Fragment of an Early Novel of the 21st Century

Chapter I

George Lincoln came to awareness, first that his name was George and possibly Lincoln, some kind of town car, after imbibing several various words that sounded naughty if one spoke them backward. He did not know how he knew this, but he did know this, with every fibrous tissue of his soul, which was also a fibrous tissue floating deep inside him. So, when they let him out of the hutch, or as they seemed to call it, the hospital, he could only say his name, and three key phrases taught to him by the sentimental monkey with strange lumps on the front wearing some sort of Saint George contraption on the top part. He could say, “I would like some water, please,” as well as “And now, Five O'Clock, time for the news.” The last sentence he could pronounce, though he often felt it difficult and barely worth trying, bubbled and spilled out of him to proclaim, “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

He did not understand the phrasing, as he did not understand the other, easier phrases. But, as his mind twisted like a square peg beating a hole into a round mallet, he sensed it had something to do with penguins. Not that he knew anything about penguins, at that point in time. That would come later, in his days, after this history, where he made his adjusted way into the society he at that time did not understand. Then, he would become a zoo keeper, and with all the animals make commune, but especially with little flightless waterfowl that looked like clowns dressed up for a banquet and coughed for fish as much as any third rate performer. They fit their station well, he would think. But he would not think this yet, not even yet knowing penguins existed.

What he did know, then, was a sharp sensation of pain in his foot. Looking up, he saw a yellow car, with an impatient little squat ugly creature with a strange voice, like a sock made to talk, tapping fingers fast against a hole.

“Come on, come on, where do you wants to go?”

“I would like some water, please,” he said.

“Piss off, buddy,” said the creature, who rove away with many loud squeaks and squeals, and his car squeaking and squealing as well. George Lincoln wondered what it was all about. He pondered more than he knew, of course, and soon found himself, distracted in his attempts at mental muscle creation, in front of the library.

It was there, that as a plot device in the grand guignol of life, he was shot down before he lived again, allowing violent segue into the arms of two robbers, Mary Mary and his lover George as they exited the bank with several bags of cash and a golden statue of a penguin in tow. George insisted they take the horrible gaudy thing simply because it was cute.

George was an attractive woman, a bit tall, with large breasts. Other authors might delve deeper into the details, but suffice to say, she looked so good that a person beholding her might only think she looked well, well indeed. Her eyes were brown, and not-catlike, attractive by their very defiance of stereotype. They were dull, and they were beautiful, and god damn anyone for saying different. She wore no make up, and was scarred from a knife across her face in a duel with a former partner. And when she talked, it sounded like an elephant with a sore throat. She could blow a room away, as she often did both with her continual smoking, and her handy automatic pistol. It was a LeMatt, and old civil war gun, with nine shots, and an extra shotgun charge. It scared the shit out of everyone. It looked like it would blow up any second.

Her companion, Mary Mary, was a different sort of person. Her personality, as well as her breasts, announced her to any room she walked in. Mary Mary, on the other hand, was the mousy sort of type that makes a bank clerk, a James Joyce, or a Nazi bureaucrat. No one ever believed that he masterminded any of the plots he carried out with his lover. No one even believed they were lovers. He was too mousy, too much like a little rodent, to be of any notice. His eyes were black, or blue enough black, and he wore business-casual clothing. Sometimes, people would mistake him for their professors. Any of their professors. He was often stopped and asked about the absence of existential meaning of existence in the ennui-ridden twenty first century.

“Thirty Nine,” he would coldly reply, smiling as if knowing everything in the world. Then, he would pet the female students on the ass, and send them on their way before he leveled his regular old gun, and blow their fucking brains out, as he liked to call it when pointing the pistol at George and declaring if she didn't keep sucking he would do the same thing.

For this heist, in particular, which the amnesiac or newly created creature called George Lincoln suffered his first remembered death in, an old model T was parked outside. Over the years, someone souped it up, and it barely even looked a thing like the original. The people who stood around gawking, as people like to do when they see something unusual, like a telephone pole in the middle of the street, or a mango, were quoted in the Haley Times. One old woman said, “it looked like a Chum-bucket, never minding the h of course, but I'm too old for sex jokes.” Another, a young boy said, “it looked like a Freudian symbol of repressed oedipal desire.” A real professor, who looked more like a circus strongman than Mr. Mary, agreed, concluding, “it was uncanny, and we all felt a real fear for castration as they raced out, their guns in their hands, and swerved down the road in the stolen car. I mean penis.”

So it was on that day, Mary Mary and his lover George made their getaway far across the state lines, and stopped in the motel run by Diggory. The sign out front called it the “Kola Inn,” but the sign in the window said, “Motel 2”. Sure enough, there were only two rooms. One was already taken when the murderous thieves checked in. This belonged to Sir Mordecai William Cooper, a time traveler under an almost assumed name, who stole a certain famous author's machines, and used it to track down the origin of life.

When Mordecai arrived at the Planck Era, he only found a single board, spinning in space. So, he went back further, back before he could go back, which he thought was rather odd, but he carried on nonetheless. And it was there he found

“What shall we do with the old man?” asked Mary, as his pistol was pointed downwards, as usual.

“I do wish you'd let all that up,” said George, “I'm going down on you. Do you know how boring, how terribly boring it is for you to do the same thing, night after day after year? We really must do something to spice up our sex lies.”

So they shifted their focus, and debated what they might do to enliven George's enjoyment of the sexual act. But, though they did come upon the ingenious idea of running a poodle through a bath of green Jello, letting it shit all over the floor, wiping that shit on a vagrant, sending him into an adult store to suck dick, having him come back with money, covered in cum, and use it to buy some cocaine, they could not come to any sort of real plan. So, they turned their minds back again to the man next door, who was busily masturbating over a picture of some mass murdering villainess or another, probably from a Wilt Dornsey picture.

Wilt Dornsey, of course, was the most well known animator in the world, not only for his cartoon creations, which included a pig simply named Pig, and a rat named Rocky, but for his theme parks. These were supposedly for children, but many people found strange rumpus rooms and sexual models in the middle of the seemingly most innocuous rides. The Flight of Fantasy, which nominally took the rider through the most famous Dornsey Movies-- for he made his original killing with fantastical re-tellings of popular legends-- included a scene often excised from the retellings of Bluebeard, showing Gilles De Rais wiping his penis through several mouths of heads of women on steaks. Further depictions in this animated robotic display included devouring, quite literally, the right breast of a virgin as Bluebeard entered her for the first time, while being drenched in the virgin's fathers semen. This was all taken from the original, non-Dornsey version of the tale he retold as Flower and her Animal. Everyone loved everything Dornsey. To not like Dornsey, or Rocky Rat, or even Pig was a sin against entertainment as well as America.

So, of course, the Underground took the challenge, and decided they would hate Rocky. They couldn't quite pull it off, because underneath their anti-Dornsey slogans, like “Rocky is a Rat!” and “Pig is a stupid Copper”, they really longed for a simpler time when one couldn't find a “Rocky Rape Room” T-Shirt and matching hand bag on every corner, or at least a third rate seventh world knock off in the immigrant owned shop in every American shopping district. The Underground were all friends of immigrants, of course, working for their rights. At least, so they said, as they went out to stop them from selling the one thing people bought. It was probably the anti-Dornsey sentiment that eventually dwindled the Underground down to three people, two of whom were kazooists, and one who played the bassoon.

The Underground became a famous band, even though they kept their anti-Rocky sentiment. Their logo was even Rocky with the head cut off. To reflect this logo, as well as steer their direction in a more mainstream alternative friendly course, their management agency, headed by Smug Brittan, decided it was time to change their name. So, the band became, along with the number one hit maker in the world with songs like “Shit” and “Shit 69” and the multi-platinum “I Farted On Your Cock While You Stuck It Up My Ass Hole”, Dead Rat. It was an uneasy shift, and three of the three members quit, forming the We Still Hate Rocky League, a band whose only notoriety, apart from being all the founding members of the electro-Pop Dead Rat, came in the form of their death by firing line for crimes against humanity, namely insulting Rocky Rat and Wilt Dornsey. Smug Brittan himself pulled the trigger, and went about crafting new members for Dead Rat. These he built out of salt, spit, semen, and the yellow pages.

But is is time now to leave the story of Wilt Dornsey, and return to Mary Mary and George. By this time, they finished their sexual act, and planning how to dispose of the old man. They started to get up, cross over from the couch, watching old reruns in blue and red, when like lightning hitting a cloud, George coughed.

“What is it, my darling dear darling,” asked Mary Mary (he always talked like that after particularly bad and unsatisfying sex, and todays he called terrific).

“What about the boy who checked us in?”

“He will check us out?”

“Well, what if her hears us as we do the deed?”

Seven months later, a teenager in the city of Cinnara, obsessed with killers, as much as he was obsessed with a girl called Kit, wondered about the murder several months prior. An old crank, known as Mordecai Cooper met his end when two strangely amphibiously androgynous murderer-thieves strangled him with his own intestinal cord. How did the boy who checked them in not hear? But his magazine, a gorish phantasm filled with fluff pieces on horrible happenings, provided the details he was listening to Rock and Roll.

“It all makes sense, now,” said Etan Miller. He turned up the Opera on his old time radio, hoping to hell the neighbor wouldn't come banging over once again, tipping over all his aunties well potted plants, and yell how her cat needed sleep more than he needed Stravinsky. “It is spring, after all,” he said to himself, “and I have my rights.”

All this prose is the poetry in writing a tome such as this. It is a spiritual history, a poetic history of a world. It comes in waves, associations, and cracks between the paving stones, like rivers of flowing pain. The whole society is a jumble, and one thing is always another, one thought is always about Henry. But we will come to him later. Suffice to say, this is the preamble to the rest of this tome, which is a didactic history of a world. But one might know this even by the title of the book, and should they not until now understand a thing, let it be proclaimed loudly, this is

A HISTORY OF A WORLD

Though it makes no pretense to tell what world it is. Only, if we are to study with scholarly tenacity these tangles within, the terrors of history that fold in on themselves in on themselves in on themselves, then we must understand this world is your world this world is my world. This world was made for you and me, my dear.

So settle down, pull up a chair. And I-- who?-- I will describe through the rest of this strange work the workings of the world.