Codename Prague Read online

  Codename Prague,

  An Unfinished

  PULP SCIENCE FICTION

  NOVEL

  By

  D. Harlan Wilson.

  Book Two of the Scikungfi Trilogy.

  THE FIRST EDITION

  Edited by Dr. Master Master Stanley Ashenbach Esquire.

  BOWIE:

  Printed by RAW DOG SCREAMING PRESS in Maryland,

  and for STICK FIGURE INCORPORATED in Pseudofolliculitis City.

  MMXI.

  Codename Prague © 2010 by D. Harlan Wilson

  All rights reserved

  Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press

  Bowie, MD

  First Edition

  Cover image: Brett Weldele

  Book design: Jennifer Barnes

  www.RawDogScreaming.com

  Other Books by D. Harlan Wilson

  Novels

  Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia

  Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria

  Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance

  Criticism

  Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body

  in Postcapitalist Science Fiction

  Fiction Collections

  The Kafka Effekt

  Stranger on the Loose

  Pseudo-City

  They Had Goat Heads

  QUOTES

  Galveston, oh Galveston,

  I still hear your sea waves crashing

  while I watch the cannons flashing.

  I clean my gun and dream of Galveston.

  —Glenn Campbell, “Galveston”

  Yellow man in Timbuktu—

  color for both me and you.

  Kung fu fighting, dancing queen,

  tribal spaceman and all that’s in between.

  —The Spice Girls, “Spice Up Your Life”

  It’s a great day for genocide. (What’s that?)

  That’s the day all the niggaz died.

  They killed JFK in ’63.

  So what the fuck you think they’ll do to me?

  —Ice Cube, “When Will They Shoot?”

  DEDICATION

  For all the aborted and unrealized acronyms.

  DEFINITIONS

  daikaiju (dah•gwhy•zhü) Giant cinematic monster(s). Also denotes the genre of films featuring giant monsters. Common sobriquet: “The Tall Angry One Who Induces Hot Ubiquitous Gore.” Distinguished by alienation, loneliness and anger, even in large numbers.

  ekphrasis (ek•frә•sәs) A graphic, ultraviolent depiction of a visual work of reality.

  —The Amerikan Hemorrhage Dictionary of Scikungfi

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  With the names of the original actors and reality studios in alphabetical order.

  (Note: Incl. only players with vital speaking roles and guild cards.)

  MEN & ALIENS

  Administrator Wichita

  Araby Manager 1

  Araby Manager 2

  Araby Manager 3

  Araby Manager 4

  Araby Manager 5

  Araby Manager 6

  Araby Manager 7

  Beauty/Ugly

  Bystander 1

  Bystander 2

  Bystander 3

  Commodore Ronald Rabelais

  Doktor Hans Reinhart

  Doktor Hermann Teufelsdrˆckh

  Doktor Hermann Teufelsdrˆckhís Father

  Doktor Ray B Flechsig

  Flight Attendant (Amerika Slingpad)

  Flight Attendant (Prague Slingpad)

  Gentleman 1

  Gentleman 2

  Gentleman 3

  HenrÌ Prague

  Man in a Letter P Costume

  Nobody 1

  Nobody 2

  Nobody 3

  Percussionist

  Production Manager of Cats

  Rardion (a.k.a. ìMikeî) the Bazaar Greeter

  Salvador Dali

  SAMSA 066

  SAMSA 067

  Stagehand

  Truth/Untruth

  Usher

  Vincent Prague a.k.a. Vincent ìCodenameî Prague

  Vincent Prague a.k.a. Vincent ìCodenameî Pragueís Father

  MEN DRESSED AS WOMEN

  Delilah Jive

  Femme Fatale 1 (M‰dchen ìThe Pragueî Prague)

  Femme Fatale 2 (Sindie Switch )

  HYBRIDS, ANDROIDS & MONSTERS

  Armand Dorleac

  Beauty/Ugly Monster

  Bouncer

  Bustopher Jones

  Donald Pleasence W¸tendeswissenschaftlermunster 1

  Donald Pleasence/Alien W¸tendeswissenschaftlermunster 2

  Hitler/Keats Hybrid + Daikaiju Monster a.k.a. The Sans Merci

  James Cagney

  James Joyce

  (Macaulay) Culkin

  Macavity Cat

  Man with a Goat Head

  Monster Peddler

  Riddler Jim Carrey perf. CSI David Caruso

  Scorcese Boy 1 (Niky Santoro)

  Scorcese Boy 2 (Bill the Butcher)

  Scorcese Boy 3 (Max Cady)

  Scorcese Boy 4 (Tommy DeVito)

  Scorcese Boy 5 (Francis Costello)

  Scorcese Boy 6 (Travis Bickle)

  Solomon Grundy Bruce Lee

  Truth/Untruth Monster

  Zero Punctuation Expobot

  UNCLASSIFIABLE PLAYERS

  The Nowhere Man

  SETTINGS

  Ch‚teau díIf, Brazil

  City City, USAmerika

  Hong Kong, China

  Prague, Former Czech Republik

  Introduction

  by Steve Aylett

  Certain memories become sacred. In D. Harlan Wilson’s case, it was the time he tripped and fell into an ancient liturgical drama, swearing point-blank into the face of a bishop long dead. He then wounded nineteen people while running amok in that antique realm, as the metal-clawed creature later known to history as “Spring-Heeled Jack.” Thus he knew paradise and lost it. Wilson is now as helpless before the dictates of his moods and whims as he was before the violent wormhole calamities of childhood. But that is unimportant. What matters is that he exists and that he was made aware of the fact before we were. Everyone has experienced the dismal waste of time that can be inflicted by those who wish us to know them before they know themselves. This is a crime for which Kermit the Frog has yet to be punished, unless you count the fact that he can’t stop moving his arms.

  It is not unusual for the memory to condense into a single mythical moment the contingencies and practicalities of artistic inspiration. Wilson claims he decided to write his barbaric and erudite Scikungfi Trilogy while trying to inflate some sort of pool toy, an exercise at which he repeatedly failed until collapsing into tears, a pathetic sight for one and all. That crude vinyl icon of a camel, dented and lopsided, hung from his lap like every failure in his life. Wilson’s life can indeed be divided into two parts: before and after this sacramental defeat. It was a bankruptcy localized enough to be effective—effortlessly checkmated by a novelty plaything, what could he do but overcompensate, creating a mental yakuza in which he could demand massive respect? The accident riveted him to a public downfall like a voodoo chicken to the door of a grateful Catholic priest, who cooks the mascot for his happy family. The scornful gaze of Wilson’s friends as he let the flaccid toy slip from his slack hands transformed him into a constituted nature. He dreamed of a world in which his powers—those of the mind—are respected. Such a world does not as yet exist, but he can imagine one in the very mind that desires respect—thus creating a vortical involution resembling his inefficiently pursed lips during that initial washout of an afternoon.

  We can surmise that this decision will be of capital importance—to say, in defiance of all, I Will Not Merel
y Be A Beaky Buffoon For You Bastards. Rather than a journey to the end of his misfortune, he invents a way out via a character who can make a blow to the face last a week. An altar of asphalt and sugar bulges from Wilson’s fireplace, embedded with femurs and vintage Vickers ammunition belts. He can immerse his books in concrete detail—coincidentally a fate the mob have had in mind for him since he crashed one of their meetings in a monster truck and leaned out to explain that the universe is “not motivated by obligation—where’s your Omerta now?” Such mad confidence within despair will bear grim fruit. It spies on its own inner life and discovers electric mischief elves pounding up eternal-repetition exit ramps aglow. To the right-thinking man these denote only psychosis, yet these are what Wilson offers to others in the guise of “supporting players.” Sure of possessing the ground spice created from exploding truth at supercompressed angles (actually the corner of someone else’s barn) and concerned only with being seen in this undertaking, he expects to be tolerated. If he looks at himself in this mirror, he sees the accelerated colors of his magically-clad transparencies, at vertices to each other and tagged with self-triggering name-clues that should be obvious to you, reader. We have seen that, as a result of his multidimensional misfortunes as a child and his public inadequacy as an adult, he has dreamed of raising himself above men. Despite the daily battering of a thousand bitter truths, this dream has never left him. Society, too, defends itself against the barrage of facts present and latent in the universe, against the numinous and the precise, by means of custom—that is, by a body of consensual observances. Inversely, infraction of the customary rules invests the offender with a sacred aura because it confers upon him the power to unloose truthful powers—though whether he chooses to use his oblique position for this purpose is another matter. In Tarka the Otter we find that Henry Williamson has used the outcast position merely to talk about an otter and “his joyful water life,” deftly skirting the explosive issues of scorching sedition and profanely exotic rebellion almost any other writer would have explored.

  Not all prose springs from the intention to communicate—whether it be meaning, disease, magnified truculence, secrets manufactured specifically to be revealed, a market mysticism of betrayal, centuries-interrupted doom plots at last resumed, the innocent back of a monster, sham delights, applicable death-blows or the custom joinery of Trojan-viral prayer. Those who have drugged furniture, diabolified dialogue and sacrificed storyline in a desperate attempt to stray from current literature’s cheap, worn paradox and pre-explained heroes deliver a merciless cure, a dimly-lit liberation that leaves the reader with the final responsibility to walk away from this trash-catharsis and start using his or her brain, if only in miniature. Beyond this, the frenzied and exacting works of quantum pointillists such as Jeff Lint, Violaine and Eddie Gamete leave their stains at the high-tide mark of psychodimensional exploration where no one thinks to look.

  Wilson’s propulsion from hydraulic misfortune to a rambunctious form of expression, his spirited attempts to wear the reader’s face for a hat, and the final, very public siege and arrest which exposed both him and his doll-filled basement to the American media, are now well-known. There is a thriving market—from which he does not profit—in t-shirts bearing the notorious mug-shot in which he is seen to have twelve eyes, all of them closed. The trial itself is better known for the sudden exhibition of Wilson’s “energy snake” than any meaningful discourse on literature. My hopes for an awakened interest in hypervortexal fiction came to an end with that childish display and the subsequent descent into flailing drop-kicks and hollering ushers. Since the debacle Wilson has been publicly defined as a snorting disaster-pig and his technical and creative gifts have been relegated to the realm of myth (or what Marshall Hurk has called “the secret place of honor”). It is hard to gauge how it has affected his personality, just as it is difficult to measure to the millimeter the distance traveled by a swarm. Certainly he could never sustain the half-mad state of nervous excitement he displayed in the courtroom. In recent photographs he stares as if stunned by a blowfish.

  Although Wilson will no doubt remain an enigma to some, as one who has made a tremendous contribution to the immense story of human violence, his work is sure to generate frantic evasion and nervous disdain amid the follower-filled timidity of modern scholarship, and a wide readership among the groundlessly triumphant, the conspicuously fanged and the seeking.

  The public image of The Author—ramrod straight, unsurprised and studded with snails that make a popping sound when removed—has given way to the general impression of a force intent on using as many words as possible to say nothing we don’t already know. It’s a choice between those who were once alive or those who are now dead. Faced with an industry impermeable to talent, real creators will turn in another direction and aim at a heightened target, a unique emblem all bedecked with resinous blossoms and chained fruit. It may feel like a mixture of a stingray, a valentine and a nasty bump on the noggin. An abyss of treasure, detail-rich and explorable at every scale. For myself, I would ask a favor of everyone reading this introduction. If you’re going to write, write something interesting and original, or get the fuck out of the way.

  —London 2009

  00

  Slowmo Scikungfi

  After he assassinated the Nowhere Man, the Ministry of Applied Pressure told Vincent Prague to go to hell. Subsequently he was appointed to the position of Anvil-in-Chief, the catbird’s seat of special agents. “If he can off Nowhere, he can do anything,” was the Ministry’s belated logic.

  Two MAP agents snuck into Prague’s conapt to deliver the news. They wore standard MAP attire: Casablanca fedoras, photoelectric razorshades, sharply defined beetledream suits. They raided the refrigerator, set up a system of wiretaps, and tiptoed into the bedroom. Prague slept naked atop the covers in a fetal curl. His lips quivered like divining rods.

  “Wake up, Mr Prague,” barked an agent, chewing a piece of ginger broccoli. The other agent turned on the lights.

  An alarm went off.

  The alarm triggered an antigravity shockwave that lifted all bodies and objects not nailed to the floor into the air. Vincent Prague remained asleep. He didn’t wake up until an agent hurled a throwing star at the alarm, silencing it in a plume of blue sparks. The star had been rigged to disavow the room’s cavoritic conversion.

  “Who’s there?” said Prague. He bumped into the ceiling. “The lights are on.”

  The agents traded confused expressions. One droned, “Put us down, sir.”

  Prague smiled a crooked smile. “The lights are on,” he reiterated.

  Confusion slipped into consternation. The agents had never met Vincent Prague. But they knew of him. Skinny fella. Tall fella. Good killer. Shitty attitude.

  The agents’ names—SAMSA 066 and SAMSA 067—scrolled around the belts of their fedoras in a pulsing LED libretto. Hanging comfortably in the air, SAMSA 067 clenched his fists. His knuckles cracked like popcorn. SAMSA 066 grinned and rearranged the nub of his tie. “We’re trained for combat in non-gravitational spatialities,” he said. “Hard or easy, Mr Prague. Either way you’re coming with us.”

  Prague scratched an armpit. “Non-gravitational spatialities? What’re you, my grandmother?”

  “Hard, then,” said SAMSA 067. SAMSA 066 flexed his jaw. “Have it your way.”

  Lack of gravity rendered the consequent scikungfi fight a decidedly slow motion affair. The agents converged on Prague, swinging their arms in wide circles and using floating pieces of furniture, books, bongs, televisions for leverage. They moved forward like unmanned zeppelins. Arms neatly folded behind his back, Prague waited for them to get closer. At one point he snatched a graphic novel that floated by and thumbed through it.

  Half a minute later the agents were almost within reach. Antennae and fossorial legs sprouted from their beetledream suits as they prepared to strike. They could kill him if they saw fit. They could even cut him into pieces. The MAP would reanimate and stitch his
body back together. Prague had already been reanimated twice, once after being gunned down by a rival assassin, the second time during a friendly water balloon fight that went sour and turned into a hydrochloric acid war. Briefly he adopted a third-time’s-a-charm sensibility. But reanimation was a messy, tiresome business; he couldn’t be bothered with it. And he hadn’t scikungfi fought in antigravity for years.

  “I’ll give you dipshits first crack,” Prague said. “Be nice now. I’m still half asleep.”

  SAMSA 066 attacked with a snap kick. Prague didn’t move, didn’t even flinch—he let the kick land on his jaw. His head ricocheted off his shoulder and bounced back into place as the agent leisurely somersaulted by…

  SAMSA 067 lashed out with an antenna that crackled and fizzed with electricity. The antenna sliced through Prague’s flesh like butter, claiming his right ear lobe. Toiletbowl blue globules of Victory brand gin floated out of the wound.