Botchi

Gulping picaresquely from the nickel-plated cigar holder his grandmamma passed down to him, and which he converted into a thistle vodka container, Sizz dwelt on his latest phase of not good luck. For someone who professed so strongly his love for Mar, his performance had, thus far, been well below par. Those sixteen months he’d spent holed up in Gothenburg, unable to help the cause of his fuhrer, seemed like Napoleon day and Pentecost wrapped up in a surprise package compared to this captive hell. The thistle vodka now wholly consumed, this was the time to formulate an escape whilst his thought matrices were as erect and alert as they were ever going to be.

Without the aid of sight, for they had removed his eyes, or hearing or smell or touch, for they had disabled all four of his award winning senses, he was going to have to taste his way out of here, the one sense he’d spent the best part of two score decades trying to destroy himself.

Twenty nine seconds later, his tongue was shredded. The captors had done their homework, for the floor was lined with sharpened objects. Sizz hoped that what his tongue initially encountered was merely a fragment of shrapnel fallen out of his pocket, but unfortunately his conclusion was negative. The floor was lined with something bigger and sharper than that. This truly was a desperate situation. Had ever a human being before Sizz been so helpless but with so much to do. His one solace was the beautiful, mercifully fresh memory of his erotic encounter with Mar. If this were to be the last phase of his life, at least he would have gone out with a mild bang.

With bleeding eyes, nose, ears and tongue Sizz finally came up with the only solution he knew he was likely to get. Infused with an exalted feeling of truth and honour, that dancing bear of a man Cosatch sprang to mind. He and Mar had spent many a night regaling each other with tales of hopeless romantics and pseudo revolutionaries that they’d chanced upon over the years, and Mar’s tour de farce tale of Cosatch was his most treasured memory (second of course to his sexual conquest of Mar’s love parts). Central to her anecdote was the detail concerning Cosatch’s metal plate in his cranium. At the time he’d dismissed the description of Cosatch’s ability to communicate telepathically as an embellishment on Mar’s part, but now, in the eternity of the present, Sizz knew it to be the most truthful part of the entire tale. All he needed to do was remove the aforementioned shrapnel (retrieved from his father’s buttock on his death bed) from his pocket and stick it onto his head, warn Cosatch that he’d been captured and make sure Mar was safe. But with broken fingers, this was no crossword puzzle. After fumbling for several minutes, Sizz finally retrieved the octagonal piece of shrapnel from the breast pocket of his jacket. He clasped it to his head and could instantly sense the crackle of airwaves on his tastebuds. Mar had taught Sizz a song which could tempt the ether into a complicit state with a mind making the telepathic leap. He began to croon internally:

“Rotational, conversational, yet whithered in mind,
Show me an ombudsman unwilling to chide,
Hasty, pasty and radical in vain,
Bachelor of credit; a trader in pain
O’er the beast, ‘neath the sailor she runs,
‘Give it a poke’ cries the watchman
Today I will ride, today I will ride.”

Old man Alan looked on with profound glee at Sizz writhing naked in the goo of the spherical virtuapod.
“There’s no greater truth serum than prolonged sensory displacement,” laughed Alan as he pulled at several large levers. Sizz’s senses were physically intact, in the organic sense, but operationally under the strict control of Alan’s manipulations and thus not physically intact. The deep questions vis a vis the nature of reality and mind had been the principles behind Alan’s virtuapod in his quest for the reductio ad absurdum. However, when the Ford gained its monopoly on truth after the intervention, his research became redundant and now the main pleasure he gleaned from the pod was watching helpless humans swimming in neurologically manufactured agony. Another ninety-five minutes and Sizz would be willing to tell all. A monitor in front of Alan kept him informed of Sizz’s cerebral fluctuations: the horizontal bar, which indicated interaction between the amygdala and Becker’s Template, had shifted below critical four.
“That’s strange.” Alan muttered to himself as he spotted that the horizontal bar, which indicated interaction between the amygdala and Becker’s Template, had shifted below critical four. “He seems to be disengaging. Maybe I’ve overdone it with the olfactory denial again.”

If only Alan had not neglected Science, he could have intuited that Sizz was attaining a preterneural state via telepathic endeavour. Sizz clasped the imaginary shrapnel harder to his forehead now, wailing “Cosatch, Cosatch…”
Within several parsecs the virtuapod was permeated by a glutinous heavy gas, which began to swirl in an anti-clockwise fashion contrary to the northern hemispherical location. Mirroring the pastoral care of Sizz’s belief system the glutinous gas started to glow brown, as Sizz’s body rose into the air on a feathered cushion of hope and love. “Cosatch! Cosatch!” Sizz felt the quasi-electrical pulses assimilate in his mind as he prepared for his first foray into telepathic communication. Free of pain he felt the soft caress of Mar on upper lip, the virtual resignation he felt earlier now completely gone.

But Old Man Alan found the scene beautiful not at all. He’d been inside for too long, and forty years of dog work for the cause had inevitably garnered a blinkered response to anything resembling Life. He would have made a good administrator if he hadn’t mistakenly swapped his figure collator for the frotting manual, and fumbled on regardless.

“Fumeur ma cigarette moustache
Fumeur ma cigarette moustache
Fumeur ma cigarette moustache” cried Alan as he began to arouse himself at the sight of another human’s torture. He span dexterously to his left, fully implicating lever 9 in his approach. Carefully tweaking the rubber head in his fingers, Alan awaited the perfect moment to extract the monoxidical nitrogen from the virtuapod, thus speeding the period of faith-flux. His ratiocination was clear-cut. The Ford had presented his occasional omission of this procedure as a classical case of insubordination. But anyone who knew the textured workings of virtuapod technique (stage 3) would (correctly) assume that unorthodox wranglings of a different kind were the reason for Alan’s dismissal.
“I’d like to see Lozike administer a nitrogen vacuum as successfully as this”, Alan screamed as he placed both hands around the aforementioned rubber head and weighted downwards. Time stood perfectly still as the spherical object in front of Alan morphed into a giant wicker basket in front of his very eyes, a rope rising slowly to the sound of an Indian roughshod scaling many eastern octaves. Sizz, now not his own, proceeded to involve himself in the mythical illusion, climbing unawares to the top of the rope, which miraculously supported his very bulk. The short climb halted as Sizz disappeared into the thins of the atmosphere, Alan aghast. He grabbed his epee and sped up the rope after his captive, wildly swinging (but somehow remaining remarkably textbook in his angled sweeps) at the mysterious void above.

Sizz’s limbs fell dramatically to earth; completely severed thighs not gracefully cascading into the horror of below. Alan peered downwards, then upwards, then downwards, then upwards, then downwards. He had diced Sizz like lamb madras, and could offer no more than a paradoxical enigma that coupled despair at the lack of truth with the joy of slaughtering the lab assistant. His only way to escape torture by Kluzens himself was to hide the body-parts in the basket. Throwing one by bloody one Alan struggled not to vomit at the tendons that still offered respectable (in the circumstances) attempts at life. His toil prolonged by the lack of nitrogen in the air, Alan sat, exhausted. His fatigue droplets permeated the weathered turrets of fear as the lid of the basket wobbled slightly, then fell to the side, spinning slightly on the ground in front of him. Sizz arose, unblemished, and yawned slightly. Their eyes met and the realisation occurred (more quickly than it occurred to Alan at the age of thirteen that the practice of self-abuse could become a hobby) that they had both enacted the only living example of one of life’s greatest mysteries. The laughable old parchments from the 1800s depicting delirious crowds were no more a controversy, the science and practical method a bore. They there stood, a gleaming and alive testament to the magic of their own making.
“Here’s to nitrogen fallout” the pair simultaneously chanted repeatedly for twenty glorious minutes.

Alan smiled. His work was done. The Ford demons exorcised, he offered a quivering left forearm to Sizz. Just as they locked into an unforgettable embrace, the earth started to shake violently beneath their feet. Deep fissures started to appear in the floor and chunks of the warehouse ceiling began to crash around Sizz and Alan who were now clutching each other fiercely. The risus sardonicus that normally adorned Alan’s face transmuted into a look of concentrated terror.
“Sizz,” Alan yelled over the deafening roar of the earthquake, “you didn’t try to make the telepathic leap whilst you were in the pod did you?”
Sizz’s head lolled backwards and his eyes glazed over; he had lapsed back into a telepathic trance, completely unaware of situational circumstance, “Cosatch, Cosatch…” he moaned.
The quake increased in intensity, the noise level was increasing exponentially and the roof was swaying precariously. Alan dragged Sizz towards the external fire escape escalator, carefully sidestepping falling debris. Alan was aware that Sizz’s cerebral interaction with the pod could have caused a tectonic shift covering several hectares; they had to move fast, very fast. Alan pulled open the door to the fire escape and prepared for a shaky, three storey descent. The quake seemed to have other ideas and redoubled under their feet. Falling to the floor at the top of the creaking escalator, Alan held his head in his hands and prepared to be mashed into the ground. Meanwhile, Sizz had calmly got to his feet and proceeded to walk to the edge of the escalator platform. He gazed out serenely over the marshland, which housed Alan’s warehouse.
“Come Alan, take my hand” Sizz gestured to Alan gently. Alan rose seemingly entranced by Sizz and clasped his hands firmly. They began to pirouette around each other, slowly at first but gradually faster and faster.
“Here’s to nitrogen fallout…”
They continued in blissful union, spinning around each other at a manic pace, giggling like young girls. Despite the unruly nature of his predicament, thoughts flowed through Alan in a clean and precise form and he attained an acuity that revealed the structured stream of chaos that forged the framework of cause and effect.
“Look” yelled Sizz, encased within a peculiar ecstasy. Alan gazed over to marshes and could clearly discern, despite his maniacal rotations, a tornado forming near the uncharted abyssal bogs. The tornado rose in height and swept towards them with malign grace, over the freight route ways of the deserted salt-mining settlements and closer still past the drained sodium swamps. The tornado whispered to Alan and Sizz,
“Cosatch is currently engaged. Please leave a message after the devastation.”

Next chapter…