Codename Prague

Codename Prague © 2010 by D. Harlan Wilson

All rights reserved

Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press

Bowie, MD

First Edition

Cover image: Brett Weldele

Book design: Jennifer Barnes

www.RawDogScreaming.com

Other Books by D. Harlan Wilson

Novels

Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia
Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria

Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance

Criticism

Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body

in Postcapitalist Science Fiction

Fiction Collections

The Kafka Effekt

Stranger on the Loose

Pseudo-City
They Had Goat Heads

QUOTES

Galveston, oh Galveston,

I still hear your sea waves crashing

while I watch the cannons flashing.

I clean my gun and dream of Galveston.

—Glenn Campbell, “Galveston”

Yellow man in Timbuktu—

color for both me and you.

Kung fu fighting, dancing queen,

tribal spaceman and all that’s in between.

—The Spice Girls, “Spice Up Your Life”

It’s a great day for genocide. (What’s that?)

That’s the day all the niggaz died.

They killed JFK in ’63.

So what the fuck you think they’ll do to me?

—Ice Cube, “When Will They Shoot?”

DEDICATION

For all the aborted and unrealized acronyms.

DEFINITIONS

daikaiju
(dah•gwhy•zhü)
Giant cinematic monster(s). Also denotes the genre of films featuring giant monsters. Common sobriquet: “The Tall Angry One Who Induces Hot Ubiquitous Gore.” Distinguished by alienation, loneliness and anger, even in large numbers.

ekphrasis (ek•fr
ә
•s
ә
s)
A graphic, ultraviolent depiction of a visual work of reality.

—The Amerikan Hemorrhage Dictionary of Scikungf
i

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

With the names of the original actors and reality studios in alphabetical order.

(Note: Incl. only players with vital speaking roles and guild cards.)

MEN & ALIENS

Administrator Wichita

Araby Manager 1

Araby Manager 2

Araby Manager 3

Araby Manager 4

Araby Manager 5

Araby Manager 6

Araby Manager 7

Beauty/Ugly

Bystander 1

Bystander 2

Bystander 3

Commodore Ronald Rabelais

Doktor Hans Reinhart

Doktor Hermann Teufelsdr
ˆ
ckh

Doktor Hermann Teufelsdr
ˆ
ckh
í
s Father

Doktor Ray B Flechsig

Flight Attendant (Amerika Slingpad)

Flight Attendant (Prague Slingpad)

Gentleman 1
Gentleman 2

Gentleman 3

HenrÌ Prague

Man in a Letter P Costume

Nobody 1
Nobody 2

Nobody 3

Percussionist

Production Manager of
Cats

Rardion (a.k.a.
ì
Mike
î
) the Bazaar Greeter

Salvador Dali

SAMSA 066

SAMSA 067

Stagehand

Truth/Untruth

Usher

Vincent Prague a.k.a. Vincent
ì
Codename
î
Prague

Vincent Prague a.k.a. Vincent
ì
Codename
î
Prague
í
s Father

MEN DRESSED AS WOMEN

Delilah Jive

Femme Fatale 1 (M
‰
dchen
ì
The Prague
î
Prague)

Femme Fatale 2 (Sindie Switch )

HYBRIDS, ANDROIDS & MONSTERS

Armand Dorleac

Beauty/Ugly Monster

Bouncer

Bustopher Jones

Donald Pleasence
W
¸
tendeswissenschaftlermunster
1
Donald Pleasence/Alien
W
¸
tendeswissenschaftlermunster 2

Hitler/Keats Hybrid +
Daikaiju
Monster a.k.a. The Sans Merci

James Cagney

James Joyce

(Macaulay) Culkin

Macavity Cat

Man with a Goat Head

Monster Peddler

Riddler Jim Carrey perf. CSI David Caruso

Scorcese Boy 1 (Niky Santoro)

Scorcese Boy 2 (Bill the Butcher)

Scorcese Boy 3 (Max Cady)

Scorcese Boy 4 (Tommy DeVito)

Scorcese Boy 5 (Francis Costello)

Scorcese Boy 6 (Travis Bickle)

Solomon Grundy Bruce Lee

Truth/Untruth Monster

Zero Punctuation Expobot

UNCLASSIFIABLE PLAYERS

The Nowhere Man

SETTINGS

Ch‚teau d
í
If, Brazil

City City, USAmerika

Hong Kong, China

Prague, Former Czech Republik

Introduction

by Steve Aylett

Certain memories become sacred. In D. Harlan Wilson’s case, it was the time he tripped and fell into an ancient liturgical drama, swearing point-blank into the face of a bishop long dead. He then wounded nineteen people while running amok in that antique realm, as the metal-clawed creature later known to history as “Spring-Heeled Jack.” Thus he knew paradise and lost it. Wilson is now as helpless before the dictates of his moods and whims as he was before the violent wormhole calamities of childhood. But that is unimportant. What matters is that he exists and that he was made aware of the fact before we were. Everyone has experienced the dismal waste of time that can be inflicted by those who wish us to know them before they know themselves. This is a crime for which Kermit the Frog has yet to be punished, unless you count the fact that he can’t stop moving his arms.

It is not unusual for the memory to condense into a single mythical moment the contingencies and practicalities of artistic inspiration. Wilson claims he decided to write his barbaric and erudite Scikungfi Trilogy while trying to inflate some sort of pool toy, an exercise at which he repeatedly failed until collapsing into tears, a pathetic sight for one and all. That crude vinyl icon of a camel, dented and lopsided, hung from his lap like every failure in his life. Wilson’s life can indeed be divided into two parts: before and after this sacramental defeat. It was a bankruptcy localized enough to be effective—effortlessly checkmated by a novelty plaything, what could he do but overcompensate, creating a mental yakuza in which he could demand massive respect? The accident riveted him to a public downfall like a voodoo chicken to the door of a grateful Catholic priest, who cooks the mascot for his happy family. The scornful gaze of Wilson’s friends as he let the flaccid toy slip from his slack hands transformed him into a constituted nature. He dreamed of a world in which his powers—those of the mind—are respected. Such a world does not as yet exist, but he can imagine one in the very mind that desires respect—thus creating a vortical involution resembling his inefficiently pursed lips during that initial washout of an afternoon.

We can surmise that this decision will be of capital importance—to say, in defiance of all, I Will Not Merely Be A Beaky Buffoon For You Bastards. Rather than a journey to the end of his misfortune, he invents a way out via a character who can make a blow to the face last a week. An altar of asphalt and sugar bulges from Wilson’s fireplace, embedded with femurs and vintage Vickers ammunition belts. He can immerse his books in concrete detail—coincidentally a fate the mob have had in mind for him since he crashed one of their meetings in a monster truck and leaned out to explain that the universe is “not motivated by obligation—where’s your Omerta now?” Such mad confidence within despair will bear grim fruit. It spies on its own inner life and discovers electric mischief elves pounding up eternal-repetition exit ramps aglow. To the right-thinking man these denote only psychosis, yet these are what Wilson offers to others in the guise of “supporting players.” Sure of possessing the ground spice created from exploding truth at supercompressed angles (actually the corner of someone else’s barn) and concerned only with being seen in this undertaking, he expects to be tolerated. If he looks at himself in this mirror, he sees the accelerated colors of his magically-clad transparencies, at vertices to each other and tagged with self-triggering name-clues that should be obvious to you, reader. We have seen that, as a result of his multidimensional misfortunes as a child and his public inadequacy as an adult, he has dreamed of raising himself above men. Despite the daily battering of a thousand bitter truths, this dream has never left him. Society, too, defends itself against the barrage of facts present and latent in the universe, against the numinous and the precise, by means of custom—that is, by a body of consensual observances. Inversely, infraction of the customary rules invests the offender with a sacred aura because it confers upon him the power to unloose truthful powers—though whether he chooses to use his oblique position for this purpose is another matter. In
Tarka the Otter
we find that Henry Williamson has used the outcast position merely to talk about an otter and “his joyful water life,” deftly skirting the explosive issues of scorching sedition and profanely exotic rebellion almost any other writer would have explored.