VINCE GOTERA (2)

Introduction: "Resurrection" is the opening chapter of an incomplete novel that I started in 1993. I suppose since the chapter is now 27 years old, we could call it a "failed novel." But not being one to give up on a good story, I might still resurrect the novel, an irony given the title. 

"Resurrection" is a science fiction detective story set in an alternate reality 15 years in the future. Of course, when I originally wrote the chapter, the setting was more like four decades ahead, so time is catching up with me. The world of the novel is a San Francisco that is heavily Asian American in culture, especially Filipino American.  

 

I had a blast writing "Resurrection," I remember, and I hope you will enjoy it without the necessity of an entire novel, since the chapter can stand alone as a short story.

 

Resurrection

Cloudy night sky awash with colors, like a television tuned to old-school ’80s MTV: pumping crimson, fluorescent green, and fleshtone. Manilatown. Johnny Cruz wandered aimlessly down streets punctuated by TVs in store windows, each one flashing Dolphy IV’s new 3D video—“Bahay Kubo”—on VH1001. A janey-janed hyper‑rap cover of the kids’ song: the teeny house made of nipa leaves, the garden stuffed with peanuts, singkamas, and the long green pods of sitaw. Johnny looked around—he knew where and when he was, at least: San Francisco milagrosa, MetroCalifornia, 2036 A.D. 

            If you were looking at one of those laminated Landsat false‑color poster blow‑ups of San Francisco they now sold in all the tourist clip joints, you would see a tricolor flag draped east-west across the city, the peninsula: Chinatown, Nihonmachi, Manilatown. Between maxi-J-town and the Dalycity Flips spreading northward into the city, Ocean Avenue flowed like a crazy pachinko river, one yaoya after another sprinkling the north side of Ocean, jammed in with old-time sushi bars and yakuza tattoo parlors, while across the street, tindahan after tindahan sold dried fish, triple-sealed jars of halo halo, and vintage videos of those B-movies made by the original, uncloned Dolphy. Along the sidewalk, turo-turo carts floated on antigravs, like gaudy neo(post)modern jeepneys—the sharp vinegar-and-spice scents of adobo, dinuguan, and pancit molo wafting into neon-tinged air.

            As he walked down Ocean, everything seemed to Johnny a blur of color. He couldn’t remember who he was—everything on the slate of his mind wiped clean off. He paused in front of a turo-turo, the cart decorated with two faces: James Brown, Godfather of Soul, his trademark wings of shiny, conked hair folded around a brilliant, tinfoil smile, and Billy Idol—that sneering venerable gray-haired patriarch of rock stars pricked out in a mosaic of tinsel, a red and green long-sleeved barong Tagalog. Johnny scratched his chin. No idea why there’s a freakin’ revival of everything 1980s right now, he thought, but at least I remember rock ’n’ roll. Johnny pointed to chunks of marinated pork grilling on bamboo sticks on the cart’s faux nuclear miniBarBQ. 

            “Inihaw,” Johnny said, mildly surprised he recalled the Filipino word.

            “Ayan. Six twenty-pibe.” The vendor—a grizzle‑haired, “new‑manong” type—handed him a skewer. Three teenage girls strolled by in platinum satin jackets emblazoned on the back with Serramonte High School in hot pink script. Maria Clara miniskirts and revival beehive hairdos. They giggled as they scoped Johnny out, their brown legs spangled in sheer, knee-high, red-white-and-blue scintilla-hose, but he didn’t notice. 

            Absently munching, Johnny fished out his wallet one more time. No cliché amnesiac, this guy; he had ID. He looked again at the license. Private detective. Address: a Westlake office building, Dalycity. A holograph: ordinary Pinoy features—brown eyes, brown skin, a typical small nose, not too flat—in his early thirties, straight black hair razor-cut and swept back in a hyper-Elvis pompadour, a conservative black facsimile suit circa 1945, white shirt, a tie with yellow fireworks bursting against a maroon sky. A stranger. Looking into a darkened shop window nearby, he saw the same face, same suit. Still a stranger.

            Johnny sighed, shook his head to clear the haze. He had to figure this all out. He knew this much: someone wanted him stone‑cold dead, a tasty snack for mechano-crabs at Fort Funston beach. Earlier this evening, he had visited the Westlake office in an attempt to jog his memory. No dice. As he left, he had palm-locked the front door to his office absent-mindedly and remembered that this was his favorite door, a Mickey Spillane faux replica: frosted plexiglass with Johnny D. Cruz, P.I. in gold italic letters. He felt more than heard the laserbeam sizzling past his right ear, and he dropped to the floor, rolling. The plexi, Johnny glimpsed, now sported a neat hole fused right through the D. Damn. He rolled into a prone firing position, spritzing the Uzi handgun in a narrow arc down the dark hallway. Sure, bullets weren’t as chichi as laserbeams, but they did the deed just as dirty. Pause. Heartbeat. A giggle threatened to bubble out of Johnny’s gut: here he was, amnesia and all, trapped in a Mike Hammer or Sam Spade flat-flick. Probably more like Sam Diamond—Peter Falk’s fake Bogart character in that old movie Murder by Death. Suddenly, a figure catapulted out of a doorway, laser pistol pulsing, and zigzagged like a crazed Ricochet Rabbit right out the street door. Johnny fired a couple of steel-jacketed epistemes in his direction. In the bad light, he hadn’t seen much to identify the hit man, except for his scarlet, post-post-post-Punk, spiked-out faux-hawk. Probably a Woolworth wig.

            Johnny had lowcrawled up to the doorway where the assassin had crouched. Nada. Holstering the Uzi under his left arm, Johnny started to laugh. A long belly laugh. The darkened shop door was labeled New Manila Cryogenics, and Johnny wondered if Imelda at that moment was quavering inside. For some undivinable reason, he remembered that this shop was rumored to be the true resting place of Ferdinand Marcos, frozen—not that glass mausoleum in the Land of the Morning—while the Imelda (now well over a hundred years old) waited for the heat to die down from her most recent die-hard escape from the MetroManila PrisonPlex. To Johnny, the imagined vision of a white-haired Imelda—trembling in high-heeled black Neiman Marcus pumps or silver lamé high-top sneakers or blue slip-on chinelas embroidered with “Pilipinas” in gold thread—was infinitely more humorous than the attempt on his life. 

            Johnny had suddenly remembered the list of vegetables in the kids’ song “Bahay Kubo”—singkamas at talong, sigarilyas at mani, sitaw, bataw, patani—then flashed on a dumpy Imelda gardening in her blue chinelas, rows of upo hanging obscenely from a trellis. The funny part was that each upo had a pair of little eyes following her every movement. Another laugh, tears smarting his eyes. Then he had slipped out the main door to Westlake, peering carefully up and down the street, his trigger finger twitching. 

            And so now here he was—back on Ocean Avenue, feeling slightly foolish as he stood there holding the investigator’s license—blankly staring at what was apparently his own image, sandwiched in flexi‑acrylic and stamped with the official seal of Dalycity. Not a clue. Not one. 

            As he walked, Johnny paged through the memory slots in his head: it was something like walking through a familiar, everyday landscape and encountering a featureless gray house growing out of the ground like a sudden toadstool or Dorothy’s cabin fallen kerplunk. You walk up to the gray, inscrutable front door (unlocked, strangely enough), walk in, then find yourself immediately exiting through the back door. The rest of the landscape, the rest of your memories—they’re all still there, solid as ever, but now the important stuff (like who the hell you are or why someone is trying to kill you) is imprisoned in the gray house. 

            Johnny tore the last chunk of inihaw off with his 3D‑vid‑star teeth and pitched the skewer into the street. A little sweepdroid scurried up with a faint wheeze of gears and scooped up the bamboo stick, like a Jetson ’toon ’bot. Johnny kept walking, his eyes like radar dishes automatically sweeping the streets for danger signs, while in his head he circled and circled the gray house, looking for a way in. He needed a place to crash.

 

Ifugao Mountain. A hodge-podge mountain of house-size PVC cubes piled on the ruins of the legendary Serramonte Mall like a three-year-old’s pyramid of blocks, teetering on the brink of avalanche. In front of the mountain, a neon-holo image floated, flashing flamingo-pink script letters one after another and then all together: 

I‑F‑U‑G‑A‑O   M‑O‑U‑N‑T‑A‑I‑N   A‑P‑A‑R‑T‑M‑E‑N‑T‑S

 

At least, that’s what the holosign was supposed to say. But, the apartments having fallen on hard times, the 35-year-old sign no longer worked as it had in 2001. The letters spluttered and stuttered, signifying God knows what. No wonder folks no longer called this place Ifugao after the tiered and terraced mountain rice fields in northern Luzon; instead it was now popularly nicknamed The New International, after San Francisco’s famous International Hotel—the Chinatown residence of so many of the first Filipino immigrants, the original manongs, until the hotel was demolished, six decades back, in the late 1970s.

            Inside, Johnny rented a “deluxe squatter” unit, one of sixty-four similar “apartments” in one of the smaller cubes near the top of the huge flophouse. Johnny didn’t know where he lived, since his ID only gave the address of his office, and obviously that location was now too dangerous. His domicile for the night consisted of a molded styrofoam bed, looking something like a KingTut sarcophagus, sans gold leaf, of course. The bed was stuffed inside an 8 by 4 by 4-foot space demarcated by neo-chicken-wire, fabricated from extruded polyplastic. In one corner of the “room” was a 10-inch color TV. It was a 2D set, but its presence was what made this apartment “deluxe,” although the set was chained down with macrosteel cables. The whole affair was meant to be a nostalgic replica of the so-called “cage apartments” that had proliferated in Hong Kong in the decades before reunification with the PRC.

            Johnny lay down in the bed and spiraled down the hypnagogic funnel. I’m a king and I’m living in some palace. Disco music filters through the wall of the baroque/rococo room I’m in, where I’m sitting at an immense mahogany desk. An office of some kind. I open the only door and there’s a party going on: the men are sporting pineapple‑fiber and polyester barongs, while the women are dolled up in satin and sequins, ternos with huge butterfly sleeves. Almost like a Lionel Richie 2D video, the men and women are float-dancing in mid-air, above tables covered with entrees and desserts—lechon and leche flan. They are floating the Cool Jerk and the Watusi along the ornately decorated walls of the ballroom, upside down near the ceiling with the trompe l’oeil putti and archangels. There’s a barrage of noise outside, and I fly—yes, I can fly—to the high windows draped in sumptuous red velvet. I pull aside the drapes and see tanks and helicopters amassing outside the palace, the grounds and the air filled with Vietnam-vintage hardware. They are firing on the palace! My elite guard has fought valiantly, if the litter of bodies is any indication, but they’re clearly losing. In slow motion, a shell corkscrews through smoke-laden air, heading straight toward my window. I am frozen, a fly caught in an ice cube. With a superhuman effort, I turn my head to look into the ballroom behind me. The dancers are paying no mind. The disco music is accelerating, speeding and speeding into an insane punk beat. The dancers boogie faster and faster. I turn my head back to the window. The air is thicker than syrup now and turning a blood-red color. The shell looks like the moon in the Revelations part of George Lucas’s cinema remake of the Bible: the moon falling to earth, and I am the earth. Inexorably drawn by my strange gravity, the shell has almost reached the window. The point of the shell is bowing in one of the glass panes, like a sheet of cellophane trying to resist penetration by a pencil. I can see initials scrawled on the nosecone of the shell. I can almost read them. F. The glass pane explodes into the room, a million sharp fragments miraculously missing my face. M. In a moment, the shell will strike me, ground zero, right between the eyes . . .

            “Whew! What a doozy of a nightmare!” Johnny took a couple of deep breaths. He could feel his armpits awash in a cold sweat. Johnny flicked on the TV to mask out the persistent sensations of the vivid dream—one which acute déjà vusuddenly convinced him he’d had several times before. The TV might also help to drown out the white noise that blanketed the entire cube of apartments: a virtual Babel like midmorning at Quiapo market in old Manila, complete with the scents of bagoong, durien, suman, and other delicacies. He slipped the Uzi out of his holster and looked around at the melange of TVs he could see in the other cages. Someone was watching the new 3D-ized Wizard of Oz, Margaret Hamilton’s pickle-green witch’s nose seeming to bulge out of the screen. Another TV showed Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, (de)colorized. To the right and below, Max Headroom bing-bonged off the edges of a TV screen—damn that ’80s revival—spouting a neo-hip impression of Pee-wee Herman, now re-erected, resurrected from that old Florida porn-theater brouhaha. Yet another TV displayed James Bond rescued from becoming road pizza—the huge tractor-trailer rig bearing down—rescued by airlift, a rope ladder slung below a helicopter . . . or was it Buckaroo Banzai? To Johnny’s left, a deluge of purples and psychedelic reds lit up a rapt neo-teenybopper playing air guitar with the immortal Jimi Hendrix kneeling in front of his flaming guitar at Monterey. Johnny began to disassemble and clean his Uzi, flipping from channel to channel, and finally settling on MTV, a descendant of the original music-video outfit, except that the M now stood for Manilatown. 

            The VJ was MaxMi Hagedorn, and she was playing a new 3D video by Madarika, the post-post-Punk/neo-Rap band based in Dalycity. The name meant “endless wanderer” and all their performances featured version upon version of that theme. This particular video was a pseudo-Hippie revivalesque piece: a spiraling Grateful Dead–clone melody and a piercing, staccato rap chanted by a high-pitched unisex voice reminiscent of Grace Slick or Robert Plant. Pulsing blots of fluorescent-colored oil sandwiched technicolor scenes sampled from movies: The Boys From Brazil—a Nazi hunter chasing down adolescent Hitlers—intercut with a pseudo-anthropological film, a black and white documentary on Filipino mythology. As he watched, Johnny pieced together the central narrative: in some ancient legend, a warrior who falls in love with a beautiful maiden (of course) is subsequently killed by his enemies who hack his body into pieces (the video dwelled lovingly on this scene) which are placed in a basket and tossed into the sea. Like a weird clone of the legendary hero Lam‑ang, the warrior is miraculously resurrected, the jigsaw puzzle of his body mysteriously resolved underwater (as purple, blue, and indigo tie‑dye circles underwent mitosis onscreen), and the two lovers live happily ever after (amen). 

            Johnny switched the TV off. For some weird reason, this video seemed to be the key to the gray house in his brain. And also to the recurring dream. But he couldn’t quite figure it all out. It must have something to do with the cutting apart of the body, Johnny mused, yet all he could mine out of the video’s gory imagery was something akin to the motto of the old TV show Naked City—“there are eight million stories in this city”—some such number, some such phrase. Could be a whole googolplex of stories, for all the good it does me. Johnny envisioned the slum mountain of the New International as a jigsaw-cut corpus, a helix of semiprecious body parts, like something out of Inferno—the movie made from the novel Pohl and Niven borrowed from Dante—so that he was only one fragment out of eight million impaled like marshmallows at a campfire on the multitudinal horns of the primal existential dilemma: what does it all mean? E pluribus unum. 

            Johnny finished reassembling the Uzi, twirled it on his right index finger like some tinseltown gunfighter, and slipped it into the shoulder holster. He shrugged on his Blues Brothers suit coat and descended from the mountain, headed for MTV headquarters. He would seek out MaxMi—maybe she, doyenne of rock videos, could psych out all the connections. Pause for the cause.

 

Johnny waltzed right past the old Pinoy janitor in the MTV lobby with some song and dance about a hush-hush investigation, flashing his private-eye license past the janitor’s eyes. The whole place looked just like a revival set for WKRP, the Cincinnati sitcom replayed ad infinitum in syndication. Johnny took a guess and headed down the hall where he knew the WKRP control room would have been, and—lo and behold!—there it was. He knocked on the door and it slid aside with a Star Trek whoosh. There was MaxMi Hagedorn surrounded by three Hulks in black pinstripe gangster suits, white razor-brimmed fedoras. They seemed distinctly menacing, and Johnny automatically assumed MaxMi was in some sort of trouble. Kidnap. Armed robbery. Whatever. Johnny magicked his Uzi into his right hand and stomped into the control room, big-time.

            “Okay, you fish-faced bug-eyed Neanderthals, get your hands up!” A little clichéd maybe, but it worked. “C’mon, Ms. Hagedorn, let’s get out of here.” MaxMi was a mocha-tinged mestiza (Johnny did worry for a moment about the political incorrectness in that phrase’s postcolonial ramifications but couldn’t help himself—to him, she looked mestiza). She was wearing the latest rave threads: the platinum satin jacket with Serramonte High School in hot pink calligraphy on the back, over a replica Sheila E fake-fur leopard-skin bodysuit in pseudo-spandex. Johnny was mesmerized by her opal-green eyes, shoulder-length black hair worn like a young Cher. Johnny grabbed MaxMi’s hand and they backed out of the control room. As they sprinted down the hall side by side and hand in hand, the light show started—a crisscross of laser beams just like tracer fire in the surrealistic bridge scene of Apocalypse Now. For one chaotic moment, MaxMi imagined that Johnny, silhouetted by an intricate pattern of ruby laser blasts, was the Chinese pirate Li Ma Hong: mauve and magenta robes of silk swirling around him while Manila burned, pennants of flame flaring into night sky.

            MaxMi Hagedorn screamed as lasers and the bullets from Johnny’s Uzi lit up the ventilation duct they were crawling through. A Fourth of July crossfire. Just like the rescue scene in the original Star Wars movie, Episode IV: A New Hope: Skywalker, Solo, and Chewbacca had just freed Princess Leia from her jail cell deep in the Deathstar, when during the ensuing firefight, Leia screamed out her question, This is some rescue! When you came in here, didn’t you have a plan for getting out?

            “This is some rescue!” MaxMi yelled. “When you came in here, didn’t you have a plan for getting out?” 

            “Star Wars, right?” Johnny laughed as he fired a crisp burst. Suddenly they fell into an intersecting duct. Down, down, down. “Aiiieeeee!” whooped Johnny as they plunged through a faux aluminum grill straight into a dumpster full of garbage. Orange peels. Soft, hairy vegetables. Reams and reams of recycled computer newsprint. Syringes and needles. Various unidentifiable objects, including some latex tubes that looked suspiciously like used condoms. Whoa! Johnny and MaxMi were out of there, like the Batmobile scooting straight out of Hell on Mach‑2 ramjets.

            An hour later, after a quick sprint through the ultrasonic shower near the front lobby of the New International, Johnny and MaxMi were in his deluxe squatter “crib.” The TV tuned to STV—not a Latino station, S for Spanglish, but “Sinatra TV”—ol’ blue eyes crooning “Strangers in the Night.” Johnny and MaxMi lying vis‑à‑vis on the bed. No. They weren’t. Shame on you. They were talking. Sure, a close and intimate tête‑à‑tête, but still only talk.

Johnny:     What was that whole scene about back at the studio?

MaxMi:     Don’t worry about that. Just kiss me. [She slips an arm around his waist. Johnny arches an eyebrow but leans down to kiss her.]

Johnny:     I could get used to this. [Pan to the TV screen. Three candles burning. Behind, slightly out of focus, a fire dancing in a stone fireplace. Sinatra’s voice flutters through the air. Pan to a window, through which we see the moon reflected in an indigo ocean: a shimmering swath of white. Tight shot on Johhny’s and MaxMi’s lips . . . ]

MaxMi:     Damn it! I can’t do this. I don’t care what Guido or the organization says. [Sudden wide shot. A shaky frame, as if the camera operator has been taken by suprise.]
         I was named after three feminist writers! My given names are Maxine Mirikitani Jessica. The third one is my confirmation name, and I got it from my great-grandmother—the original Hagedorn. [Johnny looks stunned. Are scenes from Tripmaster Monkey, Shredding Silence, and Dogeaters swimming in the whirling osterizer of Johnny’s brain? Or is he wondering if her retrofashion 1950s bad-girl jacket and the ratty beehive hairdo she had programmed into her ultra-shower give the lie to her claimed feminism? MaxMi pauses, then looks around.]
         Listen, Johnny, I was part of a plan to locate you. [Johnny arches his other eyebrow as he caresses her shoulder absently.] That Madarika video was explicitly designed to bring you in: images that would rock you (and you alone) down to the core. We—the organization, I mean—knew the reinstatement forces had zapped you with an amnesia-inducing hallucinogen so you could just blend in. Not that you ever knew who you really were anyway . . .

Johnny:     I don’t know who I am as it is.

MaxMi:     Hhmm. Your lips are so cute . . . [Johnny arches both eyebrows.] . . . uh, anyway, we—the organization—felt that since you were the last one left, we could best serve the cause by assassination. And so I, um, allowed myself to be “kidnapped.”

Johnny:     Hold on a second. I’m the “last one”? And you were in on that hit attempt in Westlake?

MaxMi:     Yeah. But I hadn’t seen you so up close before. You can trust me.

Johnny:     How do you expect me to trust you? You’re probably just setting me up, and then you’ll turn me in to this organization, whoever in the hell they are. 

MaxMi:     How can I explain . . . do you know the old flat‑flick Flame of Araby? 

Johnny:     Let’s see, Maureen O’Hara was in that one, right? 

MaxMi:     Yeah. She plays a princess who, even though she’s spunky and spirited and a redhead, falls head over heels for the Bedouin Tamerlane. 

Johnny:     But Tamerlane only has eyes for a wild black stallion.

Maxmi:      And he tames that stallion, but Maureen O’Hara—red hair and all—she gets tamed too. And so she gives up being a princess to go with him to the “black tents of his people.”

Johnny:     I don’t get it. So what?

MaxMi:     My, oh my. I was supposed to lead you on, but isn’t it obvious? [Violins playing on STV. Tight shot on MaxMi’s eyes, mandalas of reflected candlelight from the TV screen.] Johnny, I’m falling in—

“Okay, hold it right there! Get them hands up! This heater’s a Colt Magnum Peacekeeper Laser. It’ll burn right through three inches of macrosteel.” What was this? Some kind of low-budget Bogey trench-coat movie? A remake of John Wayne’s forgettable Mesquiteers? 

            “Guido!” MaxMi brought a slender hand up to her mouth. Standing there was the largest of the three gangster-types from the MTV studios. Guido was such a bruiser that he looked like he had been poured from a cement mixer into his charcoal pinstripe suit. But not messy, mind you. Very dapper.

            “Forget it, toots. The organization knows you’re a turncoat, now. Both of you get out of there, or my Colt may just have to burn an arm or a leg.” Guido punctuated this last sentence by blasting Johnny’s TV. Sinatra’s image receded as if spiraling into the gravity well of an galactic‑center black hole until there was nothing but a star-bright dot in the center of the screen. (Just like the opening hook of Outer Limits: “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture.”) Then, with an audible poof! the dot of light disappeared and smoke poured out of the set’s ventilation slots. Any time now, Lalo Schifrin ought to kick in with the Mission Impossible theme.

 

Johnny woke up with a tremendous headache. Little devils, just like in the 1950s pain-reliever TV commercial, must have been pounding his brain with red-hot sledgehammers all night. A hundred clones of Hot Stuff, that naughty comic-book devil. Johnny opened his eyes and shaded them with his hand. He was on a beach. Below a steep cliff. The Marin headlands, if he didn’t miss his guess. It was dawn, and although the sky was beginning to pale visibly, the sun had not yet peered over the cliff. He looked down. He was naked. Hmm. He looked around. A huddled figure was crumpled at the base of the cliff about twenty feet away. He moved toward the figure. MaxMi. Dead? What movie were we in now? Some perverted reversal of West Side Story? Johnny noticed a pain, an ache like a profound hunger deep in his chest. I had fallen in love with her too. A tear formed at the corner of Johnny’s left eye.

            MaxMi moaned. Alive! Johnny knelt and gathered her limp form against his chest. She opened her eyes, filmed over by a dull sheen. Then sudden recognition lit up her face like the windows of a house where people have just returned after long years of travel. Billowing of sheets whisked off furniture.

            “Johnny! I thought you were dead! Was it all a dream? I saw Guido rip . . . rip you . . .” MaxMi broke down in tears. As she sobbed, it all washed over him, a virtual tide of memory.

            Guido had driven us north over the Golden Gate Bridge and west into the headlands. When we stopped and Guido motioned us out, I caught a glimpse of MaxMi’s eyes. She seemed scared—the whites of her eyes gleaming in the glow of the slightly gibbous moon—but somehow resigned as well—her lips set into a grim line. We were standing at the crest of a sheer drop. Below, the ocean was spread out like a pane of frosted glass. Another car drove up, a nondescript Buick hovercar. A family car, unlike Guido’s cliché gansgter vehicle: a stereotypical Lincoln Continental floating contemptuously on eight repulsor antigravs. The driver of the Buick got out and reached into the car to lift out a matte-black polystyrene case. He was wearing a white lab coat, buttoned at the top with a vaguely priestlike collar, almost like a Nehru coat or a turtleneck. Shades of the original Frankenstein movie: “It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!”

            “This is him, huh?” Now Lab Coat was hefting a white‑enamel box out of the Buick. He opened it, and the eerie down‑flowing steam of dry ice drifted out and snaked across the scrub grass toward our feet—me and MaxMi. Lab Coat opened the black case, and steel instruments glinted with a cruel sheen in the moonlight. He began to draw surgical gloves onto his hands. “Okay, Guido. Let’s do it.”

            Guido laughed a demoniacal, gruff haw-haw, like some weird avatar of Bluto. He drew the Peacekeeper, pointed it at me.

            “Wait. This ain’t fair. Give me my Uzi, and we’ll shoot it out.” Instinctively I reached for my shoulder holster. Empty.

            “Just like High Noon, huh?” giggled Guido. He then swiftly tattooed my body with the laserbeam. A deadly tic‑tac‑toe game. MaxMi was screaming inarticulately, long wailing whoops.

            All of a sudden I felt like I was floating. I was in the palace dream again. No, I was still at the top of the cliff. But levitating in midair, apparently. Fragments of someone’s body were scattered near MaxMi huddled on the ground, her slim form wracked by trembling sobs. I couldn’t turn away. I was frozen again, immobile. Lab Coat was bending over the body pieces with implements of brutal steel. As he scraped here and there—from a hand, a chunk of brain, the stomach lining—Lab Coat hummed. The tune was “Whistle While You Work.” As I live and breathe. Petri dish after petri dish of scrapings went into the refrigerated box. I realized that Guido’s organization was also in the Marcos reinstatement business. They were simply eradicating the competition’s “product.” They could afford to wait until she was dead and gone. Imelda couldn’t last too much longer past her more than one hundred years, Swedish youth treatments or not.

            “OK. All done.”  Lab Coat peeled off the gloves efficiently, no wasted motion. Guido walked around, picking up the body parts and pitching them into a wicker hamper he’d gotten from the Lincoln’s trunk. 

            “Mustn’t leave our dirty laundry around.” Pantomiming a sick pandanggo sa ilaw, Guido twirled while holding a couple of the pieces, then guffawed once again. Then, all the parts collected, he sailed the hamper over the cliff edge into the ocean, where it bubbled briefly and began to sink. MaxMi, in the meantime, had fainted. Guido picked her up like she was a small child and slung her limp body over the cliff too. Oh my God. 

            As the taillights of the Continental and the Buick receded into the Marin night, I felt myself going over the edge of the cliff finally. Some strange attractor steadily gripping me through multidimensional space. Red-hot fingers hooked into the exact points where Guido’s laser had sliced my body into curlicues with endless replicating loops. The inexorable pull of a weird gravity.

            I was disintegrating into a shower of corporeal smithereens.

            Next thing I knew, I was on the beach. Eight million sharp needle-like stings all throughout my body. I looked down and an image from the claymation flat‑flick Gulliver’s Travels sprang into my head, Lilliputians swarming over my chest like intelligent locusts. No. They were mechano-crabs, and out of the tips of their platinum-and-steel alloy claws were shooting star-like bursts of red light. I’ll be damned. They were eating . . . no, they were welding me back together! Looking toward the base of the cliff, I saw MaxMi, a broken marionette. A crab scuttled in her direction, and red light played over her crumpled silhouette. A bizarre fantasy right out of E.T. The moon shone in the night sky, phasing infinitesimally into a mathematical roundness. Full circle.

            “So you know who you are now?” MaxMi’s dark eyes, gazing at him in the new light of morning, glinted with sparkles of light brown. In Johnny’s head, the gray house exploded gloriously into a million fragments. 

            “Yes. The last remaining clone of Ferdinand Marcos, produced and raised by Imelda’s cryogenic witch doctors. The organization you used to be with was pretending to oppose her plan, but they only wanted their own Marcos, a puppet version. So Guido and that guy in the lab coat last night—they must have been scraping clonable tissue.” Johnny helped MaxMi to her feet. 

            “But listen, MaxMi, I’m a new man. Different. Not him any longer. I’m my own man. And you’re my new woman. No iron madonna for me, this time. We’ll have to prepare for the future, find them all.”

            “Yeah.” MaxMi smiled, leaning on him ever so slightly as she looked into his eyes. “Just like Laurence Olivier in The Boys from Brazil, hunting down all those Hitler kids. We’ve got thirty years or so before they can have the new ones fully ready. But we’ll find all their Ferdinands—each and every one.”

            Johnny nodded. “Never again a decree of martial law—hunger, plague, death—from Malacañang Palace.” 

            He extended his hand, spiderwebbed with faint lines of red, toward her. She caught and held it in her own, their palms kissing. Johnny and MaxMi pivoted toward the rising sun and began to scale the cliff. Above them, the sky transmuted slowly, wheeling from indigo to crisp blue, like summer.

~~

 

Vince Gotera teaches at the University of Northern Iowa, where he served as Editor of the North American Review (2000-2016). He is also former Editor of Star*Line, the print journal of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (2017-2020). His poetry collections include Dragonfly, Ghost Wars, Fighting Kite, The Coolest Month, and the upcoming Pacific Crossing. Recent poems appeared in Altered Reality Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Dreams & Nightmares, The Ekphrastic Review, Philippines Graphic (Philippines), Rosebud, The Wild Word (Germany) and the anthologies Multiverse (UK), Dear America, and Hay(na)ku 15. He blogs at The Man with the Blue Guitar.