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Respect for Authority is a disease, no different from the Venusian Gook Rot. - B. A. Santamaria I’d just done this job in HK under the name of Mike the Kike - revisionist historian named Brennan - no body ever found. Alex and I were celebrating with a few drinks at this private club up on Beacon Hill {not its real location -Ed.). I had finished my third vodka tonic and was pausing before moving on to my fifth. I have a habit of drinking in prime numbers which I can recommend to anyone interested in gematria. You know gematria - Ronald Wilson Reagan - 666 - the Beast of the Apocalypse. I believe in drinking in prime numbers. The avoidance of dualism purifies the blood.
My vodka tonics were brought to me by a thick-bodied waitress with a Guangzhou peasant’s thighs. Heavy, firm, the colour they used to call brown as a nut. Usually those asian girls are sort of bruise coloured in the parts the sun doesn’t get to, a real pale pus-yellow, but her skirt (tight and metallic green) was slit way up the side and her thighs were nut-brown as far as the eye could see. They reminded me of some kind of mollusc spilling out of its shell. That, or some kind of fruit of the custard apple family. I saw it once in Malaysia but I don’t know its name.
Anyway, Alex was staring at this daughter of the pearl river - admiring like I was, I guess, the tendons standing out on her neck, and the way the muscles in her shoulders and buttocks moved under her clothes. He arched his nostrils once or twice, and I wished she would come closer so I could smell her. She should have had a smell, a fecund earthy stink to fill up the nostrils and stimulate the pituitary, but in that air-conditioned deodorised 200$ a plate room she might as well have been behind bulletproof glass. Pearl of the Jade Step - 1.3 billion acts of generation. Like I said, where they’re not tanned those Guangzhou girls are kind of bruise coloured - one’s afraid to press them too hard in case the skin splits and the syrupy flesh comes oozing out. I would have loved to get my head down between those thighs and take a couple of good deep breaths. So Alex was staring at her, and I noticed Alex didn’t have a drink in his hand - hadnt yet had a drink - and I said “Alex, you’re not drinking”.
Then he doesn’t look at me, but just keeps staring, and says in this deadpan voice “Not yet, Mike, not yet.” And I can’t help laughing, so that vodka tonic #4 comes out my nose. Alex still doesn’t look at me, or offer me a napkin while I sit there spluttering, or even crack a smile. That would have to be one of the more fucking unpleasant experiences in life, having a corrosive fluid gurgling through your sinuses. I’ve been done over by SAVAK and Pinochet’s dog trainers, so I know what I’m talking about. Ever wondered where that word “deadpan” comes from? So did I, so I looked it up. No satisfaction from Webster’s New Universal Unabridged - no etymology at all, just [Slang].
I recover from my nasogastric experience, and start on my fifth, and get into a talkative mood, and all the while I’m sort of talking around the job, getting a good look at it from all directions, setting it up for the operation, stripping off the inessentials and then taking a scalpel to the guts of it. I always like to do this after I’ve done a job, to see where I went wrong, and where I went right, and what I should scrap, and what I should try again - very Norman Vincent Peale of me. An oceanic metaphor is appropriate for the Brennan job - I gently remove the soft flesh of the job from its crystalline shell, wash it clean of debris, then ever so carefully dissect it, peeling back one soft fold after another.
“Mike, what’s the story about this Rolling Stone thing?”
Now Alex is an authority figure from way back, so instead of saying “What Rolling Stone thing?” or “The thing about the Stone Temple Pilots?” - like I would to Jimenez, or the President of the US of fucking A - I just said “How did you know it was me?”
And now Alex is looking straight at me. “Because you reused the same bullshit story you always spout when you get pissed. Let me refresh your imagination, Mike. “I’ll always remember Labor Day, 1978. It was the day Jimmy Carter asked me to kill the Pope.’”
“Oh,” I said. I tried very hard not to wet my pants.
“Mike, I have heard you tell that story a dozen times to impress cheap women in bars. No one else would want to steal it. To continue your education, Mr. Maxwell bloody Smart. You do not hunt vampires. You hunt for vampires. There is a subtle difference there. It may have eluded you, but it would have made it abundantly clear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that giving an interview to Rolling Stone magazine under the title “The Great Vampire Hunter” might be a spectacularly stupid thing to do.”
This was the point in the conversation where characters in the movies always start to blubber and go down on their knees and say things like: “Listen Luigi, I can explain” or “I’ll make it up to you, Boss,” or even “For the love of God, Montresor” {No, no, not the Pit}. I knew none of that shit would work with Alex. I did it anyway.
“Mike, I am very disappointed in you.”
“Alex, I -”
“Shut up. You know what usually happens in a case like this.” I knew. I knew that Alex, in spite of his many sterling character traits, was a being utterly without mercy. I watched Pearl River’s hips sway as she walked away from our table, balancing a couple of sissy green Midori drinks on an enamelled celadon tray. Never to taste the wine of paradise. Never to smell- I imagined myself sinking headfirst to to the bottom of the Pearl River, nostrils filled with water, wrists and ankles bound with number nine wire. I puffed out my chest and made myself look bigger. Never to touch the Pearl on the Jade Step. The fear of death always makes me want to fuck someone. When I was young I used to get off on the execution scene at the end of “The Tale of Two Cities”.
The night before - pretending to be swallowed by a boa constrictor - latin name Boa constrictor - the morning after - Rochester, Michoacan - three hanged men on a gallows. Three William Seward Burroughs, ejaculating penises outlined against Roy Rogers sunset. The great man tells me with his dying breath - chest heave - squirting semen onto the mesoamerican dust - “I may be a racist misogynist queer but at least I’m not a vampire”. Buenas noches, Sra. Ward. Esta su marido aqui? - I can’t help noticing the slight hole in her temple - Buenas noches, soldado. Ahora tomeme - If I am Maxwell Smart - then you must be - in a row like chooks on a fence - but that thought is too horrible - why not low high low like Christ and the thieves - in the humid darkness orifices multiply beyond counting
I quote Dr. Boyd Blackwell of the ANU Plasma Research Laboratory - “We are the world leaders in helical-axis stellerators. We were the first to build and fire one. We currently have the world’s largest and we’re going as fast as we can to take advantage of that.”
“I’d like you to meet someone,” said Alex. Then this space alien walked up to the table,
“Konbanwa, Alex”, it said. “Ogenki desu ka?”
“Obagesamade, Nakamura-san,” Alex replied.
“Nice tie, Alex,” said the alien. “Who’s the prick who can see me?”
I can see things that aren’t supposed to be there. I have rarely had it pointed out to me so bluntly. Damn Alex, he must have scanned the thing on arrival and timed his Rolling Stone announcement to put me in maximum panic when it got to our table. “This is Mike Liebowitz, one of our number threes. He has a few special talents. Mike, I’d like you to meet Mr. Nakamura. Mr, Nakamura, Mr.Liebowitz, Mr.Liebowitz, Mr. Nakamura.” Mr. Nakamura was a black chitinous thing. He wore an ochre jumpsuit - made of some kind of spray on foam, it looked like. He distended his mouthparts at me and sat down. I figured this was a good sign - actually managed to rise and nod my head curtly while looking him in the eyes. There were four of them, shaped like litttle sumatras, and they were a luminous red. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Nakamura.” We sat down. Mr. Nakamura had too many joints in his limbs.
“Mike has done some good work for us in the past,” said Alex. ‘“He can see things that aren’t supposed to be there, and its hard to mess with his brain. Jakob-Zwiebel syndrome, we call it. I thought of him when we spoke on the phone.” Now that Mr. Nakamura was sitting next to me, I could hear the whirr of recirculating breathing apparatus. He seemed pretty cybered up. He stank of dimethylformamide, too, and it was hard to keep my nostrils still as he studied me from the distance of a few inches. His fingers were cold and dry, like sticks; he followed the line of phalanges - metacarpals - carpals - ulna -humerus up from my ring finger to clavicle. He exchanged a few glances with Alex - a sentence in japanese that I didn’t understand - probed my abdomen - reached out under the table with another limb and ran a knobbed backhand up the inside of my thigh. There was too much silence - I stayed quiet and crossed my feet under the table, feeling more and more mindfucked. During the silence a waitress brought us our drinks - another waitress, not Pearl River - a paler thinner one like something carved out of sandalwood. Vodka tonic #5 for me, some red stuff in a shot glass for Alex, and for Mr. Nakamura something in one of those aluminium cups they serve milkshakes in. I looked at Mr. Nakamura and then at the waitress who’d just brushed against his tracheal tubes. ‘Thanks,” I said. I remember thinking why can’t he use a glass like everyone else - must be a metabolic thing - silicate intolerance. The Sandalwood Goddess stood just next to Alex, legs a little apart, maybe swaying a tiny bit. She was staring out to sea with a kind of Valley Girl grin on her face - incongruous with almond eyes, sandalwood lips, features as crisply drawn as a Starlin panel - while Alex’s hand ran casually up and down the back of her leg, tracing hermetic sigils on her buttock and thigh. Mr. Nakamura had sort of sloughed the front part of his face off into his drink, and it came back up smeared with something that looked like curry sauce. It all kind of sphinctered up into the middle and came back clean; I was fascinated.
“Mr. Nakamura requires a special service we thought you would be particularly suited for. You may consider it an opportunity to redeem yourself.” Special service. He must have satisfied himself that I was suitable for whatever it was. I imagined myself as an alien’s sex slave. Those oily dorsal tracheae - that multipartite mouth - somethings like veins pulsed under the spray-on jumpsuit. A cluster of tubes around Mr. Nakamura’s throat writhed like centipedes having an orgy.
“What kind of service?” My voice seemed to be coming from somewhere both very cold and very far away - the voice of a dead soul out of Oymyakon or Dudinka.
“Your usual line of work, but with a very special target. A dangerous and politically sensitive one. You don’t necessarily have to accept the job, if you don’t want it - plenty of men with talents wilder than yours have ended up in the Shenzhen organ banks.”
The threat didn’t bother me, but experience has taught me not to argue with the man who shot JFK. “I accept. Who’s the target?”
“You seem to have a recurring fantasy about assassinating prominent religious figures.”
“Jesus Christ! You don’t want me to kill the Pope for real.”
Alex watched me; his hand was stationary on the girl’s buttock. She watched me, but still didn’t seem to see me. Her lips were slightly parted - two upper teeth like newly shorn sheep biting lower lip on the left hand side. Mr. Nakamura watched me. “Come on, Mike, you can aim a little higher than that.”
“Jesus Christ, Alex, a little higher? Jesus Christ!”
“Jesus Christ.” Alex smiled at me. Sandalwood Goddess closed her eyes and gave a little moan. Mr. Nakamura enthusiastically plunged his face into his curry sauce again and made a deep, almost mechanical, chough, chough noise. I noticed then, I think for the first time, that three of the seven fingers on his left forehand were missing. The marks were beginning to wise up.
I kept my cool. “What makes you think he’ll stay dead this time?”
Alex was quicker. “Three days are all we need.”
Nixon used to have women cloned from flakes of skin and hair collected in the Oval Office or in service stations along the Beltway - also cervical scrapings from unscrupulous gynaecologists. Clones identical with the originals except for the brains. All the higher functions removed. Now you and I would call that an abuse of power. Was Pope John Paul the First a vampire? No, you and I both know that. Did Mike the Kike kill him? You know the answer. But if not me, who? Ultimately we are all responsible. Sanity is a shared illusion - an agreement not to think about certain things - a conspiracy agaisnt everyone in which everyone participates - an agreement not to say certain things - so you cannot say this is not a straightforward narrative structure. Yakuza Insects from the Oort Cloud - not the Crab Nebula, no one lives there - orgasm of the Sandalwood Goddess - dissected genitals of the Hottentot Venus float in a jar - organs of the Pearl River filed in the organ banks - P is for pancreas - next to the master brain in a jar. I never kept anyone’s brain in a jar. I never cloned acephalic sex partners except that once. I remember seeing a sign once “Eco-Village” - it was all done up as a Benedictine Monastery with Templars and Candomble Priestesses selling environmentally friendly bathmats and this performance artist floating in a vat of blood and breathing through a straw and someone - I think it was Aristotle - with their brain in a jar.
“Mike, what do you know about Utah?” Sandalwood Goddess had gone back to work and I found that if I let my eyes unfocus slightly I could see a balding, slightly overweight Japanese man sitting in Mr. Nakamura’s seat. I let the normality wash over me; I gave myself up to it; II offered my butt to it in submission like a vanquished baboon. “Normality” normally makes me feel uncomfortable, but reality was making me more uncomfortable.
“It’s a state of the US of A, admitted in 1896. Originally settled in 1848 by a pack of Mormons led by Brigham Young. There are still a lot of Mormons there, but they’re no longer a majority in Salt Lake City. Very low rates of crime, high life expectancy. Location of the Bonneville Salt Flats, where the land speed records are set. Brigham Young Unviersity in Provo, Utah - where Pons and Fleischman discovered cold fusion but the NSA hushed it up. Full of natural stuff. Never been there.”
“One more thing, Mike. They don’t have many of your kind in Utah.”
“There aren’t many Jews?”
“There aren’t many humans, Mikey boy. Not normal humans. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is the number one most Puppet Master infested institution of the 20th century. Where do you think they get all those teachings from - abstinence from alcohol, from tea and coffee, from birth control pills? The masonic claptrap? And that underwear that they wear all the time. They don’t even have intercourse naked. To cover up the green spots, of course. It all goes together to make them a pool of absolutely safe hosts that a Puppet Master can jump into anytime, anywhere in the world.”
“Uh huh.” My heart rate was speeding up again. Mr. Nakamura wasn’t saying much, just listening - it was probably a strain for him to talk earthling - all those damn labials and palatals must be murder without labia or palate. He was polishing his glasses - I wondered what he was really doing - my God, is that gross!
“Mormons. To be avoided, Mike.”
“I won’t kiss any with my mouth open, Alex. I take it you’re sending me to Utah? Christ finally showed up in the land of Nephi after all?”
“In a manner of speaking. He’s shown himself to select groups of Mormons, not necessarily the ones who are high in the official hierarchy. Several times in the last few months he’s promised the advent of the Millenium. He’s preaching an agenda that’s extremely dangerous to Mr. Nakamura’s people. PepsiCo may be the next to fall.” - Alex looked at Mr. Nakamura wtih a look that may have been pity; I don’t know, I’d never seen it before on Alex - “We don’t believe him to be the Son of God, naturally - we think he’s more likely to be a special breed of Seraphim Construct.”
“Like Nixon 2.”
“Like Nixon 2, but with all the powers of an Ancient and Venerable Elder.” Alex was looking at the waitresses again - Sandalwood Goddess mostly, but Pearl River a little as well. He looked hungry, and a vulpine smile was dancing across his face. A very dangerous mood to have him in - I was glad things had worked out as well as they had. I could smell my own sweat, I realised. Alex could as well, of course: maybe it turned him on, I shuddered. He reached out a hand and took mine - sharp nails dug into it painfully - the guy never seemed to know his own strength. “Why don’t you finish your drink, Mike? This apocalyptic evening deserves to be a Seven drink night.” I silently recited the names of the Seven Churches of Asia in my head: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea. Alex’s nails were drawing blood. My Rolling Stone gaffe might have been forgotten when I accepted this suicide mission, but Alex was reminding me that it hadn’t been forgiven. He wanted his pound of flesh.
“We won’t try to make you think this is easy, Mike. This Christ-simalacrum is as capable as a Seraphim Terminator. Maybe a little more so, but not quantitatively - rather, qualitiatively, in that he has a few new coercive and psychoenergetic abilities - most of which you should be resistant to.”
The gate of paradise was standing a foot to the left of my shoulder. Pearl River, drawn by whatever silent signal Alex had given out, set us up another round of drinks - vodka tonic #6, ice-tea, and a fruity thing with a frosting of sugar around the rim of the glass and a pink flamingo swizzle stick. My God, Mr. Nakamura’s people were good! I nearly believed it myself. Yes, his curry-slick tumescent pedipalps were rising up from it and sphinctering into his face - I had to check. And the fear-of-death lust was pulsing through my veins, even more than before now that the fear itself was subsiding into the future. The thousand rivers of the Middle Kingdom coursing through, laden with life-giving silt. Imagining the scent of fertile bottom lands newly plowed and ripe for planting. Peasant women hunched over poking rice stalks into the mire. Years of pain struck me in the lumbar vertebrae with that scent - this is what it means to be human - bent over in the fields - ninety-nine years of pain. Still the orifices multiply lubriciously in the darkness - the odour of conception and decay. Ninety-nine orifices drip with the curse of Eve. Ninety-nine times more damning than the mark of Cain. It always seemed to be a supernatural mutilation to me - a form of the stigmata.
I don’t know what Alex did later that night - I really don’t want to know. I left as soon as he’d made all the details of the Deseret Parousia clear in my mind and handed me the necessary paperwork, and by that time my shirtsleeve was ruined. I figure he sucked about 200cc out of my wrist. The little fuck. I went back to my apartment and midle-class Victorian prude that I am didn’t even play with myself. Played Minesweeper instead.
After that I packed my case - silver bullets with hollowed tips - two of those guns from the Czech Republic that have one ferronickel spring and are polycarbonate otherwise - Semtex enough to take out a dozen Alfred P, Murrah buildings - clean shirts - Prozac - Joojantex peril-sensitive condoms (I can recommend these to anyone with a sense of adventure. Sensitive to presence of STD organisms, fertility status of female partner; if all is clear they dissolve harmlessly in four thrusts. Unfortunately a few bugs still to be worked out - hallucinogenic plasticizer retreating up the urethra with an effect similar to yage) - permanent press trousers - palmtop GPS - Amy Tan book to read on the plane. I took all the usual precautions to cover my tracks - swapped identities twice between my apartment and Kai Tak- tipped the taxi driver the amount scientifically determined to make me least memorable.
So basically after I left the club I packed and jumped on a flight to San Francisco, which is where your goons grabbed me. So that’s all I have to say except that I’ve been treated very well by my captors and have no complaints. I can recommend the experience to anyone. I’ve met the Man from Galilee and he took all my sins on his broad caucasian shoulders. The blood of the Lamb has washed me as white as snow. I’ve sung with the heavenly choir - I’m ready to rock and roll for the Lord. And I ain’t gonna train for war no more. The World, the Flesh, and The Devil made me do it - Alex Deutsch, Pearl River, and an Insect Yakuza from the Dark Side of the Moon. Ladies and gentlemen, Thrones and Dominations, Principalities and Powers, that’s all I know. That’s all, folks. To the only God, who alone is all-wise, be glory through Jesus Christ forever! Amen. (Romans 16:27).
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