Dr. Identity (17 page)

[9,345] Hillbilly Scatman is an invasive presence in
The Ypsilanti Factor
whose slippery-when-wet
raison d’être
and unreasonable troublemaking inform the modus operandi of numerous protagonists (e.g. #4, #8, #17, #23 and #24). I would not go so far as to call him a protagonist himself as the spirit of protagonism requires a certain “pancreatic symbology” that he altogether lacks.118,02
[5]
Additionally, he suffers from gymnophobia and usually hides behind large objects in fear of the notion that his clothes might suddenly fall off and expose the world to his nakedness, the sight of which, he suspects, would turn onlookers into brain-eating zombies. This affliction is significant in terms of the aforementioned Goes To Lunch scene as it is the only point in the story where Scatman does not conceal his body in some quixotic fashion, albeit he considers the prospect on occasion. The scene reads:

A cat crossed the Hillbilly’s path as he adjusted the suspenders of his overalls and clamored towards the front door of the bistro. The cat had dark purple fur and went “Meow!” four times. Taken aback, the Hillbilly clutched his chest. He became lightheaded and, thinking he might pass out, carefully lay down on the ground so that, if he did pass out, he wouldn’t hit his head. A mechanical Chinaman with overexaggerated facial features pulling a politician wearing a top hat and monocle in a rickshaw ran him over. So did a number of pedestrians. Realizing he wasn’t going to lose consciousness, the Hillbilly stood up, brushed the tire marks and footprints off of his overalls, and entered the bistro.

“Ahhhhhh!” exclaimed a maître d’ from behind a tall podium. The Hillbilly glanced suspiciously over his shoulders. Was the exclamation a reaction to his unannounced presence? He apologized despite himself, eyeballing a nearby statue that seemed just large enough to hide his body from view.

The maître d’ smiled, then used what looked like a mascara brush to pencil a thin mustache onto his towering overlip. The Hillbilly waited for him patiently. In the background, waiters and busboys ran at top speed from table to table, taking orders and serving food. Now and then a busboy paused, dumped a bucket of dirty plates and glasses onto the floor, tapdanced on the mess, and shot himself in the head with a pistol. Another busboy promptly descended from the rafters on puppet strings to take the dead one’s place, making sure to clean the carcass up with the broken dinnerware that had been forsaken.

Inspecting the mustache with a hand mirror, the maître d’ wiped it off of his face five times, unhappy with its appearance. Finally he settled on one. “Name please?”

The Hillbilly began to sweat. “I don’t think I remember,” he said.

The maître d’ huffed. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but we don’t seat diners who either lack or fail to articulate their names. Is this a hardship with which you are familiar?”

Panicked, the Hillbilly took a step towards the statue. He stopped himself before he could take a second step.

“Scatman?” he said. “My name is Mr. Scatman.” A dove flew out of his beard.

The maître d’ looked at the dove disapprovingly. “Fine, Mr. Scatman. I might add that the bistro upholds a No Pets Allowed policy. Failure to comply must inevitably result in the death of the errant pet that is brought onto these grounds by the felonious party. Do you understand?”

“No,” said the Hillbilly, frowning.

Unwilling to pursue the matter further, the maître d’ pushed a button on the podium. A faceless robot wearing a tall, neon orange hunter’s cap emerged from a secret door in the wall and riddled the sky of the bistro full of holes with a machine gun. After a short pause, the dove fell to the floor along with a few busboys. The robot saluted the maître d’ and disappeared back into the wall.

“We apologize for the inconvenience, good sir,” remarked the maître d’, “but you must understand that a policy is not something one can easily skirt, ignore or disgrace. Table for one?”

Still not understanding, the Hillbilly shook his head compliantly and allowed the maître d’ to escort him to a table. For a moment he considered crawling under the table—maybe a waiter would serve him down there?—but he resolved to take the opposite route and sat on top of it, his legs hanging over the edge, the tips of his boots scraping against the floor. He lunched on a salad of sauerkraut and caramel-coated lima beans that he ate out of his lap, then snuck out of the bistro without paying the bill.

The police apprehended him.

They stripped his cloths off in the interrogation room. It was at this point, for the first time, that the Hillbilly’s purpose in life struck him between the eyes like a crucifixion nail. (Birdwater 126-127)

The allopathic, psychogeographic, dromological implications of this scene are obvious enough, and the messianic legitimation of Hillbilly Scatman as allegorical martyr is egregious to a disaffectingly relativistic degree. The scene, in other words, speaks for itself in terms of its situational catachresis, not to mention the highly overspecialized way in which Birdwater partakes in a correspondence theory of truth here. I am admittedly hesitant to pursue a discussion of Scatman in the above context, partly because of the immediately aforementioned point(s), partly because of the point(s) I made earlier in this essay (which, to reiterate, I will return to in due course). This elicits the question of why I cited or even mentioned the Goes To Lunch scene, which has little or nothing to do with any of my originary theses. The answer is…

15

the briefcase – 3rd person

A man opened a pink Big Chill Retro vintage refrigerator and removed a carton of plain yogurt. He opened the carton. He sniffed the yogurt. He sniffed it again.

He vomited in the kitchen trough.

Inside of a pyroelectric wine glass sitting on the counter stood the miniaturized holographic image of a telecaster reciting the morning news in a high-pitched squeak. The telecaster’s hairdo was a burning orange bush. The flames blackened and his voice slipped into a baritone as a newsflash threaded into his monologue. “This just in. Holocaust at Corndog University. Plaquedemics dead. Student-things dead. Madcap behavior. Perpetrators suspected to be plaquedemics. One human, one ’gänger. Good-looking. Fair sense of style. At large. Pigs on the scene. Papanazi on alert. Ultraviolence, gore. Stay tuned.”

The man cleaned his mouth with a damp washcloth.

He opened a closet and turned on his ’gänger. “Zippity do da,” it said.

“Mr. Bogarty 2,” said the man, and retired to the bathroom to masturbate.

Mr. Bogarty 2 adjusted and dusted off its suit, made a cup of coffee, took a sip, gargled, spit it out, picked up a briefcase, made sure the briefcase was locked, and left.

The 2,450 story elevator ride to the ground floor of the spacescraper took fifteen minutes. The elevator only stopped once. A half-naked oldster got on. Slung over his shoulder was a knapsack of Legos. He emptied them onto the floor, kneeled, and hurriedly built a small castle. He didn’t exit the elevator when they touched down.

Mr. Bogarty 2 worried about its tie as it hopped onto a slideway. Next to it was a ’gänger who had on a superior tie in its opinion. Its fingers tightened around the handle of the briefcase.

The slideway curled into a funhouse tunnel. Clowns, demons, smurfs, pornstars, Babars, homunculi, Pee-Wee Hermans danced and battled on the ceiling screens. The slideway sped up, jerked left, skated right, spiraled upwards…Momentum and magnetism kept most of the riders in place. A few flew off into the Void.

The slideway slowed down, smoothed out and emerged back into the open. It was high above ground level now, suspended in the air by interminable, pencil-thin copper wires that stretched into the sky.

A vidship passed overhead. The megascreen on its underside ran footage of an ultraviolent scikungfi fight. The camera moved in on a bloody, twitching victim. A clawlike appendage removed the victim’s mask…exposing the face of Voss Winkenweirder. The camera zoomed in to a close-upggggHis face was bruised, dripping. A gray tongue hung out of his mouth. For streetgoers with 3D glasses or vision, a holographic image of the tongue drooped out of the vidship’s bottom and swung across the slideways. “Movie star killed by plaquedemic menace,” whirred the vidship. It repeated the announcement and urged people to beware of university educators of any kind until further notice.

Mr. Bogarty 2 momentarily forgot about ties. Its eyes functioned in realspace and 3D at the same time and the swinging tongue disoriented it. Then the android’s focus returned to its tie and the tie’s lack of stylistic gumption, at least in comparison with the tie wrapped around the neck of the android at its side. It bit its lip, staring at the rival fashion statement out of the corners of two white, bulbous eyes.

“It’s a fine unit,” declared Mr. Bogarty 2 in a defeated tone.

The ’gänger didn’t hear it.

“I say. It’s a fine unit.”

The ’gänger turned and regarded Mr. Bogarty 2. “Sexuality is not part of my program. I’m sorry.”

Something snapped in Mr. Bogarty 2. It started talking in Voodoospeak as if possessed. It uttered a mélange of deep, robotic sounds. Then it toppled backwards. Its eyes popped out of its head on springs and all of its limbs broke into furious convulsions.

Ignoring the death throes, the ’gänger picked up Mr. Bogarty 2’s briefcase and coolly exited the slideway…

“Good morning, Herr Kincain,” said a receptionist to the ’gänger on its approach to the front desk. A giant cockroach, the receptionist had a Betty Davis head sticking out of its midsection. The head was black-and-white except for the bright red lipstick smeared over its lips. An old-fashioned switchboard hung on the wall—a tangle of wires, buttons and levers. The receptionist used her legs to fiddle with the contraption as she played greeter and answered phone calls.

Herr Kincain smiled at the receptionist without saying anything. On the radio the voice of an irate newscaster was in the middle of a diatribe: “They have no use-value! They’re not scientists. They’re not lawyers. They’re not fucking psychologists. They’re not even anthropologists. They’re goddamned English professors!
Philologists.
The lowest form of plaquedemic, in this pundit’s opinion, next to the philosopher and the historian. It’s no wonder they’re committing holocausts everywhere they go. They serve no postcapitalist purpose. They believe in nothing but their novels and their punctuation marks…”

“That’s a lovely tie, Herr Kincain,” the receptionist noted as the android waited for an elevator.

Herr Kincain glanced down at the tie. “A lovely tie,” it echoed.

Twenty minutes later a bell chimed and the elevator doors creaked open.

A wave of bodies spilled out of the cabin and washed over Herr Kincain. Holding the briefcase tightly, it struggled to maintain balance and stay on its feet. But the wave was too powerful. It lost its footing, tumbled over, and got trampled.

The last thing it saw before passing out: the elevator conductor’s smiling pinhead, which loomed over him and began to inflate like a balloon…

Shrieking, the receptionist leapt over the front desk and scuttled towards the body of Herr Kincain.

The elevator conductor snatched the briefcase and ducked back into the cabin. He pressed the button for the 3,002nd floor, massaging the skin of the briefcase like the thighs of an expensive hooker…

The elevator stopped at the 3rd floor. Two neozooters stepped on. They were having a conversation in Donaldduckspeak.

As the doors closed, a bandit wearing a Zorro mask and cape leapt onto the elevator and punched out all three occupants. He pushed the emergency button and robbed them of their wallets, jewelry and eyeballs…

A special report cut off the elevator Muzak. “Pardon the interruption, citizens of Bliptown. The Bullsheet News Institute offers the following update on recent holocausts committed by the now infamous Corndog plaquedemics: they are still on the loose and acting like sons of bitches. The Winkenweirder camp has increased the bounty on their heads from one to
three
lifetime memberships at Littleoldladyville on the condition that these additional memberships are assigned to alternate personalities only. Bring the doctors in dead or alive and you, too, can be a psychotically satisfied shopper.”

The bandit tore out the last pair of eyeballs and stuffed them in his satchel. He stood up, threw the satchel over his shoulder, turned to leave…and saw the briefcase. Giggling, he grabbed it, exited the elevator, and ran at top speed down a long hallway. At the end was a tall window. He wore hightop jetshoes and the resonance of his giggling increased with his speed as he bowled over the businesspeople that fastwalked across the hallway from one office to another.

He accelerated to 60 mph by the time he exploded through the window.

Every hour was rush hour in Bliptown and the flyways were a deafening maze of propulsion. The bandit sailor-dived a mile down, playfully dodging traffic, then clicked together the heels of his jetshoes. They morphed into manta rays. The rays’ wings parachuted open, broke his fall, flipped him upright and held him steady. The bandit’s Zorro cape split up the back, unleashing a set of tremendous, fake-looking Condor wings. He had recently stolen the wings from the set of the film
Condorman VII: Condorman vs. The Greatest American Hero
, which was being shot near his luxury conapt in Bliptown’s Vagina Light district. Tucking the briefcase into his armpit, he flapped the wings at a hummingbird’s speed and zipped away…

He landed on a rooftop featuring a cheap, outdoor massage parlor. There was also a golfing range, a small square of Astroturf on which arcane men and ’gängers wearing Hawaiian shirts and white pants stood shoulder-to-shoulder trying to hit balls as hard as they could. For the most part, they whiffed and hit each other: half of them clutched their bodies and moaned in pain. Every now and then, though, a golfer made contact and sent a ball sailing into the depths of Bliptown’s mechanical dystopiascape…

The bandit descended onto a small landing strip. His jetshoes morphed back into hightops and his wings caved into his cape. He let the briefcase fall out of his armpit and caught it by the handle. Cracking his neck, he strode towards the massage parlor. It was busy but there were two open massage tables. Behind them two naked, airbrushed female ’gängers waited patiently to rub him down and jerk him off.