They Had Goat Heads (3 page)

THOT EXPERIMENT WRTN ON IFON

the thot experiment went terrily wrong. test subjects suffered & died. hot gore. loVed ones prayed & wept. when it was over, dirty realism littered the epoxy flr of the lab..forenzx was late & the traIl went cld. jrnlists didn’t nO wat to write. newscasters eluded cameraeyz. it was bad, bad. underlings marked the outrézone w/yellowtape. the army decLaed martial law & persecuted the indigEnt & any1 who wisedoff. zombie apocalypse. alieN attack. avalanChe of serilkillers…………..one man left. the last man. he wud find a way. one gud thot is all it wud takE.

THE ARREST

A man said, “You are under arrest.”
   Another man said, “No. You are under arrest.”
   “No,” said the first man. “It’s the other way around. You are the one who is under arrest.”
   “I’m not under arrest,” said the second man. “You are.”
   “I’m going to arrest you now,” said the first man, taking the second man by the elbow.
   “No. Now I will arrest you,” said the second man, taking the first man by the elbow.
   “Let go of my elbow,” said the second man. He agreed to let go, but only if the second man let go, too.
   A third man said, “I’m putting the two of you under arrest.”
   “No,” said the first man.
   “No,” said the second man.
   “Yes,” said the third man.
   The first man put the third man in a headlock. He jumped up and down and the third man groaned perfunctorily.
   The second man put the first man in a headlock. He jumped up and down so that the third man experienced the brunt of two men jumping up and down. He groaned louder, with more drama, yet with less resolve.
   “That’s enough,” said a fourth man. “You are all coming with me. You are all under arrest.”
   The second man tried to put the fourth man in a headlock with his free arm but the fourth man ducked out of the way. A fifth man snuck up behind the fourth man, wrapped his hands around his neck and choked him to death. Eyes wide with surprise, the fourth man slid to the floor like a raw egg.
   The second man released the headlock on the third man. The first man released the headlock on the second man. The first, second, and third men faced the fifth man and the third man said, “You killed that man.”
   “The three of you are under arrest,” said the fifth man.
   A sixth man punched out the fifth man. “I’m arresting you.” He looked askance at the other men. “I’m arresting all of you, too.”
   The second and third men attacked a seventh man with tomahawks before he could open his mouth and put anybody under arrest. The seventh man shrieked during the murder. Blood exited his wounds in japanimated spurts as he accused the first and sixth men of allowing him to be murdered by the second and third men.
   Weird mucous leaked from the fifth man’s orifices.
   With his last breath, the seventh man whispered, “I should have arrested you all.”
   Unexpectedly, the first man took off his clothes and began to make love to his wife. She lay on a cot, on her back, beckoning him with spread legs and locked knees.
   “What does he think he’s doing?” asked the third man. The fifth man woke up and the sixth man punched him out again, dirtying his fist with slime. The third man said, “Public sex is an offense. I’m putting those sex offenders under arrest.”
   The first man climbed off his wife and attacked the third man. They wrestled around on the floor. The nakedness of the first man made the third man increasingly uncomfortable, and he tried his utmost to beat and arrest his opponent without touching him, an impossible feat, technically, and yet within moments, he was in fact beating his opponent without touching him, somehow, impressing all of the other men, except for the second man, who turned to the sixth man and told him that he knew how to beat people up without touching them better than the third man did.
   Soon the first man rallied. He grabbed the third man by the ears and cranked his head and snapped his neck. The third man slumped over like a wet pancake. The first man immediately arrested him. Then he arrested the fourth man, the fifth man, and the seventh man.
   “You can’t arrest dead men,” said the sixth man.
   “You can’t arrest an unconscious man,” said the second man.
   “I can arrest anybody I want,” said the first man.
   “No. I can arrest anybody I want,” said the second man.
   “No you can’t,” said the sixth man. “I can. I can arrest anybody. I can arrest the entire world.”
   “I’m putting the world under arrest,” said the fifth man, awakening.
   “No. I’m putting the world under arrest,” said the sixth man. He blew off the second man’s head with a shotgun. “I’m going to arrest the galaxy as well.” He turned the shotgun on the fifth man and fired. The fifth man’s stomach exploded into flaming tendrils of gore. The sixth man said, “Forthwith I will put every last black hole in the universe behind bars. I will teach Eternity the very meaning of deference and respect and authority. But first things first.” He emptied the shells from the shotgun, reloaded it, and put the barrel in his mouth . . .
   The first man looked at his wife. She was asleep. “Wake up,” he whispered helplessly. “You are under arrest.”
   She opened her eyes. She stretched, sighed.
   She rolled off the bed, slipped into the bathroom and turned on the shower, annulling the voice of her husband . . .

CHIMPANZEE

I forgot to lock the door again. Eventually a chimpanzee swaggered into the house. I called the police.
   The 911 operator said, “You have to shoot it. Shoot it now.” I told the operator I didn’t own a gun. She said, “Then improvise. Stab the monkey with a knife. Bludgeon the primate with a frying pan. Lure the simian into the oven and treat it like a casserole. Do what you must. But do it. Otherwise that hairy interloper may commit a crime. Good luck.”
   “Wait,” I said. I remembered I owned a gun after all. I hung up the phone and went and got it. Loaded it.
   I found the chimp sitting at the head of the dining table, polishing mustard yellow teeth with a fingertip. It chirped when it saw me.
   I aimed the gun, closed my eyes, and fired . . .
   I called the police. “I’ve just killed a hairy interloper,” I said. I was hysterical.
   “Calm down, sir,” said the 911 operator. “Take a deep breath and explain what happened.”
   I steadied my breathing, focusing on the operator’s voice. She sounded attractive. “Ok. I’m all right. This is what happened.” I told her.
   “I’m coming over right away,” said the operator, and hung up.
   I cocked my head. Sirens outside. A knock at the door. I still hadn’t locked it.
   The door opened and a woman entered and she called my name and marched through the house until she found me, bleak, wild, lingering over the gruesome corpse of the chimpanzee.
   “Lower your weapon and step away from the unripe mammal,” she barked, fingering a baton. I dropped the gun and backed into a china cabinet. She looked good in her uniform. And she was just my type. Skinny. Young. Like everybody’s mother used to be. I wanted to impress her.
   “I,” I said, pausing for a moment, “have certain powers.”
   She got on her knees and inspected the chimp, feeling its limbs and neck for a pulse, looking behind its ears for abnormal vascularity. “It’s only sleeping, it’s only sleeping,” she whispered, as if trying to convince herself that reality could be defied, defeated, overturned.
   “I blew that thing’s brains out,” I reminded her.
   Cradling the chimp in her arms, she picked it up and rocked it back and forth. “Oh no,” she cried.
   I said, “I don’t usually do this. But would you like to have dinner with me? I’ll pay for it.”
   She accidentally dropped the chimp. It hit the hardwood floor of the dining room like a sack of firewood. She screamed for a long time, then picked the chimp up and hurried away.
   Shortly thereafter they stormed into the house and arrested me.
   They boxed my ears on the way to the police vehicle. “Abuse is the namesake of certainty,” I said.
   They pistolwhipped me on the way to the penitentiary. “We mustn’t take these things too seriously,” I said.
   They kicked me into a cell and locked the door. My cellmate was a hairy interloper. “You have to shoot it,” it said. “Shoot it now.”
   But I left my gun at home . . .
   A prison guard passed by the cell and began to hammer the bars with a wooden broomstick, accusing us of making a commotion. He screamed and cursed and assailed the bars until the broomstick splintered and broke in half. We stared at him absently.
   Two hours later, they gave me my phone call. I dialed 911. The operator remembered my voice. I told her I was about to escape. She said, “Exercise caution as you exit the penitentiary. Jail is a treacherous venue. I advise mankind against prison. Penal institutions belie the contours of sanity. The same logic may be applied to incarceration boxes. Whatever you do, do it asap. Good luck.”
   I heard a gunshot and the line went dead . . .

VICTROLA

I place the Victrola on the kitchen counter and wait for somebody to get a midnight snack. I hear my mother, upstairs, punctuating the flat notes of birdsongs. I hear my father, too. That rankled snore . . .
   Lips sealed, my parents walk into the kitchen holding hands. They see me. They poke around the cupboards, looking for instant coffee. “Decaffeinated,” says my father sternly.
   I say, “Coffee isn’t a snack. It’s a drink. It’s a pastime.”
   They turn their heads and stare at me. I realize I haven’t said anything.
   They give up and go back upstairs and the catastrophe of their discord recommences, instantly. Inhuman melodies forced from two strangled radios . . .
   I wait, listening . . .
   Finally somebody makes an appearance. A stranger. He wears a three-piece suit and a stovepipe hat that scrapes across the ceiling as he strides toward the refrigerator. I engage the Victrola, placing its needle on an old record. The record is warped and produces harsh static before articulating these words: “Welcome to the kitchen. I am your host. I hope you enjoy a snack. You must enjoy things. Eventually you will die.” I mouth the words as they yawn out of the machine’s
fleur-de-lis
. The stranger stops in his tracks and regards me with wide, unblinking eyes. He sucks in his cheeks. The Victrola says, “You look hungry. You should eat something. If you are not killed in a freak accident, eventually your body will eat you. Cancer, you see. Our bodies always eat us in the end.” I continue to mouth the words. The stranger removes his hat and sits on the floor.
   My parents return. They dance around the stranger and rifle through the cupboards again. They think that if they look hard enough a jar of decaffeinated coffee crystals will appear, somewhere, behind something, even though I know there is no coffee in the house, and they know it, too.
   They give up again. “That’s life, son,” says my mother, tilting her head. “One failure after another. But one must continue to fail. Otherwise one ceases to be human.”
   My father grabs her violently and jerks her from side to side. He pushes her over and wrestles with her on the kitchen floor, ripping buttons from her nightgown. The stranger observes the skirmish idly.
   Winded, my parents get up. My father takes my mother in his arms and they slip away . . .
   Upstairs my mother’s tune changes: she shifts from the flat notes of birdsongs to the emotional drones of power ballads. And my father’s snore gives birth to hundreds of minor snores.
    . . . This is the climax. The stranger knows it. I know it. The Victrola confirms it, saying, “I am very pleased to meet you. You are diseased. Goodnight.” I remove the needle from the record as the stranger lies flat and curls into a languid ball. I watch. I listen to my mother and father’s muffled voices. They intersect and accomplish a crescendo, then roll out and taper off, fatigued, paling, until the only thing I can hear is the hush of ocean surf, the Victrola’s
fleur-de-lis
whispering like a conch.

WHALE—WITH A SURPRISE ALTERNATE (HAPPY) ENDING!!!

My daughter wanted a goldfish. I said, “We can do better than that.”
   I took her to the pet shop and asked a clerk where the whales were. She escorted us through a maze of aisles into a separate room, pausing to reprimand a stock boy who had stolen a nap. My daughter gazed wide-eyed at the caged lizards, birds, insects, monkeys that we passed
en route
 . . .
   “This is what we call the Whale Room,” said the clerk. She made a sweeping motion with her arm. “We also have an Elephant Room and Brontosaurus Room. The dinosaurs aren’t real.” She gave us a hand buzzer and told us to press it if we needed anything.
   Excusing herself, she closed and locked the door behind her. My daughter and I looked at each other, then at the Whale Room.
   It was the size of an airplane hangar and smelled like a bowl of cereal. “Golden Grahams,” said my daughter, nodding. I told her cereal didn’t smell like anything unless you got really close to it and sniffed very, very deeply. My daughter said, “That’s silly, Daddy.”
   The concrete floor was immaculate and had been cleaned, lacquered, and dusted. An aquarium the size of a two-story house stood at the far corner. There was nothing else.
   I put my daughter on my shoulders and we walked to the aquarium.
   The bluegreen water glowed with toxicity.
   A copious layer of fluorescent cow and pig skulls had been spread across the floor of the aquarium. Aggressive algae-eaters darted in and out of the eye sockets and jaws, unhinged for lack of any food other than their own regurgitated stool.
   There was no whale.
   My daughter began to cry.
   I pressed the hand-buzzer. Nobody came. I pressed it again and again and again. My daughter cried harder and I told her not to worry. “Things always work out, somehow.”
   Finally the clerk attended to us. I assumed it was the clerk; she was far away and I didn’t have my glasses on, and she put on an ornate gas mask as she approached the aquarium. She spoke to me through a contraption resembling a CB radio, holding the microphone to the mouth-chute of the mask. A cord attached the microphone to a long, cumbersome speaker she held at her side like a suitcase.
   “Good afternoon,” she said when she reached us. The greeting boomed out of the speaker and echoed across the Whale Room. “It is a pleasure to see you again.”
   I put my daughter down. Sniffling, she cowered between my knees. I stroked her hair reassuringly and said, “Don’t worry, little girl.” I looked at the clerk. “You’re frightening my daughter. What is this?” I gesticulated at the aquarium.
   Harsh sledges of static punctuated the clerk’s subsequent monologue: “Ah yes, I forgot. We had to submit the mammal for repair. Too many potential buyers requested to see inside of the mammal. All of the potential buyers said the same thing: ‘We won’t consider purchasing this unit unless we can see inside of it.’ So the owners of the pet shop had a meeting and decided to install a series of zippers onto its vast girth. ‘Consumer thirst must be slaked,’ they said. That’s exactly what they said. This decision was made only recently and we only recently sent it away. You should have seen me duke it out with the mammal; I pushed its head back into the wall with both of my hands while monstrous tidbits fell from its mouth to the floor. For a moment I thought we had become friends. But the whale quickly reminded me that we would always be enemies, biting off my arm.” She showed us her arms, one at a time. Neither arm had been bitten off. “Well. I promise the whale will return soon. In fact, we expect to receive two additional units, all of them equipped with zippers that might be opened and closed in a highly user-friendly manner by courageous scuba divers. In their absence, perhaps you could exercise your imagination. Tell yourself the whale is there. The mind cannot deny what you tell it.”
   The clerk bowed awkwardly and excused herself. We watched her walk away, across the expanse of the Whale Room. She walked slowly. It took over two minutes. She tripped once, dropping the speaker. She got up and tripped again when she tried to pick the speaker back up—I suspected it was much heavier than it looked. Then she disappeared through a thin rectangle of door.
   My daughter and I held hands and stared at the aquarium. “Don’t believe that horseshit about imagination,” I told her. “The real thing is always better. That’s why the imagination exists. Mostly, people can’t get the real things they want. So they have to pretend.”
   The algae-eaters threaded through the skulls. They seemed to multiply before our eyes as they devoured crumbs of excrement . . .
   It took some convincing. But eventually my daughter talked me into it.
   We stripped to our underwear and climbed a ladder that ran up the aquarium’s exterior, its rungs cold and sharp on the soles of our feet.
   “I wish we had snorkels,” my daughter said.
   “Lungs are good enough,” I replied. “Remember to take a deep breath.”
   At the top was a small square platform. We situated ourselves on it, pinched our noses, counted to three, and jumped in . . . We sank to the bottom, smiling at each other even though the water stung our eyes. The algae-eaters scattered as we landed on the skulls. They were slick to the touch, like warm balls of oil—we handled them, and we got tangled in them, and we slipped through them . . . There was nothing we could do. We fell deeper and deeper into the colored bone . . .
   As we disappeared from sight, my daughter pointed overhead, excitedly, as if to acknowledge the extraordinary passing of a cloud.