Jack Acid, Freelance Priest

by Miracle Jones

Yeah, it was a fucking mystery. Sometimes we get mysteries.

The first cat showed up mysteriously on an early Tuesday afternoon. Jack was going through Salamander Technologies mail whilst sitting in a lawn chair in the shade, and I was doing homemade tai chi on the roof of our dumpster. I’m not sure I was doing it right, but it was certainly a lot of fun. I pretended I was fighting platoons of unhinged time-traveling ninjas and I tried to breathe real deep and look serious as I shifted in slow motion to fend them off. After all, they were coming at me from the future and the past and this meant I had to concentrate if I wanted to land a blow.

I cracked each knuckle with martial splendor as I prepared to rain blows like needlepoint through the fabric of space-time. Leopard-print underwear was tied around my head (my own, thank you very much). I felt peaceful, but that could have been the pleasant spring day -- not necessarily the profits of my addled-ass dervish dance.

“Lookit Jones,” said Jack, holding up a computer printout. “Salamander is working defense contracts again.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, faltering slightly, but catching myself and keeping my balance on the ledge.

“It could mean anything. They could be making long-lasting soap for very dirty privates.”

“I’m going to ignore that,” I said, wobbling into a roundhouse kick.

“But what it probably means is that they are making weapons again. I doubt the government would hire Salamander for any sort of long-term infrastructure. They are a bit too pricey.”

“What sort of weapons? Guns? Grenades? Heat-seeking inflammable jellies?”

“That’s too confrontational. Think airborn HIV, stuff like that.”

“Senseless,” I said. “Preposterous.”

“Look at how well we control those rogue African states now that they all need our AIDS drugs to stagger forward into the future. Imagine what would happen if we could hook China the same way.”

“That’s pretty awful,” I said, slowly tearing the skull out of an imaginary assassin who had been trying to pin me with a forked, poisoned blade. I drop kicked his silk-covered head into the trees for good measure. “Wars should be fought in single, hand-to-hand combat,” I philosophized. “You should be able to look your enemy in the eye, and then bathe in his blood to get his awesome killing power.”

“We aren’t talking about wars, here,” said Jack. “Wars are fought for hot-blooded reasons. We are talking about control. Global domination. Twirly-mustaches, black briefcases, and six-course luncheons eaten on the backs of chattel slaves.”

“I am opposed,” I said.

That was when the ginger cat strolled out of the bushes and pounced into Jack’s lap. It stretched out its lanky limbs and scattered Jack’s computer printouts into the grass, quickly tearing the piece of paper Jack was holding into shreds.

“Fth, fth, fth,” said the cat.

Jack gently picked the feline up and set her down in the grass. She had no collar, and there were twists of brambles in her fur that she must have picked up in the brush.

“A stray,” said Jack. “We have to be careful about strays. If we feed them, they could lead interested parties straight to us. This would be bad for operations as it were, my ‘thentical pal.”

“Do you think she is lost?” I asked.

“Hard to say,” said Jack.

“Reeeaaaor,” said the cat.

Jack frowned.

“Reaaaerrrm. Reeeow, reeow, REEOW.”

“I see,” said Jack.

“Mew,” said the cat.

“Absolutely not,” said Jack.

“Reeeeeeeeeeooow,” said the cat. She yawned and then lay down in the grass, as if intending to sleep there. But she kept her eyes open.

“You speak cat?” I said, leaping off of the roof.

“Of course not,” said Jack. “That is senseless. Impossible, and absurd.”

Jack began to gather up his strewn papers, but he seemed shaken. He began to meditate.

“Absolutely not,” he said again quietly after awhile. “We have more important matters to attend to, if you dig. We have to be sensible in our aims, above all else.”

The cat began to lick itself. This reminded me that I had a deadline on copy for a “Lactating Yoga Instructors” photo essay, and I went back inside to get some work done. I forgot about the cat for the rest of the evening, even though I could hear it meowing periodically -- and pathetically -- right outside our door. Eventually, Jack came in and collapsed into his chair, mumbling something about the balancing act. He went to sleep, and eventually so did I.

In the morning, the cat had multiplied by a factor of ten. I opened the door to give the finger to the dawn and found eleven cats seated in a semi-circle, their tails twitching in time -- second-hands chasing the minutes.

As soon as they saw me, they jumped to their paws and began yowling in chorus like a set of demonic, leonine bagpipes. I fell back into the dumpster and cracked my bony ass.

“Jack!” I shouted. “We’re being invaded!”

The cats trampled in over my prone body, using me as a meaty bridge into our den, kneading my chest as if I were a welcome mat. Jack rose from his chair, pursed his lips, and regarded these uninvited guests with his hands behind his back. The cats bowed before him, stretching their ribs until they scraped the ground, and then they began to plead and yowl, snaking between his legs like eels in coral.

Jack could only endure so much of this before he grew…irritable.

“You must RESPECT my NEED not to get involved,” said Jack. “You have your own laws and councils, you kitten marauders. Turn to them if you seek satisfaction. Now. Hold the door open, Jones, and brace yourself.”

Jack began picking the cats up by the scruff of their necks and tossing them out the door. They landed huffily in the scrub -- turning, hissing, seriously pissed. Most of them did not land on their feet, but landed instead in fluffy balls filled with teeth and points. I shut the door in a hurry and peered through a hole bored in the wall.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve said my peace,” said Jack. “They’ll move along.”

They did not move along. In fact, as Jack brooded and I watched in horror, the cats began to rally. By mid-afternoon, every stray in Austin had gathered around our dump, fucking and fighting and periodically scratching the shit out of each other. But they persisted, as much as it annoyed them to be lumped in a herd.

To me, cats always appear peeved and agitated, unless they are asleep. I’ve never seen a cat smile. They just grimace.

The lawn grew too thick with feline flesh and fur to step outside or escape to the hills. The meowing was a constant ache in our ears. The stink of ammonia from all of the cat piss curled through the walls, pluming in pube-straightening tendrils through our possessions like stock-market stats on a coordinate plane. The dumpster began to rock as the cats circulated, rubbing against each other and churning -- sea foam with claws.

“What do they want?” I shouted. “What have we done? Did you step on some ancient crone’s monkey grass, and she has hexed us with her minions? Have they come to free the cat Barrabas and crucify the kitten Jesus? What have we done, and how do we make them happy?”

“This is extortion,” said Jack. “You are witnessing a cat protest in action.”

“Why are they protesting US? I love cats!”

“Because they think I can help them get justice. They think they can guilt me into helping them.”

“And why would they think that?” I said.

“I’ve done it before. I’m sure they could find somebody else with my…qualifications. But you know cats. They are lazy.”

Jack rolled open the door. Six cats clung to the bottom of the casters like desperate sailors on a pitching ship.

“GO AWAY!” he shrieked and then slammed the door back down.

“Maybe we should try and give them a hand,” I said. “Cats are generally pretty resourceful and independent. If they really require your services, I’m sure it’s because it is something they can’t handle themselves.”

“Certainly so,” said Jack. “Cats don’t have any mystical influence or anything. You are observing the full extent of their amazing ‘cat power’ in action. They are nature’s greatest slouches. Their ability to take up space in places where you would rather be is transcendent.”

“It’s maddening,” I said.

“Don’t let it get to you. We have to be strong.”

“We could die in here,” I said.

“Not of STARVATION,” said Jack to the door. “I’m sure we’ll find SOMETHING to eat. Something CUTE and DOMESTIC.”

“The smell alone will kill us,” I said. “Eventually, we’ll be poisoned by the spirochetes in all of the cat shit. The bacteria will burrow into our brains and start digesting our dendrites, turning our very thoughts into puke-drizzled effluent that will collect, like the yellow sweat of a tubercular fishwife, on the rails inside our skulls. Pus-holes the size of dimes will ooze infected lava all over our unfettered, ruined dreams. We’ll steadily go mad, and then we’ll throttle each other.”

“The cats will get sick of being a mob before that happens,” said Jack. “Trust me. We just have to wait this out.”

“Why don’t we just give in and give them a hand? You basically do nothing all day long, anyway. Maybe the cats are here to crown you their King.”

“I do exactly what I am supposed to do at all times -- no more, no less.”

“Tell it to the cats, Jack. The carpet of cats that has surrounded our squat. The living, breathing carpet of cat static.”

Jack groaned.

“There’s a balance that must be kept,” he explained. “An order. I don’t know. There are codes and procedures for this sort of thing. A calculus of responsibility. Next it will be dogs, or squirrels, or cockroaches, or public relations agents. We can’t help everyone.”

“What do they want, Jack? What do they want from us?”

Jack crossed-his legs sulkily.

“They want a murderer brought to justice. A child-murderer.”

Jack narrowed his eyebrows.

“The Kitten Tosser,” he intoned darkly.

“The Kitten Tosser?!” I interrobanged. “They think YOU can catch the infamous Austin Kitten Tosser? But that guy has been on the loose for years! The cops shut the case, and the ASPCA has given up completely. He’s a ghost! A cipher! A long string of question marks and then an ellipse…implying more question marks…”

“Evidently, these cats have inside information. And they want to pass it on to us. They want us to be their instrument of vengeance. Their…well. Their cat’s paw.”

“The Kitten Tosser, Jack! Think of it! We’d be heroes! Every nubile, sassy lass in the county would want to cover our prostates in gracious saliva. We would have to buy samurai swords to carve through the mountains of sex that would accrete from the ether like stink to cheese.”

“These cats want JUSTICE, Jones. They want blood. An eye for an eye. They may be small and cute to us, but deep inside every cat is a vicious jungle predator. They want to see the Kitten Tosser slaughtered, and they want to strap his guts like violin strings across the highway as an object lesson. And that is what they are hiring us to do.”

“I see,” I said.

“And that goes against my beliefs a bit,” said Jack. “I can’t kill. No killing.”

“No murder,” I said.

“Not even for fun,” said Jack, reclining glumly in his lounge chair.

“But what do we get in return?” I asked. Jack just glared at me.

If anybody deserved to be deleted from the world’s registry, it was the Austin Kitten Tosser.

His (or her) name was synonymous with evil in our happy, dopy town. The worst kind of evil. The arbitrary, hopeless kind that made you want to stuff razorblades in bran muffins and hit up the old folks home to stop all those ancient hearts a little early, to keep them from clotting and congealing with the fat of the world’s misery.

We Austinites have our problems: we are lazy, we are gullible, we have inconsistent personal hygiene habits, we do too many drugs, we don’t stick up for our beliefs as much as we should, and we universally lack the willpower to put together the grand plans that universally seethe under our greasy, knotted scalps. Every drag rat is a potential Napoleon. Our political theories are muddy and relentlessly impractical. Our artistic antipathies are reactionary and borderline pretentious.

Heh. Okay, they are ACTUALLY pretentious.

But we Austinites are hopeful, and we are pleasant. Dammit, we are NICE to each other. And we are nice to animals. Everybody that comes to Austin has been kicked out of somewhere else, so we know what it feels like to be a wandering freeloader. What Austinite can look in the eyes of a newborn kitten and pass a death sentence?

A true Austinite would instead make plans to cast that kitten in an earth-shattering independent film about corporate greed. And a true Austinite would forget about that independent film over the years and teach the cat to take bong hits through his earhole. The cat would grow up strong and lazy -- precisely as it ought to. God bless this stupid town.

I remember reading about the Tosser for the first time in the American-Statesman when I was still in school. I dug up the article for you. Let us share a moment of horror together:

Police Baffled by Recent String of Overpass Kitten Killings

AUSTIN, TX – August 11, 2003: Despite growing public concern, APD has closed their investigation on the Austin kitten tossing epidemic, pending new facts or evidence. Anybody with information leading to an arrest is encouraged to come forward and claim the $1000 award being offered by the Austin Humane Society.

“We just want this to end,” said Detective Marla Campos. “We have no leads, and we have no way of telling how much copycat killing is taking place. Pardon my pun. Ugh.”

The first five kittens were found in the spring, dropped from the MLK overpass in the early morning hours of March 13th. There were no witnesses, no tags, and the kittens were not reported missing or subsequently claimed. Veterinarians speculate that the victims died instantly and did not suffer.

Every week has turned up more deaths around town, and local shelters have grown wary of giving their kittens away, choosing instead to raise them until their safe, teenaged years. No older cats have been found murdered, leading authorities to speculate that the “Kitten Tosser” is a psychologically unstable individual with a checkered past.

“This nutjob needs to be stopped,” said Campos. “But we simply don’t have the resources. What are we supposed to do? Stake-out every overpass in town?”

APD’s biggest fear is that the phenomenon will continue to spread, and more people will be inspired by the killer’s method and goals. To date, there have been 62 recorded kitten tossings in the Austin area. While there has been no property damage, the mayor’s office is worried that eventually someone will get hurt.

“What if one of those kittens busted through somebody’s windshield?” said Martin Calloway, the mayor’s press secretary. “It could cause a major accident. Also, it would be totally surreal. AHHH! A kitten! And with all the burnouts in this town, we really have to worry about our citizen’s mental health.”

While the investigation has been put on hiatus, APD is still hopeful that the Kitten Tosser will be brought to justice.

“If this is some guy mad about people not spaying their cats, then they are going about things the wrong way,” said Campos. “They should get a bumper sticker.”

Over the years, the Kitten Tosser has kept at it. It has been impossible to pin down a pattern. There have been whole months without a tossing, and in other months there will be fifteen a week.

They caught a couple of frat guys once with a sack full of kittens in the back seat of their Explorer, but these dudes weren’t even in town when the tossing started. Who knows what they were going to do with those poor cats? They claimed it was for some fraternity ritual. Anyway, the tossing kept going, even after they were “reprimanded.”

“Hey! What the dizzy dancing nun is going on here?” shouted a familiar voice from across the clearing. It was Beer O’Leary, the Salamander Technologies security guard. He sounded like he had just awakened from a weekend bender. His words pumped out of his mouth like some sort of congestive slurry.

“It’s cats, Beer!” I shouted back from inside the dumpster. “They are protesting us!”

“We can’t have all this business -- no sir, no deal,” he shouted. “You want me to clear a path? I got a wheelbarrow in the utility shed that I can fill with bricks. I can plow through these little punks like a damn juggernaut if you want.”

“He’ll do it, too,” I said to Jack.

Jack hung his head. He slid out of his chair and threw open the dumpster door.

“ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT,” he shouted. “I’LL HELP YOU CATS WITH YOUR DIRTY DREAMS. But I’m not killing ANYBODY, no matter how awful they are. That I guarantee.”

The cats meowed in frantic unison.

“I don’t know,” said Jack. “You’ll get some kind of justice. That’s my only offer: take it or leave it. Otherwise, the fat, drunk Irishman goes at you with the garden hose and wheelbarrow.”

Beer scratched himself.

“You want me to spray these cats with the hose? Like hippies?” he asked.

Jack thumped the side of his nose and winked.

The cats soaked this up silently. A ball of visible electric static crawled across their backs like a stage diver at a rock concert and slammed into a tree, shaking loose pine needles and a very surprised grackle that took one look at the throng of cats and flew off hooting into the upper atmosphere with a speed that should have been studied by scientists.

“See, I knew you could speak cat,” I said.

“Ridiculous,” said Jack. “Even if I were able to parse their insane animal yowlings, I would have to ‘meow’ back to make myself understood. Plainly, that is not what I am doing. The very idea that I speak cat is a fantasy that you should really rid yourself of if you don’t want to be locked up by your peers and pumped full of tricky neuroleptics.”

I just smiled.

The cat that had originally disturbed our peace snaked her way through the crowd. She circled Jack three times and then bowed.

The cats began to disperse. They were so quick and so sly and so lithe! It was like watching sand sift through your fingers. They were gone almost immediately, like butter melting into a pancake. All they left was their stink, their fur, and an implicit threat that they would be back if we didn’t hold up our end of the deal.

Also, there was a shred of paper in the seat of one of our lawn chairs.

“I guess we’d better get started,” I said. Beer shuddered, muttered, and split.

Jack glared at me. He glared at the sky. He smashed his fists together, curled into a ball, and then exploded upward.

“Fine! We go! But we mustn’t make a habit out of this, Jones! Soon everyone will be knocking on our door asking for our help! That’s the sort of thing that makes a man into an icon; a soul into a corporation. We have too much life in us. Too many days left to squander joyfully. We can’t be forever serving our fellow creatures. Selfish meditation and solitude are vital to sustaining a reflective nature. The world isn’t changed by heroes gallivanting across the world righting wrongs and solving mysteries and generally making entertaining asses of themselves. That just changes money into novels, and novels into movies. The WORLD is changed by very wise people doing the correct thing at the perfect time. They are anonymous; they are crafty; and they are good to the very bedrock. They are good SOOO deep down that their roots hit lava.”

I pretended to be very interested in my thumb. This only made Jack more emphatic.

“The world makes some people great,” said Jack. “It makes them into great heaping slags that are whirled around by circumstance like galleons in a tornado. They crush nations, build empires, and force-feed innovation to the future. But the world also makes some people small. It makes them small like the central spoke of a wheel. The constellations buzz around them, dipping and diving at their every whim. These people are so small they are pivotal. We have to be pivotal; not great.”

“There’s nothing smaller than a kitten, Jack,” I said.

Jack threw his hands up in frustration and grabbed the piece of paper from the lawn chair.

“It’s just smears and scrawls,” said Jack. “But I think it’s directions. This means we are going to have to think like cats from here on out.”

“I’ve always wanted barbs on my cock,” I said.

“Why in the hell would you possibly want such an awful thing?” said Jack.

“I don’t know,” I said. “To open beer bottles and stuff.”

“You don’t get barbs on your cock,” said Jack.

“Cats have them, and if I were a cat, that’s all I would think about,” I said. “I would spend hours fiddling with my cock-barbs. Days.”

“All that obsessing would inevitably make you sleepy,” said Jack, closing one eye and frowning. “So you would have to scrunch up your eyes, if you were going to write a letter.”

Jack did this, holding the letter at arms length.

“But you’d be a cat, so you’d also be independent as hell. You wouldn’t give a damn about presentation or sense. Even if there are lives at stake.”

He wrinkled the paper up between his fingers.

“And you’d also be using claws, not fingers.”

He bent the piece of paper to the side.

“Aha!” said Jack.

I walked over and stood beside him. I scrunched up my eyes.

“It’s an address!” I shouted. “And not just any address, either.”

“Wow,” said Jack.

We looked at each other. Jack put the paper in his pocket, and then we were on our way.

It didn’t take us long to get where we were going.

We cut through the forest and then took a series of winding streets over to North Loop. We shunted down a lane whose pavement had been ripped into ribbons by an endless parade of corrupt construction projects, and then we cut through somebody’s overgrown backyard and fell headlong into one of Austin funkier pockets.

It was a shopping center. THE shopping center. There was a little vegan grocery store, an outdoor gelato café, a store that sold collectible shit from the fifties, an anarchist book hole, a dildo shoppe, and “Earnest,” the city’s most famous vintage clothing boutique. I think “Earnest” was originally intended to be an allusion to the Wilde play, except everybody pronounced it “ear nest.”

This was our unfortunate destination. As we slowly made our way out from the bracken of the adjacent neighborhood, fifteen twenty-year-old girls smoking appetite-suppressing cigarettes out in front of the clothing store narrowed their eyes like Cubans pulling switchblades and started judging the CRAP out of me and Jack.

When it came to steely glances, these guys were professionals. They had to be. This was where people came to be Young and Mighty. It was imperative to root out the cryptolame and the actually poor.

No square inch of space in this glowing shopping center was without some ironic statement of clever youthful detachment. It basically made you want to tear your clothes off and start furiously masturbating and singing commercial jingles until the police dragged you away. I’m not sure that everybody has this same response when confronted with the gilded, empty flotsam of the information age, but it was all I could do to keep my hands out of my pants. I gave my crotch a single hearty grab. I started whistling about hamburgers.

In a quiet corner of the parking lot, there was a hubcap gathering rust. Jack walked over to it and nudged it with the toe of his shoe.

“This means we are in the right place,” said Jack.

“How do you figure?”

“The hubcap is cat code. It means that this is a place of significance. If the hubcap is upside-down, that means it is a good place – free food, cool shade, dumb birds, slow squirrels, no dogs, maybe some crazy old lady who takes every stray she finds to the vet. But if the hubcap is rightside-up, like this one, it is a warning to stay away. Could be some nut with a pellet gun. Fast cars. Animal control. In this case…”

“The Kitten Tosser,” I said.

“Precisely,” said Jack.

“But which one is she?” I pondered, looking at all of the girls lined up in front of Earnest like penguins on an iceberg.

“We’ll probably have to go inside,” said Jack. “Truly, this is a test of courage and moral fiber. Don’t make an ass of yourself. I know how you get around young girls.”

“Not these kind of girls,” I said. “I imagine they are all sealed up down like Barbie dolls. It’s possible that they enjoy sex, but only as a way to express deep truth. Plus, I’m not moody enough to get them sufficiently frothy for a frictional tumble.”

“You are pretty moody,” said Jack.

“Trust me. I am not even in the same league as the emotionally disturbed and abusive men of their dreams. The only scars I have are from sports. The only self-inflicted pain I enjoy comes in a bottle and burns your throat, not your bicep or your testicles.”

“Well, try and pretend like you belong,” said Jack. “Think vintage.”

“Like old mayonnaise,” I said.

We puffed up our chests and walked the long gauntlet of silent frails to the glass doors. There were whispers behind us and sucking, gasping giggles. Ehhhhaaa-huhhhh-huhhh-huh.

As the doors swung shut, I felt something brush against my leg. It was a grey mouser. The muscle of the alley cat castes. Surly, stoic, and tough. He was missing an ear, and had a twisted scar that ran from his nose to his belly.

The cat looked up and blinked, evidently not impressed with either of us. I guess this was our appointed liaison to our feline employers.

Inside, it took a minute for our eyes to adjust. The store was nearly empty, which surprised me. I figured there would be more bustle. Instead, there were only a few customers, mainly middle-aged women, and maybe ten employees putting clothing on racks and folding things.

They seemed pretty absorbed with what they were doing, unlike the girls outside. Their style was to ignore everything but the clothes -- as opposed to the constant, unrelenting scrutiny of the welcoming committee.

The store was laid out in swoops and swatches of light and darkness. It was a chiaroscuro mess, and the whole place reminded me of a line of mottled cellulite right above a leather boot. Moldy clothes that cost more than my organs lined the walls on shower curtain rods, and were draped like corpses over display units and steel girders bent into hoops. Mannequins haunted us from the corners. Their blank faces made me want to grab a magic marker and do some cultural editing. This one would be Groucho Marx, that one would be Fu Manchu, and the glittery gold one would get a nosejob like a hatchet handle.

“What do you think, Jack?”

Jack shrugged.

“When you are trying to find the sourest pickle in the jar, you have to take a bite of every single one,” he said. “You can’t just drink the juice.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

Jack picked up the mouser, and slung him over his shoulder as if he were a water skin. The cat hissed, but what he could he do?

“We must be scientists,” said Jack.

He took off across the store, and I followed reluctantly. He headed for the changing rooms, where a sullen-looking mod was tagging things with some sort of pricing gun. She looked out from under her bangs as we approached. When she saw the cat, she gave us the faintest suggestion of a smirk. This smirk, this ghost of a facial expression, was to a smile as a matchbox car is to a battleship.

“Uh-oh,” she said quietly to herself with a pissy flip of her head. “Look what the cat dragged in.” We could hear her, obviously. This was exactly the sort of senseless, passive solipsism that made me go all stiff and throbbing with rage. I kept it together, though. For the mission. For the kittens.

“I wonder if you can help me,” said Jack diplomatically.

“No,” said the girl, laughing.

“Are you sure?” said Jack. “It appears as if you work here.”

The girl just rolled her eyes.

“I’m looking for somebody, you see. I’ve got this cat and I was supposed to give it to them.”

The girl blew air out of her mouth and made a vaguely threatening farting noise.

“I’m trying to give it a good home,” said Jack.

The girl shut her eyes and mumbled to herself. It sounded like she was quoting Gandhi.

“Do you know anybody here who would want this cat?” Jack asked again, patiently.

“I don’t know. Selena is always picking up strays,” said the girl, scraping hanger hooks aggressively against a clothing rod to make a harsh, metallic rasp that cut into your teeth like chewing on a bottle cap.

“Stray cats?” asked Jack.

“Yeah,” said the girl. “I GUESS.”

“Kittens?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl. “I’m not your secretary.”

“Does Selena work here?” I asked, trying to get into the game.

The girl narrowed her eyes at me and slung all her weight to one hip.

“Is she working here today?” asked Jack.

The girl looked like she was about to slap him. Instead, she cupped her hands over her mouth, arching her fingers backwards behind her hands in a way that looked painful.

“SELENA!” shouted the girl. “SELEEEE-NAH!”

“WHAT?” shouted somebody from the counter near the front door.

“Nothing,” said the girl quietly.

The girl smiled big for a second and then instantly resumed frowning. I don’t think her apparent momentary happiness was genuine.

“Thank you,” said Jack. “You have been very helpful.”

“Yeah, right,” said the girl with a wounded shriek. “You don’t have to be a jerk.”

Jack and I turned around slowly and headed back to the front of the store. Waves of hot resentment flowed over us from the little kit and a few of the other patrons. Being in this clothing store was like being a sixth-grader and having somebody pull your pants down in the cafeteria over and over again until the shock and despair made you sort of numb; sort of beaten into cheerfulness; the way a bell must feel on hanging day.

Selena had red hair in front and black hair in back. There was something hollow about her eyes, but no more hollow than any other fashion femme in town. There was dark eyeliner in a star pattern jutting from the corners of her eyes, creating massive crow’s feet on her placid, powdered cheeks. She was pretty. She certainly didn’t look like she killed kittens.

“Hello,” said Jack, holding the mouser up for inspection. “We brought you a cat.”

Selena frowned, and then pulled a pack of cigarettes from her bra.

“It’s too old, but it’s a good try,” she said. “Let’s have a smoke and I’ll tell you what I’m looking for.”

She fled the store with brisk determination, flipping her hand up in the air and giving the rest of the girls in Earnest the middle finger. There was one loud, mirthless laugh and a whole lot of puffs of fashionista “whatever.”

“You look familiar,” said Selena to me as soon as we were alone in the back parking lot and she had lit up a clove.

“I think we dated the same girl once,” I said. “You ever go to Veronica Jones’ Sexarium?”

“On occasion,” said Selena, her eyes twinkling.

“That probably where we’ve seen each other then,” I said. “I look different naked. Like a gasoline pump that’s been painted with arctic camouflage. Lot of knobs and squirty parts – all blazing white and self-service.”

Jack nudged me. No flirting. This chick kills kittens.

Selena took a look at the mouser in Jack’s hands.

“Who told you I was looking for cats?” asked Selena. “Was it Two-Fingers Hogan?”

“Yeah, Two-Fingers Hogan,” said Jack.

“Well he should have told you I wanted them younger,” said Selena. “This cat is ancient. His whiskers are too long.”

“So you only want kittens?” said Jack.

“That’s right,” said Selena.

“What do you do with them?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” said Selena with a huffy laugh. “A hundred dollars a tail will buy you bums a lot of popskull.”

“We aren’t homeless,” I said. “We live in a dumpster.”

“A big dumpster,” said Jack.

“With windows,” I said. “And electric lights.”

There was a squeak behind us. A swarthy, middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts, a suit jacket, a torn red tie, and what looked to be rather expensive Italian loafers (black socks) was pushing a shopping cart full of mewling kittens towards us.

“Objection!” said the man drunkenly. “My client demands due process.”

“See, THIS is what I’m looking for,” said Selena. “Look at these beauties. Sleek little heads. Absolutely no drag.”

“Two-Fingers Hogan eats steak tonight!” said the man.

“You’ve done well, Hogan,” said Selena. “Where’d you find them?”

“I plead the fifth,” said Hogan, turning to face us. “And plus there’s attorney client privilege. To think about.”

He poked me in the chest with a yellow, grizzled finger. His breath smelled like Parmesan cheese.

“I’m a lawyer,” he explained.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Let me see your license.” He cackled and fished inside his Bermuda shorts. He brought out a filthy laminated card and presented it to me triumphantly. Inexplicably, perversely, insanely – the thing was valid! The license even said “Two-Fingers Hogan” in the name blank. It was either genuine, or a really damn good fake. Why would a person have such a thing?

“I see,” I said.

“I represent all the bums in town,” said Hogan. “That way, the state don’t gotta pay no public defender. I work for a chicken salad sandwich, most days.”

“Haven’t you guys met before?” said Selena suspiciously.

“I’ve never seen these suspects before in my life,” said Hogan, bored. “Your honor, I move to go take a piss.”

“So how did you know I was looking for cats then?” said Selena, curling her lower lip.

“Grab her!” said Jack. “Time for justice!”

As Two-Fingers Hogan looked on in blank fascination, I grabbed Selena and pinned her arms back. Jack took a kitten from Hogan’s basket and smacked her in the face with it.

The kitten meowed. Jack set the kitten back in the cart, where it hissed at him, hackles high.

Jack peered into her eyes.

“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted.

“Hmmm. That didn’t take,” said Jack, reaching for a different kitten. As Selena sputtered and choked and wriggled, Jack whacked her again with a golden manx. This time the kitten spazzed out like it was being electrocuted and so did Selena. It appeared as if they were both having a seizure. She went limp in my arms.

“There!” said Jack. “Now we’ll let the cats deal with her.”

Jack put the mouser in with the kittens, and the mouser grabbed the golden manx by the scruff of the neck, hopped deftly out of the cart, and took off down the street, dodging cars, and snaking between telephone polls.

“What just happened?” asked Two-Fingers Hogan.

“I switched their consciousnesses. Now the kitten is in her body,” said Jack.

“You can do that?” I said. “You just whack somebody with a cat and they trade places?”

“Only when it is cosmically expedient.”

“What if a cat just leaps at you while you are sleeping?”

“It’s been known to happen,” said Jack. “Many people are actually cats and don’t even know it. And vice versa. Ever have a cat steal your wallet and go to Vegas?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“Like most maladies, cat switching is most common with children and the elderly,” said Jack.

Selena was now licking the top of her nose and mewing. She tried to take her pants off, but she couldn’t work the belt. Eventually she gave up and began stalking a frog that had jumped out of the gutter. She made it halfway into the street before I was able to coax her back by waving a sweater at her.

“I plead insanity,” said Two-Fingers Hogan, muttering to himself. “But whose gonna pay me for these cats?”

“A man could get disbarred for selling cats without a permit,” said Jack.

“Really?” said Hogan suspiciously.

“Better take them back where you found them,” said Jack.

“A whole days work,” said Hogan, shuffling off. “Wasted.”

“Won’t people be able to tell that Selena is suddenly a cat? Won’t they haul her away to an insane asylum to be brutally mocked and abused by crooked guards? What about the poor kitten in her mind now? Won’t she stand out like a rat at a pony show?”

I looked over at Earnest through the window. Two girls were speaking animatedly to each other while putting clothes away. A third was watching them with one eye. Each kept looking at a fourth girl who could be considered in some universe to be slightly overweight. Every time this tomato bent down to pick up a dress, the girls laughed like loons. Meow.

A vintage boutique. It was just one big ball of yarn.

“No, I guess not. She’ll fit right in, won’t she? She’ll be fine.”

by Miracle Jones

It was that time of year again. The trucks and buses had pulled in, dropping whole philosophy departments from all across the country off on Austin’s doorstep. They were here to participate in the world’s biggest outdoor philosophical convention – The Deep, Important ‘Nawledge Gathering on Sixth Street. The DING on Sixth.

It was great fun to watch these clueless hordes of bespectacled head-scratchers descend with reckless abandon on our hot-ass mystical town. A Mack truck with the decal of some stodgy Northeastern university painted on the side –Bainbridgehamforth-- would roll into a parking lot, the back would open up, and a stream of beret-wearing baldies would pile out. Sometimes you’d see an existentialist screaming about free will being persuaded to leave at pitchfork-point by a provost or grad student.

“I won’t go! You can’t make me! I’ve got tenure!”

“Get out of the van, or we put a smoke alarm in your office, Frenchy!”

Every year it got bigger and bigger. Like all of Austin’s ballyhoo-garnering self-conscious street festivals, DING was a tremendous boost to the local economy. I called Veronica down at the Sexarium to see if she wanted to meet up with me and Jack and go watch Zeke give the annual lecture on fire and its philosophical magic.

“Are you kidding?” said Veronica. “This is easily one of our busiest weekends.” In the background I could hear somebody getting whacked with a paddle and screaming “More rigour!” in a British accent after every stroke.

“Oh yeah?”

“Some of these guys literally only get laid once every year,” said Veronica. “And you wouldn’t believe the sorts of contortions we make to get them off. I had to send a girl down to the University library to get a whole hand-cart full of Bibles and math books.”

“What for?”

“Inspiration! I’m at my wit’s end, Jones! I’ve got dicks here like starving baby birds. We’ve got to seize each little twitch. You’ve never seen such twisted kinks!”

“You know the story of the Gordian knot, don’t you?”

“Ha ha. Don’t think I haven’t fantasized.”

“Well, best of luck. I hope you make some good money,” I said.

“What? I can’t talk now,” said Veronica. “Kathy, more stones! And you HAVE to wear the mustache! It’s simply not optional!”

I hung up the phone. Veronica wasn’t any fun when she was all stressed out.

“Looks like it’s just me and you,” I said to Jack. He was sitting in his chair smoking bubbles out of an opium pipe, just to be contrary. “We’d better get going.”

“Philosophers frighten me,” said Jack. “I have a real fear.”

“It’s all good fun,” I said. “Just try not to look any of them directly in the eye. And don’t interrupt them unless you want to get berated for being provincial.”

“Which I am, no question.”

“Which you are,” I said. “With your crazy philosophy of invisible, impossible, contrary connections and the music of sweet dancing crappy Krishna.”

“I prefer physics. Dig: physicists have tougher minds,” said Jack.

“They just humor you more,” I said.

“I DID punch God that one time,” said Jack.

“Debateable,” I replied, putting on a jacket.

“I DO know all the secrets of the manifest universe,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said with a sigh. “So are we going, or not?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just let me finish my thought. It could be important later.”

He took a steady pull of bubble opium and then blew a long, floating bubble-weenie. He emptied the pipe into a plant and shut his eyes. He massaged the bulge of his eyeballs through his lids. His hair stood on end, and it was possible that he slightly left his chair and hovered inches above it. I wouldn’t swear before a court of law. Maybe a court of chaos. Yowser.

Just Jack, doing his thing.

We shut down the trailer, waved bye-bye to Salamander, removed an empty bottle of whiskey and a plate of mashed potatoes from Beer O’Leary’s sleeping paws, loosened his shoes, and made sure he was on his side in the back of his security car. I didn’t know it at the time, but were headed right for his green, palooka dreams. Maybe Jack had an inkling.

Either way, duties done, we were on our way down to the freak show. Tonight was the opening night of the weekend-long philosophy extravaganza, and I (for one), didn’t want to miss the inevitable opening night war and fireworks.

Sometimes it got brutal.

Last year, a group of positivists went totally feral and started kidnapping locals and using water-torture to extract confessions of metaphysical ignorance. Their University handlers had to entice them back into their respective trucks with whole fleets of dewy-eyed grad students paid to listen to their ranting. The tribal terror was a strong object lesson in why it was important for a University to intellectually diversify and to keep its mental stew from congealing into anything solid. Once these gals and guys had enough validation, they were capable of anything.

We took the bus, but we’d still have to walk a ways to get to the performance. It was always a good show, although I personally wished Zeke would throw some new material in there, now that he had the opportunity. But the Fire Philosophy rant was a “DING on Sixth” tradition by this point, and giving it was a local intellectual honor. The crowd would grow restless if their expectations weren’t met and they were left without an anchor in the popping, philosophic mess.

“It’s an institution, Jones,” Zeke would say, drawing up to his full height and punching me in the shoulder. It was something, all right.

Anybody picking up a piece of porno knew there was going to be sex. Somebody was going to get fucked. But it was the NOVELTY that made it fun. I guess not everybody shared my finely-honed aesthetic assumptions. Deluded sons of bitches, the lot of ‘em. Anything less than novelty was religion in my book. To be fair, everybody that did the fire speech got to put their own little spin on it. Maybe that was enough. Maybe I was just cranky.

Anyway, we got off the crowded bus and headed downtown to “The Think Tank,” the traditional fire bar.

Normally, Sixth Street in Austin was filled with only one sort of clientele: kids from school cutting loose in shiny shirts and short skirts, losing their minds in a cloud of cigarette smoke, beer fumes, and tedious sexual anxiety. Later came clumsy propositions and half-remembered rape. Just like how mommy met daddy. There were a few locals on hand to exploit them, a random sprinkling of homeless inebriates, and your usual crowd of diligent office-types on hand to soak up some of the yearning of their youth like tired, noose-weaving spider sponges. These particular folks were usually better dressed and meaner. They had to be, or the calf-eyed eggs of the Texas liberal elite would see through their disguises.

Tonight, however, the streets belonged to a different blend. While normally all you could hear on Sixth were girls shrieking and guys hooting to each other as they recognized packs of their friends, tonight there was only one noise bubbling up from the street’s slanted muck. Argument. Balls to the wall, vicious, raucous, pointless, fine-tuned argument.

Evidently, EVERYBODY in a ten block radius was wrong.

I was glad to be there. It was the best mental group-grope you’d ever find. Jack, however, looked like he wished he had some sort of long, forked stick for keeping the shouting at a safe distance. Every ten feet or so, he would shut his eyes and bend over at the waist and shake his head. Like he just couldn’t sort it all.

There was a lot to sort. Schools of thought swam through the street like squinty, grumbling barracuda. There were clans, and scenes, and displays of a billion different didactic varieties. Dunking booths, life-size chess games, and Scrabble contests where the participants could only use “meaningful” words.

There were a few normies, too. I guess they were either brave or lost. With a big goofy grin on my face, I walked over to one tent that featured a pumpkin carving contest. A banner flapping above the booth boasted that the most important “sign” would win.

A guy with frosted blonde hair who had just walked out of one of the bars was swaying on his feet and watching groups of lanky gents and lasses get to carving. He did not belong. I guess he had gotten separated from his “brothers.”

“What the hell is this for?” he asked, blinking.

“We are carving signs into pumpkins. The winner gets a gold-inlaid edition of Either / Or,” said one woman with a clipped, Northern accent.

“Why don’t you carve faces?”

“Faces are poor substitutes for linguistic purity in a world of insubstantial metaphor,” she said, not looking up. She was carving a spiral into the pumpkin with a nail file. I wasn’t precisely sure what it represented, but I know a spiral when I see one.

The drunk guy’s t-shirt said “Drizzunk.” I guess this meant what it (sort of) said. Signs were tricky things.

“But pumpkins are for Halloween!” said the guy.

“Halloween is the only truly transgressive holiday,” said a stern looking dude with horn rims. “And we are the only truly transgressive thinkers,” he finished with a sneer.

“I hope you aren’t speaking for yourself, Michaelson,” said the woman, brandishing the nail file. Evidently there was friction here.

“I used to be a woman!” said Michaelson suddenly. “That’s transgressive, baby! That’s T-Capital Transgressive! What’ve you got? Huh? Anybody can, what, slut around at movie theatres? Isn’t that what you are writing papers about nowadays? You are practically thirteen!”

“Blah, blah, blah, blah,” said the woman.

“You hook up with random dudes at the movies?” said the wobbling fraternity brother. “That’s right on, dude.”

“I’m not a dude,” said the woman, stabbing the pumpkin with particular force. “That’s HIS obsession. I’m a warrior for a fading, anarchic value system. Huh. The new anarchy. What a load. Get a good look at it.” She hooked a thumb at Michaelson, who was evidently transsexual. I wouldn’t have guessed.

Michaelson stuck his tongue out at her. The frat guy fell over on his back with a loud crash. No one stood up from their pumpkins to help him.

I walked back over to Jack, chuckling to myself.

A wild-eyed street vendor was trying to get him buy futures in “time,” which evidently was going to make a comeback. Jack was politely trying to explain to the man that he was crazy.

“What’s his DEAL?” screamed the vendor at me, sensing a kindred spirit.

“He’s just a guy,” I said.

“He’s VERY AGGRAVATING! He doesn’t UNDERSTAND me!”

“He’s got a lot of unique qualities,” I said. “You just have to know him.”

“Like what?” said the man, sidling up to me conspiratorially. Now Jack was involved in fighting off a pair of twin Platonists who were berating him for not wearing velvet blinders that they were offering free of charge.

“I don’t know,” I said to the man. “He sees things differently. Shit happens to him. He knows lots of angles. I think he’s got the sort of broken mind that uniquely matches the way the world is broken.”

“Not like mine?” asked the man.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. Observing the creek of drool pouring down one jowl line of his mouth. Noting the curry stains on his blazer. “Not at all.”

The man walked away muttering, tossing sheets of “time” futures into the air.

“I love philosophy,” I said, rejoining Jack.

“All of these people smell wrong,” said Jack, giving the evil eye to a group of Epicures who were bathing in a wooden tub full of wine and sloshing it all over the street.

“Come drink with us, brother!” said one fat tub-goblin, seizing the opportunity provided by Jack’s furtive glance. “This wine has been purified by the juices of true libertine agitation!”

Jack and I looked at each other. Hmmmmm.

“You mean you peed in it?” asked Jack. The men all laughed heartily.

“What is wine but the urine of the gods?” said a short one with a squeaky voice. He was raised up out of the tub by his peers and then allowed to drop back into it with a squelching splash.

Peers. The word never fit so well.

Jack and I stepped back from the splashing wine-wall before it hit the ground. All of the Epicurean tub brothers winked in unison and held their fists high while giving us a Roman salute. They all wore mauve caps like synchronized swimmers.

By this point, we were just part of the herd. The crowd was already forming and we let ourselves be sucked forward. It was about time for the fire speech to begin, thank god.

The Think Tank was pretty much a perfect bar. It had a military theme, and all of the wait staff wore uniforms. There was a decommissioned helicopter on the roof, and behind the long, spare wooden plank was a blinking map of the world with shifting pictographs representing nuclear submarines, threatening storms, and jet traffic. It was like drinking inside Mission Control.

Like many Austin restaurants, bars, and coffee shops, the Think Tank doubled as an art gallery, and its walls were filled with brightly colored posters of skeletons and corpses in traditional religious poses. A wall-size, maggoty “Last Supper” was particular effective, and the take on the “Pieta” reminded me of pictures you sometimes saw of the holocaust, except with more sunfire and magenta. The juxtaposition between military-industrial complex and baroque Mexican chic was great, if you were into that sort of thing.

Zeke was preparing for his fire speech out front, and so he didn’t say hello. Two trashcans were on fire by the hatch that functioned as the Tank’s door, and he was meditating between them. Beads of sweat had formed on his massive forehead, and he was sweating clean through the tailored three piece suit he was wearing. Jack’s mirror tie reflected the flames like custom hubcaps in front of a liquor store fire.

Unofficially, the fire speech kicked the whole DING off, and so the whole street was paying attention. It was something everybody could agree on -- except for the cynics, of course. But they were probably all down at the Sexarium, anyway. That’s where I’d be if I were a low down dirty dog. If. Heh.

“What’s he going to do?” asked Jack.

“Just watch,” I said.

There were some professors mingling in the crowd that seemed to be new editions to the throng. I didn’t remember seeing them last year, or the year before. The men all had beards and ascots, and the women wore their hair back in buns and carried leather satchels. There must have been ten of them; all dressed alike, each well under four feet tall.

Jack grabbed one of the ladies as she pushed past.

“Say,” he asked. “Where are you guys from?”

She stared at him, frowning.

“We are from Europe,” she said. “A very little country. You wouldn’t know it.”

“I know lots of things,” he said.

“We are here to sport and make merry,” she said. “We get very few vacations. Our employers are quite strict about educational policy.”

“Which employers would that be?” he asked.

She stared at him, narrowing her eyes.

“I am completely human,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” said Jack, leaning closer.

“In every way,” she said, moving backward.

“What an odd thing to say to a stranger,” said Jack, sniffing the top of her bunned head as he bent toward her.

She flared her own nostrils and scampered away, pushing out of sight between the legs of a stoned-looking hippie. It was all quite peculiar, really. But Jack seemed to forget instantly.

“He’s standing up!” said Jack, bumping me in the shoulder and pointing to Zeke. “Does that mean something is going to happen?”

“Just watch,” I said again.

Zeke held the palms of his outstretched arms flat as if consecrating an invisible wall in front of him. He brought his hands together slowly, and then – when they were less than a foot from each other – he started speaking.

“Sisters! Brothers! Knowledge has always been here for the taking, since the very day our eyes became two-way. But what do we do with it? Where do we put it, and how do we let it manifest in the world to serve human ends? How much snake do we eat, and how much crow?

“In the end, the choice is simple. It all depends on a lovely trajectory, which you can check any time you like. Here’s the test. Ask yourself: are you searching for power?”

One of the trash cans flared up with a localized fireball that raised a gasp from the audience. Thanks to oodles of pyrotechnic dollars, the fireball formed a green, smoke-hollow face – an incendiary incubus with a long chin and narrow eyes -- before dissipating. There were some random cheers. Some boos. An air-horn. A “go fuck your mother.”

“Or are you searching for freedom?” said Zeke.

He clapped his hands. The other trashcan exploded, firing a largish lump of sparkling black confetti over the heads of the cheering crowd that turned white on its way down like chemical snow. I decided that the trashcans must have pipes that led underground, and somebody was pneumatically shooting this crap out from underneath. Of course, I cheered like a jackass, just like everybody else. Freedom! Woo! Yeah! Let me out of this hell-hole!

“There are as many different kinds of knowledge as there are different kinds of fire,” Zeke continued. “Fire can be slow burning, like coals around a potato, cooking without scorching, warming without destroying. Fire can be an instantaneous flash – an explosion of gunpowder – mimicking the sudden lightning strike of inspiration. Or, fire can rage like a blaze in a forest, its crackle stirring the hearts of the sternest among us, and turning the meek wild with panic, causing them to leave runny trails of excrement behind them as the heat of death and flight penetrates their timid sphincters.

“Fire changes solid to liquid, liquid to gas. Fire in the heart, smoke in the head, say the Italian sages who chuckle at bus stops and clean deli counters. Fire is the thinker’s courtesan, and the charlatan’s nemesis. Nobody wants to end up burned at the stake for their crimes against propriety and logic. But then again, everybody secretly does.”

He strolled over to an open grate near the sidewalk. People moved out of his way, knowing what was coming. Those that didn’t move back were physically pushed aside by three or four self-appointed Samaritans.

“So we join together now to praise flame. To live as flames. To think as flames! And to one day perish as flames, with ash for hearts and steam for heads. We shall fizzle with a hiss of satisfaction as the death rattle sounds in our philosophic throats. We are thinkers. Not magicians. But we do what we can.”

The grate in front of him started to shoot flames up in his face, clouding him in a wreath of orange destruction. His chemically treated suit burned away, sparking and whistling as the zinc buttons and epaulets peeled off in spinning, jerking strips. He raised his hands to the air and threw his head back, laughing like old grim death.

He was left wearing a bright red neoprene jumpsuit that said DING on it in yellow letters. Quite a codpiece, too, I might add.

I clapped and whistled as he took a bow. Jack even raised an eyebrow, although he simply stood there with his arms folded, his eyes flicking back and forth to the sharpish shorties, those peculiar Europeans here on vacation to “sport and make merry.”

Personally, after Zeke’s speech, I was ready to head home. Even I had limits to how much philosophy I could take without getting in a fist fight.

But then the naked magician showed up. That’s when things got really interesting.

The futures salesman had sidled up along next to me while I was listening to Zeke’s rant. There was a lot of smoke still from Zeke’s big pyrotechnic display, and I was shielding my eyes from the stinging fog by keeping my head down. That was when I noticed something very pale striding up the sidewalk toward the Think Tank out of the corner of my eye. I raised my head. Was that guy? Was that guy NAKED? Was that guy? Couldn’t be. Just another strange sexual phantom for a strange sexual cat. A phantom in the mist, surely.

But evidently I wasn’t the only one hallucinating.

“What the HELL is THAT GUY doing?” asked the time privateer. “THAT is no way to express one’s IDEAS. There are laws. LAWS.”

The pale man-shaped entity parted the drifting smoke and stood facing the crowd with austere upside-down imperiousness. Zeke was officially topped, and the guy hadn’t even started speaking yet.

This was no ordinary naked man. It wasn’t that he was particularly well-endowed or anything conventional like that. There were about thirty things that made him a spectacular piece of shockingly inhuman temerity. I wondered how far he had walked with such austere imperiousness. It was the kind of austere imperiousness that would get a guy like me arrested while wearing clothes. The sort of austere imperiousness that could make a whole crowd of imperial Austrians stop and stare:

1) He was about seven feet tall
2) His bright red beard must have been three feet long.
3) Nearly every square inch of him was tattooed
4) We’re not talking lame tats – very detailed sigilistic crap, here
5) The two tats down his arms were pictures of him. One right-side up, one upside down - like playing cards.
6) He was walking on his hands. Did I mention that?
7) His toes appeared to be fully opposable; splayed like a chimp’s toes
8) He was wearing a Prince Albert
9) A Prince Albert is a chain that attaches to the penis so you can attach it to your trousers
10) The chain was not attached to his trousers
11) The chain was attached to a stud sticking out of his solar plexus
12) His eyes were way too big
13) Way too big
14) The size of small dinner plates
15) They were golden, and they seemed to spin, like the eyes of master hypnotists in cartoons
16) He had a fairly distended pot belly
17) There was a tea cup and saucer resting on it, from which he was taking small sips, using one foot
18) Upside down. Did I mention that?
19) His beard trailed along behind like the tail of some sort of pseudopod
20) Yes, yes. He was particularly well-endowed. But so what?
21) He had an outie
22) His underarm hair was also bright red and hung like double billy-goat beards
23) His pubes were braided quite charmingly. Serious care and attention had gone into this
24) In one foot he held a crystal ball
25) I could see my own reflection in the crystal ball. I was pretty sure this was in violation of some of Newton’s laws
26) He had no teeth
27) Instead: nails
28) It appeared that his knees were double-jointed
29) It appeared that his knuckles were triple-jointed
30) He was wearing a nametag clipped into his scraggly chest hair: “Hello, my name is: FORGOTTEN”

The man was an absolute crisis of misdirection.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Jack, cutting the shocked gasp of silence that had built up like pressure in a urethra. “He’s not even real.”

“SILENCE!” said Forgotten. I didn’t see him move his mouth, but I heard the voice echo like it was my own. “I HAVE COME TO TEACH YOU ALL.”

“Teach us all about very silly parlor tricks,” said Jack, turning around in a circle. “Hey! Where’d you all run off to? Why don’t you make my ace disappear and pull some flowers out of my fly?”

The man flipped up to standing on his feet. His hair stayed in the same place, but his body turned like a wheel. His cup tossed over in the air and he caught the tea as it righted, the tea slopping perfectly into his ceramic mug like a lump of mercury. The crystal ball dropped from his foot and he caught it at the last second, curling it on the inside of his wrist. And his pecker…well, his pecker was attached to his chest by a chain. It didn’t go anywhere.

Jack leaned over and whispered into my ear.

“Hang on to your wallet, Jones,” he said. “They are around here somewhere.”

“Who is?” I asked, perplexed, withdrawing my wallet just the same.

“Them! The…things. Just trust me, here. I’m gonna go fill a bucket with whiskey.”

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

But he had already pushed through the crowd and was gone.

“I AM THE FORGOTTEN MAGICIAN OF ALL UNRECORDED PAST! I HAVE COME TO TAKE VENGEANCE ON ALL OF YOU WHO HAVE FORGOTTEN MY WAYS, AND THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE CHOSEN TO IGNORE MY TEACHINGS! YOU PHILOSOPHERS. YOU CAN THINK, AND THINK, AND THINK, AND THINK, AND THINK, AND THINK, AND GET NOWHERE. NOT WITHOUT ME! I HAUNT YOUR DREAMS, I FUEL YOUR FEAR, I AM UNLIMITED IN MY POWER AND UNDERSTANDING! I OUGHT TO TEAR THIS WHOLE PLACE TO PIECES!”

“You can’t derive an ought from an is!” shouted somebody distractedly, as if by reflex.

What a ball of gas this guy was! And yet, where was that voice coming from? He put his hands on his hips and leaned forward surveying the crowd, peering seemingly at each and every one of us.

“Just who the hell are YOU, buddy?” asked Zeke, casually keeping his distance.

“I AM THE FACE OF YOUR ETERNAL OPPOSITION! ETERNALLY BANISHED, I HAVE ETERNALLY RETURNED!”

“A modernist,” whispered an albino man with sunken eyes, turning around and giving me a wink.

Forgotten made a fist and the teacup disappeared inside it. Magic! The crowd oooed. He tossed the crystal ball into the air and it became a top hat which landed square on his shaggy head. With creeping drama, his hands drifted behind his back. A square patch the size of a bed sheet began to darken behind him, as if the pure force of his will was swelling a vertical king-size into night. Somehow, he stayed illuminated in this gathering darkness, as if he were glowing from inside.

“What’s going ON?” squealed the time futures salesman, grabbing his head.

“I think you’d better leave, sir,” said Zeke, courageously attempting to put his hand on the magician’s shoulder. The man whirled on him and held up one shivering palm. Zeke fell on his ass and scrambled away.

“YOU DARE GIVE COMMANDS TO ME?”

The magician started making strange glottal noises from his throat. There was a flash, and then suddenly his hands were filled with shining balls. He began tossing them into the black square behind him. They hung, luminous, like stars in a hypnotic pocket cosmos.

“YOU WILL ALL LEARN A THING OR TWO ABOUT RESPECT FOR MYSTERY!”

I smiled. Whatever this was, it was pretty great.

The magician closed his glowing dinner-plate eyes and snaked one gyrating hand between his legs. There was a squelching noise and then suddenly the magician was holding a small stool. The kind with three legs. Which he promptly sat down upon.

“Did he just pull that out of his ass?” asked a young woman.

The darkness curled around him like a Chinese screen, and his hand disappeared again behind him.

“THERE IS NOTHING UP MY SLEEVE,” he said with a horrible, mirthless laugh. With another squelch, his eyes flew open and he was holding a lit stick of dynamite.
The crowd gasped. Cops pulled guns. I wondered why they hadn’t jumped in yet. I guess maybe they were just as fascinated as the rest of us.

He set the dynamite down on the ground carefully. His hand went back into his bottom. This time, he gingerly pulled out a nude female mannequin, which he set up next to him. She wore a cockaded silver cap. Pretty neat trick. He didn’t even need flash paper.

“MY LOVELY ASSISTANT TINA,” he said. “TINA OF DOOM.”

The shit just kept coming. At first, the cops yelled at him to stop, but this quickly devolved into looking nervously at each other, and barking into walkie-talkies. The crowd was too dazed to panic, but they were still teeming with energy like the rowdiest section of a rock concert. Our eyes moved back and forth from the sparkling dynamite fuse to his effortless prestidigitation. What would he pull out next? Were we all about to go boom?

Out came a wheelbarrow full of live chickens, and then a small table with a pair of candelabras. Knife, fork, and plate came next. The teacup returned. Finally, he pulled out an entire roast turkey, which glistened seductively with the juices of its own basting. There was scattered applause.

“TURKEY,” said the magician. “IT’S WHAT YOU ALL ARE. STUPID TURKEYS.”

As he took a giant, squirting bite out of the turkey, the chickens all exploded one by one like popcorn.

“You should really stop insulting us,” said Zeke. “We do the best we can.” The magician ignored him.

A toy helicopter flew out from under the stool, circling the Forgotten Magician’s head and trailing a red banner behind it emblazoned with the swirls and loops of incomprehensible cabbalistic letters. There was a whistling noise and a length of rope shot out of the man’s ass, arcing and then pooling into a lasso on the ground. The helicopter flew over and picked up the end of the rope with a hook from inside. It started winding the rope around its tines, turning in circles, forming a wench. The magician stood on top of his stool and waited patiently as an electric guitar was yanked from somewhere inside his bowels by the little whirlybird.

The helicopter lifted the guitar up so that everyone could get a good look, and then set it back inside the magician’s arms.

“THEY SAY THIS IS THE LIVE MUSIC CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. BAH. I’LL GIVE YOU SOME LIVE MUSIC.”

He squirted out a tambourine which he caught and gave to Tina of Doom. He turned a key in her back, and she started to tap it, grinning dizzily. He began to strum chords, screaming in some incomprehensible language. With every high expostulation, something different shot out of his ass. A go-cart. A parrot in a cage. A foot tall snow globe. A five-iron. A smoke machine. A giant, inflatable fetus. The bones of a pterodactyl. An apple pie. Fourteen different sized mason jars filled with liquid, each one a different color. Each jar played a different note as he smashed them with a golf club. All together, it was the chorus for “Video Killed the Radio Star.” He played a wicked old-time face-melter solo and gave the audience a death stare.

“NOW WHO’S IMPORTANT? YOU LIKE MY SONG?” said the Forgotten Magician. He bashed his stool into pieces with his guitar. A cop fired a shot at him, but missed.

The magician sat on the concrete ground and put his hands together, as if meditating. He started to shake. With a sudden expulsion, he was lifted off the ground by a full-size iron maiden that squeezed out from between his bony cheeks. It was heavy dark metal, except where lichens had turned it a marbleized green. He un-sprung a latch, and the iron maiden opened invitingly. He climbed back down to the ground, using the stars in his sky backdrop as handholds.

“FOR MY NEXT TRICK, I WILL NEED A VOLUNTEER FROM THE AUDIENCE,” said the Magician, gesturing to the maiden.

“These metaphysics are questionable!” shouted somebody from the audience.

It was good thing I was still gripping my wallet tightly. I felt something move in my pocket, like the snout of a puppy. I was so wrapped up in the performance that, at first, I just brushed it aside without looking. On the second pass, I snapped back and grabbed a tiny wrist.

“Hey!” I said. It was one of the little European people. One of the men. I hoisted him high off of his feet and dangled him, an expression of utter contempt smeared across his bearded slab. I set him down and then grabbed him by his ascot. He was fiercely gripping a plastic trash sack.

“Were you trying to take my wallet?” I asked.

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “Look at the Forgotten! What will the crazy naked man do next? Yes? Yes?”

I didn’t have time to argue. The doors of the Think Tank burst open, and there was Jack pulling a radio flyer with a giant barrel in the back. A barrel that barely fit through the doors.

One of the bartenders was following him, and she was not happy. She was a four star general, no less -- her hair pulled back tightly into a sexy brown ponytail. She was literally leaping into the air she was screaming so loud, and her face was as red as the medals on her chest.

“HOW are you going to pay for that?” she yelled, grabbing Jack’s shoulder and trying to stop him. “You keep saying. But tell me HOW?”

“Gold, most likely,” he said with rare composition.

The General changed tactics and hit up the closest police officer.

“That man is stealing all of our whiskey! He just came inside and started pouring barrels into that novelty Vietnam-era rain barrel!”

The cop didn’t even look at her.

“Please, ma’m,” he said. “We have a dynamite situation here. Although, to tell you the truth, that fuse doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere, does it? I think this might just be an act.”

“What are you talking about?” screamed the General. The cop pointed, and then suddenly the General wasn’t so interested in Jack anymore.

Jack rolled the wagon to the middle of the crowd and whistled through his teeth.

“Anybody here want any whiskey?” he shouted. I think I might have been the only one watching him at this point, thanks to the little thief I was holding. The little thief was sniffing the air with an aura of sudden distraction. He started twisting under my grip.

“Whiskey!” he shouted. “I smell the brown!”

I couldn’t hold on to him. He wrenched out of my hands like a fox tearing out of a steel trap, leaving his cravat behind him.

In fact, all of the little intellectuals bubbled up from inside the crowd, like scum in a greasy pan. Each of them was carrying a plastic trash sack, and each of them swarmed on Jack and his barrel of whiskey like insects. Pick your simile. Moths. Ants. Beetles. Roaches. They were small, and they were all over him, scratching and muling. Forming human pyramids that Jack casually dismantled like the defender of a French castle.

“One at a time, one at a time,” said Jack, picking them up each in turn and tossing them inside the barrel with a splash. Even the magician seemed fascinated. He had stopped his performance completely and was watching with an utterly catatonic, dazed expression. As if somebody had stopped his reel. In fact, there was something strange about the way the Magician was bending light altogether. Something familiar. As if…

“Hey, that guy’s a fake,” I said, squinting closer at the Magician. “An honest to god fake.”

“Of course he is,” said Jack with exasperation.

“Yeah,” agreed the future’s salesman. “All magicians are fakes. That dynamite looks pretty real though.”

Another cop fired a shot and missed. A group of them were conferring quietly while loading shotguns.

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. I walked over to the magic man, pushing testily through the crowd. Zeke gave me a cock-eyed questioning look and I returned it with a confident grin.

Jack had tossed the last little person inside the rain barrel, and they were splashing around merrily. Jack was now collecting the plastic bags and shaking his head at the contents he found inside.

“Look,” I said, passing my hand in front of the Magician’s eyes, who didn’t respond. “Fake.”

I reared back and punched him. My hand went right through his pixilated face and rested in the sky behind him.

“He’s just a projection,” I said. The crowd gasped. I reached down and tried to pick up the dynamite. I couldn’t, of course. It was all smoke and mirrors. The best damned smoke and mirrors I’d ever seen, to be fair.

“Where the projection coming from?” asked Zeke, joining me in examining the scene.

“Pull the chain,” said Jack.

Zeke and I both looked at him dubiously.

“Go on,” he said. “Trust me.”

I shrugged, reached out, and gave the Prince Albert a yank. There was substance, but it wasn’t a chain I felt under my hand. It was the fibrous force of an extension cord. The crowd gasped again as the whole ball of wax went out like a dangling bulb in a gas station bathroom. The magician, his assistant, the table, the iron maiden, the stars…all the other crap. It was all just an illusion. Standing there instead was another little European person. He was holding a cube with a big lens attached to it and a car battery from which I had just cut the power. He held a microphone in his hand, and had wild, barely-restrained eyes. Flecks of foam had soaked his beard.

The crowd stared at him. He stared at Jack.

“Whiskey!” he screamed, ripping off the electronics and making a break for Jack’s barrel.

Jack caught him on the fly and held him up like a struggling baby kangaroo.

“You people,” he said. “Shame on you. Philosophers are so gullible. These little bastards were stealing all of your valuables while you were busy being bamboozled by that magic idiot.”

He dumped out one of the trash bags. It was filled with wallets, jewelry, and watches. As if waking from a dream, the entire crowd that had gathered on Sixth started checking their bags and pockets, stunned to find things missing and empty.

“Settle down now, people…settle down,” said one of the more bristly police officers. “We’ll get everything back where it belongs.”

“Who the hell are those people?” I asked, examining their projection set-up with not un-considerable admiration. “And what’s the deal with the whiskey?”

“They are quite obviously leprechauns,” said Jack, turning the struggling imp in his hands upside down. “Anybody can see that.”

“There’s no such thing as leprechauns,” said Zeke.

“Don’t be dense,” said Jack. “Leprechaun just means ‘half-bodied.’”

“Where’s the tam’ o shanter? Where’s the brogue? Where’s the stovepipe? Where’s the gold?” I asked in quick succession.

“These aren’t real leprechauns,” said Jack. “Obviously, that would be insane. These are obviously robots. God knows where they came from or what they think they are doing.”

“Obviously robots?” asked the General. “What do you mean OBVIOUSLY robots?”

“Note the single-mindedness,” said Jack. “Note the proficiency with technical apparatus. Note the lightweight, aluminum design. Note the lack of distinct human smell and ease of control. Note the switch panel on the backs of their necks.”

He turned the creature around, showing everyone. He pressed a button and the creature went dead. He pressed another button and he sprang back to life. He did this several more times until everyone was completely baffled.

“So they are robots,” said Zeke. “Why are they stealing wallets?”

“Beats me,” said Jack. “My guess would be that they have a hard time finding gainful employment otherwise. Thanks to discrimination and their distracting diminution.”

“Why would leprechaun robots need jobs?” I asked.

“To pay for things,” said Jack. “Whiskey, for instance.”

“Well, who made them, then?” asked the futures salesman.

“Who made any of us?” replied Jack with pure poise. He turned the leprechaun robot off once more and disrobed him. Underneath his professional attire was an aluminum exoskeleton, just as Jack had predicted. Jack grabbed the robot by both heels and started shaking. Little globs of gold started to fall from pockets in the robot’s frame, where they had evidently just been rattling around like you or I would carry lint in our clothing crevices.

“Just as I suspected. A brazen little cutpurse,” said Jack, tossing the robot aside and collecting the gold. He gave a handful to the General.

“This ought to pay for the whiskey,” he said.

“Yeah, what ABOUT the whiskey?” asked Zeke, scratching his chin.

“Authenticity,” said Jack, shrugging. “If that didn’t work, I was going to start asking riddles. That would have set them off just as easy.”

Another cop fired a shot. He blew up the projector in my hand and was roundly berated by his fellow bluebottles.

(“There’s no dynamite, Jimmy!”

“Oh yeah,” he said sheepishly. “It was all just tricks. Sorry. Forgot.”)

“It seems like there is much more to this,” said Zeke. “I still don’t know what the hell is going on here.”

Nearly all of his colleagues agreed, shouting at Jack to explain himself.

“I don’t know what’s going on either,” said Jack. “But I’m tired and ready for bed. It seems to me that creating an army of self-sufficient robot leprechauns is something anybody would enjoy. I’m surprised there aren’t more roving bands of them in the world. You might check their serial numbers or dust for fingerprints or something. I don’t know. That’s not my game. Try Germany. I’m going home.”

“But…” said the future’s salesman.

“Enough!” said Jack. “Leprechaun robots made a giant angry magician pull things out of his ass in order to distract you and steal your wallets. Let it go!”

“There are a lot of questions here!” shouted somebody in the back.

“Fine! Ask them! Just give me time to get away!” shouted Jack, grabbing me by the arm.

“This whole thing requires some serious debating!” shouted another voice.

I was being hauled away. I made my move.

“I say it’s a case of a priori discrimination!” shouted one woman with a Scandinavian accent.

“Those robots were doomed to be free!” shouted somebody else.

“Come on, Jones,” said Jack through his teeth. “Run!”

We did. The argument swept down the street like a nuclear blast. You could feel it at your back, pushing you forward. You could tell it was going to go on forever, and there wasn’t going to be any resolution. None at all. Maybe there would be an article in the paper, but this was going to be just one of those things better forgotten.

Personally, I was just happy I had snagged one of those trash bags on my way out. After all, they went to so much trouble. Could I really let it go to waste?

By Miracle Jones

Man, I love reading about sex. I love writing about sex. I love it. It may not be as fun as actually having sex, but it is much more awesome than reading about people coming to terms with the past, or having important epiphanies about existence, or whining about truth and justice. All writing is essentially an intimate conjugal act between two minds, and sexual fiction (it is all fiction – nobody remembers pimples and despair) strips away some of the bullshit and gets right to the heart of the matter. Imagine somebody fucking you who just won’t shut up about the Standard and Poor Index, or the expressive way light ripples on water.

But after our grand encounter with what was probably God, I contracted a withering case of literary impotence. My pen just wouldn’t flow. I couldn’t stroke my brain hard enough, and the eternal feminine would only wear flannel. Every potentially tender caress froze my finger, and She only wanted to talk about her Father. I’d met Him, though, and He was a real bastard. A nunce. A ponce. A lunker, a wanker, a stinker, and a link. A glass-jawed pony boy, and not much of a musician, either.

Maybe I was just jealous. He definitely had a bigger organ than I did.

The worst part was that Jack seemed to be fine with it. Whatever his deal was before, he was a changed man. He spent more time out, leaving me to an empty trailer and an emptier head. He bought boxes of math books, and spent days filling up pads of paper with strange calculations. Whenever I tried to talk to him about the crazy crap we had experienced, he would just smile whimsically and say something cryptic, like:

“I never appreciated math before, but think of all those numbers!”

Or:

“Dancing! Dancing! Dancing! The whole world is dancing!”

And then he would leave with an insulting skip to his step, only to return exhausted with horribly evasive explanations as to where he’d been.

That was his other new deal. Dancing all night long. Often he had girls with him when he returned and I was forced to go for solitary walks in the woods, seething with frustration and trying to puzzle through his new obsessions to avoid thinking about my own failings. It was always either about numbers or the infernal boogey fever with him all of a sudden, but I couldn’t put my finger on the pattern, and he was too busy to discuss it.

I don’t dance, and I can’t even put two and two together. Dancing is just idiotic, and math might be the smartest, most noble thing you can do in the universe, but it makes ME feel idiotic, so fuck it.

In fact, I don’t like dancing so much I am going to digress about it. I think its necessary, and it might even work into the larger themes of this story somehow.

I have to warn you, though – I’m not very good with themes, so I can’t be entirely sure about that. Most of my other stories end with somebody spurting jizz all over the face of somebody else and a pun about meat products. It’s an artifact of the craft.

Short Digression about Dancing:

Even though I absolutely detest dancing, I often find myself dragged to clubs by friends and half-assed acquaintances, forced to slink along the wall and observe hell’s gyroscopic picture show. I also watch a lot of documentaries about the mating rituals of animals and insects. Based upon my writerly scrutiny of both, I have come to the conclusion that dancing exists for two reasons.

(1) To scatter the brain. People who like to dance are people who feel very uncomfortable with the rest of existence. They are people with poor linguistic skills and a highly refined sense of awkwardness in the face of authority and responsibility. In the course of their lives, they have to listen more than they talk. People bark orders at them, and they have to take them, not knowing what the hell else to do. Therefore, they absolutely go dingo bananas when they get to flip out to music in a dark little room. Suddenly, it’s the people who get through life using their wits and will who are uncomfortable and awkward! The tables have turned! They have their revenge! “Try to screw me out of provisions and dignity now, buddy,” they shout with their unleashed hips!

Plus, the trauma caused by flinging one’s brain around kills brain cells – as does alcohol – and keeps them from sealing the connections together that might remind them of their miserable banality.

(2) To present (the verb). When high-primate females are at their most sexually fertile, they go through something called “estrus.” Their vagina becomes swollen and sensitive, and they spend all day running up to dominant males and rubbing them with this wonderful new thing. They stick out their ape asses, bat their ape eye-lashes, smack their ape lipstick (it’s how you can tell the males from the females), and say “Mount me, King Kong!” with every prickly hair on their inflamed ape libidos. The subsequent rutting comically drives whole flocks of hooting parrots out of the underbrush. Someday I am going to open a nightclub called “Estrus” with a jungle theme and make a million dollars while I laugh all night long behind a two-way mirror.

Short Digression about Math:

Math makes me very, very nervous. I mean think about it. Einstein sits in this little room in a patent office, giggling to himself and scratching his balls, and then ten years later, there are two holes in Japan the size of…I don’t know…Japan. With numbers and the way they fit together, we have put men on the moon and eradicated polio. Holy shit.

I figure that to a mathematician my entire life is the equivalent of some retarded cokehead bopping along to pasteurized techno beats in a crowded bar, and -- since I know how irritating that is -- I try to stay out of the way.

Anyway, to get back to the situation at hand, there I was writer’s blocked all to hell by that red-headed freak Jehovah. I tried everything I knew to get myself back in the game. Sleep deprivation, smoking an entire pack of cigarettes from start to finish, rabid and argumentative street theater followed by self-imposed days of silent contemplation. I even tried going on a road trip, but I only made it four miles hitchhiking, and that was just because the trucker had a broken side-mirror and didn’t see me squashed to the rims of his mud-flaps like an escaped con. Hitchhiking sucks nowadays.

I needed to sell something in order to eat, and all the cream reams were clamoring for something new from the self-proclaimed master of the fevered nib. Not clamoring, perhaps -- but a few of them definitely wanted to know what I had done with their advances.

It was a tough situation all around, and after one of the shittier weeks of my creative life, I decided to go visit Veronica to see if her Sexarium could jog my imagination. Since “Wank” had become insanely successful, she had been soaking up the public spotlight and had been much too busy to hang out with the likes of us. Plus, she had mentioned earlier that she was developing something else revolutionary with the money she was making, and I thought that if I surprised her in her lair I had a shot at finding out what it was.

Jack was at home when I declared my intention to head downtown and pay a visit to our favorite lady in black.

“Can I tag along?” he asked.

“Good lord – why?” I asked. “Since you’ve discovered clubs and the continuum, you’ve gone home with a different girl nearly every night. Surely you are sick of sex and those who profit from its scarcity.”

“I am very curious, and I’ve never been. I am welcome, aren’t I?”

“I don’t even know if I’m welcome,” I said, “There was an incident with a client in one of his personal movies. I accidentally might have turned a garden hose on him.”

“I see.”

“Don’t say it like that. I was perfectly justified. He had this dog fetish, and wouldn’t stop humping my leg. But since he was a paying customer, and I was just an idle layabout, Veronica sort of had to ban me or he threatened not to pay. I tried to explain that no one in their right mind would just let a dog hump their leg and that I was making the experience more realistic – but he wasn’t paying for realism.”

“Couldn’t we just go after hours?”

“There aren’t hours – just shifts. Besides, I don’t think it was an actual, binding ban. Just something token. She loves me. I’m great. And if you want to tag along, be my guest. The more the merrier.”

Since neither of us actually have a car, we were forced to rely upon Austin public transportation. We hiked down to the nearest bus stop and took the number 1 down to her “film studio” in the South Congress warehouse district.

The Sexarium didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the art galleries and boutiques down there. It didn’t have a campy Southwestern theme, for instance – or incomprehensible art deco sculptures that boggled the mind and pocketbook. It was a solid black cube with no windows that was in the middle of a tremendous sandlot ringed by a plastic, see-through fence. Veronica had rigged up a tractor with a rake attachment, and every morning one of her female employees raked the sand into therapeutic Tibetan patterns wearing nothing but a farmer’s hat, boots, and a bikini made out of a checkered tablecloth.

Going down to the Sexarium to watch the morning “raking” was a regular pass-time for both Austin’s largely male homeless population and the college frat daddies. It was nice that these two groups -- with their radically different lifestyles -- could rally together to appreciate crass female exploitation. Veronica was a damn genius. Almost made you want to write a haiku. Every once in a while the rider went publicly topless (something legal in Austin) and it was always entertaining to watch people smoosh their faces up against the plastic fence from inside.

Jack and I got off the bus, moseyed through the gate, and made our way to the front door – a door so embedded into the cube’s matte finish that you would only know where it was by watching people come and go. There was a secret entrance underground for more high profile guests in an apartment across the street, but getting in there was a real pain in the ass. Besides, being seen frequenting the most flagrant and notorious brothel this side of the border could only help my reputation as a lecherous snake, so I always tried to crash the place in high style.

The only way you could get into the Sexarium was by knowing somebody else that was a member. Veronica had the exclusivity/demand/price quotient down cold. Members were issued their own private RFID chip that they could put in their shoe, and when they stood in front of the door or drove up to the plastic gate, it swished open and let them in. There was still conventional security, but Veronica liked the hidden puppet master feel.

“Shall I give you the grand tour?” I asked Jack as soon as the door closed behind us.

“That would be fine and dandy like summer candy,” he replied.

But we both just stood there with dumb expressions on our faces. Maybe that was because there was a pair of eighty-year old men (wearing nothing but neckties) doubly-penetrating a young, fusty (sic) maiden in the foyer who was craning her neck around the speckled back of one bonebag to type on the computer she was using. She was evidently trying to get some work done, and she wasn’t going to let the fact that she was being saddled like a coin-op drugstore locomotive stop her.

Lobby fornication used to be against the rules, but I guess there must have been some overcrowding going on. I guess since Veronica had become so popular.

“How’s it going, Samantha?” I asked, “Should I sign in or something?”

“Don’t bother,” said the receptionist in a blasé voice. Evidently, her world was not being rocked very hard. “Careful though – the cameras are running. These guys have cataracts the size of fish-tanks, they’ll fuck anything that struggles, and you don’t want to end up an extra. Believe me.”

She pointed, and I saw the digital video camera and tripod in question. I obediently moved six inches to the left. These were paying customers, after all. And by the embedded tan-lines, I would guess retired actors.

“Howdy, old-timers,” said Jack loudly. “Don’t mind us. We’re just passing through.”

Both of them grunted in garbled unison.

“They can’t hear a word you say,” said Samantha. “Too damn old.”

“Eh, what was that, baby?” one of them shouted.

“Nothing, Grandpa!” shouted Samantha sweetly at the top of her lungs. “I’m sooooo bad and you sure know how to punish me proper.”

“Eh, right,” he said, unsure of himself.

“How is this happening?” whispered Jack to Samantha through a closed fist. “They must be older than sodomy.”

“Nothing is older than sodomy,” I chimed in.

“Still…shouldn’t they be dead? Or at least quietly convalescing?”

“Viagra and Parkinson’s disease,” sighed Samantha. “They can go for hours.”

They did seem to be twitching rather pathologically. Like they were being goosed with electric current. If it weren’t for the delightful juxtaposition of young and old, there would be nothing at all erotic about the whole affair.

“They were famous in their day,” said Samantha, trying on a wan smile. “I suppose I should feel honored they’ve decided to blow their social security checks on little ol’ me.”

There were two doors out of the foyer. I steered Jack toward one of them, and we began our tour.

“Seeya, Sam,” I said. She didn’t even look up.

The Sexarium had two long hallways that made a cross on the bottom floor. These hallways bisected into four giant rooms. All of the private rooms were upstairs, only accessible by an escalator that ran up and down where the two central corridors met in the middle.

Three of the bottom rooms were considered public, and the fourth was Veronica’s private office and laboratory, where she did her mixing and pouring. There was a library with one of the world’s largest collections of erotic literature (I was fully represented), and a ballroom where some of the better parties of recent memory were held. The other room was probably my favorite place in the world, and our first stop. If even mousy little Samantha was on duty, the Rumpus Room was surely seeing some major action.

The sign out front said “Filming in Progress: Group Therapy 1116.” As soon as I opened the door, I knew this had been a good idea. You know -- creatively.

The Rumpus Room was the size of a small church, and it was facing Austin’s downtown. This was the only room in the Sexarium whose glass sides were see-through, and the lucidity was almost entire. If it weren’t for just the slightest amount of glare, it would be as if one were standing in some sort of climate-controlled atrium. The room was two stories tall, so you could also see the sky. I don’t have to tell you how beautiful it was on nights when smog didn’t block out the stars. With the plastic fence, it was just like standing inside some barren lot in the middle of Austin.

Except there was nothing barren about the place. There was probably more seed being spilled in Veronica’s Rumpus Room than anywhere on the planet.

The décor was Victorian pleasure garden. There were hedges and flowers and pissing Grecian sculptures. Somewhere, light classical music was playing. Perhaps early Mozart, but I couldn’t tell you. I like powdered wigs and intrigue, but only as scenery, not as a way of life.

Instead of a carpet of grass, there was green flexi-foam – one of Veronica’s inventions. It was a lot like jello, except it held its shape. Veronica called it “slow water.” If you stood in one place, you would slowly sink until you were eventually four feet down. If you kept moving, you could travel across only leaving footprints. It took an hour for the flexi-foam to return to level, but since it was soft as terry cloth, there was no chance of hurting yourself if you fell into a slow water hole while running to escape buggering by some randy nymph or satyr.

“Wow,” said Jack.

Wow was right. The whole place was like a suburban backyard in lovebug season. There was so much perverse and acrobatic sex going on, Veronica had to turn on vacuum pumps for the semen pools. It was like a snowstorm in there.

The sexual implications of slow water are immense and surprising, and it is a goddamn wonderful invention that needs to find its way into every home in America. Instead of beds for mom and dad: slow water pits, I say. Some of the best sexual positions known to man can only be held in free fall and in slow water. If slow water is a newly naked woman stretching to embrace you, water beds are a can of mace, and conventional beds are electric chain-mail chastity belts.

Plus, the slow water allowed you to regulate your desired level of privacy by letting you seclude yourself in a sinking love hole. Most people didn’t last long enough to sink all the way down, but there were a few professionals who spent hours down there – taking all comers and sending them out over the top like good little Jerries. The Rumpus Room was everything WWI trench warfare should have been. Plus, there was an open bar.

We watched the surface dwellers for a good ten minutes. Men with women, women with women, men with men, men by themselves, women by themselves, post-op transsexuals with farm implements, crudely constructed robots with bowls full of kidney pie. The Rumpus Room even had a partial second story – four balconies connected by nets, swings, and tightropes -- so there was a lot to look at. Closest to the door was a pair of middle-aged blonde women I recognized as the respective heads of the sociology and history departments of UT. They were servicing four Arabs with bejeweled turbans who looked as if they were in town on business. They all wore mauve cop sunglasses.

The sociology professor turned around and winked at Jack. He started to walk forward into the fray as if hypnotized. I had to grab him by the shoulder.

“See?” I said, “Better than dancing.”

“Maybe,” said Jack, his feet still moving him forward against my restraining grip.

“We should probably say hello to Veronica first,” I said. “Besides, there’s still more to see. We can always come back.”

He didn’t really respond, but he let himself be dragged away. I shut the big double French doors. If there had been a latch, I might have used it.


I figured that the ballroom and library would be in much the same state, so I decided we should go right to the lab. There were still the private rooms upstairs and the dungeon below, but I figured Jack was now sufficiently impressed to justify staying for awhile.

Even the halls were being used, and we had to fight our way through cramped and writhing tunnels of lust to get to Veronica’s relatively secluded oasis. The law was that everybody having sex also had to be filmed, so there were cameras everywhere, even though you didn’t always see them. Veronica was just flouting the pornography loophole, so it wasn’t as if the films ever got watched. It was only in dire financial circumstances that Veronica stooped to making porno movies. And even then, her productions were much more highbrow than random people doing it in hallways and alcoves. Often, I got to consult. The best director in town was the minister of the downtown Episcopal Church. He directed under the name Willy Club, and his wife made excellent potato salad for the cast parties.

When we got to the private, oak-paneled lobby of Veronica’s suite, I rang the buzzer and waited for Veronica to squawk at us over the PA. Veronica’s suite was the original and oldest building, and she had accreted the rest of the cube from this initial egg. I knew where the camera was here, so I stood on my tippy-toes and covered it with my palm.

“Yes? Hello? Who is it?”

“It is I, Don Diego Juan Carlos – here to ravish and mystify you. I demand your virginity.”

“Virginity? Who is this really?”

“It’s me and Jack.”

“Jones! I thought I banned you.”

“Yeah, but how was Jack gonna get in without me? Very thoughtless, Veronica. I had to un-ban myself to save you from being an embarrassing boor.”

“Jack can come in. You have to pay. Or beg.”

“You won’t let your own brother into the bowels of your awesome sex castle? I built some of this stuff with my own hands.”

“You are going to be doing a lot with your own hands.”

“I promise I’ll behave. The customer is always right. Let me in. I’m completely reformed. Plllleeeeeeaaaaassssseeeee.”

Veronica sighed way too deeply, and then opened the door herself. I immediately picked her up and put her on my back. She giggled and didn’t protest. I marched in, and Jack followed, shutting the door behind him. Veronica and I did a lap around the foyer like we were at the Churchill Downs. Jack just hung by the threshold and gaped.

“This is absolutely amazing,” said Jack, once he had taken it all in. “Stunning beyond all belief.” I caught my breath and joined him. He gawked, and I felt home.

Veronica’s offices are also called the “Black Lab.” Most of the time, when you think of the laboratories of scientists and researchers, everything is polished and shiny. Antiseptic white and chrome. This makes sense: you can see spills, and there is enough reflected light to keep you from making any dumb mistakes out of blindness. Veronica was never interested in making sense, however. She was interested in making things, and therefore her laboratory suited her. It was completely jet black, counter-pointed only by fluorescent crimson highlights. The tables, the beakers, the floors, the ceilings, the walls, the curtains -- the art -- all black as pitch, and yet fully functional. No overhead lights. No chrome anywhere.

So -- in addition to the already impressive nature of a well-stocked and fully-funded research facility – the Black Lab was pretty overwhelming in its aesthetic intensity. Whatever your opinions on the matter, it definitely said a lot about Veronica.

“So what’s this new thing you’ve been working on that’s kept you so busy lately?” I asked.

“That’s none of your business,” she snapped at me coldly. But, of course, she had a warm smile for Jack. I could hear it in her voice.

“A pleasure to see you again, Mr. Acid. I wish you had told me you were coming – I would have prepared a more grand entrance for you. As it is, the place is at peak operating hours and therefore a bit frayed around the edges.”

“I noticed,” said Jack.

I set Veronica down and gave her a big kiss.

“So this is where all the magic happens, is it?” asked Jack.

“Oh, yes,” said Veronica, “I am currently between projects, but – now that you’re here --I could use your opinion on something minor. I eventually want to do a market focus group on this new little concoction of mine, but I could use the taste of two trusted gents before we go that far.”

“I don’t know about Jack,” I said, “But I have to believe you already know how I taste.”

Everyone ignored me, as usual. I tried again.

“Does that mean you’ve finished with this amazing new thing you keep teasing me with?”

“Months ago,” said Veronica. “But it’s still a secret. If you help me out -- and if you are very, very, very sweet -- maybe I’ll tell you about it AND even lift your ban. Maybe.”

“Hot damn,” I said, giving Jack a nudge. “Nepotism is my new favorite fetish.”

“Perhaps we will get to explore it further,” said Veronica. “But first – follow me.”

Now that she was done being surprised by our unexpected materialization, she was all composure and drama. She clacked down one ebony hall, her nose pointed high in the air, her palms down, stroking the aura of the floor with each swing of her muslin-clad arms. We had no choice but to follow.

Veronica led us down a snaking trail through the maze of her own endless creativity and the detritus of forgotten projects. There were lots of great toys I wanted to play with immediately, but I was supposed to be on my best behavior, and Veronica didn’t slow down to explain her oddities.

We first passed through Veronica’s Sextech section. There were whole racks of dildos laid out in baffling patterns that loosely corresponded to size, shape, and method of manufacture. Legions of sex robots lounged in baffling states of con and destruction, some of them whirring and flapping rather suggestively, many of them actually making love to one another in incomprehensible ways. There were giant scale models of every human erogenous zone, and plastic genitalia mock-ups so large you could climb them. I knew from experience that the gargantuan vagina, at least, was actually functional. Once, while dangling from the clit and doing a very passable orangutan impression, the damn thing broke off in my hands and sprayed me with several gallons of near-boiling Astroglide.

There were tubes, and coils, and burners, and bubblings vats of noxious – yet strangely enticing – perfumes. I even congratulated myself on recognizing Veronica’s signature “Wank” blend, concocted as it was from the composite smell of a billion ground-up porno magazines.

Veronica just strolled right on by like we were needed in surgery – and we certainly didn’t have time to properly linger. Jack’s eyes bugged out at some of the things in there, but he kept his questions to himself.

“This way, please,” she said calmly, taking a hard right into what looked like a wall. She passed right through. I looked at Jack, grinned, and followed. When I looked closer, I realized that it was just a trick with three mirrors and a piece of spray-painted cardboard.

Black had its uses after all. Truly, there was no end either to Veronica’s ingenuity or to her demented sexual funhouse.

After following the click-clack of Veronica’s heels through oppressive sheafs of unlit darkness, we finally found ourselves in a glowing cave I had never been in before. Veronica changed up where she hid her unreleased treasures as often as she changed the layout of her suite, and this must be where she was presently hiding her stash. Easily bored was our sultry, smoldering gal pal V.

“Take me. Take me here,” I said.

“Later, you walking hard-on. And only if you are on your best behavior.”

In this cramped and concentrated space, Veronica had taken up temporary residence. There was a queen size bed in one corner, and a satisfied-looking couple asleep in it. Veronica snapped her fingers. They stood up, bowed, and went out the way we had come. Not a stitch of clothes. The girl reminded me of “Barbie,” but only because the guy reminded me of a “Ken” doll. Hmmm.

“Newlyweds,” said Veronica after they had left. “He’s a conceptual artist, and she married him for his incredibly tiny penis. She loves it – prefers direct stimulation to penetration. I am teaching him how to use his nubbin for maximum orgasmic effect. Let me tell you: it’s a good thing this place is soundproofed.”

A word about Veronica’s Sexarium admissions policy. Veronica only has one membership rule. Members of the Sexarium must be creators. It doesn’t matter what age, what stripe, what method, how prolific, how minor, how major, or in what medium. Members of the Sexarium must be people who make things -- people whose driving force in life is to fill up the world’s crushing white space with the milk of human handywork. This could mean through business, the arts, trade, manufacturing. Patronage. Anything.

But this also meant that if you were middle-management, a politician, an accountant, a security guard, or a soldier, you were shit out of luck. Master manipulators and agents of destruction were expressly forbidden.

This meant that everybody enjoying themselves in Veronica’s Sexarium was almost invariably fascinating, and shared a higher sympathy than religion or politics could forge.

Ah, you protest, but what about doctors and teachers? They don’t create anything palpable, you say, but surely they deserve the most satisfying and kinky sex society can provide. And I say to you: what’s more palpable than health and knowledge? (FYI: doctors and teachers tend to spend most of their time down in the dungeon, disciplining each other. That’s not my thing, really…but goddamn, it is cute.)

At any rate, her membership policy selected for people I generally respected. Most people kept their sex here, and at the required monthly VD screening, there were almost no surprises.

Veronica clacked over to a black refrigerator and removed two chilled pint glasses. I noticed for the first time that an entire wall of this cave was filled up with rows and rows of stacked beer kegs.

I sprawled out on Veronica’s bed and pretended to go to sleep. I was not looking forward to whatever this was going to be. I’d been recruited for taste-testings before, and this could take hours. By the time she was finished, you wouldn’t know what you liked and what you didn’t.

Taste doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny. Taste is only honest when it first wakes up, and right before it goes to sleep. But Veronica would stab and stab, and wring and wring, until you were all used up and worthless to her.

Jack, however, was blissfully unaware what I had gotten him into. He stood politely in one place with his arms behind his back – still trying to take everything in. I knew that soon he would be cursing me for dragging him away from what could have been the best orgy of his life and instead making him try every gastric iteration of some radical new (possibly poisonous) aphrodisiac. He could wait, though. The orgy wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, according to the placard, it had been going for 1116 days.

Veronica poured each of us a heaping glass of beer, drawn expertly from one of the unmarked kegs. I hid my head under a pillow, but she threatened to pour it on me if I didn’t drink it. Rolling my eyes, I made a big production of getting up and taking the beer like hemlock from the 30 tyrants.

“Try it,” said Veronica, “It’s something special. I imagine it is going to change everything.”

“Down the hatch,” said Jack. We both took mighty draughts. Tasted like beer to me.

“How is it?” asked Veronica.

“I got to tell you…it’s nothing special,” I said.

Jack nodded.

“It just tastes like normal beer?” asked Veronica.

“Yup.”

“Nothing extraordinary or overwhelming? Nothing that curls your whiskers or toes?”

“Nothing,” said Jack.

“Excellent,” said Veronica, plucking the glasses from our hands.

Somehow this was more ominous than anything I could possibly imagine.

“Excellent? What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

Jack looked at the bottom of his glass suspiciously. He scraped a smudge with one neatly-clipped fingernail.

“Are you ready to go back to the Rumpus Room now?” asked Veronica sweetly.

“Dammit, V, what was in that beer?” I nearly shouted. It came out as a slurred and playful whisper.

“Did you just drug us?” asked Jack in a similar slippery gloss.

“Of course. How silly. Follow me.”

I started to say something. To…you know…fucking QUERY what had just happened. But all of a sudden I really didn’t give a shit. In fact, I felt right as rain. Veronica clacked out of the cave, and Jack and I followed like smitten puppies. Suddenly, we were so carefree, we were almost whistling.

As soon as we made it back into the more public area of her private suite, Veronica stopped, turned on one heel, and leapt at me. She whipped out a penlight and flashed it right in my eyes, scanning my pupils. Slowly, she grinned, put her penlight away, and then continued on her way. I was too relaxed to even say anything.

Veronica led us through her suite, back out the door, down the long, cross-hallway, and back to the Rumpus Room, where the orgy was still in full swing. She threaded her way through see-saw mobs, slow water holes, and daisy chains, and sat us at a bench welded to the floor, right in the middle of the action. Everybody said hello to Veronica as she passed, and people were very careful not to fling any fluids in her direction.

“How do you feel?” she asked, sitting down next to me.

I stared at her. I should have been mad, but I wasn’t really.

“I feel duped. But pretty good, otherwise,” I said finally. “You know, comfortable. Content.”

“How about you, Jack?”

“I feel very lazy, actually. Like I could just sit here all day long and it wouldn’t matter in the slightest.”

“It wouldn’t, you know,” said Veronica, patting his leg.

“Yes, I see that,” said Jack.

“I could really use a sandwich,” I said. “Anybody else want a sandwich?”

In front of me, a group of enthusiastic weirdos were performing the rarely executed “Flying Buttress.” This involves a six-gallon tub of margarine, several strong women who have had experience with pommel horse exercises, and a team of “catchers” with very slender wrists. A man with a handlebar mustache was doing most of the tossing, and a large crowd had gathered to watch. Strangely, I could only muster mild interest.

“I am afraid I have been guilty of misleading you both,” said Veronica. “I have drugged you with an invention of mine I am calling “Dénouement,” and it is my most powerful creation yet. It is a medication exclusively for men, although very few human subjects have tried it yet at all. This afternoon, you are each amateur psychonauts, exploring the chemical soup of consciousness. Dénouement affects each person differently, and I’m afraid I couldn’t help seeing what it would do to such rarified gentlemen as yourselves. Please: tell me everything that bubbles up. Don’t be afraid to share.”

“Not that I really care,” said Jack, “But what does Dénouement do exactly?”

“It is a psychoactive sex drug that will soon be illegal, I’m sure. It probably won’t catch on at parties, but I bet it will save a few relationships.”

“The last thing I feel like doing is having sex,” said Jack.

Veronica wrote this down on a little pad.

“And what’s the first thing you feel like doing?” asked Veronica.

“I dunno…having a conversation with a dear, dear friend. Not that I really care,” said Jack, “But what does Dénouement do exactly?”

“It is a neuro-inhibitor. Well, more of a neuro-crystallizer. It takes the feeling in your head directly after you’ve had a very strong orgasm – right after your heart has stopped thumping and you are no longer flushed and sweaty – and holds it. It spreads it all over your brain for a good three hours. Some people are more susceptible than others, of course.”

“How did you come up with such a thing, V?” I asked laconically.

“Trade secret.”

“Then WHY did you come up with such a thing?”

“Why not? It might hurt my client base, but I figured the world could use such a drug. Imagine a world where everybody has already come. It certainly takes the pressure out of things. Instead of women being drugged and date-raped, men will be drugged and date-analyzed. Couples will be able to spend entire evenings just hanging out and enjoying one another’s company without the impending doom of sexual peril. The freaks of the future will all prefer intellectual congress to the sexual variety. Instead of science and war, people will get excited about really kick-ass drum solos, water colors, and metaphysics.”

“Isn’t that what heroin is for?” I asked.

“Why is it only for men?” asked Jack.

Veronica shrugged. “I’m still trying to work that out. It doesn’t work on women. They can come, and come again. There’s not as much release when they take it. It does something – but it isn’t as dramatic.”

She smiled. We must have looked like a right couple of jackasses, gaping mildly at all of the debauchery around us without any desire to participate. I squinched up my eyes and tried to fight it.

“Not that I really care,” said Jack, “But what does Dénouement do exactly?”

“It makes men satisfied. And it is totally clean and non-habit forming, unlike other more volatile drugs. But check this out. Try doing a math problem. What’s 32 times 5?”

Jack stared at her blankly. I rested my head in my hands, and shook it back and forth like a toy spaceship. Fuck math problems: with every ounce of my being, I willed myself to become aroused. Nothing. I had never experienced this before. Ever. Was this more punishment from God in the form of his avenging angel Veronica?

“What was the question?” asked Jack.

Somebody had turned off the Mozart and was now playing circus techno music to accompany the “Flying Butress” performers. The scene had spread, and the whole room was watching – rocking to the same beat. Jack’s toes didn’t even tap. I watched a naked nineteen-year-old pianist with shaggy red hair slowly climb down from the ceiling on a human column of painfully erect sculptors. Her handholds were well chosen, but the whole thing just seemed quaint and sort of ridiculous.

“Sex and math used to be considered opposites,” said Veronica. “The best way to achieve scientific greatness used to be through physical and psychological purity. But I’ve discovered that it is almost impossible for men to give a crap about the phenomenal world at all under the influence of Dénouement. I’ve always known the split between logos and eros was bullshit, but now I’ll be able to write up a controlled clinical study. God, I’m awesome.”

I tried to cram my head full of the most twisted visions I could…to get at the center of my normally torrential libido. If I was dry before, I was practically Death Valley now. There was nothing. Not even a spark. Or was there?

“It’s two hundred or so, isn’t it?” said Jack. “Aroundabout there, anyway.” He smacked his lips and discovered his shoes weren’t fully tied. He bent down and picked up one foot and crossed it over his knee. The task of retying them seemed to baffle him beyond all belief, but he set his jaw and furrowed his brow, and dedicated himself to this all-consuming science project.

I started sifting through my consciousness, cutting and splicing, yanking cords and plugging them into dusty old amps. The part of my brain that dealt with sex was as hyperatrophied as the right arm of a javelin thrower, and drugging it into stupor was dangerous. Everything else rested on top of it in there. I mustered everything that made me human into a neon distress signal and started flashing it into my hindbrain.

In my minds-eye, buried deep within, in the pit where my secrets ate each other, I saw a girl wearing a red dress walking slowly down a beach. It was Her! She wasn’t gone after all! And that dress! She turned to me and smiled. That smile…

I screamed and fell writhing to the floor. When I finally picked myself back up, the whole room had stopped what they were doing and were watching. They immediately began fucking again as soon as they saw I was okay.

“Fascinating,” said Veronica, scribbling in her little book.

“What a cruel, horrible thing to do – robbing a pornographer of his imagination,” I started to say.

But then I realized my mind was chock full to the BRIM with sex, sex, sex. Sweet Jesus. I had never had so many competing ideas. I was cured! Being forced to rewire my brain from the bottom up must have jarred free everything that was stuck. The Deity – that BASTARD -- must have switched the libidos of Jack and I, but now that we had been chemically reset, I could feel the fire again. The Muse was whispering to me so insistently I could barely hear myself think. My hands started twitching, and I grabbed Veronica’s pad and pen and started furiously scribbling down scenarios and situations.

I now realized I had a boner that had actually put a hole in my jeans. But that was not important yet.

“Tell me Jones, how often do you masturbate? On average?” asked Veronica, sort of stunned.

“Five or six times a day. If I’m not getting laid,” I said, not looking up from my scribbling.

“How about you, Mr. Acid?”

Jack had taken off his shoes, and had become fascinated with his feet. He was spreading his toes apart and then squeezing them back together, letting out an exclamation of delight with each successful contraction.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Acid?” asked Veronica more loudly.

“I’m really more of a cuddler,” said Jack.

That was when I pounced. I crumpled up the paper I was writing on, shoved it in my pocket for later, grabbed V, and dove into the nearest vacated slow water hole. The entire Rumpus Room cheered.

I didn’t see Jack again for an entire month. Supposedly, he spent the whole time learning how to play the zither. He never got very good at it, but then again – neither of us really knew what good zither playing sounded like.