Friday, July 16, 2010

Dead Planet VIII


Dead Planet VIII

“It was as though
he had fallen into
a sewer”—William Faulkner
Light in August

The Martian light of August slanted thru the Venetian blinds—down thru the window in our Hellas City condo. It oozed and schmoozed itself—filling the room with ersatz moonlight and something cold & android-like. Android alien romance—with no regrets.

There was something—about the Martian light in August. Even when I was deep in cryogenic sleep. Do android boyz get homesick like Earthboyz do—dreaming away during deep space sleep?

There was something I was going to ask myself—but I guess I knew the answer even back then. This is surely the way Childhood’s End comes to an end—as though I had fallen into a sewer.

It was only at night—the sewer of my dreams. Everything during the day—stayed pretty much the same. I drove to work everyday—down past the spaceport alongside the 12-lane freeway up above.

But at night a different person lived inside me—leaving me feeling corrupt when I woke up in the morning. All night long I’d dream about him. Now he’s doing this—now he’d doing that.

I became him late at night—when he’d come in the dark bedroom. My dreams were flooded with slanting rays of Martian August light—the longest dayz and darkest nightz. Consumed with the usual crummy details and detours—trivial things about him that only lovers are bugged by.

There was no hurry—time went on & on like it always does. Stream of consciousness on Mars—was no different than it used to be on Earth. After awhile the novelty of droid-dreaming wore off. I’d be sitting on the condo verandah. Looking at the sunset thru clinging dream bougainvillea vines—with the droid-kid moody, looking away from me.

The humid late nights of August—even in dreams languid with a life of its own. Knowing, thinking, this isn’t real—I don’t belong here. Android awareness—it was like that. The abnegation of it all—the urgency with which it concealed and covered up itself.

Or was I hiding from him? After all back on Earth, I’d been a Rick Deckard drone—a killer bounty hunter. That’s one of the reasons I got outta LA—I got burned-out doing the dirty deed. Until one day I looked in the mirror—maybe I was a droid too?

The robot dayz & nightz—I’d spent with JJ the android hustler. Living with a replicant kid—without a past or passport into the future. He didn’t have any bad dreams—no bad boyz baggage like me. He was as virgin—as the Martian snowcaps.

And yet when I was with him sometimes—he was as dark and moody as the Greater Magellanic Cloud. I prayed aloud, quietly, erectly—sometimes hopelessly at night that I’d never wake up. “Don’t wake me up yet,” I’d pray. “Dear God, let me be damned this way a little bit longer—a little bit darker anyway.”

It seemed as if my whole humanoid past life—all those crummy human years, those inhuman years, kept fading in front of me. When I was with JJ awake or android dreaming—I ached to feel him next to me all the time.

He was so fuckin’ vulnerable and virgin—so much more human than me. Even tho he was just a replicant kid—he was so sheerly and instinctively young male. Cunning and full of deceit—with the kind of future shock that happens all at once.

During this time—our android honeymoon? It was as if we went thru every avatar new lovers could go thru. He wasn’t like any Earthboy I’d ever known—instead it was like living in sheer, unadulterated Martian sin and filth. It was against the law—to fall in love with any androids. Whether they were male, female or in-between They’d been programmed to self-destruct—if they went that way…

And yet Nexus-9 droids got away with it somehow—JJ was calm, coldfaced, insatiable about it. He was vain—somehow Tyrell had got that in there too. Vain, full of human vanity—he actually stunk with it.

When JJ spoke—it was more fork-tongued than my own. Not some geek-droid computer-speak. He was more than human—drowning in a vortex of forbidden words sliding off his tongue like drooling, warm spit. Coming outta him—nonchalantly & matter-of-factly. Bored & calm like a detached gigolo—blowing smoke-rings up at the ceiling in bed after sex.

It was that way all the time—whether we were making love or out flying high over Amazonis Planitia. I kept having flashbacks—like all this was like back during Antebellum times. Back on Earth before the Apocalypse Wars? When robots were like negro slaves—cumly young bots devoted to being Mandingo boyz for their faggot slave masters?

It surprising me—and still takes me totally unawares. When JJ would have these fits of jealous rage—for no real fuckin’ reason at all. There was no other lover—we lived together alone in the Hellas Towers. Afterwards he’d stop and laugh at himself—as if he even surprised himself. Like he was saying to himself—“WTF. So this is what it’s like being fuckin’ human—all too fuckin’ human?”

I knew that—he knew that. It was one of those unspoken things—we both knew it. And yet it went unsaid—it was kinda like don’t ask don’t tell. The purpose of playing it out like some game—trying to convince himself that he actually thought that way.

The same with getting mad—or trying to understand the unexpectedness and instinctual need of humans for intrigue. It was as if he were taking notes and concealing them in his head. Hiding them in some secret place—a wormhole in some rotting Martian pyramid archive. They were all over the place—plus all those enigmatic monoliths like the one up there on Phobos.

Sometimes I’d wake up—and he’d be there lying next to me. Smoking a Martian doobie—trying to mind-meld with me while I was sleeping. No wonder I’d be having the strangest dreams—he was inside my head checking me out. At first I’d bitch-slap him for doing it—catching him inside my mind that way.
But he’d just laugh and smirk—and then I’d shrug.

I’d take it out in trade—doing him twice to make up for it. He was double-jointed in more ways than one—Tyrell having genetically engineered Nexus 9 drones with two phalluses. Jeez lueez, I’d say to myself. Tyrell must’ve been a fuckin’ sex-maniac or something—either that or I was just another typical suburban desperate housewife?

There’s nothing more exquisite—than getting a double-jointed Nexus 9 off. A Nexus kid—with both dicks shootin’ off at the same time. Maybe Petronius or Beardsley—could have caught those wild throes of teenage doppelganger nymphomania. Either elegantly with words—or pen and paper.

But for me it wasn’t elegant or erotic—it was deadly serious. Maybe because I was an ex-bounty hunter. Now I felt more like Joseph Cotton strangling Marilyn Monroe in “Niagara.” Choking his cheating wife to death in the Bell Tower of Niagara Falls—in that old film noir Hollywood flick.

Caught up breathing hard—and full of jealousy. Her purse falling onto the cold floor—the contents of her life spilling out. The lipstick and cigarettes—the pocket mirror and Trojan rubber. Me strangling him to death—both JJ’s joints. Panting the way Joseph Cotton did—with my eyes glowing in the dark.

That’s the other half of android-nymphomania—what it does to a stupid jealous human being who makes the mistake of fallin’ in love with one. His dark android curly hair—each kinky strand of pubes writhing like octopus tentacles. Strangling both of JJ’s skanky schwanzes—“Android! Android! Android!”

There was nothing hidden in the closet—all those years of human love back on Terra seemed fake and remote from me. These new droid dayz & nightz—JJ was becoming more & more human & I was becoming more muy macho masochistic. Within a couple of months—we were both completely corrupted and deeply in love with each other.

It was then I realized the awful inescapable truth—Nexus 9 droids were really Martians. Tyrell had back-engineered what they found on Phobos—and in some of the underground ruins beneath the rotting, crumbling pyramids. Somehow he’d got his hands on some old DNA—probably from some of the Martian mummies hidden in the red sands of Amazonis.

Apparently, I’d fallen in love with a young Martian kid—a cute nexus-plexus combo of Android boy and Martian man. JJ was the corrupted offspring—of ancient interspecies promiscuity. It seemed conventional enough—like any life of healthy and normal human sin usually is.

The corruption and forbidden love part of it—came from a source more inexplicable to me than him. He already was the corrupted enfant terrible—of Martian genetics and human androidicy. And this was on Mars his own home planet—and he was more at home here than I was. So maybe it was me—I was really the queerer of us two it seemed?

I began to get paranoid—I’d obviously been set-up for what was happening to me. There in the Hellas Zoo—I’d been sucked into it from the very beginning. It wasn’t a bottomless pit—yet. I hadn’t got that far into it I suppose—and besides JJ was still just a street hustler to me. Not a monster from outer space—or The Devil Girl from Mars…

I’d go thru dayz just looking at him—thinking saying to myself he’s just a street kid, a Martian hustler, a lonely, spoiled kept boy. Then other times I’d say to myself—“I better move—and get outta here. I better get away—from this whole weird Martian thing. Before it’s too late…”

But I couldn’t help myself—I was already addicted to loving him. Both of him—especially his double-trouble climaxes at the same time. It drove me nuts—and he knew it too. Maybe that’s how Exo-interspecies love works—you kinda get sucked into it. It segues you into the Other—with a smoothie “Go Between” easin’ you in & out of a new world.

The droid thing was the in-between connection—the thing that held JJ together tight. The same fatalist feeling of helplessness—that had me by the balls. The curiosity, pessimism and sheer inertia—of having an affair with a young Martian. They were supposed to be all dead & gone—Mars was supposed to be deader than a doornail. But it wasn’t…

The old ruined Martian pyramids—the imperious and overriding kipple of a gone dead civilizations. But here I was submerged in the middle of it—realizing there was no escape. Staying, living, feeling, getting to know—what it’s like to be a double-backed beast in the throes of making love.

Two creatures—one Terran & the other Martian. Struggling in one body—sweaty, moon-gleamed, him deep inside me. Butt-plugging me and me snozzling him—all the way down my throat & down past my spaz-twitching tonsils.

Both of us—getting off becoming each other. In a thick pool of damned Martian blackness—one dead planet making love to another dead planet.

Pretending nothing had happened—somehow both worlds immune and impregnable. No apocalypse to drown out both worlds—the impervious thousands of years between us then and now.

He was like a young King Tut—resurrected just for me. All those Nexus nerves, veins & arteries—embedded in some Martian prince they must’ve dug up inside some Giza Necropolis somewhere.

All those Mayan codexes clicking away back on Earth—all the rotting stele in the jungles leaning forwards & backwards in time. The Martian monoliths saying the same thing—with their jet-black onyx physical purity preserved too long now even to be lost.

The peaceful myriad sounds—of fake droid insects droning away in the background. Piped into the condo thru the balcony-verandah speakers—the rotten richness and flow of putrefaction close enough to smell & touch. Something still growing like a swamp where deserts are now—mildewing my lips and making me feel drawn to him even more.

The android magnolias blooming even way up here on the fiftieth floor—drooping vines of droid bougainvillea growing lush in the darkness. Shadowy things moving like phantom night sisters—and murdered kid brothers in the moonlight.

Antebellum Earth nostalgia—pre-Apocalypse Terra rotting in the humid, hot wasted August nights. I didn’t even have to tell the vidscreen what to do—it already knew my moods and adroitly transgressed them even beyond my niggardly human imagination. The condo had its own android mind—it fit smoothly over my own mind like a tight pair of soft leather racer’s gloves.

JJ had two pretty-boy big bulging prongs—one dirty whiteboy vanilla & the other Mandingo jet-black licorice. He seemed to be instinctually double-trouble—without really knowing why. Instinctually Earthboy trailer whitetrash—instinctually Afro-Caribbean hoodoo voodoo. What was left of the Gulf of Mexico back Earthside—had become nothing but dying gulf stream tropical kitsch.

I taught him how to fly a floating hovercraft—we’d get outta Hellas City for awhile on weekends. We’d pick up some young exo-archeologist or lonely TerraCorp exec—and take them for a tourist ride to see the Martian sights. I kept feeling JJ had become like the mirror-half duplicate of me—the Pulp Fiction flipside of an Ace Double SF novel.

There was that kitschy Pulp Fiction thing about it—not just SF but also mystery gangster lit. Chandler’s LA noir novels—like The High Window and The Big Sleep. A sort of nostalgia for the future—the same kind of neo-noir chic Mickey Spillane dished out with NYC. Mike Hammer—Philip Marlowe. Private dick stuff.

That was one of the things about future shock—it wasn’t shocking at all. It was easy as doing business in Memphis—back during the bootlegging dayz of the First Depression. Everything was already forwards backlooking—the stream of time was too thin for just the now. It was more like the Martian light in August—thick, glutted, coagulated with time...

I noticed how I let go more & more—the same with JJ as we got to know each other. It was as though it were premeditated murder—all planned out & ready to go. As if we’d always been that way—a married couple getting it on without even thinking about it much anymore. Even tho there was something else.

Even tho what? There was always something I didn’t seem to understand—something that I wanted to know. Something about JJ—that was deader than a doornail. Deader than the dead Red Planet Mars.

Deader than Earth—the Dead Planet. Deader than all the other dead wrecked planets—orbiting the sunspot-hellhole star. The death star that was our home star—the death star that was our doom.

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