I was bitten by a radioactive Jesus

(continued from 11: Twentynine-Palms)

So I went for a walk. I was wearing “street clothes” rather than the very biblical robes I had been wearing of late, or the cool, post-modern, scripture-covered bodysuit that I imagined The Nazarene would wear. It was cool inside, but like everyone else I had to exit through the Hotel-Casino-University’s seventeen progressively warmer air locks so that the desiccating, kiln-like heat that makes these places such popular resorts would not flash-cook my cool skin, unprotected by an ablative sheen of sweat, and send me into convulsions, hydrostatic shock, and a fit of lethal embolisms. It was a lovely day outside, without a cloud in the sky and with nothing to block the views except the looming hulk of the seven-hundred story Hotel-Casino-University, whose upper four hundred floors are pressurized and whose top one hundred floors are shielded against the soothing rays of hard radiation sent our way by Mr. Sun.

Not that this was some luxuriantly vegetated countryside to be gazed upon. The desert is reputed to be very beautiful during certain minutes of the year, and the mountains surrounding the area do have a certain, austere charm, but all in all it is a landscape so obtrusively inimical to human habitation that it must be astounded that we haven’t gotten the message yet and retreated to the rivers, seas, and forest primeval.

The town itself is different from most I have seen. It consists of a miles-wide spread of heavy-walled, tile-roofed adobe bunkers cooled by technology developed for the eventual manned exploration of Mercury, and interspersed with rolling, hypnotically verdant golf courses on which the world’s fiftieth through two hundredth most powerful men play nine hole games while connected to pressurized IV systems to prevent the swift and fatal dehydration that killed the first couple of million hardy souls to explore this region.

I must admit to despising golf with an irrational intensity that may have something to do with the jaunty way my drunken father would swing his six iron into lamps, mirrors, and plastic models of comic-book characters that we had built. Or it might be the socioeconomic stigma of a game favored by Thurston Howell the Third, Uncle Scrooge, and Elmer J. Fudd, Millionaire, who owns a mansion and a yacht.

Besides that, my time in the Mysterious East gave me a sobering glimpse into the dark power of the game. In Japan golf is a different animal. Golf is in practical terms just as tied to class, but it is an obsession which gripped the hapless males of every part of the archipelago, including islands in the Sea of Japan that are too small to putt on. There is one golf shop per 3.6 people in Tokyo and Osaka, and the annual volume of trees turned into pulp to make paper on which to print golf-themed comics will completely deforest the planet by the year 2004. A set of clubs costs as much as a set of cruise ships of equal number, and must be carried at all times and in all places to avoid the danger of not conferring their full potential status benefit upon their owner. The fee to play a game of golf exceeds the median income of a section chief in a major electronics corporation, and the price of a country club membership is only slightly less than the total global cost of the Cold War.

Needless to say, I’ve never played. Perhaps if I did I would feel differently. Golf might conceivably be sort of fun. No. Strike that. Golf bad. Golf evil.

The coolest feature of the area around Twentynine Palms are the groves of gigantic, white propellers that have been cultivated on the more moderately sloped hillsides. These things are amazing. Most people believe them to be wind turbines for generating electrical power (which is the cover story given out by the U.N. and the major world powers for security reasons, but that’s almost exactly backwards. As top scientific and military leaders know, the momentum that used to keep the earth spinning on its axis ran out in 1962. Scientists knew it was coming, and had been working on a replacement source of rotational energy since before the second world war, but it was not until 1957 that a temporary solution was found.

Most people know about the launch of Sputnik, but many do not know that it was launched to deploy the longest cable ever constructed, based on decades of suspension bridge research. The satellite itself served as a drogue to keep the end of the cable dangling out into space, dragged along by the earth’s rotation like a streamer manipulated by a Rhythmic Gymnastics competitor. Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961, and all of the Saturn and Apollo missions, were actually for the purpose of attaching, fueling, and maintaining the enormous rocket engines needed to pull the cable around, catch up with the earth’s angular velocity, and gradually take up the job of spinning it around at more or less the proper rate. People in the Easter Bloc were in general aware of what was going on, as one could see the cable rising from its attachment point at Larjak, Siberia and spanning the sky as far as the wind-caressed plains of Outer Mongolia.

Titanic efforts and vast financial resources were needed to make this huge, trans-national project work and save the earth from becoming an uninhabitable wasteland of meteorological extremes as it just sat there stupidly in space, trundling around the sun with a day equal in length to its year. The costs incurred, the natural resources expended, and the hundreds of the most brilliant minds driven mad in this labor are the reason we’re not all driving flying cars today. But sacrifices had to be made until a more economical solution could be found.

These gigantic, snow-white propeller towers are that solution. Here and in fifteen other locations around the world, these phalanxes of gargantuan, geothermally-powered propellers provide the motive force for the brisk planetary rotation, relative tectonic stability, and twenty-four hour day we continue to enjoy today.

I stood in front of a posh sunscreen boutique on Twentynine Palms boulevard, oblivious to the ongoing desiccation of my flesh, mesmerized by the graceful and impossibly powerful rotation of those huge, aerodynamically-sophisticated blades, when I noticed a little dark speck at the base of one of them. I couldn’t make out what the speck on that distant hillside was at first but after a while it began to move from the base of one gleaming tower to the base of the next, and I realized it was a man, probably dressed all in black. I reeled as if kicked in the forehead by a draft horse. That was it! That was the Great Emaciator’s inhumanly despicable plan! He had no interest in the Marine Corps Base; he was going to blow up enough of this cluster of Global Rotation Impellers (or GRIs, as they are called in classified documents I happen to have seen at the laundromat) to destroy the equilibrium of the whole system, ruin the earth’s smooth rotation, and watch human civilization die as the earth’s crust, resting as it is on the lubricated melt-layer of the Mohorovician Discontinuity atop the chewy magma itself, slides around like the skin on a damp Shar-Pei as it shakes itself off.

This Abraham Lincoln Johnson guy really was mean, I realized.

I didn’t know what I could do to stop him, but I had to get up there and try. I flagged down a passing motorcyclist and asked him if I might borrow his glistening and organically-curved 1200cc Suzuki Hayabusa hyperbike, and seeing the urgency in my eyes, he said it would be fine. Accelerating the machine quickly to a barely subsonic speed, I blasted out of the city and up the hillsides to the Man in Black in 1.07 seconds, put the bike on its kickstand, scraped the bugs out of my eyes, and beheld my enemy, the Great Emaciator.
But it wasn’t him.

This man was dressed all in black, and did look pretty malevolent, but this was not the man I had glimpsed at the bar in the heart of the Garthbrooksian Empire. The figure before me was hulking and apelike, with a pronounced hump on his back and a fistful of detonators in his huge but stubby-fingered hand. His skin, despite his working out here in the sun, planting bombs on all these pylons, was the white of poached Rock Cod, and his features were clearly the inspiration for the beloved, dysfunctional puppets Punch and Judy.

His eyes gleamed with an emotion that I am happy to say has no name in any human language but dwells somewhere out in the territories past “cannibalistic ravenousness.” Not knowing what else to do, I put out my hand and said “Hi. I’m Albert.” With astounding speed for a regrettable mutation of his size, he lunged forward and bit off my right thumb. This was painful. Then he appeared to spin up into the air as I spun down to the ground at his feet. I was too dizzy to experience the space around me, and was going into serious shock, so all I could do for the moment was stare up at his wide, leering face. Then he spoke.

“Harmonica! Vampire bird fly down bite my ass! Nungo-veen!” I was in so much pain that his words sounded like gibberish to me. “Umpy-Dumpy Barf! Tangling bonemen I said!” he continued. Maybe it was gibberish.

“Do you speak English?” I inquired, with a much greater range of moment to moment pitch and volume variation than I normally exhibit. Mom always said I have a very nice telephone voice, in fact. “Do you understand me?” I asked him slowly.

“VOOOOOM! Buzzy Buzby bee, shitty-head,” he explained. “Glom it, grommet, who’s got the vomit?” he then wanted to know. I realized that I was in the presence of some major insanity. The depressives, catatonics, schizophrenics, paranoids, bulimics, bipolars, and compulsives I had come to know and love at the Baltimore Center for the Preservation of Inquisition Arts (where I had been a patient for a time) were beginners compared to this guy. He was bonkers. I was frightened, but not so much frightened that he might bite my face off or destroy the world, but gripped by the existential terror that comes from any truly unambiguous reminder that the scrambling of a few brain cells or the misfiring of some important chemical-producing gland is all that separates us from raving, incoherent madness. This guy probably didn’t even realize that I was a living being, or even that he was. If he had been sent by the Great Emaciator it was truly a tribute to the G.E.’s management skills that he could even get this guy to wear clothes, much less convince his train wreck of a brain to proceed with the technical tasks of a major demolition operation. Perhaps he was an idiot savant whose mind could function at a stratospheric level of sophistication but only in the specialized area of Evil.

Speaking of Evil, this behemoth picked me up like a rag doll by my left leg and held me upside-down before his face to bathe in his stinking breath. He said the most context-appropriate and yet the most upsetting thing he had blurted out so far:

“Yum.” He was drooling at about ten liters per minute, and his teeth were clacking involuntarily like a cat watching nearby birds. He comforted me with the words “Appalachian Bunghole!” and opened wide for a nice snack of fresh Albert. If I hadn’t been so irritated with him over his kicking my quasi-messianic butt, not to mention over my impending demise I would have felt sorry for this poor, sick bastard.

Sick bastard. Sick.

There was no way one could be as wacked out as this bruiser without something being seriously wrong with his brains. Really, it’s obvious that anyone who would bite off someone’s favorite thumb for no good reason is just fundamentally not hooked up right.

So I lunged out with my hands and managed to get a grip on some of his wiry black hair and on one of his ears. I had never tried it upside-down before, but I gave this child of the Lord all the healin’ I could muster. There was a lot of light and a loud sizzling sound, and at some point I was dropped on my head and went away for a while. When I came to consciousness I was lying beside a quiet and concerned-looking monster-man. He was still amazingly ugly, which is apparently not a disease as such, but he wasn’t roaring or gibbering, and his eyes had lost their rabid gleam.

to be continued…