Classics Mutilated (31 page)

"I'll always wake up," Jim said. "I just don't know where."

He stepped away from them, leaning slightly to one side, his heels tapping on the ground. He could feel the lizard inside him, healing.

"Where are you going, man?"

Jim didn't answer. He kept walking.

Rue Beautreillis, Paris, France.

Saturday July 3, 1971.

The city slept, lights flickering like candles, with just a hint of violet dawn burning the horizon.

The raven alighted upon the balcony of the fourth-floor apartment, shook its slick black feathers, and waited.

The End, Beautiful Friend

Pokky Man

A Film by Vernor Hertzwig

By Marc Laidlaw

VERNOR HERTZWIG

FILMMAKER

In 2004 I was contacted by Digito of America to review some film footage they had acquired in litigation with the estate of a young Pokkypet Master named Hemlock Pyne. While I have occasionally played board games such as Parchesi, and various pen-and-paper role-playing games involving dwarves and wizards, in vain hopes of escaping the nightmare ordeals that infest my soul, I was hardly the target audience for the global phenomenon of Pokkypets. I knew only the bare lineaments of the young man's story—namely that he had been at one time considered the greatest captor of Pokkypets the world had ever known. Few of these rare yet paradoxically ubiquitous creatures had escaped being added to his collection. But he had turned against his fellow Trainers, who now hurled at him the sort of venom and resentment usually reserved for race traitors. The childish, even cartoonish aspects of the story were far from appealing to me, especially as spending time on a hundred or so hours of Pokkypet footage would mean delaying my then-unfunded cinematic paean to those dedicated paleoanthropologists who study human coprolites or fossil feces. But there was an element of treachery and tragedy that lured me to look more carefully at the life and last days of Hemlock Pyne, as well as the amount of money Digito was offering. I found the combination irresistible.

HEMLOCK PYNE

POKKY MASTER

To be a Pokky Captor was for me the highest calling—the highest calling! I never dreamed of wanting anything else. All through my childhood, I trained for it. It was a kind of warrior celebration ... a pokkybration, you might say, of the warrior spirit. I lived, ate, breathed, drank, even pooped the Pokky spirit. Yes, pooped. Because there is dignity in everything they do. When it comes to Pokkypets, there is no room for shame—not even in pooping. In a sense, I was no different from many, many other children who dream of being Pokky Captors. The only difference between me and you, children like you who might be watching this, is that I didn't give up on my dream. Maybe it's because I was such a loser in every other part of my life—yeah, imagine that, I know it's difficult, right?—but I managed to pull myself free of all those other bonds and throw myself completely into the world of Pokkypets. And I don't care who you are or where you are, but that is still possible today.

VERNOR HERTZWIG

Hemlock Pyne's natural enthusiasm connected him ineluctably with the childish world of Pokkypets—the world he never really escaped. The more I studied his footage, the more I saw a boy trapped inside a gawky man-child's body. It was no wonder to me that he had such difficulty relating to the demands of the adult world. In cleaving to his prejuvenile addictions, it was clear that Pyne hoped to escape his own decay, and for this reason threw himself completely into a world that seems on its face eternal and unchanging. The irony is that in pursuing a childish wonderland, he penetrated the barrier that protects our fragile grasp on sanity by keeping us from seeing too much of the void that underlines the lurid cartoons of corporate consumer culture, as they caper in a crazed dumbshow above the abyss.

PITER YALP

ACTOR 

I think we knew, and assumed Hemlock knew, where was this was probably heading. And it's hard to see a person you care for, a friend of many years, make the sorts of decisions he made that put him ever deeper into danger.  It didn't really help to know that it was all he cared for, that all this danger was justified in a way by passion, by love. And when you saw him light up from talking about it, it was hard to argue. He'd never had anything like that in his life. I mean, he'd been through a lot. Coming back to Pokkypets, sure it seemed childish at first, but he was so disconnected from everything anyway, we had to root for him, you know? But we still feared for him. He never did anything halfway, you know? Whenever he started anything, you always knew he was going to push it past any extreme you could imagine. So it was only sort of ... sort of a shock, but more of a dreaded confirmation, when we heard the news. I remember I was in the kitchen nuking some popcorn for dinner, and the kids were watching Pokkypets on, you know, the Pokkypets network ... and then our youngest said, "Look, it's Uncle Hemlock!" Which seemed weird at first because why would he be on their cartoon? But then I saw it was the Pokkypets Evening News, and even though the sound was turned up full, I found I couldn't hear what the anchorman was saying. I just stared at the picture of Hemlock they'd put up there ... the most famous shot of him, crouched in the Pokkymaze, letting an injured Chickapork out of a Poachyball ... and from the way the camera slowly zoomed back from the photo, I knew right then ... he wouldn't be coming back to us this time.

AUGUSTINE "GUST" MASTERS

SEAPLANE PILOT

I was friends with Hem for years and years, used to fly him out here to the Pokkymaze in midsummer, come and collect him before fall settled in; I'd check in from time to time to see how he was doing, and drop off the occasional supply. He was a special sort of guy, and there won't never be another like him. For one thing, he was fearless, as you can imagine you'd have to be to try living right here like he did. From where we're standing, you can watch the migratory routes of about 150 different types of Pokkypets; everything from the super common Pecksniffs, to the Gold-n-Silver Specials, to the uniques like Abyssoid, who comes up out of this here lake once a year for about thirty seconds at 8:37 a.m. on September 9, and only if the 9th happens to fall on a Tuesday.  Really it's a Captor's dream, or would be if it wasn't a preserve. Hem came out here every year, and never once tried to capture or collect a single one of the Pokkys ... in fact they were more likely to collect him. He got adopted by Chickapork to the extent you couldn't tell who belonged to who. Anyway ... he made it a point of pride that he never carried a Poachyball, that he was here to protect the Pokkypets, to prevent them from being collected. When he was young he was a heck of a Captor, but once he put that aside, that was it. He didn't try charming them with flutes or putting them to sleep; he didn't freeze or paralyze them with any of Professor Sequoia's Dust Infusion, or Thunderwhack a single one. He came out empty-handed, and tried to make a Pokky out of himself, I guess. If I had to pick one thing, I guess I'd say that right there was his undoing. That and Surlymon.

VERNOR HERTZWIG

What others saw as evidence of everything from low self-image to schizophrenia, was to Hemlock Pyne nothing more than a kind of dramatic stage lighting, necessary to cast an imposing shadow over a world that considered him but a small-time actor in a community theater production. It did not matter to the rest of the world that in this tawdry play, Hemlock Pyne had the leading role; but to Pyne himself, nothing else mattered. He had cast himself in the part of the renegade Captor who would give himself completely to his beloved Pets. That it was to be a tragic role, I suspect would not have stopped him. And while he seems to have had premonitions of his fate, he could have asked any number of those who spent their lives working in and around the Pokky Range, and have heard many predictions that would end up remarkably close to the eventual outcome. 

AUGUSTINE "GUST" MASTERS

Right here is where I came in for my usual rendezvous, at the appointed time, ready to take him out of here. At first I thought maybe I had the day wrong, because usually I'd expect to see him with all his gear packed up and waiting here on the shore. It was later in the year than he'd ever stayed, not our usual date, so I thought it was my mistake, and I went hollering up the hillside trail here toward his camp, figuring maybe he could use a hand packing up his stuff. But halfway up the trail here I got a really funny feeling ... not a nice feeling at all. I never travel here without a few extra Poachyballs, and some Coma Flakes—I mean, I'm no Hemlock, I come prepared for anything. And I was just freeing up a Poachyball in case I had to make an emergency capture, when I heard this grumbling in the brush off to the side of the trail, and very clearly I could hear a big old Pokkypet crawling around in there, just saying its name over and over again so there was no mistaking what I was up against. Going, "Surly ... Surly ..." Like that. Just a nasty old Pokky, saying its name like a warning ... that one bad note over and over again. 

Well, I don't mind saying it scared me, and forgot about trying to catch it, since that's a tough one to collect even if you're fully prepared. I didn't have any Pokkypets of my own to back me up. So I hightailed it back to the plane, and took off, just cold and sweatin', my guts full of ice water, you know. I tried to get Hemlock on his radio a couple times, but no answer there, and I was starting to believe we weren't going to get any more answers at all. I brought the plane in low over the maze, low as I could, and the way Hem would hide his tent in the trees I knew it would be hard to get a clear picture of what was going on there—but as I was flying over, the wind swept over pretty hard. Banked me a bit just as it was parting the trees around his campsite, and I got one clear look that I'll never forget. Right below me, the tent had been flattened so that the poles were sticking up out of it. Gear was scattered everywhere—clothes, camera equipment, pots and pans. And Hemlock was scattered everywhere too, in and around the tent. I hardly knew what I was seeing. His head staring up at me, on the other side of the site from his chest; an arm here, a leg there. I couldn't tell if his eyes were open, but I didn't see how they could be. I figured he had to be sleeping after an attack like that.  I knew I'd need help getting him out of there, so I banked into the wind and headed back to town.

HEMLOCK PYNE

10 DAYS BEFORE THE END

This is Surlymon. He's a very old Pokkypet, and we're just getting to know each other. I'm not usually here in the Pokkymaze this late in the year, but I had a little upset at the airport and decided I was not ready to leave my Pokky friends just yet to return to all the ... all the bullpoop and the hassle of ... of poopy humans back in the so-called real world. Just wasn't ready. So here I am, and some of my old friends seem to have moved on, and some new Pokkys have moved in. It's the migratory time, you see ... all a completely natural part of the Pokkypet cycle, and pretty exciting to see it in action. Not to say that there isn't danger here—there's plenty of it. But that's what keeps me going. Nobody else could do what I do ... give themselves to the protection of the Pokkypets the way I do. And they respect me for it. They know that I have the best of intentions ...  that I'd be one of them if I could. But in the meantime, I'm getting to know Surlymon here ... getting to earn his trust. Isn't that right, Surlymon? We're getting to know each other. Yes we are! Yes we are! Now ... hey ... HEY! Watch it! Back off! That is not cool, Surlymon. Not cool. Good, Pokky. Okay, good old Pokky. Yes, you're a good old boy, I know, I know. I love you. I love you. I'm sorry I had to snap at you like that. I'm Hemlock, okay? Hemlock! Hemlock! Hemlock! I love you. Hemlock loves you. Hemlock. Hemlock. ... Hemlock.

AUGUSTUS "JUSTICE" PEACE

HELICOPTER PILOT

I've known Gust for years, and through him I knew Hemlock Pyne, though we weren't what you'd call close. That day he came back with news about Hemlock's troubles, I could tell he'd seen something that nobody should see. Well, we called the Pokky Park Service, which is basically every other person around here, and we got three Captors together and I took us out in the chopper. We landed on Baldymon Hill, which overlooks the Pokkymaze, and they went on down there while I kept an eye on the chopper, ready to light out at a moment's notice. I could hear them when they caught up with the Surlymon. They had some pretty tough pets with 'em, but that sonofabitch was tough. It took all three Captors in full Pokkybattle, and each one of them used at least three Poachyballs, setting their own pets on the Surlymon. It took eight—eight!—Pokkypets to wear down that Surlymon. I think the final attack was a full-on Typhon-Crash-Mastery move, and then the Surlymon finally went into slumber. It was only then that the thing was vulnerable and they could poach it. I heard all this, mind; I didn't see any of it ... but I'll tell you, every time I heard that thing giving out its call, my blood ran cold. "Surly! Surly!" Well, I can't do it. It was a horrible sound, though. When they finally came crashing through the underbrush dragging the Poachyball, with their own poor little pets limping along behind, the Captors looked like they'd been involved in the struggle themselves ... and I don't mean psychically.

But then it was over to me and Gust. He led me back down the hill and into the maze, to the campsite, and there was Hemlock Pyne in a dozen pieces. It was weird and awful. Gust called his name a few times, trying to wake him up, because we didn't really realize the extent of it yet.... It was a sleep like nothing we'd ever seen. I had some Sudden Stir powder with me and I sprinkled it in his eyes, but it didn't do a thing. And I've never seen a Pokkypet or Captor yet who could sleep through that stuff. After a while we decided we'd best get him into town to the Pokky Clinic, so we gathered up the pieces. Filled four Poachyballs with the parts. That was all we had to carry him in.