Dyscountopia (12 page)

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PRELIMINARY INTERVIEW OF ALBERT ZIM, PATIENT

January 13, 2048

From the digital recordings of Dr. R. Zayus

ALBERT:
 
It all st…. when I got fired …. Omega-Mart.
 
Well, you …. for yourself what happened.

DR. ZAYUS:
 
Would you mind speaking up a little?

ALBERT:
 
I said you saw for ….self what hap….

DR. ZAYUS:
 
Wait a second.
 
Lemme just turn a little sideways here.

ALBERT:
 
Why, what are you …?
 
Hey, I thought you said you weren’t recording this.

DR. ZAYUS:
 
What?
 
I’m not!
 
I told you I wouldn’t.
 
You’ve got trust issues, Zim.
 
I’m going to write that down.
 
Trust issues.
 
Now, go ahead with your story.

ALBERT:
  
Well, needless to say, I wasn’t very happy to see the world fading away behind me into a little ball the size of a marble.
 
I screamed a lot.
 
I think I screamed until I passed out.
 
Anyway, who knows how long I was out, but when I woke up, the first thing I noticed was that I was floating around inside the capsule surrounded by my own vomit.
 
The second thing I noticed was the red sun.
 
Well, I’m no expert on suns – I’ve spent most of my life indoors, but I immediately realized that something was very wrong because everyone knows that our sun is supposed to be yellow.

DR. ZAYUS:
 
I see.
 
Go on.

ALBERT:
 
Well, I figured I must have ended up in a different solar system.
 
I couldn’t figure out how – I don’t know a lot about space travel, but I know it takes a long, long time to get anywhere.
 
But there’s a perfectly plausible explanation.
 
It all became clear to me, after I crash landed on the planet Pog.

DR. ZAYUS:
 
…of course.

ALBERT:
 
So, I’m floating around inside my space capsule, still pretty shocked by the whole thing, looking at that red sun – and then I start to wonder.
 
Am I still hurtling through space at a thousand miles per hour?
 
Or am I just drifting?
 
I’m in space, so it’s hard to tell.
 
Then I see something outside my porthole.
 
It’s a little green dot, just ahead, the only thing I see anywhere around me except for stars and that sun.
 
The dot keeps getting bigger and bigger and pretty quickly I start to realize that it’s moving toward me.
 
Only it isn’t moving toward me, at all, you see.
 
I’m moving toward it.
 
It’s another planet, and I’m headed right for it.
 
Of course I wasn’t very excited about it at the time.
 
I was pretty sure I’d splatter on its surface like a bug on a windshield or, even if I didn’t, that I’d get there and find that there was nothing to breath but poisonous gas.
 
But I was wrong about that….
 

DR. ZAYUS:
 
This … really crazy shit….. write a whole paper on this wacko….

ALBERT:
 
What?

DR. ZAYUS:
 
Nothing.
 
I talk to myself when I take notes.
 
Keep going.

ALBERT:
 
Well, like I was saying, it turns out that the atmosphere on Pog is mostly oxygen, and I hit the surface at a good angle in a soft, grassy prairie, which I can’t take any credit for, since I wasn’t really steering.
 
Still, I must have carved a trench at least a mile long.
 
I lost consciousness again on impact – by that time I had an enormous headache -- and I didn’t wake up until I heard knocking on the capsule door.
 
Good thing I was wearing my safety belt.

DR. ZAYUS:
 
Wait – you said you heard knocking?

ALBERT:
 
Yes.
 
Lucy was knocking.

DR. ZAYUS:
 
No shit?
 
Who’s Lucy?

ALBERT:
 
I’m getting to that.
 
Like I said, I heard knocking, and when I looked out through the porthole I saw a small, furry face with whiskers, like a sea otter or a prairie dog.
 
I don’t know if I mentioned it, but there wasn’t a handle on the inside of the capsule door, so I was pretty much trapped.
 
But the door suddenly opened and the fresh oxygen poured in, and I realized that the creature outside opened it.
 
Now I could see that the creature looked
exactly
like a prairie dog, from the tip of her twitchy nose to the end of her fuzzy little tail.
 
I immediately thought that she must be somehow related to Earth prairie dogs, but it turns out it’s all just a big cosmic coincidence.
 
Pogs are entirely indigenous to the planet Pog.

DR. ZAYUS:
 
Naturally…

ALBERT:
 
Well, the first thing she said to me was, “Ooobie ooobie goo?” which was complete gibberish to me.
 
And I just stood there looking at her with my jaw hanging open.
 
She had a really pretty coat of fur, too; honey blonde and real immaculate – you could tell she took care of it.
 
Anyway, the next thing she tried saying to me was, “Geeebrak toobrak garoo,” which also, of course, didn’t register.

So I said, “Hello, my name is Albert Zim of Omega-Mart.”
 
And that didn’t seem quite enough for man’s first historic encounter with an extraterrestrial, so I added, “Take me to your leader.”
 
Kinda dumb, I know, but it seemed like the right thing at the time.
 
And then you know what she said?
 
She said, in perfect Chinese this time, “Hello Babbert Zim.
 
My name is Lucy.
 
Lucy with a ‘Y’, and I welcome you to the planet Pog.
 
Care for a gooma smoothie?”
 

Of course, I didn’t know anything about gooma fruits at the time, so I took what she offered me, a slushy little beverage served in half a giant nut shell, and I took a great big gulp.
 
It turned out to be a mistake, because gooma fruit is a powerful, powerful hallucinogen.
 
I was completely convinced that my body had exploded into a million molecules and reassembled into a kangaroo.
 
It gets a little hazy from there, but I remember bounding out of my space capsule, picking up what I thought was my baby and sticking her into my pouch, then hopping like mad through the prairie with the little joey giggling like crazy against my stomach.
 
I woke up three days later in a hole with Lucy down the front of my pants.

DR. ZAYUS:
 
Man, I’ve been there….

ALBERT:
 
And I was entirely surrounded by Pogs now.
 
They were all around me, huddled inside my jacket, under my armpits, up my sleeves, all sleeping soundly – purring, kind of.
 
Which was strange, because I could see the red sun out through the top of the hole, and it was well past noon.
 
I eventually learned that Pogs are very lethargic creatures.
 
Their metabolism can really accelerate when they’re interested in something, but most of the time they’re asleep, and they only wake up two or three times a day to chase their tails and eat massive quantities of gooma.
 

What’s more, Pogs lack any desire to innovate or to improve on themselves.
 
They have absolutely no technology, they don’t read or write, and they really don’t have any formal language.
 
But they’re innately clever, you see.
 
Extremely clever, on a level that you and I can’t even begin to understand.
 
Every day, each one of them makes up their own language, an
entire
language with nouns and verbs and predicates and what-have-you, and they just start speaking it.
 
And everyone understands them perfectly after hearing only three words.
 
Just three words.
 
Because Pogs can
triangulate
any language.
 
After hearing three words, they’re instantly able to speak and understand it.
 
That’s why, after I greeted her, Lucy could speak such good Chinese.

Over the next several weeks, I watched the Pogs carefully and learned everything I could about them.
 
We had long conversations about art and music and physics and biology; each one of them was like a walking encyclopedia on any subject you can imagine, even though I’d never seen one paint a picture, or do any kind of scientific calculation.
 
They just had a natural ability to figure things out very quickly.
 
And they also had this way of, just when you were in the middle of a sentence, standing up on their hind legs and looking around, like they thought something might be sneaking up on them at any moment; which was a ridiculous notion because there weren’t any predators on the planet Pog – the Pogs were the only living things there apart from gooma trees.
 
I found that kind of behavior distracting at first, but I got used to it.
 
I don’t think they even knew they were doing it.
 

Well, the Pogs took to me very quickly.
 
They were always eager to talk to me and snuggle up next to me and tell me how wonderful they thought I was.
 
They seemed to genuinely love me after only knowing me a few days.
 
Then Lucy explained to me why – I was the only one tall enough to reach the tallest branches of the gooma trees, where all of the biggest and best fruits were, and that made me immensely popular.
 
Also, in comparison to the average Pog, I generated an enormous amount of body warmth, something highly sought after in their nap-centered society.
 
As far as the gooma trees went, I asked Lucy why the Pogs never bothered to build a ladder – it was an easy enough thing for their clever brains to figure out.
 
Every time I suggested it, she said that maybe they would do it tomorrow, but they never did.
 

The more I talked to Lucy, the more I learned about the Pog concept of love.
 
You see, the amount that people love you in a Pog community is directly related to how much you contribute to the collective.
 
The ones who can make you laugh or tell a good story are the most loved, while the ones who are only good for holding your basket while you pick gooma fruit, or for saving your napping spot when you get up to pee, are loved quite a bit less.
 
They have unconditional love too, of course, but it’s viewed in much the opposite way as it is here on Omega-Mart.
 
On Omega-Mart, unconditional love is the purest form of love, you might say, like the love a mother has for her child.
 
But on Pog, unconditional love is the most common sort of love, even a bit pathetic – the kind of love you get if you’re not much good for anything else.
 

There’s also the kind of love you have between a male Pog and a female Pog, but I never learned a lot about that.
 
Sure, I spent a lot of time with Lucy, and we had a lot of great conversations.
 
I’ll bet not a single moment went by that we weren’t doing something together, either napping side-by-side or sharing gooma fruits (something I learned to eat slowly and sparingly).
 
But, at the end of the day, Lucy and I both knew that nothing could work out between us.
 
After all, I was married, and as far as Lucy was concerned, I lacked the appropriate scent glands to make me a viable mate.