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CONTENTS
Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright ♦ Cheese Ball! ♦ I Am the Worm ♦ Cager Messer’s List of Things He’s Never Done ♦ Hocus Pocus, and Kansas Is Full of Shit ♦ A Visit to the Hotel Kenmore ♦ Getting On Board ♦ Mojave Field ♦ Rabbit & Robot ♦ In with the Cogs ♦ Are We There Yet? ♦ Printer Ketchup ♦ Like Nothing Else in Tennessee ♦ Parker, My Valet ♦ The Longest Elevator Ride of My Life ♦ Dr. Geneva, and What Space Does to Teenage Boys ♦ Of Clocks, Cogs, and the Sense of Smell ♦ Captains Outrageous ♦ Canard à l’Orange ♦ Good King Wenceslas, and a Serious Obelisk of Friendship ♦ Deck 21 ♦ I Am the Worm ♦ Never Send a Human to Do a Cog’s Job ♦ It Really Is Christmas ♦ The Proper Way to Prepare a Curry ♦ I’m Pretty Sure We’re Upside Down Now ♦ It Happens Here, I Guess ♦ A Pedestrian Assessment of Alsatian History ♦ A Cruise-Directing Phoenix from the Ashes ♦ Stopped at the Wicket ♦ The Boy from First Class, and a Fire in the Bank ♦ An Infinity of Nevers, and a Mission to Find a Can Opener ♦ Captains Get to Do Whatever They Want to Do ♦ Right Side Up, Upside Down ♦ There’s a Bright Side to Just About Everything ♦ Unless You Happen to Be Dying to Die ♦ We Raise Our Hands ♦ A Most Unfortunate Dane ♦ Billy Hinman Goes to Church ♦ Getting Out of the Memphis Hotel ♦ Thanks for Not Killing Me ♦ Out of Bed and Into the Tennessee ♦ The Lost Girls, and the Boy in the Bucket ♦ Duncan’s Horses ♦ Put Your Welcome Faces On! ♦ The Giant Blue Fetus in Space ♦ He Makes a Great Gasket ♦ Tricky Words ♦ The Things We’d Never Seen Before ♦ Happy New Year, Happy No Year ♦ Freedom, and an Unemployed Cog in the Hallway ♦ Billy Hinman, Billy Hinman ♦ This Was the Tennessee ♦ We Dance, and Queen Dot Accounts for Mexican Cuisine and Human Evolution ♦ In Which We Find Out Where King Carlos Is and Suffer a Blow to Our Self-Esteem ♦ Herman Melville Would Be Pleased ♦ Eaters and Feeders ♦ First Night of the Neveryear ♦ It’s Time to Eat Now, and I Become Aware of My Balls ♦ The Cruise Ship to End All Cruise Ships ♦ The Nicest Giraffe I Ever Met ♦ A Sleep Sandwich ♦ Dumb Pointless Optimism ♦ You Better Watch Out for the Monkeys ♦ Cager Messer’s Can Opener and Push-Ups List ♦ Times That Aren’t Now ♦ A Normal California Boy ♦ Getting the Wrong Idea ♦ Shakespeare’s Crowbar ♦ The Porridge of Officer Dennis ♦ If Thy Right Eye Offend Thee ♦ What Kind of World ♦ Mooney, Mooney! ♦ This Is What We Saw ♦ Are You One of Us? ♦ Moon to Moon ♦ Just Like Home ♦ Helpless, Helpless, Helpless ♦ v.1 Human Beings ♦ Caveman & Spaceman ♦ The Unlock Code ♦ Righting the Ship ♦ The Doctor and the Reverend ♦ Epilogue: It Took Dominion Everywhere
For Amy Sarig King
I’ve been wading through all this unbelievable junk and wondering if I should have given the world to the monkeys.
—ELVIS COSTELLO
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill.
—WALLACE STEVENS
Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.
—ERICH FROMM
I smell humans.
I am very happy about that.
Someone else is here on the Tennessee with Billy and me. We are not alone after all.
I might begin by explaining that we are either the last or the first of our kind, and I wonder what time it is that this has come to you—how long our story has waited to be told.
We are trapped inside a moon to our moon, in a home—a lifeless jar—called the Tennessee, where we spend our time, absurdly enough, with talking animals and machines that grow increasingly human by the hour.
Are you a person, or are you some kind of cog?
Either way, I feel a compelling obligation to tell you what it meant to be a human, at least as far as I can describe it accurately.
None of this is a lie.
Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright
Is that a fucking tiger?” Billy Hinman asked.
“I think it is a fucking tiger,” I said.
I’ll admit that I had never seen a fucking tiger before.
It was certainly a day for checking things off Cager Messer’s infinite list of things he’s never done.
“An actual fucking tiger,” Billy whispered.
Even when you’re a half mile away from a tiger and you’re standing naked and chest deep in the middle of a lukewarm fake lake, it is an atavistic human instinct to make as little noise as possible.
“I think the Zoo of Tennessee must have broke,” I theorized.
“What the fuck are we going to do?” Billy said.
“I have no plan.”
“Cager? Do you know what that is?” Parker hollered.
Parker had been hiding up in the branches of a fake pine tree. It could have been a cedar. I don’t know anything about trees. He’d been watching me and Billy swim.
Since I didn’t want to draw the tiger’s attention to us, I decided to think about things for a while.
So Billy offered, “You should tell Parker it’s a tiger, and tigers are friendly, and that he should climb down from the tree and give the tiger a hug because tigers love to be hugged by horny teenagers. That way, while the tiger is distracted by clawing the fucker to pieces, we can make a run for it.”
“But what about our clothes?”
Our clothes were scattered on the shore beneath the tree where Parker was hiding.
“Cager. It’s a fucking tiger,” Billy told me.
For some reason, ever since I’d been forced off Woz, my best friend, Billy Hinman, did make a lot of sense at times.
“I can’t tell Parker that,” I whispered.
“Why not? He’s a fucking machine.”
“I know that. I just can’t, is all,” I said. And, yes, I felt stupid and embarrassed for as much as confessing to Billy Hinman that I had some measured feeling of empathy—or maybe even friendship—for Parker, who was, after all, just a fucking machine.
So I continued, “Besides, the tiger is just a machine too, right? It’s a cog. It won’t do anything to us.”
“What do you mean by us?” Billy said.
Damn all this clarity.
“Well, he’s not supposed to do anything to us.”
“You mean you.”
“Are you daring me to get out of the water and tell the tiger to go away?” I asked.
“Not at all. You should make Parker do it,” Billy said. “You said it yourself, Cager: The tiger’s just another cog. And cogs don’t eat cogs, right?”
That was becoming increasingly debatable on the Tennessee.
The Tennessee had been going to shit, and neither of us had any idea how to stop it from spiraling completely out of control. Worse yet, Billy and I were alone; we were stuck here.
Parker, who was my personal attendant on the Tennessee, called out, “Can you hear me, Cager? What is that thing with stripes and orange hair? Do you know? Will he be kind to me?”
I waded in a little closer to shore, but only about three steps. Then I backed up one. I tried to make my voice as normal sounding and calm as possible. There was no need for me to shout at Parker, because the guy did have pretty good hearing.
“How did you get up in the tree?” I asked him.
But Parker had to yell for me to hear him clearly, which certainly agitated the tiger, who clawed at and chewed on the pants I’d dropped beside the lake. “I floated up here, two
days ago when the gravity turned off. The thing with the stripes who is eating your pants right now has been walking around here in Alberta ever since.”
When the Tennessee’s gravity failed, all the animal cogs must have gotten out of the zoo.
A zoo without gravity can easily become a battlefield for clashing survival instincts.
The tiger chewed and chewed.
“Tell him to stop eating my fucking pants,” I said.
I was mad!
And Parker, being the rigidly programmed horny but obedient valet cog that he was, said, “You! Thing! Stop eating Cager Messer’s fucking pants!”
And the tiger, being the rigidly programmed large predatory cat cog that he was, snorted and growled, shook my pants wildly in his teeth, and ripped them to shreds.
“Bad idea,” Billy whispered.
“Fine. Now I don’t have any pants. Stupid fucking tiger.”
“Tigers are dicks,” Billy said.
“I think I should wait up here in the tree for a few more days, Cager,” Parker said.
“It’s only a tiger, Parker.” But I wondered when—if ever—in the history of humankind, anyone had ever said It’s only a tiger. “But he’s a cog. He won’t do anything to us. Watch. I’ll show you so you can climb down from the tree.”
Then I cupped my hands around my mouth, forming a megaphone with my fingers, and said this: “Attention, tiger! You need to go back to the zoo immediately! My name is Cager Messer, and my father owns this ship! Do you hear me? I am Anton Messer’s son, Cager, and I am telling you to return to the zoo!”
And that was when the tiger ate Billy Hinman’s pants too.
No animals, not even fake ones, like being in zoos.
Billy Hinman said, “Plan B: Cager and Billy stay naked in the lake for the next five days, waiting for a fucking tiger to die of boredom.”
What could I say? I never had a Plan A to begin with.
Fortunately for us, we did not have to wait five days in the lake. Something else, which was enormously tall, judging by the rattling and swaying of the fake cedars or pines—or whatever—that didn’t grow or photosynthesize on the recreation deck called Alberta, came crashing toward the lake through the woods.
It was another refugee from the Tennessee’s compromised zoo: a giraffe. The thing’s head, nearly as high as the branch Parker sat on, came crashing through the canopy of Alberta’s fake forest.
And Parker yelled, “Cager?”
What did he want? I refused to be my horny cog’s fucking safari guide.
“Giraffes are nice, right?” I whispered to Billy.
Billy nodded. “And they’re bisexual.”
“What?”
“They really are,” Billy said. “Totally bisexual. They’re, like, the greatest animals ever.”
“How do you know that?”
Billy shrugged. “I just do.”
The giraffe stopped at the edge of the woods on the opposite side of the trail from where the tiger continued thrashing Billy Hinman’s pants. The giraffe looked directly at Billy and me. He cocked his head slightly, as though waiting for one of us to say hello or something.
Also, I may as well admit this: I had never seen a giraffe before. It was very tall. And I was terrified of it too.
“Would you boys like to climb up onto my back, so I can carry you out from the lake?” the giraffe said.
He had a French accent.
“That giraffe is from France,” Billy said.
“Why the fuck would your dad make a French giraffe that talks?”
“I think the more important issue is why he would make a fucking tiger that eats pants,” Billy said.
The tiger thrashed and thrashed.
“Bonjour, les jeunes garçons! My name is Maurice,” the giraffe said. And if giraffes could smile, Maurice was smiling at us. “But, please, let me offer you boys a ride on my back. The Alpine Tea House serves magnificent waffles. It’s just over there, at the bottom of the hiking trail. Are you hungry? J’ai très faim. Heh heh . . . I am, as you say, very hungry.”
Cogs were not supposed to get hungry. Ever. Something had been twisting out of whack on the Tennessee.
“He seems really nice, and I love waffles,” Billy said.
“Billy, I am naked. There’s no fucking way I’m riding naked on a bisexual talking giraffe to go get waffles with you,” I argued.
And Billy countered, “Cager, like you said: It’s an opportunity for you to do one of those things you may never get a chance to try doing ever again. Who’s ever gotten to ride naked on a giraffe to go get some breakfast?”
As it turned out, Billy Hinman and I did not need to carry our argument to any definite conclusion. Maurice, being the hungry French giraffe that he claimed to be, became fascinated by the tiger, who had finished eating Billy’s pants and had moved on to his next course, which was my T-shirt.
Maurice looked at Billy and me, then apologetically said, “Excuse me. Excusez-moi, s’il vous plaît.”
Maurice spread his front legs wide and stiffly lowered his head toward the oblivious tiger, who was apparently an expert at sorting laundry and was now eating Billy’s T-shirt and socks.
Maurice cocked his head back and in one powerful thrust stabbed his pointy giraffe face directly through the tiger’s midsection.
Maurice made a sound like Mmmph mmmph mmmph! as he wriggled his face deeper inside the tiger’s body, gulping and slurping the internal components of the cat’s mechanization.
Billy Hinman said, “Okay. I take back the thing about him being the greatest animal ever.”
And the tiger, who had no discernible European accent, said, “Ow! That fucking hurts! This is all there is to life, isn’t it? Sadness and pain.”
The tiger wept and sobbed as great gushing blobs of viscous, semenlike hydraulic fluid burped from the gaping holes Maurice pierced in his torso.
Maurice ate and ate as the tiger cried and cried.
Maurice burbled, “Cette viande de tigre est délicieux!”
Four or five days in the lake was starting to look like a pretty good idea.
Parker shouted, “Cager, what do you suggest I do now?”
“Tell him to ride the giraffe,” Billy whispered.
And the tiger wailed, “Sartre was right—I cannot escape anguish, because I am anguish!”
Mmmph mmmph mmmph! went Maurice.
Cheese Ball!
There was a time when people theorized the moon was made of cheese.
Up here on the Tennessee, though, I can see it is more likely made of ash. Probably all the ashes from all the fires of all our pasts, forever and ever.
And I can turn and, in one direction, see the surface of this enormous cratered ashball as it skims below us like a moving sidewalk; and, in the other, the smoke-shrouded Earth—our lost home—burning itself out, exhaling ash one last time.
Among the enterprises that made my father one of the five wealthiest people in America (and those ventures included a television program called Rabbit & Robot, as well as a line of lunar cruise ships like the one Billy and I were trapped on) is transporting deceased loved ones—not their ashes, but their actual bodies—to the surface of the moon, where they are laid out like vigilant sentinels, eternally gazing down, or up, or wherever, at the planet of their origin. They never decay, never change. Billy and I can see the bodies every time the Tennessee passes above Mare Fecunditatis, which oddly enough means “Sea of Fertility.”
There are more than thirteen thousand fertile and dead sentinels floating there atop that sea of ash, staring down at everything that had come before them, and everything that came after.
They just lie there, dressed in their outfit of unquestioned permanence—military uniforms or perfect white smocks, every last dead and fertile one of them.
Billy Hinman and I are trapped inside a moon to our moon called the Tennessee.
Because Billy Hinman and I nicked a fucking lunar cruise ship that belongs to my dad.
; Well, to be honest, it was kind of an accident. We didn’t mean to steal it, but it’s ours now, no question about it.
It kind of just fell into our hands, you could say.
And we are at the end of everything.
So, let me back up a bit.
I Am the Worm
Here are some of the things Billy Hinman and I have never done: At sixteen years of age, we have never attended school like other kids. And we also have never seen my father’s television program, Rabbit & Robot, which, like school, is only for other kids—definitely not for Billy and me.
And Billy Hinman, who never lied to me, has also never taken Woz, which is something they only give to other kids, to help them learn, so they can become proper bonks or coders, to help them “level down” when watching Rabbit & Robot.
Billy never took it, but I am an addict.
It does not embarrass me to admit my addiction to Woz. It’s about the same thing as admitting my feet are size fourteen, and that I have a painfully acute sense of smell: all true, all true. The drug became the glue that held me together, even if the source of my cohesion was, according to my caretaker, Rowan, destined to kill me.
This is why Billy and Rowan concocted the scheme to get me up to the Tennessee.
Their plan ended up saving—and condemning—all of us.
* * *
Cager Messer hears me.
Sometimes when he wakes up in the mornings—no, let’s be honest, it’s more like the afternoon, and frequently it’s evening—he says he feels good and strong, and his head is clear, and he thinks he’s not going to smoke or snort or suck down the worm, and I tell him, Cager, who are you fooling? I’ll tell you who you’re not fooling: all of creation minus one, kid.
The kid listens to me, but only because I never tell him what to do. Maybe “listens” is the wrong boy word. He hears me. Yeah, that’s what he does.
He hears me.
Which is an unbalanced social dynamic, you might say. Right? I’ve got ears. Look at me. I hear him. I know what he wants; what he isn’t getting; what he will never get; how he’s passively letting that monster-size ball roll down the hill. Gravity, take control, because Christ knows the kid doesn’t want to.