Resisterator

Shelby shook off the seawater as she scampered out of the sea onto the dusty and well-shelled beach, somewhere off the coast of an as-of-yet-sovereign Caribbean island near the Boarsh Castle Reef, where supposedly hidden ghosts, or goats, she couldn’t remember which, were swaying with the seagrass, nestled next to a small smack of jellyfish participating in what appeared to be some sort of invertebrate ceremony commemorating their dead, the group encircling a flaccid, lifeless one; or so at least she had imagined while diving down there, discovering for herself the reality which rest serene deep in that green and pulpy ocean. She was in full SCUBA gear but was missing the obvious tank when she reached the others on the shore and was eager to narrate what she had found and learned, knowing even beforehand that whatever it was by the reef, it certainly wasn’t alive and was possibly undead, or perhaps merely was ghoulish, but was (without a doubt) festering. A general suspicion that Shelby was inordinately superstitious and perhaps also a bit oafish was wrought among the others, a group of tenured professors, white-haired and with balding heads attached to matching beards and with squinting and reaching, almost longing, eyes that were, among them, ubiquitously buried under each of their giant frames and thick prescription lenses. In any case and entirely unprivy, she went ahead with her tale, detailing to them that of course it was neither suspects, ghosts nor goats, but was in fact its own orchestrated and, contradictingly, unique existence, she surmised; an archetypal scenario or situation or scene with its own heartfelt supposedly imaginary characters and plots and matters-to-be-dealt-with, involving a sort of a crustacean queen named Oompereiorria XIII of Lournelicixia, whose head of scales shimmered like a wall of crude staggered clay bricks doused in purple fairy glitter, with a ridiculous cylindrical skull jointed horizontally to a stubby neck, hammerhead-like, and an equine snout but swinish nostrils, bejeweled, eyes twitching and blinking on her breasts above the nipples which were pressed together, along with her belly, tightly in a corset, and who outwardly wore an elegant, regal ballroom gown which betrayed her a trail of slime as she scurried about like a pacing nebbish. And yet somehow Shelby had forgotten that the old men had no idea the mistake she was making in her mind, that this dilemma had remained up to now unspoken, was private information she alone had knowledge of, and all at once now realized, and panicked about the fool she was presently making of herself, her lips still flapping and tongue still snapping. It was occurring to her now that she could not recall where this information about ghosts and goats had originated at all, was starting to doubt the sheer odds of this possibility: to be standing, still dripping, having had to swim up to the surface one league lacking an oxygen tank for god knows how many valueless measures of time. How could there be these nasty old judges, faces squished tensely, becoming more upset by the second, angrily morphing redder and more squished, into something new entirely? And how could they now have a gavel, all of them, glasses vanished, hair now curling to their shoulders? Oh how they grumbled! Oh intimidation! Oh misfortune!

So began the Degeneration!

She unwound between her ears like a roll of red ribbon on a foraged stick yanked by its end; it felt like some referendum gone awry, in which the threads of subconsciousness anthropomorphised into briefcase-toting delegates yelling and later, barfing, on other lesser delegates. She could see all of this, all of the sudden not being so much a Shelby but rather much more a Jack, or a Phil, or a something maybe more defiant like a Chance or a Vincent, and, after considering, settling with Vincent (it felt right) as, instantaneously, yet still snatching at the coattails of the newly human threads, she was him, MCV, rapper extraordinaire.

Now there was a new journey about and he reckoned that the past had happened, no doubt perfectly naturally of course, and the walls were uncomfortable, eggshell off-white in a stifling office environment where MCV just picked up new work, “Man, because I needed a way to get my bread-and-butter on.” It wasn’t long before he fell into favor with just about everybody at work, the diligent, astute minds bearing the fortress at besomebody.com, because MCV was charming to say the least and knew how to win people over. It wasn’t long before the office party, complete with cone-hats with straps and white cake with frosting balloons, at which they celebrated the bizarre Boss Appreciation Day. Though not everything was perfect that day. Bear in mind, MCV was well-known to the female community en general, was, “no doubt,” he had said, “with a very fine lady lady tonight.” She wasn’t overdone, was impressively lithe, and boy was that all becoming of her, so vibrant with enduring youthful beauty. He called her Pancake. But there was a problem, from the obstinate histosol, able to birth from it only evil sprouts; and from the so-called Adept Order of Required Roles: Male and Female Honored arose a pervert, one Brice Liaison. AKA for tonight only also Appreciated Boss. His middle name could have been Handsy, the sinister fucker. MCV didn’t plan on taking shit tonight, and he would prove it with action. Normally affable and, for it, popular, he had tonight changed character, feeling more suited to be aggressive, wanting to maybe kick some ass, to show his teeth a little. The cost was forgotten, ignored, irrelevant. The double whisky-ginger he held went straight into Handsy’s face: an airborne alcoholic blanket, a presneezelike facial expression, landing, melting ice cubes sticking to his neck trapped over the collar, shoulders wet, for laying a hand on MCV’s girl’s behind. Naturally everyone around was shocked. Much arguing ensued, voices had raised, eyebrows had pointed, and it was a grand theatre of psychological warfare that went on and on. The rapper froze in the midst of it, suddenly remembering the attack’s catalyst. Was it actually eyerape? Probably. MCV was embarrassed at gut reaction — a bad sign. It wasn’t a serious offence after all. So, as everyone continued to dismantle each other verbally, some servile with torie-like loyalty to Liaison and others backing the audacious new guy, he started to shrug away, at first subtly: still yelling vehemence though but with each step backward a degree toward a room-temperature complexion, and a voice approaching docile. He found Pancake, snatched her hand, walked swiftly out.

They retreated to Pancake’s big house, with its many walls of looking-glass, and its many dusty Elizabethan rugs, where they climbed into her third story room up a ladder through extremely narrow and impressive, passable ceiling/floor cavities. They spent something like several seasons in the room after that, friends picking up the groceries for them, visitors regularly bringing them news about the fuzz’s hunt. What had conspired that night after they had left had disintegrated to violence and there were some stiffs left behind which the fuzz ended up having to blame someone for, resulting in justice pointing to MCV, the match that lit the torch. They lived in hiding for however many measurements of months it may have been, making love and telling stories, and it was good. One morning, waking up tied like a bun and drooling placidly on the pillows, they heard sirens. Their sleepy eyes caught one another, and once in focus, they tacitly could agree on the omen. MCV shuffled and clothed, shoved his possessions into the backpack he held shaking in his other hand, and peered through the blinds, gaped at the approaching force, and turned and faced his boombox intimately. And pressed play. At the drop of the beat he was ready, his hour had come; the verse flowed unstoppably, and his arms were pronouncing it. He became the soundtrack to his own fate, to whatever reruns he would end up living, and to the stint he may be punished with for having done the stunt that sparked this hunt. He stanced for a great leaping exit out the other window facing the path to potential freedom, and went zooming out, boinging extravagantly on the hillsides which lay out before him like so many scalps of green locks to the horizon. His legs each behaved like a steroidal pogo stick, giants springs, skin elastically enhanced, bones unbrittle, and in his ears was the boombox, miniaturized for his travel. His heart dribbled in its cage while he soared far ahead of his pursuers, casting deeper and deeper shadows towards them, heading into the dropping sun, in route to Canada.

“Is ghost so different from goats?” he thought, looking out buried and camouflaged under the layers of grass on the dramatic, steep sloping hillside, hidden from the searchlights of the helicopter which sought him in the moonlight. He pondered the old mix-up; Did he touch her? Shelby? Months? Goats? Everything smashes together, violence inherent, and ones always instigate the carnage. The anachronism means nothing. He concluded there was no more time for examination, because now he must determine his next maneuver. The escape couldn’t last long, but it would have to suffice. He slept in the moonlight.

He had to assume a new identity and decided to live as a carpenter in Saskatchewan, most often building low budget stages for Buford’s Community Theatre, and was just going by Vincent. He would carry freshly lumbered birches, heading for his workshop, and would sleep in the tiny studio apartment upstairs and would talk idly with neighbors in passing, or at the markets or at church. The new life came easy for him, it lasted maybe, but no Pancake, who had been whisked away to memory, becoming antique, like film reels cobwebbed in the basement. He would often sit at his desk drawing depthless pictures, rhyming quietly so as not to disturb people across the hall, but with enough of a hum to rumble his core. He would think about a road that looped around the world. The windows were open, and it invited the dry autumn breeze to dance in the narrow wooden room, to cool it, when one day the Father of a family of four knocked hard at the door with the family in tow. The door was open and almost immediately shut, but the father tried again. “Sir it is imperative that I speak to you.”

“What’s with the wife and kids?”

“They’re with me.”

“No thanks.” Shut and locked. Persistent knocking, a muffled hullohullohullohullo singsong. Turning around, rubbing eyes and temples, a single sigh— Vincent spiralled into bed spread eagle and the knocking for the next two hours hammered him to sleep, where he dreamed a spiralling dream. The morning came, he checked the door and the man and his family were still there, looking more serious, and the Father said, “The time’s come and I cannot wait any longer. You have no reason to distrust me. Let me in.” Daughter, Mother and Brother blinked.

“What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Ask her.”

“What’s your name?”

“Oops.”

“That’s a funny name!”

“She doesn’t mean that. Tell him sweetie.” He shut and locked. He knocked and he reopened. Oops, Mother and Brother were gone. “Can we talk now?”

“If we must.” Door shut, seats took.

“Listen, I know your story. I know about the pursuit and the case hearing, I know about the extent of your travels and about the lengths you’ve gone to conceal your identity. I know you had to run for a long time.” Eyes locked. “It couldn’t have been easy.”

“Fanciful story. I don’t buy it. Who are you and what’s your point?”

Father laughed it off. “I’m not like you, man. I’m not from where you are, here it’s different. So take it easy. I have a Russian Ancestry for you. What’s headed your way, you’re gonna need it. And it’s about damn time you finally let me in. We’re not all robbers.” From his bag, the Father reassembled a stocky machine that printed courier paragraphs on sheets of paper, perforated at the sides and connected at the ends, as page after page folded on top one another, creating a bundled accordion fan effect. The pages were family trees, diagrams, photos with caption epithets, Significant Individual Profiles, proofs of bloodline, lists of names and dates of events, six or ten birth certificates, copies of passports and IDs, long forwarded messages, a legal section.  The new past was meant to help him, and Vincent felt guilty for his treatment to the man and his family before.

“What do I do with this?”

“Make the best of it. But be cautious. Sometimes a mistake is all it takes to make all your hard work disintegrate. But this’ll be a piece of cake. Relax. What’s past is passed, and the future’s in tact. Try to spare yourself the lash. Or keep going, hair blowing, just know that you get out what you put in, so put it in 1st gear and blow this shit to wind.”

The beat dropped and he was out the window again, this time with a stout head start on his pursuers, bass thumping and run-jumping.  In travel, exercising, Vincent was capable of intense analysis, the biological processes thrived then, rendering his judgement astute, and his scruples struck him interminably. What a ridiculous, unprecedented existence I seem to be living, he thought as he sprung in large arches, yards at a time. His Russian ancestors would be disgraced, if they knew about his life on the lam. From what was the running? A farmer in his bungalow on the green hillside watched Vincent bounce toward the large, setting sun. The Father may have had a good point, the future’s in tact, so what use was it to worry? It was already decided, and Vincent clung to his courageousness. He leaped, chasing the sun to the horizon, determined to pass it, but only ran into the night. He didn’t remember how he ended up in his next identity, how he somehow managed to disguise himself, living in the chassis of a small robot, so small in fact that inside it, with his bottom seated, his knees reached his ears while his head was tucked between them. He controlled the robots conveyor belt tracts with two levers from the inside, one for throttle and the other for direction. It’s hard to say how he spent his time, there wasn’t much to see from inside the robot, but he was aware of his location: a long dock and quay, at a warm-weather bay, where the languages were a foreign chirp and the loitering residents, a colony of living obsolete technologies, communed around garbage can bonfires, morosely united. Tourists would eat at the urbane restaurants, locals would pass the colony uncomfortably on the way to their schooners, occasionally throwing dimes to the robots, who were lucky if the money didn’t slip through the wide cracks of the pier. Vincent never used his robots claws to scramble for pocket change. He wouldn’t eat, didn’t need to. He mumbled verses he didn’t remember learning, and the chassis shook from the vibrations, the noise accentuated because of a few loose screws in the frame, until the time came again to flee. This time the pursuers were monsters in uniform, the creatures of nightmares, with hellish rage and sophisticated weaponry, and they encapsulated the quay from every front, confident in their knowledge of their target’s whereabouts. Vincent heard them coming, their squeals. A centisecond didn’t pass before he burst out from the chassis heroically, projecting metal shards and inspiring shock and awe among the bystanders. He sprang upwards and launched himself, his right fist leading the way, through the open sky, as pellets shot up at him. The sun was high in the middle of the sky, Vincent was looking directly into it, rapidly rocketing into it, and his eyes widened wider and wider, and his fist dropped to his side and his chest stuck out ahead of him, his heart now leading the way, and his body had become limp in posture but still he was rocketing, as below him the monsters, shrinking in the distance, piled atop one another reaching desperately, snatching for him. The sun became nothing but an expanse of white to Vincent, and outside the expanse were clouds swirling, forming funnels, with their own gravity, like black holes, sucking to infinity. The white spoke to him sans words, super-communicating, that it would go on like this forever. He was planned obsolescence. Don’t be surprised, because you’ve known it all along, honestly, haven’t you? Have you not been barrelling through the holograms of what you are, what you can be and are? Is this not born from you alone? You are regenerating the degeneration, are the belt of a treadmill always re-emerging from and disappearing into the underside; off and on and off again like a light sensing a motion already gone. You are anachronistic, sought first and found guilty later, perpetrated perpetually. Escape is the death state. Are you afraid? Do you think you should be? To what end would that allow? One free of the chase, a cavernous life, a couch-locked high. No! That is only a slower agony, to give up. He gaped at the white, at the tornado clouds. It morphed and spoke, and the enemies remained present, still towered, faltering. There was no use in wondering if this was heaven or hell, for Vincent, once released by the white, would go on leaping, albeit transfigured, awake, to the next moment of his, the only thing to know, ensconced in the five senses.