They Had Goat Heads (2 page)

BENEATH A PINK SUN

Conflict is an illusion without which apes and begonias would shrivel in the wind. The grill, however, is covered with steaks. Tenderloins. They sizzle in the back yard beneath a pink sun. Somebody turns on a bugzapper. Music of tiny deaths. Overweight neighbors in beetle suits scuttle up tree trunks and attack flying squirrels. One should not do battle with arboreal gliders, theoretical or otherwise (ref. Deleuze & Guattari’s
Anti-Oedipus
), no matter what they’re wearing. Particularly if they lack Just Cause. I can already hear the gavel slamming against the anvil. Blacksmiths line up in the streets and sharpen meat cleavers with power tools. A steel gray Camaro runs them over. Bones crunch. The blacksmiths rise to their knees. An out-of-control stagecoach runs them over. Pastiche of viscera. They stay down for the count as the stagecoach metamorphoses into a giant pumpkin. Remember that old Greco-Egyptian fairy tale of unwarranted oppression and triumphant reward (ref.
Wikipedia
)? Cinderella a.k.a. Rhodopsis was born without a hard palate. She had to install a ribbed prosthesis. She ran her tongue across the prosthesis during moments of ontological skepticism. And yet soldiers rarely strangle each other in the heat of combat. At the same time, keys don’t always work. Stick it in a keyhole, turn it . . . and it doesn’t turn. And you’re using the right key. You’re sure of it. Inebriation. Hallucination. Micturation. You make a decision to get your back rubbed. Chiropractors invade the Temple of Diegesis and begin cracking the congregation’s collective neck. The congregation begs the doctors to stop, but secretly they feel better, fresher. They’re thankful for being violated. Near the restrooms, a contortionist juggles minute koalas while dishing out smoked sausages for $3 a pop. Takers are legion, and they’re not unhappy with the taste, given the proper medley of condiments. Dip a French fry in ketchup and pretend it’s a flaming match. Eat the fire. Ceiling fans have the capacity to burn down the house if you install a flamethrower in the rafters. Acme is the best brand. “I’m extremely happy with this fine product,” says a craggy Vietnam veteran and disappears into the jungle depths. Suh-suh-Saigon. Fishermen infiltrate the motels and scale perch in the shower stalls. The manager tells them not to do it, but they do it anyway. Pack of solipsists. They light candles in the hallways, apply blindfolds, strip naked and do fifty yard dashes, trampling old folks who wander into the hallways to get buckets of ice. A blacklight implodes. The baby can’t be soothed. It cries and cries and dares somebody to console it. A passenger plane crashes into the apartment complex down the block. Impossible cinematic explosions and carnage. Top notch special effekts. A
daikaiju
(trans. giant monster, e.g., Godzilla) emerges from the electrically charged wreckage and storms up and down the streets of Winesburg. Policemen attack it with harpoons. Ahab impersonators seek pan-seared vengeance. They man the decks of vintage zeppelins. Surprise gust of wind. Queequeg slips and topples over the edge at an altitude of 500 feet. Thud. A bright yellow daisy crawls out of the dirt like an undead corpse (ref.
White Zombie
). A fasttime weed overtakes the daisy like a boa on a flagpole (ref.
Anaconda
, particularly when the great snake vomits a partially digested Paraguayan Jon Voight and Voight winks at Jennifer Lopez and Ice-Cube before dying). The flag comes loose and sails to the horizon like a magic carpet (ref.
One Thousand and One Nights
). Intellect of human viscera. Animé nights and scikungfi battle royals. People paint themselves purple and pretend they’re cats. They meow. They drink milk from bowls. They imagine the sensation of possessing an elongated coccyx. Meanwhile the pod door opens and accommodates a heart, pulsing, spitting blood as it floats across the cockpit. “Is it a coincidence?” says Captain Klondike to an off duty space cadet. “Who tears out somebody’s heart and throws it into the cosmos?” The space cadet shrugs. The captain fingers his chin. Formica is better than carpet tile, he thinks. Especially in kitchens. If you’re going to carpet a kitchen floor, you might as well carpet the stove and the refrigerator, too. And the coffee maker. Got it from Sharper Image. Flavia Fusion J10N. Stainless steel with amazing push-button speed. The payroll clerk assured me that I could purchase this at-home brewing system. I do what the payroll clerk assures me to do. The others lack credibility and élan. That includes fontmakers, of course. All day long they loaf and invite their souls, dreaming up new brands of letters, numbers, symbols. That’s no way to spend one’s time. Time is precious. Time is the splash of a raindrop on a cornflake.

MONSTER TRUCK

A man wanted to be a monster truck. All day and night, he made vrooming noises and hurled himself over long sequences of beat-up smart cars.
   One night he welded giant wheels onto his elbows and knees . . .
   “Whoever fights monster trucks should see to it that in the process she does not become a monster truck,” said his wife when he tried to crawl into bed. She pointed at the door. The man fell forward onto his wheels and puttered down to the living room couch.
   He dreamt of mud-stained windshields, Brobdingnagian engines and sperm whale spoilers . . .
   The next morning, the man opened his chest and tuned up his arteries with a monkey wrench. He ate breakfast and drove to work. He drove over his secretary and officemates and his boss. He turned in his resignation and departed in an apocalypse of smoke and skid marks.
   On his way home, he swerved into a lamppost and totaled himself . . .

QUALITY OF LIFE

“I have to blow my nose.”
   I left the office and walked down the hallway to the toilet. The towel dispenser was empty. There was no toilet paper.
   I leaned over the sink and pressed one of my nostrils closed. I held my breath and blew . . .
   The sink basin overflowed. I looked in the mirror. My mouth was a hideous gash.
   I went back to the office. “I have to go to the doctor.”
   I left.

•

The doctor wore a surgical mask. He claimed to be inordinately susceptible to germs.
   I said, “Something’s wrong with me.”
   Raising an eyebrow, the doctor replied, “The weatherman forecasted rain today. Can you believe it?”
   The mask garbled his voice. I strode across the room and pulled it off.
   He dove underneath a table and begged me to go away, coughing and wheezing and choking as if in a gas chamber.
   I apologized, and excused myself.

•

The next doctor made me take an IQ test. Satisfied with the results, he asked me why I came to see him.
   I said, “Something’s wrong with me.”
   His beard twitched, throbbed . . . and crawled off his face. With a squirrel’s bare-knuckled urgency, the beard situated itself inside the doctor’s white coat pocket like a handkerchief. His smooth cheeks glistened with sweat.
   “Pardon me,” he droned.
   “Ok,” I replied, and excused myself.

•

The next doctor opened a closet and sicced a bantam weight wrestler on me. It took me fifteen minutes to pin him. The doctor slapped the floor three times and blew a whistle. The wrestler got up, pulled a wedgie out of his asscrack, and returned to the closet.
   Clearing my throat, I stood and asked for a towel.
   “Get to the point please,” said the doctor.
   I sighed. I asked for a milkbowl.
   “I have a bedpan.” He pulled one out of his coat and handed it to me.
   I took it and pressed one of my nostrils closed and held my breath and blew . . .
   The doctor puckered his lips. He inspected the contents of the bedpan, sniffing, touching, taste-testing them . . . He took a picture with a disposable Kodak camera. He disposed of the camera, emptied the contents of the bedpan into a large Ziploc bag and sealed it.
   “Wait here please,” he said. He locked the door behind him.

•

My nose began to leak of its own free will. I got dizzy and passed out.
   A nurse woke me up. “I’m here,” she whispered. One of her breasts hung out of her uniform. It sagged down to her knees.
   “I’m here too,” said the doctor. He pushed the nurse aside. She crashed into a table of surgical instruments. Her breast wrapped around her neck like a tetherball and strangled her. The doctor pulled the errant breast loose and told her to go see the anesthesiologist. She staggered away.
   The doctor looked at me. He gave me a paper cup. “Don’t let your nose fool you. Your memories are leaking out of your head.”
   “Memories?”
   “Yes. Do you know what memories are? Have you already forgotten?”
   I put the cup beneath my nose.
   “You’re not beyond repair. Allow your memories to drain into the cup. Then drink them. Or don’t. Do whatever you want. You don’t need memories to stay alive. Quality of life is the thing. I’d like to start you on an antidepressant. Excuse me.”
   The doctor’s head and limbs disappeared into his coat and the coat fell to the floor in a clump.

•

My nose stopped leaking. The cup had overflowed and my jeans were soaked. I took them off, stuffed them in a garbage can, and put on a pair of surgical pants I found in a cabinet.
   I left.
   The doctor passed me in the hallway and pretended not to see me. He was wearing a grizzly bear costume with the head tucked underneath an arm.
   I returned to the office. “I’m back.” A memo lay on my secretary’s desk. It read: “Welcome back!”
   I sat behind my desk. The phone rang. I picked it up.
   “Hello?”
   “It’s me,” the doctor grumbled.
   “Oh. Hi!”
   “Why did you leave?”
   “I’m not sure. It seemed like the right thing to do. I passed you in the hallway. Why didn’t you stop me?”
   “I can’t answer that question.”
   “Ok.”
   Sound of an orgasm. “I diagnosed your condition improperly. I want to refer you to another doctor. I’ll send you the prescription for the antidepressant by mail.”
   “Thank you.”
   “I have to go.”
   “Ok.”
   “Goodbye.”
   I hung up the phone. “I have to go to the doctor.” Nobody was in the room but me.
   I left.

•

I came back. I picked up the phone and dialed the hospital.
   “Hello?”
   “It’s me,” I said.
   “I know.”
   “I don’t know where to go.”
   “I know. You hung up before I could tell you.” The doctor told me where to go.
   “Ok.”
   “Goodbye.”
   I hung up the phone. “I’ll be back soon.” Nobody was in the room but me.

•

Somebody tried to mug me in the elevator. I boxed his ears and smashed his face into the control panel. The elevator stopped at every floor on the way down.
   The referral doctor lived in Singapore. I took a plane.

•

He greeted me with a sensual hug, rubbing his genitals against my thigh. He told me my lips were chapped, offered me a balm and said, “I’m sorry to hear about your condition. Please remove your clothes so that I can see what we’re dealing with here.”
   I removed my clothes. The doctor studied me. He flicked my penis and fingered my nipples until they were hard. He nodded. “Go ahead and get dressed.”
   I got dressed.
   “Is your nose still giving you trouble?”
   I stuck my fingers into my nostrils. I took them out. “No. It’s empty.”
   The doctor smiled. “You’re suffering from a rare case of memory loss. It’s rare because nobody’s ever had it like this before. According to my analysis, you possess no memory whatsoever. Your body, for some reason, has rejected it. Take one of these daily.” He handed me a bottle.
   I took it. “What’s in here?” I twisted off the cap. “There’s nothing in here.”
   “There isn’t?”
   “No.”
   “That’s curious. But I’m afraid our time is up.” The doctor removed a large pair of amputation scissors from a cabinet and asked me to bend over and bare my neck. Unresponsive, I waited for him to depart.

•

On the plane ride home I watched a movie and fingered a stewardess in the lavatory. She gave me free wine. I got drunk.

•

I couldn’t remember how to get back to the office. I called my secretary. The answering machine picked up. It said: “We’re out of toilet paper. We’re out of paper towels.”

•

It was raining out. I walked to a store and bought an umbrella. I didn’t realize it was a squid on a stick until I tried to open it. Its tentacles stiffened as if electrocuted.
   I came to a hill. Tired of walking, I turned the squid onto its head, sat on its underbelly, and rode it down the hill like a sled.
   We came to a slow halt in a field at the bottom of the hill. Trees rustled in the wind. Clouds passed overhead. Black-eyed Susans stretched across the field as far as I could see.
   A rickshaw ran me over.

•

“You look familiar,” said the doctor, inspecting my penis with a magnifying glass.
   I sat up on the operating table. “Do I know you?”
   His nose had been replaced with a papier mâché elephant trunk. “No,” he said. “Drink this.”
   I drank it. “Goodbye,” I said.
   The doctor trumpeted.
   I pulled up my pants and went home.

•

In my mailbox was a prescription. I took it to the pharmacist. He asked for my insurance card. I gave it to him. He asked for my co-payment. I gave it to him. He told a technician to get my medicine. She saluted him, ducked into an aisle and returned with a jar of dill pickles. She handed it to me.
   “Dills for thrills,” the pharmacist droned.
   They said goodbye in unison and a chain-link fence slammed onto the counter like a guillotine.
   Grimacing, I twisted open the pickle jar and ate one of the baby dills inside. It was sweet.

•

I fell down. My fingers clenched the pavement.

•

Shadows flowed up and down the streets.

•

I went back to the office.
   “I’m back.”
   There was a note on my secretary’s desk. It read: “The sink basin overflowed.”
   I sat down behind my desk.
   I blinked.
   I opened a drawer and removed a handheld mirror. I looked in it.
   My mouth was a hideous gash . . .