Professor Edgarstein squealed. A perfect paper. William Gibson meets Mel Gibson. Umberto Eco meets Marc Ecko. It was gritty and mean and dystopian and weirdly urban. A freshman wrote it? Not some rarefied tract in “Fibonacci Journ.”, not an illuminated scrap of analytic hand-wringing gracing the onion-skin pages of the “Denotational Biennial.” Jesus. Co-authored by the Zimbicki twins? God, so wonderfully weird those two:
this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks
General Johannes kicked a steel-toed cockroach killer through the dusty screen of 17-inch CRT. Pop. A swan song of the tubes. It was done. Every boob-tube in the Western and Eastern hemisphere, the whole world even, had been collected and destroyed. On account of there being no TV’s left, the revolution would not be televised. “Make a shirt with that slogan,” Johannes muttered to himself doing his best Dwayne Johnson.
But we have gotten ahead of ourselves. Where are we or, more importantly, when are we? The year 2020, the galaxy, not so far away. The planet … is … Earth! Gaia, Terra Firma, the Third Rock from the Sun, ol’ blue eye. Of course the bankers destroyed it. Of course those fat cats in the Capitol stood by and shoveled their faces full of caviar wrenched from the enervated ovaries of the three or four sturgeon left in our all-but-salt-lick oceans. The teachers, the sanitation workers, the hard-luck Friday Night Lights dads? They picked up the tin scraps and Bugles snacks that the unemployment office so generously let them have. War — and there was always war — had sunk the Balkans into Earth’s mantle. A sea of fire stood in as a churning, licking monument to that region that America couldn’t quite pinpoint on a map.
And now the last television had been crushed by only the fifth-largest military presence, the Children of God’s Divine Majesty. Government cronies, hitmen, cowards, sycophants. Their bulging and irregular frames transformed the sunlight into plasmodial shit-puddles. CrossFitters, the lot of them. They danced around garages fencing with barbells, they threw comically large hatchets into the sky, they wore 2 pood gauntlets to church and the clubs, and most of them owned more than a few parkour laser discs. “With mass like that who needs fat?” joked funny-man Gary Shandling. Right before they painted a wall with his grey matter. Right before Sgt. Faceshooter — aptly named — hollowed out his eye socket with a sausage-like finger.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad freeYeah the world was messed. Like the business end of a baby wrapped in a saran-wrap diaper. Messed. Although, you have to admit, the simile breaks down on account of the heinous lack of transparency in the world governments of the double-twenties. There were no TVs left; you think they bothered to keep around the Sunlight Foundation, reporters, or statistics? Hell no. First they came for the data scientists. Like marshmallows in a Nazi prison oven, bespectacled dorks — probably all virgins given the fury and frequency of their self-abuse while in solitary — were melted into nerdpies. “What’s the probability of you living, jerk? 0%!” roared Admiral Genocide. Then they came for the his girl Fridays. Dismembered all the dandies in the press club with those little Mad Hatter cards in their hats. What did they say? “Press”? “Dead Man” would have been more accurate, all things considered. Finally, the brutes of the militias tore into the math departments. Frère Fourscock bent Pi over and put a little bar in him that had nothing to do with an infinite string of selfsame decimals. The Privates got out theirs — their privates, that is — and treated the transfinite cardinals like the cardinals treated the very finite altar boys. Whole sequences of numbers were deflowered and bedazzled with guts. The natural numbers … there was nothing natural about what happened. God, those bastards.
Which brings our lens to our protagonist John F. Yewkennedy. He was built the way that a tween would imagine a Call of Duty character. French foreign legion beret, unimaginative color scheme, six to eight muscles where the two heads etymologically suggested by the name “biceps” should be, acceptably spaghetti-like legs (real soldiers understanding only the German of the bench press, not the queer French of the Smith) and a gun that shot laser bazooka chainsaws. Of course John F. Yewkennedy killed the warlords and the Alan Rickmans and Albert Pujols commemorative zombies. Of course, he kicked down the door of that Mexican drug dealer, flubbed a Scarface quote — “Say hello my friend” — crammed a commemorative grenade down his cocaine caked gullet and pulled the pin. Yeah, with his wolverine claws.
When the dust had settled, John F. Yewkennedy found a world on the brink. Of madness. Of sadness. It had already passed into badness. There was a song there, he just knew it. So he started to rebuild. But fear creeps in after a while. The hearts of good men can be perverted and so John F. Yewkennedy passed into darkness.
Ring ring ring. John F. Yewkennedy woke up. “Whew, all a dream?” He stared down at his wolverine claws. Brushing the hair aside, “What’s this? A USB port?” He didn’t have time to run the numbers, he still could after all, the revolution had been just a dream. “Shh, honey,” purred his mother Filippa K. Dick. “Drink your milk and go back to bed,” she mewed, shoving the cable back into his furry mitt. Her heaving breasts heaved wildly. “Shh.” Back to the dream.
Check your hands, dear reader. Check your hands.
God it was good. The way they had keenly tossed convention aside, dispensed with subtlety entirely. It was like that Vin Diesel flick, Fast und Furious — he assumed the reference was correct; he had caught the tail end of a pirated foreign language dub of the film and didn’t watch even that.
Edgarstein was torn up. He was intimidated by these two literary tour-de-forces. Then again, perhaps they were tours-de-force. Even Strunk and White had left him. Aw, look at the poor, rock-hard literature wonk. No, he could get through this. They might have been kissed by some mad God but he, Edgarstein was a learned man.
The cathexis of desire … or was it catharsis. One was Greek, the other was all Greek to me. Had he made that joke before? Surely, it killed in his Freshman seminar. The medics had to wheel her out in a handtruck. Poor girl didn’t have the heart for humor, apparently.
Let’s try this again. There’s sense and reference, right? Venus and the Morning Wood. Venus rises in the bedroom. Should he have dot quoted Venus? The evening star, too. The morning star and the evening star, someone’s been doing pilates. The endurance … no no no.
Get it together, Edgarstein. Infinite Jest wasn’t built in a day. Those footnotes must have taken forever. Where do you even get a typewriter that small? He just had to put his mind to it. His focus could be unbelievable, it was downright elliptical at times. Right now, though, he wasn’t even circular, he was a vector, in a word he was up.
The male, shit, the male as we are taught by — fuck whoever that psychoanalyst was … Lacan, g-d who knows? — the male is linear, a-to-b, the fucking terminus embodied, but these two, turn it on their heads — ironically — these two fucking headless horsemen covered in that godawful Tommy Bahama and Ed Hardy, shit, they are the line without end, without me, I am the end — God I’m straight — what are they? I could never finish them. I’d have to start …
That was it. He had spent his life in the epilogue, the postscript. He was all coda and, right now, these two boys stripped of all necessary equipment — Tim Allen in a jelly factory — needed a prolegomenon. The depths of Apollyon had to hit the pines, the Big Bang was getting the call to the Big Show.
Edgarstein would later learn that the Big Show had a bum rotator cuff. 5 foot 4, belly like an armadillo, mostly Nitrogen. He got up on the diamatech and pounded Piazza’s little mitts. Day in and day out he threw sliders that were lower than lower. In other words, they sank lower and then they sank lower. “Holy guacamole. Is he duck pin bowling, Jeff?”
“I dunno Jerry, he seems to be burying the ball with a tiny spade he had tucked in his cup.”
“I mean, let’s call a spade a spade here.”
“Funny story Jerry, there was a time you couldn’t call a Negro a spade in this here US of A.”
The Big Bang walked some, hit most. He wasn’t shaping up. He hadn’t been worth the 18 million a year but his shit-eating grin had won over the GM’s wife. What a lady. He was on his third Tommy John. “Purely elective,” so his insurance provider had rejected the claim. Edgarstein would have to trade him and he never even got to third. The twins would have to discover themselves; Edgarstein was getting sent down. Back to the Ironbirds.