The Second Labor


My first instinct was to keep on going and find some other way to make money. Sucking dicks in the kitchen of a country and western bar, for instance. Looking at the lawn as I rode up on my bicycle, my stomach body-slammed itself as I realized I was going to have to do actual work, something to which I am normally allergic. But then I remembered that I was getting paid in cash by the hour, and that if I just relaxed and found a comfortable pace, I could maybe string this job along for weeks. I could easily get what I needed, and the wretched condition of the lawn could be an incidental blessing.

I parked my bike on the curb and made my way to the back where I was supposed to find gardening tools. The lawn was a knee-high nightmare, probably the sole subject of many a furious neighborhood association meeting, and I felt like a five-year-old wading nervously through occluded and oily surf. Anything that could live in this matted thicket was surely nastier than I.

I took some time to give the place a more thorough examination before I set to work. The cottage was nice enough, and the tools were in a pile by the back door, right where the brisk old landlord said they would be. I put on some thick canvas gloves, grabbed a sharpshooter shovel, and walked back to the front to plan my attack.

Even though it had been abandoned for nearly half a year, the cottage itself looked to be in fairly decent repair. It was a two story pink and yellow townhouse with bright blue trim, a gingerbread roof, and a whitewashed picket fence that ran crooked and sharp, easily lethal enough to mangle enthusiastic, invading Huns. It was right in the middle of the city, and I would have loved to live in a place like this. Hard to imagine that anybody would pack up and leave it in the middle of the night without even a notice or a forwarding address. No, somebody had loved it once, despite the mysterious circumstances surrounding its surrender, and it was my job to make sure somebody would love it again.

I tapped the sharpshooter against my left Ked. Before I could mow, I would need to get rid of the weeds. The grass underneath the mess was a healthy Bermuda that seemed like it would thrive and enthusiastically choke away interlopers given the right starting conditions. I just needed to even up the odds a bit…let the Bermuda know someone was on its side.

I could tell there were some flowers and shrubs wildly kicking around as well. However, I snappily decided that I would only preserve the grass. Landscaping was really more of a stage two affair, and I wasn’t being paid to beautify – only to salvage and repair. I could tell where the landlord had started to do the job he was paying me for and then given up. There was a largish clean patch near the evening-sun side that I took to be an example of what he wanted me to make the rest of the yard look like. There was a child’s red wagon over the defoliated dirt, and I made a mental note: I could use it as a trolley, and not have to make a billion trips to the trash.

Heaving a deep sigh of frustration at my lot in life to be a working shithead instead of somehow independently wealthy, I grabbed the shovel with two hard fists and plunged it into the nearest bluebell.

I started digging, kicking and scooping. It was mid-morning, and I suddenly realized it was eventually going to be hot as July horse shit squeezed by a boxcar onto July railroad tracks. I wrapped a wet bandanna around my head, but not before sweat started to flow in nasty, unctuous sheets down my back like torrential rain on a semi-truck’s dirty side mirror. Nothing else to be done for it.

It was not long before I found my rhythm. I was proud of myself: with the right beat, my shovel started gouging the incontestable quick out of that stony ground. I first went for all the little bastards – the weeds in soft dirt that came up surprised and sheepish - and I started making a pile of their eerie emerald corpses on the wagon. At first I kept the gloves on, but this proved to be impractical and awkward. Soon, they too joined the graveyard. My last experience of pulling weeds must have been when I was twelve, where I did eight months in an “alternative school” for a dime sack of weed in my gym locker. Now that I was doing it for money, I found I sort of enjoyed the wholesale slaughter of the tough, innocent, and evolutionarily-superior foliage. I was an avenging, desperate monkey waging my personal war for Adam and Cain against the rampant injustice of The Garden.

The weeds were not the only casualty in my savage, peccant assault. Under the merciless blade of my thin shovel, earthworms suddenly found themselves meeting their identical twins, pillbugs were turned into shiny black balls of undulating jelly, and tiny spiders tasted their own bitter innards before curling terminally into tiny pools of tiny spider goo. As I worked, often squatting, my fists and knees turned a grainy cellulose green, and I imagined the stain was literally the blood of the land.

The lawn's heady chartreuse vodka and the sun's happy acid started to intoxicate me. By noon I had cleared out most of the little weeds, and I was surveying the larger ones to figure out how their root systems worked and how best to eliminate each. I was dizzy and kind of unsteady, and starting to get dehydrated. I picked up the garden hose and tried to take a swig from it. The water tasted like paint and hit my stomach like the warm, regurgitated bile of an alcoholic rock star. I doubled over, grabbed at my temples to keep my brain from exploding out of my head, and found myself face to face with the most curious, dangerous looking little plant I had ever seen.

Hello. How come I hadn’t noticed this monstrosity before?

As waves of heatstroke and nausea climbed back down from my face into my guts, I stared at it with a hilarious calm and let it be my entire focus. It didn’t take much work.

I was a hired destroyer of weeds (various and sundry, plain and simple) and not a horticulturist or even somebody who could tell you the names of plants beyond dandelions (they have white puff balls that you can blow) and apple trees (they have apples). But I did know this was a plant I had never seen before, and I had spent a goodly amount of time rolling around in people’s lawns as a both a tot and as a recreational abuser of hallucinogens.

First of all, it was purple. Most plants have similar sickly organic purple in them somewhere – close to their joints and where the leaves bud out, perhaps – but this plant was all purple. It was about a two feet tall and covered with small, hypodermic thorns. Its leaves were fluted, and even though there was a slight breeze, it didn’t sway. It didn’t have any flowers, but I imagined that if it ever bloomed it was bright neon pink and dripped sugary battery acid in order to attract and murder bees – sticking them and then slowly dissolving them alive as they ineffectually flapped their wiggly diaphanous membranes.

When I poked it with the edge of my shoe, it only gave a little bit in the dirt and didn’t bend at all.

When I sifted through the soil around it with two fingers, I noticed that the soil was finer and looser than the rest of the lawn. It was almost like the dirt of an ant mound.

I looked for insects, but there weren’t any. Something instinctive told me the plant was poisonous.

I picked up the shovel and gave the plant a swipe. I managed to hack off one of its limbs. It came away clean, snapping, and didn’t splinter - and the remaining tube began to ooze clear, thick fluid. I picked up the lopped stalk. It smelled like butterscotch, and between the thorns of the plant, I could feel miniscule hairs.

I took big gulps out of the water hose, now. It was finally running cold. Focusing so completely on one thing did the job of curing my nausea. But I knew that before I could get any more work done, I would have to find every instance of this plant and destroy it. Its organic menace chilled me somewhere deeply abstract. I wanted to punch it repeatedly in its chloroplast as it wept unto death.

First things first: I walked over to the steaming weed graveyard, fished around until I found them, and then put the gardening gloves back on.

Refreshed and enthusiastic at my latest quarry, I chunked the shovel into the base of the lurid purple nightmare with all of my might. In my head, I had already named it the Backhanded Hydra, because it looked bruised, battered, and sly. I kicked hard at the buried shovel, driving it deeper into the ground, and then I leaned on it with every pint of my strength and weight, attempting to leverage up all of the surrounding dirt and expose some of the Hydra’s roots. I must have sliced through at least some part of the root network, because the smell of butterscotch was even stronger now.

I continued to dig and pry, dig and pry, trying to get as cleanly to the bottom of the plant as I could. I wanted to get all of it, and the rule of thumb I had always been taught was that a weed’s root structure was usually twice as large as its sprouted manifestation. I circled around the Hydra with the shovel twice, cutting into the ground and lifting. I wanted that plant to lift clean out by the time I took hold of it: I didn’t want to have to yank it out like an impacted tooth and risk some of its thorns pricking me through my work gloves.

Eventually satisfied that I had tilled enough soil and ripped through enough maggoty-white wire roots with my shark lever, I set it down and grabbed the Hydra in two hands. I gave it a slight, experimental pull, but it still seemed solidly planted. I gave it a harder tug. Nothing. I dug my feet in, squatted, and then lifted up with all of my force. It didn’t budge – it didn’t even strain – signifying that the Hydra’s central root must still be embedded far below the surface, where the soil was still tightly packed.

I tried again after another frustrating round of shovel prying. Nada, although this time I managed to pull off some leaves and break off another length of stalk. Now it would merely be more difficult to get a good grip the next time I tried to yank it out.

Evidently, I was going about this all wrong, and I wasn’t quite sure how to remedy the situation. It was starting to look like it was going to be a really long day. But I had about seven hours of daylight left, and that was plenty of time to wrangle out one stubborn weed from sandy Texas topsoil, even if I had to use a little brute force to get the job done. I grabbed a short spade from the pile of tools. All I needed was a little patience.

I started digging deeply now around the base of the plant, periodically clearing away dirt and flinging it back over my shoulder with the spade. There was a tremendous amount of roots, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that the central root wasn’t just settled and intact – it actually expanded in size the further down it got. It was a dirty trick. More and more I was beginning to realize that the Hydra was just a minor nubbin on a giant community of roots that had no discernible end. The central root had tubes growing on it that spiraled around like thirsty pinwheels, and there were sticky glutinous runners leading off in every direction. I had already severed many of them with my initial blundering, but these runners lay just below the surface and were taut enough to evade all but the most expertly wielded shovelblow. I could actually see tiny purple offshoots budding up all over the lawn now that I was looking for them.

After about an hour of digging, and an hour of shaking, pulling, grunting and sweating, I was no closer to my goal. The central root was the size of my forearm, and no amount of physical persuasion could tease it any direction that would give me a clue as to how deep it actually went.

“Fuck,” I screamed. “This is absolutely ridiculous.”

Out of atavistic frustration, I threw the shovel like an Olympic javelin at the Hydra’s exposed root. To my surprise, the shovel sliced clean through and the hole I had dug started to fill up with its viscous butterscotch juice. The plant landed a foot behind it, shuddering as it fell. I peered into the hole – but most of the juice was now seeping back into the ground. I picked the shovel back up and started filling the dirt back in, until there was no trace left. I tossed the giant plant on top of my graveyard where it seemed laughably out of place.

But this was a petty, Pyrrhic victory.

I knew that if I didn’t destroy all of the roots, the plant would come back. The only thing more resilient than a weed that has already got its foot in the door is perhaps trackball dandruff. And yet, I was sick of dealing with this plant by now. I decided to renege on my decision, and get rid of the other weeds before I came back and finished assassinating these purple Aristocrats.

I spent the rest of the day vigorously uprooting surprised amateurs. My Backhanded Hydra made these crenulated poseurs look like timid calves. I actually managed to wipe most of them out, and while I felt vindicated, I still had a gnawing feeling of unresolved inner conflict. Tomorrow, I would come back with help. Maybe even a little firepower.

2.

My next door neighbor, The Naturalist, drove a bright blue Buick with a broken headlight. This meant he could only drive during the day. Even though he was a deliberately slow and anal driver, getting a ride with him was infinitely better than biking the four miles.

“This is it, right here,” I told him. He wheeled the car over to the curb. We both got out.

“It doesn’t look so bad,” he said.

“I did a lot of work yesterday,” I said. I pointed to the seven black garbage sacks sitting on the sidewalk. The Naturalist nodded his approval.

“So show me this amazing discovery of yours,” said the Naturalist.

I walked him over to the nearest Hydra. He knelt down, and took out a magnifying glass. Something was wrong. I started counting...

“This is fascinating,” he said, clucking his tongue, “I couldn’t even tell you the genus, although it certainly isn’t native. Notice the incredibly thin thorns, normally indicative of a desert plant. Observe, if you will, the color and patina - how it shimmers like the iridescent shell of a scarab or an oil stain. Take heed of its fragrance – to what manner of creature could this possibly make an odiferous plea?”

“Yeah. It’s fucking nuts,” I said softly.

There were seven plants in the front lawn this morning. There had been six yesterday, and I had spent hours cutting that number down to five. I had named these plants Backhanded Hydras because of their many-headed serpentine structure – but it looked like the name was fitting for an even more baffling reason.

There was always the possibility I had simply screwed up my addition…

I decided not to say anything. Instead, I watched the Naturalist mince and caper while stroking his goatee. He took hold of a stalk and gently broke it off with tapered, typewriter fingers. He sniffed it experimentally. He furrowed. He frowned. I could almost see his empty thought bubble.

“Butterscotch,” I said.

“So it is,” said the Naturalist, “I couldn’t place it.”

To my horror, he placed the dripping end in his mouth and began sucking.

“Mmmmm. Even tastes like it, by god!”

“What are you doing? That plant’s poison!” I cried.

“How do you know? All I taste is earth-sugar and rainwater,” said the Naturalist, smugly.

“Look at it! I don’t even want to touch it.”

“It’s beautiful. Besides, plants with thorns rarely ever need further defense from large mammals.”

There was clear juice running down from the corner of his mouth. I stared at it until he flicked it away with his tongue. When he didn’t immediately fall over retching and clutching his chest, I relaxed.

“It’s your hospital bill,” I said, “Let me know if your innards start bleeding and you begin disgorging infected fecal matter into your brain. I’ve never driven a Buick before, but I can probably get you to the hospital.”

The Naturalist ignored me. He went around back, returned with a shovel, and began to dig. I got the hint.

“Don’t dig so close,” I said, joining him with a shovel of my own – a big flat-headed one. “And mind the central root. It’s not as robust as it looks, and you don’t want to cut it through.”

We began to dig, excavating the weed as if it were an ancient archaeological treasure. The Naturalist chewed on a stub of Hydra and hummed garbled Mozart. I tried my best to ignore him.

As the day wore on, we merely found ourselves deeper in a confusing and tangled mess. Our first startling but ultimately fruitless revelation was that all of the plants were connected. Each Hydra had roots that led to the others, making them effectively a single plant, like grass or ivy. The Naturalist nearly wet himself, claiming it was as stunning and as important a biological discovery as he had ever seen, and that he simply must communicate it to his colleagues and professors at the University. I bade him keep his mouth shut until we found out where all of the central roots led, or I would crack him with my shovel and bury him out here.

I was pretty sure I was joking. He gave a wounded and mirthless bark, but he shut up.

“The last thing I need is for this place to be declared some sort of nature preserve. Then I’d never get paid. Our deal still stands: you can keep any specimens you help me dig up for yourself, as long as you don’t say where you got them.”

He nodded, contrite.

“We need a backhoe,” I said finally, surveying our work. The front lawn was now a good three feet lower wherever the Hydras or their roots lay exposed.

“That would be most efficacious,” said the Naturalist. “I fear we have hit clay, and to go any deeper would require exertions of heroic, hubristic proportions.”

“Clay? This stuff feels like rawhide.”

The Naturalist took his shovel and plunged it into one of the trenches. It stuck deep, and its recreational end vibrated in the afternoon air like the silent string of a dampened violin.

“We can make it another grueling four inches on our own,” said the Naturalist. “Or we could defer to the pneumatic drill. It may not be the most efficient means, but it will certainly…”

Before he could finish, I jumped on him and knocked him out of the way. Behind us, his shovel had rocketed up out of the dirt like an inverted falcon or a marble lodged inside Spindletop. It was coming down fast at his head before I registered it and reacted, shoving him to the ground. The shovel landed on the driveway with a scraping clatter, denting the concrete. It suddenly began to rain. Thick, sticky rain. Overwhelmingly pungent clear fluid pelted us as we lay there mystified, and it took a few moments before I realized we were being drenched with Hydra juice.

The earth shook beneath us, and we heard the groan of metal twisting itself around metal. In my mind’s eye, I could see water pipes, gas lines, and sewage drains bending into strange mineral spaghetti as the ground rippled like a stormy lake. There was another sound, too. A deep, subterranean howling. The sound of a massive animal sick with torment.

I rolled over and struggled to my knees. My tackle had conked the Naturalist’s head against the curb, and he was no longer moving.

Each of the Hydras sucked down into the ground in sequence like Bugs Bunny carrots. The sidewalk became unfixed like a torn tire tread, and crumpled in on itself like a five car pile-up. Neighbors and locals began to pour out from nearby houses and shops, and I grabbed the Naturalist by his collar and started pulling him toward the street.

The howling became deafening, and a bubble of turf formed underneath us, lifting us high into the air – level with the roof of the cottage. A Hydra spat through the ground and thwapped me in my face, giving me a nose full of thorns. Taken by surprise, I let go of the Naturalist, and he rolled ass over teakettle down the impromptu hill and out into the street, where a passing mail truck narrowly avoided crushing him by swerving into a fire hydrant. You’ll be shocked and amazed to know that the mail carrier’s first instinct was not (in fact) to protect his load from water damage, but to tend to my bedazzled companion.

I had time to see the Naturalist groggily wake from a fetal position into a dazed hunch before the bubble dropped out from underneath me. It sunk like a punched-in baseball cap, sending me plummeting into a tank-size crater that only moments before had been glorious Mount Holyshit. I thought the ground would brake me, but the dirt where I landed was loose and hollow, and I just kept falling.

3.

I fell, stretching and clawing, until the sky above me was a distant pinprick. I would have been screaming, but my mouth was full of clods and bugs. I could have been falling forever, and when finally I landed in total darkness, it was a slow process of frictional attrition. The dirt gelled around me and I was caught fast. I could still breathe, after spitting out the muck that had collected in my throat, but I already felt the dread panic of inevitable death, and breathing came short and gasping. Had we tapped into some forgotten mine shaft? Was this turning of the earth the result of a punctured gas pocket that would soon engulf my already doomed corpse in chemical flame?

I didn’t have much time to ponder such delicacies. My night eyes came, and with them came the greater Night Eye before me.

I must have been in some kind of cavernous void, because I still had freedom of movement from my torso up. As soon as I realized that I wasn’t dead, I began twisting and flexing – attempting to wrench the rest of me loose as well. It wasn’t difficult. All of the dirt was newly settled and therefore pliant.

As I crawled on top of something cold and dark (it is so incredibly cold that deep underground), I realized that something in the darkness was glowing. A round disk was slightly inflamed in front of me, and it began to move closer.

It grew to the size of a buffalo. I lay on my side and looked up at its hard, vibrant whiteness. Was I insane? Was I alive? Was this the tunnel of light each person must crawl through toward his oblivion?

And then it blinked.

I began to scream. The floor began to rumble and howl.

Daddy, he burns me!

I know, sweety. Sir? Please…please don’t do that…my ears are very sensitive and it makes me angry when you shriek so. I’m still…human…I think…but this anger is very hard to control. It is better for us to sleep, but now we are awake. And now we will talk. Perhaps you shall live. Here.

I abruptly silenced myself in mid-wail. The voice was coming from inside my skull, like how paranoid transients must pick up radio signals from the CIA.

Daddy, is he going to be a new friend?

I don’t know, Annie…try not to scare him.

I’m lonely, Daddy.

I know, honey…but maybe he doesn’t want to stay here with us. We have to get used to being together...by ourselves…and not bothering anybody. For awhile, anyway. We must bargain, or we must move on.

But I want to play, Daddy…

The voices were almost familiar, and filled with such yearning. The giant white circle of burning eye had fixed all of its intensity on me. Above, I could hear quiet creaking. I assumed it was all of the dirt piled on top of the cavern steadily insisting that nature abhors a vacuum.

“Who are you? What’s going on?” I cried into the white.

The eye began to roll like a searchlight, exposing and illuminating the rest of the cave. The floor was Hydra purple – textured like snail shell – and giant pillars of white Hydra root were all that was keeping the dirt from crushing me. I shivered. This must be the heart we were seeking, I thought. Now that I had found it, I wished for a stake carved out of a telephone pole and a dumpster full of garlic. Or perhaps filled with napalm.

My daughter and I can protect you for a limited amount of time. Each day we become more Plant, but each day the Plant becomes more us. Each day my daughter and I too become further as one. If you wish to escape with your life and soul, you must bargain, and bargain well. If you become part of the soil, you will lose both, and join us. It’s not what you think, but you will assuredly desire your current serene stasis when given the choice.

“What do you mean? Current serene stasis?”

You will wish to stay conventionally human. To die with your kind in the next cruel turn of evolution.

The light flared up blindingly brilliant, and I turned away to face my shadow behind. As I sat staring at the circle of white reflected on the wall behind me, two other shadows joined my cowering silhouette. One was demonstrably larger than the other. They wriggled and writhed like sacks of pythons, but maintained the vague human shapes of a full-grown man and a little bob-headed girl.

“Who are you people?” I said. I eased halfway round to try to squinch them into my periphery, but the light was toxic.

We were once as you are. We too were once trapped inside our individual selves like eggs in a carton awaiting the frying pan. I was a claims adjuster for a small insurance company and I was also the previous occupant of the house under which we now linger. My daughter and I. My wife never could handle just one man, so I got custody in the divorce proceedings. We lived here quietly, tending to our business and peaceably cultivating uneventful comfort. But there was an accident…a gas leak. The utilities were old, and the landlord was a negligent coward. He must have found us dead in our living room, slumped over our unfinished game of Chutes and Ladders. We awoke here, buried deep underground.

“The old man didn’t want Haunted House syndrome, eh?”

Tell him about the Plant, Daddy! Tell him about New Life!

I’m getting to that, Annie. We remember nothing of our death, because we were reborn as part of something wonderful before we had even gone cold. The soil took us in, and we have been subsumed by it…our bodies and minds used like creeper vines on wooden trellises. It was a strange transition. We awoke to find ourselves here, in this cavern. All of our needs and fears had vanished, and our hearts were aglow with the deepest, most pure love you could ever imagine. We had no chance to feel damned, for we knew we were in heaven.

Do you feel the love, mister?

“I love a lot of things,” I said. “Pinball, for instance. Keep going.”

I cannot explain very much, because I do not know very much. The Plant of which we are now only a small part gives us immortality, and all it asks is shared use of our reason and industry. It is the New Life, the next stage in the development of consciousness and intelligence for earth. Animals have passion and energy, but are ultimately selfish and lack the patience, thrift, and perspective of vegetation. Deep down we all know this and suffer from it: humanity has caused its own demise and it desires its own destruction. I see that now. It is the losing team. But there is salvation here, if you have the will and imagination for it.

I pondered this, edging toward the back, trying to find the hole that I had fallen through.

“So you used to be human, but then you died under an odd set of convenient circumstances, and now you are part of this mutant vegetable? This is some sort of…um…Bardo experience, right? I collapsed from exhaustion and am now having a very involved speculative journey through grand metaphor.”

The Plant is one. It is the mother and the provider. We consume, and we return to Plant. And the Plant is returning to reclaim its children…slowly…and with poise and precision. If I had known before I was taken, I would have buried more humans myself among the purple.

“That’s pretty fucking disturbing,” I said, “It’s terrible that you guys died and all, but maybe it was just your time. There’s no need to jump to bullshit etiological conclusions about the future of humanity. I mean, assuming I’m not hallucinating right now, I’d say you guys are sort of screwed if you are the intelligent extensions of some sort of corpse-infesting weed.”

Daddy, he makes me sad inside.

I know honey. I told you they never understand. It is their loneliness that makes them so hateful. They do not know the bliss of breaking from their shell and being part of something larger than their own small vision can provide.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Seriously.

“Uh-huh.”

I mean it.

“Whatever, man. Are you going to murder me, or what?”

No! No…I wouldn’t dream of it. Not me.

Killing is wrong, right Daddy?

Yes, dear. It is the consolation of the ignorant and fearful. But the Plant…the Plant will defend itself. It is not killing if the Plant decides to take you. It is mercy. And your death will merely transcend you. You will see with new eyes…hear with new ears…love with a new, purple center…

“Were you a particularly religious man before you became a zombie plant?”

Spiritual, not religious. Why do you ask?

“Just curious. I really don’t think the Plant wants me. I’m not good at sharing anything, especially my feelings and insides. You seem very nice, but what are my other options?”

If you are so strong, why don’t you turn around and face me instead of talking to my shadow?

The light dimmed a bit. It was still bright enough to be painful as a traffic cop’s flashlight into drunken eyes, but it was no longer something that could broil out your retinas like flapjacks on a griddle.

I felt my mind begin to float and distend. Looking into the circle of light was like being really high, closing your eyes, and then putting your spinning gob on a waterbed. There was a complex strobing sensation. Each thought was massaged from my forebrain, eased out of my skull, and greedily dispatched by the now-pulsating disco tuber in front of me like ketchupy waffle fries. I swear I could hear chewing, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

So you are just a human after all, aren’t you? Nothing special.

Did I ever used to be so silly? I’d rather be lonely than have a big old head full of poop.

“You are killing me, I think. What gives you…the right?” My head wouldn’t budge in either direction. I clawed at my temples and tried to bash my face aside with force, but my fists fell weakly against the side of my head as if in a dream.

Look. Just look.

Suddenly I understood the depth of the affair. The recycling of humanity…how souls commingled deep underground, struggled as supermen, and then became rare delicacies for lucky worms and greenery. I saw the girl and her father as puppets on the end of thorny purple reeds, playing me as a captive audience. They were toys for explaining to me my own predicament. I questioned whether there had even been such a pair. How easily my individuality could be mocked and mimicked by such slow moving genius.

I saw the dead in their graves, tickled and caressed by purple runners all over the world. I saw a world without pain, a world without meaning or bliss. The only emotion I could muster for such an abominable existence was complete disgust. But it didn't matter. The Plant could easily afford to let me be. I was grass in the garden it was growing, and someday I would be mowed.

I started to rise. The Plant began to recede, and I began to squeeze back to the surface. The light began to fade, and then it winked out completely. A part of me realized that I was being lifted by a roiling current of sticky clear juice back out of the hole into which I had fallen, like being ejected out of the blowhole of a whale. A larger and more significant part of me - a part that was slowly dawning with subterranean, transcendent horror - only cared about forgetting everything.

4.

The tube must have curved while I was going insane. I came out in the backyard, covered in muck, sweat, and sweet.

I trudged back to the front. I could hear the Naturalist giving his report to a swelling group of cops and rescue workers.

“I remember waking up this morning, Officer, but that is the extent of my knowledge about the dramatic state of the current dilemma. Perhaps I was kidnapped by errant ne’er-do-wells hoping to arrange a tidy ransom. Surely you understand the well-documented cognitive displacement effect of extreme trauma.”

“Uh-huh. You’ll answer questions when I ask them, and not until then. Once again: is this your Buick, and why in God’s name are you here?”

I started slinking toward the sidewalk, hoping to avoid a similar fate. I put my hands in my pockets to maximize my air of unapproachable surliness. To my shock, I found they were filled with hundreds of hard, purple pellets with flaky peanut shells. Had I been drafted? Was I to be the next Johnny Appleseed, traveling the country and spreading Hydras like religion? These seeds were a message. Fighting them would be absurd. It would be an endless war that humanity had no chance of winning. But why had I been allowed to live? What was I supposed to do now?

“Hey buddy! C’mere! Yer a witness!” yelled a small, portly, ferret-faced pig. I didn’t look up until I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Leave me alone. I don’t know anything.”

“What did you say? I give the orders. You want to come with me and answer some questions, or am I going to have to treat you as hostile? Mind your manners, son.”

“Look: I know exactly where you stand. You are in a fucking uniform. That makes you, guaranteed, an Officer of the Law. But you don’t know the first thing about me or my business. I could be anybody. I could be a Judge. I could be a Law-yer, or a Law-maker for all you know. At best, I am just a citizen that knows his rights. At worst, I am a journalist investigating shoddy construction of the Mayor’s new urban sewage renewal initiative.”

The pig hesitated. I took his hand gently off of my shoulder and squared up with him.

“Do I smell gas?”

He started to look really nervous. I began walking away.

“I guess I won’t quote you on anything, then. You have a good day.”

I didn’t look back, and he didn’t press the issue. Anyway, I had business elsewhere.

The walk back to my apartment would take me right past the Shady Lawn funeral home and cemetery. Which was convenient, although first I would stop by the hardware store for some tools, blasting caps, and cleaning products. I had some weeds to pull.

A Posteriori


Look: things get stuck inside people asses, and somebody has to pull them out, okay? Sorry for losing my temper, but there’s no need to dance around the issue. It’s not a glamorous job, but I get paid ridiculous amounts of money to do something that’s usually pretty easy, is always interesting, and is something at which I consider myself a consummate professional. Let me just say, to clear the air, I have extricated some hilarious protuberances from the rectums of some very important people and not once have I even so much as cracked a smile. And no pun intended about the ‘cracking a smile’ bit, either.

The jagged and cylindrical abortions of the extremely unlucky and inordinately curious require a tender midwife, and I feel I have answered the call with poise and humility. But I did not come here today to defend my chosen occupation. I came here because I need help. And I think you can help me.

Don’t worry about the plastic bag right now. There will come a time when I will open it and you are going to want to panic, but for the time being, ignore the beeping and glowing and just focus on me. In fact, I am going to put it under my chair. It's the reason I have come, but before I can spring it on you, you are going to need a hefty bit of background to pad the shock.

Two weeks ago found me listening to your radio program and doing a routine surgical operation on a particularly high profile patient who I am not comfortable naming. This was not by itself unusual. My phone number as a physician is unlisted because I have more business than I can handle due to my presently unrivalled expertise in the craft of rectal excavation, and because my demand among the nation’s elite has, along with my career, reached its apex. You would be shocked and amazed if you knew how often members of the first estate require the care of an excellent emergency proctologist. When a situation arises that requires nothing less than the best of the proctologic field, I am informed via emergency pager by a trusted nurse, causing me more often than not to immediately hop on a plane with barely enough time to pick out a festive new pair of surgical gloves. Due to a variety of factors (discretion, whim, obeisance, competitive quality control) I frequently service my patients in their homes, making do with an operating theater that has the easy potential to be less than optimal. Usually all that can be found as audio accompaniment to my work is AM radio.

Take this however you like, but whenever I work and if I can find it, I like to listen to your radio program. Your voice relaxes me and your often very droll and stimulating speculation into realms of the supernatural and extraordinary does a good job of occupying my mind’s dangerous extraneous anxiety. And if I am pacific, my patient too becomes more relaxed, even sensing my peace if they are already unconscious. Sometimes a relaxed patient is all it takes to get the job done, if you catch my drift.

Anyway, there I was, elbows deep in one of our nation’s premier Hollywood bad boys, enjoying your thoughts on inconsistencies in the Drake Equation and hoping I would be able to get the video game controller out in playable condition as I had been instructed. The sharp angles and ridges, not to mention the expansive Batarang-like structure, were making things touch and go. We were in a vaulted-ceilinged, oak-and-red-velvet paneled dining room, and my patient’s moody valet insisted on observing the proceedings. I found this odd. Most rational human beings can’t stand the smell of proctologic spelunking, but I suppose loyalty knows no bounds. I did, however, find his occasional peals of laughter distracting. I was about to send him out to get me some sort of expensive French pastry, a banana éclair perhaps, when my pager went off quite unexpectedly.

My message service clearly warns those who have my pager number not to disturb me when I am working. It could be dangerous. In this case, my thumb twitched slightly out of shock and I must have pressed one of the buttons on the controller because I heard a zombie explode on the television in the next room.

No major damage done, but enough to irritate me.

“Could you see who that is, O’Neill?” I asked the valet.

“Certainly, sir.”

“Just read me off the number.”

It was from my nurse. I decided to ignore it for the time being. In retrospect, this was probably a good thing. Not necessarily for me, but I believe our handsome celluloid superhero on the operating table would have considered my jittery hands a liability to his continued career.

After finishing up and giving my fingers and forearms a good herbal soak, I was ready to take my leave. My host begged me to stay, pleading for me to get high with him and play some Contra. However, after giving him a vague physicianly lecture on the importance of mindfulness in all of our activities, not quite pointing out that intoxication and pixilated distraction was probably what brought me here in the first place, I bid my good day and retreated to my awaiting rented sedan.

It was dark already, but that is no excuse. I should have noticed that something was amiss upon very first sitting down in my car. The driver-side seat was in the most forward position, causing my knees to graze my chin and my chest to inhale the steering column, giving me barely enough room to snake my hand down to the lever on the floorboard. It was strange, but it almost felt like there was something pushing against the small motor that moved the seat backwards on its tracks.

“How peculiar,” I said to myself, thinking nothing further of it. Rental cars always come with their individual idiosyncratic maladies.

I decided to find out what my nurse had wanted from me, now that I was otherwise unoccupied. I retrieved my cellular phone from my briefcase and made the long-distance call.

“What could possibly be so important as to bother me during surgery, Sinclair?”

“Ira? Thank God. I want you to hang up the phone with me, and dial the police immediately. Let them know exactly where you are. You are in great danger, and you would be in custody already if we had been able to find you all evening.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Right after you left this morning, a man came to your offices that I have never seen before. He was....unsavory. A wretch. You could smell the insanity in him. I don’t know how he got past security downstairs, and I was just going to give him some money and send him on his way, but there was something about the wildness in his eyes that transpierced and transfixed me. He was looking for you, and when I told him you were away, he became very uncooperative. He had a gun, Ira. He forced me to give him the index card with the Los Angeles address of your latest patient on it. I tried to get in touch with you...but you know how your patients are. That phone number and street address are unlisted. He took the only copy we had. I tried everything, and I finally had no choice but to use your emergency pager. I don’t know why you won’t switch to a computer customer database.”

“I don’t trust them. Besides, computers can be hacked. And you know how cunning the tabloids have become. Listen, Sinclair...are Maddy and the kids alright?”

“Yes, they are fine. They are with your brother in Spokane. I drove them myself.”

“You are a good man. I am going to call the police right now and get to the bottom of this. No need to worry any further. This is probably just some desperate reporter trying to win a Pulitzer.”

“I’ll stop worrying when that man is encased in several miles of prison.”

“Let’s not let our imaginations run away with us.”

I was a big fat pot and he was a kettle, and I had just turned down his application to the Klu Klux Klan. Every pore in my body was excreting liquid fear. With plummeting dread, I suddenly remembered the resistance of my chair motor, and the oddity of my chair’s forward position. In my rear-view mirror, I thought I saw movement in the backseat.

“Sinclair, would you hold on a second? I don’t think I am alone.”

“Jesus Christ, Ira! The police! Call the police!”

I adjusted my mirror slightly with my trembling right hand. There was definitely something hominoid occupying the seat behind me. Those were definitely eyes. That was definitely an unhinged grin on a face that didn’t need any expressions to make it any more stark and unsettling. And that was definitely the barrel of a small firearm.

“I don’t think calling the police would be a very good idea at this point. I’m going to have to let you go now, Sinclair. My love to Maddy.”

It took me three tries to sufficiently stab the END button on my phone and silence Sinclair’s panicking digital squeals.

“Hello, sir,” I said. Anybody with a gun is automatically a “sir” to me. Human beings are slowly getting bravado naturally deselected from their genome, and I consider myself at the tip-top of the evolutionary ladder.

I turned around to face my assailant head on. It’s strange how sometimes you can’t smell something unless you see it first. It’s possible that I wasn’t able to smell anything until he opened his mouth to speak. Regardless, his odor hit me like a chunk of Gothic masonry to a Faberge egg. If I wasn’t a professional rooter through the foul orifices of the diseased, I wouldn’t have been able to cope. Imagine finding a colony of maggots enjoying the ripe and rotten remains of a cottage-cheese-and-tuna-salad casserole in your broken refrigerator, throwing up all over the writhing and festering dish out of shock, and then taking the entire brimming concoction and leaving it in your locked trunk in the middle of a particularly humid summer, allowing the maggots themselves to die, and your vomit to grow fragrant blue mold. It is a testament to my constant professionalism that I was able to keep my composure. I did, however, roll down a window. He seemed to understand.

I couldn’t tell what was filth and what was hair on his head and face. He was wearing a navy blue suit, and was probably either Mexican-American or Puerto Rican. He had never been handsome, but once, maybe not so long ago, he had been lucid and healthy. His eyes were milky-coffee colored, and they spun and fluttered like his consciousness was trying to escape but was bound by the glass confines of his will, like smoke in a mason jar. This was a man who had not slept or eaten for a very long time, in my medical opinion. He could probably be overpowered quite easily, but I didn’t like the way his hand kept tensing up around the trigger of his weapon. He knew his gun was all that gained him an advantage over beefy spry little me, and I could tell he would not be easily convinced into banishing the threat of violence from our impending hostile congress.

“You are the proctologist right? The best one, right? You do all the asses of the superstars, right cabron?” His voice was thick and throaty, but powerful. He would have made a spectacular nightclub emcee in the thirties. In college, if he had tried to sell me drugs, I would have bought them.

“At your service,” I replied.

“I thought you would be white. What kind of black name is Ira Witherspoon?”

“It was my father’s name.”

“Huh. It doesn’t matter. Your name could be Casper Whitington Palesman the Third and that would be alright with me. You got all your tools and equipment with you?”

“I do.”

“They say you are some sort of badass ass doctor. A proctologiant. Amen: that’s what I need. We are going to go somewhere private, and you are going to give me a free consultation. I got something inside of me, and you are going to get it out. If you fuck up, though, it’s going to kill you. If you fuck up, it’s going to kill me, too, eventually – unless I go to the government, and I ain’t going to the government. Hell, even if you don’t fuck up, it’s probably still going to kill us both. But you are going to get it out anyway, or die trying, because I say so. There’s more to it – but I don’t feel like talking until I get some food in me.”

“As exciting as this all sounds, I’m not staying anywhere in town. There’s really no place I can take you.”

“Then you gonna get a hotel room. Start driving: I saw a fancy place on the highway, and that’s where we are gonna go. I need to eat, and I want a comfortable bed. With the good pillows. You need to eat, too. You got to be in perfect condition for this shit. Trust me.”

The man needed medical attention, and I was a doctor. True, he was absolutely insane. True, all of my monkey intuition told me he was a killer and I was prey. But when you get right down to it, you either believe in the Hippocratic Oath or you don’t. I surprised myself: I’d always figured I was only in it for the money. Turns out I had a heart after all. Plus...well. He did have that gun.

“Uncle Ivan’s EZ Lodge, here we come.”

Let me just say that acquiring a room was awkward. Awkward to the point of rendering the entire downstairs lobby of a medium-large hotel chain completely silent. I’m not sure what exactly the clerk thought our intentions were, but I guarantee you his internal film was at least rated R. When we finally made it up the elevator and to our room, the nameless stranger pulled out a pair of leather handcuffs. Even I began to dread I was in for a Torquemada weekend. Speculate however you will about the sexual peccadilloes of proctologi; let me assure you that my personal tastes run to the sweet, boring, and Puritan.

“Relax. I just want to take a shower, and I can’t trust you to behave. If you think about it, you’ll probably agree that taking a shower is good idea. We are going to get pretty close once things get clinical, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s been awhile since I’ve had a place to get cleaned up. Why don’t you order us some grub while you wait, and then I’ll explain everything.”

It sounded reasonable enough. Crazy guy wants me to order food while he’s in the shower. Here’s where I make my grand escape, or at the very least alert the hotel personnel as to my unwilling captivity.

Nameless bound my hands to the pay-television and then sequestered himself in the bathroom. The television was bolted to the ground with what looked like Lockheed-Martin jet engine linchpins. I wondered how often the Mafia also took advantage of this fact. As I searched for any way to free myself, I could hear Nameless making horrific loogie-hawking noises magnified to Niagra Falls levels by unmerciful porcelain. It sounded like he was trying to cough up his own kneecaps.

“Um, excuse me? How am I supposed to order food without a phone?”

“Ain’t you ever been in a place like this, Doc? You just use the TV menu. Punch in what you want with your nose if you have to. I want steak and eggs. Holler for me if they knock while I’m busy in here. They’ll bring it right up and it all goes on our tab. Eat good: it may be your last meal.”

The aggressive hiss of the high-pressure shower added dramatic punctuation to this last assertion.

Shit.

I did as I was told, glumly, seeing no alternative. There was no option to just have somebody come up to your room ASAP. I considered ordering a single lemon, hoping it would arrive posthaste, but I immediately scrapped this bit of ingenious cunning, imagining what might happen if my machinations went sour and falling back on an old dictum never to trust the service industry at any cost. Eventually, I ordered him the Ropin’ Gropin’ Farmhand’s Mornin’ Platter, and myself the Captain Dainty’s Melba Toast Explosion, with a side of pecan fritters, a jug of coffee for the both of us, a bottle of Jack Daniels (just in case), a bucket of ice, and a Colossal Fruit Basket (whatever that was). He was out of the shower and dressed almost as soon as I completed keying in the eleven-digit security numbers with my elbows. After freeing me, he picked up his gun and took a seat in one of the leather recliners, suggesting I do the same.

He smelled...better. Tolerable. Like the stench had been driven back into its hole by a freak cloudburst and put to sleep by the rain’s soothing cadence.

“I need coffee before I start yapping at you, so just sit tight.”

Bored, he snatched the television remote from the night stand and flipped through all the channels several times, growing increasingly disgusted. With one hand holding a lethal firearm and the other a television remote he shook and strangled like the last desert island jackrabbit, dangerous confusion seemed imminent and I prayed for our food to arrive. Eventually it did, without incident. We both began to eat and he began to talk.

“Alright, patient’s history time. First things first. I’m not crazy. I’m not a schizoid who haunts the countryside kidnapping medical specialists and forcing them to operate on him to feed a sick hypochondriac power-trip. I got a college degree, even. That’s like, a get-out-of-crazy-free card, right? I’m not a particularly nice guy, I guess. But I used to at least be respectable.”

“I turned forty a month ago. I don’t have any family, really – but my mom and dad are still alive and they depend on me for money. So that means it’s time to go see the GP and get me a check-up to keep my insurance company happy. There I am sitting on the table in a paper pixie-suit when my whole world turns to shit.”

“I’d been going to the same doctor for ten, twelve years, pretty regular. Dr. Jim Spivey. Anyway, he’s feeling around on my abdomen, pressing down hard with the tips of his fingers, when all of a sudden he stops, and grunts, and then he says he feels something irregular. There’s some sort of lesion or hard encrustation in my bowels and he wants me to have it checked out by somebody more knowledgeable about internal medicine before he signs me off as 100% healthy. But he knows a guy, so it won’t be too big of a deal for me. He isn’t freaking out, seems pretty calm and reasonable, so I don’t freak out either. I take the business card of this other guy and make an appointment for the next day right there in Dr. Spivey’s office.”


“So the next day there I am in this proctologists office, naked as a Polynesian howler monkey, not particularly excited about what’s about to happen, but resigned to my fate just the same. He comes in, immediately tells me to turn over, and starts making polite chit-chat, obviously unaware he has just reached inside my anus with a giant gnarly old hand and is having himself a hell of a time exploring the recesses of my deepest inner sanctum. Without taking a close look at his hand before it went into my crap factory, I could now tell that his middle finger was both his longest and his most in need of a fingernail clipping.”

“The joke’s on him, though. He’s feeling around like a guy trying to get a coke out of a vending machine without paying for it, when all of a sudden he tenses up real tight – I can feel it – and he starts making choked, sickly gasping noises. I instinctively try to scramble off the table, but the procto has grabbed something inside of me and won’t let go. The pain almost knocks me unconscious, because whatever it is, it is wider than my sphincter. It’s a miracle I didn’t rip out my colon or something. Anyway, finally, after an agonizing couple of seconds, the procto finally lets go – POP - and collapses to the floor.”

“I start screaming. A nurse runs in. Turns out he’s dead. Heart attack. But I got my degree in electrical engineering, and I know exactly what happened to him. He took direct current straight to his heart, stopping it like a thunderbolt to a Timex. I could smell the burning hairs on his forearms. But he was old, he had a history of heart trouble, and nobody asked any questions. My better judgment told me not to volunteer any information.”

“I should have said something right then, but I was in too much shock. I would have just created a criminal dilemma, and I hate cops worse than I hate doctors.”

“That’s when the dreams started. That’s when I stopped sleeping. I also stopped bathing. Not for any rational reason. I’d been taking baths all along without turning myself into human toast. I simply decided it was probably a good idea to avoid immersing myself in water until I found out just what exactly was going on. It seemed smart not to push my medical luck. Since you didn’t hear me just now frying like a Florida Death Row granny-strangler, I guess I was being paranoid. God, I needed a bath.”

He shuddered and swished around his cup of coffee, sniffing at the dregs. He uncracked the bottle of whiskey and filled his mug up to the top. Probably smart. If he didn’t start drinking of his own accord, I was going to suggest it. There was no way he was going to let me put him under. Once you pass a certain point in sleep deprivation and your mind has exhausted its normal bag of tricks to get you to shut it down, it normally takes some pretty strong atypical antipsychotics to get you centered enough to even consider rest.

“Anyway, every night afterward I started to have the same dream. I was a flashlight in the woods and I couldn’t turn myself off. It sounds weird, but it was scary as hell. There were wolves all around, and demons, and I simply couldn’t make myself turn off, because, you know, I wasn’t a person – I didn’t have fingers – I was a flashlight. So I’m just hoping that my batteries will run out, but I know they won’t because batteries only run out when you don’t want them to, and all the time, the wolves are getting closer, and the demons know where I am, and they are going to find me...”

He knocked back his grainy black coffee-whiskey and poured himself a clear fresh cup.

“Did you know that it is actually possible to will yourself awake? Not just wake up out of shock or fear – but to actually will your brain to stop dreaming and experience consensus reality again? Let me tell you, Doc, it’s about the most painful thing there is. It’s like reaching down and tearing the skin off your own leg in a big sweaty patch. You can do it, but why in God’s name would you want to? Your brain feels all raw and chewed, and you start getting loopy – thinking in big, crazy circles. Well, Doc, let me tell you: I started willing myself awake every time I fell asleep, because that dream was so terrible. It was the demons and wolves. They were not human. Not even imaginary. They were something alien my mind was only able to handle by replacing them with things I understood. My brain chose the things that used to scare me most when I was a kid. My brain wanted me to submit. But I knew it wasn’t really a dream. I really am a flashlight, Doc, and it really is the woods. And you got to pull my batteries out.”

“Sometimes a flashlight is just a flashlight,” I said. He ignored me.

“I stopped sleeping altogether after about a week of tossing and turning,” my penitent continued. “That’s when I put two and two together. So I scheduled another visit with a different proctologist, this time with somebody who had been around. I had some friends in the army, and I had them recommend me somebody who had seen military action. Somebody tough.”

He stared at me with big, bulging flapjack eyes. It was like somebody was stepping on the neck of a Chihuahua and the head was just about to pop off and go whizzing round the room.

“My friends thought I was starting to, you know, go nuts. Unmarried workaholic engineer: it’s time for him to snap. My best friend Billy actually thought it was some sort of gay S&M fetish. You believe that? Anyway, eventually I extracted a phone number from them and met up with The Sandpaper Quaker down at his office in the 5th ward in Houston. They called him the Sandpaper Quaker because he had Parkinson’s disease and his hands were notoriously rough. But he would do whatever you wanted - for money - and he was grim as old Jack Death. I told him my situation, and he said he would take a look. For 3 grand.”

“Keep in mind, by this time I was starting to turn a little bit sour smelling, and I was not at my tightest and most lucid. Now that I think about it, The Quaker was probably just trying to get rid of me. It almost worked: that money was my retirement nut. But I had to sleep, and the thinner I got, the more I actually felt something buried inside my abdomen. My time was running out. There’s no do-it-yourself home proctology kit, and I think any doctor with his AMA card paid up would have nodded politely and then had me taken away by the cops.”

Too true. That’s what I would have done.

“But I had the money, and he was a man of his word. Ummm...are you going to eat that last fritter?”

“Go ahead.”

“Thanks. Since I had warned The Quaker about what had happened to Doc Spivey’s man, he was a whole lot more cautious. He got out this heavy duty speculum with a long snaky video camera, and he wore a full-body rubber jumpsuit. It made me feel good, like somebody believed me. But it didn’t matter. He was only subterranean for ten minutes when my ass began to buzz. I felt this very strange muscular contraction, all the lights went out, and the Quaker started to scream. It was painfully high pitched. He whistled like an industrial tea kettle. I rolled over on the examination shelf and looked behind me. His head was on fire. He fell down to his knees and then he hit the floor. I could hear the sickly crunch of breaking face, and then everything went dark as the fire extinguished. I ran out of that place as quick as a man with two feet of video equipment dangling from his innards can. The video cable got caught on a chain link fence, but I was so scared I didn’t even slow down when it ripped its way out. Later, in a bar, I saw on the news that The Quaker was as dead as I suspected. He had inhaled a rare compound gas – Tuuoxine - and while it was crystallizing in his lungs, his own carbon dioxide ignited it and blew apart his chest and trachea from the inside. His bloody sternum fragments collected inside his body-suit, thankfully sparing me the grisly memory of his disemboweling. I assume the gas also reacted explosively with the fluorine in the lights. For some reason, I was okay.”

“My buddy Billy was on the news, too. He was pleading for me to turn myself in. Despite the good luck of my survival, my fingerprints were everywhere. There was an exhumation and an autopsy of my first doctor. I was a wanted man, now. I swear the amount of helicopters in the Houston sky tripled.”

“Which brings me to today’s debacle. Now you see why I had to kidnap you. And now you see why you got to help me.”

He looked at me expectantly.

“Look,” I said. “You are going to have to be more forthcoming if you want help. And don’t be cryptic. If you are telling the truth about what has happened, which I doubt, and if you are even slightly sane, which I also doubt, you must have some kind of theory, at least. You are holding back. Look at it like this: before I examine your guts, you’ll have to spill them.”

He sighed deeply and clutched at his head with both hands. The gun was now pointed at the ceiling. Now was my chance to spring and Battle Him to The Death. But after listening to him talk, I was more curious than afraid. I think it must have been the influence of your Wednesday “Ten-Minute Improbable Problem” segment. You don’t shoot the comedian before the punch line. How do you keep a moron in suspense? How do you keep a moron in suspense? How do you keep a moron in suspense?

“Aliens,” he said. “It’s aliens. I know it is. They must have gotten to me when I was sleeping. They must have left something behind. A tracking device. You have to help me, Doc. Or die trying. I’m not going to the government. I refuse.”

“Aliens, huh?”

He nodded.

“Like extra-terrestrials or like migrant farm workers?”

“Why would migrant farm workers implant me with a high-tech tracking device that defends itself violently against all attempts to remove it and then wait for me to discover it by accidentally killing a few quacks?”

“Maybe you are an unwilling drug mule. Maybe whatever is in your posterior is guarding a few pounds of Bolivian flake cocaine, and you want to hustle your American contact. I’ve got to tell you, it’s a whole lot more likely that Paco and Miguel are responsible than Zanzar and T’lok Nor Nath.”

He started crying right then – sobbing like a broken-hearted twelve-year-old girl. I reached over to pat him on the shoulder out of sympathy, but he jumped out of his chair like an electromagnetic tiddlywink, and the gun was back in my face before I could even remember what Bruce Lee looked like.

“I’m ready,” he said, his eyes suddenly very clear and very dry. “I don’t care what you think. Let’s get started.”

He took off his pants in one sudden movement, straddling the easy chair and lifting up his flaccid penis.

“You’re going in frontwards like I’m giving birth. I’ve got to keep the gun on you. I can see that I can’t trust you very much.”

I shrugged, opened my bag, and rolled up my sleeves.

“I suppose since I can’t persuade you to reconsider your options, we should at least do this logically. First off, it seems like it would be a good idea to use the rubber gloves and not the latex.”

I snapped them on.

“Second, I think we can assume that Tuuoxine must be lighter than air, and that’s why you were not affected by the gas. Your head was below your waist in patient position number forty three, was it not?” I mimed the position with a hand gesture

“Yeah, my ass was all up in the air like that. That’s true.”

“Then I suppose I will have to drop into a rather undignified crouch for this procedure. Now. What other fatal scenarios can we foresee besides electrocution and aerial poisoning?”

“I don’t know. Dynamite? Nanobots? A Teflon hunter/seeker dart?”

“Hmmm, not much we can do about those except remain flexible. Speaking of, you are going to have to open a bit wider.”

“Okay. How’s that?”

“Fine. I’ll just bend this lamp around to give me some light, and then we begin.”

“Just like that? You’re ready to go? No lube?”

“Try to hold still.”

Let me stop right here and just say that he was either deliriously sleepy, or he hadn’t thought about this very much. Forcing someone to perform medicine at gunpoint is usually a bad idea. Especially a proctologist. The most powerful nerve clusters in the human body are located in the nether and genital regions. I had an entire Anatomy 101 textbook full of options.

Thrusting one hand deeply into his anus, I used the other hand to plunge a butter knife into the interior wall of his sphincter, and then neatly kicked away the gun as it fell out of his hand. Every nerve in his body went critical neon red before his neo-cortex could catch up, and he began to howl in agonizing, atavistic agony. Thinking fast, I cold-cocked him with the ice bucket. He fell in a shallow stupor to the floor. I wiped my working hand on his shirt.

“Tough luck, Nutbar.”

I was trying to decide what to do next when I began to hear the beeping. At first I thought it was coming from the TV, but I quickly ruled that out by unplugging it and registering no change. It began to grow in rate and volume. Was it a cell phone in my unconscious captor’s pocket? Half of me was interested in investigating further, but by this point, the other half was merely interested in making my escape and leaving further investigations to the authorities.

I picked up the gun from under the bed and made sure it was loaded and the safety was off.

The beeping was definitely coming from Nameless.

“No, it couldn’t possibly be true. And yet…”

I put my head against the ample belly of the snoring Latino. This was truly the origin of the short, shrill beeps. And they were getting faster.

That settled that. Time to get the hell out of there.

I was halfway to the door when the man regained his consciousness. I had figured the sleep I had given him would be lasting and welcome, but he seemed to have other ideas. He stood up carefully, and then slowly looked down at his belly with growing horror.

“I’m beeping.”

“You sure are.” I raised the gun and pulled the hammer back.

“Why am I beeping?”

“How the hell should I know? Don’t come any closer.”

He reached around behind him and pulled out the bloody, shit-encrusted butter knife.

“Doc, you have to help me. I don’t feel right. I think you did something to me when you stabbed me. I think I’m dying. There sure is a lot of blood.”

“I’ll admit: it wasn’t my cleanest work.”

He took a step forward. I shot him in the leg. He fell to the ground, alternately blubbering and screaming. I think he was praying. The beeping became a deafening, pulsating siren, rattling the windows and making my teeth hurt. I opened the hotel room door and quickly stepped outside.

Nameless reached for the door with his full length, one leg tucked underneath him in a convulsive, cramping manner.

“Help, please...”

I shut the door behind me.

There was the sound of what could only be a small, localized explosion. I held my breath. Silence. And then, faintly, I could make out the sound of a gentle, arythmic tapping – but no screaming. No sounds of further carnage and destruction. A bell-hop came running down the hallway, brandishing a walkie-talkie. I suddenly remembered that my fingerprints were all over my orange juice glass, among other things. I pressed my back up against the closed door, crossed my legs, and tried to look nonchalant.

“Is everything okay in here, sir?”

“Wonderful. Although, the biscuits were a bit dry.”

“Do you want me to take your cart away?”

“NO. We’re not finished. I’ll bring it down myself.”

“Very good, sir.”

He walked away, shaking his head, muttering quiet gibberish into his walkie-talkie.

I took a deep breath, and stepped back into the room.

Nameless was dead, that much was clear. His glazed eyes stared at me from the floor like angry marbles. His lower half looked like an exploded bag of microwave popcorn. Feces, eggs, warm flesh, steak, coffee, and ropy intestines made the hotel room’s sleepy kitty-cat wallpaper somehow deeply disturbing.

Instead of wiping down everything I had touched in the hotel room, I merely grabbed the plastic bag out of the tiny trash can and started tossing contaminated items into it. I’d studied a little forensic pathology when I was a resident, so I was thorough. I could still hear that tiny thumping noise coming from somewhere, but I was trying to reach a Zen state of total awareness and avoid having to think about what had just happened, so I just let the sound pass through me without giving it much attention. There would be time for all that later. Right now, I just wanted out.

And then I saw it.

I’m going to open the plastic bag now. Here’s where I pass on what I found to you.

Here, you can hold it in your hand. It’s safe. It was beeping and glowing just like it is now, except it was hovering in mid-air with a trail of smoke and flame behind it about the intensity of a roman candle. It was tapping against the ceiling vent the way a trapped fly smacks itself repeatedly against a closed window. As I watched, it rotated itself in mid-air and zeroed in on me. I yelped. It kept rotating, though, finally pointing itself at the hotel room door. A door that I had left partially open. It was going to escape.

If you’ll notice, the shape it most closely resembles is that of an expensive female marital aid, perhaps more commonly referred to as a “rocket cock.” Maybe the sheer absurdity of its appearance is what lent me my bravery as I stood in a slippery pile of the entrails of its last victim and decided to make a heroic grab for it as it passed me by. It started to accelerate, and then I nabbed it, tossing the plastic bag over it and cinching the bag tight.

“Got you, you little bastard,” I said.

It fought back, but I was quick and I was smart. I tossed the bag into the bathtub, slammed down on the hot water knob, turned on the bathroom vent, and shut the door on it. The bathroom lights flickered. I heard the crackle of discharged current and the room began to smell like a toy I once bought for my niece called The Amazing Talking Robot that danced around and blew noxious smoke rings when you pushed a button on its forehead. “I am the Amazing Talking Robot,” it said: “Please give my best wishes to everyone.” Not today.

Eventually, I got a hold of myself and went back in to claim my prize. I splashed some water on my face, picked up the inert bag, and split. I phoned Sinclair and told him not to worry. I told him the man had been caught, but that I wanted to take my vacation time early and do a little soul-searching and stock-taking. He’s one of those crystal-rubbing New Agers and he claimed he understood completely. My wife and I often take separate vacations. It is the professional’s prerogative.

And now I am here. For the past two weeks I have been scanning the local papers, making sure the police are sufficiently baffled, and trying to forget. But the weight of my knowledge is just too heavy. I thought, who do I know in Los Angeles who won’t think I am totally, irreparably insane? More importantly, who do I know in Los Angeles? Your name popped into my head, and your gate was open, and I recognized you working in your garden. Don’t question my fear of the law – I am black, and this is Los Angeles. So I am handing this over to you. Surely you have contacts in the underworld, or know people who study this sort of thing rigorously. I just want to be rid of it, and I have realized that I don’t particularly care what it is or where it came from. You are always ranting about government cover-ups and conspiracies –here’s your chance to get a leg-up on the competition.

Don’t try to follow me. My name isn’t really Ira Witherspoon and you are already an accomplice. Trust me, just study the object and try to forget about its origins. I can be dangerous if I want to be.

And, you know. Watch your ass.

Intercepted


To Whom It May Concern:

[Lengthy introduction omitted by editorial fiat to preserve anonymity for the purposes of mass publishing. Nothing spectacular, anyway. The author rambles on about the “unsung call to heroism of the common man,” and eventually identifies himself as a nationally syndicated radio talk show host whose daily call-in program concerning the supernatural has won credibility in avant garde circles, while functioning as an audio equivalent to the “Weekly World News.” He calls on us to believe him no matter how ludicrous his following claims may be, and demands that he be judged only by physical evidence, which he is willing to provide to those he feels are not trying to exploit him for financial gain. One gets the impression that various incarnations of this letter have been sent out repeatedly to the national news media and repeatedly been rejected. The author’s “usual inclination toward stringent fucking sobriety and extreme Pyhrronic fucking skepticism” is brought up and then alluded to in four separate places.]

So what was I supposed to think when this brother shows up in my office with a shiny red dildo in a plastic bag, telling me he pulled it out of some crazy homeless guy and that it tried to kill him? Do you have any idea how many waterheads and lead-spoon-licking twitchers and spazzers try to contact me on a regular basis with their insights and theories?

For instance, every night like clockwork I get a phone call from a guy that calls himself The Big Rotten Banana, who wheezes and puffs at me over a bad cell phone connection, letting me know he is on to the schemes of my superiors. At first he thought only he was a bug-eyed telepathic alien in disguise. But then, with a little help from fundamentalist Christianity, he discovered what it truly meant to be human and realized everyone else is really a bug-eyed telepathic alien in disguise and he is one of the special chosen few who aren’t. After a soul-searching sabbatical to the Painted Desert and a few choice buttons of peyote, he finally figured out the truth: just government officials are bug-eyed telepathic aliens in disguise. And now, thanks to the internet, he is completely, 100% convinced that only Oprah Winfrey, the Dalai Llama, and Ralph Nader are optically-protuberant, psychically-sensitive extraterrestrials and he wants to know how to get back to their home world to breathe in the fresh, neon air which he hopes will cure his emphysema. I told him to send me a postcard if he ever made it. Instead, I get Xeroxed articles from the Mini Page “proving” his claims.

So, I only trust what I see with my own two eyes. And what I saw was just another beeping, glowing dildo. They sell them for twenty bucks down at the Buy Curious Sex Emporium as "The Anal Probe" and those cheap little wonders even have crude cartoons of a very naughty Steven Spielberg escapee stenciled on the shaft. More bang for your buck. This guy, in his pink chambray shirt and 500 dollar loafers, was trying to play me for a rube.

Okay, so he had horn-rimmed glasses and an Ivy League accent. So what? He might have been the proctologist he said he was; he might have just been a very competent psychotic. It didn’t matter a bucket load of processed chickenshit to me: I hit him with my best “I’ll look into it, you dangerous crazy fanatic” speech, made him a roast beef sandwich, and sent him on his way. I gave the rocket-cock a good whack against my desk, tried to silence it by giving it a twist, and then finally gave up altogether and wrote the afternoon off.

I put it on my trophy shelf, along with my signed photograph of Ronald Reagan in S&M Gay Cowboy Drag (“To Cheney, Armey, and Clark - my three favorite Dicks”), my unopened bottle of crystal Pepsi with the suspended, immaculately preserved human eyeball, and my Skull and Bones Secret Decoder Ring, with neato little compartments for cyanide caplets and a flywheel on either side that makes the Jolly Roger’s eyes spark when you thumb it. I considered the dildo just another trinket of a damned and contemptible age, a throwback to yesteryear’s outer space paranoia and hypocrisy, and if it weren’t for its constant beeping, I would have immediately and entirely forgotten all about it.

It stayed there, inert, all the rest of that week. It wasn’t until my Friday night show that its mojo started to rise.

I do my radio program live at 1 AM. That’s when I’m the most juiced up, and that’s when I do my best work. My studio is in the basement of my Los Angeles chateau, and my office – along with my trophy shelf – is right next to it, partitioned off by a hefty sheet of clear, soundproof plexiglass. My sound technician and my producer have a booth on the other side, partitioned off in the same manner.

That Friday night I was doing a show about celebrity ghosts. It was also one of the only shows I’ve ever done that I didn’t video for posterity. I had run out of film that morning, and a slick little voice in the back of my head told me not to worry about it. Reverse premonition? Perhaps. Or maybe it was just a function of the domain “supernatural.” My job makes me a whipping boy for the occult, and, skeptic or not, something was bound to happen to me sooner or later that I would never be able to explain satisfactorily to a rational agent. I guess this is my attempt. The world needs to know.

My producer and my sound technician are both named Dave. Dave B., my producer, is a wiry, fortyish guy with a perpetual frown who always looks as if he has just bitten into the pit of a peach. Dave P., my sound technician, wears his brown hair in a swarthy ponytail and is always trying to take off his shirt to air out his constant hippy stink. When he’s not campaigning for clean water and free health care, he’s composing death metal songs about his vengeful dark lord, Moloch. Dave B., on the other hand, drives a Saab. They ought to hate each other – but they get along remarkably well and Dave P. was even Dave B.’s best man at his wedding last summer. I’ve been working with the Daves for the past decade, and we’ve got my humble radio show down to a tight, perfected science.

I came in late that Friday, and the Daves were both eating food stolen from my pantry upstairs. Audio Dave was reading Fangoria, rocking out to Cannibal Corpse, and couldn’t care less about my tardiness. Producer Dave put down his plate and opened the door of my studio to yell at me.

“You’re late, in your own house. Hey, what’s the deal? Celebrity ghosts? Is it going to be about the ghosts of famous celebrities, or is it going to be about ghosts that are themselves celebrities? Like Bluebeard, say?” asked Producer Dave.

“I don’t know. I’ll wing it,” I said. “Like always, I’ll just try to figure out what will sound best by tuning into the pulsating truth of the great god, Frequency – and then spewing out my own groovy, genius lies to the most righteous beat I can find.”

“I guess you must have already gone into radio mode. I was only asking because I need to know how to structure your twelve forty-five promo.”

“I’ve got an article from page 30 of the Washington Post about George Washington. Maybe I’ll use that. Whatever you do, make the promo vague, make it sizzle, and make it get me ears for my necklace, baby.”

“It’s going to be heavy on kettle drums,” said Audio Dave without looking up from his magazine. “I’m into kettle drums now. Kettle drums totally give me a redwood erection. Oh, and you’ve only got ten minutes to get ready. No yoga.”

I limbered up a bit anyway, had a couple of cups of coffee laced with unrefined Venezuelan sugar and industrial strength Ginkgo-Biloba (surrogate Samadhi), and considered myself primed for sweet, sweet radio action. The buzzer went off. Wild, out-of-control tom-toms – like red thunder through a doctor’s stethoscope - carried me in from a commercial about mood crystals. I was on the air.

“Good evening, denizens, prisoners, and fugitives of the material plane. Do not even attempt to touch your radio dial, or my armies of trained, gelded helicopter-baboons will be at your house to decapitate your children before you can blink. I don’t want to have to hurt you, but, as always, it is for your own good.”

“It will be Easter soon, and with Easter comes the celebration of the world’s most famous zombie. So, my fine and faithful, it is time once again to placate the departed. But not all the dead rest easy. To you, the rebellious and insistent deceased are known as “spooks.” Boggarts. Banshees. Great bleeding holy spirits. It is not your mommy and daddy going bump in the night – no – that wailing and moaning, that rattling of chains, that bumping of bedposts and music of the damned, is always, undoubtedly, and most assuredly ghosts.”

“Tonight, we discuss ghosts – but not just any see-through, decaying bags of billowy ectojism. Tonight we discuss the ghosts of the famous dead. Celebrities whose fame has come back to haunt us. The standing rule still applies, of course. No Elvis. But if you’ve got the skinny on anything else, call in. Let me know what you’ve seen. Let me know what you haven’t. Let me know what makes the short hairs on your balls straighten, your eyebrows curl, and your nipples suck in like frightened groundhogs.”

“First off, I’m going to read you something straight from today’s AP ticker. Something the national media won’t talk about, because they like to keep you stupid and complacent. The headline reads: George Washington Returns to Mount Vernon; Gets High, Eats Ice Cream, and Impregnates Tour Guide. I’ll say it again, folks – this is from a reputed and accredited news source, but you’ll only hear it from me because I’m the only Radio Friend who respects you enough to give you the straight stick. You won’t hear a story like this from Rob and Tanya on your giggly, plastic eleven o’ clock ACTION affiliate.”

“Here it goes…”

Before I could begin, somebody tapped on my office-side window. Strictly speaking, I couldn’t hear anybody tap through the soundproofing – but I could see the shadows wriggle on the wall in front of me. I looked up, but my office was dark and empty. I looked over into my producer’s box, but the Daves were both busy answering phones and wolfing down chili dogs. It was enough to depth-charge my flimsy concentration and rattle me into a stupor. Momentarily, my mind went utterly blank – radio death – but with a fake cough I regained my composure and plunged ahead.

“Ahem. Anyway, the ghost of George Washington is alive and well. Turns out one of the Tour Guides at Mount Vernon, a devout Southern Baptist and former Miss Teen Kentucky, showed up mysteriously pregnant after leading a congressional subcommittee on a weekend retreat through the hallowed habitation of the nation’s first tyrant. Witnesses claim many of the rooms smelled strongly afterward of marijuana, and Mount Vernon’s entire supply of Fudge Ripple and Extreme Marshmallow Crunch also disappeared into the spectral ether. Historians and paranormal investigators claim that there is a good, paranormal explanation: Mr. Washington made a hefty percentage of his money by growing reefer, and was also probably addicted to the substance. Therefore his ghost would be, too. Historians also point out that based on receipts it is also highly probable Washington ate upwards of a gallon of iced cream a day. This is not all. Whitish ectoplasmic residue on many historic sheets, slipcovers, and documents is further evidence for ghostly presidential activity.”

The shadows in my office writhed and flickered once again. I stood up, almost pulling my headset out of its socket, peering into the gloom. Was that something glowing? A flame?

I leaned forward.

“Do we have a caller? This is a question for my salivating listeners and their unquestionable, razor-sharp judgment. Again, if anybody has any first hand experience with the celebrity dead, now is your chance to share your story.”

I pressed my forehead up against the plastic. I motioned for one of the Daves to turn on my office lights. There was definitely something on fire in there. There was too much glare and refraction for me to get a good reading on its shape.

“Hello, this is Chucky Ghirardelli from Pennsylvania. I see lotsa ghosteses. You wanna hear about the time me an’ Thomas Edison wallpapered my Aunt Jeanie’s bathroom closet? Or the time Amelia Earhardt pantsed me in front of a whole friggin’ Girl Scout Troop? Hey, Johnny Carson even stole my thinking pills, and he won’t give ‘em back, neither.”

“Johnny Carson isn’t dead. He’s just retired.”

“So?”

“Well, that means he probably isn’t a ghost yet.”

“Who are you, friggin’ Matlock? He’s got my pills, I tell ya. He loves those damn things. Eats ‘em like friggin’ Corn Pops.”

“Alright, next caller.”

Audio Dave did something on the sound board that made him curse. The lights finally came on in my office. I gasped.

I wasn’t as surprised as I probably should have been. I guess there must have been something in the proctologist’s eyes that I subconsciously found persuasive.

The dildo had rocketed off of my trophy shelf and was tapping against the plastic partition right in front of me, trailing smoke and some sort of incendiary propellant. It seemed like it was trying to dig its way into my recording chamber in the same way that a river carves through a mountain: slowly, persistently, and stubbornly. It was still uncanny, like a retarded torpedo born without a payload.

I turned to look over at the Daves, and I saw wide, shocked Q’s of surprise on their normally placid faces. They were caught so off guard that their tongues were literally lolling out onto their droopy chins. I felt the same way. But I was live in 36 states.

“Hello, am I on? This is Roberta from Topeka. I’m pretty sure my next-door-neighbor is Peter Lorre. I mean, Peter Lorre’s dead, isn’t he? But this guy looks like Peter Lorre, he talks like Peter Lorre…you know, “yehnssss bossss.”

I eventually got control of myself. The Daves were still out of it. I started jumping up and down waving my arms like I was landing an F-15, trying to catch their attention. Finally, Producer Dave looked up. I gave him the middle finger, my sign to immediately go to a commercial.

“And somebody keeps letting their dog poopy on my lawn. It could be Peter Lorre. If so, how do I get rid of him, and what do I do if he tries to eat my children?”

“Roberta, I suggest you take a sample of that dog’s waste and send it to the FBI for analysis. Send them a lot, maybe a whole big briefcase full. And if Peter Lorre really wants to eat your children, maybe you should let him. Maybe he knows something about natural selection that I can only speculate about.”

Audio Dave’s kettle drums started up again, just in time. As they played my theme song, I stared at the thumping dong. It was mesmerizing. It reminded me of this sparrow that once got trapped inside my chimney. I called PETA, but they never showed up, so instead, with a flashlight I watched that thing fly around squawking inside my chimney for what must have been a week. Eventually, I had to light a fire to get some sleep.

“Alright folks…here are some products and services that quite possibly may save your life. We’ll be right back with more ghosts, and at 1:30 we’ll bring you the Ten-Minute Improbable Problem. Buy.”

The two Daves scrambled into my recording booth.

“What in the seven holy Hells is that?” asked Producer Dave.

“Ah, it’s a long story. Could you just go in there and take care of it? Besides being incredibly creepy and dangerous-looking, it is distracting the pants off of me.”

“The pants, huh? Is this something we should know about, or is this something from your private collection?” asked Audio Dave, giving me a salacious grin through his layers of soggy, chili-encrusted beard.

“Just go in there and catch it before it sets my office on fire, you letch.”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Producer Dave. “But how do you turn it off?”

“Try hitting it with a chair or something. Don’t touch it, though.” I tried to think back to the story the proctologist told me. What was his name? Sinclair something? My initial hunch was that this was still some sort of elaborate practical joke. It wasn’t April Fools Day yet, but it was close. Still - it was always best to play it safe. “If it looks like it is giving off some sort of noxious gas, don’t breathe any in.”

“Check. No huffing the noxious gas. It’s a good thing you’re here, Stephen Hawking.”

Producer Dave pushed his glasses up onto his nose and entered my office. Audio Dave ducked back into the sound booth and gave me the middle finger this time. The show must go on. My only option was to work this in.

“To those of you just joining us, the topic originally slated for today was celebrity ghosts. I’m afraid that is going to be scrapped due to unforeseen circumstances that have risen up and asserted themselves here in the studio like a repressed, agit-propped Balkan Republic. Strange developments are taking place, as you listen. My unlikely producer is currently battling what appears to be a sentient marital aid, dropped off earlier in the week by a renowned proctologist who claims it killed a homeless man. The marital aid is quite likely mystical alien technology, and until this very moment was lying dormant in my office, waiting for its opportunity to strike. The time has come. We aren’t sure what exactly it is doing, but right now it looks exactly like a mosquito hawk trapped inside Venetian blinds as it gracelessly taps against my plexiglass. Perhaps it is trying to bash its way into the outside world.”

Producer Dave was frowning at the dildo, trying to figure out what to do. As an afterthought, he closed the office door behind him - ensuring that it wouldn’t escape, I guess.

“During the commercial break, we drew straws, and as I said, my producer lost and is now attempting to combat the device. Can we turn on Dave’s mike?”

“Righty-O.”

TAP TAP TAP…TAP…tink…TAP TAP TAP

“Dave is trying to find something with which to stun the probe, hoping it will turn itself off so that we can study it. I recommended a chair, but who listens to me? The only other viable alternative in my office is my desk lamp. I love that desk lamp.”

Sure enough, Producer Dave slowly and surreptitiously picked up my green banker’s lamp and held it in his hand like an Apache tomahawk. He tiptoed over to the dildo, and carefully observed it up close, trying to gauge its rhythm. His glasses slid partially down his nose, but evidently not low enough to obstruct his view.

“According to the proctologist, the probe is equipped with numerous security measures, including the ability to administer lethal current. Are you sure it’s a good idea to hit it with that lamp, Dave? It’s conductive. Not to mention worth more than your last couple of paychecks.”

Producer Dave gave me the evil eye.

“Alright, Dave. Do your worst. The probe is about six inches long, red chrome, and vaguely menacing in the way that inanimate objects suddenly displaying will and imagination always are. Dave is five-feet-eight, bald, and by all accounts he’s the kind of guy that gets bullied by his nephew into sitting at the kiddie table at Christmas.”

Producer Dave pulled back the desk lamp like Don Knotts about to make his second attempt at hammering a nail after already smashing his thumb.

“He’s lifting back the lamp, folks…he’s going to strike…”

Dave took a swing. A whole bunch of minor catastrophes happened at once. Luckily, everyone survived.

First of all, the lamp was still plugged in. He swung it hard, but it stopped short. The head of the lamp covered about half the distance to the probe before its cord went taut. The cord swept across my desk like a bowstring, sending an entire tabletop of knick-knacks flying, and turning snow-globes, paperweights, and ceremonial gavels into deadly ersatz projectiles. Most of them bounced harmlessly off of the plexiglass, and for the first time, I was glad I paid the extra money to have it doubly reinforced.

The rest of the room exploded in an avalanche of paper and debris. My laptop flew across the room and banged into the glass frame of my RTF diploma, breaking the glass with a shuddering whipcrack, but perversely not so much as even pulling the computer out of its screensaver mode. A vase filled with dead Valentine’s Day flowers tipped into my trashcan, making an even louder, trash-can amplified crash. A coffee mug with a picture of Ziggy getting a blowjob from Cathy in a seedy cartoon alley, Gasoline Alley for all I knew, conked Producer Dave right in the center of his forehead and then bounced up into the air, rotating end-over-end in a widening arc. On its descent, it clipped the side of the probe, making a harmonic ding, and the probe started to sputter and fart. Producer Dave fell down to his knees, rubbing at the bleeding dent in his head and looking green.

“Holy shit,” I said. Fuck the FCC.

The probe turned around in mid-air and pointed itself first at the swooning Producer Dave and then at my empty desk. It haltingly started to travel forward, like a kid just learning how to drive a stick. I could tell something vital inside of it had been damaged, and that it was quickly losing its sustaining pith.

“Nice rebound, dude. I think you scared it,” said Audio Dave. Truant, my Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar fell off of the wall behind my bookcase, smashing a ceramic kitty cat into a thousand pieces. I flinched. An unnecessary coda.

“Ladies and gentleman,” I said, “Using ancient voodoo kung-fu, my producer has managed to damage the probe. It seems to be going in for an emergency landing. Are you okay in there, Dave?”

“I think I’m going to puke,” said Producer Dave.

“Come on out of there and get some ice on your damned noggin.”

Producer Dave crawled hands and knees to the door of my office on the other side, heading upstairs into my laundry room and ignoring my spinsterly concern. He did manage to shut the door behind him. We could hear him clomping his way up the wooden stairs, and at what must have been the top, he started to retch. I had a vision of him opening up my dryer and puking all over my freshly laundered delicates.

“Kill Dave’s mike, please.”

The retching stopped.

“He better clean that up himself,” I said, “That’s my food he’s wasting.”

The probe was definitely engaged in some sort of landing operation. Its ass end was now perpendicular to the desktop, and it was slowly maneuvering itself downward to land like a space shuttle, its innards discharging a brownish cloud of slow-moving smoke that looked like a bowlful of flushed diarrhea. Silently, what I was beginning to think of as The Craft – as in shuttlecraft – came to a stop, pointed up in the air like the world’s tiniest Apollo 11. Ominous.

“The probe has come to a halt, loyal listeners. What now? What tricks and traps await?”

“Do you want sound in there, man?” asked Audio Dave.

“Why not?” I said.

I stared at the craft intently, waiting for something to happen. I was not left unsatisfied for long.

And here begins a tale you are probably not going to believe. I am aware of this and I am going to tell it regardless.

A quarter of my mindpie doesn’t want to air out this insanity for public disapproval. A quarter of my mindpie knows that nobody is going to buy it anyway, so it doesn’t particularly matter. The rest feels the cold obligation of scientific inquiry. The truth is still the truth, and if you are Semmelweis or Galileo, you just have to take your lumps.

My first thought was that I must have been drugged. No, strike that – my first thought was “how cute.”

It was sudden. A tiny hatch on the side of the probe opened up like a camera shutter, and from inside came the tiniest, most elegantly articulated hominoid I have ever seen. It was a Lilliputian by way of 5th Avenue by way of the Dark Side of the Moon. Imagine a human the size of a green plastic army man, wearing a blue Lycra wetsuit and topped by a windy shock of pink, curly hair. I didn’t see any tails or gills or anything else that suggested a remarkable difference from a regular human, other than size. Its skin was a coffee brown, and its proportions all seemed to belie an advanced technological culture: no bulging muscle mass, just slender efficiency. It was too small for me to determine its eye color or the amount of fingers it had, but it was large enough for me to read its facial expressions. It was smug and amused about something. I suppose the more fantastic proposal is that it had any facial expressions at all.

“No way. I deny the reality of this manifestation,” I simultaneously said to a few million listeners and no one in particular.

“Oh man, dude, what are we ON? We have been dosed like a couple of traffic cops.”

A ramp spurted forth out of the side of The Craft in a tiny ejection of red steel which moved faster than my eyes could process. A tongue. The creature began to walk the tongue’s length with disjunctive, solemn dignity. When the creature got to the end, it tentatively placed one miniscule foot on my desk, as if to test its give. Seemingly satisfied, the creature proceeded to walk briskly all the way to the edge, facing me. It stopped, spread its legs slightly, put its hands behind its back, and blew a shrill, sharp whistle. It must have been loud, because the speakers picked it up.

As far as the sex of the creature was concerned, I was completely at a loss. If you just have a single chopped-off hand floating in a void, is it a right hand or a left hand? And why should I be Earth chauvinistic and impose my dichotomous sexual understanding on the otherworldly?

I wouldn’t have time to ponder such paradoxes for long. The Craft began to shimmy and shake, the way a cartoon house does when it is signifying “party.” Six more creatures - vaguely identical, but each with different hair colors, skin colors, and builds – minor derivations of thin, really - and four of them with surprisingly firm, full breasts - scrambled out of the ship to join their scout in a regimented line. Last came what must have been The Captain. My mouth went dry and all of my words ran screaming into nine billion separate compartments, slamming doors and leaving behind stuffed animals and uneaten meals.

The final figure to walk the ramp was, to put it mildly, stunningly beautiful. Pygmy Creature from Beyond Space and Time or not, she gouged me with an indescribably sharp longing that filled my entire undercarriage with erotic, jasmine-scented propane. And the way she walked provided the match and sandpaper strip. She had long red hair (proportionally) that curved into the nape of her back, thereby accentuating with unashamed intensity a body built by the feverish imagination of shepherds, sailors, hackers, and Antarctic scientists, a body built out of sex bricks and satin, a body that could clear a New York sidewalk, making beggars jump into the gutter and businessmen drop their cell phones with the very aura of its blinding perfection. She had devastatingly long legs (proportionally), firm hips, milky white skin, luscious, cruel lips, and if I squinted, I could just make out her piercing baby blue eyes. They must have been electric if I could see them. She was wearing a green halter top and shorts to match, and in her hand was a glowing rod of the same minty hue. Black combat boots shod her; a circlet of gold covered with moving symbols like a stock ticker topped her off. She slowly ambled down the tongue, torturing me, each step a railroad spike hammered deeper into my chest. I started to drool. I wanted more than anything to run a single finger down her body and to feel her hot breath and the curve of her breasts on my skin – to feel her hard little nipples and supple thighs against my own trembling digit, to hear a tiny shriek of passion and delight…

The ON AIR sign flashed at me like the seedy lights of a cheap nudie bar. I remembered my erstwhile obligation.

“Ahem. Well, folks, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think we are just about to make contact with what appears to be an alien species. The Craft has landed, and this sounds ludicrous, but it has discharged eight creatures that look exactly like very small people, each about the size of a nickel. I don’t believe it myself. There are some men and some women, and they seem to share the same virtue of discipline that our militaries do, if this is in fact a military craft. Their leader is making her way across my desk right now, perhaps to seek an audience with Yours Truly. They are a multicultural bunch, but none of them are green, specifically, so nuts to that particular theory. They are all wearing blue jumpsuits of some sort – surely uniforms – with the exception of their leader, who appears to be dressed for Go Go dancing on Hugh Hefner’s mantel. ”

“Dude, that is one hot space chick,” said Audio Dave, “Whatever we are on right now, I am totally going to start dealing it.”

At first I wondered how Audio Dave could see what I was seeing from all the way across the room, but then I remembered the closed-circuit video camera that fed into the sound booth to keep tabs on guests. He probably had a better view than I did. I swallowed a whole mouthful of cold envy.

“Dave, if we are sober right now, we should attempt to be as diplomatic and savvy as we can. This could be a momentous occasion for the entire human strain, and we should give these travelers from beyond our fullest, most noble display of Earth hospitality.”

“Yeah, but like, you know, what about that homeless guy you said they killed? These guys are probably like trained space soldiers and shit. You know, if they are real. I mean black widows are small, but they can still kill you.”

“We can only hope they fight exclusively in self defense. Otherwise, our options are fairly limited. Besides, accidentally making the wrong kind of enemies is how entire planets get destroyed by…um…lasers.”

“Fucking A’.”

“I am going to attempt to establish a dialogue. Listeners, this may be my end, so wish me luck. Can you patch me in?”

“Done.”

“People of the Red Probe! Greetings! I bid you good day, and wish you glad tidings as guests of our mighty blue planet! We must seem as gods to you, but lo, your size is equally captivating and unique, and we hope to learn as much from you and your kind as you will learn from us. We have much to teach about love, peace, individuality, and…er...diversity. Peace, especially. We are big on peace here. Huge. We give out prizes. No lasers for us. Hell no.”

The Captain said something inaudible, directed exclusively to her troops. They parted, allowing her to walk forward between them and assume the forward position. She pointed at me with her glowing rod. My bowels clenched up and made what I would, in a different context, have taken to be hilarious noises. I jooked to the left, but the rod didn’t waver. She wasn’t pointing at me at all. She was pointing behind me.

Audio Dave stood up in his chair, ready to bolt.

“Nah, come on…I’m a good guy…don’t zap me, man. Don-“

Too late.

There was a crackle like the solenoid of an old car being shorted by a pair of cheap screwdrivers. Audio Dave started convulsing. His eyes rolled back in his head, and his face turned purple with pooled blood. His beard caught on fire. A back molar was yanked from his head by the thrashing and chomping of his dominated jaw and landed on his paper plate. I began to scream.

Suddenly, he stopped shaking and simply hung there like a suit on a rack, still alive, his chest heaving and his eyes still staring at the top of his skull. Slowly, with insane calm, he picked up the can of Black Cherry Soda he was drinking from and poured it on his flaming beard. Tendrils of acrid smoke wreathed his head and made him look like the only survivor of a particularly gruesome chemistry lab explosion.

When Audio Dave began to speak, he was using his own voice, but it was definitely not him. His mind had been hijacked. A part of me understood the necessity of the alien’s device, but the unwarranted license of it, and its extreme violence, caused me to look at my visitors with new loathing, the kind I normally reserved for insects and lawyers. Was that triumph and glee I saw on the face of their angelic commander? Yet, it made her more beautiful still. I shivered.

“I have taken control of your footman in order to communicate to you in a language you will understand. I have tunneled directly into his Wernicke ’s area, and am using his primal language generating capacity to translate thought-symbols to you in the most formal and elegant speech this creature has the intelligence to produce. You were saying something earlier. Would you like to continue?”

“No biggie,” I said, “Just peace and love, right? Heh. Peace and love and making babies.”

Concomitant with Audio Dave’s possessed rant was the high-pitched squeal of the alien’s Captain speaking in the booth next door. She sounded like a tinny mouse singing Britpop karaoke. I took heart: sure they had crazy, invincible mind-control rods - but at least they weren’t telepathic.

“We have done enough biological examination on your species, Representative Human. Our clandestine research operations have come to an end. Rejoice! We have chosen not to destroy you. Your kind will suffice, despite the fact that we have noticed redundant and dispensable traits in your genome, a result of the overabundance on this planet that has made you lazy and ignorant and not forced the full flower of our genetic heritage to bloom as it should have. We have come, nonetheless, to reclaim our seed-servants from this flower pot you call Earth. Your enslavement will be total, and your size will allow us to use you to build even larger cities and structures on our planets and fiefdoms. When we have extracted enough service from you, and your feeding costs begins to outweigh your utility, you will form the vanguard of our offensive fleet against the mighty U’u’Uurookian hordes. It will be a day of much honor for humanity. And for ourselves, the Jikklebellies. A name you will do well to remember. For we are your new masters.”

“Say again?” I said, “What’s this about enslavement? Jikklebellies? U’u’Uurookian hordes? You are going to have to elaborate if you want anybody to take you seriously, little sister. Even then, you still might have some work to do.”

“Peace and love - the Stage 4 memes you are hosting - will serve you well in the days to come. Love your new rulers, and do not resist – or your species will be put to sleep.”

“Like cryogenics?”

“Like a cancerous rat.”

All of this coming from the mouth of the normally laid-back-to-the-edge-of-comatose Audio Dave was hard to accept. I was getting pretty petulant inside. All forms of coercive authority tend to make me lash out self-destructively. Even if said locus of coercive authority can fit entirely in your open palm.

“Come on, now. Surely we can work this out. Start over from the beginning. What do you mean by reclaiming your seed-servants? I understand enslaving all of humanity – although you certainly wouldn’t be the first to try – but what are seed-servants?”

“I see you are woefully unprepared for the revelations I bring. Your mind is binary, and unable to accept dissonant input. Very well. I was hoping to make this quick, but I will tell you your own history since it appears you have not determined it for yourselves. Or perhaps you do not have the proper information clearance from your laughable human overlords.”

“Yeah, they are pretty laughable. I’ll give you that. Although…let’s be fair if we’re discussing what’s funny. Jikklebellies? What kind of a name for a hegemonic, imperialist alien species is that? Especially considering how bite-size you are. You sound delicious.”

“SILENCE!”

The green rod throbbed, and a bolt of sickly emerald flame burst out of it, striking the plexiglass right in front of me. The whole sheet of plexiglass simply disintegrated, cropped out of reality like a Photoshop smudge and leaving behind a vacuum that filled seconds later with an audible pop. There was now nothing between me and the alien invaders but a few unmediated feet of empty air. It was impressive, and it very easily could have been my beautiful face reduced to historical speculation, but I kept thinking that death by ray-gun was a pretty romantic way to trip the light fantastic. I mean, hey: it beats Alzheimer’s and a heart attack.

“We Jikk are a proud life structure, and food for no one. Now you will listen, Representative Human, and take heed. I am correct in assuming that this is a broadcasting station of crude construction?”

“Yep. You are on live radio, Representative Jikklebelly. Try not to say anything bad about The Velvet Fishhook Bar and Grill, if you can. They are this portion’s sponsor.”

“Excellent. Then I shall only have to explain this once.”

“You hear that listeners? If you are in your car and driving to the convenience store late at night, just sit idling in the parking lot and wait to buy that bag of hot fries until after tonight’s show. The apocalypse begins now. And you heard it here first.”

The Jikklebelly Captain gave me a hot stare from where she stood on my desk. Her troops had not moved a millimeter since they had disembarked. I noticed, for the first time, that each of them had control rods dangling from holsters around their waists. Some of them were also green like the Captain’s, but some of them were an equally vibrant purple, and the scout with the curly pink hair even had a yellow one. This seemed worth noting, while I retained my noting-apparatus.

I motioned for the Captain to continue with her rant. Dead air is still dead air, even if you are being held hostage by a Napoleonic cadre of fascist, furious munchkins.

“The first time my species made contact with your planet was 65 million years ago, before the ascension of mammals. It was a time when hair and breasts were seen as passing evolutionary fads in this solar system, naught but gourmet delicacies to the predatory pre-avian reptiles. We have always been interventionist in our dealings with crude, hopelessly misdirected fauna, and we saw the benefit of taking a proactive stance against the life forms then inhabiting your world. Our analytical AI projected that if these gigantic, dangerous creatures ever achieved viable sentience, they could be a severe threat to our kind. To put it bluntly, clever Dinosaurs would crush us like paper cups. The mother ship assigned to your planet made a command decision, and steps toward extermination were taken.”

“You bombed the hell out of them,” I said.

“We systematically removed them from evolutionary niches better inhabited by the more tractable, peaceable mammals, yes.”

“Tell me they at least put up a fight.”

“Well, there were some casualties – mainly among the initial reconnaissance craft sent to catalogue genetic information. Our history cubes relate that many of them were eaten, and quite a few were ignobly trod upon by careless, unthinking herbivores.”

“Were these initial reconnaissance craft also shaped like red, rocket powered dildos?”

“Our recon vessels adjust metamorphically to fit the animals they are surveying. But that is inconsequential. All you need to know is that in addition to destroying the Dinosaurs, we judged your planet a suitable candidate for another of our traditional initiatives. Your planet is green and healthy – what we call a flower pot. Our policy is to seed a flower pot’s biomass with our own genetics (tweaked to meet our needs, of course, the only true Jikklebelly is a natural born Jikklebelly) and then come back when the picking is ripe to reclaim our rightful crop. What you know as humanity is merely an apple in our orchard. We have used flower pots to make smaller seed-servants than ourselves, we have used flower pots to make smarter seed-servants, and now we have simply made larger ones, as need has demanded. We are your long lost grandparents, and it is harvest time. We have never been successfully defied for long, and the principles will remain the same as they always have. You will serve or perish.”

“So you are telling me you are the agents responsible for us being smart and in charge here?”

“In charge? Hardly. You have merely been allowed to grow,” said Audio Dave. The pixie commandeering his brain lifted her head back in what must pass for these creatures as laughter. It sounded like an overclocked kazoo played by a helium-snorting Turkish Eunuch. “And smart is a relative term. We have been forced to intervene to keep you alive on numerous occasions, thwarting self-destructive memes and on multiple instances assassinating charismatic key figures who would have curdled your souls like milk. You don’t even have replicators or longevity-enhancing molecular assemblers yet. What have you been doing with your time instead? Praying, fucking, and killing each other. To be honest, we contemplated simply blowing you off as a failed experiment. Your reptilian ancestors at least had clumsy brute force.”

“I don’t know…I think we’re doing okay. It looks like my producer took out your spacecraft there with a coffee mug. Accidentally. And until then, you seemed pretty confused about the laws governing solid objects. Explain that, Thumbelina.”

Instead of explaining anything, she simply vaporized my Ziggy mug. This was beginning to be a thoroughly irritating trend. I still wanted to make nasty, sweaty inter-species love to her, though. Perhaps with some sort of rubber toothpick attachment. Ain’t hormones a bitch?

“Fine. Stay hostile,” I said, “But I, and the rest of the free world, want to know why such an advanced alien species is crash landing on the desk of a third-rate talk show host in Los Angeles instead of zapping the President and forcing him to proclaim you the new God, like any self-respecting human with a mind control rod would do.”

“It is a simple technical difficulty. Vital components of our ship were damaged by an unexpected dousing of…dihydrogen monoxide…some weeks ago, and we have been unable to satisfactorily repair them until now. My crew and I have spent the better part of a decade researching your kind and its weaknesses while buried deep inside of an American engineer, but he recently became aware of our activities, took unexpected risks to discharge us, and the ensuing melee left us without the cover under which we were hoping to operate. It is irrelevant. My assignment and its plan will merely be infinitesimally altered. When you are working for p-terminal stimulation in our Uranium mines on your own asteroid belt, you will no longer care about coffee mugs or talk shows.”

I decided to change tactics.

“Would you be willing to answer a few questions from our listeners? I’m sure they all have an opinion about their impending enslavement at your tiny, fragile hands.”

The Captain turned and looked at the pink, curly haired Jikk with the yellow rod. He pointed his rod at me and goosed it before I could react. A stream of pure, piss-yellow crashed into each of my eyeballs and flooded what felt like the entire front of my skull. I had an overwhelming sensation of incredible intelligence picking apart my consciousness like an elementary school guidance counselor checking for nits, and then, before I could grab my head and dramatically scream “Get out of my mind!,” it was over. It was a good thing I had yet to formulate some sort of retaliatory plan: it would have been discovered, and I would have been turned into a nice pair of shoes and a thin wisp of Barbasol-scented smoke.

The Jikk with the yellow rod grunted assent at his Captain - a sound like a hamster being punted into a brick wall.

“Questions?” said Audio Dave. “Fine. Let the illusion of our patience continue. We have a minor construction project to attend to, and this will pass the time. I am always curious about the bloated culture of idiots and the insane.”

The Captain made a brisk hand gesture, and her troops scrambled. They speedily filed back into The Craft, stomping on each others heels and shoving at each other’s backs. It was now just between me and the Captain, will against will, my only arbiter the lonely voices of America’s lost and gullible.

I rarely worked the phones, but I had not forgotten how.

“Hello? Am I on? This here is Aimee Turbot from Louisiana, and I have a question for the little Jikklebelly that’s been doing all the talkin’ bout blowing us up.”

“Oh, you will be kept alive Miss Turbot. Your strong body and malleable mind will finally make the Jikk invincible Centurions in the War for All. Each will take one of you as steeds, and we shall husband you until you perish from exhaustion or valor.”

“Right. Anyway, mah question’s ‘bout ghosts. You’ve been talkin’ bout blowing us up, and I want to know if you’ve ever seen a ghost yourself. I mean, I’m turning the tables on you. Has you ever seen a ghost? Be honest…no foolin’…”

The confused look on the tiny, spectacular face of the Captain filled me with a dangerous thought. She was vulnerable. I could just squish her while she sat perplexed at my audience’s characteristic inanity, putting an immediate gooey end to this whole fantastic dilemma. But I didn’t have the heart, and it just didn’t seem very sporting. Plus, who knew what personal protection devices they had? I didn’t want to walk away with a whole fistful of bleeding spikes. Or not walk away at all, for that matter.

Finally, after much stewing, the Captain gave another Minnie Mouse laugh.

“A ghost? I’m sorry, but ghosts don’t exist. They are merely projections of fear, caused by desire for spectacle, displaced onto a harsh material universe. Your coping mechanism needs reprogramming, Miss Turbot. I suggest meditation.”

I hit another red button.

“You are live with a dominant alien conqueror. Please, keep your questions relevant to your own impending enslavement and doom.”

“Yes, hello, my name is Bud Aldridge. I don’t think slavery is right. I think you ought to go back to where you came from, and leave good, decent people alone. We’ve got a good thing going here, and you people have to come in and mess it up with your death rays and your spaceships. You damn alien fairies. Sizists. My cousin Ernie once got abducted by aliens, and ever since, he does nothing but read all damn day and try to move things with his mind. If I ever see one of you guys, I’m gonna step on you.”

The Captain narrowed her eyes into squints and raised her rod as if to vaporize the sound board. She held it for a beat, tensed, but then seemed to reach an alternate decision. Instead, she coolly tapped her rod against her other hand like a head-breaking Bobby.

“Tell me Mister Aldridge – are you using a communication device to contact this radio program?”

“Sure, I’m on my princess phone.”

“There was once a time when such a message would have been carried by one of your slaves over great distances, possibly causing the death of this messenger, and at least inhibiting his agency and freedom. Explain your hypocrisy. Humanity has held slaves since its first courtship with the arts of control.”

“Yeah, but we’re beyond that now. Now we’ve got circuits and silicon wires to do our grunt work.”

“So it would be fair to say that you have enslaved technology?”

“Wait just a minute now. Technology doesn’t have feelings the way people do. It isn’t alive.”

“And what separates non-living matter from living? What makes you any different than a virus or a telephone?”

“Well, I just am. I guess it’s cause I think and feel stuff.”

“The only way you can prove that a refrigerator magnet is not sentient is that it does not talk back to you when you question it. You are forever bound in judging sentience to that with which you can communicate. Which I can only assume, in your case, is a very small set. Your wife, perhaps? A friend or two down at some fraternal organization of soul-less, white bowling enthusiasts? Beyond that, the Petri dish you call reality grows a bit limited, doesn’t it?”

“Now wait a second…that’s not fair…”

“Let me assure you, Mister Aldridge, that there is as much a gap between you and myself as there is between you and a single-celled virus. Or a washing machine. So not only is your slavery justified, it is an imperative of nature. Now hang up your slave, and then seriously consider hanging yourself. I predict that the Jikk Interrogators will take special pleasure in torturing the supposed reason out of imbeciles such as yourself. There are wonderful things a dedicated sadist can do with the ability to transfer consciousness to a machine. If you are annihilated, or go insane, the circuits and silicon wires that will be your new home can always be fixed and restarted. For eternity. Next caller, please.”

Her face had flushed prettily, high color rising to her cheekbones like a hard-working petticoat lawyer.

“You’re a natural at this,” I said, my mouth gone Sahara. Something was wrong with The Craft behind her. It was changing its structure and gaining additions like a bewitched set of Legos. I couldn’t be certain, but it seemed like it was building itself into a transmitter of some kind. Some kind of advanced conning tower. “What’s with your ship, though? Should I be cowering in fear?”

“We Jikk never rest.”

“Kind of like ants, huh?”

“Yes, we have much respect for that form of life. Their strict hierarchies and tireless war effort ought to inspire even the most slovenly idler.”

“So what are you building back there?”

“While we pass-time in ceaseless yapping, even now my crew puts the finishing touches on an invention of my own design. Using our ship for component parts, we are building a communications buoy to get in touch with the reinforcements and mother ship lazily in orbit around Venus. You wouldn’t understand it. Just think telephone. They need our information about how easy you will be to conquer, and our research on ways to bewilder you into quick compliance. We had planned to do this some place more secluded, but our timetables require speed, and we have already let our jack out of his box.”

“What kind of research?” I asked.

She gave me a sly smile. She looked over at Audio Dave, and then zapped him again. He fell over onto the floor, snapping a rolling chair in half on his way down. He curled up into a little ball amidst the wreckage and loudly started to snore. The Jikk Captain began twisting diodes and rheostats on her control rod, laughing.

“Uh…never mind. I can wait until the invasion begins for my bewilderment. There’s no need to…to…”

There was a flash of green. I blinked. My jaw hit my Adam’s apple, and my eyeballs threatened to join them.

The Captain was no longer a tiny specimen of theoretical womanhood. She had grown. Up. And out. She was now human-height, and human-built, and suddenly my pants just didn’t seem to fit right.

She reclined against my desk like a Polynesian mermaid, her electric blue eyes blowing tiny holes into my brainpan like a pouty pink blunderbuss to a plastic sack filled with gray Jell-o. Steaming intellect juice began to leak out of my cerebellum and down the back of my neck, where it eventually pooled into my groin. My libido splashed around like a toddler in a backyard kiddie pool, splashing dear old doddering Daddy Reason in his face at every new opportunity. I was unmanned – unseated – and unstrung.

She threw her long red hair over one shoulder, and then gave it a sassy twirl. She arched her back seductively and licked her control rod like a summer popsickle, giving me an enthusiastic example of how far down her voluptuous throat the rod would actually fit. It was sleazy as all hell – like the calendar in a gas station men’s room - but this was almost too much for me. Sure, her rod was a phallic symbol of illegitimate authority – but it was also a phallic symbol of a phallus. And I had a phallus. Oh man, did I ever.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your new masters may be worth getting to know better,” I found my tongue uttering. “Hate is such a strong feeling. I don’t necessarily think an eternity of servitude will be quite as bad as it all sounds. Somebody certainly has to fluff the pillows, and help zip up the backs of dresses. Unpeel the grapes. Maybe it’s time to get used to being loyal and dependable.”

She leaned close, her lips slightly parted in a wan smile. That green halter top she wore was only being held in place by friction and rotten luck. When she spoke, it was no longer in the angry falsetto of an addle-pated chipmunk. It was in a deep, throaty alto that would have been great for the timeslot after mine.

“It is not uncommon for a conquering species to allow slaves to operate in other areas of life, Representative Human. One of my reasons for choosing this particular assignment is that I have always been curious about the mating habits of…larger…men. Perhaps there will be time during the culling for me to take a concubine or two. Tell me, do you ever fantasize about women from another planet?”

“This is a network broadcast. You don’t want me to lose my license, do you?” I said weakly.

She grabbed my necktie in a slender, firm hand. I willingly let myself be pulled closer. The stock-ticker bangle around her head was showing a quite detailed display of humans engaging in several of the more vigorous forms of sexual congress.

“This is a trick,” I said. “You are just brainwashing me. I bet you are really some sort of intergalactic vermin with eighteen eyes and furry knees. This is all just smoke and mirrors.”

She answered me by placing one of my shivering hands on her thigh.

“Trick? No, there’s no trick. Now, why don’t your turn that radio off? While my communications uplink begins its data transfer, I think we can even make time now for some biological experimentation. Don’t be shy: I am almost certain our parts will conjoin. Let’s test it. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

And that’s when Producer Dave busted in and saved the day. I still haven’t forgiven him.

He threw open the door to my office like he was launching a javelin, eyes wild, his glasses askew. He stepped into the room, ready to deal death. Though, his arms were laden with what I thought were way too many items for an effective frontal assault on these creatures. Most notably was my housecat Artaud, who was clawing and scratching at Producer Dave’s forearms, yowling at the indignity. But Producer Dave seemed like he knew what he was doing. I had only seen him yoke such passionate intensity once before, and that had ended in hospital bills for an entire defensive line of raging high school football players.

First off, he dropped a small radio on the ground, and then kicked it forward, as close to my studio as he could get it. The radio was tuned in to my show and blaring at full volume. The feedback was monstrous. I slapped my hands over my ears, but not before awakening from my erotic reverie and watching in horror as the Captain dropped back to her normal size.

The Jikk with the yellow rod exploded out of The Craft. The Captain covered her ears and screamed in primal anger. She lifted her rod; pink hair lifted his. And that was when Producer Dave did an exceedingly odd thing. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of what looked to be recently made aluminum confetti. He must have been up there chopping up aluminum foil this whole time.

Walking forward, cat in hand, baseball bat crooked under his arm, he tossed the confetti into the air. And then he tossed the cat.

Producer Dave was a military genius. The Jikklebellies were only able to fire their weapons once before Artaud was upon them in a screeching dervish of mangy orange instinct and teeth. The aluminum foil rained down between him and the Jikk, and their bolts struck particles of falling metal instead of Artaud, leaving behind the same smell that happens when you accidentally microwave foil-covered leftovers. The foil was physical chaff for rods of incredible power that ironically lacked a means of discerning between organic and inorganic material, and the Jikk could never expect the audacity of a cornered monkey and his feline companion when confronted by transcendent technological prowess. I knew I had been giving that cat multicolored chew-toys for something.

As soon as he was close enough, Producer Dave planted his feet and then stepped into a grand slam swing that got all of The Craft and would have sent it into the skyboxes had it not exploded in a shiny red smear of wires, the guts and severed limbs of tiny astronauts, and sparking, shrieking circuitry. Artaud had his own paws full – mainly with the ropy intestines of the Jikk with the yellow rod, who had only survived a single swipe from Artaud’s gnarly old claws and was not nearly as challenging as a ball of irregular twine. Artaud then turned his catty grin on The Captain, who seemed frozen in absolute terror. Since her rod had proved ineffective, so had she.

Let me just say that her squealing and pleading did absolutely nothing to quell Artaud’s boiling mouser blood. I think cats like it when their food tries to bargain. With a lazy pounce, Artaud - exempt from my fascination with her quasi-feminine guiles - put her out of her misery. I felt a sudden sting – as a science enthusiast and lover of curiosities – but I knew it was ultimately for the best. There was something so humiliating about a miniscule master race, and the human ego already has enough affronts to its alleged superiority from the insect world. I reached over and gave Artaud a scratch behind his ears.

“Good boy,” I said, picking up my mike. “Ladies and gentlemen, what we have witnessed here today…”

“Forget about it,” said Producer Dave wearily. “The show’s been over for five minutes. It’s religious broadcasting now.”

I dropped the mike and surveyed the wreckage of my studio and office. Would alien bloodstains ever come out of my Berber carpet?

“Do you think anybody will buy this?” I asked. “I can’t believe I didn’t have the camera running tonight. What are the odds?”

“High enough to convince people that anything we might claim would be a fraud. I think the best plan would just be to warn as many of the open-minded and perpetually paranoid as we can about this and let them be their own police. There will almost certainly be more aliens, and the next time they won’t be as trusting in our docility and incompetence.”

“How’s he?” I asked, hooking a thumb at Audio Dave.

“Sleeping. He’ll be fine. We’ll scold him for doing drugs on the job, and I think he just might be permafried enough to believe us. I don’t think anybody should have to suffer through life knowing they’ve been the victim of violent mind control.”

“I think he deserves the truth.”

“Maybe later. Right now, let him sleep. The bigger question is what we do with all of these bodies and these zappers. We can’t just burn them, can we?”

Artaud sat licking his teeth and purring with satisfaction. I made a mental note to buy him some catnip.

“I have a safe deposit box,” I said. “I’ll just mix them in with a whole bunch of antique doll furniture.”

I picked up the Captain’s green rod and held it between my thumb and forefinger. It had gone dim, but as soon as it made contact with my skin it began to glow again.

“My life will never be the same,” said Producer Dave. “This changes everything. How can I rest in a world where tiny aliens could abduct me at any time and destroy everything I care about? I think…yes…I think I am going to tender my resignation. I think I am going to fight these things full time.”

Suddenly, against my will, the rod began to pulsate. A stream of green smacked Producer Dave in his forehead and he went spinning over backwards, out like a flashlight dropped into a trash compactor.

“Dave!” I shouted. But he was now just as asleep as his Audio equivalent. I felt like I was running an adult day care center.

This might not be so bad, I thought. Acting on a brutal hunch, I collected up all of the evidence and locked it upstairs in my bedroom. I tidied up everything else and threw away anything that might beg questions. My suspicions proved true: when the Daves woke up, they had forgotten the entire affair. I put a sack of weed and six or seven Vicodin from my personal stash in Producer Dave’s pocket, and they never brought it up again. They didn’t even ask any questions when they discovered the audiotape from the show was missing, nor did they display any curiosity regarding what was on it. Now it was my problem, and my problem alone.

It was an impossible burden to bear. After a few months of silence, I decided to draft this open letter to the conventional mainstream media. I would let people know the strengths and weaknesses of our common foes by sticking to the facts of my own experience. My eyewitness testimony would be the cornerstone of a grassroots alien defense initiative, helmed by martinets and ornery survivalist-types throughout the country. The psychos that sustain this wonderful free land can never have too much to obsess about.

And, I believe there is solace in our small victory. I’m still too shit scared to mess with the toys the aliens left, but I have a feeling they could be mighty useful if an all out war began. If we could perfect them and bend them to our own ends, who knows how powerful humanity might become?

It seems that there were only a few people in the country who were awake and listening to the radio program as it happened. But there must be a bootleg tape out there somewhere, because the message is spreading. The true believers have banded together and are working on circulating an informational pamphlet complete with artist’s renditions of the aliens and transcripts of The Captain’s ranting. I found one in my local independent bookstore. If you pick one up, don’t laugh. If you are afraid you will be judged, fold it up and put it in your pocket and read it at your leisure. There is a number to call if you ever sight a Craft, and there are trained vigilante groups forming all over the nation. They say the fight must be won without the bureaucratic mess of an authoritarian government, and we must be both flexible and creative to compete against an enemy that can hide inside our own minds. I agree with them, but I have a life to live. Truthfully, I don’t want to be involved any further than I already am.

I have felt internal pressure to release my findings to the government. And yet, I pause for reflection each time I get an irate phone call from somebody who claims their organs were harvested against their will by NATO. Will the world ever be a place safe enough for control rods of total obliterating destruction and consciousness scanners? Would I want to live in such a world? It is a real dilemma, and every day I sway in a different direction.

That’s my story, though. I’ve said my piece. Now that you know the dangers, you won’t be caught with your pants down. I recommend you publish this as conspicuously as you can, even if it has to be as fiction. Better to plant seeds than leave people completely unprotected. You too can do your part to stave off the destruction of the human way of life, and with luck, we will chase these aliens away forever.

There is one last thing. I only tell you this because I feel it may be important. I am no longer able to masturbate without thinking of that alien Captain in some form or fashion. I think I am immune to further corruption, but who can say for sure? The sexual mystique of these invaders is truly crippling to those who are inclined toward fantasy and speculation. The shape of their Craft, coupled with this power, is no unlikely coincidence. I have reason to believe that even now they are infiltrating the nation’s sex shops and erotic online catalogs, making deals with dealers and using their bodies to gain them an entry port into our most sacred orifices. Watch yourself, America. If you want to stay safe, make sure you only buy vibrators. Even if the interlopers do start hiding inside giant vibrating electric dills, every time you use them you are increasing the odds that their safety harnesses inside will break and they will be dashed against their own equipment. If these dildos are shaped like human penises, even better. They are less aerodynamic. It’s a small thing to watch out for – but it could very well be our ultimate salvation. We can only beat these things off if we can keep from irresponsibly beating off ourselves.