traffic, then spat a foaming full-stop at the sidewalk. Chat shows, on the other hand, would play a spooky theremin fugue when he was introduced. First time was an eye-opener. “Fruitcake corner—this guy’s got the Seventh Seal gaffa-taped to his ass and claims he’ll scare up an apocalypse out of a clear blue sky. Come all the way here from New York City—Dr. Theo Skychum, welcome.” Polite applause and already some sniggers. The host was on garrulous overload, headed for his end like a belly-laughing Wall of Death rider. How he’d got here was anybody’s guess. “Doctor Skychum, you assert that come the millennium, extraterrestrials will monopolize the colonic irrigation industry—how do you support that?”
Amid audience hilarity Skychum stammered that that wasn’t his theory at all. The gravity of his demeanor made it all the more of a crack-up. Then the host erupted into a bongo frenzy, hammering away at two toy flying saucers. Skychum was baffled.
He found that some guests were regulars who rolled off the charmed banter with ease.
“Well see here Ray, this life story of yours appears to have been carved from a potato.”
“I know, Bill, but that’s the way I like it.”
“You said you had a little exclusive for us tonight, what’s that about?”
“Credit it or not, Bill, I’m an otter.”
“Thought so, Ray.”
It blew by on an ill, hysterical wind and Skychum couldn’t get with the program. He’d start in with some light-hearted quip about bug-eyed men and end up bellowing “Idiots! Discarding your own foundation! Oppression evolves like everything else!”
Even on serious shows he was systematically misunderstood. The current affairs show The Unpalatable Truth was expressing hour-long surprise at the existence of anti-government survivalists. This was the eighty-seventh time they’d done this and Skychum’s exasperated and finally sobbing repetition of the phrase “even a child knows” was interpreted as an attempt to steal everyone’s faint thunder. And when his tear-rashed face filled the screen, blurring in and out as he asked, “Does the obvious have a reachable bottom?” he was condemned for making a mockery of media debate. A televangelist accused him of “godless snoopery of the upper grief” and, when Skychum told him to simmer down, cursed him with some vague future aggravation. The whole thing was a dismal mess, smeared beyond salvation.
Skychum’s vision receded as though abashed.
There was no shortage of replacements. One guy insisted the millennium bug meant virtual sex dolls would give users the brush-off for being over a hundred years old and broke. Another claimed he spoke regularly to the ghost of Abe Lincoln. “My communications with this lisping blowhead yield no wisdom at all,” he said. “But I’m happy.” Then he sneezed like a cropduster, festooning the host with phlegm.
The commentators deemed radical were those going only so far as to question what was being celebrated. Skychum himself found he wanted to walk away. But even he had to admit the turn was a big deal, humanity having survived so long and learnt so little—there was a defiant feeling of rebellion about it that put a scampish grin on everyone’s face. For once people were bound with a genuine sense of kick-ass accomplishment and self-congratulatory cool. Skychum began at last to wish he was among them. But just as he felt his revelation slipping away, it would seem to him that the mischievous glint in people’s eyes were redshifted to the power of the Earth itself if viewed from a civilized planet. And his brush with perspective would return with the intensity of a fever dream.
Floating through psychic contamination above a billion converging vitriol channels, toward that massive rumbling cataract of discarded corruption.
Drawing near, Skychum had seen that ranged around the cauldroning pit, like steel nuts around a wheel hub, were tiny glinting objects. They were hung perfectly motionless at the rim of the slow vortex. These sentinels gave him the heebie-jeebies, but he zoomed in on the detail. There against the god-high waterfall of volatility. Spaceships.
Ludicrous. There they were.
“If we dealt honestly, maturely with our horrors,” he told the purple-haired clown hosting a public access slot, “instead of evading, rejecting and forgetting, the energy of these events would be naturally re-absorbed. But as it is we have treated it as we treat our nuclear waste—and where we have dumped it, it is not wanted. The most recent waste will be the first to return.”
“Last in, first out eh,” said the clown somberly.
“Precisely,” said Skychum.
“Well, I wish I could help you,” stated the clown with offhand sincerity. “But I’m just a clown.”
This is what he was reduced to. Had any of it happened? Was he mad?
A matter of days before the ball dropped in Times Square and Skychum was holed up alone, blinds drawn, bottles empty. He lay on his back, dwarfed by indifference. So much for kicking the hive. The authorities hadn’t even bothered to demonize him. It was clear he’d had a florid breakdown, taking it to heart and the public. Could he leave, start a clean life? Everything was strange, undead and dented. He saw again, ghosting across his ceiling, a hundred thousand Guatemalan civilians murdered by US-backed troops. He’d confirmed this afterwards, but how could he have known it before the vision? He only watched CNN. In a strong convulsion of logic, Skychum sat up.
At that moment, the phone rang. A TV guy accusing him of dereliction of banality—laughing that he had a chance to redeem himself and trumpet some bull for the masses. Skychum agreed, too inspired to protest. It was called The Crackpot Arena and it gathered the cream of the foil hat crowd to shoot the rarefied breeze in the hours leading up to the turn. This interlocking perdition of pan-moronic pundits and macabre gripers was helped and hindered by forgotten medication and the pencil-breaking perfectionism of the director. One nutter would be crowned King of the Freaks at the top hour. The criteria were extremity and zero shame at the lectern. Be ridiculed or dubbed the royal target of ridicule—Skychum marvelled at the custom joinery of this conceit. And he was probably in with a chance. In the bizarre stakes, what could be more improbable than justice?
The host’s eyes were like raisins and existed to generously blockade his brainlobes. As each guest surfaced from the cracker-barrel he fielded them with a patronizing show of interest.
A man holding a twig spoke of the turn. “All I can reveal,” he said, meting out his words like a bait trail, “is that it will be discouraging. And very, very costly.”
“For me?” asked the host, and the audience roared.
“For me,” said the man, and they were in the aisles.
“Make a habit of monkey antics,” declared another guest. “Pleasure employs muscles of enlightenment.” Then he led in a screaming chimp, assured everyone its name was Ramone, pushed it down a slide and said, “There you go.” Skychum told him he was playing a dangerous game.
A sag-eyed old man pronounced his judgment. “The dawn of the beard was the dawn of modern civilization.”
“In what way.”
“In that time spent growing a beard is time wasted. Now curb this strange melancholy—let us burn our legs with these matches and shout loud.”
“I ... I’m sorry ... what ...”
And the codger was dancing a strange jig on the table, cackling from a dry throat.
“One conk on the head and he’ll stop dancing,” whispered someone behind the cameras.
Another suspect was the ringmaster of the Lobster Circus, who lashed at a wagon-ring of these unresponsive creatures as though at the advancing spawn of the devil. “The time will come,” he announced, “when these mothers will be silent.” And at that he laid the whip into a lobster positioned side-on to him, breaking it in half.
A little girl read a poem:
behind answers are hoverflies
properly