The Robotessy
Chapter Four
by Courtney
So. It was a bright spring morning when Leigh cruised around to my house on the hill, and by a bright spring morning I mean it was around five o clock in the evening, but it was still pretty bright. Despite rumours to the contrary, when she turned up I wasn’t having a little pre-party drinkie, and it wasn’t from a bottle marked BLEACH. Oh no! I was in my room at the time, sitting in front of the altar. I’d just lit the votive candles to Sts. Kurt, Lowtax and Sherlock Holmes, and was praying to the figurine (some might say Pool Party Princess Barbie doll) of Mary Wollstonecraft, Our Lady of the Vindication of the Rights of Women.
“Sup fag,” Leigh said casually.
“Nm d00der,” I replied casually, taking a casual swig of bleach and casually blowing out the candles, pointing my hand at them in the shape of a gun as I did so. To the most casual of observers, it might almost have seemed as though the gun of my hand was shooting out the flames! Which, needless to say, would have been awesome.
“Whatcha praying for?” she asked.
“Another car.”
Her forehead wrinkled, probably in awe from the gun-candle trick. “Another car? Dude, you can’t pray for that. You don’t have a car, not to mention the fact that your car-driving ability is limited at best.”
I laughed lightly. I knew that I could be a pretty awesome driver if I only put my mind to it. There was no need to go into that with Leigh, though. “That’s the whole point. You know in Alice in Wonderland, how the Mad Hatter or some fag asks Alice if she wants another cup of tea, and she says how the fuck can she have another cup of tea when she hasn’t had a cup of tea yet, and the other dude’s like . . . that’s fucking deep, dude.”
Leigh said, “No. But go on, I want to know where this is going.”
“Okay, so I thought to myself, I thought: Self, that is pretty fucking deep. I mean, how can you have another of something you haven’t even had one of yet? That kind of shit would cause a rip in the space-time continuum! But then I thought – wait just one cotton-pickin’ minute here, Self. There’s some pretty good shit you could do with a rip in the actual fabric of reality itself.”
Leigh stared at me with a look I had come to know very well. It was a look based somewhere between reluctant awe at my genius, and reluctant awe at the fact that, somehow, I managed to dress myself. “Okay,” she said slowly, as if she kind of wished she weren’t, “What would you do with a rip in the actual fabric of reality, Courtney?”
“I would steal Kurt Cobain.”
About five minutes later we were speeding up the hill known as Dead Man’s Curve. Leigh was still either telling me about the numerous so-called “scientific” reasons ensuring that there was no way in hell my plan would work, or telling me something about her so-called “day at work”. Either way, I wasn’t listening. I’d had the awesomest dream about Harry Potter the night before, and was trying to recall all the details, the better to turn it into a self-insertion fanfic when I got home.
We drove behind hideous butter-trolls, failures in the great game of existence going nowhere with all day to get there. Our destination, the $2 Shop, seemed further away than it had ever been in the history of my life.
“Look,” I cut in angrily on Leigh’s monologue, “For the last time I don’t know whether or not the instability of the multiverse would be severe enough to enable me to pull through characters from novels. But if it was, I sure as hell wouldn’t bring Hannibal Lecter through! So stop asking already!”
Leigh turned to me, her mouth agape.
“What the hell, fag,” she said finally. “I didn’t ask you any of that shit even once.”
I looked pained. “We can’t expect Our Lady to do it all, Leigh. We have to do our bit too.”
Since we’d arrived, and as the shop was closing in mere minutes, Leigh got out of the car without another word and went inside. I followed. I do that sometimes. Not often, but when someone has a pretty solid plan, like a really decent concept that could do with swift execution, and that dude goes ahead and starts, well then I usually just follow. As I did now. It made perfect sense.
We spent five or so pleasant minutes in the shop. “I’d probably rescue Bertie Wooster, if I could,” I said conversationally. “There’s a guy who really knows the value of just kicking back, you know?”
“No, I don’t know,” Leigh said as we got back into the car. Youths loitered outside the shop, wallowing in their brutish ignorance. Now, I don’t make a habit of staring at brutishly ignorant youths, well not when I can look at something slightly more appealing (such as a dead baby bunny, or naked pics of Bob Saget posing saucily in a Japanese schoolgirl’s uniform), but something was nagging at the back of my powerful brain in regards to the dreary tableau before me. Something not right. Something . . . wrong?
“Courtney, what the hell,” Leigh yelled suddenly, snapping me from my reverie. “Get in the car before I question your sexual orientation again, you slack-jawed faggot.”
I got in the car. But as we were driving away I carefully replayed the scene in my mind, trying to see it as St. Sherlock Holmes might have seen it. Brick wall – youths – gum trodden into concrete – brick wall again – apart from the obvious conclusion that one of the youths had recently spent some time in Afghanistan, I could remember nothing out of the ordinary.
“Unusual, considering the current political climate,” I commented to Leigh.
“Shut up.”
But of course! The wall! I laughed a light laugh, glad both that I had solved the mystery and that St. Holmes hadn’t incarnated spontaneously in the car in order to observe the embarrassingly long time it had taken me.
“That wall had graffiti on it,” I explained patiently to Leigh. “And you know what that graffiti was?”
She sighed long and heavily. “Your mother’s phone number?”
I laughed another little light laugh, scrawling Leigh’s name in my little book of punishment with a debonair flourish. I tucked it back into my cravat pocket and continued.
“No, fag,” I explained even more patiently. “It was the single word – Jedi.”
“Jedi.”
“Jedi.”
“Nice try, chump change,” she said. “The Jedi graffito is on that fence by the driveway to C---- B---- house, as anyone who’s lived five minutes in our rotting foetus of a town knows perfectly well.”
“I know that. Bizarre, when you think about it – I mean, the kind of person who’d write Jedi on a random fence would probably be more inclined to identify with the Sith, you know, the baddies. But then what if they got a gang together? Apparently there can only be two Sith at any given time, a master and an apprentice. A gang of two, haha, that’s pretty sad.”
“Yes,” Leigh said pointedly. “A great many things in this life are very sad, very sad and pathetic. Look, I’m going to drive down V------- Ave now, and you’re going to look out of the window, and the graffiti will be there.”
She did. I did. It wasn’t.
“Great Loki’s high heels,” she said slowly. We pulled up to the corner and got out of the car.
Same old fence, same old weathered wood, no sign whatsoever of the one-time presence of a lonely nerd.
It hadn’t been washed off, not that after all this time there seemed any chance of that working – the word was just gone, not as if it had never been but as though there was no way in hell it could ever have been.
There was a dead silence. Leigh looked at me. I looked at Leigh. It was a moment of crystalline shock, like the moment right after your grandmother kicks you in the face.
“Get back in the car,” Leigh said, white-faced.
“Where are we going?”
“Right the fuck back to the $2 Shop.”
And so we did. And it was there. And there was it.
We drove to her place. I think Leigh might have been speeding just a little, but with her wild history of traffic fines and reckless mud entrapment, it was only to be expected. Victoria and her parents were there, ready for a night out at Sophie’s place way out in the bayou.
“Hey Courtney,” Victoria said casually.
She was looking very festive indeed, in a black Halloween costume with bones drawn on the outside, accessorised perfectly with black spike-heeled boots and a huge black Day of the Dead sombrero.
“What’s cookin’, good lookin’,” I joked casually back. She suddenly went dead pale.
“My spinach puffs!” she yelped, and leaped away.
Leigh handed me the phone.
“What’s this for?”
“Call your family,” she said in an odd tone, “And ask them if there’s anything . . . unusual, maybe, outside your house.”
“Why?”
In response, she fired one of the fake guns we’d bought earlier. Instead of the plastic click this had elicited in the store, a jet of pale amber liquid shot out the end, fizzing where it landed.
“Oh my . . . is that beer?”
Leigh yanked the other gun out of my hand and thrust the phone at me. “Seriously, you don’t want to drink that stuff. Just . . . just call your parents.”
Leigh’s mother’s voice floated down to us from the kitchen. “Victoria, your chickens have come back! How did that happen! Is that – have they got human teeth?”
Leigh ran to her mother. I dialled.
When she came back I was looking out of the window in the office, peering through the lace curtains at the street outside. She looked suspiciously teary, and there was a feather or two stuck to her hand. She dropped the mallet on the bed.
“Did you call your parents?”
“Dude, what happened with the chickens?”
She shook her head. “I don’t ever want to talk about it. I don’t ever want to see chickens again either, or use an eraser. What did your parents say?”
I tried to pass it off with a debonair laugh. “Haha, funny thing actually, pretty funny story now that I come to tell it to someone - ”
“There’s another car in your driveway.”
“Haha.”
Fine, okay, so I knew Leigh was mad at me for maybe – I said maybe – causing a rip in the fabric of time and space. But A, it might not even have been me anyway, and B, this was actually a pretty fucking sweet opportunity, and yes I was sorry about the chickens, but that other stuff hadn’t actually hurt anybody.
And now . . .
“Look, I know you didn’t approve of this whole idea. And I know you’re probably pretty bummed about, you know, being wrong as fuck about all that science bullshit. But this is the opportunity of a lifetime, this is my dream, and I’m asking you to help me now. For the sake of all the years of our friendship, and for the sake of everything we hold dear. For the sake of rock and roll!”
I secretly knew that Leigh only approved sporadically of rock and/or roll, but my powerful argument seemed to sway her. “What do you want me to do?” she asked suspiciously.
“I need you to help me build a gateway to St. Kurt’s time-space locus. And possibly some kind of lasso, and maybe a soporific. He won’t know we’re from an alternate future, come to save his life, and we won’t have much time to explain before someone pushes a panic button.”
“Oh, for the love of God.”
“Now,” I said, planning feverishly, “We’re going to need sand, probably lots of sand.”
She sighed heavily. Leigh seemed to spend a lot of the time sighing; that was probably how she developed her prodigious lung-al capacity. The girl could shriek like a 747 for three minutes straight until your ears started to leak important blood and brains, and you’d be like oh noes, not my blood and brains, I need them to live!
“Well, you’re in luck,” she said acidly. “It appears my empty pool is now full of sand. I’m going to get some gloves and a bucket; I don’t know where in hell it came from.”
“Me neither,” I said, “I never read Dante. I always meant to, you know?”
But she was gone. So I grabbed my wallet and headed over the road to the liquor store.
*** Intermission. ***
By the time I returned, heavier of bag and lighter of wallet, Leigh had spread the sand in a thick layer over the grass of her backyard. I dumped the plastic bag beside my own, testing the depth of the sand.
“Perfect,” I said with considerable satisfaction.
Leigh raised her eyebrows, high, as though they were trying to escape the sordid confines of her head to fly majestically to the blue-black sky.
“And . . . this would be the part where you tell me what the crap we’re doing?”
“It’s really very simple, Leigh.” I explained patiently, unloading the contents of both bags. “Reality as it currently stands is very thin indeed, and all kinds of crap is leaking to and from this plane. But in order to exploit this dangerous instability properly, we have to create a bridge, a gateway if you will, to the specific time-space locus we require.”
”I think you mean locum,” she said.
In response, I flicked a lit match casually in the general direction of her eyes and continued. “As I was saying, we have to create a door between this place and time and the place and time we seek. The sand will help with the general opening, coming as it does from God knows where. Then we need items that will create sympathy specifically with St. Kurt.”
While Leigh batted frantically at her face, rolling her head on the concrete in order to put out a stray curl that had been lit ablaze, I deposited a shiny new bottle of whiskey in the middle of the sand-dais. Six bottles of beer arranged artistically around it followed, then candles, their ends melted a little in order to plant them securely in the sand.
“Hard liquor, soft liquor, candles,” I said. “Uh – go inside and get some flowers or something. You know, something pretty.”
Leigh went in, grumbling about something or other. I extracted a small pocketknife from my pocket and began to carve Nirvana lyrics into the wax of the candles. When Leigh came out with the foliage, I threw a packet of Marlboros at her. “Arrange these in a circle on the edge of the sand, you know, like in that anime stuff we watched that one time.”
She threw one back at me, which I popped in my mouth and began to chew.
“And now . . . his favourite book.” I said, in an inadvertent spray of tobacco flakes.
Leigh snorted, a very unladylike thing to do. “Where the hell do you think we’re going to get that? Are you going to get me to rob a bookshop now?”
I shook my head slowly. I debated making a tsk-tsk sound as I did so, but decided not to push Leigh too far just yet. I settled instead for simply drawing a dark green paperback from my back, dropping it casually with the other objects.
Leigh stared at me.
I stared at Leigh.
“What is that?” she asked finally.
“Perfume, by Patrick Suskind.”
“And you just happened to have it with you?”
I didn’t dignify that with a response.
Not long after that, we were good to go and ready to rock. Leigh’s expression of martyred disapproval had been softened by liberal doses of the ‘medicine’ she kept in her bedroom cabinet. I didn’t point out the fact that medicine was rarely taken in frequent dosages of ‘four to five bottles’, or the fact that medicine rarely came in containers featuring grinning Jamaican natives and equally jovial skulls. I was too busy to comment had I wanted to, for I had been occupied in assembling an outfit designed to augment my natural magical powers.
And I knew I was resplendent. Oh yes. Oh yes I was.
“Is that a Burger King crown?” Leigh asked.
“Shut up,” I replied breezily.
It was a beautiful night for traversing the space-time continuum. Leigh lit the circle of cigarettes and the candles at the centre. I upended the whiskey bottle, applying myself to a big huge wee drop of Dutch Courage, Scots Tea, Irish Television. “Right,” I said slowly, patting the dark air in the centre of the circle like a mime.
“Look,” Leigh said, pointing at the sky. “Check out those clouds. Cirro-cumulus, if I’m any judge.”
Not only was she not any judge, she was trying to break my concentration. It was almost as though she didn’t care about the taking of the greatest opportunity of our young lives!
“Homunculus,” I said tersely, continuing to feel around in the air for any weakness.
“Words can’t describe how friggin’ stupid you are, I swear to God,” she replied. “Homunculus means, you know, like people and stuff.”
“Well it is like people and stuff, jerko. It’s that cloud I see all the time, the one that looks like David Bowie.”
Leigh drew breath, but whatever she might have wanted to say to me would have to wait. I had found the way in! A section of air, somehow thinner than the rest and more substantial all at the same time, that I found I could part the slightest bit with my hands.
“What the hell?”
“It’s working!” I cried, the rush of air from the rip in the fabric of reality majestically billowing out my magical cloak (some might say Leigh’s bedroom curtains) behind me, “Quick! Get the whiskey! Get a cigarette! More sympathy, hurry!”
Leigh grabbed up the bottle and splashed a little at the tear. I felt it give further. “Go!” I yelled. She snatched up a cigarette from the perimeter boundary and wafted the smoke around my hands, splashing and wafting by turns. The air sagged and softened around it, blowing in air that was wet with rain we weren’t having here. “It’s nearly there!” I said triumphantly. Leigh grinned back, caught up in the excitement of this truly momentous moment. It was a pretty great moment.
Until we heard the high-pitched shrieking sound behind us.
“No!” I yelled in anguish, looking with Leigh to the source of the discordant sound and seeing, more horrible even than I had feared, the screaming whistling sucking of our very reality out through the hole in the circle – the gap that Leigh had made when she’d removed that one cigarette.
The world beyond our circle was gone. Out there in the howling dark things whipped round and around, objects like shining fish, people in crazy oldey-timey clothes, pages ripped from books, all kinds of crap and some weirdly hooked little wooden things I don’t even think we have a name for anymore, all that stuff was shooting around faster and faster, currently being joined by our boundary markers. One by one they were sucked out, glowing faintly before they were gone.
The rain was gone, and through the rip in reality I could now faintly see the darkened grass and iron fence of Leigh’s backyard; she was trying to cling to it too but it was narrowing and disappearing, and the bottles of beer were exploding and flying outwards, and I was screaming at her, “You’re fucking stupid, what are you, you’re so bloody stupid, you’re so stupid,” and just before everything went black I was pretty sure I could hear her yelling the same thing back at me.
No, that was a lie. ‘Everything going black’ is a literary convention; what it really meant was that we were caught in a transdimensional fuck-up of Escher-like construction, which our feeble little ape minds didn’t have the faintest chance of being able to comprehend. Besides which, I think the whiskey bottle hit my head pretty hard at some point.
We came to in a supermarket.
First thing I was aware of was a pained sigh. Then I heard Leigh make a sound that is best approximated here as ‘Arrgh’.
“You stupid fag,” she continued painfully, “If my head doesn’t fall off in the next couple of seconds, I’m going to kill you so dead.”
“How did I know it would be you?” came another voice from somewhere above us, right on the heels of Leigh’s. If voices had heels, and considering our current circumstances I considered it too soon just now to rule anything out.
Leigh and I blearily clambered to our feet, swaying not a little as we surveyed the apparition before us. It was a shortish woman, red of hair, sharp of eye and worryingly crossed of arms. I sagged.
“Oh, hey dude,” I said miserably. “What’s the what-what?”
She shook her head sternly. “You know jolly well what the ‘what-what’ is. I knew it was you, too, the moment I heard. No one else, not one single person born in the last hundred years, would be stupid enough to pull a stunt like this, much less think of it in the first place.”
I laughed weakly. Leigh jabbed me in the ribs, harder than I thought strictly necessary. “Who is that?” she hissed.
“That’s Eris, the goddess of chaos and discord,” I explained. I had another go at the weak laughter, but Eris was having none of it. She surveyed at Leigh over her wire-framed glasses.
“And you,” she scolded, and even though I’d always thought of scolding as a rather indulgent, hands-on-huge-hips-fat-finger-waggling kind of word, I found out that day that Eris could scold like a thin, steely, chicken-sticking kitchen implement. “You, the McLennon girl. I thought you’d have had more common sense than to go along with any of her ridiculous schemes.”
Leigh responded by goggling like a fish that had just figured out someone had taken it out of a pot of hot water, filled its gills with jelly crystals, then put it back.
“So dead,” she managed to choke out. “So . . . fag I’ma – so fuckin’ dead – so dead.”
“And another thing,” Eris said. “Why do you call each other that word all the time?”
“Word?” I asked.
“So . . . dead . . .”
“You know which word I mean. The ‘f’ word; you know,” she said darkly.
F word, f word. I tried muzzily to remember what it was Leigh had just called me.
“Fucknuckle?” I tried.
“No.”
“Fuckabilly?”
“No.”
“Frodomite?”
“ . . . what?”
“So dead,” Leigh said more steadily. “You have no idea how dead.”
“Well, you know the word sodomy, right?”
Eris glared steadily at me. I had to assume that she was in fact aware of the word in question. “Yeah. And you know Frodo, from the Lord of the Rings?”
She raised a hand, closing her eyes in despair. “Stop. No more. No more of that ever, not to me, not to anyone. You take that story to your grave.”
“Oh, fag,” Leigh said, rejoining the world of the not-apoplectically-insane. “You want to know why I call her a fag, such as when I say, for instance, ‘I’m going to kill you, fag, I’m going to stab your face with my fist’.”
“That’s the one,” Eris said, looking very relieved indeed to be moving away from a story that really wasn’t as terrible as she seemed to think. For someone so offended by us casually using the ‘f’ word, she sure was homophobic.
“We’re reclaiming the word,” I said, “for every person who’s ever had their sexual orientation called into question just because they had better things to do with their time than propagate the species.”
Leigh snorted again. “No, you just do it because that Lowtax guy from the Internet does it, and you think he’s cool. And I really don’t have enough words right now to explain how many flavours of sad that is. And you know what else?”
I had to sigh. “I don’t know; then your brain fell out?”
“Don’t you dare quote David Wong to me,” she replied icily.
“Ahem,” Eris said.
We turned to look at her.
“In case you haven’t noticed,” she said, withering sarcasm right on the button, “We have what our American friends would call a situation on our hands. Thanks to you idiots, anything could be happening out there, and thanks to Murphy’s Law it probably is. I suggest you find Victoria as soon as possible; if she cant figure out a way to reverse the process she may be able to build a machine to control it and repair the worst of the damage. And take these – I’m afraid they’ll probably be useful.”
And just like that, she was gone, vanished into the ether, which was a good thing because I was getting pretty fucking sick of her holier-than-thou attitude and weird, stilted way of talking. She actually looked and sounded a lot like this bitchy teacher I had at primary school. I have this memory of her falling off a mountain and not teaching for about six months, but that might not be true.
“Here,” Leigh said, throwing something incredibly heavy at me which I, with lightening-fast reflexes, deflected with my head.
“Motherfucking Jesus Christ!” I howled, clutching my cranium, but only for a moment as there was work to be done and adventures to be had! I leapt into action!
Heavy thing – turned out to be a hefty spade – grasped! I gripped it threateningly and whirled into action, which is like leaping only this time my magical cloak swirled around me like a tornado of bad-assery.
“There’s one!” I screamed and pointed. “An anomaly! A mysterious hottie from another dimension come to destroy us all!”
Leigh grabbed the spade as I was about to smack the business end alongside the head of the strange figure that Eris had left, with the spades, in her wake.
“Easy, Gaytron,” Leigh said, “That’s Cam.”
***Intermission***
Cam it was I found, once my eyes had adjusted to the subtle dark radiance of his very being. I had never met Cam in real life, of course, but I recognised him immediately from his haunting green eyes.
“Hay guys, what's going on?” he said, in his manly yet melodic voice.
Leigh smiled. “Good to see you, buddy. Obviously Eris thought we’d need you on our quest, and I’m glad she did. Welcome to the team.”
“Bathtub,” I said casually. “Uh, oh crap, I mean . . . bathtub,” I tried again, nodding knowingly.
“Hi Courtney,” Cam said.
Yeah, it was me alright. Who else would have mentioned the bathtub at all, let alone in mixed company? Probably Leigh, but she was already here. I backed off a few steps, removing my feeble woman’s brain from the immediate circle of Cam’s irresistible magnestism, and felt somewhat better. My crown was crumpled, so I adjusted it as best I could.
“So I finished off this packet of nutmeg last night,” Cam said conversationally to Leigh, “and I had a few beers and I’m like lying there, and this bear came out of the ceiling and winked at me and went away.”
“And then you found yourself here?” Leigh asked.
Cam frowned, eyebrows delicately crinkling over his bottomless jade eyes. “What? Here? Oh, crap.” A small dog poked its head out of Cam’s long black coat. “Vegie,” he informed the dog, “I don’t think we’re in Warragul anymore.”
“Doesn’t look like it, mate,” the dog agreed.
“Uh, Cam?” I asked, whipping on a pair of dark glasses so as not to become inadvertently entranced when his attention was turned to me. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t your friend Vegie usually more . . . humanoid?”
Cam stared at me.
I stared at Cam.
A small leg joined the head, and Vegie scratched fitfully behind his ear.
“Let’s get to Victoria, shall we?” said Leigh.
We changed into appropriate zombie-or-worse slaying attire, found Cam a spade, found Vegie a delicious pound of raw steak, and ventured out into the moonless night.
“I hope nothing’s happened to Victoria,” Leigh said.
I agreed fervently. “Shut up, clownparty.”
To be continued.
(NB: No one seems to get why the Eris thing is funny, so here it is: deus ex machina, motherfuckers. –Ed.)