wildcat

Theodore's roommate took to pranking him with the omni-ventriloquism trick he'd developed, which got old quite quickly. Imagine sitting in the kitchen, at the table, finishing a crossword puzzle that makes you feel woefully inadequate. Imagine having every object in the room abruptly start to mutter at you as if under their breath; the blue tea kettle your sister gave you for Christmas. The microwave. The block of cheese that your roommate still hasn't put in the fridge since he used it last night. Imagine all these pinprick voices referring to your indiscretions, your secret fears, the ugliness of your individual body parts. This was Theodore's life now, rubbing his temples while his shoes demeaned the smell of his toes and the crossword called him names. The pencil, well, the pencil made terribly unfunny Freudian references. This was all Lyle's doing with his ability to throw his voice about simultaneously. As a result, Theodore felt it best to execute him. There would be no time to practice the weird technique with Lyle nursing a major chest wound and a disgorged heart leaking rotten blood onto the bathroom floor. Unable to think of a suitably ironic means of death, Theodore bludgeoned him with a frying pan -- a frying pan that pleaded with him for its life as he brought it up and down -- while he screamed "I can't hear you." The whole thing was a bit embarrassing in retrospect, but Theodore could, afterward, walk into a room crowded with knick-knacks and antiques without being concerned they'd make reference to his hairline.

The robot is cute and little girls love it. They go heart-shaped over it, over him, thanks to a crack team of designers and engineers. He has plastic eyes that sparkled, almost teary, never mind that he's got the emotional range of your common sociopath. The button nose in particular tested well. Little girls demand their mummies and daddies purchase the robot for them, slotting cards into vending machines and waiting for the coiled metal arms to discharge one of the robots from within the vacuum-sealed womb.

"Hi," says the robot as he stands in front of a little girl on the plaza, her father hopping from foot to foot a comfortable meter away so that his little baby can meet her robot. He's jacked up on coffee and wishing his ex-wife would show up already to take the kid and her weird bastard machine off his hands. He has things to do. He's got a date tonight. Family time's great and he loves his little girl but he's allowed to have his own life, right? Right. "Hi," says the robot to the little girl and he leans forward, plastic joints clicking arthritically as he goes, to hug her. The little girl giggles, as one does when one is hugged manically by a robot that feels like plastic wrapped around gelatin, wobbling as it goes, with the click-click-click of a mouth opening and shutting. She hugs the robot back, arms around that detailed spine.

"Oh, daddy! I love him!"

"Great, honey." Her father checks his phone again, no calls and his ex-wife is a full half-hour late. She'll bitch about having to deal with the robot, which probably has exhaustive cleaning procedures attached to it -- the booklet remains sealed in an envelope on the back of the robot's head -- but she's going to have to deal with it, because it was the only way to keep Pumpkin quiet while they wait.

"I love you too," says the robot and for the first time her father actually turns his head to look -- there's something about that tone of voice, perfectly pristine and modulated and good lord, it's still hugging her and...and... "I'm hungry," the robot says.

"Pumpkin!"

You have to understand, dozens of engineers have worked long hours to ensure the speed and dexterity of the robot, because coordinated movement that look natural is important for creating that meaningful bond between robot and child. Pumpkin's father has no hope of stopping it, even from this close, because Pumpkin doesn't fight. She's struck by the hug-euphoria and the drugs secreted through special fingertip pores. She's giggling still, and he lunges for them as the robot opens up as a mouth, hidden seam opening, as one whole mouth, and take her into himself -- itself! -- and begins to digest. It will be able to make another of itself in under five minutes, it will bud off quite easily, and they will have the father's credit cards within seven minutes.

The vending machine will be empty within fifteen minutes.

The Accomplice's birthday.

I made it to the bar driven by the Gin, my bladder, and a bag of dreams; flanked on either side by C, S, and the Pride Cowboy. Our arrival was heralded by angels, of course, but not New Age nancies with wings -- I'm talking Old Testament, flaming swords, divine justice angels. Angels with frank ideas about capital punishment. They would have slaughtered the crowd to announce us but, honey, let's be honest. It's no fun grinding someone beneath your heel if they're already dead. The others arrived shortly thereafter, having branched off on another quest (Which we shall call, "Dan Had To Go To The Bank"), and court was held on expansive leather seats to the corner. Now, initially there were other people sitting over there but quickly the heat, the very heat of us overwhelmed them and they inched away to leave us the space. I CAN NOT HELP THAT WE COME OFF AS ROYAL, Russian, perhaps ("Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine...").

The music was fair to middling, danceable even if the DJ had a slice of pizza congealing in one hand while he pumped the air vigourously with the other (we're not talking the music of the spheres here), the dance floor was both sweaty and inexplicable like a dream you had once, where the scale is all wrong. The two servers, Blue-Hair and the Kid, were pretty on the ball even if the Kid had a sizeable black eye that invited much discussion among the court -- we do require our little passing fancies, after all. The Sundry came and went, offered thumbs down by B (in various numbers and configurations but, as far as gladiator movies went, nobody was walking out this Pit alive). We were callous and strange. The DJ kept calling out to the crowd, using the wrong name (or the official name for the place for the moment) because they have no good sense to simply reduce it to its platonic ideals ("The Gay Bar" at worst and "Disco Heaven" at best), D.A.N.C.E. pounded, S and the Cowboy discussing its implications for their Burning Man experience ("We heard it when we were on our way to get married -- witnessed by a penguin..."), our numbers began to dwindle as the musical numbers (terribly uncoordinated, subpar Bollywood) stretched out past their best-before date.

And then there was the street meat interlude. There is always that period of time, just coming out of the bar, safe in the pickled sanctity of your corpse against decay should you immediately die on the spot, when you feel warm regardless of how cold it is. We shuffled past the bar stars and bar flies revealed by lamplight to Mister Tube-Steak, as one does, as one must, apparently, dragged on by things like necessity and chance (and me, of course, with no easy hotline to get the Japanese Asset on the phone and shout prophecies at her!).

I had a veggie dog that was a dream of mustard and sauerkraut. I don't recall immediately whether or not it was really even cooked, having the pallid excuse for colour that veggie dogs have. This was not our most exquisite hour, talking as we did of wieners. Feel free to splice in dialogue from all those terrible twelve-year-old boys snickering movies you may or may not have on hand. Afterward we were fired as if from a gun for Parts Away, and began the slow dispersal of the drunk and disaffected, like gunpowder, like oil in water, like all that bad cliches that swirl in the basin of your mouth at three-thirty in the morning, Bukowski on the radio in your brain, GIVE UP, GIVE UP, GIVE UP GOOD SIR.

And then she walked out of his life—cheaper than buying a bonesaw. Thumbed a ride past the edge of town with an alcoholic soccer mom named Patrice, jumped off at a stub of a gas station along the highway. Had to get a key for the restroom, where she chopped at her hair with a pair of plastic safety scissors, cussing all the way. Bastard. Leaned over the cast-iron half-sink and assembled her new face out of makeup from her bag—she'd dump it on the way out in favour of a white leather clutch. Hitch her way to the border before dark. She puckered up for her reflection; purple lipstick didn't say "on the lam," did it?

Slush on the streets and telephone poles. Easy to forget sometimes, that people still use land-lines, that it's not all cell towers and wireless signal. "Who's going to save my soul now?" In the old days, people stood on street corners and espoused religions. Now they ask who's coming to save them. Ask them for pamphlets and they ask you if you've got anything to show them. Earnestly—not a come on, no eyebrows arched in the direction of the nearest alleyway. "There's nothing left to peddle," say the drug dealers while they ask passers-by for any gum or pain-killers that happen to jostle to and fro in their pockets and purses. "I'll do your taxes for you," calls one of them, one of the old dealers, trying to fill up a basketball with a bicycle pump up until a car swings by and splashes him with brown snow and muck. What was the name of that guy who was supposed to come save us? "You talking about Ted? I think he's got a blog these days."

Rainclouds seeded with the week's stale antitoxins and a headless body clogging the storm drain. For this he dragged his ass out of bed at three in the morning? Everything's washed with sodium-yellow and the icy shit-water sluicing past means Carmine can't feel his feet. Mandrake's doing the dirty work, kneeling by the body to pick at it with her blue-condomed hands. "I trust you've had your shots," she says—the city's unofficial slogan, delivered with the cool detachment of someone who will never ever feel the cold. She was probably already out when the call came through, hunting nuns from Our Lady of the Grinning Epidemic into the wee hours.

"Do I even want to know?" The way the body's legs are jammed right into the vomit-crusted grate, the way the ass bobs up and down in the water, Carmine can already guess. If he was a rookie he'd be planning to skip breakfast, but even with the way things are he's picturing a bowl of hot udon and Mama's meatballs on the side. Mandrake straightens up and stands, like ceramic tiles brushing over each other. She snaps off the latex gloves and tosses them in the drink. "Tell me it's a serial killer. Tell me that's a saw wound."

Only, her response runs like, "Judging by the pustules along the neckline..." She stops, because there's no need to continue. Fuck. The city doesn't need another Walker outbreak. He doesn't need another outbreak—he remembers quite well what it looks like when you're landlord stops in the middle of shaking you down for the rent to let his head bud off in a squealing eruption before it scurries down the damn hallway on freshly formed finger-feet. The last of the great space-plagues to sputter upon the Earth. "One hopes the head drowned and didn't have the chance to spread anything."

"Fat chance." You can hope for a lot of things around here—that maybe it's nothing more serious eyelash fever or that tumour on your lungs will develop meta-cancer and die off. Hope is a wet, phlegmy cough first thing in the damn morning. "They're persistent little survivalist bastards and they don't breathe." Carmine hasn't taken his hands out of the pockets of his coat, even coming down the near-sheer embankment, but he squelches down the urge to massage his temples about the same time he surpresses a yawn. He was promised a full night's sleep and now he's staring down at a possible outbreak, which means mandatory headhunter duty—which he knows from experience does shit-all to your sex life, thanks. Hanging out the gutter waiting for the head of some housewife or city official to spider by so you can harpoon it and get blistered brain-bits all over your shoes. "This whole section needs to be sterilized, now." Up to his ankles in human waste and there's a walker out there. "Instead of a leisurely shower listening to music and massaging shampoo into my scalp, I get an hour of decontamination scrubbing with Doctor Cream leering at my damn ass the whole time." Carmine gives up and fishes his phone out of his pocket, splashing around in the slush until he's got more than a bar's worth of signal—must be some router-rats swarming through nearby tunnels—to fire off a text to Central so they can send in the clean-up crews. He scrapes rainwater out of his eyes and diluted snot from the end of his nose.

"I'll see to it they erect statues in your honour." Ugh. Perhaps creepier than the idea that some nameless fucker's infected noggin's making the rounds is Mandrake saying something that sounds passably like sarcasm.

1. Don't Talk to Me.

She dressed like a mime to avoid talking to people. She applied makeup, found an black unitard and white gloves. Shuffled like she was inside an invisible box if someone—like canvassers on corners—called to her. She spotted the other mime capering around the Living Statue—noticed him following her but never catching up. Maybe thinking she was a kindred spirit. He kept scaling her damn invisible walls.

2. Instructions.

Difficult to speak tongues all day and pretend the Lord's in your throat. Gibberish must be divine but inconsistent—no pattern if possible, but humans are repetitive. Gaze should be glassy yet fixed, otherwise people will come to you for spiritual guidance. Keep your foot tapping beside the collection plate and Mary Magdalene between your legs—scrub her ceramic with your fingers to keep the warm. Props are important.

3. Valid Criticism.

The argument isn't rehearsed—they stood at the bus stop, shouting at each other. He worried, meeting her in a parkade after storming off in separate directions, that the dialogue was too Neil Simon. "When you insult my mother, is it a big mother-in-law cliché?" She wanted to tell him his mother once threatened to poke her eyes out with a meat skewer. Maybe in the rewrites.

The white reindeer twinkles wire mesh fiasco with a motorized head that pivots with the doggedness of a crack addict under the binge fluorescent lighting. The Box Store has us, caught between cardboard bins piled with plush penguins in Santa hats. I knock the goddamn reindeer out of your hands and try to dissuade you with stories of cats gobbling fallen tinsel and shitting glittery death pellets into people's coffee, or worse. "Bowel obstructions," I shout and wave my arms while you paw at garlands. No dice. There is no War on Christmas, this year, because Christmas has already beaten us—a shambling nightmare Christmas drawn like a death masque across the failing, diabetic economy. Christmas this year looks like it's been shot in the head but it's still coming. "We'll do stockings, you bastard," I say. "That will be my one allowance for this atrocity!"

He kept his head down as he passed the alley—a pack of Greys over by the trashcans, huffing low-quality space-gas from origami packets that crumpled in their delicate three-fingered hands. Space-gas wasn't going to help him. Maybe he make a few bucks off the Greys, let him probe his ass up against a wall for five bucks a pop. Their invasion was already a bust and they probed because that was all they were trained to do—a repetitive action that made them feel briefly normal under the scorching sunlight. He could relate, maybe, hovering around the mouth of the alley and scraping at the scab on his forehead with a thumbnail.

The police explained to the little girl that her father was killed by a freak swarm of rare, poison-winged butterflies; one hundred and four of them caught, counted, and mounted less than two hours after his death was reported. The hero was a two-fisted entomologist and the villain cruel Mother Nature. The girl was raised by a pair of maiden aunts who tutored her in their crumbling mansion until she left—inspired by the entomologist, she went in pursuit of a lost city of intelligent fire ants last seen in Brazil. One of the aunts died from Malaria and the other from despair. The girl made all the scientific journals and taught at Harvard for several years—her further adventures popularized in a series of novels written by a distant cousin she'd met in passing one summer night, at her aunts' mansion. There had been a party, and he'd been too forward. She'd slapped him and they never spoke again. The royalty cheques were always returned to his publisher, unopened.