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Authors: D. Harlan Wilson

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THE KEROSENE LANTERN TOUR

 

The kerosene lantern tour lasted for eighty-six days. They showed us the wick. They discussed the lantern’s agricultural application. They compared its candela of light to a firefly’s mating call.
   When the tour guides ran out of material, they escorted us to a cliff and ordered us to leap off. We used plastic garbage bags for parachutes.
   At the bottom of the cliff, a morbidly obese woman contemplated an abortion. She leaned against a rock, folds of bruised fat expanding from her core. “I’m three hundred and one and a half months pregnant,” she groused. Her jaw hung open like a laundry chute. “This is a big one. I don’t eat much. It’s genetic. I will explode with baby flesh if somebody doesn’t help me.”
   Somebody began to beat her with a horsewhip. The woman sighed convulsively with each lash. We watched for awhile, commenting on the whipper’s skill, acuity, and experience as a corporeal instrument of torture. Then we jumped on the whipper and wrestled the horsewhip away from him.
   We climbed back up the cliff on the rungs of exposed roots and tree branches. By the time we had reached the top, twenty-three days later, the tour guides had thought of something else to tell us about the kerosene lantern. “Observe the curvature of its porcelain trunk.” They moved their hands in a synchronized arc. “If you confiscate the glass housing, one might easily mistake the contraption for a vase. One might attempt to arrange flowers in such a contraption.”
   An ant bit me on the foot. My pupils engulfed my eyeballs. “I am the flesh-bot through which the ant speaks,” I said. “I can turn this flesh-bot into a GIANT ME if I like.” I fell to the ground and scuttled toward a pile of dirt. They captured me in a burlap sack, hung me on a tree branch, hit me with golf clubs, injected me with something cold, and cut me loose. I felt better.
   “And now we shall communicate entirely by way of interesting aphorisms and twice-told tales,” said a stranger.
   Dazed, I didn’t see who had spoken. Everybody looked at me as if I were the culprit.
   Then everybody commenced trading aphorisms and twice-told tales . . .
   The end of human machinery is the beginning of timeless lint blizzards.
   A cautious man always eats the bait before he catches the fishes.
   Timeless lint blizzards should be wrangled and punished with the same efficiency and enthusiasm as cautious men. The fact is . . .
    . . . Lithuanian tourists cannot be trusted. Nonetheless he survived. His subsequent epiphany produced a fiery mean-on. Figuratively and literally. He buttered up the natives with a few Molotov cocktails, then razed them with a flamethrower. Their ashes floated across the water like decayed barcodes. The end . . . Lithuanian tourists cannot be trusted. Nonetheless he survived. His subsequent epiphany produced a fiery mean-on. Figuratively and literally. Thus he buttered up the natives with a few Molotov cocktails, then razed them with a flamethrower. Their ashes floated across the water like decayed barcodes. The end . . .
   They passed around a bowl of string cheese. We were instructed to take no more than two servings apiece under the penalty of excommunication from the kerosene lantern tour.
   The gears of the clock tower looming over the reservation slowly rusted and died. Nobody fixed them.
   We killed an elk. Nobody ate it.
   We wrote a play and tried to perform it. Nobody could remember their lines.
   We observed a group member’s bald spot with magnifying glasses, speculating about its origin and future. Some of the children began to cry; they had to be timeouted. Music emanated from a broken Victrola. Voices disambiguated. The arrows pointed NNW. The color turquoise went extinct. A man’s navel exploded.
Kaiju
emerged from the surf. Gunfire. Extended lectures on pedagogy. Ultraviolent Amerikan Dreams. They wanted to sell the land and build a suburb, but protestors egged the developers and yanked down their trousers. Conversation oscillated between guttural squawks and heated meditations on beef eating. 1001 nights in Bangkok. Antennae. Pulp morality. Darkness.
   The whipper cracked his knuckles and said, “It is time for bed. Hence we must lie down. No man owns the right to remain erect and awake when bedtime has come to pass.”
    . . . At sunup, we rolled off our cots and shuffled around the kerosene lantern like drowsy penguins. The tour guides didn’t get up until noon. They negated their hangovers with makeshift IVs. They smoked cigarettes. They did calisthenics, screaming at each other to go faster.
   Pulsing swaths of clouds contaminated the sky . . .
   They instructed us in the realm of nomenclature. “Some users call it paraffin,” said a tour guide, “whereas others simply refer to it as The Wet Substance that Bursts Aflame When One Touches It with Fire . . . ”

 

LORD BYRON CIRCUS

 

Polar bears inundated the Midwest, walking on hind legs and willing to work for below minimum wage . . . The penguins shed their tuxedos and picketed until dusk. The migrant workers went home and ate breakfast. The pterodactyl men pulled up their pantaloons and ran to the DMV, shrieking like moths and requesting dire audiences with the Secretary of Hate . . . Something happened to the parataxis man. He slipped and fell from a cliff and landed on his head but he was all right and he got up and dusted himself off and looked both ways and a steel-eyed bull nailed him in the tailbone. He flipped end over end back onto the lip of the cliff in a casual standing position. Meanwhile the polar bears were stealing everybody’s jobs. They operated at the very pinnacle of efficiency, pausing only to use the Men’s Room and devour the odd assistant manager . . . “The technology of the mechanized retroflesh,” said a backyard fetishist in response to an organ donor who asked him for the time and directions to the cafeteria . . . (NOTE: The connections don’t work. A work ethic isn’t enough to excel in the postcapitalist scheme of intelligent design.) . . . Down the hallway Judge Schreber slipped out of a straight jacket, snuck up behind a sunflower, and strapped the jacket onto the perennial beast’s green limbs. The sunflower resisted, seeds and florets erupting from its oversized head like sparks. Just last night Judge Schreber sentenced a Venus flytrap to two years in Auschwitz for eating more than its lawful share—EIGHT FLIES PER TRAP PER DAY OR ELSE, say the Rules of the Game—and now here he stood oppressing yet another member of the plant family. A wildly anabolic sense of guilt induced an epileptic seizure. He hit the floor and vibrated and clanked like a rusty turbine. Clock springs exploded from his ears and nostrils and then his flesh gave way to the Machine, sharp follicles of metal growing from his pores in fasttime until he became a porcupine of conductivity and industrial panic, a
tetsuo
through and through. “That’s unwise,” said a hole in the blackface of the sunflower. A polar bear said the same thing when it discovered its boss making love to the candy bar dispenser in the break room. It didn’t know what to do. Quit? Or ride this gig to the end? It cleared its mind and searched for an answer . . . nothing. Best consult the
I Ching
. The polar bear dumped a bag of yarrow stalks onto the table, carefully arranged them according to the schiz-flows of its psyche, then consulted an out-of-date translation of Lao-tzu’s
New York Times
bestseller. This is what the book told the animal:
   
   
When taxes are too high,
   people go hungry.
   When the government is too intrusive,
   people lose their spirit.
   
   Act for the people’s benefit.
   Trust them; leave them alone.
   
The candy bar dispenser groaned as the polar bear’s lips flared with gray blood . . . Life as nothing more than the struggle not to shout expletives at Black Tie Luncheons. Life as nothing more than the shouting of expletives at Red Lobster when the food comes out and the depressed-emaciated-browbeaten waitress breaks down and cries mascara-stained tears all over your Seaside Shrimp Trio because her husband’s in the clink and her snaggletoothed kids have low self- esteem and too many VDs . . . Breakfast at Tiffany Texarkana’s. George Peppard is there and so is the rest of the A-Team. After the gangbang a machinegunfight breaks out. No blood. Nobody gets shot and everybody dies . . . “Don’t forget to boil that nipple!” exclaimed Mother as she tiptoed across the balance beam. Father saluted and thought: Who serves a perfectly healthy infant a cold nipple? Then the acrobats began to spill out of the ceiling ducts in a somersaulting tsunami of hard-boiled aggression. The gymnasium filled up quickly. Mother and Father escaped through an emergency exit. Infant was left behind and grew up to be a comic book villain . . . (NOTE: Don’t forget about the polar bears.) . . . Neglect is the fundament of psychopathy. Schreber’ll tell you. Freud, too . . . Consider Freud’s analysis of Schreber via his memoirs: “The exciting cause of his illness, then, was an outburst of homosexual libido; the object of this libido was probably from the very first his physician, who enjoyed masquerading around the asylum in various polar bear costumes.” . . . That’s when everybody started goosing and trying to fuck the animals. Bestiality became the apple of the working man’s eye, but humanality wasn’t the polar bears’ bag. They clocked out, collected payment for services rendered, dropped back onto all fours, and returned to the North Pole where the sun raced around the horizon like a tangerine in a blue, blue toilet bowl . . . In their wake, the gears and girders of existence fell into an abrupt Romantic stupor. Pistons, cogs, engines sang in the cornfield breeze as the Lord Byron Circus emerged from the dust and tore across the landscape of the Midwest going 120 mph. Celebratory terrazzos of gore hung out the windows of the mechanical centipede that served as the circus’s caboose. Taking the lead was a virgin mime who had yet to officially parody the wiles of men in the public sphere. His vast goosesteps progressed forward in a deafening, technologized blur . . .

 

THE MONK SPITTER

 

There was a machine that spit monks. “Ptk,” went the machine. “Ptk. Ptk.”
   Brown bundles of fabric sailed across the sky . . .
   A police force patrolled the field to make sure the monks didn’t break anything when they landed. For instance: A monk hit the ground face first and swallowed a mouthful of dirt and a policeman helped him up by the elbow and patted him on the back so he didn’t choke on the dirt and the monk dusted himself off and thanked the policeman and the policeman asked the monk if he had broken any bones and the monk felt his body from top to bottom to top and told the policeman he believed his bones were in good shape. Nodding, the policeman folded arms across chest, and the monk said, “If you think about it, all white people look vaguely like Macauley Culkin. The skin. The lips. This is assuming, of course, that all white people have blond hair. Likewise must they possess a certain undernourished quality.”
   Next: The clouds fell into the horizon, exposing an unforgiving red sun, and all the monks pulled down their hoods, and the policemen pulled down the brims of their hats.
   Next: One of the monks noticed a small tear in his hood. He brandished a needle and thread and sewed up the tear.
   Next: . . .
   Next: An old man took a sip of hot bouillon.
   The bouillon tasted sour, and the old man died of malaise, but not before writing a letter to the bouillon factory that produced it. The letter read: “I’m extremely saddened by your bouillon.”
   Next: . . . Dunno. A violent shipwreck?
   The
S.S. Buzzardspoon
crashed into a towering island reef at a speed exceeding 80 knots. Bar tenders, lounge singers, captains, navy seals, smokestack sweepers flew off of the deck and were impaled on a vast, otherworldly bed of stalagmites. Death throes. Spurts and rivulets of gore. The native islanders swarmed the carnage like termites. Colonists must be taught a lesson. Frozen screams. Sequence of apocalyptic explosions. A kraken rose out of the surf and devoured the natives by the handful. Sopwith Camel warplanes sputtered overhead and dropped bombs the size of mules. More explosions. One of the planes flew into the kraken’s cyclopic eye and the beast toppled over with a resounding grunt. Across the universe a meteor spiraled into a black hole. On the other side of the island a second ship, the
S.S. Yanomamo
, crashed. No stalagmites here. No boulders or rocks. Only a smooth white coastline—and yet the
S.S. Yanomamo
still, somehow, crashed. Every soul on board survived. They dashed to the island’s highest peak and erected a church with steeples and bell towers and gargoyles and the pastor slammed his fist into his palm and the congregation took communion and spoke in tongues and put on capes with collars that swallowed their heads. In the vestibule, children poked each other in the ribs. In the belfry, an arthritic hunchback swung on a bell clapper like a monkey. In the basement, a stranger wolfed down his medication and waited, patiently, for the pain to subside.
   In the distance: “Ptk” . . .

 

INFANCY

 

A man screwed an antenna into the soft spot of an infant’s skull and tried to get a signal. No luck.
   He called the front desk of the hotel. “The baby doesn’t work,” he told the concierge. “I’m getting rid of it.” He hung up the phone, opened a window, and honored his promise.
   The shriek of radio static dopplered down to the street . . .

 

THE LESSON

 

The lesson-giver’s elbow wasn’t working. Whenever he thrust his finger into the air to accentuate a point, the elbow convulsed, swung like a pendulum, and struck him in the cheek. His audience: a morass of taxidermists imitating ornery, cigar-smoking bullfrogs.
   Nearby a tree shook its leaves. Everybody pretended the tree wasn’t there . . .
   The lesson-giver grew more careful. He thrust his finger softly, gently, and his elbow began to kiss him on the cheek. A taxidermist acknowledged the feat of acclimatization with a powerful
ribbit!
The tree acknowledged it by shaking its leaves harder.
   Overhead the silhouette of a kung-fu fighter sailed across the night sky. His karate chops were as fluid and true as a child’s mother-love . . .
   The finger stopped thrusting, the elbow stopped kissing. The taxidermists swallowed their cigars and stood as the elbow blackened, withered, died. It fell off of his arm and swam to the earth like a leaf.
   The lesson-giver pushed out his lips. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he croaked . . .

BOOK: They Had Goat Heads
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