Dr. Identity (20 page)

The digigraffiti didn’t entertain or educate me. It didn’t scare me either. All the screaming and bloodshed and hellfire just annoyed me. Good thing I slept like a corpse.

An old-fashioned duel between a centaur and a satyr unfolded in the section of wall before me. Vintage German warplanes flew across the orange sky in the background as the characters systematically paced away from each other, pivoted, and fired muskets. Both creatures missed their targets. But the centaur had heat vision: two flaming rivers of lava beamed out of its eyes and doused the satyr, who, as it caught fire and began to melt, stopped, dropped and rolled. The centaur put an end to this safety measure, though, galloping over and trampling its victim with gigantic granite hooves. As it was reduced to mulch, the satyr swore and complained that it hadn’t had enough time to live and accomplish its goals.

The centaur unleashed a piercing victory cry.

The Red Baron swooped out of a cloud and machinegunned the centaur in the back.

The centaur danced the dance of an electrified puppet as bullets riddled it. The Red Baron climbed back into the sky, came around and dropped a bomb on the cadaver. An excess of blood and body parts and internal organs blew apart. The Red Baron beeped its horn and headed for the horizon where a flaming green sun was setting. The sun turned out to be a colossal worm with dreadlocks and a beard that rose out of the horizon, opened its fanged mouth, and devoured the warplane. Storm clouds moved in. A burst of acid rain perforated and cooked the body of the worm, and when the rain passed, a tribe of vicious Amelia Bedelia androids emerged from a cave and fell on the worm, devouring its soft, molten flesh. They were followed by a pack of ligers that partook in the eating of the worm and also ate the Amelia Bedelias. Like the satyr, the worm bitched about its unfinished, soon-to-be-abbreviated life. The Amelia Bedelias, on the other hand, stubbornly refused to articulate any regrets…

As I continued to observe the narrative of mayhem, a feeling of anxiety and dread paralyzed me. The feeling was unrelated to the digigraffiti. I began to sweat and tremble, but I didn’t know why. Something was close. Something was about to happen. Not on the wall, but in real life. I started to hyperventilate.

She appeared. I stopped breathing altogether.

The digigraffiti froze.

She popped up between the bed and the wall as if out of a jack-in-the-box. She made a sharp, horrifying noise that defied representation as she sprang into view.

She was about a foot tall. She was entirely brown and appeared to be made of chocolate. In fact, she looked very much like a chocolate bunny, albeit an emaciated one. A closer inspection revealed she had a human structure. Her hairdo was a tall pointy affair topped off with a bun. Tiny pince-nez sat on the tip of her horned nose. The skin of her face had the texture of a brussel sprout and her lips were knotted into a mad sneer. She wore a little out-of-date buttondown shirt and a shawl over her bowed shoulders. Despite being brown and possibly edible, she looked more like a librarian than a bunny.

It was horrifying.

But I couldn’t move. And I couldn’t scream.

And I couldn’t look away.

My joints left me. My bones turned to iron, my internal organs to brick. Paralyzed, I lay in my bed like a statue that’s been pushed onto its side. My body felt so heavy…I began to sink into the mattress. The bunk bed made cracking sounds. Soon it would cave in and crush me. I prayed for it to happen.

The brown lady…She didn’t flinch and her expression never changed. She was as harmless as a popsicle on a stick. Yet I had never been so terrified. Tears poured out of my rotund eyes as I stared into the miniature, empty eyes of a monster who I sensed was an incarnation of the Devil. I recalled thinking how it all made sense. My mother-thing experienced demonic possession and had to be exorcised regularly. I figured it was my turn.

Then, suddenly, my body came back to me. The digigraffiti reanimated.

I sprung into a sitting position and cried for my mother-thing, pretending the brown lady wasn’t there but eyeing her just the same. The logical thing to do would have been to sprint to my mother-thing’s bedcube for refuge. But I stayed in my bed.

My mother-thing didn’t come. Eventually my lungs gave out. I stopped calling for her. I turned and faced the brown lady.

I said, “Go, please. Go away, please. Thusly.” I didn’t know what the latter word meant but my mother-thing always said it when she wanted something. I’m not sure she understood what the word meant either, but I liked saying it. And it assuaged my anxiety. I started to whisper it over and over. “Thusly. Thusly. Thusly. Thusly.”

The brown lady stared at me.

I remained in bed. Now I began to whisper-scream for my mother-thing. Unless she was sitting next to me, she wouldn’t have been able to hear me. But I whisper-screamed anyway.

…She stumbled into the bedcube.

The thick locks of her hair were fastened in tinfoil, copper wires, scrunchies, curlers and other bindings. Drunk and confused, she walked forward as if her knees had been unscrewed, falling into the walls and then bouncing erect. I watched her through a chink in the drop-drawer.

She opened the drop-drawer, tried to crawl inside and hit her head on an overhang. She somersaulted backwards across the bedcube…

The brown lady stared at me.

My mother-thing got up and staggered to the bed again. She climbed on without incident this time, her breasts spilling out of her nightgown. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Her breath stunk of Mad Dog.

I pointed at the brown lady.

“Oh.”

My mother-thing reached across the bed. One of her breasts spanked my cheek.

Snorting, she gripped the brown lady, pushed her down beneath the bed and gave her a crank, as if locking her into place. “There.” She kissed my forehead. She eased me into my pillow. “Goodnight, son.”

As she retreated from the bed, my eyes begged her to stay, but she didn’t see me, and then she was gone. I didn’t follow her.

I closed my eyes and fell sleep.

The next morning, I couldn’t look underneath the bed.

At breakfast I thanked my mother-thing for her assistance and asked why the brown lady was living in my room, how long she had been living there, and why I had never seen her before.

“Goodnight, son,” said my mother-thing, and passed out. The plate of soggy eggs and raw bacon she had been holding flew out of her hand and shattered against the ceiling…

I started sleeping on the top bunk, buried in a hill of toys and unable to turn onto my side under any circumstance. To this day I still can’t do it. The only position anybody will ever find me in a bed is on my back.

A few weeks later I found the courage to take a peek beneath my lower bunk. Nothing was there, of course.

I became a light sleeper. I woke up all the time in the middle of the night, even when I muted the digigrafitti. The slightest disturbance or vibration beckoned my consciousness. Sometimes my heartbeat was enough to rouse me. Once I woke from the sound of an ant stomping across the carpet of my bedcube.

The brown lady never returned. On occasion, however, I could see her silhouette in my periphery, lingering at my bedside…

18

BATTLE ROYAL – 3RD PERSON

Student-thing Happy Q. Squarebone was late again. He had been seeing his third string sorority girl’s ’gänger on the sly. Nothing got him off in bed like a good old-fashioned dirty mouth, and the android’s mouth was much dirtier than its owner’s. Sometimes he insisted that it actually eat dirt before sleeping with him. He liked to feed it a particular brand: Mr. Greenjeans’ Saleté Noire. He kept a big plastic bag of it underneath his bed. Whenever he got the itch, he hauled the bag out, dumped some onto a plate, arranged it into three sections (each representing a different serving of food), gave the ’gänger a fork, and ordered it to dine.

Today he fed the ’gänger too large a portion. It choked and died. He and a group of fratboys who had been observing the meal disposed of the body by carving it into thin slices and feeding it to an industrial paper shredder. The project took longer than expected. Now St. Squarebone faced another tardy point in his ENG 350CC (Novels Concerning Bullfrogs) course. He couldn’t afford the point. His professor was a reasonable and fair plaquedemic, but he had been tardy on five occasions this semester. He didn’t know the university had been shut down for the day because of a holocaust. As far as he knew, one more tardy ensured his death.

He wasn’t tardy yet, though. Class didn’t officially begin for twelve minutes. Corndog University’s building was twenty blocks ahead. He couldn’t make it there on time by foot. But a jetpack would suffice…

He kidney-punched an unsuspecting alaristrian who was bending over to tie his shoe. Gasping, the alaristrian fell forward. The student-thing clocked him in the back of the head with his bookbag, then kicked a hole in his face and stripped him of his jetpack.

The eggs of his brains gurgled onto the asphalt.

The streets, slideways and escalators were crowded, but nobody seemed to notice the crime. St. Squarebone strapped on the jetpack, secured his bookbag and prepared to lift off.

He felt the hairs on his neck singe…He got sucked backward off his feet…then projected forward in a flaming, airborn somersault…He crashed through the window of a cucumber café. The burlap arm of his jumpsuit was on fire. He thrust it into a pot of cucumber soup. The cashier screamed. The lights flashed on and off. St. Squarebone felt himself up. No broken bones. But he was bleeding, gouged, burnt…dizzy…He staggered to the window and peered outside.

Smoke billowing into a nightcrawler sky…Stampede of bodies aflame, bawling and flailing…In an above flyway, alaristrians crashed into each other, spun out of control and exploded…Across the street, a burning beast. The flames crackled and fumed. Smell of overcooked Spaghetti-Os…

Explosion…the flames rose in sweltering umbrellas…Implosion. The aircraft tried to stand up…It slumped over with a defeated groan. Sparks, electric ringlets. The dark fog of a dead thing…

Disoriented, the major domo of the cucumber café accused St. Squarebone of vandalism and insisted he pay for the window he crashed through and the soup he used to put the fire out on his arm.

St. Squarebone lurched outside…

Blast of hot air…His eyes began to bleed. He tripped over a skeleton and fell into the gutter…Faded in and out of consciousness, struggling to keep his vision in focus. Thick walls of smoke encased him.

Abraham Lincoln stepped through the smoke in slow motion…

He looked more like a cartoon than a real person—his skin and clothes luminesced and the contours of his body were uncannily sharp. He was adorned in proverbial Lincolnesque attire—top hat, eyeglasses, bow tie, long suit coat—with the addition of a Frank-N-Furter corset and kneehigh Electra boots. In one hand he carried a ray gun, in the other a chainsword.

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” he intoned.

Following Lincoln was a meek, hunched-over, Igorlike being who barked, “Quit quoting the President-thing.” He exhibited moon boots and a white, loose-fitting swashbuckler shirt that had been ripped and scorched in places. He had a nondescript face in spite of a classic Love-is-a-Battlefield hairdo.

St. Squarebone reached out to them…

Lincoln told the Igor to take cover. The Igor refused. They got into an argument. A flaming skeleton dashed by them. Lincoln clotheslined the skeleton and took off its skull.

Slowly the smoke cleared.

Lincoln and the Igor were still arguing when the army trudged onto the scene.

The army featured vigilantes, ninjas, bounty hunters, Pigs and Cerberus dogs as well as a host of rainforest creatures recruited by the Law to hunt down what the Media was currently calling BBP (Bliptown’s Bubonic Plaquepidemic). A troop of Voss Winkenweirder ghosts accompanied the horde. The movie star’s family had hired a Ouija diva to summon the ghost and then they had it cloned by a top-of-the-line parageneticist. Needless to say, the ghosts were in vengeful moods. A glittering fog of Papanazi pulsed overhead.

A Pig wearing a Victorian police commissioner’s hat put a bullhorn to its snout and announced something in Squealspeak.

The Igor dashed across the street and dove into the cucumber café. He landed head-first in a basket of fresh cucumbers.

Abraham Lincoln said, “
If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can. And I mean to keep doing so until the end.”

The members of the army exchanged confused glances. A Frankenstein monster grunted.

Lincoln shot the Pig-in-Chief with the ray gun. A cobalt radioluminescent aura formed around the Pig. Its body flashed and turned to shadow. The shadow blew away like grains of sand and its big hat fell on the ground.

Bolts of lightning erupted from the Papanazi stormcloud as the army attacked.

St. Squarebone crawled out of the gutter and fell back into the cucumber café. The major domo was reprimanding the Igor now, although when he saw St. Squarebone, he said, “I haven’t forgotten about you!”

Lincoln took out the first two lines of blitzkriegers with the ray gun, using the chainsword to repel ammunition fired on him. The third line was a morass of Winkenweirder ghosts. The gun had no effect on the holographic figures. They swarmed him like killer bees, trying to leap into his body and possess it. Lincoln slashed them in pieces with the chainsword. The pieces reformatted and came at him again. He ditched the ray gun. He leapt backwards, somersaulting in fasttime…In the air he pulled a poltergun out of one of the overfull de la Footwas in his pants. The poltergun operated in reverse, inhaling and disintegrating beyond-the-grave life forms.

By the time Lincoln landed on his feet, no ghosts remained…

“St. Squarebone?” the Igor said, pushing the café’s major domo aside. He checked his watch. “Why aren’t you in class?”