Codename Prague (15 page)

The moon. The stars. Powerful blasts of catnip…

ACT I: When Cats Are Maddened by the Midnight Dance…During the first number, “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” the players flooded the stage, strutting, prancing, shadow-clawing, hitting low and high notes with varying degrees of success. They looked the same as always, just as they did BAR (Before After Reality)—ballerinas and Cooper Nielsens in tights and overdone cat makeup—with the exception of a giant TS Eliot robot and scores of vibrating Bolshevik scythes and giraffe cannons. Spawn armor encased the cats’ flesh as they attacked the robot and reduced it to a heap of molten shit. The Eliot killed a few of the players during the battle, and the audience clicked fingers as the Deceased’s stark red blood flowed across the stage into the orchestra pit, stifling the jovial blurts of tubas, saxophones and French horns.

Humans had been barred from stage acting long ago by FCR Law. The government never specified why. Nobody cared—except for a handful of out-of-work actors who found employment in the Theater of Postblanketyblank Life.

…The Naming of Cats. The Invitation to the Jellicle Ball. The Old Gumbie Cat. The Rum Tug Tugger.

The Ugly/Beauty monster whispered, “Rum Tug Tugger’s hogging the dance floor. He’s too much! He keeps sticking out his tongue. He’s, like, Dr Frank-N-Fürter or something.”

“Shh!” said the Truth/Untruth monster.

…Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer. Old Deuteronomy. The Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles.

…“What’s a Pollicle?”

“Shhhhhhhhhhh!”…

During intermission, the casino games and slots fired up and a janitorial crew hosed the gore off the stage. They had goat heads.

A
CT II: Why Will the Summer Day Delay—When Will Time Flow Away?…The Moments of Happiness. Gus: The Theater Cat. Growltiger’s Last Stand. Dr Moreau’s Vivisectional Romp (Recently Added Song & Flimflam/Scikungfi Dance) in which Mr Mistoffelees’ Machinic Assistant Removes his Facial Tissue with a Scalpel & Sprays Glistening Hairballs from a Gash in his Navel…

Macavity “The Master Criminal” Cat. It appeared only for a moment. It bore resemblance to an old glamrocker with teased mane, impossible eyeshadow, crotchrocket glitterslacks, Holy Diver chest hair, and throbbing erect tail. “
Achtung
, muthafuckaaaaaahs!” it bellowed, ejaculating from multiple orifices, and then disappeared in an explosion of dead rodents. A herd of pussycat-strippers sashayed onstage. They tore off fans and folds and fishnets of lingerie and performed a series of synchronized splits and contortions and sex acts while singing about the dastardliness of Macavity Cat.

Halfway through the number a stranger wandered onto the stage. Clearly not part of the show. No makeup, with ghostwhite skin in the carbuncular light of the theater. Medals that dinged like wind chimes hung from a black, skintight suit. A lean mustache punctuated the stranger’s overlip.

Bouncers retaliated with exigency. They leapt at the stranger from offstage, descended on the stranger from the rafters, lunged at the stranger from trap doors. The stranger dealt with each bouncer in turn, breaking backs, legs, necks with hammer-fast punches and kicks.

Suddenly the stranger was center stage. The music stopped. The pussycat-strippers stopped.

Silence.

Somebody said, “Is that Jean-Claude Van Damme?”

“Where did Macavity go?” the stranger asked the audience in an affected accent. “I empathize deeply with this character.”

“Psst,” said a voice from the foot of the main aisle. “Get the hell off of there.
Sofort!
”

The stranger glanced down. “I’m not leaving this stage until I talk to Macavity Cat, Dr Teufelsdröchk.”

Dr Teufelsdröchk peered over his shoulder and giggled nervously at the audience. He eyeballed The Sans Merci and motioned it offstage with an exaggerated jerk of his head.

The Sans Merci folded arms across chest. Another bouncer attacked it. The Sans Merci clean-pressed the bouncer over its head and ripped him in half. Tic Tacs tinkled across the stage.

Fingers clicked.

Dr Teufelsdröchk rolled a program into a cone, put it to his mouth and said, “I knew it was a bad idea to take you to the theater. This is what I get for trying to enculture a friend. Grief. Absurdist grief.”

“Is this part of the show?” asked the Ugly/Beauty monster. The monster’s companion rolled a program into a cone, put it to its mouth and said, “No.”

Nobody spoke for a long time. The Sans Merci and Dr Teufelsdröchk stared defiantly at each other as the machinic cat people cleaned hands and feet with tongues and the spectators buried their noses in paperback novels with dynamic cover illustrations and large black dots on every page…Finally Macavity Cat slouched onstage gripping a bottle of Jim Beam by the neck. It had skinned Old Deuteronomy and draped the patriarch’s blood-spattered pelt over its shoulders.

“Hello,” said The Sans Merci. “I am The Sans Merci.”

Macavity took a swig of bourbon and slurred, “What’s a Sans Merci?”

Dramatic pause….….….“It is why I sojourn here,” the monster replied, “alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing.”

“I don’t know what that means,” said Macavity. “Look. Beat it, weirdo. We’re in the middle of a goddamn musical.”

The Sans Merci sucked in its cheeks. “I thought we might talk a little. I am a fine conversationalist. I can talk about anything. Incidentally I can
do
anything. I can write poems, and I can commit genocide. And I can do everything in between. Which is in fact
everything
, is it not? Existence as the gulf that divides a poem from a holocaust—that is my philosophy, my ideology, my ontology.”

“Are you retarded? Somebody get this retard off my stage!” Macavity gesticulated at the production manager. Helpless, the production manager gesticulated back at him from behind the curtain.

“He’s not disabled,” proclaimed Dr Teufelsdröchk. “He’s home schooled. Don’t be so hard on him. He’s only been alive for a few days.”

“My queen!” bellowed The Sans Merci.

“Queen my ass.” Macavity smashed the whiskey bottle against the head of Skimbleshanks, who was standing next to it. A computerized meow escaped Skimbleshanks and the cat hit the stage like a bag of snooker balls. Macavity pointed the jagged bottleneck at The Sans Merci and made a clumsy cutting motion.

Dr Teufelsdröchk said, “Leave him alone! You’re drunk!”

“Please desist, sir,” whispered the maestro to the doktor from the orchestra pit. “Never aggravate an actor.”

The audience turned the pages of their paperbacks from one black dot to another.

“Aggravate who? Macavity? He’s not the one you should worry about aggravating.”

“Your fly is open, sir.”

Dr Teufelsdröchk blushed and zipped up his pants.

“I’m going to the lavatory,” said the Ugly/Beauty monster, getting up from its seat. The Truth/Untruth monster stopped it.

“You’re an android,” it said. “Androids don’t use the lavatory.”

“I can use the lavatory if I want to. There are all kinds of things you can do in the lavatory.”

“Who calls a lavatory a lavatory? It’s the toilet. It’s the loo. It’s the water closet. It’s the vay-say. It’s the restroom. It’s the shitter. It’s the head…”

“…Please, Mr Macavity. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to be friends with you,” said The Sans Merci.

“Hurt me? Do you know how many nicknames I have? The Mystery Cat. The Not There Cat. The Un-Cat Cat. The Hidden Paw. The Napoleon of Crime. Sherlock’s Anus. The Sasquatch of Irk. Lord of the Chicken Dance. Diddly Do-Wrong. Eliot’s Id. Prufrock’s Suplex. Boo-Yah of the Waste Land. The Illusory Fairy Rebuke. The Screaming Raw Dog. Kiss of the Barbed Wire Fist. Bizarro Mike. Eurotrash Jack. Overbaked Vampire Penetration. Seventy-Thousand Grasshoppers’ Unfathomable Collective Hangnail Fury. The Well-Moistened Crabgrass Stomper…Get the picture? Nobody hurts a cunt with that many nicknames. I hurt you, see? I am the Way the World Ends. Not with a bang, not with a whimper—but with a cliché. Translation: Blow it out your ass.”

“No more swearing!” insisted the production director. “Especially the c-word. It’s misogynist!”

“Representation as critique,” epiphanized Codename Vincent Prague. The Anvil-in-Chief sat ten rows behind Dr Teufelsdröchk’s assistants’ monsters and remained one of the few spectators who had not surrogated boredom with a plotless, wordless novel. In his periphery, ushers did wind sprints up and down the aisles, timing themselves with stopwatches, passing off flashlights
like batons…

The Sans Merci made every effort to befriend Macavity Cat, even as Macavity stabbed at the android with the bottleneck. The scene transcended ridiculousness. Then, parrying a blow, The Sans Merci accidentally struck Macavity Cat on the forearm with the blade of its hand in such a way that Macavity’s elbow and wrist exploded and its radius and ulna shot out of the forearm in opposite directions like two possessed chopsticks. The radius skewered a stagehand. The ulna smashed a Tiffany lamp offstage.

Macavity’s forearm dangled from the ramparts of its elbow like a dirty sock. It ogled the hideous wound. It ogled The Sans Merci. “You think this means something?” it spat. “You think you’ve won? I don’t give a shit about this!”

“That’s the problem,” breathed The Sans Merci. “Apathy. An epidemic of apathy. And a deprivation of camaraderie.”

Dr Teufelsdröchk said, “Don’t fancify your discourse. Be more colloquial, i.e., instead of saying ‘a deprivation of camaraderie,’ say, ‘nobody likes one another.’ But it’s simply not true. People like people. Some do. I like you, for instance. I’m your comrade. I care about things, too.”

“You only care about two things: the perpetration of food, and your lack of acclaim for the perpetration of food. And you’re not my comrade. You’re my master. You’re my maker.”

“Master? Let’s not use that word. Let’s say I’m your benefactor, or your mentor. That sounds nicer, doesn’t it?”

An usher dropped a flashlight and slipped on it. The
faux pas
started a chain reaction. The usher toppled onto a spectator. The spectator dropped his novel and bumped into the spectator next to him. That spectator dropped her novel and bumped into her neighbor, who dropped his novel. And so on. A wave of novel dropping spread across the theater. It triggered other modes of asynchronous dropping. Musicians dropping instruments. Blackjack dealers dropping chips. Makeup technicians dropping hairdryers. And so on. The communal gaffe was brought to a conclusion by a possum dropping from the ceiling onto the stage between The Sans Merci and Macavity Cat. The possum wasn’t dead. It struggled for breath. The Sans Merci pitied it.

Shrugging off the pelt of Old Deuteronomy, Macavity Cat stomped on it. The possum deflated like a football.

…The Sans Merci skinned and defleshed Macavity Cat with makeshift Wermacht daggers that morphed from its fingernails.

The razorwire skeleton beneath Macavity’s hide was more anthropoid than human or feline. Two broad, membranous wings sprouted from its thorax. Macavity took flight, did three revolutions around the heavens of the theater to gain momentum, then kamikazed into The Sans Merci…They rolled across the stage and out of view. There was a backstage brawl that the theatergoers, lacking the energy or desire to retrieve their reading material from the floor, listened to with a modicum of curiosity. They clicked when Macavity’s skeleton was hurled back onto the stage in pieces. The Sans Merci reappeared. The overdecorated shirt of its uniform had been torn off, revealing an impressive hypermuscular torso that bled from deep scratches. A caricature of The Sans Merci’s own face had been tattooed onto its chest.

One piece of Macavity Cat was still alive. The Sans Merci finished the player in a feat of extreme ekphrasis…

Until now, Codename Prague had more or less enjoyed the play-that-wasn’t-a-play-within-the-play, even if it didn’t make sense. Just being at the theater again felt good. But the manner in which The Sans Merci had executed Macavity Cat riled him. He stood and shouted, “You can’t do that! That sort of ekphrasis isn’t ! I don’t care what country this is! You’re under arrest! I’m taking you to Amerika!”

“I’ve never been to Amerika!” said The Sans Merci.

“Leave him alone!” said Dr Teufelsdröchk.

“What’s an ekphrasis!” said the Beauty/Ugly monster.

“It’s a graphic, ultraviolent depiction of a visual work of reality!”” said an usher.

“That’s Vincent Prague!” said a nobody.

“Can I have your autograph!” said a nobody.

“
Anshlag!
” said the production manager.

“Do they have poets in Amerika!” said The Sans Merci.

“Poetry died with the modernists!” said an usher.

“The poet laureates of the postreal era are rappers, country music singers, car salesmen and people who make their mouths into big O-shapes!” said a percussionist. “Like this!” He made his mouth into an O-shape.

“Get your ass down here!” said Codename Prague.

“The institution that is now erroneously called the State generally classifies people only into two groups: citizens and aliens!” said The Sans Merci.

“What’s he talking about!” said a nobody.

“It’s a mnemonic flashback!” said Dr Teufelsdröchk. “It’s perfectly normal!
”

“The projection of memory is a symptom of insanity!” said a stagehand.

“Ditto!” said Bustopher Jones.

“Get your hands in the air!” said Codename Prague.

“Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?” said The Sans Merci.

“Don’t make me come up there and get you!” said Codename Prague.

“
Kumite!
” said The Sans Merci.

“Ekphrasis!” said Codename Prague. He stormed down the aisle.

“Ruuun!” said Dr Teufelsdröchk.

Everybody took the doktor seriously; cats and band members and spectators and ushers and even the production manager and his entourage ran out of the theater in a crazed exodus. The Sans Merci darted offstage. Codename Prague chased after him. Dr Teufelsdröchk turned and threw up his arms and shook his head at the empty theater. Empty except for two monsters, one of which waved at him.