Dr. Identity Read online

  She appeared. I stopped breathing altogether.

  The digigraffiti froze.

  She popped up between the bed and the wall as if out of a jack-in-the-box. She made a sharp, horrifying noise that defied representation as she sprang into view.

  She was about a foot tall. She was entirely brown and appeared to be made of chocolate. In fact, she looked very much like a chocolate bunny, albeit an emaciated one. A closer inspection revealed she had a human structure. Her hairdo was a tall pointy affair topped off with a bun. Tiny pince-nez sat on the tip of her horned nose. The skin of her face had the texture of a brussel sprout and her lips were knotted into a mad sneer. She wore a little out-of-date buttondown shirt and a shawl over her bowed shoulders. Despite being brown and possibly edible, she looked more like a librarian than a bunny.

  It was horrifying.

  But I couldn’t move. And I couldn’t scream.

  And I couldn’t look away.

  My joints left me. My bones turned to iron, my internal organs to brick. Paralyzed, I lay in my bed like a statue that’s been pushed onto its side. My body felt so heavy…I began to sink into the mattress. The bunk bed made cracking sounds. Soon it would cave in and crush me. I prayed for it to happen.

  The brown lady…She didn’t flinch and her expression never changed. She was as harmless as a popsicle on a stick. Yet I had never been so terrified. Tears poured out of my rotund eyes as I stared into the miniature, empty eyes of a monster who I sensed was an incarnation of the Devil. I recalled thinking how it all made sense. My mother-thing experienced demonic possession and had to be exorcised regularly. I figured it was my turn.

  Then, suddenly, my body came back to me. The digigraffiti reanimated.

  I sprung into a sitting position and cried for my mother-thing, pretending the brown lady wasn’t there but eyeing her just the same. The logical thing to do would have been to sprint to my mother-thing’s bedcube for refuge. But I stayed in my bed.

  My mother-thing didn’t come. Eventually my lungs gave out. I stopped calling for her. I turned and faced the brown lady.

  I said, “Go, please. Go away, please. Thusly.” I didn’t know what the latter word meant but my mother-thing always said it when she wanted something. I’m not sure she understood what the word meant either, but I liked saying it. And it assuaged my anxiety. I started to whisper it over and over. “Thusly. Thusly. Thusly. Thusly.”

  The brown lady stared at me.

  I remained in bed. Now I began to whisper-scream for my mother-thing. Unless she was sitting next to me, she wouldn’t have been able to hear me. But I whisper-screamed anyway.

  …She stumbled into the bedcube.

  The thick locks of her hair were fastened in tinfoil, copper wires, scrunchies, curlers and other bindings. Drunk and confused, she walked forward as if her knees had been unscrewed, falling into the walls and then bouncing erect. I watched her through a chink in the drop-drawer.

  She opened the drop-drawer, tried to crawl inside and hit her head on an overhang. She somersaulted backwards across the bedcube…

  The brown lady stared at me.

  My mother-thing got up and staggered to the bed again. She climbed on without incident this time, her breasts spilling out of her nightgown. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Her breath stunk of Mad Dog.

  I pointed at the brown lady.

  “Oh.”

  My mother-thing reached across the bed. One of her breasts spanked my cheek.

  Snorting, she gripped the brown lady, pushed her down beneath the bed and gave her a crank, as if locking her into place. “There.” She kissed my forehead. She eased me into my pillow. “Goodnight, son.”

  As she retreated from the bed, my eyes begged her to stay, but she didn’t see me, and then she was gone. I didn’t follow her.

  I closed my eyes and fell sleep.

  The next morning, I couldn’t look underneath the bed.

  At breakfast I thanked my mother-thing for her assistance and asked why the brown lady was living in my room, how long she had been living there, and why I had never seen her before.

  “Goodnight, son,” said my mother-thing, and passed out. The plate of soggy eggs and raw bacon she had been holding flew out of her hand and shattered against the ceiling…

  I started sleeping on the top bunk, buried in a hill of toys and unable to turn onto my side under any circumstance. To this day I still can’t do it. The only position anybody will ever find me in a bed is on my back.

  A few weeks later I found the courage to take a peek beneath my lower bunk. Nothing was there, of course.

  I became a light sleeper. I woke up all the time in the middle of the night, even when I muted the digigrafitti. The slightest disturbance or vibration beckoned my consciousness. Sometimes my heartbeat was enough to rouse me. Once I woke from the sound of an ant stomping across the carpet of my bedcube.

  The brown lady never returned. On occasion, however, I could see her silhouette in my periphery, lingering at my bedside…

  18

  BATTLE ROYAL – 3RD PERSON

  Student-thing Happy Q. Squarebone was late again. He had been seeing his third string sorority girl’s ’gänger on the sly. Nothing got him off in bed like a good old-fashioned dirty mouth, and the android’s mouth was much dirtier than its owner’s. Sometimes he insisted that it actually eat dirt before sleeping with him. He liked to feed it a particular brand: Mr. Greenjeans’ Saleté Noire. He kept a big plastic bag of it underneath his bed. Whenever he got the itch, he hauled the bag out, dumped some onto a plate, arranged it into three sections (each representing a different serving of food), gave the ’gänger a fork, and ordered it to dine.

  Today he fed the ’gänger too large a portion. It choked and died. He and a group of fratboys who had been observing the meal disposed of the body by carving it into thin slices and feeding it to an industrial paper shredder. The project took longer than expected. Now St. Squarebone faced another tardy point in his ENG 350CC (Novels Concerning Bullfrogs) course. He couldn’t afford the point. His professor was a reasonable and fair plaquedemic, but he had been tardy on five occasions this semester. He didn’t know the university had been shut down for the day because of a holocaust. As far as he knew, one more tardy ensured his death.

  He wasn’t tardy yet, though. Class didn’t officially begin for twelve minutes. Corndog University’s building was twenty blocks ahead. He couldn’t make it there on time by foot. But a jetpack would suffice…

  He kidney-punched an unsuspecting alaristrian who was bending over to tie his shoe. Gasping, the alaristrian fell forward. The student-thing clocked him in the back of the head with his bookbag, then kicked a hole in his face and stripped him of his jetpack.

  The eggs of his brains gurgled onto the asphalt.

  The streets, slideways and escalators were crowded, but nobody seemed to notice the crime. St. Squarebone strapped on the jetpack, secured his bookbag and prepared to lift off.

  He felt the hairs on his neck singe…He got sucked backward off his feet…then projected forward in a flaming, airborn somersault…He crashed through the window of a cucumber café. The burlap arm of his jumpsuit was on fire. He thrust it into a pot of cucumber soup. The cashier screamed. The lights flashed on and off. St. Squarebone felt himself up. No broken bones. But he was bleeding, gouged, burnt…dizzy…He staggered to the window and peered outside.

  Smoke billowing into a nightcrawler sky…Stampede of bodies aflame, bawling and flailing…In an above flyway, alaristrians crashed into each other, spun out of control and exploded…Across the street, a burning beast. The flames crackled and fumed. Smell of overcooked Spaghetti-Os…

  Explosion…the flames rose in sweltering umbrellas…Implosion. The aircraft tried to stand up…It slumped over with a defeated groan. Sparks, electric ringlets. The dark fog of a dead thing…

  Disoriented, the major domo of the cucumber café accused St. Squarebone of vandalism and insisted he pay for the window he crashed through
and the soup he used to put the fire out on his arm.

  St. Squarebone lurched outside…

  Blast of hot air…His eyes began to bleed. He tripped over a skeleton and fell into the gutter…Faded in and out of consciousness, struggling to keep his vision in focus. Thick walls of smoke encased him.

  Abraham Lincoln stepped through the smoke in slow motion…

  He looked more like a cartoon than a real person—his skin and clothes luminesced and the contours of his body were uncannily sharp. He was adorned in proverbial Lincolnesque attire—top hat, eyeglasses, bow tie, long suit coat—with the addition of a Frank-N-Furter corset and kneehigh Electra boots. In one hand he carried a ray gun, in the other a chainsword.

  “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” he intoned.

  Following Lincoln was a meek, hunched-over, Igorlike being who barked, “Quit quoting the President-thing.” He exhibited moon boots and a white, loose-fitting swashbuckler shirt that had been ripped and scorched in places. He had a nondescript face in spite of a classic Love-is-a-Battlefield hairdo.

  St. Squarebone reached out to them…

  Lincoln told the Igor to take cover. The Igor refused. They got into an argument. A flaming skeleton dashed by them. Lincoln clotheslined the skeleton and took off its skull.

  Slowly the smoke cleared.

  Lincoln and the Igor were still arguing when the army trudged onto the scene.

  The army featured vigilantes, ninjas, bounty hunters, Pigs and Cerberus dogs as well as a host of rainforest creatures recruited by the Law to hunt down what the Media was currently calling BBP (Bliptown’s Bubonic Plaquepidemic). A troop of Voss Winkenweirder ghosts accompanied the horde. The movie star’s family had hired a Ouija diva to summon the ghost and then they had it cloned by a top-of-the-line parageneticist. Needless to say, the ghosts were in vengeful moods. A glittering fog of Papanazi pulsed overhead.

  A Pig wearing a Victorian police commissioner’s hat put a bullhorn to its snout and announced something in Squealspeak.

  The Igor dashed across the street and dove into the cucumber café. He landed head-first in a basket of fresh cucumbers.

  Abraham Lincoln said, “If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can. And I mean to keep doing so until the end.”

  The members of the army exchanged confused glances. A Frankenstein monster grunted.

  Lincoln shot the Pig-in-Chief with the ray gun. A cobalt radioluminescent aura formed around the Pig. Its body flashed and turned to shadow. The shadow blew away like grains of sand and its big hat fell on the ground.

  Bolts of lightning erupted from the Papanazi stormcloud as the army attacked.

  St. Squarebone crawled out of the gutter and fell back into the cucumber café. The major domo was reprimanding the Igor now, although when he saw St. Squarebone, he said, “I haven’t forgotten about you!”

  Lincoln took out the first two lines of blitzkriegers with the ray gun, using the chainsword to repel ammunition fired on him. The third line was a morass of Winkenweirder ghosts. The gun had no effect on the holographic figures. They swarmed him like killer bees, trying to leap into his body and possess it. Lincoln slashed them in pieces with the chainsword. The pieces reformatted and came at him again. He ditched the ray gun. He leapt backwards, somersaulting in fasttime…In the air he pulled a poltergun out of one of the overfull de la Footwas in his pants. The poltergun operated in reverse, inhaling and disintegrating beyond-the-grave life forms.

  By the time Lincoln landed on his feet, no ghosts remained…

  “St. Squarebone?” the Igor said, pushing the café’s major domo aside. He checked his watch. “Why aren’t you in class?”

  The student-thing was in rough shape. He didn’t process the question. Nor did he comprehend that the Igor was his professor for Novels Concerning Bullfrogs.

  The major domo clipped the Igor from behind. He fell into a tower of cucumber finger sandwiches. The cashier screamed again.

  “Those took me all morning to make!” the major domo shouted.

  “You pushed me into them!” The Igor stood up, wiped a glob of mayonnaise from his eye, and slapped the major domo.

  An old man sat alone at a table. Unfazed by the commotion, he quietly sipped a cup of exfoliating tea…

  A bounty hunter in a Shazam outfit beelined Abraham Lincoln and tried to capture him in a big pillowcase. Lincoln cut his head off with the chainsword. He dropped the head in the pillowcase and swung it at the speed of a helicopter blade, battering the flock of somersaulting ninjas that pounced on him.

  He let go of the pillowcase. It flew into the cloud of Media overhead and a handful of Papanazis dropped out of the sky.

  “Nearly all men can stand adversity,” Lincoln said, “but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” He dropped the chainsword and started to remove weapons from his pockets with machinic proficiency and velocity.

  He threw a living torpedo at an abominable snowman. The torpedo was a three-eyed hairless bat. It awoke in mid-air. Screeching, it hit the abominable snowman’s hairy chest and chewed out its heart.

  He threw a contamination wad at a vigilante. The wad was a fist-sized chunk of slimy flesh. It hit the vigilante’s face and a skin disease spread across his body. In seconds his flesh shriveled and dissolved. The vigilante crumpled into a quivering, bloody lump.

  He threw a vibronic eel at a vigilante’s ’gänger. The eel smacked its neck, wrapped around it and constricted…The ’gänger’s head popped off like a bottlecap.

  He threw a tanglevine at a King Kong. The weapon looked like a large weed. It hit the giant ape’s knee, replicated, and spread across its body until it was completely enveloped. Then the tanglevine compressed back to its original size…A blast of simian blood and viscera showered the army. Two of its soldiers drowned.

  He threw a psychoactive spike at a T-Rex. It hit the dinosaur in the temple and incited a hallucination. Suddenly the dinosaur believed it was a coffee pot. It sat down on its tail, squeezed its eyes shut, and tried its best to percolate…

  Fusillade of bullets, heat rays, energy bolts, flechettes, shuriken, hypodermics, caltrops, grenades, mortars, throwing stars, fireballs, harpoons, bricks, javelins, rockets, missiles, coral snakes…

  Abraham Lincoln leapt into the air, pirouetted, grabbed and spun around a street lamp, jackknifed over a King Kong that tried to bearhug him, and landed on the hood of a blown-up Buick. A velociraptor sprung at him. He caught it by the jaws and ripped its head in two.

  Fusillade of bullets, heat rays, energy bolts, flechettes…

  Lincoln leapt into the air…

  “I’m talking to you young man,” the Igor said. “How many tardies do you have this semester?” He started towards the student-thing, who was balled up underneath a spice rack. The café’s major domo hit him on the back of the head with a soup spoon.

  “Ouch!”

  The Igor wrenched the spoon from his grip and wedged the spoon between his legs. The pudgy major domo squealed, grabbed his crotch and tipped over.

  The cashier opened a safe in the wall and stared at the barcode inside until she had depleted the café’s savings funds. Then she ran out the back door.

  “Thief,” whimpered the major domo.

  The Igor grabbed St. Squarebone’s foot and pulled him out into the open. He kicked him in the stomach. “Did you at least do your reading for today? I was going to present a lecture on The Wind in the Willows and the theoretical Afterward that accompanies it. Are you prepared to discuss this text? Are you prepared to answer questions in regards to the syllogistic implications of the protagonist’s negative capability?”

  “Please, Dr.…” St. Squarebone had regained his mental faculties. He knew who the Igor was now. But his throat had been burnt to a crisp; when the initial blast from the Smaug crash hit him, he inhaled a tongue
of fire. He tried to beg for mercy. “Dr.…Dr.…”

  “Dr. ’Blah. Dr. Blah Blah Blah.”

  “I’m sorry,” the student-thing rasped. “But…the sorority…her ’gänger…She died.”

  “Your turn.” Dr. ’Blah extracted a medieval crusader sword from his pocket. He hoisted the weapon over his head…and was stabbed in the calf with a fork by the major domo. It was a plastic fork and didn’t even puncture the fabric of his pants. But it stung. And it brought back memories.

  The major domo became Gilbert Hemingway, Utensil Tyrant. Dr. ’Blah went ballistic. Screeching like a monkey, he swung the sword at the major domo as hard as he could, repeatedly, and missed his target every time. The major domo dodged the blows with ease.

  In time Dr. ’Blah destroyed the café. Shards of glassware and cucumber chunks littered the floor, and the dessert carousel lay in ruins. St. Squarebone had retreated beneath the spice rack again. Exhausted, Dr. ’Blah caught his breath, apologized to the major domo, and ordered something cold to drink…

  Outside the melee neared a climax. The Papanazi had swelled and expanded into a full-fledged hurricane that spanned blocks and blocks. Winds accelerated up to 80 mph, sweeping humans and ’gängers and Frankenstein monsters off of their feet and throwing the larger rainforest creatures into buildings. Dinosaurs roared and cracked their tails. King Kongs pounded their chests. Abominable snowmen and sasquatches tore their hair out. Lightning drilled the street. Abraham Lincoln hovered between heaven and earth on the thrusters of a Beetlesneak jetpack. The sky shone around him like a million suns, calling him on and on across the universe…

  His body slipped into the Bizarro dimension of fasttime. Armed only with a hypersharp rapier, he annihilated the minions of the postcapitalist confederacy…The scene kicked off with a slashed jugular. Before the jugular bled dry, the scene had evolved into a histrionic spectacle of bouncing heads, twitching limbs, spurting gashes and intestinal fireworks…An unsuspecting Pig’s snout was hacked off and blue blood gushed out of the hole…An allosaurus’ stomach was slashed from the neck to the anus. Its skin opened up like a body bag and out dumped half a ton of whale blubber…D.C. Comics superheroes and villains diced into precise cubes of beef fondue…bouquets of blood and flesh-confetti…soaking technologies…sledgehammer of sparks…thunder, lightning…smell of cooked meat…exploding eyeballs…exploding light bulbs…exploding windows and demolished brick walls…Barbarella yawps…whirlwinds of dark ninja hoods and gees…hairdos tousling into anonymity…rumble of thunder…rhizome of lightning…black-and-white flashbulbs of digitized ultraviolence…close-up on Lincoln’s sharp, bearded visage and the purposeful gleam in his bright…white…irisless eyes…