Dinner talk was depressing. At the top of the news the Missouri state legislature once again rejected Federal Government aid. "The House Speaker said they would not accept any money from the 'crypto-fascist' Feds," his wife complained as she lay the table. "Instead the state assembly voted to balance the budget by taking two dollars a month out of the Governor's paycheck to play on the lottery."
To try and introduce some levity into the otherwise dower dinner conversation, he told her that Winston Churchill had once said: "The U.S. will do the right thing... after they have exhausted every other possibility."
Despite his best efforts, however, the reference landed flat.
All his wife said in return was: "Maybe before, maybe way back then the Federal Government could have been counted on to do the right thing. I just don't know anymore. Look at what they are doing to Iowa. They've practically turned it into a police state."
After all the personal hardship they had endured during their son's descent into madness, it was difficult for him to see his wife still in so much pain. And now that the boy had gone missing (it was nine days since the child ran off) he could see how the 'not knowing' and fear of what might happen was eating away at her.
When did it happen, he wondered? When did Michael Michaels' otherwise very pleasant pornographic news reenactments first start to sting him with their falsity? He tried to think back. How long ago was it that the forecasts of slowing indicators of unemployment and the seemingly never-ending string of optimistic headlines of imminent recovery first started to sour? When was it, he tried to remember, that he finally realized that the Federal Government's charges that Missouri was "meddling" with their neighbor Iowa's state affairs was nothing more than a sick joke, one perpetrated by the very folks who occupied Iowa.
The phone rang.
"It was the sheriff's deputy," she told him after she hung up. He and his wife locked eyes. "Our boy's been arrested for a rape and murder three counties over," she said. "They got him caged up in the insane asylum over there."
To see her so obviously distraught would have scared the crap out of anyone else, but when her husband came back into the dining room to clear the last of the dishes from the table and saw her hugging her knees to her chest sobbing, he knew better. The boy was their oldest child. Schizophrenia was no joke. They had suffered close up and personally the boy's fall from "All American" athlete and summa cum laude academic student to wild-eyed animal. What he saw in his wife that no one else could have understood was that those tears she shed were not tears of sorrow. They were tears of relief. If nothing else, he knew she could finally rest assured her boy couldn't harm himself or anybody else anymore.
Contrary to what one might think, to them the news called for a celebration. He pulled out the best bottle of white wine they had.
Towards the climax of the boy's growing dementia, family life for them had become next to impossible. The first inkling they had that their son was not quite right was when he plucked all the heads off his baby sister's dolls and drew mustaches on their faces with a permanent black marker. He was fifteen. Had they been more vigilant -- they struggled with the possibility -- they might have seen the signs in the decapitation and defacement of their daughter's collection of Barbies. But what had they done in the ensuing four years? Nothing. They had not wanted to think the worst.
"Remember when he re-wrote the United States Constitution?"
The two of them sat out in the backyard. She topped their wine glasses off.
"The United 'Snakes' of American," he automatically replied.
"The United 'Snakes' of Erotica," she corrected.
However much tinged with sadness, her face lit up. It was the first good laugh they had had together in quite some time. A honeybee circled her glass of Chardonnay. Together they watched the sun set over the flat horizon.
"Most likely, the deputy said," she recounted the phone call, "the authorities will throw away the key." She was assured the family would have unlimited visitation rights, but the boy, it was explained to her, would probably remain the ward of the state for the rest of his natural life. It was the best thing for everyone.
...So, you can imagine their shock and disbelief when the doorbell rang only three weeks later and there the boy stood with a box of chocolates, a bouquet of wild flowers, and an awkward, posed smile.
Despite his emotional numbness at the sight of his kid, his wife's excitement more than made up for the pregnant silence that had passed between father and son after he opened the door -- her motherly instinct kicked right in. Both he and his wife were overwhelmed by how strong, healthy, and well groomed their firstborn looked. The only difference between the two of them was how quickly his wife was able to process what struck him as a rather irrational and improbable turn of events. It was like they had got their original son back, not the sick one, but the "All American" one, and everything that had happened was nothing but a bad dream from which they had both unexpectedly awakened. The kid who stood before them wore a fairly well tailored Government Issue gray suit and practically beamed with good spirits.
A cup of hot steaming coffee in his hand he recounted how the Federal recruiter came to the asylum for the criminally insane and picked him out from all the others for a scholarship to Fort College. He told them how he leveled up in Version XXVII of Drone Wars and passed the "Rabelais Diagnostic Exam" with flying colors -- and how he was now a proud holder of a university degree.
"In only three weeks?" his father had a hard time repressing his disbelief.
The searing look his wife shot him forced the man to back off. He reluctantly conceded. "That's great," he eventually praised the boy, and patted the kid on the shoulder despite his gnawing reservations.
His father wasn't the only one who found the boy's story a little hard to swallow. Everyone else in the neighborhood was equally skeptical of the total transformation. The younger kids especially were hard-pressed to shake their earlier impressions. When he walked out into the street and expressed an interest in tossing a football around with them their immediate reaction was to shrink back with fear, but all was somehow forgotten after he quarterbacked a couple of successful sure handed passes that lead to scores. It was true everyone including the mailman visibly winced when they saw the boy was back home from the asylum, but his father was genuinely touched and astounded by how quickly his kid was able to win the rest of the neighborhood back with his newly reacquired positive outlook.
Cigars went all around. It was like a full-grown man was born into the world. For the longest time he had blamed all his bad luck on the Christian God -- "The God of Suffering," he called him. At the darkest moments of his self-doubt he seriously wondered if his fortunes might change by simply disavowing the tortured godhead, and yet here he was finally witness to a miracle of kindness. Neither he nor his wife had dared to believe that in the material world anything of the kind was possible, yet here it was, presented to them plain as the day is light and the night is dark -- his boy was somehow made whole again.
Well almost, anyway. Little things, the kind you could easily disregard, caught his father's attention. Like something about the look in the boy's eyes that scared him when they took out the garbage that night. There was nothing to suggest the boy was in any danger of slipping back into his former schizophrenic psychosis. And for that they were grateful. His new public personality didn't concern them too much either. After the first couple of days they finally came to think of it more as an immovable object than anything else. But as much as he was the son they always wished they had, bright eyed and gregarious as far as all their friends and neighbors knew, at home he wasn't quite their son anymore.
Out of the public eye he was a different person altogether, hollow, empty, like there was something more to the Fort College curriculum he had not told them about. He didn't sleep, his father noted, not at night anyway, and there was his latest habit, neither of them could ignore, of rearranging everything in the house. "Try and get some shut-eye, dear," his mother sweetly entreated. She could hear him hard at work on the bathroom medicine cabinet when she closed the bedroom door.
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Early the next morning she stood behind him while he chopped wood. It was cold enough in the mountains to make her breath visible when she spoke. He had every right to be angry with her. Up 'till that point she hadn't been entirely truthful with him. There was no longer any point in trying to deny it. She told him she never wanted to hurt his feelings. The younger girl wasn't really her daughter. They hadn't set out to deceive him exactly, but now he had caught them together in flagrante delicto there was no point in pretending otherwise anymore, the other girl was really her lover and best friend.
Chopping wood he was clearly upset. He pretended to ignore her as he stood the next log on the stump and split it in two with a single swing of his ax.
If he wanted to kick them back to the curb, that was his prerogative she told him. She would understand but she wanted him to see it from her point of view. She tried to make her case why he shouldn't toss them out. He had to appreciate that in their own way she and her partner really did love him. They might have deceived him about some things like their own relationship but when it came to their affection for him, she insisted that part was genuine and heartfelt in a way no one could fake.
But she could tell he had already made up his mind. Maybe he didn't know what exactly to do next, but the game was over. As he grabbed another log off the woodpile he was so upset with her he couldn't even look her in the eye.
When she leveled the pistol to the back of his head and dropped him like he was nothing but a sack of potatoes she tried to remind herself it wasn't because he called her and her lover "dirty girls" but because she was a government trained intelligence woman and he was a suspected dissident. It wasn't her fault he had caught the attention of the Internal Revenue Service. It was his fault. He had brought suspicion on himself by waving around a fat wad of bills and bragging to everyone in town how rich he was. She and her partner had only done their job by inserting themselves into his personal life. Their mission was to locate the source of his funds, and they had.
"We ran a full diagnostic exam before she shot him," the software engineer told Senator Loudan Rich. "Her secret phrase is the capitol of Wyoming. When she responded 'Cheyenne' the home office gave her the go-ahead."
The government was holding hearings on Capitol Hill about the use of schizophrenics in the service of national security.
"She described how the blood spurted out of the back of his head after she shot him," the Senator beat his gavel for quiet. "She graphically recounted how she dismembered his body with a rusty chainsaw she found under the cabin, how heavy his decapitated head was when she hurled it over the mountainside and watched it roll down to the bottom. Didn't any of that raise red flags?"
"Writing code isn't perfect," the Drone Wars software engineer responded. "We write hundreds and thousands of lines of code. For every program we write there are bound to be some minor glitches, especially in a game as complicated as this one."
"Minor glitches? What about the fact that she and her partner drained the man's bank accounts and ultimately burned his cabin down to the ground to try and cash in on the insurance?" the New Mexico representative did not sound satisfied with the software engineer's answers.
Next up before the Senate panel was her Fort College instructor.
"Office hours are always a strain," the instructor testified. "I never feel more like I'm herding cattle, and it is hard for me to distinguish the kid with a blank smile who sits in front of me at any given time from the last student with a blank smile who has left only minutes ago."
His standard question with all the new recruits, he explained to the Senate panel, was on the topic of Rabelais.
"The 'vinegar butt' passage is one of my favs," was how the young girl had answered.
He admitted the answer had troubled him, but after a brief pause the instructor said he decided to change the subject to Beckett.
The only thing the young student knew about Beckett was that he supposedly drove Andre the Giant to school. "It is one of those persistent if somewhat improbable legends," the intelligence instructor explained to the panel, "the kind everyone wants to believe even though it most likely isn't true."
"Only what I don't get is how Andre the Giant fit into the car?" the young schizophrenic intelligence recruit had asked.
"You have to keep in mind," the instructor played along, "he was only a student at the time."
The young woman had grinned. "Funny. Wonder what they talked about?"
"Maybe Gargantua and Pantagruel?" the instructor stiffened slightly when he said it.
"The 'vinegar butt' passage is one of my favs," the young intelligence student tossed her hair back and mechanically reiterated.
"What about Gargantua and Pantagruel?" the instructor leaned forward and grabbed the armrests of his chair afraid of what he knew would come next.
"The 'vinegar butt' passage..." the woman sounded like a skipping record, "Is one of my favs."
"Clearly there was something wrong with her code," the instructor conceded.
"So you had your suspicions about the intelligence recruit all along?" the Senator squinted his eyes at the instructor.
"Definitely," the instructor answered. "The 'Rabelais Test' is just about the only accurate means of product control we have with these schizophrenic agents. If it shorts out in a newly trained intelligence recruit, the only recourse almost always is to send them back for reprogramming. To my knowledge there are no quick fixes."
"And you, Doc," the Senator turned to the man who sat next to the instructor. "What's your expert opinion?"
"Two distinct groups of humanoids exist -- water and alcohol based," the doctor replied. "I believe the young woman was misdiagnosed as an alcohol based humanoid. A misdiagnosis like that can have very serious consequences. Alcohol based humanoids have severe negative reactions to the consumption of water. And the opposite is true. Water based humanoids should not drink alcohol."
"Are you saying she was drunk?" the Senator interrupted.
"To use the vernacular," the doctor came back, "she was in all likelihood 'shitfaced' when she committed the crime, yes."
"Disturbing evidence has come to the fore in this case," the Senator went on, "that the young schizophrenic woman is suspected in her brother's death a number of years back and there is circumstantial evidence she was the student who sent the pipe-bombs to various Fort College senior faculty the semester before last. Were you aware of these suspicions?"
"No. None of that information was ever forwarded to my desk," the doctor sat rigid. "In fact I only ever interviewed the intelligence woman once. In our brief discussion she was almost robotic in her answers. Like she was trying to hide something, or mask some aspect of her personality. It didn't strike me as anything so serious to indicate she needed reprogramming."
"Alright," the New Mexico Senator leaned back to receive a note from his aid. "We are going to have to wrap things up for today and adjourn the panel until first thing tomorrow morning. After a brief recess we will reconvene for the Version XXVI hearing on Drone War atrocities."
The chamber was already starting to fill up with toddler gamers accused of all kinds of terrible crimes. Some infants came with their parents. Others had obtained lawyers to speak on their behalf.
"It's a sad day," Loudan Rich muttered from the podium, "when the real world is a shabby version of its own satire."
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Normally he didn't like to stop and talk to strangers, but there was something about the lines of the young girl's face that stood outside the mini-mart with a cast on her leg that made him wonder what it was she was doing out there in the cold.
She explained how she had to get out of an abusive situation. "My man beat me something awful," she said.
Still, there was a long way to go between a bad relationship and panhandling in a mini-mart parking lot. How did she get so low he wanted to know?
It was a matter of life or death she told him. She had to get out of the relationship to save herself. If she stayed with him, her man would have killed her "for sure" she said.
But how had it gotten to that? He didn't quite understand. Didn't she know the man was a snake-in-the-grass from the start?
"Quite the contrary," she sighed. Maybe she should have seen it coming, she conceded, but when her man came into her life he was like the most beautiful figure skater she had ever seen. His sharp body lines and the expressive gestures he made were perfectly synchronized. His movements were so gracefully fluid she got caught up in the fantasy of his performance right away. She had never seen anyone's blades cut the ice so effortlessly, like he was otherworldly, like an angel or a demon. The silver serpent that curled around his neck and his elastic black bodysuit might have told her which one he was; she admitted to that, but from the first moment he skated into her life, she was captured by his spell.
Mayberry was their enchanted small mid-western town, a perfect retro-mid-twentieth-century Norman Rockwell dream world in which dogs barked at mailmen and narcotics salesmen helped little old ladies cross the street. There was one gas station, one diner, and one post-office in front of which stood the town flagpole. Come rain or snow the stars-and-stripes proudly waved. Whatever the weather, the mayor, the newspaperman, and the police and fire chiefs were regularly seen skating down the main drag of this winter paradise.
Life was like one big ice-dance. The two lovers spun around and pirouetted down Main Street together to the applause of all their friends and neighbors. For a while their world was like a fantastic ice-pageant. Every day was a Waltz or a Tango. The lovers skated in perfect symmetry with the most exquisite harmony and movement, as if nothing but first-place ribbons marked their future.
Then the government intelligence man skated into town in his shabby gray suit. "It was as if God had a seizure," she tried to convey the gravity of the change that overcame the little town she had grown up in to the man who had approached her with the grocery bag under his arm. "Everyone didn't unexpectedly become completely spastic," she continued. Nothing so obvious -- "it wasn't exactly as dramatic as if someone or something shined a strobe light on the little town and everyone's movements got all choppy" -- she made herself all angular and started to twitch in an attempt to illustrate what she was talking about.
"What happened was far subtler than that. More of a feeling like something was the 'teensiest' bit askew," she said. "Small insignificant stuff was off. Something had changed, something hard to place but no less serious. Like the intelligence man's sense of timing was off by a fraction of a second and somehow the minute he showed up simply through his own incompetence he managed to throw everyone else in town off their mark. No doubt everyone in Mayberry went about their business the way they always had. Only everything they did became somehow miscued like they were just a single beat off the mark. Everyone was either too early or too late, like their timing was somehow thrown by just the tiniest fraction, and skaters narrowly missed each other, or far worse, actually collided."
"Let's put it this way," she told the man in front of the mini-mart, "The fellow's arrival definitely coincided with a number of very ugly Main Street pile-ups."
It turned out the government intelligence man was not entirely without talent. As soon as they got themselves disentangled, townsfolk skated up to meet the newcomer. He made his money at the local bar. What he would do was put some change in the jukebox and sing and dance to the song. The fact he couldn't land a single note or hit a beat made him the toast of Mayberry. No one in town had ever known a world without rhythm and to them the new found revelation was exiting and novel.
"I definitely wasn't the only one," she wanted to make sure the man with the grocery bag understood. "All the other girls thought so too."
"She told him this last distasteful business," she explained, "because a lot of the male prima donna skaters in town soured on the Federal Government intelligence man as soon as they perceived him as a sexual threat."
"Trouble is, it always cuts all around," she went on. "If their girlfriends showed the slightest bit of interest in the intelligence man cum minstrel, lots of their guys also turned on them." Mayberry turned into a kind of daytime soap on ice.
"Don't get me wrong," she allowed. "Girls will be girls." All of them flirted with the newcomer. Maybe one or two of them actually wanted to make a play for the guy, but it didn't stop many of their boyfriends from getting pissed off, including hers, even though like most of the other girls in town all she really wanted to do was flare her feathers.
The young woman outside the mini-mart described how the next morning after the arrival of the intelligence man had begun like every other morning before that. She left her mother at the kitchen table staring dumbly at the TV, went into the master bedroom and took twenty dollars from her mother's purse for the third period mandatory gambling hour. But like a chump she lost practically all of it at the craps table after only about ten minutes. The idea was to milk the rest of the hour at the nickel-slots with the change she had left over, but her bad luck became even worse.
Out of cash she turned around. As usual her teacher was at the school cafeteria bar, on his third drink by the look of him. Her chances at a clean getaway were good.
With all the stealth she could muster she ducked out of class. Once outside in the cool air of the pond she felt alive. Her triple axels were giving her trouble. She definitely wasn't landing them as smoothly as she needed to and this bonus time seemed as good as any other to practice.
"My best friend used to say on the ice I was like a weightless, magical fairy tale creature," she told the man. "In retrospect it all sounds pretty funny I guess."
Rhythmic dissonance wasn't the only thing the government intelligence man had introduced into her quiet community. He had brought with him a nasty case of psychic discord. It was her best friend who hit her on the kneecap with a lead pipe, who ended her skating career with that single blow, and all in a calculated attempt to steal her boyfriend from her. And the saddest thing of all was that it actually worked. Afterwards, when bent over with pain, her leg destroyed, the man she had fallen so hard for, the man in the black spandex leotard with the serpent necklace she had given herself so fervently to -- shunned her, and worse still, actually physically abused her crippled body until she was forced to flee her little town of Mayberry. Without regard for the indignity that would certainly face her in a world foreign to the only one she knew, she packed her bags, slung her skates over her shoulder, and set out on her own.
The Kennedy Center audience gave a rousing ovation. Hoots and hollers followed applause. What a show! They loved it!
For Version XXV, scores of government intelligence men were dispatched to small-town America to provide boots on the ground intel for Drone Wars gamers the world over. Securing men like the figure skater with the serpent around his neck to pinpoint local targets for Hellfire attacks was key to the success of the mission. What did it matter if it was a phantom undertaking against a made-up citizen resistance, or that government forces fought against a ghost revolt which was entirely concocted by paranoid minds inside the Beltway? Not only had the Feds and the intelligence agencies that reported to them invented a totally fallacious enemy to launch a surge against, since it was pure fiction to begin with, the entire story could be controlled from start to finish.
"Say what you will," one high-ranking Federal Government official in the Kennedy Center audience bloviated after the ice-pageant finale, "Our art is hands-down way better than the enemy's."
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Among the nameless faces, he was just another face without a name as he walked past pornographic DVD rental stores and gun shops.
On the news, they were trying to put a glass observation dome on the Chinese space station, but the giant robot arm couldn't get the air seal to fit correctly; high surf advisories for the big-wave competition in Half Moon Bay didn't account for the monster breakers that crushed camera towers and sucked several dozen spectators and participants out to sea; major ski events at the Winter Olympics were canceled outright do to the poor slushy condition of the snow -- tons of the white stuff were being trucked in at major expense to the host-country only to melt in the hot sun; and, much closer to home, New Mexico Senator Loudan Rich made headlines once again, this time for dating a gorgeous seventeen-year-old alleged Rebel spy -- "The only secrets I'm sharing with her," the cocky representative reportedly told a concerned colleague, "are Victoria Secrets."
With a great big grin reminiscent of the Cheshire cat he turned off his handheld electronic device, entered the dimly lit establishment recommended to him by the motel clerk, and pulled up a seat at the bar. "They're naked and they dance," the DJ said as he segued into the song "On with the Show".
Except for him and a few other men the place was depressingly empty. It was the "off-season" as one girl put it. "We mostly only get geriatrics on discount vacation packages this time of year," she said.
After their sets were over a number of the prettiest girls in the line-up approached him with their personal stories. "He was a simple country peach farmer," he told them when they asked. In part it was true. In part it was because most of the top-billed girls seriously intimidated him. They were so spectacularly good looking he just couldn't realistically picture a hook-up working out with any one of them.
They came, he learned, from just about anywhere and everywhere you could think of all around the country. Many of them had fought their way out of dead-end urban or rural backgrounds. He was surprised to find a lot of them were dancing to fund their educations. Most of the rest were supporting their children after dead-beat dads had split on them. Only one of them said she was just in it for the kicks. "No strings attached," she winked. She was a remarkably beautiful Philippine girl and the two of them hit it off right away.
For reasons he wasn't quite sure of, he changed his story with her and told her he was a VP of a major multi-billion dollar corporation. In the heat of the moment it seemed like the right thing to say, and the glint in her eyes when he said it was reward enough. After some small talk and a couple of drinks he finally mustered enough courage to ask her if she wanted to come back to his place. He had a small cabana with a little balcony and he told her it came with a super view of the stars. It was a calculated risk he had to take. Chances were good she would turn him down, but that's not at all what happened. Much to his surprise, she actually welcomed the idea.
Back in his motel room they did a couple of lines of cocaine, enjoyed a few more drinks compliments of the well-stocked bar, and she rolled a fat joint from which he took several eager drags.
For a while afterwards things got a little blurred. They made love. That was for sure! To put it less delicately they really went at it. He remembered how her hands were pressed up against the mirrored backboard of the king-sized bed as he took her doggy-style. In his own mind he was like some kind of out-of-control sex machine. They must have done it just about every single way he could think of. At about 3 AM they both collapsed into a sweaty pile. Much to his satisfaction, ego-wise anyway, she lay next to him out of breath, her body convulsing with pleasure, her skin glistening with moisture.
When he rolled out of bed she was still totally out of it. So, when he came back to the bedroom with two fresh drinks only moments later he was marginally disappointed to find she had put her underwear back on and was clutching her skimpy dress tightly to her stomach.
"I can't stay the night," she sounded apologetic.
"Okay," he answered all of a sudden self-conscious about his own nakedness.
"My car stalled out on the freeway halfway to work," she looked quite helpless to him. "Can you do me a small favor and drive me out there? The electrics are messed up or something. At least that's what the mechanic told me. I gotta trade it in for something more reliable, I know, everyone tells me so, but I think, if you can get me out to Route 360, after sitting all day the car should start up just fine."
From sex god to knight in shining armor, he thought triumphantly, still a bit high on the drugs and sex. His Southern gallantry kicked right in.
The rural road got darker and darker the farther out they drove. She switched the radio channel on his rental until she found the Oldies-But-Goodies station. For a while they sang along to some of their favorite old-time nostalgic favorites. But about thirty miles out of town she unexpectedly interrupted the fun-times sing-a-long and indicated he should pull over. Up ahead at the outer-edge of his headlights he could see a dusty convertible parked on the side of the road. They pulled in behind it, got out.
But after they had advanced only a few yards toward the abandoned vehicle the blindingly bright headlights of another car flashed on in front of them.
Almost before he had a chance to process the meaning of the unexpected intrusion into his fantasy the prostitute beside him shrank away with fear and screamed, "Oh, no!" She was practically panic-stricken. "It's my boyfriend," she moaned as she collapsed to her knees. "He's crazy. He's going to kill us both."
The sense of betrayal almost overwhelmed him as the other man stepped out of the light holding a shotgun. It definitely didn't help that the Philippine dancer yelled out to her pimp that it wasn't her fault, he had forced himself on her, forced her to have sex with him against her will, that he had, in fact, raped her repeatedly for hours on end. She was practically challenging her boyfriend to kill him. And just as quickly he realized the plan all along was probably to seduce him, and lure him out to this remote and desolate place to rob and murder him.
If the two of them had imagined he would go down easily, however, they were seriously mistaken. For one, he was packing. Yes-sir-y-Bob, he had some deadly steel tucked away in his belt. Before the prostitute's boyfriend could raise his rifle waist-high and pull the trigger he shot the Asian pimp twice in the head. Of course the whore begged for her life, but she was wasting her time. He put a thirty-three slug right between her breasts. Their plan was to put his dead body in the convertible, pour gasoline all over it, and light the car on fire to destroy all the evidence, so that's exactly what he did with their bodies. He piled them into the car and lit it on fire. The whole scene was gruesome, but as the convertible flared up and was engulfed by flame, he was surprised how easily he shrugged off any sense of moral self-reproach...
"What a kick!" he exclaimed to his wife moments later, a little out of breath after the insane adrenaline-rush he had just experienced, shiny and alert like he had just emerged from the water after a vigorous dip. His family was reconvened on the front steps of the Museum and Amusement Park of Middle-Class Sexual Fantasy just as they had planned to do. The fun-park was a Version XXIV Drone Wars addition to the game. They were lucky. If they had passed this way a day or two earlier, for instance, none of it would have been here.
His wife's cheeks were as flushed with color as his were. He could plainly see Iris d'Mint's face was still all aglow and vibrant after her thrill-ride. Both girls, he also noticed, were made up and dressed like little sluts.
As the family got back into their old Buick, he couldn't help himself but entertain all the many unsavory scenarios that raced through his mind about what could have happened to his wife and daughters while he was otherwise concerned with his Philippine seductress. Had his wife been gang-raped and hate-fucked by a bunch of misogynist Marines? Was that her fantasy? After better than ten years of marriage, he realized, much to his chagrin, he had absolutely no clue what her secret turn-on was. Had his daughters chosen to get sold into sexual slavery? Had they allowed themselves to be diddled by a bunch of old man perverts? Had they been bound and gagged, made the nubile playthings of some local minister, or gym teacher?
Every bit of the pleasure he got from his own fun-park ride seemed to dissolve. A bit queasy and creeped out by the possibilities of what might have befallen his wife and daughters during his own male fantasy experience, he bit his lip. As he edged the car back onto the freeway, he genuinely hoped their female sexual desires were completely different from his own middle-class male perversions.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
"Hi, honey."
"Where are you?"
"Terrabella X."
"Where?"
"Planet Terrabella X. It's on the outer edge of the galaxy."
"I don't care where you are. Get your butt back home pronto. We've been worried sick about you. I thought you were dead."
"Standing room only on the flight, but otherwise no worse for the wear. I have to tell you a funny story. When we touched down at the Intergalactic Airport I couldn't help but think of that funny joke by the talking rabbit. Remember? We saw it together on the Internet. The talking rabbit said: Two U.S. Federal Government officials get off a rocket-ship in Nuevo Nebraska. 'Occupation?' the customs official asks them. 'No,' the senior U.S. delegate answers, 'pleasure.'"
"Darling, I've been heartsick since the Cape Canaveral drone attack on the Chinese rocket-ship."
"No need for concern, dear. Really. The alien race on the planet is generally friendly. Honestly, it's not that much different than home."
"I need you back here now."
"Don't be so melodramatic. It could be some time before I can schedule a flight back to Earth."
"I'm serious. It's no joking matter. The little one cries all day and that damn nannybot you bought me is utterly worthless."
"Maybe you could use some therapy."
"What? Are you calling me crazy?"
"Don't go there. I'm just saying, maybe a therapist could help you get over your issues with the nannybot."
"First off, mister, I don't have any issues with the damn robot."
"You never liked the machine. You thought of it as a threat to your motherhood."
"You're sick, you know that. You're seriously sick in the head if you honestly think that. Maybe you're the one who should see a therapist?"
"I'm just saying. You know. For your own good."
"Screw you! If you seriously think I'm crazy then maybe we don't have anything to talk about."
"Listen to yourself, honey..."
"What the hell do you mean? I can hear myself just fine!"
"Maybe I shouldn't have called?"
"Maybe you shouldn't have!"
"Please don't hang up, sweetheart."
"Who said anything about hanging up?"
"We've danced this little dance so many times before, and every time before you've hung the phone up."
"Well, why shouldn't I? I've got a lot on my plate right now and the last thing I need is you insinuating I'm crazy."
"But I'm not. That's not what I'm saying at all."
"Sure sounds that way to me."
"I just wish you would give the booze a break."
"Dick-less wonder. Now you're calling me a lush. Maybe you want me to join AA while I'm at it?"
"Couldn't hurt."
"And between my psychiatrist and AA meetings how am I supposed to take care of the baby? Tell me that, Mister Smart Pants."
"Look, none of that really matters a whole lot right this very second. We can discuss it later."
"Self-righteous bastard. You really think you can call me drunk and crazy and change the subject just like that? You're sleeping on the couch when you get back from wherever it is you think you are -- Terrabella X, my ass! It's taking all my self-control not to play the same stupid power game you are, and not call your sorry ass out. Where the hell are you?"
"Planet Terrabella X."
"Bullshit. Where are you really?"
"On a distant planet in a far off solar-system."
"You're in some bar, aren't you?"
"Not exactly."
"You hear that. That's the baby crying. What am I supposed to tell her? Her shit-for-brains father survived the Chinese rocket launch and now he's out there somewhere drunk as a skunk?"
"You haven't asked me anything about Terrabella X. It's really quite an advanced civilization, dear. Did you know on this planet infants are piloting the robot drones? For Drone Wars Version XXIII they have determined that adolescents are far too sexualized to maintain their concentration on the key, most difficult missions. They have also initiated a program of cloning babies to fly their droids. In the future all their remote control drone pilots will be clone-babies. How remarkable is that?
What's more their intelligence men are all certifiable loonies. The Terrebellan Xers believe that while the wars of the last millennium required an army of paranoiacs, the new security challenges we face in this century demand they employ schizophrenics on the front lines. They believe paranoiacs are far better suited to a democratic form of government and have limited that particular population solely to civic service.
And get this -- the Top-Cop up here is a flaming transvestite. I kid you not. The military on this planet not only accepts gays, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and every other kind of sexual deviant, they actually promote them to the highest offices for the betterment of the entire planet."
"Are you talking about Stalker Flogum?"
"Sounds familiar."
"You idiot! Transvestite Top-Cop Stalker Flogum is right here on Earth!"
"Maybe I got the name wrong?"
"Maybe? Maybe if you grew some balls you would stop playing games and come back home?"
"I don't think you understand the full gravity of my situation."
"Lay it on me, big daddy. And please don't spare the details."
"I'm in a bit of a bind."
"Do tell."
"Some Terrabella X officials got it in their head I'm a bit soft."
"How so, darling?"
"I was sort of rescued by this alien princess."
"Rescued by an alien princess you say?"
"I thought she was my welcoming committee."
"I suppose you thought wrong."
"Bit of a miscalculation on my part you could say."
"And you're so good with numbers."
"I'm trying to tell you something. Your snide remarks don't help."
"Just tell me what the hell happened."
"Like I said, I met this fabulous alien princess. She found me on the spaceship. We went to the mall. Don't ask me why. For whatever reason she wanted to go to the mall, so I went with her. I bought her a cheeseburger and french-fries. What do I know about the local customs on this far-out alien planet? I was just trying to make friends."
"A real cultural diplomat you are."
"Exactly. I was an Earth representative on this wonderful exotic planet. You would have done the same, or something similar anyway. I mean the only other Earthlings they knew were the Chinese."
"Big of you to represent the rest of us."
"Exactly! I'm so glad you understand. I was a stranger on a new planet, I didn't know my way around, and here was this young princess to greet me and introduce me to the customs and ways of her people. Of course, I followed her out of the ship. If she had wanted macaroni and cheese, I would have gladly got her mac and cheese. Let's face it, they didn't exactly send their entire diplomatic core. So, the alien princess was all I had."
"Now I'm positive you're the one who needs to see a shrink."
"Don't make fun. I couldn't be more serious."
"Get on with it. I can hardly wait to hear the whole story."
"The Terrabella Xers have somehow got it into their stupid telepathic skulls my intentions with the child princess were, let us say, less than entirely pure. I'm down here at the police station. They are making the wildest accusations. They claim I groped her. I've been arrested on child-molestation charges -- can you believe it? Me? A child-molester? No, don't answer that...
Of course, the whole business is libelous and scurrilous. I never laid a single hand on the little Lolita temptress. These aliens are so completely out of their oversized misshapen gourds. Nothing they say makes sense. Did I already tell you that nothing they say makes any sense at all?
I'm a bit down on my luck, darling. You must hurry. I don't have much time. The Chinese soldier with the big ray gun, or whatever he is waving in my face, he is telling me my time is up and I have to hang up the phone. You must believe me, sweetheart. I've been scheduled for a dawn execution and I think this planet has more than one sun.
It's all a terrible, terrible mistake. I've been set up. Please send money!"
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
"Have you ever checked out Pirate Radio 1?" the young student asked.
"Not really," he said. "I mostly like to watch Michael Michaels' pornographic reenactments of the news."
"On the state of our national economy Pirate Radio 1 quipped: 'The gravy-train ran out of gravy'. She's pretty funny that way."
He was on assignment at Fort College. Government types were concerned about a recent slew of students radicalized at the university. Throughout the entire lecture on earnestness and the transparency of written language the young girl next to him tried to strike up a conversation.
"Even in the epic video game," the pompous professor droned on, "where everything is reconceived as total caricature, and made out like a cartoon, there is no place for the author, or authors to hide."
"Blackheart was on the 'Hot-Seat' the other night," she whispered. "You know, the Rebel leader. I thought he would be so scary, you know the way he is portrayed in the major monolithic media as a baby eater and all, but he was actually quite the card. Pirate Radio 1 asked him how he was doing and his answer was rather flippant. 'It's pretty lonely at the top,' he said. She didn't let him get away with that answer, not for a second. 'How would you know?' she pounced. 'Well,' he shot back: 'All I know for sure is it's pretty darn crowded down here!' Funny stuff, right?"
"Are you following me?" he said an hour later in Art Appreciation. She was apparently also enrolled in the class.
She squealed with laughter when she saw what he was painting.
"What's so funny?" he sheepishly asked, embarrassed.
"You are," she said.
"Haven't you ever seen an upside down smile before?" he tried to explain. "Like a clown when he paints his smile upside down," the undercover student flailed, "So he's smiling even when he makes a frown."
Overhead the lights flickered, then the painting studio went completely dark. The electric grid was down. At first, he was happy. He didn't have to explain any more about his stupid painting. But then the reality of the situation began to set in. None of his appliances would work. He checked the power supply on his hand-held device. Of course he had forgotten to recharge it the night before. The battery was almost dead. Not that it mattered. He had zero reception.
"Class dismissed!" the art teacher announced. There wasn't much else the old man could do. His planned multi-media presentation was shot to hell.
Dusk came unusually early that day. Not a light shone up and down the campus drive. Nor could he see any lights in the neighboring town. The sky was a cloudless, starless uniform dark gray.
Sitting alone in his dark apartment among all his dead appliances was a depressing thought. He decided it was not a viable option. He would follow the young girl instead. After all it was his job to infiltrate the student body.
They walked and talked. The undercover student looked so skinny and emaciated the girl had him pegged for a starving creative type. Not once during their entire conversation did it ever occur to her he was a government spy.
Truth to tell he wasn't so sure himself. His mind raced through the various scenarios. If the grid was down, and it clearly was, didn't it follow that the game was also down? If the Internet was down, what about Drone Wars? Wasn't Drone Wars by extension logically down too? No Internet, no game, no need to spy.
Momentarily he was unsure of himself. What, he wondered, was his mission if the game was over? After all, these students seemed innocent enough. They talked a good game, he gave them that, but he honestly couldn't see anything about them that could threaten the authority he was assigned to safeguard.
For a moment, he forgot himself in the general mirth of the situation. Everything he took as normal depended entirely on the grid. Without the grid none of it existed. All this time he had thought of the grid like he thought of the sun and the moon and the weather -- like the grid was a part of nature, like the grid was like the air we breathed or the sea we swam in.
But, he realized, the grid wasn't anything like that at all. Nothing said the grid had to stay on line. The grid was artificial, fake. And if it could go down after only a few inches of rain how could one live by it? He had never known a world without the grid. In fact, he had never suspected such a world existed. And, yet, here he was on a dark unlit street. His world, the world he knew, the world of electric appliances and electronic gadgets could disappear just like that.
Yet another world, this other world he was in right now, that world went on happily without any knowledge of the grid. Without Drone Wars the tides still presumably rose and fell like they always did. Autumn leaves turned orange and fell off tree branches just as they had always done, and today, like every other day since before recorded time, the cycle of life continued unabated.
It was as if he heard the melody of birds chirping, and the buzzing bees for the first time. Scales fell from his eyes. There was a living, breathing universe all around him that had nothing to do with the video game.
"You still don't get it, do you?" the young student's voice seemed to echo strangely in the quiet of the electric blackout, as if the two of them were not actually walking outside at all, but stood in a large enclosed space. Even the sound of their footfall, he noticed with a growing sense of irritation, seemed out of place, like they were walking on plywood instead of concrete. "I come here sometimes," she looked rather frightened by what she herself saw, "to get away, you know, from all the mumbo-jumbo they teach us in school. For me it's a kind of reality check."
His attention was drawn to the shops and buildings around them. All of which, he now saw clearly, were no more than flimsy stage sets.
"Is it all like this?" he was caught up short.
"Yup," she said. "There's even a place where they store the sets further on down a ways, and what looks like a prop-house."
The young intelligence man spun around to take it all in. "You mean the entire campus is like a giant sound-stage!"
"And the quaint college town, too," she added dryly. "I don't know about Freemont, the next town over, but I'm guessing it's another sound-stage, maybe a little bigger than this one, but probably not much. When the lights are on you wouldn't even notice a thing. It all looks and feels perfectly real."
"How many other students know?" he was genuinely alarmed.
"Some," she hesitated, bent down and gently cupped a colorful little bird in her hands that had just fallen out of a tree, and handed it to him.
The bird was a robot, the tree a fake. Even the young student's words seemed increasingly stuttered, like her battery was running low.
So this was the big secret. This was the reason they had assigned him the undercover job at Fort College. He wondered if any of the students were real. Or were they all robots like her? The whole thing was a set-up, an elaborate charade. How many other intelligence men had they sent to Fort College to discover the "truth"? He realized he was on a campus for higher learning, that was for certain, but it definitely wasn't the kind of campus he had assumed it was. And the reason he was here? That wasn't what they told him it was either. Such an elaborate ruse, he wondered. What possible gain could they hope to achieve by sending him into this rat's maze?
Without any warning the bird came back to life and flew away. The lights were back on. Drone Wars Version XXII was once again up and running. His hand-held electronic device chimed, and he was happy to see Michael Michaels' face on the small screen promoting that evening's pornographic reenactment of the news.
"Tonight," the anchorman bellowed in his usual stentorian tone, "the lion will lay down with the lamb, and only one of them will leave the ring alive: Smack-down on the Holy Mount!"
The young student broke free from the undercover intelligence man's embrace. Her long dark hair trailed in the warm breeze as he chased her across the green grass of the campus commons. The air was crisp and fresh, the sky perfectly blue, like it only is after the good soaking of a rainstorm. She giggled with girlish glee as he gathered her back into his arms and kissed her for the first time.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
"Wooden, stiff," his face was blurred and his voice was electronically altered to protect his anonymity. "That's how the critic described the characters in Drone Wars Version XXI. I mean do I look wooden and stiff? I ask you: do I look like I'm all surface?"
A man behind the camera introduced him as an underemployed engineer.
"My first thought was: the idiotic critic is out to lunch. I mean he clearly doesn't get it. Whether we like it or not we are all in on the game. Then I started thinking... about a lot of things. Like, did you ever wonder about the stock market -- why it goes up and why it goes down? Famously it went up last century the day Saint John F. Kennedy was assassinated even though one might have expected after a national tragedy like that it would have gone down. No one can really explain the fluctuations of the market. A sane person might start to wonder if a bunch of retarded monkeys are really running the show. The question is: where are these crazy chimps? And if they don't exist in our version of reality, then what version of reality do they exist in?"
He poured some water into his glass.
"As a scientifically minded person I began to wonder if, for example, market prognostications didn't emanate from another reality altogether -- one in which they actually made sense," he sipped from his glass. "Maybe there was a world outside of Drone Wars in which all the people were not wooden and stiff and there was some kind of rhyme and reason for this otherwise apocalyptic nightmare? My curiosity nagged at me. I began to doubt the things I was told about our fate in this world. I looked for a door through which I could pass to the other side.
"For years I tried every door handle I could find, swung every door I came upon wide open with the hope of gaining entrance into the other world, the one that made sense, because the one I'm in obviously doesn't make any sense at all."
He adjusted himself in his chair.
"Well I found it," he said. "But I can't tell you where it is. That was the one and only condition of my return."
"You walked out to the middle of a field," the interviewer said. "But you can't tell us where that field is. There was an abandoned farmhouse. But you can't tell us where it was either. You walked through many doors before this one, explored many abandoned lots, and mineshafts, and any other place you could think of where there might be a portal to another world. Hardly a side-alley or wooded area escaped your curiosity. What was it about this particular ruin that caught your attention?"
"Nothing special," the underemployed engineer said.
"So, you weren't expecting to find anything out of the ordinary."
"No, not really. By that time I seriously started to doubt my own premise."
"So you walk into this dilapidated house in the middle of a field that you can't tell us where it is. Then what?"
"Nothing at first. I nosed around a while like I usually did. Looked through cupboards and such. Turned some furniture over. It was pretty clear no one had lived there for a while. Nature was reclaiming the place. Rodents had nested in most every nook-and-cranny. Rot had set in. It seemed like another dead end, but for some reason I pulled the carpet back. I knew from some murder investigations I'd followed closely some of these places had hidden cellars. And, sure enough, there was the trapdoor. I felt around for the latch and pulled it up. You got to understand this was about ten years after I started out looking for 'the magic door'. I was pretty hardened by that time. Not nearly the excitable kid I once was."
"So you pulled back the hinged floor-panel and descended the creaky steps. What did you expect to find?"
"Maybe some old pickle jars and musty old boxes. For all I knew," he laughed, " I could have found a torture chamber down there."
"Then what? Take us through it."
"Nothing much. I pointed my flashlight around. No chained skeletons. No bizarre collection of surgical instruments. Just some cobwebs and an abandoned possum nest. I ran the beam of light across the floor in case the color of the concrete didn't match. Wouldn't have been the first time a body was buried in a basement. But everything checked out."
"You were headed back up the stairs."
"Yeh."
"Then what happened?"
"Nothing much really.
"Let's put a marker here," the intelligence man instructed the video operator. "The subject seemed to squirm or twitch at the question. It's unclear if he saw something insane in the face of his interviewer or the interviewer was caught off-guard by something dark and haunting in the subject's demeanor."
"You said earlier in the pre-interview you heard the squeal of a field mouse?" the interviewer prodded.
"That's almost right," he answered. "I was about halfway up the stairs when a sharp squeak sounded in the dark. Might have been a field mouse. At least that's what I thought it was at the time. I went back down to take a second look not expecting to find much other than a couple of mouse pellets. Wasn't like I had anything better to do, so I went back down."
"Well, you didn't find any pellets did you?"
"No. But there was something weird about the wall. I can't quite put my finger on it. What was strange was how palatable the feeling was. Yet, I'm unable to put words to it. Like something about it didn't quite fit. Like it was somehow too real or something."
"So what did you do?"
"This is the part where it gets truly bizarre," the underemployed engineer said. "I put my hand up to the wall to feel it, but I only caught air. My hand and half my forearm were swallowed up by the brick facade."
"What did you do next?"
"I pulled my arm back as fast as possible. That's what I did. The whole scene was so creepy. But you have to remember I was looking for something like this. So I pushed my arm through the virtual wall and retracted it a couple of more times just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. Believe me I sat there for some time trying to make head-or-tail out of it. My first impulse was definitely not to jump through the wall right away. Must have smoked half-a-pack of cigarettes down in that basement. Finally, I don't know, I must have been out of smokes or something."
"You walked through the wall."
"Man, I wish I hadn't. It was horrible. You think Drone Wars is bad, I never saw anything close to it before. First off the spectrum of color was wild, unnaturally bright. Compared to our world's muted and grayed range, the color spectrum was nearly blinding. I stepped into a field of blooming flowers. Birds sang. I never heard so many birds sing in my life. The sweet fecund smell of nature was fairly overpowering -- nothing but rolling hills of grass, multi-colored flowers and great big shaggy trees all around me. The place was pregnant with life.
"I managed to make my way across the glade. What I saw next was horrible. In full view before me stood a satyr and a nymph. I had apparently walked in on a Dionysian Bacchanal. They drank wine and made love with an unselfconscious abandon I could in no way mentally process. The vulgar dancing was what really got to me. Nothing before in my life allowed me to fathom that anything like that kind of behavior was possible. The video game I walked into was so incongruous with anything I knew, I honestly turned to find my way back as quickly as I could. I'm embarrassed to say I was discovered desperately digging in the tall grass where I thought the door back home was by the most beautiful woodland creature. I have never seen a woman that beautiful in my whole entire life."
"You're out of your mind at about this time?"
"Totally desperate."
"How did you get back?"
"Believe me, I'm not proud. I begged, I pleaded, I cried at the sandaled-foot of that golden-haired goddess to let me return to my own videogame. I kissed the ground she walked on, I admit it -- I grabbed her thin ankle and kissed her shapely foot like there was no tomorrow. It wasn't pretty, I prostrated myself before a power that was greater than me, but I guess it worked."
"Put another marker here," the intelligence man sternly told the video operator. "This is the schizophrenic who predicted the coordinated drone attack on the House of Representatives?" he asked in disbelief.
"He's the one," the operator responded.
"I want this man put through some more tests," the intelligence man indicated. "We need to know what he is really capable of. We need to separate fact from fiction. I need to know. The government needs to know. How are these schizophrenics able to react to national security issues so much better than our own supposed 'experts'. Pack the video interview up nice and tight," he ordered the video operator.
"...And thanks, again," the cold intelligence man forced a complement against his reserved nature, "I mean for the heads up on this character. We definitely appreciate the inter-office level of cooperation -- believe me we do. And we're not the only ones. The higher-ups do too.
"There are still some very curious aspects of the interview I can't quite square with the facts," he said by way of a rational. "No one can know that much ahead of time, can they? Our office is going to have to study the taped footage of the psychotic much more closely in order to puzzle out this mess."
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
As per usual his wife woke up before he did. He could smell the percolating coffee when he stepped out of the shower. Handsomely attired in one of his nicest pinstriped suites he sat down at the kitchen table to the glass of orange juice and bowl of cereal she had waiting for him.
Together they watched the morning show, Good Day United States of Money, like they always did during breakfast, silently noting the stories of suicide bombings, drone attacks, and the government response -- always firm but fair. Despite the dire news accounts of skyrocketing crime, a country in near-total disarray after economic collapse, and ever more brazen attacks by Rebel dissidents, they lived a nearly picture perfect middle-class suburban life.
On the way out the door his wife told him how handsome she thought he looked in his new double-breasted suit and tastefully conservative necktie. In a ritual they had repeated a million times before she kissed him at the door and, as he strapped himself into his sporty Blue Oval electric Regina, she waved one last time and wished him a good day at the office.
Traffic was worse than usual. He tried not to think of it as a bad omen for the day ahead, but he couldn't help himself. By nature he was a fatalist. He was constantly on the alert for little signs -- "tells" they called them in poker. A string of green lights, for instance, meant his luck was good. By the same token, any hold-up, or other annoyance, was seen as a sure harbinger of bad things to come. A flipped over vehicle that blocked the right lane of the freeway, and caused traffic to slow to a trickle just before his exit sinched it. "Today," he decided dryly, "is going to be a rough day."
And, sure enough, as he pulled into work, there was another man standing on his corner.
"What's the big idea?" he demanded of the other fellow and put down his briefcase in a huff. "I've been working this side of the street for years." He was practically livid, but his tone softened somewhat when he realized the interloper was just a kid. After closer inspection he saw the young man's suit was poorly fitted and lacked any distinction. He had survived hostile takeover attempts before, attempts by competing pharmaceutical companies to force an unwanted merger or leveraged buy-out, but this wasn't anything like that. The boy stood stock-still, clearly frightened. After further assessment he asked the young man if he was lost. "You got to move along, son," he explained it to the kid, "this here corner is mine. Go on," he waved, "scoot."
After drugs were legalized legitimate businessmen took the place of dealers. It was inevitable it would happen. Faced with the certitude of bankruptcy states were desperate for any taxable income they could lay claim to. He was among the first legitimate drug salesmen, and from the start there was a lot of pressure to bring a certain amount of respectability to the trade.
His peers all had their specialty. His was methamphetamines. Directly across the street the man in the snappy bow-tie sold weed. On the two other adjacent corners stood an opiate salesman and a rather twitchy character he found somewhat objectionable.
There was something about the fellow's attire he disliked. Sure enough the man wore a well-tailored suit like the rest of them. By any reasonable assessment the other salesman's appearance was utterly professional and beyond reproach. Nevertheless, he found the man's color choices garish and untoward. "What the hell," he resignedly thought to himself, "do I know about how to run a psychedelics business," and steadied himself for his own growing line of customers.
There was no way to make one's way down any of the major streets in downtown Kansas City without fighting off the drug merchants. They were on every corner of every street. Whichever way one turned any number of these otherwise respectable well-heeled citizens closed in fast with a pitch for their "cure-whatever-ails-you" product. The same was true for every metropolitan area in the country. Gray-suited salespersons in thin-brimmed fedoras and briefcases accosted every sidewalk passerby in every major city touting the virtues of their various pharmaceutical wares.
And he was definitely no exception. "Now there's a sad case," he could spot a perspective customer a mile away. With a forced smile he filled the last crystal-meth prescription before his lunch-break.
Among the pharmaceutical sales-people there was a distinct pecking order. For whatever reason the opiate and methamphetamine merchant were shunned by the rest of the sales-force. The others made it abundantly clear they didn't want to have anything to do with them. No surprise then that they spent much of their lunch-hours badmouthing their fellow businesspersons. After a while, however, their conversation inevitably turned to more serious topics like politics.
"There must be something more important in life," he sighed, "than selling drugs to a bunch of addicts. Mustn't there?"
"A forty-four in brainpan," the heroin salesman flatly said over drinks at the bar. They were talking about the doctor at the local abortion clinic. "That's my prescription for the bastard, anyway."
Both looked up at the 3DTV above the bar. It was a pornographic re-enactment of the news. A renowned professor of archeology was getting head in his trailer at an unspecified dig-site. "Work the shaft, squeeze the balls," he kept yelling. Animal groans followed as the leading academic built to his climax. His favorite student closed her eyes and tilted her face up to receive the load. In the heat of passion he had boasted a facial she would never forget, but at the moment of truth all she felt was a single hot spatter on her skin. Unimpressed she opened one eye to see if he was really done.
As she flicked the single pearly droplet off her chin with her pinky the intercom crackled to life. "We broke through to the other side of the barrier rock," the foreman of the drill-crew yelled. "Come quick. It's unbelievable. You've got to see this."
Three miles down, at the base of the pit, the foreman held out a ratty Teddy Bear for the archeology professor to inspect. "We found it just under the black rock-line Doc, what do you make of it?"
"What else did you find?" the professor asked.
"A mess of plastic garbage and junk just like you might find in your average landfill on the planet's surface."
"Impossible," the professor exclaimed in total disbelief. "We are talking about hundreds of millions of years ago: Before Lucy-kind man, before even dinosaurs." He was clearly puzzled. No one had ever penetrated the black shale layer before him. For years he had argued for the great discovery that lay below the layer of impenetrable rock, and now all he had to show for it was a tattered Teddy Bear and a bunch of modern-day trash. Unless... The more he thought about it the more it made sense.
News anchor Michael Michaels ripped off his fake professorial beard and unceremoniously cut off the archeology student and drill-crew orgy that followed their breakthrough discovery with a news bulletin. "New evidence has surfaced," the anchorman bellowed into the microphone, "that a civilization much like our own existed millions of years ago. In fact, it was almost exactly like our own. Scientists believe it achieved a parallel level of development to our civilization then inexplicably and mysteriously caused its own extinction. Are we doomed to relive its fate? Is, as a prominent physicist has theorized based on this new and astounding evidence, our civilization caught in some kind of time warp where we are destined to relive our own demise over and over again? Answers to these and many other questions at six..."
The methamphetamine salesman knew full well the heroin salesman was right. There was more to life than pushing drugs. And he knew exactly what he had to do...
Michael Michaels sat up straight in his anchor's chair as if to give the next story more credence. "In version XX of Drone Wars," he reported, "The Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, ruled that the jury-pool should in some cases be expanded to include all interested parties." He shuffled some papers on the narrow shelf of the news set countertop. "...And," he picked right up again, "in the first test case, the Kansas City methamphetamine salesman accused of the cold-blooded murder of a local abortion clinic doctor was, after only thirty minutes of deliberation, easily acquitted of the crime by a jury of unborn children."
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Alone in the attic the boy looked through old boxes in search of his original issue childhood Pray Station. He remembered how magical it was when he first opened the Operating Manual. "To start push 'Start' button," the first line read. Version XIX Pray Stations were far more sophisticated than the old model, but he liked the arcane user-interface of his boyhood toy. He brushed off the dust and opened the box. All around him electric candles lit up. The bright and shiny face of Jesus Christ welcomed him on the alter screen with a beaming smile.
"Revelations level 21:15" blinked on and off. The boy read the passage: "The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long."
When he pulled out his old joystick his heart launched itself against his ribs with such a jolt he felt the need to place his free hand over his breast as if some extra effort were required to hold the organ in place.
"The Suicide Party?" the boy scoffed, remembering what his old man had said. On the news the story was abstract, funny because it made no sense. In his father's study he realized it was no joking matter, his old man was dead serious.
"We are willing to die for our beliefs," the man's frail voice rose to meet his son's disapproval.
After it finally sunk in that his old man felt as strongly about his position as he did, his son recoiled in horror. "You're kidding me, right?" he almost pleaded.
"We would rather put a gun to our head," the righteous earnestness in his father's manner sent a shiver through the boy, "Than contribute our blood and sweat to such a criminal enterprise."
"You're drunk," the unmoored teenager had stuttered. "How do you expect to form a political party if your members drink the proverbial 'Cool-Aide' every time they disagree with something?" He was utterly perplexed, overwhelmed by a sinking feeling he had never experienced before, and as he kneeled at the console of his Pray Station, he hoped beyond hope that the video game could somehow realign the shards of his reality.
His old man's words rang in his ears. "If that's what it takes," he had waved a half-empty whiskey bottle over his head and declared his party's position in a purposeful voice his son didn't recognize, "Then that's what it takes."
It seemed to the teenager as if reality had sprung a leak, and as the water table lowered on his Pray Station monitor, a whole new universe revealed itself before his eyes. All along under the waterline of the game's 3D world there had existed a vast necropolis he had never imagined possible.
What materialized on the screen was, however, not a heavenly diamond-studded golden city but something far more sinister. What took shape was a satanic vision of monolithic slime-covered architecture that dripped as it emerged from the depths of the dark sea to reveal itself to the light of day for the first time in millennia. Slowly, as the water drained from the sea, the lifeless metropolis came into view. Titanic arches and domes oozed algae as they rose into the air. To him his father's newly acquired belief system was as impossible as the terrible geometry that now climbed up all around him.
Almost the entire necropolis was made visible -- all except for one last temple at the end of the city, still partially submerged under the placid surface of the black pool; goop, he realized with fright, was for centuries all that separated his world from this hellish edifice.
Cryptic symbols, lurid hieroglyphs, and skull-like faces leered at him through the sloppy film of muck that covered the moldering walls. He chocked back the smell of rot and decay. Swarms of bats harassed him at every turn. They rushed passed him in blind flight. Rats, so many rats. The vermin scrambled between his virtual 3D legs. Slowly and painstakingly his avatar felt its way along the crumbling, damp corridor.
On screen, bony spires reflected up at him from glassy puddles. He saw himself slipping and sliding down gigantic, slick wet slabs of stone. "Sonora," he pronounced his dead mother's name softly. Her murder was devastating, but he had never missed her so much as he did now.
"Washed in the blood of a lamb," was the phrase his father repeated. The son mouthed it in disbelief, and held up a photograph of his dead mother he had placed beside the keyboard. " Washed in the blood of a lamb?" he made it a question and put it to the picture.
Without warning the giant steel rings of the chain that held up the drawbridge upon which he stood snapped with an ugly sound and clattered along the cobblestones of a great wall as they dropped into the abyss bellow him.
The game was on.
He was plunged into a lightless netherworld filled with predatory phantasms he had never known existed before. Amidst the shadows of cyclopic columns were creatures so far beyond description they could not possibly have been born from human imagination. Giant white-haired Sasquatch-like robots and even more frightening apparitions lurked menacingly among the shadows.
With a final thrust into his consciousness, the frightful edifice of the temple at the end of the city was fully laid bare before him. A number of mammoth laser-cut stone blocks from the highest reaches of the dead city narrowly missed him as they crashed to the ground. There wasn't much time. He replaced his mother's photograph beside the electric candles of his Pray Station and squeezed the handle of the joystick tightly. Alien Abominable Snowman robots or not, all he knew for sure was that horrible hostile demons were closing in fast.
In a flash he realized the freakish phantasms had not come for him. They had come for his father. The old man was the one who had summoned the eons-old wrath of these alien space creatures with his idiotic, nihilistic selfishness. Instinct took over. His avatar edged its way through the dead city and loped up the oversized mud-smeared granite blocks that led to his dad's study.
Despite protests from his 3D old man -- who, true to life, simply couldn't understand what had come over his son -- the boy pulled him out of the chamber.
His son kept referring to some temple. "We have to get there as fast as possible," the image of his boy kept saying.
"What temple?" his virtual old man asked peevishly. This was new, this talk of a civilization of alien death-worshipers.
"Right ahead," his son answered. "Almost there," he tried to reassure his drunk father who was dragging his feet the whole way. "Can't you see it? Right up ahead. Only a couple of more steps that's all," the boy pleaded.
"Hear the gong?" his son asked his old man. "Hurry now," he dragged his father behind him. "Any hope of salvation, any at all" he tried to explain, "Means we have to get to the alter before the third and final gong."
With every step forward the terrible temple loomed larger until it all but blotted out the sky. The two of them looked no bigger than miniature toy figurines at the base of the enormous steel doors. Once inside it took a while for their eyes to adjust to the dark. Arched ceilings seemed to rise forever into infinity. Each hall they entered was larger than the last.
"Faster," the boy yelled at his old man. "We have to go faster if we are ever going to get there."
"Get where?" his 3D dad was losing his patience.
"There," the kid pointed to a staggered pyramid in the middle of the great chamber.
In order to get to the next level of the game they had to first scale two sizable walls. It was not easy. His old man was in pretty bad shape, but they finally made it to the base of the pyramid. All they had to do afterward was climb the twenty thousand steps to the top. An array of incredible creatures harassed them. The boy fought them off one at a time with a slew of primitive weapons. Once safe they paused momentarily to catch their breath. The floor was far beneath them yet the ceiling looked no closer than before.
In the middle of the pyramid's flat capstone a block of granite stood before an altarpiece of devilish design. It was on this stone before this altarpiece the boy wanted his virtual 3D father to lie down and bare his chest.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
A beautiful fairy princess from another planet stood over the reluctant astronaut. He lay on the metal floor of the spaceship and squinted his eyes up at her. She trailed colors like an erratic rainbow, as if she were dissolving in the warm sun. The girlish phantom had on a golden plastic tiara, and poked him with a juicy looking cherry flavored lollypop that matched the color of her lips, clearly trying to tell him something.
But when she opened her mouth the princess spoke a strange language he had never heard before. In fact, her gestures were utterly foreign to him, her vocabulary inscrutable, her tone filled with dread and animal brutality one moment, and singsong kindness the next. Sometimes her voice was low and deep as if slowed way down. At other times it sped up suddenly and without warning to a loud screech, as if someone had just kicked a cat down an alleyway.
Garbled sounds radiated out of her mouth in thick gushing torrents, but not in any particular order and with no rational end he could make out. He rolled onto his stomach to try and crawl away, but she easily outmaneuvered him and blocked his escape with a remarkably nimble step considering her strawberry red high-heeled shoes were at least a couple of sizes too big.
"Am I already on Terrabella X?" the reluctant astronaut wondered to himself. "Funny how these things go," he tried to puzzle it out, and quickly concluded the girlish apparition he saw before him was probably his welcoming committee.
The two of them exited the rocket ship hand-in-hand. The astronaut looked back over his shoulder one last time at the huge silver ship lying on its side, and remarked at the purple and pink sunset; how beautiful it was, "like an Earth sunset," he thought "but somehow way more haunting and strange."
Terrabella X was silent. Except for the occasional Chinese security patrol, streets were empty, devoid of people. The princess pulled him by the arm. She wanted to go into a big-box electronics store. A pimple-faced Asian kid was the only one around. 3D flat-screen televisions lined the walls. The reluctant astronaut noticed that every single one of them had a foreign brand name he couldn't read. "If that don't beat all," he thought. "The Chinese already have a forward base set up here."
Eventually, the beautiful princess' strange tongue began to make more sense to him. He ascribed it to some kind of advanced form of mental telepathy known only to the alien race of the planet. Words like "cool", "gosh-darn", and "nifty" floated out from the otherwise incomprehensible hisses, gurgles, and barks that had issued from her pretty throat up to that point. But when she pointed to the array of monitors and announced, "What a dumb-ass," he was elated. It was the first entire thought he comprehended from the alien species.
"To paraphrase the old song," the snarled voice of Top-Cop Stalker Flogum interrupted the reluctant astronaut's reverie "You don't count the dead when God is on your side..." His black-lipsticked face appeared in virtual 3-D on all the flat screens. "And," the five-star general thrust his leather bustier out, "You damn well don't ask questions when God is on your side."
Up on the podium Stalker Flogum reminded him of an Earth-type he had once known. The kind of irreconcilable bully that had made his service life hell -- one of those knuckle-dragger types who would rub your nose in his shit-stained panties.
Near as he could make out the press conference was called to announce the capture of some important dissident. For Drone Wars Version XVIII a pre-recorded videotaped confession was released to the major monolithic news networks.
"This is the kind of egregious over-reaching by the government that's gradually making our lives unlivable," the hangdog ex-Baltimore cop said. "First off, if you really think the government is going to roll back the program after economic times improve, that's never going to happen. The whole idea that we are going to be monitored to this extent... why don't they just have Predator drones flying over the entire country recording everything we do all day long, and then they can sit down at night and write tickets for people who spit on the sidewalk..."
The reluctant astronaut wondered what his wife was doing back on Earth: probably having another drink and screaming at the poor nannybot.
"Is this the kind of society we really want to live in?" the hangdog traffic cop on the 3DTV continued. "Where we are photographed and monitored every single thing we do just because all the morons in the government building have wasted all the revenue they taxed us in the first place?"
Somehow the wrong tape was sent out to all the stations. But Transvestite Top Cop Stalker Flogum remained oblivious to the mix up. He was too busy fixing his makeup.
"I don't support the government plan at all," the former motorcycle officer didn't mince his words. "I spent forty-one years with the Baltimore Police Department, I did thirty-three years active duty, I was a motorcycle supervisor, I supervised motor officers for eighteen years. It's exactly because the government of Maryland has turned to this kind of activity to bail out its budget, to generate money, that I finally said to hell with them and their corrupt thinking. Hey I got an idea for the maniacs in Annapolis: Why not just eliminate law enforcement officers altogether, eliminate the cost altogether, and simply put up 'Big-Daddy' cameras everywhere?"
The family joke was if the reluctant astronaut was in an airplane with his wife and it went down over a jungle rainforest it was only a matter of time after the plane crashed before she emerged from the forest fully in charge of the situation, whereas, if not for her, he might never emerge. After a while, so the family joke went, out of sheer impatience his wife would rush back into the jungle only to find her husband sitting against a tree and staring with great intensity at a Halloween yellow autumn leaf, or something equally obscure.
His wife could obviously survive and thrive under any circumstance. She was an "indestructible child" like Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp" figure. The reluctant astronaut, on the other hand, had no such resilience. He couldn't live for one second without his electric appliances. "How am I going to get along on Terrabella X," he suddenly despaired, quite disconsolate. His enthusiasm flagged.
"Transvestite Top-Cop Stalker Flogum didn't just use the expression 'silver-bullet', did he?" the reluctant astronaut perked back up. "God knows I can't stand that expression," he griped, and began to feel more like his old self again. "Back on Earth they go for it all the time, as if every problem is lunar, and the only solution is to kill a werewolf, or some other demonic hell-spawn."
"Silly-Billy," the fairy princess said in a magical musical voice, and added rather seriously, "I'm hungry!" She wanted to go to the food-court. "Don't french-fries sound really, really good right about now?" she asked. "And a quarter-pounder with cheese!"
"I'll be darned if they haven't," the reluctant astronaut thought as they walked through the empty mall. "They've created a near perfect facsimile of the Earth, by golly I believe they have. Everything," he marveled, "down to the smallest detail reminds me of home." He looked around. "All my favorite outlets -- and right here on Terrabella X!" He really found it quite remarkable what the Chinese had been able to pull off so many hundreds-of-millions of miles away in such a short period of time. "There's no way they could have done all this on their own," he thought. "The people of Terrabella X -- these fabulous creatures at the outer edge of the Milky-Way galaxy -- must have been in on the deal. They must have helped," there was no doubt about it in his mind. "Clearly their technology is far superior to our own Earth technology."
He looked at the little alien princess beside him with not a little awe. "If french-fries and a quarter-pounder with cheese are what she wants, french-fries and a quarter-pounder with cheese are what she gets," he said to himself. "Probably made from some exotic potato-like plant found only here on Terrabella X." He could barely contain his newfound enthusiasm.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
"The real world never looked that 3-D," Alice Springs gasped as she took her turn in the training module. Of course, it wasn't her real name. She had to leave her old one at the door when she donned the mirrored specs for the final exam. Brightly colored artificial looking figures surrounded her. They were boarding a plane for San Francisco. She needed to stay alert.
Back in the day her uncle had the same job. Eventually he rose in the ranks of the Transportation Security Agency. He pulled himself up from a job in the mailroom to become a section boss. To Alice Springs he was a constant reminder of the diligence required by the job.
All she knew was that she was on the lookout for a nefarious figure called "The Crotch Bomber". John Dillinger's silhouette was still on the targets the Federal Bureau of Investigation used for shooting practice. For the TSA Public Enemy #1 was still "The Crotch Bomber". Training exercise or not it didn't matter. Her future career was on the line. "Find him, or else..."
At one point when the idea popped into her head that she might consider national security as a possible career path she sheepishly asked her uncle if when he wore the mirrored specs he privately got off on the people he screened. "Underwear," he answered. "Not many people know it, but you can change the setting on the glasses a little. Sexy underwear is what really gets me going."
Behind her glasses her eyes were peeled. Halfway around the world in someplace called Quail Haven, Tennessee a simulation of the "Crotch Bomber", much like the original young man, only more intense in virtual 3-D, was about to board a plane with the intent of blowing it up. Alice Springs was on the sharp lookout for a pair of naughty underwear.
"Oh, I should probably mention," anchorman Michael Michaels said. "Alice Springs is schizophrenic. In reality she lives on Skid Row. It's all part of a new experiment that follows on the heels of the highly touted success of last year's nation-wide handout of Blue Tooth earpiece devices to the homeless. The growing population of chemically imbalanced street people that walk around talking to themselves, so the thinking of civic-minded leaders went, might become more socially integrated and generally palatable if it appeared to the public at large that they were actually talking on the phone like everyone else. Today we have with us the criminal psychology professor who spearheaded the drive..."
"Broadly seen as a paradigm shift in the way we think about our insane population," the criminal psychologist was irrepressible in his zeal for the new program, "many people out there want to expand the mandate even further. They believe the mentally challenged lunatics in our country are an underused resource, and in these times of trouble everyone available needs to get recruited for the sake of the cause. We have a huge schizophrenic population, but it's idle," he said. "What we need more than anything else are more security forces on the front lines. Our military is almost entirely reliant on young children to man its drones. No one I admire has ever questioned the policy. It's a major moneymaker, a huge source of revenue for the government and the entertainment industry. The science is there. The economics are sound. It works. A short mental skip-and-jump to integrate the mentally retarded, depressed people, and psychotics into the nation's campaign against terror is all that's required."
"Please turn around and salute the flag," Alice Springs asked the hologram behind her mirrored 3-D lenses. "Like you mean it," she added. She got a thrill from watching the man's butt-cheeks tighten when he made the patriotic gesture.
"Donating a bunch of Blue Tooth earphones to schizophrenics to make them look less conspicuous is one thing," Michael Michaels tried to understand the criminal psychologist. "Putting them to work on the front line of national security is quite another, isn't it?"
"Not now!" Alice Springs yelled out-of-the-blue. She was sitting on a bench in a park under a leafless black Oak. Presumably she was talking to someone or something she saw behind her mirrored glasses. "Not now!" she yelled again and pulled her shoulder back as if to shrug some invisible person's hand off.
"Our nation's enemies are crazy." The criminal psychology professor tried to make it sound simple so Michael Michaels could understand better. "They must be, mustn't they?" he asked. "Because we simply don't understand their motivation. I mean why do the Rebels do the things they do? Who knows? Not me. Why is that? Because I'm sane, that's how come. Ipso facto, so it follows, who better than crazies to pick one of their own out of a line-up?"
"Nothing's as silly as young white girls dancing," Alice Springs responded to an instant message from her friend Goodnight Goodblood. Anyone looking would have thought the homeless bag lady with the oversized mirrored glasses was talking to the pigeons at her feet.
"Except maybe young white boys dancing," her friend texted back.
"Dance me to your lonely violin," the schizophrenic woman in turn sent the lyrics of one of their favorite songs.
On the inside lens of Alice Springs' mirrored 3-D specs Goodnight Goodblood completed the refrain. The words "Dance me with your naked hand, dance me with your glove," scrolled across the bottom of her high-tech glasses.
"In the past the mirrored glasses worn by police were meant to convey the all-seeing eye and concurrent omnipotence of law enforcement," the criminal psychologist tried to explain for Michael Michaels and the television audience the new eyewear handed out to schizophrenics. "The high-way patrolman's psychological interiority was hidden behind the lenses. It was as if he didn't have any interiority at all. Like he was a pure exteriority, a pure reflection of the landscape that surrounded him. In those silver lenses his psychology was an uncontaminated reflection of the outside world. But what today's law enforcement officer sees behind his mirrored lenses is not just the outside world as we see it. He sees a make-believe universe, a virtual world that includes the real world enhanced by a fully realized digital world."
"The Crotch-Bomber," Alice Springs screamed from her perch upon the park bench. Tears streamed from her eyes. "The Crotch Bomber!" She yelled her ass off. She had to alert her proctor before the suspect got aboard the airplane. She was sure it was him. It had to be him. The fellow's underwear she saw through her reflective glasses was provocative, patterned with hearts, and Alice Springs liked hearts.
The first snowflakes fell on her head. "The Crotch Bomber," she yelled again a little less emphatically than she had done the time before and turned her mirrored specs off. The test was over. The virtual terrorist was apprehended by airport security. Snow started to come down more quickly. "Snowmageddon," her voice trailed off to a quiet mumble. "It's a snowmageddon."
"We're losing her," the TSA proctor yelled to his assistant. "Quick. Turn the training module off! She's having some kind of fantasy delusion response to the 3-D lenses. She's talking nonsense -- says she's a bag lady -- keeps repeating the phrase 'Goodnight Goodblood' -- thinks it's snowing something awful in there."
The test grader stood in the frame of the door and scratched his head. "You won't believe this," he said and held out a computer printout to the proctor.
"I'll be darned," the man said. "A perfect score."
"Early results with schizophrenic-test participants are very good," the criminal psychology professor told Michael Michaels. "Much better than expected. If they hold up the way they look like they will there is already talk of a Federal Government Drone War Idol tie-in for Version XVII. Administration officials and game show and video game executives are calling it "Connect The Dots". The thinking is to test it on mental patients and psychotics first, who, like I said before, might very well turn out are the ideal users given their unique state-of-mind. But once the kinks are out it could very well get released to the general consumer audience. Think of the potential profits!" he panted. "It would be the live-action interactive version of 'Find Elmo', only the object of the game would be to find the Crotch Bomber..."
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
"Nothing is as scary as living through a bad idea," Michael Michaels got the editorial meeting underway. "When it's happening anyone who is halfway sane thinks the whole world is on a free-fall slide to hell. Afterwards you can joke about it. Afterwards the immediate danger of the old bad idea is gone. So many worse ideas have filled the gap in the meantime the whole thing is funny like a bad joke. Everyone can look back on the old bad joke with twenty-twenty hindsight and shrug it off."
"What's on tap today?" the news editor cut the dim-witted anchor off.
"I'm not sure if it's actually such a bad idea," the political desk started the ball rolling. "It's a little complicated, but here goes. How about the Puppy Dog Channel? New Mexico Senator Loudan Rich is way out in front of it. His latest anti-Rebel strategy. Can't figure out if it's a bad idea or genius. What he wants is to have a channel that plays nothing but images of cute puppy dogs frolicking twenty-four seven at every major government checkpoint. Here's the quote: 'No need for metal detectors, pat downs, interviews,' so the senator's argument goes. We could make it a question: Superfluous police theater?"
"Everyone likes puppy dogs," Michael Michaels said in his best anchorman voice.
"In fact, the Senator believes anyone who doesn't like puppy dogs is against the American way of life, a villainous enemy of the State. So, the best way to weed out insurgents hell-bent on bringing down the US government, according to the senator, is to make them watch puppy dogs at play," the political desk continued.
The news editor turned it over in his head. "I like it," he finally said. "The story's got legs. But what's the gimmick?"
"Most everyone would think the Puppy Dog Channel was the cutest thing they ever saw, right?" the political desk fleshed it out a bit more. "Anyone caught reacting in a negative way or looking away as they pass the monitors is immediately separated from the rest of the crowd and directed into a special line. There are some tactical problems, but Senator Rich is already at work on a fix. Curmudgeons, it was pointed out to him, would likely get swept up in the dragnet. Among patriotic citizens there are undoubtedly a few bitter old coots that hate small children, kittens, and puppy dogs, a small number of ill-tempered geriatrics so forth and so on."
"I saw the senator speak on Meet The Press," Michael Michaels said. "He was really putting the meat into the microphone. He suggested the line get divided. 'Two lines,' he said. 'One for the firing squad, the other for the restroom.' The civilization-hating anarchist saboteurs will go down the main path to their certain death and the old fogies will go to the restroom which is where they probably were headed anyhow."
"Bladder control," the news editor scoffed.
"The Puppy Dog Channel?" Michael Michaels mused.
"Let's go with it," his editor smiled. "What else?"
"The Smart Mattress?" the business desk perked up. "It's the latest black market craze to hit the nation."
"I don't know," Michael Michaels answered. He hated the idea of a mattress that was smarter than him.
"Maybe we should put our weight behind it?" the news editor nudged.
"Maybe," Michael Michaels conceded. He knew full well there was more to the story. Some of the mattresses had gone haywire in the past and the Federal Trade Commission considered them so dangerous they were outlawed for public consumption.
"You know those dreams you have about how you didn't graduate from high school?" the business desk offered a possible lead in.
"I never did graduate from high school," Michael Michaels joked.
"Maybe you could have used a Smart Mattress? Ever since Private Joe Shmuck got his nothing's been the same," the business desk offered. "Something along those lines. Private Joe Shmuck could say something like: 'In my old reoccurring dream I never graduated from high school. Now that I have my Smart Mattress I've graduated from college. I still have the old anxiety, but I'm not anxious anymore. Before I got the Smart Mattress I never even went to class in my dream. Now I do even though it's bizarre because I am so much older than the other kids. In my old dream I used to skip all my classes because the premise was so ridiculous. Now I actually attend my classes. And even though I am still sometimes really late I don't sweat it as much with the Smart Mattress.' What do you think?" the business desk turned to the news editor.
"Needs more drama," he shot back. "A hook."
"What if someone in Private Joe Shmuck's dream breaks into his locker and steels his class schedule?" Michael Michaels gave it some thought. "At first Private Joe Shmuck is upset, but then he realizes he doesn't give a shit. I mean he's already graduated from college in his dream. What does he care about high school? Zip. Nada. Nothing. It is like an anxiety nightmare, but because he has a Smart Mattress he doesn't care one iota one way or the other!"
"Okay," the news editor said. He clearly had some reservations, but he let them go. "What's going on over at the science desk?" he asked.
"Professor Ivar Zimbolist over at Fort College has an interesting theory about human migration patterns and how they could pertain to the Civil War here in the States," the science desk answered. "According to the professor, people who lived in the warmer climates were loud. They loved the sand, the sun, and the surf. The loud people were philistines. They liked eating, fucking, and fighting, not necessarily in that order. They liked all the things loud people like. Most of their time was spent on the beach. 'Loud and lazy' is how the professor describes them in his book. They ruled the world. They still do. There were lots of seashells all around them, the professor has discovered, so they made seashells their currency. It was the simplest and laziest thing to do so that's what they did."
"What's the pitch?" the news editor wanted to know.
"Well," the science desk continued, "The loud people were so obnoxious anyone who liked peace and quiet was forced to move to the outskirts of town. But before they knew it the loud people began to overpopulate the warm tropical shore they inhabited and they started to impinge on the outer-lying hamlet the quiet people had settled. So the quiet people moved even further away. 'That's how they got to the polar ice caps,' the professor writes on page 123. They figured it was so inhospitable and uninhabitable up there the tropical loud mouths would never follow them. They were wrong. For a while they were free from all the mindless chitchat of the loud people. It was a kind of golden era for them up there on the North Pole. They read and did all the creative things people can do when they are not crowded out of their own minds."
"A golden era of silence, however short lived," Michael Michaels ended the meeting. The show was about to go on air. He took his seat on the news set and smiled his million-dollar smile. Under the harsh klieg lights in the broadcast booth the anchorman looked positively alien, like a Venusian talking head.
"It's not what you sell, it's how you tell them the price," Michael Michaels briskly launched into the first story of the newscast. "Drone War Idol has just announced they will donate Pray Station laptop game-boxes to every underprivileged schoolchild in Uruguay. A top executive was quoted as saying: 'This isn't just a media stunt designed to boost our ratings. Think of the children. Every kid in the world deserves a chance at fifteen minutes of fame. And not only that, these kids are heroes. Think of them out there protecting us from the evil-doers here in our own front yard.'
"Later in Drone Wars news, we will take an insider look into the version XVI recall. We will also look at New Mexico Senator Loudan Rich's latest security proposal -- The Puppy Dog Channel; Smart Mattresses in the military; and a new study out of Fort College that could shed some light on the Rebel psychology.
"But first: the Federal Government closure of its embassy in Atlanta, Georgia. After six military trucks with weapons and explosives went missing the compound was temporarily shuttered as a precaution. Officials believe local insurgents hijacked the trucks. A State Department spokesperson would not deny or confirm concerns about instability in the region. 'It's premature to call Georgia a failed state,' the spokesperson said. 'But we definitely don't want it to turn into another North Dakota or Idaho,' the spokesperson added. The government of Georgia faces a secessionist uprising in the south and a rebellion in the north..."
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Computer monitors buzzed, snapped and flickered across the globe. One minute Version XV Drone Wars gamers were watching a live-feed. The next there was a writhing mound of indistinct pink flesh on their screens. Male parts eventually differentiated themselves from female parts. Most of the unmanned aerial vehicle operators were too young to think of the images and the accompanying sounds of moans and gasps as anything but a sublime gross-out. Surveillance footage of a liquor store hold-up interrupted the pornographic snippet. None of the kids could understand what was happening. After watching the robbery-in-progress for a while the youngsters got spooked, but then what every one of them thought was a live-feed came back on line.
Only later did they learn they had been "spoofed". Official coordinates and flight paths the kids took for real had been swapped out with dummy footage by rebel hackers who apparently had little trouble compromising the Pentagon security feeds. Drone War Idol carried the whole disaster live on their oversized Jumbotron. No one at the network could figure out how to shut the thing off, or go to a commercial break in time to avoid broadcasting the ensuing catastrophe.
In Europe the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Brandenburg Gate, and the Roman Coliseum were pulverized before the eyes of a shocked audience of millions. US watchers were held passive hostages to the destruction of Monument Valley, Mount Rushmore, and the Washington Monument.
"Can you believe this shit?" his bodyguard limped into the car the arms dealer had parked and waiting outside the emergency room. "If this bitch gets infected I'm gonna sue that sorry ass state-sponsored bible hospital back to the stone-age where it belongs."
His boss jerked the steering wheel and floored the gas. "Took some extra heat along for the ride," he indicated the two men in the backseat. "FBI thinks I double-crossed them by not giving them a heads-up on this mess."
He took a hard right onto an unlit street. The car fishtailed and swerved in the loose gravel as they rounded the corner. An LAPD drone was hot on their tail.
"Government pigs want to know what happened," one of the men in the back passed forward a handheld flip-top device.
"Skygrabber," he trapped the device between his cheek and his shoulder and yelled into the receiver. "Russian Federation made. That's right. Only $30. Anyone can download it from the Internet."
The car s-ed around another sharp curve and roared down the boulevard.
His bodyguard swallowed a painkiller, pulled a Glock out of the glove compartment, and cocked it.
"You suckers blew my cover when you started handing out big dollar pay-offs to every hood in town. 'Counter-insurgency.' Suck my big fat dick!" The arms dealer was pissed at the FBI agent on the other end. "You knew what was gonna happen when you started throwing cash around to every small-time scumbag on the block. Total fuckin' mayhem, that's what. The minute you put the colors on the payroll, you lit this town on fire. You sold me down the line -- and you know it," with his free hand he snapped the device shut against the steering wheel. In case the Feds had hidden a GPS tracking device inside it that his men had somehow missed when they scanned it, he tossed the little black box out the window the first chance he got.
"No matter what the Feds do it always turns into a major fuck-up," his bodyguard turned to look out the rear window. "Besides making a mess the only thing they excel at is mop-up. Most of the time all they do is clean up their own damn mess. Now they've gone in with the street gangs, I guess they figure you're nothing but a potential embarrassment, a black-eye for the department, an unwanted loose-end they need to eliminate."
The arms dealer couldn't be sure the FBI put the drone on his ass, but under the circumstances it was near impossible to know who was friend or foe. More than likely the milk-toast guy he just teleconferenced with was the guy who called in his assassination.
He blew a red light. The Cadillac skidded, swerved to avoid the sports coup in front, barely missed another oncoming car, and sped up again just before the first drone missile slid out of its chute, trailed vapor as it swept through the air, and detonated in the middle of the intersection. The arms-dealer adjusted the rearview mirror in time to see the cars behind him go airborne in a plume of flame.
A laptop was pulled out of a black duffle bag. "Give it here," his bodyguard reached behind him. He grabbed the thing and tapped out some commands with the nose of his blue steel pistol.
Behind them the unmanned robotic remote-control craft almost instantly stuttered in mid-flight, lost air, and performed a couple of indescribably odd maneuvers to keep from wrecking. The arms dealer jammed on the brakes just as the belly of the low-flying robotic plane passed them overhead. Tires squealed and everyone in the car lurched forward. Only a few yards in front of them the LAPD drone slammed into the street nose first. He and his wounded bodyguard ducked down under the dashboard just before the remaining munitions went off. Even with their heads hidden bellow the dashboard of the car they could see the horrific fireball ignite in front of them.
"What did you do?" he was impressed.
"LAPD drones have lousy 'information assurance.' I switched out the live feed with footage of this nasty old bitch going all Sapphic on this fat nigger's anorexic old lady while he beat off," his bodyguard said.
The arms dealer slid back up in his driver's-side Corinthian leather seat. "After this the FBI can kiss my sweet black ghetto ass goodbye. If the government bastards call again," he looked over at his bodyguard, "Tell them I slipped out the little door in the side. Maybe no one else will, but those crazy paranoid cock-suckers in the Hoover Building will know exactly what I'm talking about."
His bodyguard nodded as the arms dealer turned the sedan around and made for the Hollywood Freeway.
Once safely away from the downed drone, the unusually large man flipped the laptop back open. Everyone in the Cadillac celebrated when they realized that the bedlam created by the "spoofed" unmanned remote-control planes continued unabated. Drone War Idol technicians still hadn't figured out how to cut the live-stream and despite all their best efforts to the contrary they were broadcasting a beautiful shot of the Washington Monument tipping over in a maelstrom of flame.
Some young cad had obviously figured out how to usurp the show's soundtrack. A pop music hit based on an old patriotic song by Toby Keith played over the burning rubble of the Egyptian-style Masonic obelisk, cut in half moments earlier by a Hellfire rocket. Some Arab Sheik's kid in a Dubai penthouse had shot at it under the impression he was firing at a Rebel gun-nest a few miles over in Arlington, VA. The music was basically the same as it was in the old hit with a couple of minor rearrangements that included newly added eastern influenced instrumentation, including the incongruous use of an electric sitar. Only the lyrics were significantly changed to conform to the present mood of the country. For sure it wasn't the arms dealer's first choice of music, but after giving it some thought he decided he dug it on principal even though it was nothing but lousy Country-and-Western inspired schmaltz.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2009
"Bourbon or Scotch?"
"Bourbon!"
"Sometimes I forget I'm talking to a rabbit."
"Hooey."
"No really. I never met a talking rabbit who liked bourbon before."
"Hello," Roman Forester yelled from the front porch. Snow was coming down hard in the Upper Peninsula. He stamped his feet to get the slush off his boots.
Dr. Tulsa Phoenix put the rabbit back in its cage, grabbed the open bottle of Maker's Mark, and ran upstairs to answer the door.
Between nips from the bottle they undressed each other. Her skin was so beautiful Roman Forester was overwhelmed by an idea. There was something he always wanted to, but never had done before. With a swift motion he grabbed the waistband of her underwear and tore them off her. Dr. Tulsa Phoenix's first thought was confused, a little angry even. They were her nicest lace underwear and she had saved them especially for such an occasion. Her dismay didn't last long, however. She quickly realized it was a romantic first for her. No man had ever ripped her underwear off before. Both of them practically busted their sides, they thought it was so funny. Roman Forester wanted to say "We interrupt Drone Wars to bring you this special moment," but he couldn't quite catch his breath.
Emergency alert sirens went off. Drones were coming in again. The young man wanted to get back to his equipment at the refugee camp, but she pointed out that they were both still a little drunk from the night before. "Besides it's too dangerous. There isn't enough time. My neighbor has a bomb shelter." She ran downstairs to grab her rabbit. "It's right over the hill," she yelled up from the basement. "If we're lucky we might just about make it to the farm before they seal the hatch."
Half-hidden faces winced in the dark bunker with every new thump and quake overhead. About thirty people had made their way to the bomb-shelter. A nearby impact, quite a bit louder than the rest, made them all flinch. Roman Forester had his arm around Dr. Tulsa Phoenix who nervously cradled her fluffy white rabbit. He knew the drones were targeting the outer-lying camps because that was where all the Drone War Version XIV points were, but he also knew adolescent and teenage remote-control operators halfway around the world could care less what they blew up. As long as it was in the designated mission grid they got some points.
"Who was it you were talking to in the basement when I came over last night?" he figured she would tell him about a roommate he didn't know she had.
"The rabbit."
"I thought I heard another voice."
She tickled the rabbit under the chin.
"He talks?"
"She sure does, don't you," Dr. Tulsa Phoenix corrected him and set the fur-ball on her lap so it could nibble on the snacks she had cupped in her palm.
Air in the bunker was getting thin. Everyone was breathing heavily and wiped the perspiration from their wet brows. "Damn this old death-trap all to hell," the old farmer stood up and pounded the air vent with his hand to try and get the rusted out fan to start working again, but it was frozen. A whiff of smoke from singed electrical wiring was a sure sign the motor had burned out.
"Last year at this time we were down here for two days before the carpet bombing let up," a middle-aged woman across from them pulled out a songbook to try and raise everyone's spirits. "To pass the time we all sang Christmas carols."
"Last year at this time we all thought if we only embraced Jesus Christ as our savior and lord everything would turn out fine and all the wrongs in the world would miraculously get righted," her husband sardonically cut her off. "And the year before that, and the year before that going all the way back as far as I can remember. Well, where's it got us, mother? Huddled down here while the whole town up above us gets blown to kingdom come!"
"Hard hearted stick-in-the-mud," she gently reprimanded and flipped through her book for the right song. "Don't pay him any mind," she said to everyone else in the shelter. "Hard in the heart and soft in the brain like all those right-winger nuts he's always crooning over."
"You're a fine one to talk," another bearded man accused the farmer's wife.
Sooner or later someone was going to notice Roman Forester was not a local. Tulsa Phoenix would defend him, but he was already self-conscious enough about the fact that were it not for him and all the other folks like him camped out on the outskirts of their town these people -- otherwise forgotten on the northern boarder -- would enjoy a peaceful and placid existence far away from the chaos of the civil war that raged in the rest of the country.
Roman Forester felt so sure the second bearded man was about to turn on him he tried to change the subject back to the talking rabbit. The tension in the fall-out-shelter was unbearable. To the young man it seemed like all hell could break loose with the next impact.
"So," the rabbit asked: "Did you ever hear the one about the comedian Vagina von Lesbian? I'll tell you right up front the guy was a wet rag, down on his luck. He was desperate -- at the end of his rope," the rabbit held one paw over her head, cocked paw and head to the side, and stuck her tongue out to indicate an invisible noose. "Living in a one-room cold-water flat in New York with a view out his only window of an air-duct.'
"One day Ruth Buzzi walks in on his lounge act. After the gig is over Vagina von Lesbian comes over to her table. 'Ms. Buzzi,' he says, 'I'm one of your biggest fans. Do you have any advice for a young aspiring comedian? I'm putting my best material out there but it all flames out like the Hindenburg. No one ever laughs at any of my material. You're the greatest of the great. What do you think I should do?' She narrows her bleary eyes, clearly unhappy with the intrusion. 'Whah? Who the hell are you?' she whines and knocks her drink over reaching for her cigarettes. 'Vagina von Lesbian,' he says with as much pride and self-confidence as he can muster. 'Vagina von who?' Ruth Buzzi practically spits up her olive. 'Are you kidding me with a name like that?' she gags. 'I mean that's awful. Maybe you should start by changing your crummy name.'
"A year later she stumbled into a Vegas lounge. The room is in stitches, the comedian is killing, but the minute he sees her walk in he runs down to greet her. 'Thank you, thank you, thank you,' he says. 'For what?' Ruth Buzzi asks somewhat annoyed. She doesn't recognize him from Adam. 'Last year I was down-and-out and it's all thanks to you my career was resuscitated,' he tells her. 'You saved it when you told me to change my name. And you were right!' She squints up at this lanky character: 'What did you say your new name is?' He stands back for dramatic effect. 'Dick van Dyke,' he says proudly."
No one was conscious enough to get the joke. Far from it, a number of folks clutched their throats and coughed uncontrollably like they were about to throw up.
Not much oxygen was left in the shelter when the firemen finally cracked the metal hatch open with their jaws-of-life contraption. "Bless you baby Jesus," the middle-aged farmer's wife wept at the sight of daylight. The drone raid was over. The bombing had stopped. Everyone, young and old alike, poured out of the bunker and gasped for fresh air. A shaky Roman Forester helped the physician and her talking rabbit up the stairs. Most everyone recovered after a gust of icy cold wind.
Dr. Tulsa Phoenix had her work cut out for her at the hospital tent. Victims of the drone attack numbered in the hundreds.
Back at the VW Van Roman Forester's friend ribbed him about the doctor: "No way that's her real skin," he said. "She bought that skin."
"Not even the Pentagon can make skin that perfect," Roman Forester wistfully brushed the comment aside and got back to work wiring a stack of hardware that he believed could cut down their response time to the Drone War Idol gamers by half -- maybe even give them the edge. He didn't mention anything about a talking rabbit.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2009
Panicked crowds pressed up against the sides of buildings. Drones hung over Park Avenue. Some people prayed. Others turned their shoulders at the hiss of the first rockets let loose on the civilian population. "Operation Rapture Day" was underway. Missiles ripped through the pavement. They tore into storefronts. Large chunks of asphalt and concrete flew through the air. Taxis and other vehicles were sitting pigeons in the congested traffic. Drivers jumped out of cars. It all came back to Smalls Hawkins with a rush of cold sweat. He was sitting in the back of a cab when the first bombs hit. There was a gust of hot air. The taxi was momentarily airborne. It hit the ground upside down with the sick crunch of broken glass and crushed metal.
At the time he couldn't have known it, but the same scene was repeated all over town. Manhattan was under attack.
"We wanted the game to get off with a bang," one of the Drone Wars creators reminisced about the initial launch.
"It had to be big," his partner explained the pressure they felt from their financial backers. "Really big and very loud."
Mystery surrounded the inventors. Neither had ever agreed to an interview before.
"Every square inch of every surface of life made esthetic," the video game entrepreneur described his fantasy world.
"But it quickly became evident to us that only a few chosen people could participate in the design revolution," his partner explained the shortfall of their dream of a world in which everything was completely art-directed.
"Our first mistake was to think about it in terms of a single ideal esthetic for everyone. We had to step back and look at the whole picture."
"Popular art was as good a place to start as any. And, if you think about it, many of the most popular forms of entertainment are very dark. People are scared. Fear is real. But they can't stand the uncertainty. They want their worst fears to come true as fast as possible so they can get on with their lives. Drone Wars is nothing but a perfectly designed version of the nightmare world they want to get out of their minds."
"All we are actually doing, in a sense, is frontloading everything bad and terrible. Maybe it's a false premise, but if everyone wants to believe the world will be a much better place after Drone Wars is over, who are we to tell them any different?" the co-creator went off on a tangent.
"But there are still some severe limitations to the game," his partner tried to get the interview back on track. "Lamentably, private moments between people are still so elusive to machine logic. Our interactive vision requires that everyone is an equal participant in the video game (whether they like it or not). We are currently working on tools that will hopefully make it more possible in future upgrades to..."
"Did you say your name was Plastic?" Smalls Hawkins pulled out one of his earphones so he could hear her better. "Are you a hostess?"
"Shasta," she repeated from behind the foldout table at the Pleasant Valley Nuclear Association booth and pointed to her nametag. "As in Mount Shasta... The sex booths are on the other side of the park."
"I'm looking for electronics," Smalls Hawkins looked up from under the brim of his fedora as if to convey how foolish he felt for his mistake.
Her perfect teeth glinted when she smiled. It was the previously agreed-upon password. "By the zoo," she winked and quickly handed him a promotional brochure she had set aside from the others.
Central Park looked almost medieval, transformed into an extended modern-day frontier outpost town -- like Woodstock with Power Point presentations. Chickens and other domestic animals ran wild. Muddy thoroughfares connected the various districts. Anything and everything was available for the right price; sex, gambling, drugs, you name it. The place had an electric bazaar-like feel. Folks came in from New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware to purchase what was outlawed in their own neo-Puritanical Christian-ruled states. Pirated drones circled overhead. Every so often an NYPD drone broke through and managed to let loose a missile, but most of the time they were shot down before they got anywhere near the various booths and stalls in which business was done. Rebel officials bragged it was safer in the park than in the nation's capitol.
"Heard what the young president said the other day about the massive explosions that practically leveled several federal buildings, including the Department of Justice," the Electronics District contact chatted up Smalls Hawkins. "He said: 'There are a few assassinations, bombs go of every once in a while, but besides these major attacks, it's not a bad place for the country to be.' Can you believe it? The Feds are crazy out of their skulls with the crap that comes out of their mouths. What phony-baloney. His own mother wouldn't believe him."
To anyone else it looked like a chance encounter. But to Detective Alejandro Chomsky's well-trained eye the exchange between the two men took on sinister proportions. He observed the whole scene from a dark corner of the park. Nothing about the seemingly casual rendezvous escaped him. Smalls Hawkins clearly shoved something into the other man's pocket -- probably the brochure he picked up at the Pleasant Valley Nuclear Association booth. Detective Chomsky wanted some answers. It was time to bring his former partner into custody for questioning.
An old grifter's con was employed. A man steps out in front of you at the last minute holding out his bifocals like a toreador holds his red cape in front of a charging bull. Inevitably the glasses are knocked to the ground by the supposedly incidental contact. In case the impact of the eyewear on the asphalt does not smash the lenses they have already been cracked ahead of time. The scam-artist raises heck about his broken eyewear. In full throat he demands as loudly as possible so everyone nearby can hear him that the victim of the swindle compensate him for the accident. Nine-out-of-ten times even the most seasoned cynical New Yorkers will fall for the trick.
Before Smalls Hawkins knew what had happened he found himself surrounded by a crush of irate witnesses all of which insisted he do the right thing and compensate the poor nearsighted man for his broken glasses. All Detective Chomsky had to do was make sure there were enough undercover officers in the crowd to block the suspect's escape and apprehend him. When it works it's a thing of beauty. Before anyone knew what had happened Chomsky's men were walking him away in handcuffs. None of the Central Park bystanders had any idea what had just happened.
"HitList writers might do well to take some notes on how to detain a suspect," thought Smalls Hawkins dryly as he was shoved into an unmarked NYPD cruiser.
"Allan Arkin," Detective Alejandro Chomsky paced the interrogation cell, "once said 'There's two people in this world who can talk without making sense. That's John Wayne and Fred Willard.' I'm thinking of adding your name to the list Hawkins." The pressure was on. NYPD brass wanted answers and they wanted them fast. "You might recall Version XIII of Drone Wars overturned the US Constitution. We don't have to call it 'extraordinary rendition' anymore. We don't have to farm it out to contractors. We don't have to send you to black sights halfway across the planet. We don't have to lie to the American people about what we are doing behind closed doors anymore. Call it torture if you want to. Call it any damn thing you please.
"If we have to harm you to get the information we want we can do it, easy as that. NYPD can hurt you so you can never walk again, or hold a spoon. We can drug you so you piss blood and shit your pants," he knocked Smalls Hawkins hat off his head. "Don't you get it, man? You are on your own. Can't you see that there's no one to stop us? Don't test my patience. I don't care if you once wore the uniform. You better start talking and start talking fast. I saw you make the exchange in the park. I got it on tape. We got your Ms. Shasta in the holding room across the hall and I'm in a rush. She won't hold up as long as you. Are you going to tell me what was in that pamphlet or do I have to order my goons to ruin that perfect smile of hers?"
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2009
