The Dark Balloon

§

Nachurlly churly hair

Jark reluctantly took the spot, and the procession of notes began throwing confetti—strange, alluring confetti that would ensnare those that ate it.

“Ever wonder,” one doctor—the type of doctor that makes people cringe on Tuesday mornings and cries when people kick him—said between huffs. “What, huff, the meaning, huff, of this, huff, is?”

Someone with piqued interest, “You mean life?”

“No, I meant this exer—”

“Life is mostly love,” chimed another doctor.

“That’s great, but that’s not what I—”

“… and love is caring about people who don’t care about you,” completed another.

“Life is the choice between mediocre happiness and dark unhappiness. Life is a long list of errands you run for other people.”

“Life is being unable to be happy and then growing up and regretting not ever being happy, forgetting you never could have been happy.”

“Life is a chorus of sad music set to a montage of sad images.”

“Whatever you say, Asswhore; if that is your real name.”

“My balls are burning with laughter.”

“Or is it herpes?” “I don’t know; it comes and goes.”

One of the fluorescent tubes flickered and died. The doctors stared at it but didn’t care.

§

Doing the churlish pule

“Remind me why we’re going to gym.

“Because this one won’t sink … Jark.”

“I’ll say it once, and I’ll say it again: It’s not my fault the Titanic had a great cardio program.”

“Fatso here fell overboard and froze; the ship ran into him, and he tore the side open.”

“Fatso killed people,” they chanted. “Fatso’s fatal; fat fat death.”

Fatso cried because there’s nothing you can do when people chant alliteratively at you but really cry.

The exposition-ending automatic doors submissively shuffled aside, revealing a bare-white room illuminated by the buzzing, fluorescent lights powered by newer,

Better bumblebees.

“All right, I need everybody to pair up for this slow dance. I’ll wait. I’m waiting.” He waited.

“Press the damn button?” they shouted at him; submit he did. An odd, winding passage of notes filed through the sparse room, ambling behind the Flexmill and squatting down near the Ripmaster because the notes were obese and unable to walk long distances. I think an accordion flew out.

Or perhaps it was always there.

The doctors shuffled against each other for the eighth notes, and a spark lit their eyes for the sixteenth. But the quarter notes, nobody could forget the quarter notes. Quarter notes are dreams; we go through life thinking dreams are too hard, too unthinkable. And then when one of your dreams come true, it makes every other dream a little closer—a little less starry, a little more world-weary.

Maria was cowering. “Where’s your partner, Maria? I ask,” a doctor asked.

“There’s an odd number of people in here.”

“Then. Well, why are you cowering? Could it be the natural human impulse to shut itself from beauty and nature, to build sturdy houses of brick and mortar, to surround that wood and plank with plastic paneling and shingles and scurry, to build rafters around windows and insulation around doors, to build hideboxes above entrances and called them ‘awnings’ when they’re really ‘hideboxes,’ a plot to conceal—in the furtive, turgid, bombastic manner—the truth (the now red truth) because we can simultaneously delude and forge on?”

“My partner, he keeps hitting me,” she said. Her bruises stood proudly, blemishes yearning for attention upon the spindly banana that sits and knits on the one-week grocery store shelf.

The coördinator groaned inwardly and made strangling motions outwardly.

“My eye!” exclaimed one caught in the unending warpath of a coördinator scorned. “I’m not a grasshopper!”

The one-eyed man was taken to and admitted into the local teaching hospital hours later, condemened to live an ocularly impaired lifestyle.

The coördinator emitted a series of small coughs and changed the subject.

“Maria. Why. Go partner with Jark. Jark, take Maria’s spot.”

Jark, “It’s not my spot.” “Take it.” Jark, “Oh. Yeah.”

§

A case of it going down, part eleven

The doctors and the woman wandered into a gully, which many agreed was a predicament. They were all uncertain about how to proceed, but then one doctor found a tunnel leading to someplace considerably better-lit than the gully. Lighting was and is important because you cannot read a fine book or follow a yummy recipe without light. Also, many people die in darkness.

“Should we go through the tunnel?” one doctor asked. Everybody else was already in the tunnel so they left him behind.

Midway upon the journey to light, the doctors found themselves within a dark tunnel for the true path had been lost back at Sewage Junction.

“Ah, poop!” said one doctor. “How hard it is to wander astray in a one-way tunnel, what a tunnel smooth, cylindrical, and one-wayed. This very thought scares me.”

(“And me,” chimed another doctor.)

“It seems most prudent to elect a leader to guide us with spirit and courage. A leader whose breath that smells of the ocean could turn water into wine, the weak-spined into the iron-spined, the tendrils of plantlings into young, strapping prepubescent flowers aggressively battling fungi and parasitic insects alike, bravely flaunting any form of symbiosis in a Darwinistic field of competition.”

His bold biology rhetoric had convinced us: He should be the leader. We all elected him as the leader.

Then, the aliens came. “Take us to your leader,” they said in a pleasant, conversational tone. Then, they killed our leader in a peasant, confrontational uprising. So we had to elect Jark, a not quite ready for leader time leader who had never taken biology in his life.

“Our DNA of justice shall prevail in this thyme of spontaneous degeneration,” he would try. We all agreed to cheer him up, but secretly we were disappointed with his lack of biology-fu.

Biology-fu.

They came upon a metal grating with holes. Jark’s hand on my arm, his rabbit foot charm around his neck, called his friend to check what to do. Jark’s acting dumb, but that’s what we expect. He’s wearing doctor’s clothes, but he doesn’t have a clue. I think he’s going to get caught in the hole, and we’re going to have to pull him through.

Somebody else correctly identified the mysterious grating. It was a Brita pitcher filter.

“Can we pass through successfully, though?” another doctor asked.

We threw the woman at the grating, but she was too fat to pass through any of the nine-millimeter holes. She sank down onto the ground, her face bruised except in circles spaced evenly now and then. One of the circles was right above her eye and gave her the appearance of a motherly monster menacing masterfully mupon mour mgroup.

“The answer is no,” the Brita filter identifier concluded.

“Shame.”

“In any case, not all of us could pass through. We know Brita filters filter chlorine and leaders.” Awkward silence. We all looked at Jark, who suddenly didn’t cherish the idea of being the leader even though it meant he gained immortality. A brief digression about Jark.

Jark was born on the West Side of an unknown city at age 3. At age 8, he walked into his local library for the first time and immediately learned about puberty, and, at age 9, he learned how to walk by reading a book on the subject (Cantor’s Further Analytical Research on the Mechanics of Bipods in an Urban Environment, a Complete Thesis). Simultaneously with reading that book, he died of boredom. Fortunately, his suicide failed. After being in the hospital for two days, he checked out, proudly walked home, and discovered his parents had divorced, which was why they never came to see him even when he was near death.

His sister died when a badly aimed vase thrown by her father at her mother hit her instead. This would have been all right, but the family kept heirloom knives in the vase.

Jark angrily walked upstairs, into the corridor, past his now-empty sister’s and his only friend’s bedroom, and into his bedroom. He laid his head on his pillow and, for the first time that he could remember, cried.

Jark had two lips like roses and, moreover, he was the cutest of his class. Nobody noticed that he was cute however so he spent many lonely Friday nights with a lonely heart, thinking himself to be ugly. “If I only had wavy hair and glittery eyes black as the night,” he thought.

He entered medical school because that’s what all the cool people did. He joined the Coroner’s Toupee, an improvisation group that mocked Shakespeare ruthlessly, and graduated without fanfare in the back of a pizzeria—the college’s auditorium was closed for renovation due to asbestos. After graduating, he delivered his last pizza and drove to Boston. At Boston, he discovered he had lung cancer due to all the asbestos he had inhaled while improvising in his college’s auditorium.

People who attempt suicide and fail are more likely to, at some point in their miserable lives, try again and succeed.

Jark decided to go ahead. Several doctors followed him. The rest had watched Audi’s commercials and decided to “never follow.” Car commercials rarely have words you can live by, but here it saved them.

§

This is a case of it going down, part ten.

The Doctors Almighty and the woman huddled around the mentholated fire. “How … how are we going to get out?!” one doctor whispered softly into his stethoscope. An unconscious doctor woke up and asked “Get out of where?” “We’ve been trapped in this packet of Halls Sugar Free Menthol Cough Suppressant/Oral Anesthetic Mountain Menthol Fights Sore Throats; Coughs Vapor; What-Have-You Action Sugar Free cough drops for weeks.” “Ah, the Paradox,” he said knowingly, drifting back into unconsciousness.

“Somebody wake that guy up!” “No! Let’s procrastinate that decision until we regret it! Trust me. Just trust me!” A charismatic doctor from the back stood up and proclaimed for all to hear, “No one should eat a cough drop or else we may be stuck here for eternity.” “How so?” “Yeah, how so?” “Dude, I just said that.” “Shut up.” “You always do this to me in public.” The charisma- and patience-filled doctor, impatient to get it on, cleared his throat. Another doctor handed him a cough drop to numb his pain—because we’re all in pain. The charisma doctor thanked the other doctor and ate it. Instantly, the steel (or plastic) seal came down and the last glimpses of light touched upon the knowingly snoring doctor’ cherub nose before the doctors (and the woman) were all trapped in darkness. Somebody swore. “Damn it, we should’ve gone out that incredibly large opening into freedom while it was open.”

Then and now and again, a doctor began wheezing and fainting and coughing. “As an expert doctor, I know what he’s suffering.” “Coughitis!” another doctor excavated. Then silence. They stood around waiting for the next unlikely plot event to occur. All of a sudden, a calvary ran out from the whale’s vagina, which had been waiting in the back of the small enclosure for its moment to shine. The man unmounted his vaginahorse and declared, “Everybody step back. I’m an only child, and I know what to do!” He waltzed forward, grabbed the coughitis by the throat, and verbally raped it, an ironical move for someone coming out of a whale’s vagina. That was the end of that. The man and the vaginahorse walked into the fire, screamed with anguish, and disappeared. (Technically, though, he became man-horsevagina ashes.)

The coughitis-stricken doctor said, “Boy, I need a cough drop,” and reached out his hand to obtain one. The man-horsevagina ashes trampled his hand. Bleeding, the doctor bled. The ashes explained, “If you eat another one, we’ll just be trapped more.” “That doesn’t make sense,” somebody replied yet further back in the enclosure. The other doctors tried to find the one person who believed that that was the only thing up until now that didn’t make sense. Taking advantage of the confusion, the bleeding doctor seized a cough drop with his non-trampled hand and ate it. The ashes were right: In that instant, another steel door came down and the room because &uumul;ber-dark. But then, Pandora’s box rolled into the center and Pandora popped out, gagged and bruised. The doctors all kicked her aside until hope, the true savior of the story, arrived. Hope, with his bare muscles and whatnot, lifted the plastic seals, letting the doctors and the woman free. Hope closed the convenient zip lock pouch before the gross ashes could come out. Hope taught us that freedom is earned and not written.

§

The case of it going down, part nine

We drove past several streetlight portals before finding the one we wanted. The doctors and the woman all clamored out of the vestibule and into the street. “You sure this is the right one?” “Positive.” I glanced doubtfully; then I stepped into the Museum of Flesh.

“What is this place anyway?” “It was a museum constructed back in the thirties to collect, to document, and to store all things flesh.” The museum tour was uneventful until we arrived at Exhibit 183. “This is the hands-on, inner-cheek pain exhibit. Any pain you inflict upon this inner-cheek will be dutifully, realistically, and physically reflected.” The tour guide gestured to a small, six-inch by six-inch square of inner-cheek, the red fleshy sides of your mouth interior. Beside the cheek was a box of various instruments of pain, including a hooked knife, several antique pins, razors, and forks. The box rested on a table, which glared at us as we passed by it thirty five seconds ago. We all took turns prodding, stabbing, bleeding, and brutalizing the square of inner-cheek. As advertised, the cheek dutifully reflected the pain. Except me. “Come on, what are you afraid of now?” “Do you ever get the feeling that the cheek might be hooked up to some guy’s actual cheek?” “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, and the group moved on, leaving me gazing at the cheek.

On an impulse, I took a different corridor. I did not know what I was doing. I stepped on gum. I dry-cleaned my shirt. I arrived at an elevator, and I went down to the basement. As I stepped out the elevator, I could clearly see I was right. Skeletons littered the floor. As I walked more and more into the corridor, the skeletons slowly faded into recently dead corpses into people who were dying into a small girl with an electronic wire leading into her inner cheek. She was laying down on the floor; blood clotted around her cheek. Her frail body was unconscious, her skirt a pattern of blue and green stripes and her shoes absurdly normal and white within all the chaos. A door closed behind me. Bats overhead scattered in the sudden noise and flew out the window, each seeking hope and capital. The doctors and the woman stood, blocking the door.

“You knew. You knew!” I screamed. One of the doctors pushed me on the ground and shattered my ribs with a kick, sending me into unconsciousness. With the girl and the dead corpses, we could have formed an army. When I regained consciousness, a wire had been attached to my inner cheek. Horrified, I tried to pull it out, but the pain started. I felt the hooked knife, the several antique pins, the razors, and the forks, each bizarrely, beautifully unique in its pain. I rolled over in agony, onto the girl who was only a white shadow of calcium. I clung on to the feeling of the absurd, shoelace-less shoes.

§

A case of it going down, dart eight

It was a muggy Colorado afternoon as the golf cart pulled up into a gas station, and the doctors (and the woman) all piled out, standing around the golf cart, wondering the why of life. One doctor, wearing sunglasses, spoke up, “Anybody need to go to the bathroom?” A murmur of assent ran around the golf cart. The doctors all went to the back of the gas station and crowded into the bathroom. The bathroom was bear, only holding a trash can and another door. On its walls were plaques commemorating special occasions in the bathroom’s history. The doctors stood still for a second, wondering the why of life.

A doctor opened the trash can, revealing a pitch black room. The doctor walked in and closed the door behind him. Two doctors pounded on the door murmuring, “You’ve entered the ‘You Can’t Beat This Room’. Please exit. Please exit. Please exit.” The doctor ignored them and sat down on the stool above him. A light came on, illuminating a crouched figure on the stage. The figure began to beat drums. The doctor stood up and snarled, “I can beat that and I will,” before stepping onto the stage and wrenching the drums out of the figure. As the drums began to horribly entwine themselves around the doctor’s body with acoustic tendrils, the hooded figure stood up saying, “You can’t beat this,” before punching him.

When the doctor awoke, he was standing in the living room again. “I told you you couldn’t beat it. You can’t beat it.” “I know. You were right.” But the doctor knew he could beat it, he knew he could have beaten it good. He took over the world with his iPod vendeko, wondering the why of life.

§

A case of it going down, part seven

Previously.

It was a beautiful day. I say “was” because the day was chased down a street in a bad neighborhood and was mugged to death.

“Guys, I think I know a way out of this adobe.” He pointed to a doorknob without a door. A doorknob with a door is a welcoming; it signals adventure, safety, and regularity. A doorknob without a door is chilling and frightening. You must act cautiously around a doorknob with no door. This caution and anxiety is subconscious, built in from millenia of evolution in jungles filled with doorknob-like objects.

On the doorknob hung a “Do Not Enter” sign. It was hung at a pleasant angle, providing all the more reason to be suspicious.

“We can’t go outside through that door. There’s obviously a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign hanging from it.”

“He’s right. We’ll need to find another door.” A spirited scavenging for another door began. One of the doctors bumped into the door. The “Do Not Enter” sign quivered briefly. He bumped into it again. Still nothing. Now a crowd was beginning to form around him. Adrenaline pumped in his only remaining elbow. After nine times, the sign fell off. “Now look what you accidentally did.” The doctors all groaned and mumbled and trudged off.

“Hey look! A door!” The doctors all clamored around the door, stepping on the “Do Not Sign” an inhumane number of times. Everybody excitedly opened it. Sunlight streamed out and illuminated the courtyard below. The door opened to a balcony on the fifth floor of a large building. There were many more doors on the floor. There was a crowbar on the floor, attempting to look like a hammer. “Hey look, a hammer!” The doctor picked it up and began smashing another doctor’s face in. “Hey look, a hammer!” Another doctor grabbed the crowbar from the first doctor and began smashing the already smashed face. “Hey look a hammer!”

“Hold on just a second, mister. Where’s your comma?” “In here,” he said seductively. The doctors all looked. The woman all looked away. It shimmered.

“We’re going to need heat. Somebody mugged this poor doctor,” the doctor said, gesturing towards the bleeding doctor. “Heat? Where will we find that?” “At a heat machine!”

The doctors all packed into a golf cart and drove off the balcony. “Hey look, there’s a balcony!” The doctors drove falling the golf cart into there’s a balcony. There’s a balcony died of severe head trauma as a result of being driven into, and now the doctors were wanted for a hit and drive. One of the doctors sobbed. “There, there. It’ll be all right,” a senior doctor comforted the younger one. “I knew there’s a balcony. She was a good man,” he sobbed into his knees. “He didn’t die for nothing,” someone from the back of the golf cart piped up. The sobbing doctor looked around, but he could see this mysterious talking stranger, for the back was too back. “He died so we could go to the heat machine.” “Hear, hear!” Everybody broke out into a rousing chorus.

“He died so we could go to the heat machine,” “Alas, I think I need to pee.” “His body is broken in three, but we’ll remember him.” “Alas, I think I need to pee.” “We’ll never forget there’s a balcony, what a man.” “Alas, I think I need to pee.” “He was a great lover, he was a great hus-band.” “Alas, I think I need to pee.” “We will miss you, there’s a balcony.” “Alas, I think I need to pee.” “Now everybody, let’s get some heat!” “ALAS, I THINK I NEED TO PEE.” Everybody harmonized, “ALAS, I THINK I NEED TO PEE,” and they did so. “AND NOW WE REALLY NEED SOME HEAT!” Hearty laughs broke out, and everybody forgot about there’s a balcony. An angel ripped its wings off.

“Here’s a bucket.” They ran over him too, singing happily.

§

A case of it going down, part six

“Has anybody tried this door—uh, rhetorical question.” I gazed up at the ceiling anxiously. “I think,” somebody called out from the other end of the room. The doctors and the woman had been looking for a way out of the room for hours. Minutes, even. Seconds. It was hard to tell. They were doctors, and they all had experience with waiting rooms. Unfortunately, there was only one way out of this room: through a door. And there was only one door. I know, because I checked the other doors.

“Screw you, we’re trying this door!”

“Now, wait a minute. Let’s not make any rash decisions. Just step … just step away from that doorknob.”

“Sure … not! I’m trying this door!” I screamed, rebelling with all my might.

I tried it. It opened. It was like the scene from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” where Dorothy steps out into Oz and discovers everything in color; like that, except that three tall and scary women stood blocking the doorway.

“Um. Hi … how are … how are … plumes … where are we?”

“Oz.”

We stood dumbstruck. Could it be possible that we were in a satirical look on Baum‘s classic masterpiece commenting on the relativism of ethics and the empty categorization of good and evil? Did I just foreshadow? JUST THEN, all three of them—women, if you’re not into objectification—laughed.

“We get that a lot.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” We weren’t.

“We are the Three Sisters Hello Kitty.”

“Well. Hello, Three Sisters.”

“No. Three Sisters Hello Kitty. ‘llo Kit’ is part of the name.”

“Ohh, pathetic. We didn’t ask you who you guys were, though.”

“In that case, I never told you that I’m Hypnotica, this is Erratica, and this is Mica.”

“Hi. We are malpractice doctors.”

“Your coming has been foretold, circumcision.”

I began to shake … hands with Mica. “No! Don‘t do that. She’s flaky.” I quickly withdrew my hand and never started a relationship with Mica. She was flaky, mmm? I decided to shake hands with Erratica.

“Hi. Where are we?” I asked. Tic, tic.

“So,” I said to Hypnotica. “What’s special about you? Let me guess. You hypnotize people.”

She looked confused. “No, I notice hips.” That was a good thing, because I have nice hips. “You have nice hips.” See?

A doctor stepped forward. “Again. Where are we?” Tic, tic.

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Why aren’t boxes falling on us anymore?”

“The room disappeared!” someone exclaimed. Indeed it had. Indeed it had.

“But how?”

getById("meetWomenPara") . innerHTML += " The room disappeared."

“Buhh,” I elucidated.

Mica spoke. “Sorry to break up the Ruby Way parade, but we have to get you guys out of here. The room may expand at any moment.”

“You heard her … stone … guys! Let’s go!”

Like mad rabbits with a situation on their faces, we sprang towards the exit, pushing away the women, and running into the open. We ran and ran and ran into another room, slamming the door behind us, the door sliding up after we closed it.

“I think we’re in an elevator.”

“No, that was definitely a panty whip escalator. Fffpshh.”

A groan came from the corner, reminding us all that the object was still there. Someone took a crowbar and stroked her nose gently. Her blood splattered all over the walls, and she fell asleep.

“You have a crowbar? I thought we promised each other that we wouldn’t hide food.”

“Look, man, I’m sorry, but—”

“No tampons. If you‘re going to be a traitor, we’re all going to have a nine-star dinner right now without you.” Without a fuss, all the doctors did not put their elbows to the table, except for the traitor, who starved to delicious, delicious death.

“Hey, Jark, why are you holding a prank Halloween hand?” You know, one of those amputated hands. Jark looked at it for the first time. Another groan arose, this time from among the doctors. “You shook her hand. You just had to shake her hand.”

It was nightfall, we think. Sleeping arrangements were being made. “How do you sleep?” I said conversationally to the woman.

“A pillow.”

“Be More Specific.”

“A pillow of chicks.”

“Chicks?” That was alarming.

“No no, baby chickens. Those chicks.”

“Oh, those chicks.” Reassured, I turned around and slept fitfully on a bed of manatees. Sea cows to hallucinogenic people who think they look like cows.

Sunlight broke through the windows, gently arcing over bedroom. Its warm rays soothingly awakened each person as it streamed past their faces, their faces then breaking into a comfortable, cozy yawn, signaling the start of another normal but happy day. Unfortunately, there were no windows in the room, and sunlight was given a very big “Talk to the hand, sister.” by the laws of physics. Instead, everybody slept way past noon and woke up when they felt like it.

Many people wake up asking, “What will I do today?” Others wake up asking, “Mmm, coffee.”. Later, Jark asked in a completely unrelated situation, “Wouldn’t it be possible to break down these walls? Looks like adobe.”

“How can you tell?”

“Footnotes.”

“No guys, I don’t think we should. We might die.”

“That‘s a risk I’m willing to laugh at you for considering it.”

“He‘s right. We shouldn’t take risks. It’s too risky. Besides, we have nothing to break the wall down with.”

We gasped. Then we thought. Then we had children. Then we killed the children to not derail the already fragile plot arc any more than allowed. Then we all looked at each other before exclaiming in unison, “Hummmmmmoohh.”

§

A case of it going down, part five

Many people believe in Heaven and Hell. Some people believe in neither. A handful of people believe only in Heaven. Seven believe only in Hell. One man believes that the true afterlife exists in a remote village in Pennsylvania, aptly titled Throb. It would surprise the 592 inhabitants of Throb that this man is uncannily right. Well. Almost.

The doctors and the woman fell for a long time before thudding surprisingly gently on a disturbingly mattress-like floor. Everyone one groaned and slowly stood up, as people often do. I looked around. The room was brightly lit by quietly buzzing neon lights. The interior designer for the room had pulled off the remarkable achievement of making a room cheerful and optimistic with only bricks and neon lights. There was a large bean bag blob in the corner, most likely intended to be a comfortable chair. The word “squashy” vaguely popped into my head. “Anybody know where we are?” one of the doctors asked. A large cardboard box fell on him. The box, on account of its quivering, was widely avoided by the group. Another doctor cautiously attempted to touch it. The box jumped into the air and turned around to face the man as best as it could with no face or, for that matter, any distinction between its front and back. We got the distinct notion that it was baring its teeth. The doctor it had landed on grabbed it, shook it a few times for good protocol, and then opened it. There was a small slip of paper in it with neat handwriting. At the top, the paper was titled “Alert Box”. Underneath it, “It is of no concern to you where you are.” was printed. This was generally agreed to be a very good answer.

“I’m thirsty; is there anything to drink?” Another cardboard box fell on him. It was decided that asking questions was a bad idea at this point. We arrived at another distinct notion. The box was trying as hard as possible to be a telephone. Not that it resembled a telephone at all, but we felt that it was trying very hard to be one. All in all, it invoked a cocktail of pity and confusion within us. Upon closer inspection, there did happen to be some resemblance after all. A small square neatly divided into nine smaller squares was drawn. Each square was numbered left to right and top to bottom. The numbers 5, 6, and 4 on the middle row were constantly being shaded (and then unshaded), in that order. The thirsty man that the box had landed on got up, opened the box, and found another slip of paper. In the same neat handwriting, it was titled “Dialogue Box: Drink Choice”. Beneath it, the words “Lemon”, “Pulp”, and “Something Hard” were meticulously drawn in separate rounded rectangles, a most curious affair.

§

A case of it going down, part nine

To understand truly what’s happening here, we need to view The Beginning. The Beginning, logically, with their great-grandparents were conceived in the late 1890s, a time of innocence and when ragtime exploded on the music scene. Now there’s something crucial to remember while dealing with this time panorama we’re about to take. Seven of his great-grandparents cannot sing at all. The eighth can hum a fair rendition of “Hava Nagila” and was beat up a lot as a child. Ragtime is not to be confused with dirty ragtime, which deals with weightier issues like racism and poverty, or many of the other sub-genres of cloth music, which a scholar can dedicate years to learn the intricate and subtle differences only to realize that he has wasted years of his life dedicated to learning the intricate and subtle differences.

Demon Jerky, a popular ragtime band back in the 1890s, became notorious for their crude and filthy eponymous album Young Blood, marking the first time bodily fluids would appear in brands (and, fortunately, the last). Quickly establishing itself as a rebellious ragtime band, it became a sensation throughout the teenage world. We mention this because their great-grandparents are teenagers right now, and now puzzle pieces should be falling into place like a morbidly obese man slamming himself onto a New Hampshire sidewalk from the fifth floor on a breezy morning, right before traffic starts to get bad. Their third album, Still Going at It … Pus was widely received among Demon Jerky’s fans as betrayal. Many of the singles sounded washclothtime instead of ragtime, and the band would never re-achieve its status again. Reggie, one of the great-grandparents, was the drummer for the band. No, he isn’t the one who can hum. Stop drawing conclusions. Who’s writing this, me or you? Not everything is about you.

This will all make sense later.

§

A case of it going down, part four

The woman got up and brushed herself up. She had fallen while yelling. It’s a rare occurrence but it happens. She stepped inside the Medical Malpractice Awards ceremony. All the eyes in the room instantly turned onto her face, except the corpse. She was a handsome woman of thirty with dark piercing eyes and a shiny red gown. “C sharp,” she said. The music started up. She hummed and then began.

“Row row row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a—”

There are moments when life pauses, a heartbeat away from catastrophe. Everything freezes for that one breath and, in that moment, life is but a—

“NIGHTMARE!” The room collapsed into an opening in the center of the room. We all fell deep into the pits of despair. I could feel myself falling down a gigantic pit. The pit was so large, none of us made contact with any of the furniture or each other.

Outside, police swarmed onto the scene. The roof had collapsed inwards with the outer edge architecture still mostly standing. It would later be documented in the police report that the mahogany wood at where the center of the collapse should’ve fallen towards was unscratched and appeared to be brand new, polish, varnish, and all. I sat in the police car with Jark, surveying the scene from a distance. “What do you make of it?” “Freak old building syndrome. Probably termites.” “Did you hear the building was abandoned? Glad no poor bastard was in there when the roof collapsed.”

Besides the car, a pamphlet advertising the Medical Malpractice Awards flew by as the wind carried it gently. All of a sudden, a sharp upwind carried the paper straight up. From a child’s perspective, if there was indeed a child near the police car, it would have seemed that the paper faded away. This theoretical child would then have shook his head and blamed it on a trick of eyesight. After all, it was a sunny day and everything was shimmering under the bright rays of light, except the corpse.

§

A case of it going down, part three

“Dictionary,” I said again. This man was infuriating me; he had the guts to challenge the very roots of my actor education.

I faltered. I had never been corrected in my life before. As it stood currently, my speech therapist had been absolutely right. I broke out into a flop sweat. On live stage in front of hundreds of colleagues the very roots of my speech education was being contested and I had to resolve it quickly. I panicked. I threw out my fist and hit the man as hard as I could.

“Ow. You hit me. You bloody hit me. You bloody well broke my nose, you idiot.” I felt it. It wasn’t broken.

I wasn’t good at hitting.

I rose from the audience. “Stop! All of you stop! Violence never solved anything!” Then I was shot and was unable to continue with my monologue.

I rose from the audience after putting my gun away. “Stop! All of you stop! He’s right! Violence never solved anything. This is all my fault. I ... I’m his speech therapist.” An audible gasp from the audience arose. “It’s true. I never got around to teach him the fourth syllable in ‘dictionary’. I was a poor man at the time, going around to all the leper colonies—”

“That’s Literate Enrichment on a Per-basis Removal colony to you.”

“— and I simply didn’t have the time. I’m sorry. This is all my fault,” I repeated. There was a moment of tense silence in the room. Nobody knew what to say. The person I shot quivered a bit before dying. All of a sudden, a masked man swooped down from the ceiling onto a seat by the dead man.

“I am the Masked Man! I have been watching your Medical Malpractice Awards since 1892. This is all my fault, not yours. Allow me to explain.”

“But wait. That’d make you at least 112 years old.”

“You know, you didn’t need to point that out. We could’ve bloody well continued with the story. But no, you have to challenge the very roots of my age. Well, fine. I’ll drop dead. Is that good enough for you? Is that bloody well good enough for you?”

“I was just pointing it out.”

“Yeah, wank off.” I stepped a little to the left and stepped on the dead man’s head. It squeaked a little.

On the stage, I punched the guy again, for lack of anything better to do. “Stop that!” he yelled. Outside, a woman shrieked and fainted.

§

A case of it going down, part two

The story of my language impediment is a fascinating and curious one. In my childhood and at the height of the great literature war between Europe and the Americas, many Americans were illegally detained in Literate Enrichment on a Per-basis Removal colonies. There we’d stay, waiting for the war to end and achieving some semblance of normality in our isolated state. Here I made several close friends, as we were all united by the often common thread of oppression. “I never reeled in cod (really got)”—here, my friend who spoke in puns was speaking—“eggzactlyy (exactly why) they put us Ali into a ring (all into a ring; ”ring“ is an archaic term for camp).”

We pontificated upon this subject for a while to whet our whangy wappetites.

“That’s ass-backwards man. It really assis. What kind of asinine idiots assegregate us? Are we asso different?” A loyalist, “I think they’re totaljustified in their swiftchoice. We are, afterall, naturefreaks.” “Ass that, man, every man is assentitled to freedom in this asscountry.”

And so, what barely passed as conversation was our bread and cheese for our day-to-day activities. And it was here that I picked up my language impediment from our speech therapist, who, indeed, had a speech impediment himself.

“Now Jark, the key to OVERcoming your lanGUage dEFEcts is pRONunciation. As we know, there are three types of ‘diction’s: dicTION, DICtion, and diction,” he would say to me every session. “‘dicTION’ is—or, I should say, was—a Byzantine insult. ‘DICtion’ is a modern insult. ‘Diction’ is a word native to Cameroonia. In the native language of Cameroonia, there is sometimes a stress on a syllable that does not exist. Cameroonian is a very difficult language.”

While this trivia would’ve undoubtedly be useful had I ever gone planned on going to Cameroonia, U.S. immigration laws currently prevented any of us from traveling beyond the country, for fear of retaliation from the countries that, to paraphrase several friends, us assnaturefreaks would’ve caused.

He continued, “But only one of these words actually mean the reference book.” And before he could continue, the bell would ring and his time was up. He was, as much as I could surmount, a camp-to-camp traveling speech therapist.

It was my firm belief that he meant to teach me one syllable at a time all the important words in the English language. He could not have started simply with “dic” for taboo reasons. And he never started with the full blown “dictionary” since that would’ve been at least ninety permutations, a lengthy waste of time. And, anyway, I never did master the two-syllable “diction” until a much further period of time in my life.

Why hasn’t the Devil IPOd yet? Because he likes being a soul proprietorship.

§

A case of it going down, part one

The music and introduction started. I mentally envisioned the camera panning in to the stage. Given a cue from my producer, I walk out, smiling. “Welcome,” I say, for what must be the billionth time in the heady and tiring rehearsal days before. Live shows are where the weak actors are separated from the men. I continue, “to the fifty first annual Medical Malpractice Awards.” A cheer goes up in the audience, which I quickly survey. Mostly middle-aged men, a large congregation of women in second section from the right, and a few people younger than twenty, either hard-core fans or extremely bored. I go through my monologue perfectly, as planned, cracking a few jokes and pretending to ad-lib a few comments about the audience. The monologue finishes and I call on the first pair of people to present the first award before stepping out stage right.

It was my cue. I hooked arms with the nice lady besides me, who I heard from the crew was a famous surgeon. We walked slowly, methodically, ensuring that we wouldn’t get ahead or behind each other, as had often occurred in the rehearsals. We both smiled; at least, I thought she did. I couldn’t turn around and see. I was to keep my head ahead straight the entire time. “It’s not often I say this,” I began my monologue, “but this is a stupefabulous event.” I was told by one of the crew members that this would be a well-received allusion to a recent novel published by another famous surgeon. “And even though it’s not in the medical malpractice diction—”

I couldn’t handle the complete lack of attention of words made by the announcer. “Stupefabulous”. How stupid. So when he said “diction”, I couldn’t handle it. “That’s not a word.” The audience instinctively turn their head to stage right. I silently cursed. “It’s not.” I decided to step out onto the stage.

“‘Malpractice’? Yeah, I always thought it was anti-practice.”

“No, no, the word ‘diction’, you fool.”

“That’s a word. Look it up in the diction.”

“It’s dictionary. Dictionary.” I said it again to emphasize both the importance of the pronunciation, the word, and my contempt.