delirifacient (23 page)

And the tsarevich became lyrical and wondered where the world would be without mothers and their blind love and the browncoat said that many a smarter man than he or the tsarevich had pronounced mothers and their horripilant maternal functions a bane upon this world and so the world would in troth find itself in a superior state if mothers were not there to erode its tendons and filth its blood. And this was such a risqué pronouncement that the tsarevich begged browncoat to elucidate, and the browncoat told the tsarevich there wasn’t much to clarify it was a simple problem of over-population and over-crowding. And the tsarevich was confused since Russia was a great lordly cuntry with astounding territorial reserves few of which were even modestly well-endowed in terms of population and indeed many of its lands were perfectly devoid of even the minutest human defilement as the browncoat termed it.

And browncoat was unswayed by this banal truth but claimed Russia was most blessed in this respect but it fell upon the greatest of leaders to think of lesser states than theirs and to accrete as many gains against the mad peril of over-population on the mappemonde as was achievable in their own blessed kingdom and playground so as to compensate for the many failings in this respect of stupider nations who had no foresight and no guiding philosophical lights. And the browncoat told the tsarevich how all babies are parasites eating women’s souls from the inside and since women had such small perishable souls to begin with the babies would ineluctably render them hard withered husks by the time they were born, and then they perfected in the physical the process of gleeful destruction they had launched in the spiritual. And moreover the lands of Russia were already being cultivated in the optimal manner and the technology could not foreseeably improve for there was nowhere further to push the soil and the gains from adding extra peasants to the soil were negligible at best and so economically irrelevant, and the more mouths one added the more one had to divide the precious gifts of the earth, and the more peasants there were the greater the chances some would starve and all would go hungrier because of the greater need for food and resources and therefore the greater the chances of the hungry peasants launching protests and jacqueries and the greater the odds of some of the hungry peasants learning to read and reading books that explained to them not only why they were not getting enough to eat but also why they were not getting enough to own and call their own and why monarchy is theft and their negligible peasant minds would be unable to process such convoluted reasoning and they would skip to the end and the end said kill the boyars and blow up the tsar and this would lead not only to the death of the nobility and the monarchy but also less importantly to the death of Russia as the browncoat and the tsarevich knew it for a Russia without aristocrats and without a strong silent fist clutching the reins would be a new creature and scared of the light and covered in amniotic nonsense and such a creature would know nothing of the world and interpret every movement outside and inside itself as hostile and respond in kind once it grew its own young claws and it would hurl itself at the world and scratch in fury and tear open its own stomach to claw at the enemy within and the hunger within like Erysichthon and surely the tsarevich understood the browncoat’s thinking the browncoat thought so he would not distress the tsarevich any longer with his apocalyptic follies.

And the tsarevich was so engrossed in the brownback’s argument that he kept nodding for minutes after the brownback had finished and then opened his mouth three times but had nothing to say and simply gasped for air like a trophy fish whose head is about to be smashed with an hammer and then rushed off to the royal palace screaming for his armed guards. And the browncoat was amazed by how the world’s fallacies seemed compatible and fully consistent with each other and cohabited in an admirable and fully enviable harmony, a splendid system of friendly falsehoods and interlocking idiocies like the splinters of a Trojan horse.

And he walked back downtown and he stopped suddenly on the street for he saw her. And grace was in all her steps, heav'n in her eye and so cruel was she. And her stony face was still beautiful and her stony face shielded them both against the blades of wind and the blades of wind did not shield either of them from her stony face. And he had not seen her since the kiss no that was not it he hadn’t seen her since she had jumped from the window maybe hoping to ride the old man’s laughter like a magic carpet into the sun and dissipate herself and her being into the sun. And right after the kiss that kiss she had told him how she and the old man had met. The old man had approached her in the summer garden one day and told her that he wanted ‘to write my name in come all over [her] face’ and she said nothing but took his hand and took him home and adopted him and he came on her face and in her mouth, knelt studiously besides her, made her stick out her tongue so as to render the come that he had deposited there accessible and proceeded to fingerpaint in come on her forehead, which he had left purposefully unpolluted. His final draft spelt out the words 'my name'. And she was what the brownback saw on the street now no mistaking her and she saw him too and was alive and she walked toward him.

And the brownback held out his open palm toward her and she stopped and then he stopped looking at her and walked away and she stayed behind.

And downtown the brownback saw that the city thought and moved at a rate and complexity no human could ever match for there were buildings under demolition and buildings under renovation and buildings under construction and interrupted constructions under demolition and interrupted demolitions being reconstructed and all the noises and dust storms played amongst themselves like bored tiger cubs. And for some reason browncoat walked straight to the most ungainly and least ferocious and most monochromatic building he could see and the building was new but completed and seemed fully functional for there was an huge line of people waiting to go in.

And no one in the crowd knew what they were queuing for and they had joined the line many hours before and even then the line had been enormous and they all went by the principle that if so many people were queuing it must be something worthwhile and all the many people simultaneously choosing to go inside the same building could not be wrong since they were so many. And the browncoat pretended to need to use the bathroom urgently and threatened to let loose in the middle of the crowd and the guards let him in but asked him to hurry the fuck up and use the handicapped bathroom since it was generally less likely to be occupied.

And the brownback walked in the only hallway and the hallway eventually split in two and the two new hallways were very short and led to two rooms labelled
men
and
women
respectively. The brownback went into the room labelled
men
and saw that it consisted of an huge open space and there were hundreds of hospital beds and lounge chairs and hundreds of men being talked to and operated on by hundreds of doctors and hundreds of nurses. And all the doctors told all the men that there were essentially three options and they were all perfectly safe and that none of them hurt not at all not the tiniest bit and these were removal of the testicles or permanent erectile inhibition via injection – this would also leave the men bald and most likely toothless – or removal of the testicles
and
the penis if only to etch the men legibly onto the safe side. And the men nodded and weighed the three options and discarded the second immediately for they were very attached to their hair and most went for the third. And the doctors would inform the men that because of the risible lack of funding and suitable conditions and equipment the doctors would be performing the operations right there on the lounge chairs and there were no anæsthetics so could the men please grit their teeth – which they were very wise to keep by the way so excellent choice – and not bother the doctors excessively during the operation as this only made them irascible and vindictive and the men knew how doctors can be petty didn’t they so it was best to leave their complaints until after and oh if they wanted anything at any time including during the operation like a drink of water or a last swing at one of the buxom nurses they should just get up from the beds or lounge chairs and tuck their innards back in if need be and do what they needed to do and get back in reasonable time no worries whatever. And the men nodded so the doctors said they would spare the men their blathering and they pulled out their switchblades and steak knives and letter openers and carved the men up and started work. And some of the doctors were quite old and naturally made mistakes, most of them quite anodyne and rectifiable, such as opening up the men’s chests or performing prophylactic lobotomies or giving the men complimentary circumcisions.

And the brownback walked to the nearest man who appeared to have passed out from pain in his navy blue lounge chair and his doctor was so absorbed in his work he did not notice the brownback at all and the brownback asked the nurse, who was doing nothing at the time anyway, if she could waken the patient for the brownback had some nagging questions. And the bored nurse nodded and she poked the fainted man repeatedly in the shoulder with her sharp nail and this triggered a reflex kick of the man’s left foot and the kick made full contact with the doctor and the doctor lost his balance and fell over and tried to arrest his fall by stabbing his razorblade into the man’s leg and and sliding down along the man’s leg with the razorblade and holding on and the deep slash must have deranged a nerve center in the man’s leg for he screamed out and opened his eyes and was fully conscious. And browncoat seized this advantage and he asked the man who had forced or coerced him to undergo this operation and the man said no one it was absolutely voluntary and browncoat asked him why do it then and the man said it was free and browncoat asked him whether he had considered the numerous ramifications of such a procedure and the man said no not really but his wife was a prude and he was bored of vag anyway and he wouldn’t miss it at all eh what.

And the brownback thanked him for his answers and exited the men’s operation room and entered the room labelled
women
.

And in this other room, which was as large and densely populated as the previous one if not more so, there were also many many lounge chairs and doctors and nurses.

And the women in the lounge chairs did not receive a verbose briefing or a trinity of options but were told to lie down and spread their legs and the doctors did not make any fuss over their simple repetitive but to them eminently necessary work and they sewed and stitched the women’s cunts fully shut. And there were other non-medical men in the room holding women’s hands during the operation, presumably husbands boyfriends lovers or fathers. And the women’s operations were significantly faster than the surgery on men in the other room, and the supportive men helped the women up and gave them a solid shoulder and helped them walk out of the operation amphitheatre and back outside. And some men would, for unknown and incomprehensible reasons, grow very excited and take their women then and there on the lounge chairs or in the small hallway and they the men would breathe relieved although they could rarely hear themselves breathe or think through the women’s screams and the men would walk out and immediately put the women back in the growing queue outside and this was not as tedious as it sounds since women were processed much much faster than men so they and their accompaniments were out in less than three hours generally although there were some deviations.

And the brownback had seen all he had wanted to see and did not fail to marvel at what fat black echoes lurked in the cavities of his fat black O’s and D’s and Q’s, and as he was about to walk out of the building he ran into a small man wearing a long blue coat. And the small man looked at the browncoat and inspected him thoroughly but quickly and was rather surprised by the results and then looked up to browncoat’s face and flashed a long, painful automatic smile and asked browncoat how he was and if there was anything he the small man could help him with. And the browncoat was put off by the infectious, acquisitive emptiness in the small man and in the small man’s words and told the small man he was leaving. And the small man extended an arm sideways to prevent this and still smiling told the browncoat that it was impossible not to notice, and now that he the small man had noticed it impossible to un-notice, how the browncoat was in a building holding a specific designated purpose and yet he appeared to be walking out of it without having achieved and embraced that purpose. And the browncoat looked at the small man and cut his eyes on the steeled sharpness of the small man’s smile and told the small man that he had come here with his wife and had been with her in the women’s room but unfortunately she had not survived the operation and so he was going to their his and his wife’s home to grieve. And he believed he would not be a suitable subject for the doctors in the men’s room anyway since he would grieve and cry uninterruptedly and this surely would greatly aggravate the doctors and only render his own operation more uselessly complex. And the small man’s steel was knocked out of his smile by the iron of the browncoat’s logic and he extended the same hand, tame and friendly now, and gifted the browncoat with his honestest condolences and it was tragic and they were stomping on the incidence of female death but unfortunately the evil had not been wholly eradicated and he hoped the brownback would understand in time that it had all been for a supremely necessary cause and reason. And the browncoat waved the unspoken blame away by saying no no he understood fully it was just that the human infrastructure was less gifted at processing such events than the mind regardless of their moral and logical necessity but regardless he hoped to make a full recovery as soon as his wife was cremated.