felt good.
She looked anxiously about, hoping Dr. Demum would appear. It was now over an hour since she had discovered her legs worked. What should she do? She headed for the door across the long stretch of concrete.
“I could walk to the top of Stone Mountain.” She thought idly, smiling at the thought. When she found the door locked she had only a moment of doubt concerning what to do. She kicked out with the bottom of her foot. Though shod in nothing more than flimsy slippers, she felt no pain as she easily broke the lock.

Pelican Returns to Base

The zetoga transport, nicknamed the Pelican by irreverent grunts among the task force, landed somewhat abruptly and with far less aplomb than its designer and manufacturer had projected. User error, a spokesman at Buice Motors would probably say if any complaints were made. The transport’s cavernous beak opened, revealing nine men standing within. Drew Mangrove, the pilot and first to descend from the beak, pulled his helmet off, swearing vigorously. He scanned the makeshift landing bay.
“Where’s Gooberson?” He bellowed.
In response a hulking man in coveralls with a dirty red rag about his neck emerged from beneath the upraised hood of an ancient truck.
“You want me?” He asked in his harsh, deep voice.
As the rest of the Pelican’s crew clambered out of the beak Mangrove began to make his dissatisfaction with the vehicle and the servicing it had received known to Gooberson.
“Calm down!” The big man insisted.
“This thing is a piece of shit!” Mangrove ended his tirade just as he ran out of breath.
“I never said it wasn’t.” Gooberson had by now walked over to the upset pilot. “It was Rackham that made us take it.”
“That’ll do, Vic.” Came a voice from behind him. It was Rackham himself, the task force’s director.
“Speak of the devil.” Gooberson said as he turned and looked down at the little man with the sharp features.
“What did you see, Drew?” The director addressed himself to the pilot.
“Damn little.” Came the reply.
“Explain.”
“In between trying to keep from flying out of the sky and overcompensating for the lack of ergonomic ratios, I had little time to make any observations.”
“I told you that bird’s a deathtrap.” Gooberson added.
“The zetoga transport is a highly advanced piece of machinery.” Rackham lectured them. “Our department didn’t spend millions of dollars on it for us not to use it. And use it we shall.”

The Cambrian Revival

“Where else could we find such a stunning array of exotic specimens?” The gray-haired man in the trench coat asked.
“He looks so Eastern European.” Thought Dallas Pimiento. “I wonder if he’s a spy.”
“Mr. Waffelkof, these specimens aren’t all that exotic.” Objected Pansel, one of the members of the group of observers.
“Do you not have eyes?” Waffelkof, the man wearing the trench coat, demanded.
Dallas Pimiento had stuffed too many pieces of pineapple into his mouth. He nearly swallowed one whole, but managed to return the piece to the main chewing area of his mouth before it was too late, and without making any sounds that might bring unwanted solicitude from the others. “You’re going to choke yourself one day!” He remonstrated with himself. “Stop being such a glutton!”
Pansel remained unimpressed as Waffelkof pointed out various denizens of his private aquarium. The group, which Pimiento had unhappily joined, stood inside a transparent tunnel that ran beneath the lowest level of the saltwater tank. While Pansel elected to remain silent and not further antagonize the fish-loving spy, Pimiento turned up the can in his hand and drank the sweet juice.
“Do you see a trash can anywhere?” Pimiento whispered to a woman beside him.
“No.” She mouthed the word.
He regretted having mentioned it to the woman. In the relative darkness, and with everyone’s attention focused on Waffelkof and Pansel, he could have easily placed the can the plastic fork on the floor against the plexiglass. Now, bored with the creepy marine life, he drifted back the way the group had come, back into the previous chamber. Out of sight, Pimiento put his trash on the floor and then rejoined the group just as it rounded the corner and slowly climbed up into sunnier depths.
“More of the same mundane life forms!” Pansel could not hold back his contempt. The moved Waffelkof to a burst of vitriol, delivered in whatever language he had been born to.
“Did you find a trash can?” The woman whispered to Pimiento.
“No.” Pimiento confessed with a grin.

Pronounced Mechanism

Dallas Pimiento and his wife Elsa were having dinner with the Blackeyes, a married couple roughly ten years younger than they.
“Where do you go to church?” Asked Louisa Blackeye.
“We don’t.” Dallas promptly replied. He knew his wife would answer much less tactfully than he, and wanted to get the first word in, hoping to shape the course of what could become an explosive topic.
However, Elsa jumped right in after him with, “There is no god.”
“Oh, how can you say that?” Kent Blackeye demanded.
Dallas decided to withdraw at that point. He concentrated on the macaroni and cheese on his plate. That, along with a nearly room temperature dinner roll were all he found among the offerings that he could eat. The centerpiece was a suckling pig. The Blackeyes seemed to find the Pimiento’s spurning of it as perplexing as their failure to believe in god, the soul, or the afterlife. Though he had resigned himself to allowing Elsa to do all the talking, Dallas found himself asked pointedly what it was he did believe.
“I’m a mechanist.” He said without emotion.
After the dinner was over and he and Elsa were driving home, Elsa asked him, “Why did you say you were a mecha-nist?”
“Because I am.” Dallas was relieved that the Blackeyes had served dessert, else he might not have gotten enough to eat.
“How does that differ from an atheist?” Elsa asked. “Or a materialist, for that matter?” She added before Dallas could begin answering.
“I don’t know.” He admitted. “It just sounds good to me, the idea of the universe as a great machine-like thing, with us just parts of it.”
“You shouldn’t use terms you can’t exactly define. Just stick with ‘atheist.’ That alone pisses them off enough.”
“I didn’t think we were there to piss them off.”
“I didn’t know what we were there for. Sitting there having to stare at that dead baby pig!”
Intrigued, Pimiento looked up the word “mechanist” after they reached their small, International style house. He was pleased when he saw that denial of free will that the word’s meaning contained.

There Will Be No Breakfast

Suth Demum was painfully roused from a deep sleep by black-uniformed members of the Science Ministry’s enforcement division.
“Suth Demum.” The squad’s leader said, directing attention to himself.” “Put on these clothes and be quick about it.”
“What’s going on?” Demum asked breathlessly.
“You see this patch?” The leader asked, pointing at the enforcement division’s crest sewn onto his sleeve. “Get dressed now. Don’t make us dress you. We’ve been known to break fingers while pulling arms through sleeves.”
“Are you arresting me?” Demum begged as he stepped into the orange coveralls provided him.
“That’s not my job.” Said the leader. “You questions will have to wait.”
“Put on these shoes.” Ordered another of the science troops.
Demum stepped into the plastic loafers. He thought better than to ask for socks. Now dressed, he was hustled out of his apartment and down to a van waiting in the street.
Around ten thirty that morning Bud Shank, wanting to see if the absent Demum wanted to get together for lunch, called the latter’s house. He got no answer. After work he drove by Demum’s apartment and, seeing his car outside, went up to the door. There he saw the unusual lock placed on the door by the enforcement squad. Making no show of panic, for he knew that he must be under observation, Shank returned to his car and drove home as usual, all the while wondering about what the reason could be for Demum’s arrest. No mention had been made at work about Demum. Could it be that the Science Ministry had discovered his friend’s little project in the warehouse? Or was it some irregularity in his work at the lab? He longed to drive to the warehouse and check, but there was no way that he wanted to get himself into trouble.
At home Shank found his wife in a jolly mood.
“It’s Friday!” She sang.
“Yeah.” He smiled briefly.
“You remember what we’re doing tomorrow?” She asked.
Shank paused for a moment to recollect. His wife answered her own question before he could.
“We’re leaving early in the morning for the mountains.” She said.

The Kids Get Off the Bus

Among Pimiento’s many duties was waiting for his two children, Fox and Emily, to get off the bus in the afternoon. There were a couple of outdoor chairs at the end of his driveway where he could sit and read while waiting. On the day under review he was struggling through Henry James’ The Ambassadors for the fourth or fifth time. Yes, the struggle was still there. He hoped that one day, after a couple more readings, the text would become clearer to him. Clear enough, he hoped, that he could make out exactly what the American characters found so… wrong about Europe.
Just as Pimiento turned to page 50, he heard what at first he thought was the school bus. He stopped reading, although he remained posed as a reader so that anyone watching from the coming vehicle would see him thus and know that he was literate. Scanning the gravel and pine straw before him absently, he listened closely. That wasn’t the school bus. He looked up and saw a small hovercraft. This vehicle, as amazing as was its appearance, yet amazed him further by pulling into his driveway. Pimiento stared through the windscreen for the identity of the operator, but saw only someone in a helmet which completely covered the person’s face. The craft stopped just before Pimiento. For a lingering moment neither the driver nor our longsuffering protagonist did more than stare at each other.
“What do you think?” Demanded the driver, his voice muffled by his helmet.
Pimiento, prudent as usual, said nothing, only stared.
The driver pulled off his helmet, revealing himself to be Dallas Pimiento’s father, Erskine Pimiento.
Still Pimiento stared, but allowing the stare to drift over the odd choice of vehicle.
“Where did you get it?” Pimiento asked, hoping his true feelings were not evident in his voice. Knowing it was his father behind the controls, the entire situation had become immediately suspect. As suspect, though in a different way, as if the helmet had concealed a futuristic assassin.
“Miami.” Came the answer.
“Miami.” Repeated Pimiento.
Further exchange was inhibited by the arrival of the bus. The children descended, crying “Granddaddy, Granddaddy!” once they discovered who the stranger was. Pimiento was thankful for the interruption.

Elbows

Dallas Pimiento examined his elbows in the polished surface of a cuirass, there being no mirror handy at the moment he suddenly became interested in the subject of elbows. True, he could have examined the elbows of the other man in the room, but the fellow was old; his skin hung slackly; chalky lines covered his elbows, as if he wasn’t kept sufficiently moist. Pimiento stretched the skin over his own elbows. How long before he, too, bore such signs of aging? He noted the rounded point of the bone beneath the skin. He considered it a perfect compromise between the sharpness of some people’s elbows and the great, protruding knob some people, such as the man with whom he currently shared this room in the old armory.
“Did you hurt yourself?” Asked the stranger.
“No.” Pimiento shook his head, doubling the force of his negation. He dropped his arm, content to continue his contemplation from a purely philosophic standpoint.
“Boy, they really put a lot of work into this place, didn’t they?” The stranger begged to communicate.
Pimiento made an “mm-hmm” noise and proceeded to walk out of the room, not too quickly, so as to minimize any hurt feelings. In the next room, one containing a full-size reproduction of an elaborately designed catapult, he lost the thread of what he was going to think about. He rubbed both of his elbows with his fingertips idly, reduced to remembering the old saying that one could change one’s sex by kissing one’s own elbow. He longed to try it, merely to see how close he could get, at ridiculous would be the sight, but he was afraid the old man would emerge at any moment, see him, and make some comment.
“Elbows facilitate bending, yet they themselves don’t bend.” Pimiento thought suddenly. He exhaled sharply, relieved to have made at least one decent observation. He could relax now. He turned to see the old man coming through the door.
“Big, isn’t it?” He said to the stranger, cocking his head at the machine.
“Mm-hmm.” The old man agreed, moving to the opposite side of the catapult.
Pimiento smiled. He pushed through the exit door and descended the spiraling stairwell to the gift shop, where he found his wife.
“Ready for lunch?” Elsa asked.
“Sure. What are we having?”
“Macaroni and cheese.”

Smaller and Smaller Units

Following his meeting with Thorpe and Gravele, Pimiento made arrangements to spend some time in the Set Theory Lab, located in the basement of LPM headquarters. He was met by Al Fewks, the technician-in-charge on that day.
“What’s it to be this time, Mr. Pimiento?” The tall, skinny, bespectacled Fewks asked.
“Need some practice with the subdivisional palletizer.” Said Pimiento as he looked about at the bewildering panoply of unidentifiable machinery.
“Right this way.” The stick-like man led him to a narrow passageway obscured with a curtain of black velour between two large metal machines. Fewks pulled the curtain aside and pointed within. “In there.” He said. As Pimiento entered, the other man said, “If the Ministry keep putting more junk in here, soon we won’t have room to work.”
“Yeah.” Said Pimiento, though he cared not about the technician’s problems.
“You know how to get it started?” Fewks called. On hearing Pimiento’s affirmative reply, Fewks said, “OK, I’ll be monitoring you from the darkroom.”
Down the narrow passage Pimiento continued, until he reached a small, low-ceilinged room, a book-lined den furnished with a single padded chair and an ottoman. Our friend and identificiary (person or thing with which we identify) sat down in the chair and put his feet up on the ottoman. He picked up the slim volume lying on the little stand next to him and opened it without glancing at the title. He read aloud:
Amendations to the ruled lain down
Prior to my own beginning
Guarantee my right to make the sound
Drawn from a lottery winning
“That’s stupid.” He said just as an automaton emerged from the refrigerator.
“What are you doing in my house?” Said the mechanized anthropoid.
“I’m just leaving.” Pimiento replied mechanically. He began to search for a way out.
Fewks, eating an apricot as he monitored Pimiento’s session, answered the summons of the interoffice phone.
“How’s he doing down there, Fewks?” Asked Mr. Thorpe.
“Not as well as one would expect of a seasoned operative, Sir.”
“Well, send me a report when you’ve done.”
“Yes sir.” Fewks said through a mouthful of fruit.

Two Dots Hiragana

“I assume you can read Japanese, Bronco.” Thorpe began.
“Oh, Nihongo.” Pimiento said with authority. “Yes, of course.” He chuckled silently, with his eyes mostly.
Thorpe passed over a file folder. On its cover it bore the seventeen-stroke character for “demon.” Pimiento put his finger on the character.
“‘Kairan.’” He said confidently.
“Your new assignment.” Thorpe told him. “Put everything else on hold.”
“Everything?” Pimiento repeated, a note of hope sounding resonantly within.
“Well, naturally, you’ll have to maintain your cover as a postal worker, and we can’t allow your painting career to suffer. But, anything else you have on your desk at the moment—clear off. This is vitally important, Bronco.”
Pimiento waited for the hint of briefing that would make his reading of the file superfluous.
“Our old friends the Penumbrella Group are trying to establish contact with the Inner World.” Thorpe put his hands behind his head. There were sweat stains on his shirt. Pimiento swallowed in revulsion. “Apparently,” continued Thorpe, “They believe that one person made it out before the collapse of the Duality Door.”
“Interesting.” Pimiento tried to put a Connery-esque look of seriousness on his face.
“Of course, this is al contained in the case file there.” Thorpe put his arms down, to Pimiento’s relief, and pointed at the file lying in Pimiento’s lap. “I don’t want to detain you further. You’re to start on this immediately.”
Pimiento knew by Thorpe’s tone that the meeting was over. He stood and exited. Outside Thorpe’s office he flirted with Thorpe’s gay secretary Phillip, though he knew he would feel guilty afterwards for misleading the man. He couldn’t help it, however; he couldn’t stand the idea of disappointing anyone, especially if the person took flattering views of him.
“Do you need a dictionary?” Phillip mockingly asked, eyes rolling to the file.
“I might at that. A big one.” Pimiento winced internally.
Thorpe’s voice cut through the banter from the electronic device on Phillip’s desk.
“Bronco’s in a hurry, Phillip.”
“I guess I’d better go.” Pimiento smiled apologetically. Phillip flipped a “bird” at the intercom for Pimiento’s benefit.

The Ivy League Look

In direct opposition to every peer, contemporary, and friend he had in the universe, Dallas Pimiento loved dressing up in suit and tie. And not just any suit and tie. It had to be the look of the late 1950’s – early 1960’s, vaguely referred to as Ivy League. This look was defined by jackets that had narrow lapels and natural shoulders. Ties were narrow. Shirts were tucked in. Dallas Pimiento kept his hair short, no matter the blow to his “sex appeal.”
In preparing for his new assignment, Pimiento readied himself by dressing as meticulously as possible. He had gone to his private room in the Club, the informal annex to LPM headquarters, consulted a picture of John F. Kennedy, and begun to change, all the while listening to an album by Mantovani playing popular show tunes from forty years ago. As he was adjusting his bow tie in the full-length mirror (one framed in the same rich cherry the rest of the room was furnished in), a knock came at the door. Pimiento opened the door on a small, hairy man dressed in the uniform of a club servant.
“Message, sir.” Said the man. Pimiento was handed a small green envelope, the hallmark of a missive from Thorpe. His dismissed the servant and closed the door. Opening the envelope, he was stunned to read that Thorpe was ordering him to dress in rags! Pimiento sat down on the narrow bed (that he had never once used in all his time of enjoying the Club’s facilities) and stared, staggered, at the framed photograph of Cary Grant on the opposite wall. To dress like a , a… common slob! It was unthinkable!
That afternoon, back at his home in fragrant Jammiton, Pimiento dug out a picture of Eddie Vedder. No, it wouldn’t do! He must blend in with the crowd, but he had to maintain a level of individuality, else what good were his skills as a trained Procurement agent? The real problem, as he saw it, was that he was too old to dress like a relaxed and carefree fellow, concerned only with good times and the avoidance of pain. He looked at a t-shirt with an image of a dragon on it that he had had hidden away in a drawer. Could he really wear such a thing? He owned not a single pair of jeans. At last he decided that the only course of action was to appear as the anachronism he was, but as if he had fallen on hard times, or were suffering from some sort of mental aberration, one that caused him to make minor errors in grooming.

The Workings of Miso

Rectus Aimwell was summoned to the office of his employer, Molt Mannerly.
“Tell me about miso, Aimwell.” The portly man begged.
Aimwell cleared his throat and began.
“Miso is a salty paste made from fermented soybean pulp and juice. It comes in several traditional varieties, ranging from a hearty dark to a subtle light-colored version.”
“I’ve heard it has healthful properties.” Mannerly rubbed his nose thoughtfully.
“As miso contains active enzymes, it can be said to be a living thing, or at least, an ecosystem that supports life. This beneficial foundation is transferred to the person who eats it.”
“So it is edible?” Mannerly raised his eyebrows.
“Well, yes.” Aimwell partially smiled. “Traditionally, it is used as a soup stock, usually a soup consumed as a breakfast food, much like oatmeal is here. However, it can also be used in many recipes as a substitute for salt or starch.”
“Could the price of miso be manipulated?” Mannerly asked cagily.
“Possibly, but the manipulation of the price of the soybeans from which the miso is made would be more handy in achieving such a goal.”
“No, no soybeans. I got into them once before. Too many bad memories. No, I want you to look in on this miso business.”
“But what about my regular work?” Protested Aimwell.
“Don’t worry about that. Higdon can fill in for you.”
“Higdon…” Aimwell started to say something about one of his underlings.
“He can handle it. I want you to handle this.” Mannerly’s tone was not unkind. “Oh, and get me some miso. I want to try it.”
“OK.” Aimwell sighed.
“Get all the different kinds you can find. I want to see if we can use it like peanut butter. Maybe we can find a way to make it out of peanuts. ‘Miso substitute.’ I like that idea. I’ve got a good peanut connection in the old country.”
Out in the hall Aimwell began to wonder whether he would have to quit this job, too. He decided to make use of the assignment to look into other options for himself.




The Sacred Text

Purvis owned a copy of volume three of The Caviler’s Compendium, a collection of cartoons by a group of cartoonists known as Mosquitomato. This hefty book was a constant companion during his formative years. By the time he was fifteen he had internalized the book’s contents and the general thrust of the philosophy expressed within. Thereafter the book remained shelved in his room, but rarely looked at.
One spring day, when Purvis was in his eighteenth year, he was vacationing with his family in remote Glandular Island. There was on this tiny island only one store of any significant size, a store selling not only groceries, sunburn cream, and fishing tackle, but used books. On the family’s first trip to this store, to pick up something easily cooked in their rented house (Purvis’ parents having not realized how expensive eating out would be), Purvis discovered volumes one and two of The Caviler’s Compendium among the romance novels, men’s adventure series, and old Islander issues. While his parents farted along up and down every aisle grousing at the outrageous mark-up, Purvis pored over each book. By the time the folks were ready to make their purchases of ketchup and hamburger buns, Purvis had bonded with the two books as a child might with a pony bound for the gelatin factory.
“Can you loan me ten dollars?” Purvis asked his mother, the more nearly approachable of the two fonts of genetic material.
“Loan you?” She repeated incredulously.
“Then let me have ten dollars.” Purvis admitted with exasperation.
“For what?” His mother demanded.
Then Purvis had to show her the tattered volumes, explain their significance, and make plain his willingness to demand nothing more in the way of a souvenir from this shabby backwater.
“You don’t want a t-shirt with ‘Glandular Island’ on it?” She tried to tempt him, but Purvis was resolute.
In the end she gave in readily enough, as Purvis had known she would. In truth, even his father would have indulged him, and Purvis knew that as well. The only difference was that he had not wanted to see that judgmental eye passing over these two items so subjectively special to him. The next day, however, Purvis had neglected the pleasures of the beach in favor of the new reading material, much to his father’s annoyance.
“You don’t bring a book to the beach!” The man said.

High Praise

Dallas Pimiento had the privilege of having a couple of his paintings examined by the noted, professional artist, Sam Corker.
“And what is the title of this one?” Corker, his head involuntarily jerking up and to the right, as if writhing under the assault of some powerful stench, asked.
“Uh,” Pimiento hung fire while he tilted the painting forward to read the title scrawled on the back in marker. “The Coming Digital Singularity of All Human Consciousness.” He read with some embarrassment. His conceits, conjured up in the solitude of his studio, always seemed to him to fall flat in the face of strangers’ apparently more mature and practical viewpoints.
Corker made no comment. He only made a sound like “Mm-ahh-mm-hm-ah.” The he twisted up his head again and said, “Go back to the other one again.”
Pimiento obliged, shuffling the two paintings so that the other was visible.
“And what was this one?” Corker sounded as if he was speaking through a fog of fumes.
“My Oath Before the Ocean of Loss.” Pimiento repeated the title mechanically. This was not as much fun as he had thought it would be.
“Are these the only two you have?” Corker asked.
“At the moment. All of the others are in a storage unit across town.”
Corker looked about the small studio.
“How many do you have in the storage unit?” The noted, professional artist and amateur detective asked.
“I’ll say… it’s got to be over two hundred.”
“I’d like to see them. Sometime.” Corker added quickly. His voice was not unpleasant. Pimiento’s hopes remained buoyant. Yet what exactly he hoped for was nebulous in conception. On paper it might look like future plans for lottery winnings of the promises of authoritarian religions.
“Sure.” Said Pimiento, mentally stamping any such second meeting with Corker with a black mark of negation. Hopes remain buoyant when they carry no anchor.
“Well, let’s got outside for a minute.” Suggested Corker.
In the tiny, but well landscaped garden around the studio door Corker took a deep breath.
“What a charming spot.” He said.

The Big Stapler

“I’ll need a weapon.” Dallas Pimiento told the LPM’s armorer, Flip Shidwick.
“What kind of opposition do you foresee in your upcoming assignment?” Shidwick, a middle-aged man who had in his youth been a dashing, handsome devil, was looking through a microscope. He rose and tipped his glasses from the top of this head over his eyes.
“I really don’t know.” Replied Pimiento.
“Didn’t read your case file, did you?” Shidwick’s mouth flattened into a simper of superiority.
“I looked through it.” Pimiento protested feebly.
“Going to wing it as usual, I suppose.” Shidwick shook his head and started walking towards a padlocked cabinet. Pimiento followed. “Oh, Bronco, when will you ever learn?” The armorer removed a set of keys attached to a long, brass chain from his pocket. “When will you start planning ahead, plottin out your assignments so that you achieve some worthy and foreseeable end?” He fitted a key into the padlock.
Pimiento, who ten or fifteen years ago would have taken this admonishment without a word, was by now an experienced operative, rightly proud of his accomplishments. He bristled at Shidwick’s words.
“I have my own methods. And I haven’t done half-bad by them.” He argued.
“If you say so.” Shidwick opened the cabinet and began rummaging about inside. “But you could be and do so much more.”
Now Pimiento did remain silent. He knew better, but there was no point debating it with Shidwick. Pimiento’s philosophy, developed through years of both failure and success, was yet the natural maturation of a seed of a mindset he had always had with him.
Shidwick pulled an item out of the cabinet and handed it to Pimiento, then he turned back and began relocking the cabinet.
“Is this what I think it is?” Pimiento asked, turning the “weapon” over in his hand.
“The big stapler; that’s right.” Shidwick nodded. He turned back to Pimiento. “Now, if you’ll give me half and hour, I can show you some pointers.”
Pimiento didn’t know whether to feel insulted or privileged. He paid attention to Shidwick’s lecture, however.

Stolen Milk Crates

“Where did all these milk crates come from?” Dallas Pimiento’s father, visiting his son at the latter’s workshop and studio, asked.
“I found them behind various grocery stores around town.” Dallas answered truthfully.
“Found them?” Erskine Pimiento repeated.
“Yes, found them.”
“They belong to the dairy that has their name on them.” The elder Pimiento pointed with the toe of his Wee-Jun at the warning stamped into the plastic of one of the crates.
“Mm.” Dallas nodded, indicating that, although he had understood what had been said, he did not care.
“You’re going to get arrested again.” Erskine intoned. Later Dallas would mimic this sentence in a voice totally unlike his father’s, making the man sound old and out-of-touch with reality.
“I think not.” Dallas, although approximately thirty-six years old, yet risked his father’s wrath by “talking fancy” in this way.
Later that evening, while going through the thousands of pieces of paper stored in the milk crates, Pimiento heard a knock on the door to the studio.
“Who is it?!” He bellowed in a threatening voice.
“It’s your Daddy.” Came the reply.
Dallas opened the door and saw Erskine Pimiento standing there in the dusk holding a stack of cheap, wooden vegetable crates.
“What’s this.” Dallas asked.
Erskine stepped into the studio. “I’ve got some more in the truck.” He said, setting the dog-eared containers down on the rug.
“I don’t want these.” Dallas’ eyebrows lowered. “I don’t need them.”
“You ca use these to store your stuff and I’ll take the milk crates back to the store.” Erskine informed his son.
“First of all, the ‘store’ doesn’t own my milk crates.” Dallas began with the least of his objections to the scheme. “Second, I’m not going to keep my important papers in some ratty old bushel baskets.” He didn’t mention that there was a third item, one at odds with his father’s morals.
“Dallas, I don’t know where you get your ideas about right and wrong,” Erskine’s voice shook. “Because you didn’t get them from me.”

Wipe with a Sock

To amuse his young cousin Fletcher, Dallas Pimiento, aged sixteen, took a shit on the floor of one of the dressing rooms in a fancy department store at the local mall. The walls of the enclosure did not extend all the way to the floor so Fletcher was able to watch the turds as they fell. Fletcher then saw a sock, soiled from being used as toilet paper, follow Pimiento’s waste, then another. These socks had been taken into the dressing room for just this purpose. To the young Dallas, it had been this forethought that excited him more that the thrill of fecally desecrating the dressing room. He faithfully included this detail when later relating the incident.
Now, many years later, as he traveled by bus t the first needful stop on his assignment, he suddenly found himself imagining what it would be like to come across the turds on the rug, the new, unworn pair of socks beside them. Would he have been more upset if he had been an employee or some random customer? It was not that he regretted doing what he had done all of a sudden; it was that he now knew that he no longer found it funny, much less took pride in it. He decided to stop telling the story. Unless the situation really called for it.
The smell of vitamins caught his attention. The seat beside him was unoccupied, as were the two seats across the aisle. He cautiously peered behind him. There sat an old woman. She was just recapping the plastic container. Pimiento turned back around. She had probably done similar things to his little incident in her life, and most likely, they had been done recently, not out of spite, but out of confusion. This thought, accurate or not, left Pimiento in a sour mood.
When the bus stopped in Bruiserwood, Pimiento’s destination, he hopped up, grabbed his bag from the overhead rack, and headed down the aisle. He had no other luggage, something he was grateful for. The big stapler was in his bag, along with a couple of books, and, he remembered to his amazement as he stepped down onto the concrete, a pair of socks! He turned back to the bus and waited to see if the old woman was going to get off. His wait quickly turned into an ordeal. No one else got off. He said to hell with it. He walked across the street to a Waffle House. In the restroom he found that some thoughtless jerk had left shit smears on the toilet seat.
“My crime was victimless in comparison.” He thought.

Noodles

The noodles came in a deep plastic bowl. There was a printed band of red and yellow roosters and cows running about the outside rim of the bowl. I found the design amusing and the noodles hot, spicy, and delicious. I ignored the chopsticks, grabbing instead a fork.
“I like noodles.” I said aloud as I held my nose over the bowl.
“What you got in there besides noodles?” My companion asked.
“Seasoning.” I said it as if I were another man stating the name of some kind of rare, beloved kind of meat. My companion was just about to tell me how he had to have some meat in his food and exactly what kind he would prefer in his noodles, if he had been eating noodles, when a young guy burst in through the front door of the converted warehouse where we sat.
“Come outside everybody! Look at this!” He roared in his young guy’s voice.
Of course, several of those about me, including my companion, jumped up and ran out to see what was so compelling. To show whoever might be watching me that I was above such ease of influence, I remained where I was, eating my noodles, but watching all the same, looking at the backs of the heads of the people outside as they stared at whatever it was.
I must admit that, as the object of their observations seemed more than an immediately transient event, I bolted my noodles and rose to join the crowd. Pushing my way through with grunts of irritation, I reached the front line. I followed the upraised fingers of those about me to gaze at the fourth story of the building across the street where I saw a slim young woman in a sundress standing on the ledge, backing away from a man in a hat.
“You ignorant rabble!” I growled as I moved forward. I crossed the street and began climbing the face of the building.
“The power of the noodles sustains me.” I clearly remember thinking to myself. “Would that I had had an eggroll as well.” Was something I added later in talking to the newspapermen who wrote of my rescue of the girl.
“Did you get a look at her attacker?” One asked.
“No.” I said. “As soon as I confronted him he dived off the ledge as everyone saw and flew away using his arms as wings. What he had been eating, I cannot say. It may have been cold cereal.”


Side Two Already

“What more do you know about this Dallas Pimiento?” Agent Greene asked me.
I rubbed the corners of my mouth with thumb and forefinger.
“Nothing except what I’ve read.” I told him.
“Which is?” Greene’s partner Agent Lorne almost barked at me. I glared at him.
“I’m not going to sit here and paraphrase a whole book and any commentary I might have read regarding it.” I let him know exactly the score. I ‘m sure my eyes flashed. I never got to see the footage of my interview with the two agents, but the intensity of my eyeballing the agent must have been captured.
“Mr. Ash, we can keep you here indefinitely.” Lorne leaned on the back of a chair, bending towards me.
“That’s a lie.” I said calmly, as if pointing out a bug on a potato chip someone was about to eat. My calm in such a situation, of course, would depend on who was about to eat the bug.
“Mr. Ash,” Agent Greene interposed, “We have reached a crucial junction, a tipping point, if you will…”
“I won’t.” I interrupted.
“…in our investigation. With your help we can complete our work and help make our world a little more secure.”
“Your world, perhaps.” I said. “Mine is another story.”
“He thinks he can play games with us.” Lorne told his partner.
“I hate to do this, fellows.” I said as I stood up.
“Please remain seated.” Greene ordered.
“But you’ve left me with no choice.”
The two men tensed. Was I about to become violent?
Putting the fingertips of my left hand and right together, I made a snapping motion that brought the fingertips down into my palms but pushed the thumbs out, towards the two men. This is the sign of my Curse. As I made the sign, I said the magic word “library.”
Instantly all three of us disappeared. The only one to reappear, however, was I. I reappeared in a comfortable chair at the Athens-Clarke County Library.
“What happened to the two men?” My friend Speke’s son York asked me at the conclusion of a retelling of this story. I had no answer then, and have none now.

In Glistening Abandon

Bud Shank decided to save money by buying a case of honey buns from the grocery store instead of one at a time from the vending machine in the break room at work. True, they weren’t Mrs. Bakersby’s brand; they were labeled Happy Owl, but they were almost indistinguishable. Shank held one up to the florescent bulbs. The juice that the pastry was glazed with had puddle at the bottom of the wrapper. Just like Mrs. Bakersby’s. As he tore open the packaging, he wondered if perhaps there really had been a Mrs. Bakersby. Probably not. But with a name like that, you would almost have to get into the baking business. Before he threw away the wrapper he looked at the name of the company that manufactured Happy Owl brand honey buns. It was the Grosvenor Baking Company, located in the next town down the road, Giverton. How odd! A product from the area! And he was consuming it. He had forgotten who Mrs. Bakersby’s was manufactured by and where, though he had read the information often enough over his years at the lab. Shank glanced at the vending machine. He would have to wait until someone else bought one. Then he would read their discarded wrapper. He put that on his long-term mental memento slate.
He had just turned his attention to the book he was reading, Valuable Suggestions, when a girl who worked in the dung room approached him.
“Hi!” She said. “Excuse me, but do you know where Suth Demum is? Is he sick or…” She ended her question by rolling her hand around towards indefinite, infinite options.
Shank burped silently.
“I really don’t know.” He said.
“You’re good friends with him, aren’t you?” She asked.
Shank paused. He held the last two bites’ worth of honey bun in his right hand. With his left he held his book.
“Yeah.” He nodded, his tone indicating, “Yeah? So?”
“Well, I just wondered. I didn’t know if he was sick or anything.” She backed away. Shank saw her off until she turned around.
“Damned spy!” He thought. “I can’t trust anyone around here now.” He went back to his reading, but couldn’t concentrate. “At least I can still eat when paranoid.” He said to himself as he stuffed the remainder of his treat into his mouth.

Eleven Kisses

Ruth walked without significant tiring to the home of her aunt Vera, her mother’s sister. The house was twenty miles from the warehouse she had quitted, yet she made the trip in less than two hours. She rang the doorbell.
“Ruth!” Vera’s hand went to her throat in shock at the sight of her niece. “Where have you been?” She pulled Ruth inside. “Rebekeh had the police looking for you!”
“She did?” Ruth asked. Her face was red from the sun. Now that she was inside the air-conditioned house, she did feel the effects of her long, rapid walk. She felt somewhat weak. “I need to sit down.” She said.
“Sure, sit…” Vera began, but stopped when she noticed Ruth’s legs. “Ruth! Your legs! What happened?”
“A miracle, Aunt Vera.” Ruth’s eyes teared up.
“Praise Jesus!” Vera whispered.
“A medical miracle.” Ruth continued.
“Oh.” The older woman’s mouth turned down at the corners slightly.
“A wonderful doctor named Suth Demum grew my legs back.”
“Grew them back?” Vera repeated.
Ruth’s eyes closed. She opened them wearily.
“I’ll tell you all about it.” She said. “But can I get something to eat first?”
“Sure, Honey. You stay right there.” Vera started towards the kitchen.
“No, I’ll come with you. I’ll sit at the kitchen table.” Ruth stood up on quivering legs.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.” Ruth nodded.
“I need to call Rebekeh.” Vera said as she opened the refrigerator.
“I’ll call her if you want.” Ruth sat down. A large cat padded slowly into the kitchen. “Here, girl.” Ruth leaned over and patted her new left leg. It felt strangely firm and alive to her. The cat came to her.
“Her name is Bailey, right?” She asked.
“That’s right.” Vera picked up the phone and dialed.
Ruth picked up the cat and cradled it in her arms. She talked to it softly until Vera handed her the phone.
“Hello?” She said.
“Ruth?” Rebekeh’s voice was like an alarm clock. “Where in the world have you been?”

Thimble

“This is where it all starts to come together.” Thought Thimble. The organ music in her headphones mingled with the sounds of some commercial on ESPN to make a singular occurrence in the history of music. “I had always thought red beans and pintos were the same thing.”
“Technically,” read a reference book she consulted, “A pinto is a horse.”
“It’s a car, too.” Thimble’s mother told her in a rare display of surrender to the spirit of discussion.
“I smell pizza.” Said Thimble aloud, though she knew as soon as she had said it that she had exposed herself to ridicule.
“Well, there isn’t any.” Thimble’s mother let her know.
A fly smelled pizza, too. Perhaps Thimble’s mother smelled it as well, but she never let anyone know if she did. The fly—a big one—however, had no one he needed to confess his perceptions to. He merely began circling, trying to get a fix on the exact location of the food.
“It’s a fly!” Thimble squealed.
“It’s a big one!” Thimble’s mother added.
Funny how you can still make fun of the Irish.
“I’ll release the anti-fly.” Thimble headed for the activation control.
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“What?” Thimble demanded, so foolish was the objection.
“Oh, go ahead.”
The anti-fly, a small aircraft—tiny, really—zoomed out of its container high up on the wall. The noise it made was much louder than that the fly made. A trail of stinky gray smoke lingered in the air from its flight.
“Analyze that fly’s flight pattern.” Barked the commander on duty in the anti-fly.
“Doing it now.” Responded a data chief.
“I said now!” The commander rebarked.
“I am!” A drop of sweat started down the data chief’s forehead.
“There’s no time for your fumbling inadequacy!” The commander screamed. “Attack the fly now!” He ordered the boys at the grappling board.
“Blind, sir?” One questioned.
Thimble’s mother, tired of waiting, smashed both fly and anti-fly with what she still called the “flit.”

Button

The button bore a picture of Hillary Clinton. Dallas Pimiento pinned it to the lapel of what he called his “beatnik” coat, an off-the-rack sport jacket with natural shoulders.
“Shoulder pads were such a crazy concept.” Rectus Aimwell commented.
“Are you being ‘catty?’” Pimiento asked him, careful not to prick his finger as he completed the pinning procedure. “I ask because I don’t think I really know what ‘catty’ is.”
“No, that’s not catty.” Aimwell mused. “Besides, I don’t think I’m really the right type to be considered as ‘catty’ or to make catty statements.”
Pimiento held his cuffs carefully as he drew on the coat.
“Anyway,” continued Aimwell. “The natural shoulder is so much better.”
“I agree with you.” Pimiento said through his teeth as he checked his hair, especially the crown, in the full-length mirror with the carved frame. Fat-bellied cherubs and sober-faced businessmen tumbled about its circumference amid a tightly knotted array of morning glories.
“Are you afraid you’ll catch hell from the rednecks for wearing that button?” Aimwell asked.
“No more than you are when you wear your Captain Beefheart button.” Pimiento looked down at his shoes ruefully. Not only were they lace-ups, but they were dreadfully scuffed.
“Oh, I’ve changed it. Now I wear a Franz Kline button.” Aimwell folded his arms and leaned against the wall of the antechamber.
“It’s the same thing.” Pimiento told him.
“How do you figure?”
“Well, it’s someone the average redneck doesn’t know on sight. And when you explain it to them, they’ll think its nothing but rank pretension.”
“Well, it is, isn’t it?”
“Not if you really mean it. Not if you really believe in the person you wear on your button.”
“Do you really believe in Hillary Clinton?” Aimwell wanted to know.
Pimiento took a breath before he answered. “No. But I believe in what she stands for: pissing off Bush and his bible-thumping followers.”

Dreadnaught

“A dreadnaught, gentlemen, is a wonderful thing.” The elder Thorbuldsen, whose belly prohibited him from sitting any closer to the boardroom table, rubbed that belly with his fingertips. Nance Rallod stared intently at Thorbuldsen’s signet ring as Thorbuldsen rubbed.
“It’s an old-timey battleship, isn’t it?” Asked Peeny, another of the powerful executives seated around the table.
“‘Old-timey?’” Rallod thought contemptuously.
“That’s right, Mr. Peeny.” Thorbuldsen, who had built Ribbonomics into a statewide distribution overseer from a tiny part of the estate left to him by his father, pushed his buttocks luxuriously back into his chair, rocking back and forth, feeling his femoral sockets push satisfyingly against his skin. He had to lean forward to do this properly. He put his elbows and forearms on the table and pushed and rocked at will. More than one man at the table thought the fat old man was about to fart. Instead, as he continued to speak, he reached one hand down and performed some other action equally satisfying to him that the others could guess at, but were relieved they could not actually see.
“A dreadnaught is an old-timey battleship.” He gazed up at the ceiling. “It’s a wonderful thing.”
Nance Rollad glanced across at Dan Chuck. He raised his left eyebrow briefly in a display of bewilderment and disgust. Chuck, not so bold as Rallod, merely stared back wide-eyed. He was every bit as bewildered and disgusted. Rallod wanted to take out a piece of paper, write “BORING” on it, and hold it up to Chuck.
“Have you ever ridden on one?” Peeny asked his chief.
“I’m not that old, Mr. Peeny.” Thorbuldsen chuckled, pulling his lowered hand up to his nose and sniffing it. “No, but I have seen one in dry dock.” He looked about at the other men’s faces with a sudden flash of his full executive authority. “The Proud Lady!” He declared, slapping his ringed hand down on the tabletop. “A fine old ship.” He gazed up at the ceiling.
After a good ten seconds had passed in silence, Rallod spoke up.
“The Proud Lady was the dreadnaught’s name?” He asked.
“Hmm?” Thorbuldsen looked at Rallod. “Oh, yes, yes. The Proud Lady. The Proud Lady; a wonderful thing.”

Gum

Dallas Pimiento chewed the gum until the sugar in it had been extracted by his oral processes, then looked about for a place to discard it. Some people were gum chewers; some were not. He remembered watching a John Lennon concert on videotape during which Lennon chewed gum the whole time. The only reason Pimiento had put the gum in his mouth in the first place was because his breath was foul. It was always Fowl; normally he wouldn’t care. But he had to speak secretly with a lady and no other breath-freshening agents were at hand save this piece of wintergreen gum he had begged from the lady’s butler.
“Mrs. Staterk will see you now, sir.” The butler informed him.
“Thanks.” Pimiento nodded and rose from his seat. He looked about feverishly as he walked towards the door. Finally, mainly because the butler was right there, he jerked a piece of paper out of his pocket—lyrics to a song he was writing—and pushed the gum into it with his tongue. He stuffed the wadded-up back in his pocket just as the door was opened.
“Ah, Mr. Pimiento, it’s good to see you again.” Mrs. Staterk sat on a love seat before a glass-shelved serving trolley laden with a teapot, cups, and a platter of ugly, hard-looking cookies.
“Hi, Mrs. Staterk. Pimiento smiled as well as he could.
“Would you like some tea?” The lady asked. She was about ten years older than Pimiento and clad in a long satin robe adorned with stars. On her head was a tiara.
“Yes, please.” Pimiento almost begged. Perhaps hot tea would make his breath smell better and get this gum taste out of his mouth.
“Have a seat.” Mrs. Staterk invited as she poured a cup of tea. The steam rose in tiny arching dragons. She passed him his cup. “Will you have a biscuit as well?”
“No thank you. Trying to stay slim.” He patted his gut.
“How have you been?” Mrs. Staterk asked.
“Oh, fine.” Pimiento answered, the cup poised at his lips. He sipped carefully, knowing it was hot. Hmm, intriguing flavor. What was it? As the lady made some innocuous pleasantry, he sipped again, deeper this time, getting a deeper grasp on the flavor. When he realized what it was, he spat what was in his mouth back in the cup unceremoniously. “This has caffeine in it!” He charged.

Talisman

The shaman reached into his shirt and drew out a miniature trumpet attached to a chain around his neck. He spoke in the language of the People of the Forest, translated here for your benefit into substandard English.
“In echo room play you this thing.” He said, grinning. He was missing a few teeth, but no more so than most postal workers.
“What language is that?” Dallas Pimiento asked.
“Take this thing.” The old, half-naked man instructed. He unsnapped the chain and pulled it through the tiny thumbhole on the trumpet. “Take this thing.” He repeated, holding out the trumpet to Pimiento.
“I take this most graciously.” Said Pimiento. “At least, I hope I do.” He added, glancing back at Puluo, his guide.
“Now, give him your offering.” Puluo whispered.
Smiling constantly, Pimiento reached into his bag (his father would have disapproved his carrying it, even after seeing Indiana Jones carry one nearly identical to it) and pulled out a bag of chocolate-covered ants.
“Here.” He said, handing them over. “You’re sure he likes these things?” He asked Puluo without taking his eyes off the shaman or ceasing to smile.
“Who can say, boss?”
Later that evening, after he had returned to base camp, Pimiento radioed his wife.
“I got it.” He said, somewhat more emphatically than he intended and with an obvious undercurrent of irritation; bugs were swarming all around.
“Good.” Elsa replied, sounding every bit as irritated. In the background Pimiento could hear one of the children making a fuss. “Fox wants to talk to you.” His wife told him.
“Pop?” Seven-year-old Fox greeted Pimiento in a voice thick with tears.
“Hey, Fox. What’s wrong?”
“Mom won’t let me watch TV.” Came the answer.
“I’m sorry about that.” Pimiento tried to calm the boy down. After a being given a brief, distracting reiteration of the day’s events, Fox asked to hear the trumpet blown.
“I can’t blow it until I get back.” Pimiento told him. “I can’t blow it until I’m with you and your mother and your sister.”



Landscape Filter

Once blown, the trumpet talisman acted as a landscape filter, removing Pimiento and his family from the world of distractions and obstructions, and helping to boil this macro-narrative down to a more manageable condition. On the morning after blowing the trumpet in the stairwell of the UGA library, Pimiento awoke in a much more constricted and simplified universe. Of course, this simplification was somewhat subjective; the fact that his old fried Speke was now living downstairs from him did somewhat complicate matters. However, the fact that until now there had been no downstairs was proof enough that the shaman’s theories and Pimiento’s expectations had been fulfilled.
Pimiento found that he had been awakened by the sound of the trumpet being blown. How could this be? It was still being blown. He could hear it. He didn’t have it; the sound was coming from the next room. He leapt out of bed.
Fox was blowing through it.
“Fox!” Pimiento shouted. “No!” He hurried over and took it away from his son. Fox retreated. Pimiento looked anxiously at the horn. How much damage had the boy done? Better hid this thing away before the kids got hold of it again. As he stowed it in a hiding place in his room, Pimiento wondered if perhaps the so-called “magic” had run out, or if its manifestation was limited to himself alone. Either way, he hoped so. Things should be just the way he wanted them to be.
That was when he discovered Speke outside.
To Speke, an outsider to the workings of the trumpet, things were as they had always been. For Pimiento, they would take some familiarization.
“Hey, Buddy!” Speke greeted him.
“Hey.” Said Pimiento. “I didn’t know you got up so early.”
“Early? It’s noon!”
“Noon?” Pimiento puzzled. He walked over to the balcony on which Speke sat smoking a cigarette and reading the paper. The sky had an unusual dullness to it. The grounds below looked strange. Everything was in place, but… he could see everything. He could see the post office, the mall, his grandparents’ old house, even though he was standing on the balcony of Speke’s apartment. That in itself was strange, because Speke lived ten miles away.
“The trumpet changed me.” Said Pimiento aloud, to Speke’s amusement.

Ethos of the Fragrant

The spy, Brenda Lamb, splashed a handful of cologne about her face and neck. She hummed as she splashed. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, watching her, was Remiz Abanjo, her roommate.
“Why are you using cologne?” Remiz asked Brenda.
“I like to smell good.” Brenda told her. “And, in my business, it’s often advantageous to engender positive feelings in others through scent.”
“I understand that.” Remiz was peevish. “But why cologne?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why not perfume?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Perfume is for women; cologne is for men.”
Brenda, in the act of checking her teeth, ceased doing this and turned to Remiz with a smile. She picked up the bottle from which she had anointed herself.
“Smell this.” She said.
Remiz did so.
“It smells good.” Remiz said. The scent was a complex bouquet containing hints of kerosene, pine straw, horse manure, overripe pears, and baby shampoo, among other things.
“So what’s the problem?” Brenda demanded, taking back the bottle and making certain the top was secure; that bottle had cost her seventy-five dollars.
“It says ‘cologne’ on the label.” Remiz pointed.
Brenda looked at the label. The name of the fragrance was Gail.
“So?” She was amused.
“So, cologne is for men!” Remiz was emphatic. She turned and put the plug in the tub.
“And you think that because the word ‘cologne’ in on the label, this scent is intended for men only and that a woman who wears it is… what? A criminal?”
Remiz had turned on the water.
“You’re going against the manufacturer’s recommen-dations.” Remiz said lamely.
Brenda did not laugh. She wanted to splash some of the cologne on her roommate, such was her irritation at Remiz’ obtuseness, but the stuff was just too expensive.

Vegetative Anomalies

“Well, Paul, what sort of vegetable anomalies do you have for us today?” Mason Fling asked Paul Funebre on camera, prompting one of the assistant directors of Rural Science Now to hiss at the director, “He said it wrong again!”
As the director signaled that he too had witnessed the mangling of the show segment’s title, on the elaborate set the action continued.
“Well, the first thing we have today,” Funebre began, moving to a table covered with various items, “Is the mosquitomato.”
In at least one household in the Oglethorpe-Clarke-Oconee county nexus, someone reacted strongly to the name of that first item.
“Harry, this is Buck. Something has just happened.”
“What?” Harry glanced at the clock irritably. It wasn’t a charitable hour to be calling.
“Someone is using the Mosquitomato name without permission, and applying it to an actual vegetable.” Buck’s eyes went back to the TV. Funebre and Fling had moved on the something else. It looked like a corncob shaped like a fish, or was it a fish with kernels of corn instead of scales? He listened while Harry talked, then answered him,
“I don’t know, some kind of tomato. I didn’t hang around watching it. It was enough to know they were abusing the name.”
They talked a minute more before concluding the call. Buck hung up the phone and returned to the TV. He was still in his pajamas. He sipped his coffee and wondered how best to proceed with his grievance.
On TV Fling thanked Funebre cheerfully and looked into the camera as the director of the program cut to a commercial.
“Mason,” The director called over the loudspeaker, “The segment is called ‘Vegetative Anomalies,’ not ‘vegetable.’”
“Did I say that wrong again? I’m sorry.” Fling snapped his fingers at a girl who rushed over and brought him an ashtray. She held it while Fling sucked on a cigarette as fast and hard as he could.
“See you, Mason.” Paul Funebre waved at the show’s host as he pushed the rolling table off the set.
“Sure.” Fling winked at the farmer for whom he was doing a big favor.

Floating Stick Man

“We shall follow the Floating Stick Man!” Will Gummion declaimed in a voice quavering with both age and the burden of authority.
“A kind of madness has come over him.” No-Leg Mule said to his three companions.
“It is the madness of a return to childish play.” Apjohn agreed.
“I experienced that once.” Said the last to speak of the trio. His name was Scuddo. “I had dropped some acid.”
The three stood at the rear of the crowd that faced Gummion. As the old man continued to orate, Apjohn jerked his head and led his companions on to the next group of people, this one smaller and standing before a display of gleaming white kitchen appliances.
“Let’s keep moving.” Scuddo urged.
“Wait.” Begged Apjohn.
A man on the platform with the appliances called out in a deep voice, “Who would like to come up here and demonstrate the voluminous storage area of the Retromede model 800 refrigerator?”
“Do it, No-Leg.” Hissed Scuddo.
“You do it.” No-Leg returned.
“Yeah, Scuddo. Go up and…” Apjohn started to say, but it was too late. Someone else, an older man, had already ascended the steps to the platform.
“Come right up, sir.” Said the appliance man. “Can I get your name, sir?”
“Stan Ignerbus.” The volunteer replied.
“Alright, Stan, I’m going to ask you to step inside the all-new Retromede model 800 refrigerator.” The pitchman started to lead his volunteer to the refrigerator.
“Step inside?” Ignerbus repeated warily.
“Don’t worry, sir. You see, we have an air hole cut into this display unit.”
“Won’t the cold air come out?”
“You’re very sharp, Stan. But this unit is for demonstration purposes only.” He opened the door and took Ignerbus by the elbow, steering him inside. A sour look was on the man’s face as the door was shut upon him.
“What do you think, Stan?” The appliance man asked.
“The Floating Stick Man is our icon!” Ignerbus called out.
“Listen to the man in the box, folks.” The appliance man turned to the crowd and pointed.

Louse of Collections

After I had hit upon the idea of contaminating the group’s ice water with tiny worms, I felt justified in taking a break. There seemed to be no available rest chamber, so I climbed to the roof where I met Dallas Pimiento for the first time. He was standing at the railing looking down on the movements of the artificial elephants below. As I kicked at some of the pea gravel on the roof he turned and saw me.
“Hi.” He said.
“Hello.” I returned. He was about the same height as I, but thinner. He wore an outfit that I might have worn, could I but afford such vintage wear. I was wearing my lab coat and fake eyeglasses. After glancing back at the activity below, he looked back at me, studying my attire.
“You work in the lab here?” He asked.
“Sometimes.” I answered. I meant to say nothing more, but relented, from what perception of empathy between us I cannot say. “I own the building.” I said.
His eyebrows raised slightly.
“You’re Lance Ash?” He asked.
“Yes.”
His foot, which had been propped up on the rail, came down. Pimiento looked me over top to bottom and back up to my face again. Of course, I immediately wondered if he was appraising me as a potential sexual companion. I am always flattered by such perusals whether they come from a woman or a man, but no; he was apparently judging if he could take me in a fight.
“I imagined you’d be taller.” He said.
“More hulking?” I joked.
“Perhaps.” His eyes were suddenly cold, like a freeze-frame of the instant before the bull charges.
“Who are you?” I asked, since he was being so rude.
“I’m Dallas Pimiento.” He told me.
“The hell you say.” I took off my glasses and put them away carefully in the side pocket of my coat before I charged him. I suppose he thought his big stapler would do something. I took it out of his hand before I tossed him over the roof. The tiny worms were unnecessary.

Toast Scrapings

Breakfast on the evening before the end of all human civilization consisted of tea and toast, traditional fare that went down well with those of us gathered for the meal. All of us, that is, except Norman, who complained.
“No meat?” He scowled.
“The human body isn’t designed to eat meat.” I addressed his concern.
“Ah,” Norman’s wife pounced. “You admit the human body is designed!”
I looked down at the table for a moment, mouth tightly compressed in an ironic smile. I looked up at my other mealtime companions, and then back at Norman and his wife. As she was about to say something like “You don’t have an answer to that, do you?” I pushed two buttons on a small panel beside me. Norman and his wife, whose name I never learned, dropped through sprung trapdoors down into something resembling their mystical, medieval hell.
“Would anyone like to join me up on the roof?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Lance.” Said one young man. “There’s a TV show—a really loud one—starting in five minutes that I’d like to watch.” He smiled. It was a joke.
I dramatically circled my finger above the button connected to his chair to show I got the joke, but didn’t think it was all that funny.
Everyone, as far as I remember, accompanied me to the roof. I carried two pieces of toast with me and a cup of tea. As we stepped up onto the roof we could hear the sound of the end of civilization. I calmly sipped my tea and ate my toast.
“How can you eat like that at a time like this?” Martha demanded. I do believe she was angry, as if the destruction in the distance was somehow my fault.
“Because I’m not upset.” I told her.
“Not upset? The Rolling Stones, the Paris Opera, General Mills, Stone Mountain, Napoleon’s tomb… Key West—all gone, and you’re not upset?” She began crying.
“I really don’t know what you want me to say.” I dusted my hands off. “I’m still alive. You’re still alive. Everyone in this building is still alive.”
“What good is it?” She sobbed.
“Larry, Jack,” I said to two of the guys in the party. “I’m a little tired: would you oblige me?” I pointed at Martha. They nodded, came forward, picked up the still-sobbing woman, and threw her off the roof.

Profusely Symmetrical

From out of his box came Hebnal, an insect-like creature with the head of a young man. He was red in color, though his legs were black.
“What’s all this about the end of human civilization?” He asked one of the secretaries.
“Oh, it’s just a little joke.” The woman paused in her typing to tell him.
“It doesn’t sound like a joke.” His eyebrows were lowered.
That evening Hebnal again emerged from his comfortable box. He stole down to the commissary, which was lit only by the glow of the vending machines. He had brought with him an illustrated book of myths. This he tossed onto one of the tables on his way to one of the vending machines. Although the pads on the ends of his feet were seemingly clumsy, he pulled a few coins out of his change purse easily enough. He bought a honey bun and a half-pint of milk.
Opening the book, The Secret Saxophone, more or less at random, he found himself staring at a detailed map of some bizarrely shaped land.
“What are you looking at?” I asked Hebnal as I entered the commissary. Was I disappointed that the six-legged fellow did not jump? No; I don’t like scaring people. Some think scaring people is funny; I don’t.
“Are you going to throw me off the roof if I answer incorrectly?” Hebnal asked, not looking up from his book.
“I doubt I could.” I said.
“I’m looking at this book of myths.” Hebnal held up the book’s cover to me.
“You belong in that book.” I said. I pulled out a chair and sat heavily down. It had been a long night. I was beginning to feel my age.
Hebnal opened his honey bun.
“Do you know how many calories are in those things?” I asked.
“No, and I don’t care.” He said with his mouth full.
I sighed.
Time to try a different tack.
I returned to the roof for the third time that day. It was raining, but in the distance one could still see the luminosity of the eternal television. It was growing. One day it would loom over this landscape like the sun itself. I was scared, and I did jump.


PART THREE

Duck’s Table as it is Today

Dry pinto beans spilled out of the jar Nick had so carelessly knocked over.
“Watch it, Nick.” Susan, drunk and married to a Mexican who lived across town, warned Nick as she wagged a finger.
Most of the beans were accounted for; either picked up immediately and put back in the jar, which fortunately did not break; or stepped on, cracked, and later swept up when the place was cleaned for the incoming tenants. But three of the beans had bounced under the nonfunctional radiator and forgotten.
Wrest, the largest of the beans, was the first to come to life. He looked about, disappointed at finding the beans accompanying him to be not from among his tribe. He prodded them with an umbrella he found until they each woke up.
“I’m Wrest.” He told them, prompting them to give him their names, Col and Dlanfy. “Seems we’re stuck together. Any objections to hanging around with a member of Bando tribe?” Wrest asked them.
“Don’t be so defensive.” Col growled. He found some shoes and put them on. “Dammit, these don’t fit.” He threw them across the floor.
“Yeah,” Dlanfy added. “After all, it’s Shagril tribe that everyone hates.”
“Is that what you are?” Wrest asked.
“Yeah, can’t you tell by my accent? You people are always making fun of how we talk.”
Col poked around in the refuse that lay all about them. “Can’t find any shoes that fit.” He complained.
“Hey pal,” Dlanfy called to him. “What tribe are you?”
“Fiskerson.” Col answered.
Wrest and Dlanfy looked at each other. They sucked their cheeks in.
“Fancy fancy.” Wrest said.
“We are indeed privileged.” Dlanfy drummed his fingers in the air.
“Oh, knock it off.” Col growled. “These will have to do.” He said as he drew on a battered pair of cowboy boots.
“Can’t go barefoot, can we, rich boy?” Dlanfy cracked.
“I’m not… Do I look rich to you?” Col demanded.
“Rich in education.” Wrest quipped.
The beans spent the remainder of the year hunting for the way outside.

A Selection of Orchestras

On the surface of the small moon, relaying biscuit orders from the hard-working men of This is Your Postal Service, was an automated unit contained in a building about as large as those old-fashioned photomat booths that people of my generation only barely remember.
“That reminds me of a photomat.” I told the precious young people with me.
“What’s a photomat?” One of the girls asked.
“A relic of the seventies.” Joked Will, dressed in his faded bell-bottomed jeans and his red t-shirt with the picture of a Chinese dragon on it.
“Now, now,” I reprimanded the boy gently. “Photomats provided employment for kids just like you who didn’t want to do manual labor in the sun.”
“Did you work in one?” Asked Sabrina, hottest of the barely college-aged youth.
“No, I bagged groceries.” I said. We walked closer to the relay unit. “I hear something.” I cocked my ear dramatically.
“Let’s investigate.” Urged Keith. He reminded me of myself at that age: ready to enter into the spirit of the game, the playacting, and totally oblivious to how most of the girls looked upon him as a creep. Those that didn’t see him that way were either repulsive to him or didn’t see him at all. He would have to learn, as I had, not to be so picky.
“Yes.” I said. Reluctantly, the group followed, knowing only that I had the keys to the lander in my pocket.
“Ten biscuits with sausage, five biscuits with steak, two biscuits with steak and egg, three biscuits with sausage and egg and cheese.” A robotic voice recited.
“It’s someone’s biscuits order!” I said, wildly, enthusias-tically.
“Duh.” Croaked a gawky girl.
“Look, Starling…” I snapped.
“Starla.” She corrected.
“Starla. No more of your wise-ass comments. That goes for all of you. I know you think this is boring, but it’s…” Another interruption, this time from a man inside the relay unit.
“What’s going on out here?” He demanded, coming to the window.
“I’m sorry.” I said. “I thought this unit was automated.”
“It is!” He barked, pointing a thumb at his chest.

Secluded Activity’s Boat

“Remind me to take two Motrin after we finish here.” I instructed one of the crab machines in the room.
“Yes sir.” The robotic servitor replied.
“I say, Lance,” Dr. Steinfeld interrupted his contemplation of his next move (we were playing chess) to ask me something. “Why do you say ‘Motrin’ and not ‘ibuprofen,’ when you never take the name brand, but rather the generic?” He moved his white bishop to b3.
“How do you know I never take the name brand?” I asked.
“I know how cheap you are. You’d never take the more expensive pill when you could get the cheaper generic.”
“I think you spy on me.”
“My dear chap, how could I?” He craved to know, rhetorically, of course.
After I had driven him to tip his king, I set out to determine how he was conducting his spying. I went to the window and, while the elderly PhD was examining some framed examples of my juvenilia, slipped through it to the outside.
“Sir, your Motrin!” The crab machine mentioned earlier called to me as I was nearly around the far corner of the abandoned church.
“Dammit.” I growled. I was forgetting things far too often lately. It was annoying to have to depend on artificial aids ot memory, but there really was no remedy for it. I had tried many times over the years to boost my failing short-term memory (long-term was no problem: I had full access to detailed files stretching back to the foundation of the ghost civilization on the island), the most successful of which was the mnemonic hat that dangled reminders in front of me. The shortcomings of this hat were revealed to me when it promoted false memories (the ways I thought certain movies should have ended, for example) as much as real ones, and by the inconvenience of wearing it at the theater.
I reentered the old church by the front door and went to the medicine cabinet. I put two of the painkillers in my mouth and swallowed them without water. If the mouth is sufficiently moist, there is no need to wash pills down with anything, I find. Grated nutmeg is another matter. In order to choke that stuff down it is vital that one use an ample amount of fluid. If the fluid is grape soda, there is the aided benefit of killing the horrible taste.

Felt Stratagem Still Lingers

A stalwart cheese of the old church, taken by its fingers to the fabled car lot of Davidson, fell apart at the mention of time’s inexorable passage.
“Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with him?” One of the tire disciples asked.
There was no one around to hear his query, however; the lot was deserted. Most were down at the river watching the Marsh King’s arrival, but a few, like Ray and I, were ascending staircases in ancient boarding houses, makeshift weapons in hand.
“I wish your friend Jerry was here instead of me.” Ray whispered.
“I thought you liked adventure. At least, that’s what you claimed when you answered the ad.” I whispered back.
“What?” He asked. I guess the old stairs were squeaking too much, or he just wasn’t a good listener.
“Never mind.” I hissed. I took a step more, then turned back to look at Ray. “And,” I said, making sure he could hear me. “Jerry isn’t my friend; he’s…”
“I know, I know, he’s ‘Toadsgoboad’s’ friend. But it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?” Ray must have been scared indeed to speak to me thus.
“You know what,” I began, not wanting to acknowledge the theory he had put forth. “I do wish I had a friend here. Someone I could rely on.”
“You don’t think you can rely on me?” Ray pretended to be hurt. I started to tell him what I really thought, but was stopped by the sudden appearance of Dallas Pimiento at the top of the stairs.
“What are you fellas doing?” He asked.
“A ghost!” Ray croaked.
“Dallas Pimiento!” I was staggered.
“Lance Ash!” Pimiento seemed genuinely happy and delightedly surprised to see me.
I gasped. “Are you a ghost?” I asked.
“That’s a good question.” He mused.
“Get him!” Ray bellowed and started charging up the stairs.
I struck Ray neatly on the top of his head with my big stapler.
“That looks familiar.” Pimiento commented.
“Hmm,” I looked down at Ray’s lifeless body tumbling to a halt half-way down the stairs. “A real friend is one you shouldn’t have to pay for.” I felt silly even as I said it.

Zombie Wings Lift Their Intended Passenger

The puppet selected for the task was Weaver Hade, a friendly chap, but one with a streak of melancholy that he tried to keep hidden, so friendly was he determined to be. He wore a bowler, a short, choppy moustache, and seemed to be forever clutching at his solar plexus.
“Do you like poetry?” I asked him.
Hade ineptly rubbed his chin. “That depends.” He said. “I like old-fashioned poetry, stuff that rhymes. What you might call ‘minor’ poetry.”
“Light verse?” I suggested.
“If you mean humorous verse, then no. I mean Eugene Field, Walter de la Mare, um…”
While he attempted to think of a third, I jumped in with,
“But those could be considered writers of light verse.”
“Yes, but…” Again he tried to come up with something to say.
“Do you like Housman?” I finally asked him what I had been meaning to ask all along. I had been reading A Shropshire Lad recently and wanted to talk about it.
“Yes, that’s the kind of thing. It’s not trivial, yet isn’t heavy-handed, either. And it feels like poetry to me when I read it.”
Someone, a teen-aged boy in the small audience, disrupted our conversation.
“This stinks!” I shouted.
“A low-brow.” Hade commented.
“What kind of puppet show is this?” The boy continued.
“Yeah, it’s boring!” Another of his kind added.
Dallas Pimiento stepped out of the informal wings of our little theater.
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave.” He ordered the youths.
“This is a public sidewalk.” A woman in her late thirties protested.
“You’re defending them?” I was stunned.
“I’m not defending anybody. I’m simply pointing out that this is a public place.” The woman, whom I immediately put down as a modern-day hippie, told me in a confident tone, one of moral superiority that I cannot stand.
During this exchange, Pimiento had remained in place before the stage.
“Hey, Dallas,” Hade hissed. “Move out of the way. I want to get a look at her.”
“You traitor.” I tried for a cheap, puppeteer’s laugh.
“She’s moderately attractive.” Said Hade poetically.

Fall Forward with Scrum’s Own Illusion

I bought a smart-looking case for Dallas Pimiento. I presented it to him over lunch.
“It’s very nice,” he said. “But what am I supposed to keep in it?”
“Whatever you like.” I told him.
“You’re not giving this to me out of guilt, are you?” He looked at me over the top of the opened case.
“Certainly not.” I put another pillow of ravioli in my mouth.
“Because you know you killed me.” Now I couldn’t see his face; he seemed totally concealed by his new case.
“Well, obviously I didn’t.” I retorted. He made no reply, so I went on, “Because no one comes back from the dead.” I looked down at the last of the food on my plate. I was already full, but felt compelled to finish. Would I make the right decision and stop now?
“You aren’t a ghost.” I insisted, shoving the plate away. I put out my hand and pushed on the upturned half of the case. It fell down revealing the absence of Dallas Pimiento.
“I guess it’s my case now.” I said aloud, scanning to the left and right of me without turning my head. One of the waiters came over to the table.
“Is everything alright, sir?” He asked.
“Did you happen to notice where my companion went?” I asked him.
“No sir.”
“OK.” I nodded shallowly. I asked for and received the bill, left the money and an imprecisely calculated tip on the table, and left the place, taking the case with me.
Outside in the still-too-cold-for-my-taste early spring air I hefted the case. It seemed a bit too heavy for what it contained, which was, after all, nothing. Had Pimiento slipped me a little parting gift? Crazily, I imagined that he had put his abandoned plate of food in there. What was he so upset about? In this new era it couldn’t possibly still be possible for a person to expect to hold onto corporeality with nothing more than some irresponsible fiction to his name. As I thought about that I wondered if it made any sense. I shook my head at my continuing folly and entered the park. I sat on a bench and opened the case.
“Give me a hand, will you?” Pimiento begged in a little voice.

A Paradox in Outflow

Even as I struggled to keep my eyes in focus, someone in the crowd emerging from the institution recognized me.
“Aren’t you Lance Ash?” The young woman asked.
“Yes.” I answered, tipping back my head like John Lennon in order to see my interlocutor more clearly.
She looked down at my shoes for some reason. Smiling, she shook her head slightly as she worked her way up my body, passing over the pubic region with no greater interest than the rest of me, thank the gods.
“I’ve only seen a photograph of you.” She said as she returned to my face.
“Oh yeah?” I glanced at my watch. Time was running out, but I could afford to waste a little more of it for a stranger who had knowledge of me from a secondary source.
“Yes, on the back of one of your books.” She set my heart galloping with these words.
“Which one?” I was eager to know. I would probably go home at once and reread it.
“Intricate Sardonic Roguries.” She told me slowly, wanting to get the title out correctly.
“Oh really? Well, good.” I could sense the waning of my interest now that she had said that much. Enough to know she had read it (or seen it). Too much to expect that she had loved it. What I really wanted was to hear her discuss it, but in addition to realizing that that was beyond all hope, I also didn’t have time. But then, I had to ask,
“Did you like it?”
“Yes, I did.” Her eyes, it seemed to me, drifted to the monument to Our War of Northern Aggression Dead just beyond me.
“Well, good. I’m glad.” I smiled by frowning and nodded once preparatory to moving on with my life. We each stepped away from the spot, as if repelled by surface tension. Well, not really, but that sounds psychically correct.
“See you.” I said from a distance.
“I wish I had a copy of it with me so you could autograph it.” She called.
I made a face of appreciation, repressed hilarity. I made it to my car and drove all the way home in an angry flutter, eager to get back and write something that had nothing to do with the encounter.

Knitted Pasteboard Factory

The lights inside the postal facility are pink. The official reason why they are pink is that this cuts down on glare, but the real reason is that the pink lights keep one subconsciously confused as to what the real time of day it is. True, this eternal dusk (or is it dawn?) encourages sleepiness, but is also deadens the spirit, something far more important to the hidden masters of the postal system.
After a long weekend of aesthetic indulgence (relatively speaking) it is hard for me to face those pink lights. What I nee to counteract them is caffeine, but I have give up that last drug addiction, the first whose sway I fell under, in the name of greater devotion of my religion/philosophy of Loath Procurement (or just plain Procurement). Even chocolate is denied me.
Instead of chocolate chips the cookies now contain nuggets of cork from the Cecil Taylor’s tree, which, as you much know by now, grows only on the small moon hanging in pseudonymous orbit in my room.
“That’s no moon; it’s a space station.” My elderly passenger asserts.
“Please, sir, will you stay out of the cockpit? Thank you.” I had to lead the old fellow back to his seat and give him the last cork nugget cookie. Maybe it would mollify him. After all, they excited me; mentally, that is. Physically, they did little more than get my emotions churning.
“The lights don’t look so pink from up here.” I commented to one of the orchard attendants.
“Red shift.” He explained.
“Ah.”
“Say, pal,” The man addressed me. “Why do you come all this way to get these cork nuggets? Why don’t you just buy them at your local grocery store?”
“I didn’t know I could get them at the store.” I was aghast. What a waste of gas!
“Sure. They’re packaged under the name ‘Zombie-O’s.’ They come in a black package.”
“In the bakery section?” I asked for confirmation.
“Yeah.”
I thanked the man and hopped back in my transport. I was back on the floor before I realized I had forgotten my passenger.

Disillusioned Reactionary

“Some have accused you of self-pity.” Dallas Pimiento, playing the part of a television interviewer for a show like 60 Minutes, put it to me.
“You mean in my work?” I asked.
“Yes.” Pimiento wore a gray, lightweight summer suit. He had let his hair grow out in the back into a collegiate DA, the first step on the road to corruption.
I sat back and mused on this accusation. Of course, in the edited version, as broadcast, it appeared that I mused for only a second. In reality, I took the rest of the afternoon off to wander about the grounds and contemplate what some had accused me of. Did I really present a self-pitying persona through my work? It was hard to countenance such a thing, in light of all the grand visions of triumph I had slopped out over the years. Down at the power plant on the edge of the known universe I bought a honey bun from a vending truck and protested complete, all-encompassing ignorance at the proprietor’s efforts at engaging me in a conversation about the NASCAR events of the previous day.
From my hotel room (provided by the producers of the program) I called Pimiento and told him that I thought I had the answer to his question.
“What question?” He asked groggily. Apparently he was unwinding the way journalists do.
“The one about my work displaying self-pity.”
“That wasn’t a question.” His words were slightly slurred. I heard the cynical laughter of his peers in the background.
“How do you figure?” I wanted him to see his error.
“I merely commented that some of your critics have accused you of self-pity, I didn’t frame it as a question.” I could hear the rustling of the pages of a notebook. He must have had the documentation right there, probably in the sweaty inner pocket of his lightweight summer suit.
“Oh.” I said. “Well, I have my response ready.”
“Good. We’ll meet you in the morning and take it up where we left off.”
“OK.”
“Oh, another thing. Wear the same thing you wore today.”
I agreed and hung up, wondering whom these critics were he mentioned. He hadn’t said anything the day before about them being critics.

Tony Tory and the Inner Weave

He knew little about playing drums. Certainly, he knew next to nothing about jazz drumming, yet he was credited as the drummer on Bean Thirsty’s 1975 release, Lock in to the Power. I went to the library to find out more about this odd figure in the history of recorded sound.
“Why don’t you just look him up on the internet?” Dallas Pimiento asked as we stepped out of the elevator on the seventh floor.
“I must wean myself off the internet.” I told my companion. He gave that response a comedic beat then asked me “Why,” as if this was a stupid idea of mine.
“Because the internet and television are becoming the same.” I explained.
“They already will have become, by the time the story of our adventure here is made public.”
I started to elaborate on my theory, but interrupted myself to demand, “Can ghosts see the future?”
Pimiento considered it.
“I don’t know.” He said.
I turned to the bookshelves. “Anyway,” I said, “This will be more fun. Who knows what we may find?”
Pimiento watched me hunt among the titles. “Do you know the call number you’re looking for?”
“No, I don’t even know that there is a specific book on this man.”
“Why don’t you use the catalog at the computer over there?” Pimiento pointed at a computer sitting on a desk.
“Too much work. I told you, I don’t really know what it is I’m looking for.”
“Then how will you find it?”
“That’s what the library is for. Finding stuff you didn’t know you were looking for.”
Pimiento sighed.
“What’s the man’s name?” He asked.
“Tony Tory.”
“Tony Tory.” He repeated, walking over to the catalog terminal.
As he searched, I continued to browse, moving generally in the direction I needed to go. After a few minutes he returned to me with a book on Bean Thirsty.
“It’s the closest thing I could find.” He said.
“Look what I found.” I said. I held up a Polaroid of a man standing next to a statue of Bugs Bunny that I had found inside a book on George Duke.

Enumerated Solicitude

The new headphones were appreciably louder than the old ones. They made it much easier for me to drown out the sound of the TV in the break room. After my recent campaign to lower the volume on the TV, someone from the clerk’s union had come in and permanently fixed the TV so that it could never be turned down; it could never be turned off; and it could never be switched to another channel. It stayed loud and on sports.
With the new headphones I was once again able to concentrate on my break time task of creating art. I was in the midst of doing so on this deafening Tuesday when Speke suddenly appeared in the seat opposite me. He didn’t bother apologizing for interrupting me in my real work of the evening as the others did before begging me to draw a picture of their dog or to help their child with a school project. Speke got immediately to what he wanted to say.
“I don’t see you much anymore.” He said.
I took off my headphones.
“Yeah.” I said. I made a pained expression.
“It’s your ghost friend, isn’t it? Been spending most of your time with him?”
“‘My ghost friend?’” I wrinkled my brow. I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Yes, your ghost friend.” Speke insisted. “I know all about him.”
I doubted that, and told Speke so.
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“Everybody knows.” He put my paranoia to work.
“I don’t spend ‘most’ of my time with him.” I countered.
“Well, every time I call you you’re not home.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.” I said. “I’ve been very busy lately.”
“What have you been up to?”
“I’m trying to get this new book done. It’s going to be a book of my paintings. I’m debating writing a story for each one. But I don’t know.”
“I think you should. I think writing is your strong suit.”
“Do you want to meet ‘my ghost friend?’” I asked Speke.
“Aren’t you the only person who can see him?” He sounded cynical.
“No, nor am I the only one who can hear him either.”

Domicile, Undeservedly

The sound of elephants trumpeting and stampeding to Tarzan’s aid suddenly blared from a small black gadget hanging from Jay’s personalized belt.
“Excuse me a minute.” He said, putting our religious discussion on hold and the gadget up to his ear.
“Truly this must be an important call.” I said to myself. But why, I asked, do I have to settle for merely telling myself? I pulled an emergency puppet, Sox Malter, not one of my favorites, but the only one I had on hand, from the pocket of my homemade slacks.
“I say, truly this must be an important call.” I repeated for Malter’s benefit.
“Why is that?” Malter asked as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and picked lint from his sleeves.
“Well, for one thing, he has interrupted our talk, which I really didn’t want to have in the first place, to take this ethereal summons. And for another, we have the matter of the special gadget on which he speaks to his Mysterious Caller. Is it not special indeed? It has games ones can play on it and not only does it allow one to be within the reach of the telephone at all times, once can receive pornographic pictures on it to share with workmates and giggle over.”
Malter replied with a shake of the head, “Truly you must be a bitter man.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re so contrary to this age you find yourself living in. It all offends you.”
“Well, I’d love to continue this discussion,” I said, “But it looks like Jay’s call is coming to an end.” I started to remove Malter from my hand.
“You’re doing to same thing to me that Jay did…” He was silenced as contact was broken. I stuffed him back in my pocket.
“Sorry about that, but that was God.” Jay said.
“Oh, and did he give you any pointers?” I asked.
“What was that?” Jay pointed to my pocket. “That’s a mighty big condom.”
I sighed.
“That was my version of the cell phone. It’s a highly advanced, sophisticated invention.”
“Oh yeah? Well, God said that even if you don’t believe in your heart, isn’t it better to just play along out of fear of the unknown?”

The Trash Greeters

Speke arrived at my studio about midnight. I was in the middle of working on a painting of three boys torturing a dog-man with puppets and cameras under the watchful eyes of three grown-up men. I put my brush in a container of water when he knocked and opened the door to him.
He entered carrying a cup of coffee and a CD.
“Where’s your ghost friend?” He asked as he took a seat on the sofa.
“He’s in that briefcase there.” I indicated the case I had bought for Dallas Pimiento. It lay on a chair next to the sofa. The case now bore several stickers that Pimiento had put on it.
“You’re kidding.” Speke said.
“No, I’m not. Are you ready?”
“Sure.”
I flipped the catches on the case and lifted the top. I reached in and grasped Pimiento’s hand. With a grunt on both our parts, he stepped into the studio.
“Thanks.” He said. He noted Speke almost immediately. He nodded at him. “Hello.” He said.
“Hello.” Speke returned the greeting.
“Dallas, this is Speke Osnerbrook; we’ve known each other for thirty years.” I introduced my old friend. They shook hands.
“I’m Dallas Pimiento. The ghost.” Pimiento added humorously.
“Your hand feels solid.” Speke told him.
“There’s a technical reason for that.” Pimiento glanced at me as if I could explain.
“It’s because you’re not technically dead.” I said.
“Yes, I am!” Pimiento snapped.
I smiled at Speke. “We won’t get into that now, OK?”
“OK.” Speke agreed.
Pimiento had to go along with that.
“It’s good to meet you.” He told Speke.
“You too.”
“Lance tells me you’re divorced.”
Speke smiled at me.
“We won’t get into that now, OK?”

Pathos of the Flagrant

Too bad the vending machine company hadn’t seen the advantages of stocking their coin-operated dispenser robots with fresh hot rice: I would have bought some. As it was I had to make do with rice from home and maple syrup-flavored doughnuts stolen from the supervisors’ office.
“Say, pal, I asked a passerby. “Do you think the TV is loud enough in here?” I sounded like a homeless drunk bumming change.
After my lunch break was over I returned to my place on the workroom floor. This was a three foot square painted in safety yellow in which I was to stand and pitch bricks of compressed human feces into the yawning furnace below the Omegasorter, a tall robot bolted to the floor. The Postal Service had fought for years to keep us from using gloves when handling the bricks; something to do with punishing us for sins committed in past lives, but luckily the union, in a rare display of… well, what’s the best antonym for lethargy? The union fought for our right to wear the gloves it provided to for us at a moderately discounted rate.
Fueling the Omegasorter was not my only job, no indeed. If it had been, my nights would have passed in a relatively benign, trance-like state. No, the other significant activity was clearing the jams of mail that occasionally built up. The Omegasorter could work thousands of pieces of mail of all sizes with its ten boom-like arms, but it could not clean out its own insides. “Lucky for us.” The union representative kept reminding us. So, I was alternately pitching crap into the machine’s mouth or climbing into its rectum, depending on which point of view you took.
Speke called to me from across the floor. He was standing in his own yellow square, doing the same thing for the Omegasorter he was shackled to that I was to mine.
“Hey!” He yelled.
“What?”
“I had a good time at your studio this weekend.”
“Good.” I yelled back. “I’m glad.”
“Dallas is a good guy.”
“Yeah.” I nodded, then turned back to my work. I pushed the play button on my antique CD player and let Alice Cooper soothe my so-called “spirit.”

Folding Chair

From where I sat the beans appeared to be jumping across the top of the TV. This was, I knew, merely an illusion caused by the heat rising from the back of the entertainment unit. In truth, the beans were walking ordinarily, shod in their soft-soled athletic shoes.
My antagonism towards TV extends to not being hooked up to cable, but not to denying myself the watching of recorded movies. On this occasion I was watching an old Woody Allen movie, A Funeral on Fifth Avenue. In it, Allen portrays Skip Rawley, a rich socialite who discovers he is adopted after the death of his mother. There are three funerals in the film, each one symbolic of the protagonist’s deeper insight into his own identity. I had just reached the second funeral, the one at which Sean Connery reads the moving eulogy to his and Allen’s mutual second cousin Daisy, when the beans stopped walking and began to rappel down the left side of the TV.
My son had left a foam-dart shooting toy gun on the sofa. I picked it up. Had it been on the floor across the room I would have been out of luck. I was too tired to move around much. The gun was loaded. I fired, not even bothering to pause the action on TV. Connery went ahead with his verbal abuse of Allen as they walked to their cars. I knocked at least three beans into oblivion with the first shot.
Their screaming started immediately. Tiny fists were shaken in my direction. I cocked the gun again. Years of throwing mail had given me a greater aim than I had had back in my schooldays, when a good aim might have made me more acceptable to the other kids. I say ‘kids,’ but really I mean boys. Girls don’t much care how far you can throw or how accurately. I blasted another couple of beans off the TV. My wife came into the room.
“What are you doing?” She wanted, nay, needed, to know.
“Shooting beans off the TV.” I said.
“Why, may I ask?”
“They’re interrupting my enjoyment of the film.” This was more words and more elaborately constructed than I would usually speak to her. Girls do care about that.
“What are you watching?”
I told her. “Do you want to join me?” I invited.
“No. Whiny Jews are not my idea of entertainment.” She declined.

Onometrics

Sometimes people ask me why I don’t paint real things, real people. My art is realistic, after a fashion, but to depict the outside world is boring to me. To Dallas Pimiento, however, it is not, apparently, for that is all he paints.
When Pimiento first started to paint, I told him upfront that there was no way he could share my studio. He might, in effect, be living with me, but there was no way he was going to paint with me. Those paintings of mythological subjects done by a dozen people in Java that each signs his name to? That has always been anathema to me. One man’s expression, that’s the way I see painting. I agree with the auteur theory, not only in cinema, but in all of art. Pimiento, therefore, took up space in a small room in the larger structure that houses my studio. I call my studio the Caboose; Pimiento called his the Tender.
I didn’t bother offering to give him any instruction or little hints. I thought that would be insulting. If he wanted me, he could ask. I had taught myself; I knew he could do the same. It surprised me, however, that I started seeing models and props being brought in. He was really going to go at this thing all the way.
“Are you using oils?” I asked Pimiento one day when I could no longer stand not knowing how things were going. I hadn’t even visited the Tender yet.
“No, acrylics.” He said.
“Good man.” I endorsed his plan.
It staggered me when one day I saw Speke heading into Pimiento’s studio. I had painted him as a cowboy using a photograph once, back when I was still learning and hadn’t settled on my cartoon-like style of pure fantasy. That Pimiento was going to paint Speke meant more than just a growing confidence on his part; it meant that they had established a friendship of their own, a third arm of a triangle. This irked me not a little. That, and my desire to see how Pimiento’s depiction of Speke looked led me to climb into the disused heating conduit and crawl through it to a vantage point high on the wall where I could spy on them both.
Was Pimiento really painting Speke in the nude? It was hard to see. He had so many crazy props in his tiny space I could only see a shoulder here, a kneecap there. Finally I got a good look at the canvas itself. What a relief it was to me to see just how crappy it was.

Pollywog’s Wonk from the Inaccessible Floor

Since Pimiento and Speke had fallen out with each other over the former’s inept and unflattering depiction of the latter, I felt it necessary to lay low for a while, hiding out from each in case one wanted me to take sides against the other. In pursuit of this goal, I took a little trip into the foothills of the Georgia mountains where I came across a farm that proudly advertised a large, mechanical sheep.
“Name’s Bodrum, Earl Bodrum.” The owner introduced himself as he put out a big, flat hand for me to shake.
“I’m Lance Ash.” I replied, bracing myself for the brutal grip and the seismic shake.
“Where’re you from?” Bodrum asked me as he led me to the corral wherein the sheep could be found.
“Just outside Athens.” I said. I usually said this. People knew Athens, but no Somaton.
“Very good. You think the dawgs gonna do it this year?”
“I don’t know.” I answered lamely. Oh, if I could only tell this stranger precisely how little I cared about the performance of any sporting team of any kind anywhere in the world.
“Think they’ll beat Tech?” He asked. Where was the damn sheep? I asked myself.
“I don’t know.” I said, more strongly this time. One more question and I will be forced to be rude.
“Here she is.” Bodrum pointed as we came within view of the corral. He didn’t charge for the opportunity to see the sheep; he used it as a gimmick to draw people in, hoping to sell them homemade preserves and fresh produce.
“What does it run on?” I asked as I looked over the fence.
“Hay, grass, regular sheep feed.”
“Amazing.” The sheep did little more than move about. Bodrum whistled, which brought the sheep to us. It put its head over the fence.
“You want to feed her?” Bodrum asked me. He pulled out a carrot from the pocket of his coat.
“Uh, sure.” I took the carrot and stuck it in nibbling range. The rubbery, prehensile lips and piano key teeth pulled it in. The sheep’s eyes were dead.
“Who made it?” I asked.
“I don’t really know. Been trying to find out for almost three months.”
It behooved me to purchase a jar of apple butter and a couple of tomatoes.

Pushing the Wheelbarrow

“Doesn’t your family miss you when you take off on such an extended, impromptu journey?” A female reader from Sweden asks in regard to my rather sudden evacuation of my native Somaton.
Indeed they do miss me. And I miss them. However, the demands of my identity are such that I must meet them as loyally as I do those of supplying my family with food, gasoline, and toys. Do not think that I completely abandoned my family during my trip. We stayed in constant contact. In fact, it was almost as constant and immediate a contact as that I enjoy with my readers around the world, like the delightful Swedish woman mentioned above who thoughtfully included a picture of her two dogs with her letter.
As I was passing through the replica Italian hamlet of Lucretia I received a communication from my wife Elsa.
“Lance?” Her face appeared on the dashboard screen.
“Yes?” I had a funnel cake on a paper plate in my lap when she called. I answered with a forkful of the treat in my hand.
“Are you eating while driving?” She demanded.
“You didn’t call to ask that.” I said as I put the piece in my mouth.
“Tell me you’re not eating while driving.”
“OK. I’m not.” I swallowed.
“Why would you eat while driving?”
“Because I’m hungry.”
“Why can’t you stop and eat? Have a nice picnic beside a mountain stream.”
“Elsa, what did you call for?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Her mouth was pursed in anger.
“You had to have something in mind besides…”
She hung up on me.
I so much wanted to drive the car off the side of the road, plunge down the mountain to certain death. That would show her. What held me back was the thought of completing this book and the idea that I could achieve the same ends by having he read it. I knew I would suffer for that in the long run, however, so I decided to be a good guy and call her back. When I finally succeeded in getting her on screen and talking, she told me what brats the children were.

Let’s Have a Parade

While I was gone Dallas Pimiento got into the puppets. He put one on each hand. The one on his left hand was Solomon Fowler, a gentleman from Rome. The one on his right was Sox Malter, whom we met earlier.
“Tonight on Orbital Transaction out topic is the stupidity of the average American.” Pimiento began. “With me is Medford Lincoln, a professor of philosophy at Bristlecone University.” He paused and looked at Fowler, to allow the latter to acknowledge his introduction.
Fowler looked at Pimiento uncertainly. He glanced at Malter, then turned back to Pimiento.
“Are you talking to me?” He asked.
“Yes, Professor Lincoln.” Pimiento chuckled indulgently.
“My name is Solomon Fowler.”
“He wants you to pretend.” Sox Malter explained.
“What do you mean?” Fowler asked.
“Pimiento’s doing some kind of play or skit. You see… well, like for instance,” Malter turned to Pimiento. “Who am I supposed to be?”
“Mr. Fishlung, don’t you know?” Pimiento’s chuckle was less indulgent, more pained this time.
“‘Fishlung?’” Malter repeated. “OK, got it. See, Solomon, I’m supposed to be somebody called Mr. Fishlung.”
“I don’t understand.” Fowler shook his head. “I don’t want to ‘do some kind of play or skit.’”
“Gentlemen,” Pimiento broke in. “This is Orbital Transaction, a weekly program covering current topics of interest to today’s intellectual.”
“On the radio?” Malter asked.
“On TV!” Pimiento pointed forward, towards you and I sitting in our comfortable place of observation.
Fowler looked in the direction indicated by Pimiento’s finger.
“I don’t see a TV.” He said.
“What about that TV camera?” Pimiento begged.
“What are you talking about? That’s a blank wall.”
“Can’t you just play along?” Pimiento whined through gritted teeth.
Malter sighed a sigh of enlightenment.
“Oh, I see.” He said. “You’ve mistaken us for that other kind of puppet.”

Frederick the Damager

Swinging her ponytail behind her like some unusually large fish lure, Minley Madison attracted nothing at all. She was running towards the small boat pulling away from the shore of the secret pond, trying to reach it before catching it would of a necessity involve her getting completely into the dark, cold water. Maybe, she had the luxury to think as she barreled forward in her out-of-shape way, I can only splash in up to my ankles. This thought remained with her even up to the point that she reached the water’s edge, by which time the small boat and its evil monkey pilot were nearing the center of the pond, so that she splashed in anyway, going so far as to soak herself up to the buds of her pre-pubescent breasts. As the monkey turned back at the sound of her displacement, she lumbered into a hole below the water and managed to soak herself completely after all.
“Aha, aha, aha!” The monkey, not described as evil for nothing, laughed in his unusual way.
“You do laugh in an unusual way.” His friend Mark later told him, after the monkey had related the above incident.
“How is it unusual?” The monkey demanded.
“Well, most people laugh like ‘ha, ha, ha.’ But you go ‘aha, aha, aha.” Mark explained.
“Maybe this is evidence of my great evil.” The monkey laughed, this time joined by Mark in his more traditional manner.
Together they continued to work on attaching the upturned boat to the bed of Mark’s truck.
“Hopefully this will keep us warm during the trip north.” Mark said idly as he turned the socket wrench.
“That’s the plan.” The monkey agreed. He held tightly onto the spar Mark was bolting to the truck’s frame.
Mark sniffed the air. “Hey,” he said. “We better go check on that girl.”
“You go check on her. I can’t bear the sight of her.” The monkey shuddered.
Mark laughed.
“Maybe you’re not so evil after all.” He said.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I’m the one that skinned her, remember.” He did not laugh, however. Nodding thoughtfully, Mark clambered out of the truck to turn the spit on which their meat was slowly cooking.

Wholesale Foodcloth Trust

No sense returning by the way I had come, I told myself. I already knew that route. So, as I stuffed the last bite of the next to last piece of pound cake in my mouth and took the very last piece from the plate, I headed out the back door of the high-ceilinged kitchen into what had once been Lady Shipfed’s herb garden.
There was a sundial in the center of the garden, but I couldn’t make any sense out of it. The watch on my wrist told me noon had just passed. Very important to keep up with the time. Days pass and one forget what that means exactly. Watching every hour plays hell with the enjoyment of one’s surroundings, but at least you get more done.
I passed though the tall hedge that surrounded the garden into the parade grounds, where the locals were holding some kind of festival. Folk art types and crafters had set up booths in which they displayed and sold every conceivable kind of crap. Some of the booths on the large field sold snacks. Luckily, I didn’t have to spend any money, having already stolen all I needed in the manor house. Nothing I saw among the booths or in the fat, sweaty crowd interested me. On the periphery were the couple of thousand cars that had brought everyone except me here that day. As I walked through the thinly graveled lot I happened to spy an automobile so distinctive that there could be only one in all my universe. I knew whom it belonged to. No one was in it. I glanced around. I didn’t see the fellow who owned the car. Tearing out a sheet of paper from one of the small notebooks I carry with at all times, I wrote the following note and left it under one of his wiper blades:
“Bobadil,
I was here today, but just missed you. One of these days we really must get together so that you can return the knife you stole from me.
Sincerely, Lance Ash”

I thought about letting the air out of his tires, but there were too many people about. It would have been wonderful to break into the fellow’s car and steal some stuff from him, but I knew there would be an alarm. As I tucked the note in place I glanced inside, hoping to see an envelope printed with his address or something that would give me a clue to his current situation. I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. The baby seat in the back gave me pause.

Hot Strips of Wood Soaked in Chemicals

The track led to a clearing among the trees wherein I found a small cottage. I say “found” even though, as my grandmother used to sharply retort, “it wasn’t lost!” Apparently, the “Greatest Generation” was unaware of the alternate uses of the word. Shall I say discovered it? That doesn’t sound right, since obviously it wasn’t unknown to the memory of man; there was smoke coming from the chimney and the sound of music. I just hoped there wasn’t a dog around.
The place appeared to have once been a typical peasant’s dwelling, the home of simple people dedicated to little more than maintaining a tidy home. It had been taken over by what the grandmother mentioned above might have called hippies, could she have brought herself to say the word. There was a van out front, but other than that, there was little that I could see that gave me that impression. It was more a feeling I got looking at the old place. Maybe it was the fact that the music I heard coming out of the open windows was the Cult album Love.
Aha, a skateboard, I thought as I got closer to the house. That confirms my suspicions. The way I estimated things, my car was somewhere one the other side of the surrounding forest. If I could just make it by this house, I would be back on the road in less than half an hour. As I passed by a window I heard a couple of the people inside, two guys, talking about something. I imagined them both with beards, each younger than I in years, but somehow older in their outlook, independence, and emotional development. I wished that I could be living in that house, growing a beard, involved in some kind of art uninterrupted by the demands of some wretched job. As I reached the safety of the track, which picked up again on the other side of the clearing, I reflected on what a waste I had made of my youth.
Only a few minutes later I came to another clearing, this one much smaller. In the middle of it was a man about my age dressed in a suit and tie. I nodded at him.
“Excuse me,” he said to me. “But do you know where this path leads?”
“To a small house not far from here, and beyond that to a parking lot behind a Dunkin Donuts.” I said.
“That’s what I needed to know. Thanks.” He continued on his way, towards the cottage. I imagined all kinds of scenarios resulting from this encounter as I walked the rest of the way through the woods.

Dust-Choked Room Beneath the Work Floor

The yard around the cottage was mostly white, sandy soil sparsely dotted with weeds. The man in the suit, Ralph Flinder, hoped there was no dog lurking about, as I had. Unlike me, however, Flinder made no effort to sneak by the house. He went straight to the back door and knocked. He wished the music wasn’t loud. He would like to be able to hear if a dog was approaching. As he waited, he reflected on what a taxing journey it had been to get here. He looked at the ugly, barren yard that held more machine parts and old tires than plants and wished he could make an easier living.
“Of course, that’s impossible.” He thought. “I never finished college.” He had a friend whom he had gone to high school with. This friend (Some friend! Flinder thought. We haven’t seen each other in over fifteen years!) had a PhD and was now some kind of executive with a hearing aid company. He was making millions just sitting on his ass. Meanwhile Flinder was walking though a goddamned forest to meet with his clients, two hippies ten years younger than he.
The door was opened by Troy. Travis stood just behind him. Liquor boxes full of comic books were stacked all about them.
“Ralph!” Troy beckoned the man in the suit inside. “Why didn’t you come to the front door?”
“I got mixed up and came by the wrong way.” Flinder explained.
“Hey, man.” Travis greeted Flinder.
“Well, that’s alright. You made it. Want anything to drink?” Troy led the way to the kitchen.
“That would be great.” Flinder replied. “Whatever you have.”
Troy handed him a bottled beer out of the refrigerator.
“Did you get the stuff?” Travis asked.
Flinder nodded in affirmation as he drank. He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out an envelope. He passed this over the Travis, who opened it and removed a stack of photographs. Troy moved next to him and looked at the pictures with him.
“Where did you get them?” Travis asked.
“More importantly, where is the sheep now?” Troy added.
“There’s something you need to know first.” Flinder began. “It’s not a ‘sheep’ at all. It’s a bronco.”




He Speaks with Fretless Bass Sounds

In the interest of maintaining sanity, I admit that one day death will claim me and there will be nothing for me after that final experience. However, in light of that grim terminus, I suppose it seems equally insane that I would waste so much of my precious time in the emotional hell that is the post office. I hate it, but in order to properly provide for my biological offspring (the poor man’s art) I have to keep coming back into this place where I am considered to be a second, or even third class participant. The privileges and rights that belong to the shirkers, the imbeciles, and the historically disadvantaged are not for me.
I returned to work full of happy dreams of fantastic, mythical mid-60’s television, all color and celebrity (when celebrity meant more than mere flash-in-the-pan notoriety and a cheap willingness to show one’s ass to the world’s shrinking collective sense of propriety); a tiny, jeweled box into which one might thrust one’s weeping-in-ecstasy eye. The pink lights and smell of diesel quickly dispelled these dreams. I’ll never find what I’m searching for, because it doesn’t exist.
On my lunch break I sit down to write. All I need is one sentence. Sometimes it comes easily, when I realize that the world is absurd and that I shouldn’t give a shit about anything. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all and I have to force it, resulting in opening sentences like the following one.
The two hippies were disconcerted to learn from Flinder that a stranger had just passed through their yard and that Flinder had not told them immediately about this stranger.
“What did he look like?” Troy asked Flinder.
“About my age, my height. He was wearing a suit, but not a very good one. He looked… rumpled. Sorry I didn’t tell you; I was too intent on delivering the photos.”
“No, it’s alright.” Troy told him. “I wonder who he is.”
Travis returned from a quick scout around the property.
“There’s nobody out there.” He said.
“Do you think somebody is out to disrupt your plans?” Flinder asked.
“Could be.” Troy replied. He stared at the ceiling, thinking hard.
“Maybe it was just some random guy, Troy.” Travis suggested.
“I’ve told you before, Travis. There are no such things as random events. And certainly not random people.”

An Appearance on the Noontime Radio Funhouse

Turning the rock over, Stalemont found the key, just as the big fellow had said. Stalemont dropped the rock back in place and stood up with a satisfying, bean soup fart.
“Charming.” Imelda scared him by commenting.
“Where the hell did you come from?” Stalement demanded after his initial squeal of surprise.
“From behind the big man’s back.” She smiled, delighted still at having gotten such a reaction from Stalemont.
Stalemont looked up at Dallas Pimiento.
“Just how many arms have you got, anyway?” He asked.
“More than I did a week ago.” Pimiento cryptically answered. He was smiling broadly, almost to the point of snickering. What did he have to be so mysteriously pleased about? If we examine him closer, sneaking up behind him with the omnipotent observer’s single eye, we see that ghost-like Pimiento has a multitude of arms, each housed in its own sleeve dependent from his black cardigan. Most bear puppets on their ends.
“I am Bronco.” Pimiento greeted me on my return.
“So am I.” I answered. “That is to say, I have the bronco. That’s why I need to get straight to work. Who knows how long it will last?”
“No, you don’t understand.” Pimiento shook his head. “I am Bronco. I am Bronco.”
“You’re ‘Bronco?’” I used my fingers in the air as quotation marks. “What does that mean?”
“I had forgotten.” Pimiento said. “‘Bronco’ is my alter ego, my secret name.”
“Is your past that dead to you?” I asked.
“I am dead.” He said calmly. For once I didn’t argue with him. It seemed to mean so much to him.
“If you say so.” I sighed. “But if you’re ‘Bronco,’ if that’s your alternate identity, that puts me in an odd position. You see, ‘bronco’ is a state of mind I get into.”
“Bronco is you and you are Lance.” Stalemont said to Pimiento, handing him the key.
“Now, let’s not get tacky.” I said. I looked behind Pimiento’s back. “Been into my puppets, have you?”

Selected Readings from Drinkers’ Protest

Louise took down the heavy ceramic crock from the shelf over the framed portrait of John Wayne.
“Careful.” Hans advised in his creaky voice.
“I’ve got it.” Louise assured him as she carefully descended from the chair.
“Well, let’s have a look.” Hans said, watching the old, but still girlish lady bring the crock over to the table at which he sat. He had no arms. He refused to let anyone feed him, however. He leaned his head over his plate and ate like a dog. Tonight he had been eating pound cake. The half-eaten hunk of cake lay before him. The crock soon sat beside Hans’ plate. Louise put her arm into it up to her elbow.
“It’s in here somewhere.” She said. Gray water sloshed over the sides of the crock as she fished around.
“I hope she can find it.” Dobson whispered to his accomplice.
The latter man, looking in the window alongside Dobson, did not reply. He clutched his hands together tightly. He could not afford to allow himself to relax. He had been promised so much in connection with this evening. When at last he and Dobson saw Louise withdraw a key from the crock, he poked Dobson in the shoulder and they moved together around the side of the little cottage.
“That’s interesting.” Hans admitted to Louise. “Haven’t seen an old-timey key like that in many a year.”
“What’s more interesting,” said Louise as she sat down. “Is what it goes to.”
“Really?” Hans didn’t sound interested. He sounded drunk and sleepy, which he was.
Dobson and his accomplice kicked open the door and entered, bandannas over their faces and stabbing weapons in their hands.
“Who are you?” Hans asked with slightly more interest in his voice than before.
“Never mind, armless one.” Dobson growled. “Hand over the key, old woman.”
“My name is Louise.” The old girl corrected the intruder. She stood up with the key in her hand, putting it slowly behind her back.
Hans got to his feet.
“I may be armless, but I can still fight!” He raised one foot precariously off the floor. Dobson’s companion threw a chair at Hans and knocked him down. “Get the key!” He hissed at Dobson. The latter advanced on Louise, his hands before him.

Slippers, Grinding

Money for the Club’s annual convention was due to be apportioned at the meeting of the financial committee on the Tuesday following Ned’s birthday. As Ned tied his third favorite bow tie around his neck he tried to put all anxious thoughts about either event out of his mind. After making final adjustments to the tie, he took a deep breath and said to himself in his head (in that voice we each have, the one that sounds like no other on Earth, without accent, without discernible timbre) “So what if I’m turning forty! So what if I’m not a member of the Club!”
Regardless of his non-membership, Ned planned on being there when the convention started. His uncle Franz had promised him a job at the hot dog concession. This would give him access to the grand hall where the speeches would be made. He might have to wear a substandard bow tie and maybe a funny hat, but it would be worth it. He would know how it felt to be in the presence of those great men.
His wife knocked on the door to the bathroom.
“Ned! Are you ready yet?” She bellowed.
“Yes!” He bellowed back.
“Then why aren’t you out here?”
He charged out of the bathroom with fire in his eyes.
“I’m almost forty!” He growled at her.
“You don’t act it!” She rebutted.
“And I shouldn’t have to take this kind of abuse!”
“You think you’re being abused?” She demanded to know with her cutting rhetoric. “I’m the one that has to spend her summer vacation watching cable while you sell hot dogs!”
“I already told you, you don’t have to come!” Ned hunted about for his keys. As he searched, he noted with satisfaction that his wife looked like an old feather pillow in her ill-fitting, ugly dress.
“I just might not.” She replied, but some of the heat was gone from her voice. Of course she would come. A crappy vacation was better than no vacation.
Ned found his keys under a torn-open package of panty liners.
“Are you ready to go?” He asked.
“I’ve been ready.”
Together they drove to Ned’s father’s funeral.

Out for Blood?

In the spirited chicken’s defense, the state legislature held hearings on the possibility of delaying wholesale slaughter until a replacement could be found. All that spring as Pimiento and I waited in dread for the brutal heat to arrive, we grew sicker and sicker of hearing nothing but news of these on-going hearings. With nothing better to do, Pimiento began an obscure program of self-improvement. I, who should have had plenty to occupy men, indulged myself by constructing a chicken mask. On the last day before summer began my wife went out to her bibliophiles’ support group, leaving my friend and me at home.
With his left hand Pimiento wrote out the alphabet. I was adjusting my mask in the mirror.
“How does this look?” We each asked the other at the same time. Then we laughed. I took the sheet of paper from Pimiento.
“You’ve just about got it.” I said. “Now try writing some spontaneous poetry with it.”
“So the chicken says.”
“Let that be the first line of your poem.” I called after Pimiento as he disappeared down the hall.
The doorbell rang. I answered it in my mask and the robe I customarily wear on Procurement holidays.
“Yes?” I asked the man in the stained overcoat.
“Dallas Pimiento live here?” He asked.
“Sort of. Why?”
“I’ve come to collect him.”
“Collect him?”
“Yes. You know, don’t you, that Pimiento is the legal property of the Loath Procurement Ministry?”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, come on. You’re wearing a diplodocus robe on Ansembourg Day. There’s no need to pretend with me.”
I sighed. “Wait here.” I told the man. “I’ll get him.”
Pimiento gave me his poem as a parting gift. I offered him the chicken mask in exchange, but he told me he would rather keep the key.

So Many Strange Ones

The factory made paper out of pigeon feathers. Invited for a tour of the facility, Rectus Aimwell discovered that he had an allergy to the feathers within a minute of stepping onto the processing floor.
“This happens sometimes.” The facility’s director reassured him calmly. He guided the watery-eyed Aimwell to a disused office where Aimwell’s condition continued to worsen.
“Now,” said the director, after he had locked the door. “Dr. Tennis, why don’t you tell me how to gain access to the hidden world?”
“What?” Aimwell asked. He was doubled over with stomach cramps. His nose was running copiously.
The director removed the chicken mask from his face.
“We know who you are.” He said.
“You’re not a chicken at all!” Aimwell choked.
“Tell me, Dr. Tennis!”
“My name is Aimwell! Rectus…” Aimwell fell off his chair onto the floor, writhing and gagging.
“We have the antidote, Dr. Tennis. Tell me the secret and we’ll administer it.”
Aimwell vaguely felt others in the room now, but he was too busy trying merely to breathe to note them clearly.
“He’s not going to die, is he?” One of the others asked.
“Don’t worry.” The director insisted. “We’ve calculated the feather particulates precisely.”
“I don’t know.” Another in the room was dubious. This last speaker approached the stricken man. “He’s turning blue.”
“Give him the antidote!” The former speaker shouted.
“There isn’t one! I just told him that to get the secret!”
“Jam a spoon in his mouth!”
“What spoon?”
Aimwell, or Dr. Tennis as he now reverted to calling himself, was giving his assailants the secret they so craved without their even being aware of it. Inside his mind he summoned forth from a quiet reading room a friend to come to his aid. In exiting the room this friend made use of the door.

Talk About Resting

Realistic war games, coupled with a steady diet of honey buns and fake baby carrots, were molding the agrophiles into tense, but mobile creatures capable of direct action upon whatever field the council chose to engage them. As Betty Freedslave, a custodian working in the building where the council was holding its meetings while the old Council Hall was being repaired, put it in a letter to her mother, “Apparently, these so-called agrophiles are tough little boogers. They going to be the salvation of the whole metropolitan area.” Many were those in that so-called metropolitan area that shared such sentiments, but, as is usually the case with the mutual hopes of more than two or three people, the future would never meet the expectations of the past.
For one thing, there was young Hickey, one of the creatures being so very carefully cultivated and funded. As the ultimate goal of his training was revealed to him, Hickey found it, and what he understood of the motivations behind it, unattractive as a way of life. He was not alone. Enough of the expensively created and maintained creatures proved to be reluctant, if not outright recalcitrant, to render the whole ineffectual for the uses that every line of their composition declared them to be fit for. Hickey remained the most public symbol of this subset of the new crop, however. He was never to be one of the leaders of any of the factions among the now-named Legumes Terribles, but often one of his widely reported comments would so exactly match everyone’s perceptions of the situation, that it was assumed that he spoke for all of his kind.
“That Hickey thinks he’s the big man, don’t he?” Muttered Alvin to one of his companions-in-drink down at the empty pool.
“He makes me sick.” Agreed another.
It was never known precisely how many individuals were in the group. Enough affirmative grunts and random commentary issued from them, however, for Alvin to find it necessary to bellow out “Shut up!” before making his fateful suggestion.
“If we all feel that way, then why don’t we do something about it?” He said.
It was then, when the polar bears had moved into the wastes to the west of the city in their annual hunt for ice, that the drunken ones went together to where Hickey was. They found him conducting an impromptu class in cloud watching. They removed him from his informal classroom and uprooted him.

Come to Me

“And that is where mechanical trees come from.” I ended my story.
“And where do you come from?” Asked one of the little finger puppets to whom I had been telling such wildly improbable tales.
“Oh, I come from Ireland.” I said wistfully.
“Come on!” My interlocutress’ neighbor brayed.
Irritated, I seized his head between my teeth and jerked him off my finger. His cries of terror (“I don’t want to go back into the void!” and the like) were abruptly halted as my naked finger underneath was exposed. The remaining puppets, at first horrified, and maybe a little outraged, at their colleague’s treatment, were soon transfixed by a new spectacle: the fleshy finger in their midst.
“Is it alive?” One of the obstreperous thumbs asked.
“Of course I’m alive!” The finger snapped.
A collective gasp issued from the nonet.
“Are you cold?”
“Are you in pain?”
“How can you see?”
“What’s your name?”
Every remaining puppet seemed to have a question for Fleshy, as they soon took to calling him, though he insisted his name was Maurice. I have only reprinted four of these questions here, however, because they make a nice rhythmic pattern in the middle of my story and an incomplete rhyme. Such stories as these are sometimes denigrated by my critics as being too short or boring or “without even a modicum of intelligibility,” as one notorious review claimed. Would that I could bite the heads of such dullards as I would an equally irritating finger puppet and send them into the void!
In the days that followed, Maurice became a fully accepted member of the group, though I’m sure that some, if not most, felt that he was an unsatisfying substitute for Brad, the missing puppet, who had been quite a character! The whole scene came apart quite suddenly and violently one day (which is better, I guess, than everybody just sort of slowly drifting apart) when my wife, sniffing the air, demanded to know what was that offensive odor? Zeroing in on the source of the stink, she snatched the sweaty, sticky puppets from my fingers and threw them in the wash.

Send off the Whistle

Close examination of the dilapidated barn yielded no clues concerning the car that had been found abandoned in Mrs. Haw’s backyard. Inspector Smedge and his men stepped warily through the high grass that surrounded the barn.
“Sure is snaky.” One of the junior operatives commented.
Smedge himself didn’t like it either. This scene reminded him of visiting obscure, elderly relatives as a child. It was a hot day in June and, except for the tramping of his team through the overgrown field, there was a stillness to the air that gave even the inspector the creeps. He gave it another minute, then pulled his men out.
Mrs. Haw was no help. She was probably the oldest person that any of them had ever seen. She lived alone in the big farmhouse and had been gradually losing her wits for as many years as Smedge had spent on the force. After dutifully informing the old woman that he was about to leave, Inspector Smedge emerged from the house and went to the mysterious vehicle.
“It’s the damndest car I ever saw, Inspector.” Said one of Smedge’s men as he approached.
“I never saw anything like it either.” Smedge agreed. It was tall and boxy like their conceptions of a London cab, but there was no obvious place for an engine. In the front of the car protruded a large head made of the same material as the rest of the body.
“Is that fiberglass?” Smedge asked, running his hand over the side.
“Inspector?” One of the operatives on the other side called. “Do you hear that?”
They had succeeded in opening one of the curiously placed doors, but not in discovering how one started the car. Smedge put his ear against the side. He could hear a faint rumbling, almost like the purr of a cat. Curious, he went to the odd head. The face on it appeared to sleeping. The eyes were closed.
“He looks like a wrestler, don’t he?” Charlie, near Smedge’s age, chuckled.
Smedge peered into the car’s face. He studied the shuttered eyes. He reached out and carefully took the edge of one of the eyelids between his fingers.
“I’ll be damned.” He said. Beneath the eyelid was a glistening eyeball.
At that moment a whistle sounded from the area of the old barn. The other eye opened of its own accord. Smedge jumped back. Both eyes looked out at the world with sublime mechanical indifference. The mouth below opened to emit a high-pitched, creaky answer to the whistle. The unseen anus in the back released a quart of chalky, odorless waste.

Fond of Singing

I told Speke that I was fond of singing, but he seemed not to hear me.
“What did you do today?” He asked.
I disguised my discontent at his dismissal of my “discord.”
“I alphabetized my LPs.” I answered blithely. It would only make it worse if I showed how hurt I was. I didn’t want sympathy; I wanted real appreciation, dammit!
“Why did you do that?” Speke followed up with.
“To make it easier to find stuff!” I exploded and, choking back a sob, rushed up the steps of the old castle to the armory. The old man I had met there earlier had not returned. I was glad, glad to be alone with the empty suits of armor and the heavily framed portrait of Lord Helmheitz, the titular master of Solfeggio Castle, though his bank might dispute that.
Later in the week I confessed to Dallas Pimiento that I was working on an album.
“What, of your amazing guitar solo (and I do mean solo) improvisation skills?” He asked while idly flipping through the pages of the October 1984 issue of GQ.
“No, of my singing and songwriting.” I answered, gingerly balancing my cup of hot herbal tea as I sat down.
He looked at me curiously, as if he thought I had burned myself with the tea and wondering why I wasn’t screaming in pain.
“Your singing and songwriting.” He said it with almost no emotional content, but I knew what dark feelings his words contained.
“I can sing, you know.” I put down my tea. It was much too hot to drink now.
“Sing something for me.” Pimiento urged. He put aside the magazine and sat erect, hands folded in his lap non-threateningly.
“OK.” I looked down, trying to think of something to sing. “A cappella, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“OK, uh…” It would be so much easier to sing with my guitar in accompaniment.
I began.
“Oh, I wept for the day. I filled my eyes with silly tears…”
Pimiento held up his hand.
“How can I put this?” He asked himself.

A Considerable Fortune

While Dallas Pimiento waited downstairs at the bar, I went up to the party underway at Retchedson’s apartment. Ostensibly the party was to commemorate the filling of Retchedson’s waterbed, an act that was performed during the party with many of the guests standing around the bed as it was filled. Most of them circulated in and out of the bedroom, while Retchedson himself remained by the bed, sipping a drink and watching to see that the hose didn’t fall out.
When I entered the apartment, I made a conscious decision to stay away from the bedroom, though good manners dictated that I should at least say hello to the host. I was more interested in Retchedson’s art collection. Everyone else was busy drinking and socializing while I made my way through the rooms, looking at all that my host’s walls had to offer. I had heard that he had bought one of my early paintings.
Many women tried to make conversation with me. While it was most satisfying to see women attired in actual dresses, and elegant ones at that, there was little point that I could see in talking to them. Where would it lead? I’m not going to cheat on my wife, and other than sex, what more could result? Finally, as I was exhausting the last of the art that I could find, a woman in glasses approached me.
“You seem intent on studying Donald’s collection.” She said.
“Yeah.” I answered as I had all the others.
“He has some good pieces.”
I glanced at her. She had a look of intelligence about her. You could hear it in her voice as well. I decided to open up a little.
“Yes. That one of the bipedal goat in the pantry is especially nice.”
“I must have missed that one.” She smiled. Did she think I was joking? “What did you think of the one over the waterbed?”
“I haven’t been in there yet.” I confessed. Maybe my painting was in the bedroom?
“You haven’t?” She seemed shocked. “You must see it. It’s amazing.” She turned to lead me there, but at that moment Retchedson emerged, weary but exultant.
“It is done!” He cried. Everyone applauded. “Break out the champagne!”
“Oh, well.” My new friend said resignedly. “Maybe some other time.”
“We can still go look.” I protested.
“That wouldn’t be very polite.” She said. “It’s champagne time.”
I stared at her glasses. Were they fake?

Interested in You Here

I returned to Dallas Pimiento. He was entertaining a crowd of people with a couple of the more stupid puppets. As they were all having such a good time, I sat at the other end of the bar and waited.
Before leaving Retchedson’s I had finally stolen into his bedroom and took a look over the newly filled bed. There was no painting of mine hung there. It was a picture of Mickey Mouse as a wheelchair-bound FDR with Minnie beside him in a burqa. If Retchedson did own one of my works, it was expertly hidden. I took out a pen from my pocket and stabbed a hole in the bed, a small one on the far side. I left hurriedly, without ever having made contact with the host.
Now I watched Pimiento, longing to stab a hole in him. I hated to leave things unresolved, but I had no patience and never did have any.
Someone—it may have been Pimiento, I don’t know—sneaked into the mechanical sheep’s enclosure and inserted a key into the sheep’s electrical rectum. I have heard various reports as to what happened then, but none of them seemed convincing to me. I know I’m supposed to be some kind of omniscient narrator, but in truth that only applies inside the boundaries of my universe (which is everything that I know or experience). My own theory is that the mechanical sheep, not actually ever having been intended to be understood as a sheep, but a bronco, was not fully activated until the key was inserted. It had been a rather dull creature, doing little more than eating and responding to a primitive summons. Now, fully activated, it was free to do all that it had been designed to do. One possible proof of this theory is that the sheep was discovered to be missing the next day. Bodrum put out ads and offered a reward, but no one ever found it.
When I got home I found that Pimiento had cleaned out the Tender, leaving me only a note. I started work immediately on something new.