The Kyoto Man (The SciKungFi Trilogy) Read online

  Blood poured from the body artist’s wrist. Blood poured from the flapped crater where the goiterscreen used to be.

  Astounded, he fainted, twitched. Died.

  The Dick Van Dyke emitted an insect scream. His cohorts reacted like snapdragons.

  The outréman tended to his cuticles. Then:

  —The world of men burns with the persistence of gratuitous idiocy, he announced, raising a pointed eyebrow. I fondle the Udders of Chaos. I eat veal in the shadow of the Tall Window. Gonna sermonize, me. Let me tell you a story. A myth. A legend. It begins with a man. It ends with a city. The space between these polarities is marked by the slash of an aluminum grin.

  The body artists stroked their extensions and implants in raw agitation.

  —Things went sour when they erased obesity from the genetic code of the human contraption, said the outréman. Nobody appreciated that people actually enjoyed being fat; the texture, the very sight of flab pleased the corpulent subject. They didn’t stop there. They dissolved gender, rendering straight lines from curves, manufacturing flat stuff from protuberances. They turned everybody’s pigment the same color and made certain that everybody grew at the same rate and achieved the same height. They handed out fake rubber noses. Eventually the only distinguishing feature on a “person” was a hairdo, the one permissible artifact of identity and self-fashioning. Body communism. It failed. They blew up the city.

  The body artists blinked.

  —What I just told you, the outréman continued, is a metaphor for the narrative I am about to reveal. This is how it begins. There was a man who could transform into a city. This is how it ends.

  In a painful flash of understanding, the body artists realized what they were up against. Tentatively they paced backwards despite the futility of escape.

  Infodump, or, Thy Piles

  The mythology of the man-city persisted for centuries and suffered the diachronic backpain of evolution and metamorphosis. Curiously, the man-city had only existed for half a century, at least according to some eschatologists. Experts of course attributed this temporal anomaly to timecrashes, as they attributed every anomaly that they couldn’t deprocess, temporal or atemporal. Certain variables in the mythology stayed constant. The man-city was an inadvertent mass murderer, for instance, killing thousands, on occasion millions, depending upon the outrézone, whenever he transformed from skin and bone into wood and metal and concrete. Additionally, prominent apparatchiks held him responsible for an acceleration in global warming, a phenomenon attributed to the rapid manner in which, throughout the course of his transformation, he forced a reinscription of space and atmosphere as the earth struggled to accommodate his sudden, unanticipated metropolitan bulk. He was also indicted for the quickening of the science fictionalization of the social and cultural register, something well underway before his investment in the reality studio, and yet something that undeniably belonged to him, as the emergent knowledge of his existence and the capabilities of the human body kindled virtual forest fires of scientific, epistemological, ontological and metaphysical creativity, exploration and application. The moral(ity) of this latter narrative was a topic of fiery defibrillation. At any rate, the man-city had long been a household name, feared, fetishized and fixated on with Kierkegaardian rigor, an affliction exacerbated by the fact that nobody knew what he looked like, since nobody had ever seen him and lived to tell the tale.

  And if in fact the outréman was the man-city, the body artists couldn’t discern his face, and if by some hypothetical miracle they were set free, they would have no tangible basis on which to describe him, other than he was a man, not exceedingly tall, not terribly short, with a nettled, sonorous voice, and with gestures the likes of reptiles, slow and deliberate, yet on the verge of lashing out.

  A body artist in stop-motion animation gathered courage and told the outréman to lie down on the ground and put his hands behind his head.

  —I am a spatial anthropology, he replied. Spatial anthropologies don’t lie down on the ground. They rise into the clouds and shatter heaven’s skylights.

  —That’s enough clever talk, clever talker, said the Dick Van Dyke. This is your last chance.

  —Last chance. Last chance for what? What will you to do to me? Molest me? Murder me? Swallow my soul? You don’t even know. You’re simply enacting the motions. Dionysian motions. Entropic motions. You’re enslaved by a narrative that you can’t see. You’re characters in a trashy pulp novel. It ticks and it tocks—you can’t stop the lynched pendulum from swinging like a dogtongue. You can enter it from infinite orifices. You can go backwards and forwards. You can put a bookmark in it, pause it. But unless you understand it, it means nothing. And yet this narrative is God and Guide. I am not the author. There is no author. There is Cause. There is Effekt. I roost on the Precipice and perceive the geographies of Apeshit. Through the vehicle of my body, you will learn the meaning of ragged storytelling. I am the Podium on which you may stand tall and pose questions with lethal answers. Interrogation is contingent upon desire, you Unholy Fuckers. Crack open my person like an egg and my fuming essence will flow into the gutters and drown all of the impersonators. These are mere snippets of my plagiarized word horde. My word horde is fractal and true. But in the end it will ring false. Mind you, Gentlemen Cunts: the scope of my assholery knows no boundaries.

  The monologue struck a mutual chord. Enmity overwhelmed fear . . .

  —Scheißekopf.

  The body artists blitzed the outréman. In the face of the Unknown and the Incomprehensible, violence and aggression are the only viable resorts.

  They beat him to a proverbial and literal pulp. Sometimes they took turns; sometimes they did it all at once. He let them. He bled for them. Twice he told them they were doing “seminal work in the field.”

  His bruises pulsed, grew larger and uglier, turned deeper shades of purple, then black. Blood flowed from his wounds and made small, orderly puddles in the sand.

  They beat him until they couldn’t beat him anymore. Fatigued, the body artists slumped over, gasping for breath.

  Red-rimmed clouds flared onto the sky like rashes.

  The outréman stood . . . and the puddles of blood disappeared into his wounds . . . and the wounds disappeared . . . and the bruises faded, faded, faded . . . He cracked his neck. He grinned a Cartesian grin as his flesh acclimatized to the assault, reconfiguring itself, preparing itself.

  The body artists lifted their arms and reached out for him, fingers trembling . . .

  It was the ten thousand and first time he turned into Kyoto.

  THE 1ST TIME I TURNED INTO KYOTO

  CRITERION PROSE

  Grocery carts squeaked and clattered and rumbled up and down the aisles . . .

  The blueberries looked good today. He opened a carton and tasted one of them. Tasted all right. A little sour, but he liked them sour, and when he bit down on the berry, its juices burst onto his teeth and palate and tongue. Few berries burst with that sort of fanaticism.

  “Ahem.”

  He peered over his shoulder. A nonsequitor Schutz with white lambchop sideburns flexed a filigreed jaw and said, “What’re you doing?”

  Inquisitive eyes darted left, right, left . . .

  “Yeah. I’m talking to you. What do think you’re doing?”

  “Me?” he replied. “Nothing. I’m testing these berries.”

  “No,” said the nonsequitor Schutz. “You’re buying those berries. This isn’t a free-for-all. This isn’t the Garden of Eden. There are rules. Food costs money. Food goes into our mouth—food gets bought.”

  “I’m not buying flat berries.”

  “I’ve been watching you. We’ve all been watching you.” The nonsequitor Schutz pointed at the ceiling and moved his finger in a broad, drowsy circle. “You have taste-tested nearly every fruit in the supermarket.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “There are bite marks in the pears. There are bite marks in the apples. There are bite marks i
n the kiwis.”

  He enacted a complex hesitation. “I didn’t do that.”

  “You did that, sir.”

  “You have no evidence.”

  “We have obtained thousands of analogue and digital video recordings of your actions. These recordings are self-replicating and have been transmitted to thousands of local law enforcement agencies.”

  He enacted a complex hesitation . . . “I’m not buying flat berries,” he repeated.

  “You will buy them flat,” the nonsequitor Schutz bleated. “You will buy them unflat.”

  He smiled. He nodded.

  He ran away.

  Derailed, the nonsequitor Schutz fell over, then took him out at the heels with a meaty forearm.

  A fistful of blueberries sailed through the air in slow motion, froze at their peak, then fastforwarded into a sharp descent and exploded against the checkered tile floor . . .

  They wrestled. Awkwardly. He was slim and in good shape but not very coordinated, and the nonsequitor Schutz was overweight and out of shape and extremely uncoordinated. They sort of rolled around on each other, failing to apply headlocks. Shoppers observed them with canned wonderment. Finally the nonsequitor Schutz managed to grab a bottle of balsamic vinegar and whack him in the head with it.

  Things went dark.

  He awoke in a stock room on his back. Giant anthrohydraulic forklifts moved wooden crates on and off shelves that rose to a distant ceiling. The floor shook as they loped across it with heavy iron steps. Rabbitear antennae extended and retracted from their braincubes as their eyes pulsed red and burned barcodes and brand names onto the crates.

  He pushed himself up. He enacted a complex hesitation . . .

  A forklift dropped a crate. It fell to the cement floor in fasttime, exploded in slow motion. Synthetic dirt and genetically enlarged legumes burst from the cracks.

  The commotion excited the forklifts. They plodded haphazardly across the stock room, crashing into shelves, crashing into themselves, tripping over stacks and piles of detritus, collapsing . . .

  Things went dark.

  He awoke . . . somewhere else. Dark, musty. Cement floor, cold against the skin. But not the stock room. Realtime deceived him. It was not a dream . . . Broad-shouldered stickmen shocked him with cattle prods and shouted about the “__________.” The features, the contours of their faces escaped his (in)sights . . .

  . . . opened his flesh. He bled electric ants . . . dashed across the floor, mandibles clicking like spilled birdshot pellets . . .

  Things went dark.

  He awoke . . . somewhere else. A waiting room or lobby. Bright lights. Canary yellow walls. Cheap carpet. Tables fanned with homemaking magazines. Chairs . . .

  Faint Cashmere Muzak crackled from a square speaker in the ceiling.

  He was alone. He sat upright and gazed absently at the far wall. There was an ornately framed photograph hanging on it at a slight angle. The only photograph in the room . . .

  . . . entered his screen of vision . . . ears and a mustache . . . bald . . . The man wore navy blue slacks and a short-sleeved dress shirt and a thin tie with thick stripes. “I am an Organizational Leadership Provider,” said the man. “The acronym for this title is appropriately OLP. I have been trained as such since birth. Hence you may say that I am a born Organizational Leadership Provider—viz., a Born Leader.” He brandished a pen and clipboard. “Call me Ishmael. L. Ron Ishmael.” He tapped the plastic nametag on his shirt with the pen. “Please refer to me as Mr. Ishmael in professional conversation. Your name, please?”

  “Where am I?” he uttered.

  Mr. Ishmael said, “Name, please, sir?”

  “I forgot.” He leaned to one side and squinted at the photograph on the wall. It wasn’t large, but he could see it clearly—too clearly, as if viewing it through a telescope. Or a microscope . . . It was a photograph of a city, captured from a remote crow’s nest in the sky.

  “You forgot.” Mr. Ishmael recorded the information, intently, white-knuckled, fingers trembling, as if carving words into the clipboard. “Do you have amnesia?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I have.” Beat. “Amnesia . . . Amnesia tempers the bashful rat like an unsuspecting skinhole.” Beat. “I’ve never heard that maxim. I don’t know what it means.” Beat. “I don’t know what I have.”

  Mr. Ishmael nodded perfunctorily. “I’m familiar with this affliction. For sake of record, I am going to call you, uh, Misterrrrrr”—running a finger down the clipboard—“uhhhhhhh, Plissken. As in Snake Plissken. Indeed, sir. That’s what we’ll call you. We always identify criminals by way of corny action heroes, even though we usually don’t tell criminals about this practice. That’s a secret among us Born Leaders. You are the spitting image of Kurt Russell, if I might add, except for the hair and the face and the body. You are certainly a Caucasian. You are a man, I think.”

  “I’m not a criminal,” said Plissken.

  “As you wish.” Smiling, Mr. Ishmael discussed the nature of Being-in-Charge and his primal Dasein. “First of all, one must set a good example. Additionally, one must act accordingly. Then one must understand the laws of social Darwinism, logical systems, sensoria and noumenons. And one must hold one’s chin up when one upholds the policies of the supermarket. Yes, one must be brave, thrifty, reverent . . .”

  Rapt, Plissken tried to figure out what city was depicted in the photograph. It occurred to him that it might not be a photograph, but a portrait, or perhaps a photograph that had been airbrushed or doktored to resemble a portrait . . . Something about the sky. It looked rusted. Corroded.

  Virile.

  Lush mountains embossed the city. Enormous Asian symbols punctuated the green peaks; trees had been mindfully cut down in their intricate shapes. One of the symbols burst aflame . . .

  Difficult to perceive the buildings. He noted a unique architectural variety. He wanted a closer look.

  Patellas rotated like combination locks . . . Knees retracted into ligaments, enabling the levers of thighs . . .

  L. Ron Ishmael checked his soliloquy and put a hand on Plissken’s shoulder. “If you please, sir. You are under arrest.”

  “Arrest? For what?” He sat, limply, as if the OLP’s touch had wounded him.

  Mr. Ishmael placed the clipboard against his chest and crossed his arms over it. He looked down at Plissken disappointedly. “Empty rhetoric. Disposable prose. There’s nothing worse. Well. The thing is, you attempted to steal the supermarket. You aimed a gun at the supermarket’s Grand Dragon of the Realm and told him to give it to you. He said, quote, ‘What?’ You said, quote, ‘Give me the goddamned supermarket.’ It’s right here.” He showed him the clipboard. “It’s written down right here. Expletive and all.”

  “I didn’t do that.”

  “The question concerning how you would go about confiscating the supermarket remains problematic. Insidious logistics. A supermarket is a rather large apparatus, after all, and you, we’ve concluded, are just a man. How would you unearth the apparatus? How would you carry it away? Where would you hide it? And what would you do with the employees? A supermarket is not a supermarket without its technological extensions. Otherwise it is merely a receptacle of goods. A box of boxes.”

  “. . .”

  “As I was saying,” Mr. Ishmael continued, “once you have been processed by the supermarket’s Grand Titan of the Dominion and his squadron of Furies, you will be turned over to the local authorities. I am in no position to make a judgment as to what they will do with you. They may let you go. They may put you under arrest and process you in a fashion that resembles the very manner in which you have been processed by the Born Leaders of the supermarket. Then again, they may . . .”

  His voice floated away, far, far away, across the static vastness, through the tall reeds of savannahs, on a bed of oysterflesh . . . Plissken succumbed to a weird hypnosis . . . Novocain . . . Butane . . . Metropocalypse . . . The city entranced him. Commanded him. He had no excuse. The city de
fied his memory, his identity . . . Was it Tokyo? Hong Kong? Shanghai? . . . No. A Japanese city. He knew virtually nothing about Asian architecture and landscapes other than what Godzilla and Bruce Lee films had revealed to him. But he sensed a yawning Japanese character.

  The photograph engulfed the wall.

  No. The city leaked out of the frame and engulfed the wall . . . Plissken shuddered as it expanded, showing him street grids . . . clusters of buildings . . . colorful gardens and bursts of evergreen . . . wingtip rooftops and skyblue rivers and great gold-plated Buddhas . . .

  Eyes glazed, Plissken exclaimed, “I feel sick!” Then, quieter, in an almost indecipherable murmur: “I don’t feel good.”

  Mr. Ishmael bowed his head. “I’m sorry to hear this. But your health is your own affair as long as it doesn’t affect the health of others in some fashion. Then your health becomes my concern. Then your health becomes everybody’s concern. I’m going to write that down.”

  Plissken produced an obscene burp and vomited in the chair beside him. It was mercury.

  “Foul, Mr. Plissken.” Mr. Ishmael stared at the quicksilver discharge like a flower of evil. “Are you going to do that again? The real Snake Plissken wouldn’t do that. Mr. Kurt Russell wouldn’t do that. I’ve met Mr. Russell, incidentally. We had dinner once in London in a private room in the back of an upscale restaurant. The name of the restaurant escapes me. My sister went to school with the actor’s daughter. It was a hell of a time. Mr. Russell paid for everything and I got drunk and met a girl. Nothing happened, but it might have been the best night of my life.”

  Plissken doubled over, groaning. He fell forward off the chair like a crash-test dummy. Mr. Ishmael stepped aside and allowed him to collapse. “I hope this isn’t some feeble attempt to deceive me,” he said. “I’m no stranger to the deception of everymen.”

  A fever swelled from his core. Sweat rolled from gaping pores. The shivers . . . Hot flashes hit him like snapkicks. Cottonmouth . . .