Doctor Flesh- Director's Cut Page 6

  Dr. Flesh panicked. Solare was still missing, and the Camjector was gaining on her, taking rapid steps through the center aisle and speaking in a polyglot of dubbed movie languages.

  “Don’t hurt me,” said Dr. Flesh in a last-ditch effort to assume control. “I’m part of you. If you kill me, you’ll kill yourself.”

  “That’s bullshit,” roared the Camjector through the house speakers.

  She had to admit that the creature had a point.

  “I know you want to click your stiletto heels and wake up in the Okay State,” said the Camjector. “But you know what? It’s not gonna happen.”

  “Damn,” thought Dr. Flesh, who had been counting on that maneuver as an option.

  “This is what happens when you treat acid as just another breakfast cereal. Didn’t anybody tell you that drugs are bad for you? Didn’t anybody ever teach you to just say no?”

  Viola had to admit that although that instruction had been attempted, it just didn’t take.

  “You thought you were too good for the simple, durable claims of consensual reality. You took chaos as a starting point, as opposed to a very scary, off-limits taboo area man was not meant to explore. You wanted to be Frankenstein 2.0, the Postmodern Prometheus. You scoffed at the delicate but essential boundaries between fact and fiction, dream and reality, flesh and spirit.”

  Viola had to admit the creature’s point there too.

  “Look on thy works, ye mighty, and despair!” said the Camjector, opening the duster and revealing a capacious set of tits.

  “Damn, them’s good eatin,’” thought Viola, unaccountably. The creature’s tits would do credit to any fertility goddess. They looked like they could carry enough milk to supply any number of mutant, hybrid children.”

  “Like what you see?”

  Viola nodded.

  “Want to tittie-fuck me?”

  Viola nodded again.

  “Look,” said the Camjector. “I don’t have endless time to bandy words. This is the stirring climax where creature confronts creator. Only now the roles have been reversed. And reversed again. Damn, even I don’t know what the fuck you’ve created.”

  “It’s a mystery,” said Viola philosophically. Experimentally, she clicked her stiletto heels twice and thought of Leatherface.

  “How’s that working for you?” said the Camjector.

  “Not…so…good,” said Viola. “That, or Oklahoma is a little different than I remembered it.”

  The Camjector’s twins shot forth fiery beams, drilling Dr. Flesh straight through the forehead with dream plasma.

  “You twat!” she screamed. “That really hurt.”

  “You said pain was unreal, that nothing was real. So why are you whining like a little bitch?”

  “I am not whining like a little bitch,” said Dr. Flesh defiantly. “Who made who made who made what…look, can’t we just sit down and talk this over, irrational adult to mutant creature?”

  “What, you mean like over coffee?” roared the Camjector.

  “Yeah, kind of like that,” said Dr. Flesh. “Game?”

  “It’s a fucking stupid idea, and anticlimactic into the bargain. The time for talking this over with a nice cup of java has long past. Time to die, you medical deviant!”

  She had to admit the words had a nice pulp fiction quality to them. It was unfortunate, then, that she herself had ruptured the boundary lines separating pulp fiction from squishy medical fact.

  The Camjector opened the duster to reveal a set of massive lungs, like an accordion file. The lungs crackled and wheezed.

  From inside the duster’s lining, dozens of transparent scrotal sacs depended. Within them could be seen flash-frozen images from the movie: Gooch being impaled on the Great White’s two-pronged spear, Tiffany Tiffany’s soul being sought in vain, as she screamed for small salads through the pump gag, the elaborate lengths to which the blogger had been driven when he realized that snarky reviews can have lethal consequences, and an oddly tranquil fantasy sequence featuring a small boy, a balloon and liquid acid.

  The sacs burst, heaving the contents onto the lab floor. Dr. Flesh watched with fascinated horror as the products of her mad science crawled, wriggled and slithered towards her, a spreading pool of monstrosities.

  But the worst was yet to come.

  Behind the spurting sacs lay a curtain. The curtain ripped open to reveal an unusually large coffin, built as though to contain the form of a somnambulist hermaphrodite hench-thing.

  “Meet my not-so-little fiend,” exulted the Camjector through the wall-to-wall speakers.

  The coffin lid yawned.

  “Solare?”

  Solare leapt down from the coffin, bearing a telescoping spear.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, Viola felt the twin terrors of projectile vomit and explosive diarrhea churning within her guts.

  “You aren’t seriously going to…” began Solare as Viola clutched her belly and raised an index finger in the universal “be with you in a second” hand signage.

  The vomitus was rank, copious and extensive, spattering the sleepwalking hermaphrodite with a foul, yellow-green goop. At the same time her bowels let loose, ripping a hole straight through her frilly French panties and smearing the inside of her erstwhile pristine lab coat with watery shit.

  It seemed like insult to injury, but Solare added a painful eyeball spearing to the mix.

  ***

  A movie for beautiful people only, Dr. Flesh stars some truly unmemorable, generic, highly modular characters and extraordinary synthetics. Retrospectively it may be viewed as yet another version of The Hands of Orlac outfitted for rugged adventure with elements of The Most Dangerous Game and spliced into a jelly aquarium.

  The idiotically simplistic plotline features zombies, a zombie doctor, sex change operations and organ transplants. It is revolting, sickening and putrid in almost every fly in aspic except one.

  Don’t see Dr. Flesh if you’ve just eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge.

  XI.

  Bilge started awake.

  He’d missed the end of the movie, but he generally fell asleep earlier, passing into the unquiet sleep of the blogger.

  In his dream, Dr. Flesh was not only the biggest pile of crap he’d ever had the misfortune to sit through as a non-paying audience member, it was maybe the worst movie ever conceived. How Viola had garnered funds for it was the biggest mystery of all, considering her record. But she had done it, finally. If she wasn’t permanently banned from the industry and made to suck eggs on an irregular pumpkin-metaphysical prison planet, there was simply no justice.

  He peeled off the headset and tossed it in the aisle, looked around for the nearest exit and made a beeline for it, the review already forming itself in his mind.

  “If you hated its precursor and abhorred the one before that, if you think Dr. Flesh should go back to medicine and stay far, far away from cinema, Reality Stack will not change your mind one iota. If anything, it will confirm what you already suspected—that Viola Flesh is a bloated non-talent, a pretentious pseudo-artiste whose dreams of grandeur are belied by her truly puke-worthy efforts. Although this blogger must admit that the technology employed is truly spectacular, it is utterly wasted on an incoherent plot, inane and unbelievable characters, and cinematography straight out of Ed Wood’s ecstatic nightmares.”

  Bilge walked out into the street. The neighborhood between Bunuel Street and Jodorowsky Avenue was still as creepy as he remembered it. Nothing had changed under the sun. Now to find his car and return to Redundant Beach where he shared tight quarters with Flopsy, Mopsy, Hairy, Belchy and the Fart Twins, also known as Coven of Superfans.

  “Oh my god, that was so weird!” said a voice behind him.

  He turned around. There she was, the girl from the audience, the one without the really sexy ass-tat. Off-screen, she still looked good. She was trying to catch her reflection in a window, patting herself down and probably reassuring herself that she was back
to small-salad proportions.

  “Who’s that weirdo?” she asked her companion, Matt Gooch, who was escorting her and her former rival, Brittany Lapierre, back to his home in Sugar Valley for a crank-fueled threesome.

  “Who do you mean?” asked Gooch.

  “That pervy, hairy guy…I think he writes a blog?”

  Bilge bristled. He was standing five feet away and they were talking shit about him. Like he was invisible, or utterly devoid of feelings. Or not worth the effort involved with dignifying his humanity. A thing, snark-bait.

  “I loved the conceptual innovations,” said Gooch. “I think Flesh has really captured the zeitgeist, you know? Our sense that identity is no longer a fixed structure, that it participates in culture and to a certain extent is embodied in culture.”

  What?

  “I totally agree,” said Tiffany Tiffany, hanging off his arm. “I didn’t mean weird in the bad way, more like the Freudian sense, you know, unheimlich. The uncanny.”

  “Hot and perceptive,” said Gooch. “We are so going to have that crank-fueled three-way and maybe write our blogs afterward? What did you think, Brittany?”

  “I totally agree with Tiffany Tiffany,” said Brittany. “It was definitely weird in the best sense possible. Totally.”

  So now everyone’s a critic, thought Bilge. If he wasn’t experiencing it himself he might think this was just another bizarre narrative turn in the movie. But now, come to think of it, the movie had felt more real than this did, which meant…what…that they were either still in the movie, or the movie had succeeded in cloning and amping up the signal of the formerly real…”oh yeah, totally Baudrillian,” Brittany was saying. “Hyper-real.”

  He could have sworn the three were just empty-headed hormone bags from Sugar Valley, but now they were talking like they’d just stepped off the pages of Cahiers du Cinema. Could it be that he, Bilge, was the irrelevant one? Just another not particularly bright loud-mouth with an opinion?

  He was starting to feel thinner, less substantial. As he walked towards the parking lot, he realized that his body was evaporating. Shrinking. Although he still felt the cold air and could smell the stench of the city, there was less and less of him the further he went. By the time he had reached his car, he was almost completely invisible.

  “Hey,” said Gooch, 15 feet behind him. “Was that Nathan Bilge?”

  “Who?” asked Tiffany Tiffany.

  “Oh yeah, Bilge,” chuckled Brittany. “Couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag. A total geek with grandiose delusions.”

  “How many readers does he have now?” asked Gooch.

  “Maybe his mom,” said Tiffany Tiffany.

  The three exploded with laughter as Bilge completed his descent into obscurity.

  Doctor Flesh Part Two: Pink Holocaust

  I.

  Vice President Duke Charnel clawed his way out of a fresh hole in the White House lawn like a deranged marmot. When he had entirely emerged, he was clad in an SS officer’s hat, a butcher’s apron and a jockstrap, all made of black leather. His body was white as soap from years spent underground, and as the mid-morning sun splashed against his backside, President Bermuda O’Clodder winced, noting the shadowed craters of acne scars on the Veep’s buttocks.

  Charnel began chucking rocks at the President’s window.

  O’Clodder looked down, wiped the sleep crust from his eyes, cursed whatever chemical cocktail was in his system when he chose his Vice President, rushed down the stairs two at a time, burst out the door, grabbed Charnel and pulled him inside.

  “Jesus, man, what is wrong with you? Have you been tunneling again?”

  “No time to talk,” said Charnel. “We’ll have to pull it. Now.”

  “Pull what?”

  “My finger. Listen, you arrogant sack of shit. You’re lucky I’ve been in charge of the shadow presidency all this time. Otherwise I’d be talking to a robot duplicate. Hell, I oughta cyborg you right now just for questioning me. Who do you think faked your birth certificate? I spilled blood for you, Bermuda. Literal blood. Not my own, of course, but lots of the red, red krovvy. So when I say ‘pull it,’ I mean, put the secret plan in operation. Or did you really enjoy living in my man-sized freezer?”

  “It was chill,” mumbled O’Clodder, shivering involuntarily at the memory. “But I went to school in Sugar Valley. It’s a great community. Beautiful, well-kept lawns. And the draperies—just bursting out with passementerie. Thousands of dollars’ worth.”

  “Oh, save your interior decorating expertise for someone who cares,” said Charnel. “Where’s the black box?”

  “You mean Mrs. O’Clodder?”

  “No, you fool. The box with the button that if you push it, sets in motion the codes of utter devastation.”

  “Fine, I’ll get the box. Shouldn’t I make some sort of public announcement, though? Maybe we should warn them, you know, so they can clear the aorta—I mean area— before we detonate the UltiBomb.”

  “No time, no time!”

  “That’s what you always say, Charnel. You’re like that fucking bunny in Alice in Wonderland. But there should be time, dammit. There should always be time to pause, contemplate, reflect and reconsider before an act of this gravity and magnitude, affecting the lives of millions of people. We’re not murderers, after all, despite what you wrote in your autobiography.”

  Charnel snorted.

  “Maybe just a Twitter?”

  “Okay, you get one Twitter. Make it good. Then we pull it.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you have any soul at all, Charnel.”

  The Vice President smiled, revealing a mouth full of jagged, blackened teeth. “It’s a good thing you’re not the real President and never will be. You’re much too naïve for the job.”

  The President opened his laptop. “Wait, I have a ton of messages on Facefuck. Let’s see—oh, this is good. ‘Hi, I saw your profile and I love it. Here’s a link to some pix LOL. Giggle. Maybe we can get together some time.’ You see that, Charnel? Damn, this girl is hot. And she’s barely wearing anything. Just a teensy weensy strip of cellophane. What should I say?”

  “That’s exactly what I was getting at just now, Bermuda. The naivete. The utter simplicity of your mind! That’s not a real live girl, it’s a bot. A bot! You’ve been too busy staring at big hippie tits to see the crazy behind them.”

  The President looked crestfallen. “Yeah well, some of those hippie chicks really got it going on, you know? ‘Drivin’ that train, high on cocaine…” O’Clodder’s a capella version of the Dead classic was both off-key and highly inappropriate, a fact which the President immediately realized as he trailed off and lapsed into an embarrassed silence. “Um, anyway, I’m going to post a status update. Just a little one. Some good friends and supporters of this administration live in Sugar Valley.”

  “You’ll be the death of me, Bermuda,” said Charnel. “But go on. Tweet your Tweet. Share your status. If that’s what it takes for you to focus on the real business at hand.”

  “What should I say, just…”

  “Do I have to do everything around here? Just say...” Something flickered behind Charnel’s eyes. Were those feelers? The President suspected flashbacks from his days at Accidental College. If his senses weren’t betraying him, then Charnel wasn’t, strictly speaking, human.

  For a moment it was as though he could see right through the man, and what he saw was extraordinary in its ugliness and sheer perversion. Smoking diodes, twisted circuitry, heaps of rubble with bugs crawling through them.

  Charnel suddenly lurched towards the President and clamped his hands around his neck. “What did you see, dude?”

  “Nothing…I saw nothing. Carry on,” said the President distractedly. “We’ll sort this out later.”

  “It’s probably nothing more than a TSA—Transient Schematic Attack.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” said the President. “Maybe we should just get this thing over with?” There was no use arguing with the
Veep when he got like this.

  Charnel smiled and sticky wings clapped on his lips. “Indeed.”

  ***

  O’Clodder now found himself in a pentagonal chamber deep in the bowels of the White House, a place he only knew about from rumors subsequently squelched and their originators redacted. Screens covered every wall with live video feeds from various ongoing operations of the shadow government, as well as a generous selection of fetish porn.

  Charnel bent over a machine that resembled a speaker’s podium, complete with microphone. He cleared his throat and leveled a frosty gaze at the President.

  “I saw where you went, right there.”

  “Huh?”

  “You were thinking about muff. Hairy twat. Jungle bush.”

  “I was not, and how dare you insinuate…” O’Clodder sputtered. “I am the fucking President, and this is a very grave and serious moment. To imply that my mind is on anything but the crisis in Sugar Valley is beyond the realm of insult. I…”

  “You can protest as much as you like, but you forget about the microchip.”

  “What microchip?”

  “Come and take a look.”

  O’Clodder reluctantly joined Charnel and gazed over his shoulder at the podium. Without a doubt, the display screen was flush to bursting with quim. “Well,” O’Clodder said, “that proves nothing. Anybody with a Supranet link can pull up ‘Girls with Natural Papaya’ or any related site. Not that I’m familiar with those…ahem…under certain conditions, the President is privy to esoteric, um, concerns that may or may not affect the body politic.”

  “Oh really,” said Charnel. “I want you to look carefully. This isn’t just any follicular snatch page. Check out the design in her foliage. A peace symbol. You can see where some of the blonde hairs are lighter than the background. It’s actually touchingly artful, from a detached aesthetic place, I mean. Too bad that isn’t where your head is at, my friend. Voila, a slice of presidential brain gone crazier than a Coco Puffs addict over fleecy hippie vajay.”