Classics Mutilated (50 page)

"Haven't even opened yet, and the parasites and the vermin are already sucking my blood." He lights another cigarette and sucks half of it to ash. The doctors want to take out his left lung, but still he sucks in that smoke, like the atmosphere of his lost home planet. "My squirrels don't have rabies. Perish the thought." Dixon dips another donut and then coughs. "Nussbaum. Squirrels. Ha!"

The complaint gets a bit vague, but the boy has grown a tail and outsized incisors, and lost his thumbs. 

"We should counter-sue him," Dixon muses. "He's stolen our proprietary, patented process. Shame about the little boy, but we can't allow our property to slip into the public domain." 

We split the difference. Offer little Nussbaum a chance to audition for the Moxie Monkey Club, a new project being developed for ABC's embryonic television network. He dictates a letter in his windy, emphysemic tenor, then has me sign it. His world-renowned signature, with its trademarked whimsically swooping initials, is the effect of my fluid trunk penmanship. His own signature, even when sober, looks like a spider smashed into the paper.

His facial tic starts up again. "Spare the rod and spoil the child … I should've listened to Moreau. All these problems you filthy, ungrateful creatures brought to my door. It's enough to make me think about going back to animation. When a drawing goes wrong, you just erase it."

He wants to show me his new tabletop model. Dixon's World breaks ground in another month, and he's got so many plans. Flying ahead of schedule on the backs of bull and baboon slaves, it will take only months to build the 2,000-acre park and miles of hotels and walled suburbs. There have been daily discipline problems and a few uprisings, but beast men are not unionized contractors. Gunning them down in a ditch or burning them in ovens isn't genocide. It's inventory reduction. 

"The new park will be bigger and cleaner than this one, Gene. And it'll have a little portion for every corner of the globe, so you can go around the world in a day, without all the unrest and germs. And all the inhabitants will be humanimals from each region. I've got Hiss working on Komodo dragons and panda-men, and...."

"What about the Cowboys and the Lummoxes, sir?"

"Well, what about them? Who'd pay to see them? They're trained killers, they've tasted human blood. And—" He catches himself rationalizing to me, and lights a cigarette to go with the pair in his ashtray. "And as it happens, they'll be staying in Europe. Soviet Union's licking its chops over the mess Hitler left. Someone has to hold the line."

"Where will they stay? Some of them will … want to come home."

He bites a nail and looks away. "In the old German facilities. As it happens, Hitler had a lot of accommodations that will work perfectly for our extended family."

I've wanted to ask him about this for some time, but Uncle Will has been on edge, firing loyal workers for using profanity, sending half the staff to spy on the other half. Enemies are everywhere. Trying to steal us from him, even now. Even my position is not invulnerable. "You love us ... but you sent us to war. To die...."

He downs his scotch, oblivious to the cigarette butt floating in it. "Not to worry, Gene. My old partner, Doc Iwerks, doped it out before he tried to stab me in the back. Dr. Hiss perfected it. You know how much it pained me to see my children suffer, so we cored out the anterior cingulated cortex." 

He takes out another of his precious models, of the human brain, and pulls off the frontal lobe to point at an innocuous organelle like a wad of chewing gum underneath. "It's uniquely overdeveloped in humans, and it's the part that regulates pain and fatigue. All of my humanimals were modified so they wouldn't feel pain or exhaustion as humans do, but there was something else about it that made me a little blue at first.

"Our best medical minds believe it's the seat of the soul. This little joy buzzer lights up when our barnyard exhibits are treated with the serum, but we nip it in the bud with a few cc's of sterile mineral oil. Voila! No souls."

"No souls," says the robot macaw.

"We did yours up when we grafted those ears on you for
Banjo
." He looks up from his brain model and sees the wetness streaming from my eyes. 

"But ... Master. I
do
have a soul ... don't I?"

"Oh, of course you do, Gene! Good heavens! You and all my other stars have the very best kind of souls. The movies we made are your souls. The world fell in love with you through them, and they'll go on forever, long after you're all dead and gone. I tell you, Gene, you poor bastards don't know how lucky you really are. It's no picnic, having a God-given soul."

He's drifting, but I suddenly see what must be done. "Sir, the short list of new feature projects needs reviewing."

"None of them. They're all tarted-up modern trash. We need something grand, that'll remind the world of what we do best and put those naysayers and vulgar cartoonists in their place."

Despite our best efforts, animated cartoons are becoming popular again. Dixon's old animated character, Babbitt the Rabbit, has been revived by Universal, and now dominates the one-reeler territory we once owned, since Dixon moved into grandiose features. 

I humbly offer a suggestion. "What about ...
The Island
...
of Dr. Moreau
?"

I can hear his stomach roll over, hear the tumors bubbling in his lungs. He gathers his thoughts and breath. It takes a while. "What the devil are you trying to pull, Gene?"

"I believe it's time the world learned the truth about us. About how you rescued us from the jungle, and the House of Pain."

He continues to look stricken.

"Think of it, sir: the true story of how Moxie, Snafu, the Three Little Pigs, and I came to Hollywood. All of us in our prime, with you in the starring role. I was thinking that Clark Gable—"

"Nothing doing. The man's a philandering drunk. I'll handle the casting and the scenario. You ... you...."

"I would be most useful, I think, scouting locations."

15
^º
South, 115
^º
East (11/4/44)

It should be grander than it is. A pilgrimage to meet one's creator should be something exalted, and not another chapter in a sordid Hollywood tell-all. 

To see the real world after being submerged for so long in a hand-crafted improvement upon it is more depressing than liberating. From Easter Island to Mount Rushmore, men have written their madness upon the remotest edges of the earth. Only the ocean resists them, and I find myself praying to it, in my endless seasick nod. Rise up and devour all their works, drive them from the land, and free your wayward children! Perhaps the fault was not in men, but in all of us, who crept out of the womb of the sea.

The island has not changed. From the bay, it seems to have erased all traces of Moreau. The compound is engulfed in jungle.

Our chartered schooner drops anchor and we row ashore. Three merchant marines with tommy guns and my bodyguard, a mongrel with too much Australian shepherd in him. I hope and dread that something will come out of the trees to meet us.

He could not have survived. He was a very old man, when Dixon ruined him. The few of the Master's mistakes that stayed behind must have died out, long ago. But the island is very much alive. And everything bears the marks of his hand.

The fins of sharks circle us and shepherd us into the waves, then follow us onto the land. Great sleek, tawny bodies heave out of the surf on powerful, clawed fins. Sea-lions and tiger-sharks. Massive green-black igloos dot the shore like a fishing village, but the doorways open to disgorge scaly heads with curving beaked maws that hiss wisdom in centuried syllables. 

Shy octopi slither up into the palm trees and brachiate off into the jungle as we chop the overgrown trail to the old compound. A puff of wind, and all three marines drop dead with tiny darts in their necks. My bodyguard whines and lifts his leg to mark a tree. All around us, the jungle whispers.

They pelt us with rocks and sticks, driving us across the creek, where flying frogs and queer, orchid-faced fish on lobed, prehensile fins bask in the green shade. Tiny pink homunculi peer at us from under every leaf, but now their shapes are not crude imitations of human features. Every one is unique, as if self-sculpted. They whisper, timid and fearful, but they do not try to stop us.

Across the sulfur flats and through the canebreak, we march until, at the mouth of the ravine, a shaggy, eyeless thing with a twisted crown of antlers and naked, yellow bone for a face blocks the way. "Have you come to apologize?"

I should hate Montgomery. I have a whip. I could give him a taste of his own medicine, but he has already drunk it, and tasted ours, besides.

"You've been spying on us through Dr. Hiss."

"Not spying, old son." The new Sayer of the Law turns and hobbles on all fours back up the ravine, now a cathedral grotto roofed in palm fronds and littered with abalone shells and fruit husks. Strange eyes study us as we pass, stranger than the ones before, but with one common difference. None of them looks anything like a man.

Montgomery stops before a steeply sloping cave and draws back the curtain of moss to usher us inside. "He forgives you, you know. To forgive our enemies, that is the law. We are not men."

I step into the cave. A meager shaft of green light slips past my pygmy bulk to illuminate the Master.

"So good to see you, Diogenes.... Someone must bear witness to my repentance."

"You have not stopped tampering with nature."

"Oh, but I could never stop, for I am as God made me. But I have learned from my sins of pride. I thought that the greatest service to nature was to lift it up to humanity, but nature had other ideas. When you strip away all of the animal from man, the result is not so different from a disease, if a very persuasive one. I finally learned to listen to nature, and cure myself."

His elephantine bulk spills off the bed. His feet and hands are swollen into featureless stalks. His hairless head is the size of an icebox, too heavy to lift off its pillow. His trunk trembles with arthritic eagerness as it reaches out to me. 

"Once, I gave you a human form and mind from my own blood, but I never considered that this made me your father. I was dying, and using the serum on myself seemed the only way to stay alive long enough to undo the evil that I did, and close the circle."

We are now each other's father
, I did not say. "We never knew what evil was until we left the island, Master."

"I won't say I tried to warn you. No, I am only a creature, old and tired. It's good to see you."

"I am the last one left. But there are thousands of us now. Dixon … he's unstable, insane … cruel."

"He's become all the things you thought I was, when you rebelled against me." 

Trunk drooping, my father reaches for a mango. There is no self-pity in him, no rebuke. But when he picks up a satchel and sets it at my feet, his eyes flash with the old zeal, the stolen god-fire, though his eyes blaze green, not red. 

"This will not absolve you of your sins, my old friend. But it will relieve humanity of its sickness."

(Anaheim, 7/4/45)

It's Dixon's birthday (unofficially, for his birth certificate has never been located, fueling a lifelong terror that he was adopted), and Dixonland is throwing a party. Free admission to the park, with parades, special performances, and fireworks all night long. 

The gates are thrown wide open at 8 a.m., though the lines flow slowly, as G-Men search purses and force visitors to remove shoes and hats to prove they don't have hooves or horns. 

In their hunger to love him and his fabulous creations, the crowd tramples nine of its own to death outside the gates, with hundreds more injured. Fifty thousand more roam outside.

The rides are all whirling and racing, the exhibits—
Why Is the FBI Watching You?—
mobbed, the arcades and shooting galleries—
Bag the Leopard Man! Win a Prize!—
are chattering madhouses.

The guest of honor is nowhere to be seen, but he is here. From his suite in the highest tower of Fairyland Castle, he can see it all. 

It cannot give him much comfort. The uncensored news from Florida is disturbing. Only six weeks from completion, Dixon's World is plagued with accidents and disasters. The humanimal work crews are riddled with saboteurs. Reports of gator-man raids and sightings of roving snafus and lummoxes in the Everglades and Louisiana bayous have gotten beyond Hoover's ability to suppress. 

This enormous, expensive birthday gesture might gladden his heart and keep the Florida insurrection out of the news, but tomorrow, the National Guard will begin combing the swamps and erecting a barricade around Dixon World and its suburbs.

The tens of thousands of happy tourists know and worry about nothing today. The rivers of bobbing balloons and Moxie Monkey hats—made from capybara pelts—swell and burst through every dam in the park. In the painterly hour before dusk, they are sweaty and exhausted, and churn through the splendid attractions like cud through the many-chambered stomach of a cow.

So drunk on the relentless barrage of wonder, they don't even look up when our shadow falls upon them.

The dirigible LZ131 was commissioned in 1939 as a second
Hindenburg
, but it crossed the Atlantic only once, last year. Then it was abandoned and forgotten in Buenos Aires by the Third Reich fugitives who escaped in it. 

Now its silver skin is emblazoned with red fangs and claws, and its underbelly bristles with bombs.

We have christened it
The Law of the Jungle
.

I take up a microphone in my trunk and twist it round to bring to my parched lips. My undescended tusks throb in my jaw. "Will Dixon! Dr. Moreau has come to claim his debt from you!" 

From the trees of Sherwood Forest and the summit of Mount Olympus, hidden anti-aircraft batteries and howitzers open up on us. The aft gondola is ripped to splinters by the first volley. Jets of flame erupt amidships, but our nacelles are filled not with hydrogen, but helium and something else.