The Kyoto Man (The SciKungFi Trilogy) Read online

  D. HARLAN WILSON

  THE KYOTO MAN

  A PULP SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

  BOOK III OF THE SCIKUNGFI TRILOGY

  “Extravagant fiction today—cold fact tomorrow.”

  BOWIE, MARYLAND

  ACCLAIM FOR THE WORKS OF D. HARLAN WILSON

  Codename Prague

  “In this second installment of his Scikungfi Trilogy (after Dr. Identity), Wilson ups his creative ante with new bursts of stream-of-cyberconsciousness prose to rival Gilbert Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) . . . With the cinematic feel of Pulp Fiction and a sound slap at modern culture, this should attract a select audience that appreciates metafiction and pulp action.”

  —Library Journal

  “This novel is from the wild edge of science fiction, in the tradition of Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch—fast, smart, funny, and full of a scarily plausible vision of just how weird things could get if we take our biological fate into our own hands.”

  —Kim Stanley Robinson

  “This intense mixture of giddy activity, cyberpunk essences, avant-fusion and social satire may make your head spin at an accelerated rate. Actual brain damage is unlikely, in most cases.”

  —John Shirley

  “Codename Prague is a thrill-a-minute combination of James Bond, Robert Ludlum, and cyberpunk set in a dangerous, erotic, and not-as-distant-as-you’d-wish future.”

  —Mike Resnick

  Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia

  “D. Harlan Wilson’s hilarious meta-pulp SF novel, Dr. Identity, is a funhouse mirror whose cartoonish distortions continually amaze and amuse—until one realizes that what we’re seeing is a disturbingly accurate vision of ourselves. An instant avant-pop classic by a major new talent.”

  —Larry McCaffery

  “Readers with a taste for wacky experimental fiction will enjoy D. Harlan Wilson’s Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia, a pulp science fiction novel set in the postcapitalist city of Bliptown.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Wilson’s sardonic, riotously imaginative vision of the future holds a mirror up to our own increasingly chaotic society and makes provocative entertainment.”

  —Booklist

  “Dr. Identity is a rollicking romp through a future so absurd, it can’t help but feel real. D. Harlan Wilson shows us everything we know—but wish we didn’t—about ourselves.”

  —Robert Venditti

  “This book’s better’n the bushelful of Benzedrine-spiked donut holes with which Dr. Identity tries to bribe his students into civilized demeanor! Pomo cybertheory never tasted so good or made you fly this high!”

  —American Book Review

  Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance

  “A bludgeoning celluloid rush of language and ideas served from an actionpainter’s bucket of fluorescent spatter, Peckinpah is an incendiary gem and very probably the most extraordinary new novel you will read this year.”

  —Alan Moore

  “Wilson’s surreal view of a midwestern town called Dreamfield features the author’s trademark prose which goes from violent to hysterical to bizarre—sometimes within the same sentence . . . all the while leaving behind witty commentary and observances on the rural lifestyle.”

  —Horror Fiction Review

  “Peckinpah . . . proves that Wilson is either a genius or a madman, in all likelihood a crazed hybrid of both. A book that will delight Wilson’s fans and mortally shock the uninitiated.”

  —Eric Miles Williamson

  They Had Goat Heads

  “Wilson delights in turning language to new and exciting uses.”

  —Shroud Magazine

  “D. Harlan Wilson doesn’t just gaze into the abyss. He dives headlong into it, pulling us with him and laughing maniacally all the way down.”

  —Tim Waggoner

  “Funny, experimental, troubling, this brilliant collection of short stories proves conclusively that D. Harlan Wilson is a maverick author of genius.”

  —Rhys Hughes

  Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria

  “Wilson has been duly anointed as speculative fiction’s most unpredictable stylist.”

  —Booklist

  “This comedy of menace, this spooky Kabuki, is never comfortable to inhabit but is as enjoyable as Krazy Kat just the same—the author indulges himself to the hilt and denies himself nothing.”

  —Rain Taxi

  “The exquisite tilt of this novel runs us all off the board and on; its originality is a weapon. Firing at that bullseye on time.”

  —Barry N. Malzberg

  “If you had a time machine and could secure the living brains of James Thurber and Andre Breton ripped untimely from their skulls, run them through a juicer, then mainline the blended liquid neurons, you might become a writer like D. Harlan Wilson . . . If this be ‘interstitial’ fiction, then it’s a case of the interstices expanding like a galaxy to overwhelm whatever bland shores once flanked them.”

  —Paul Di Filippo

  The Kyoto Man © 2013 by D. Harlan Wilson

  First Ebook Edition, March 2013

  All rights reserved. Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press in Bowie, MD. Printed in the United States of America.

  Stanley Ashenbach, M.B.A. (Honorary)

  Design & layout by Jennifer Barnes

  Cover art © 2011 by Brett Weldele

  www.RawDogScreaming.com

  OTHER BOOKS BY D. HARLAN WILSON

  Novels

  Codename Prague

  Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance

  Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia

  Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria

  Criticism

  Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction

  Fiction Collections

  They Had Goat Heads

  Pseudo-City

  Stranger on the Loose

  The Kafka Effekt

  “I am a superior being suffering from a nervous breakdown.”

  —E.V. Odle, The Clockwork Man

  For the Unnamable

  NOTE TO THE READER

  This is an abridged version of The Kyoto Man compiled exclusively for tablets and e-readers. All events continue to occur in outrétime, but certain creative content has been sacrificed for the sake of futurity, including illustrations, screenplays, teleplays, movie ratings, proto-epistolary riffs, homeopape advertisements, and other superegoic media. Thus this electronic edition suffers from production constraints. WARNING: a schizophrenic reading experience may ensue. To read The Kyoto Man in its photogenic, techno-surreal entirety, please refer to the paperback and hardcover editions. Learn more at www.thekyotoman.com.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  The 10001st Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 1st Time I Turned into Kyoto

  Before the 1st Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 2nd Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 3rd Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 26th-170th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 257th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 500th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 510th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The XXXth Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 666th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 1000th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 1001st Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 3000th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 3001st Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 4000th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 5000th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 7000th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 8
193rd Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 9000th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 9500th Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The 10001st Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The Nth Time I Turned into Kyoto

  The Last Time I Turned into Kyoto

  THE 10001ST TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO

  DIAGNOSTIC PROSE

  A strong red sun bloomed onto the white screen of sky. Thick rays beamed from its margins, widening as they extended to the horizon.

  Beneath the sun—cacti, buttes, lizards, bones, vastness . . .

  The outréman sped across the landscape on a driftdisc, knees locked, arms stiff, wearing a cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge. A long mustard scarf flapped behind him in the wind and dust. Macrobiotic earbuds converted the howl of air into a grainy pop ballad that sounded as familiar and branded as it did alien and remote.

  He adjusted the earbuds two notches so that, instead of pop music, they played talk radio, harnessing and reinterpreting the windpower, but also dipping into his preconscious, sifting through the mnemonic chinoise and manufacturing a “new” talk show personality based upon all of the “old” talk show personalities he had listened to on live and prerecorded satellite transmissions, in different temporal matrices, and in the current fashion of technorganic recall. Tranzmodern green machinery was a capable monster.

  The voice that came through called itself Travis Manderbean.

  —The boundaries of modern eXistenZ have been collapsing at a mindboggling rate of speed and exactitude, said Manderbean in an electric staccato. Whaleflesh will soon become a hot commodity. Boil at your own risk. But we know this. News is always news. No innovation. Only partisan regurgitation. Or innovation in the form of imaginative partisan regurgitation. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know. I predict that the next timecrash will occur in the month of Dismember. The ghost of Nostradamus speaks to me like Zarathustra from an Austrian mountaintop. Hold on to your limp nodes and don’t forget to stow away les viscères. One needs the bowels. Artificial entrails are for cataleptic bos’ns. And if all else fails, the backwash of species-threatening defectors will conquer the sequela of evil energy-clowns. Transcend this equation and you are left with little more than an amphibious vacuum. Vacuums inhibit the status quo and cause psoriasis, among other trickledown effekts, but remember that dry skin is the primary accelerator of syncretism and xenophobia in some communities. Hand cream helps. I recommend Cetaphil, the sponsor of this multivalent broadcast and the source of my expansive and fecund livelihood. Thus spake Travis Manderbean. Let’s take a few calls from our listeners. Hello this is Travis Manderbean. Hello. Travis Manderbean here. Hello. Hello there. Is anybody there? Let’s not take any calls then. Let’s return to the issue of extraterrestrial aliens. The skinny white fellas. They are not from another planet. They are thoroughbred earthlings. They’re just terrifically old people. Old people who have lost all their hair. Old people who have grown tired of wearing clothes. Old people who don’t eat much. Old people whose noses and ears and genitals have fallen off. Old people whose pupils have ruptured and leaked blackness onto the hoary whites of their eyeballs. Ergo your archetypal alien à la countless blockbuster movies centering on strained friendships and family dynamics. Why don’t they have wrinkles? If you live long enough, wrinkles go away. Where do they get their spaceships? Their ray guns? Their penchant for human abduction, penetration and experimentation? Old people are smart. Old people are interested in things. They like to make things. Especially the ones that don’t submit to pathology or abandon their mnemonic turbines . . .

  The outréman didn’t see the trap. Nor did his alterity goggles; the asterisks on the dashboard of the eyescreen remained pale and inert.

  The clothesline caught him in the chest. Any higher and it might have beheaded him. His legs sprung out and up and he pinwheeled backwards while continuing to accelerate forwards. The driftdisc sputtered into the dirt and severed a cactus at the heel. Water gurgled onto the quiet earth.

  He hit the ground like a sledgehammer. The blow would have killed most people, shattered their bones and exploded their organs.

  He lost wind.

  The body artists hid behind the gargantuan skeletons of whales and elephants and dinosaurs. They lurched into the sunlight and closed on their prey.

  They exhibited fabulous deformities. The supposed leader appeared to be composed of plasticine clay and moved forward in stop-motion animation—awkward, disjointed, clumsily serpentine. One step behind him was a man in chimneysweep-chic sartorials with the brideshead of Dick Van Dyke.

  The deformities of their entourage ranged from prosaic fins, gills, beaks, tails and other animalia to the hard technologies of weaponized limbs, growthscreens, and retrofarscaped bandwidths of secondskin. No way to tell if they had been induced by timecrashes or surgical enhancement. It didn’t matter. Fashion and Artistry mimicked Folly with pathological resolve.

  Infodump, or, Thy Piles

  Nobody knew when the timecrashes began. Without temporal uniformity and constructedness, there can be no history—real or illusory. Origins had become ardent Speculative Fictions. Most of these SFs, however, postulated that the timecrashes were fallout from the Stick Figure War (2406-2416 A.R.). What aspects of the SFW produced timecrashes, on the other hand, was a subject of endless debate. Most SFers claimed they resulted from widespread pseudoscientific tampering with the spacetime continuum to create more effektive metaphysical superweapons, an epidemic that terminally lacerated the carcass of reality. Others said timecrashes had been conjured out of thin air by the Stix themselves and the war had never come to an end; in fact, the war was monotonously palpable, and humans felt the burns and bruises of “defeat” on a daily basis, if only psychologically, as the SFW currently unfolded on the battlefield of the unconscious, sometimes the preconscious. But this position relied upon the capacity for dreams to expose the (simulated) nature of “truth,” “reality,” etc. And nobody had dreamed in years. Hence the argument presupposed an imagined diegesis in which representations of “reality” might shed light on “reality,” an intricate representation (of) itself . . . A few extremist SFers argued that timecrashes had nothing to do with the war. Rather, they materialized because of a surplus of godlessness and nihilism in the collective (un)consciousness that spilled out of the mind-body consortium onto the physical landscape, perverting it. Whatever the case, while nobody knew how long they had been around, timecrashes were here to stay.

  The outréman stood and steadied his breath. A breeze kicked up. Dust devils sped away from his boots in galactic spirals.

  —Take off your scarf and show us your face, said the Dick Van Dyke, grinning like a chimp.

  The outréman cocked his head. The body artists converged on him. He raised a slow hand . . .

  . . . and removed his gloves. Then his headgear. Then his alterity goggles. Then a pair of gloveliners. Then his scarf—it took eight careful revolutions to unwrap it from his neck. Then he mimicked removing a pair of gloves, as if in a silent film. Then he removed his earbuds and stuffed them in a pocket. Then he unbuttoned his jacket. Rebuttoned it. Unbuttoned it halfway, then all the way, then busied himself with a racetrack of zippers on his chest and abdomen, all with the excruciating performativity of a seasoned showman . . . The body artists got antsy, but they didn’t attack him. For once, they exercised communal patience. Soon he would be dead. Soon they would consume him. Aestheticize his flesh.

  . . . The outréman didn’t take off his mask. He placed arms akimbo and nodded in friendly affirmation. Such behavior, of course, would only exacerbate his antagonists’ default aggression and mania. But absurdist bravado seemed like the appropriate response mechanism, at least according to the first wave of impulses that directed the flows of his desires. He always tried to obey the first wave.

  —Take it off, said a man with a goiterscreen projecting from his neck. The goiterscreen expanded and contracted, as if breathing. Its obscene surface c
rackled with static.

  —A dead channel, intoned the outréman. That static reeks of oblivion and tranquility.

  —Take the mask off. Now.

  —The mask is the doorway to the soul. The soul is the doorway to the future of an illusion.

  —Do what you’re told or I’ll do it for you.

  —I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

  The body artist marched forward and reached out and snatched the mask from the outréman’s face. It came free easily.

  And ate the body artist’s hand. The trauma exploded his goiterscreen into acidic flecks of celluloid . . .

  The mask convulsed in the dirt. It coughed up phlegm, bile and oil.

  It scuttled away.

  The outréman’s physiognomic prowess besieged normative parameters and the body artists struggled to negotiate and process it. If compelled to describe him to a sketch artist, they wouldn’t know where to begin, other than with the usual suspects: hair, eyes, nose, mouth, chin . . .

  —That was an expensive pretense, the outréman said sadly.