Jan and Yolinda have Horsey Heads, Beetle and Frugg do too. They
are all living in the various rooms of the Cavalcade House waiting for Early Departure.
Early Departure is when you leave early—when you can retire from the Cavalcade
House, and leave the Spectacle behind. Early Departure is what everyone is
waiting for, and for some it never actually seems to arrive quickly enough. But
for the denizens of the house, it is finally only a few days away, and they are
all high on anticipation, and whispering each other into states of near
ecstasy. “What is it like”? They ask. “What is it really like?” Will there be
an indoor swimming pool of infinite length and depth?” Will there be a room with
a beach motif and a tree house where we can put our hammocks?” “Will there be any new people?” “Do we need to
take any extra money, or is everything provided?” Beetle even asks if they have
machines that one can crawl into, like a sleeping bag, so that you can dream
about anything you want and they will record it—they, being the ‘machines.’ But
mostly, everyone just wants to be able to confirm that they won’t be disconnected
entirely from the Spectacle—it has, after all, given them the only home that most
of them can remember, and the only version of the world that any of them can
conjure at this point; so, it is only natural that they imagine this new place,
in terms borrowed, smuggled and stolen, from the one that they are leaving.
And, the leaving will be permanent, but nobody seems to mind. Nobody, that is,
except Frugg, he won’t allow himself the oblique luxury of being thrown into a
mysterious circumstantial miasma, at least not until he’s figured out all the
angles.
Beetle is dreaming, and it’s a good dream—he’s a whale; but
not just any whale, he’s a Flying Blue, floating invisibly above cities made
entirely of jellied fish-innards encased in giant transparent plastic tubes. He
winds through the foliage of this enormous assemblage of delicious smells and
sometimes gnaws on the cylinders, only to realize that he has baleens instead
of teeth, and must wait for the pipes to decompose naturally. But, the only
thing that decomposes here, are the fish innards, turning first to jelly, then
to a yellow liquid, which is siphoned off to who knows where, while Beetle
Blue-Whale waits for a chink in the plastic plumbing that never seems to appear.
Nevertheless, he’s a happy whale, who can swim wherever he likes while doing
backflips and somersaults without losing his buoyancy. Then, while meditating
over the question of how a whale could live to adulthood, without any food,
there is an explosion. Beetle is shaken awake and realizes that he isn’t
dreaming any longer; that, in fact, someone has blown up an adjoining room in
Cavalcade House.
Nobody else seems to
waken, however, and Beetle is already having thoughts of Blue Whaleness again,
when he forces himself out of his sleeping hammock and goes to find his
pen-light. The pen-light is small—about the same dimensions as the hypodermic
syringes that he uses to pump himself full of Levo-Dromorphan on Saturday
nights—but it will do for this purpose. He checks the adjacent rooms, The Green
room, The Mauve Room, and The Jungle Book Room—which is festooned with
wallpaper showing exotic tropical animals and plants. None of the rooms have
been touched, and their respective sleepers are snug in their hammocks and
completely oblivious to what has just happened.
Beetle is confused; even more so, when he finds himself
awakening in his hammock, as the dream within a dream dissolves leaving him
wondering if this sequence of events is also imagined. He can’t remember now,
whether, as a whale, he had a Horsey-Head, or a Fishy-Whale-Head; and, it
probably shouldn’t matter, but he can’t get the question out of his mind, so he
asks Frugg: “How the fuck should I know?” croaks Frugg, who occasionally, looks
more like a jowly toad than he does a Horsey, with green eyes and vibrating
rolls of flesh hanging down from his prognathous chin, like stalactites in a
cave. Beetle wonders if Frugg might actually be an hallucinogenic, Horse-Headed
Toad (‘could such a creature actually exist?’); if so, he could lick the
sebaceous cysts that have crystallized on Frugg’s jowls and get a visionary
feeling, like he did that time when he swallowed Jan’s prosthetic left eyeball.
The eyeball had been soaking in a Paregoric solution, which Jan used for
cleaning, his ‘glazzy,’ as he liked to call it, when Beetle got the urge and
swallowed the contents of the cup. Jan didn’t speak to him after that for many
months. And, it was only after Beetle found him a new ‘glazzy’ in an attic trinket-box
that Jan would even accept his apology.
Yolinda has finished her morning ablutions and is now
entering the kitchen. She is still full of questions about Early Departure. “Can
we take our hammocks to Early Departure?” she asks no one in particular. “Ask
Beetle,” says Frugg, “he can make new questions out of your old questions,
until you actually inquire about something interesting.” “That’s a not-nice
thing to say,” says Yolinda. “Perhaps,” counters Frugg, “but I haven’t even
worked out the complete details of Early Departure yet; and before we can talk
about doing stuff, and taking stuff, we need to know where we are actually
going!” This makes everybody assembled in the small kitchen area think for a
long moment, until a large bubble of yellow cogitation fills the room like an
exhaust gas pumped from the intestines of a giant machine, whose sole purpose
is to manufacture abstruse questions about meaningless hypotheticals.
Yolinda hates this yellow machine gas and begins climbing
the wall, until she is no more than a small dot adjacent to the ceiling, her
Horsey Head shaking up and down like that talking equine that Frugg remembers
from television. “Come down,” orders Jan. “If you stay up there too long you
will turn back into empty space, and then we’ll all have to mix our differing
memories of you with water to reconstitute them—and if we do that you’ll be
different than before, and you will ask all of the same questions again,
because you won’t remember the original answers.” “I would rather shrink into
nothing and be reconstituted!” says Yolinda impetuously. “Then, I can be
reborn, and I’ll be as fresh as a Pike hatchling, or a newborn baby Lizard on
an equatorial beach in Early Departure.” “But there aren’t any beaches in Early
Departure,” says Jan, “the place isn’t a destination, it’s a deadline!”
“Deadlines have beaches too!” insists Yolinda, but she begins the slow climb
back down the wall, as if she knows better than to take her own assertions on
the subject seriously. “Now your showing sense.” Says Jan. When she gets back
to floor level, and reassumes her full size, she rubs her neck across Jan’s
neck, and their two interlocked Horsey-Heads inadvertently take on the shape of
a large X.
Beetle is confused, and asks Frugg—who is very smart but
looking more and more Toad-like every minute—why Horsey-Heads shrink when they
climb short distances up walls. “Well,” says Frugg—who really has no
idea—“Horsey Heads get smaller in direct inverse proportion to their tendency
to become larger when they loom close.” “Well, isn’t that true of everything,
isn’t it just a matter of degree?” asks Beetle; who continues, asking, “Why do
they shrink so much more than other objects, when they are only a short
distance away?” Frugg is irritated now, and his Horsey-Head nostrils begin to
flare and blow out green tufts of mossy-smoke. “If you don’t like it, blame it
on Physics, because only Physics knows why things are the way they are!”
“Where do I find Physics?”
“In a book, stupid!”
“How can he fit in a book—is it a large book with a high
ceiling?”
“Books don’t have ceilings, you read them.”
“So Physics is covered with words to read, like tattoos?”
“Physics is not a person, it’s a set of ideas, a structure,
a scientific framework—you don’t talk to it directly, you do it, or you read
about it in a book!” says Frugg, his Horsey-Head shaking up and down
sarcastically.
“I don’t understand,” says Beetle, “I thought Physics was a
person, because you are always saying, ‘Physics tells us,’ like ‘Plato
asserts’, or ‘Fishies feel such-and-such;’ remember when you started a sentence
saying, ‘Fishies feel such and such?’
“I never started a sentence saying, ‘Fishies feel such and
such,’ I started a sentence saying ‘Fishies feel pain, so if you hook them
while Fishy Trolling, you will be causing them to suffer.’ That is what I
said.”
“Then why don’t the Fishes complain?” asks Beetle, who is
genuinely confused, and starting to foam at the Horsey-mouth. He also knows,
simultaneously, that his incessant queries are getting Frugg more and more
angry.
“Beetle, why don’t you just direct all future questions to
Yolinda, she seems to be on the same wavelength as you, and I only respond to
questions that can actually be answered,” retorts Frugg, who then punctuates
his response, by walking briskly out of the kitchen.
Beetle is silent, he really wants answers to his questions,
especially now that Early Departure is looming so closely, but he doesn’t know
if there is enough time left to learn the intricacies of life in Cavalcade
House; or even, for that matter, what Cavalcade House actually is. Does it have
an outside? Is it stationary, or does it move, but just too slowly for anyone
to actually feel it? Is it the whole world? Or, does the world get bigger
suddenly with the advent of Early Departure? There were no easy answers to
these questions; in fact, there were no answers at all, and Beetle contemplated
the silence, as he peered out the kitchen window, and noticed that the light
coming through was diffuse and without a center. “I wonder where that light
comes from?” he asks himself, “And why does it disappear at night?”
Frugg sits in the Pink Room deftly applying pressure to two
tiny metal pins, as he affixes them to the top of an odd structure comprised of
thousands of similar little connecting rods. When viewed as a whole, the
apparatus is shaped like an intricate machine, but one of unknown purpose and
function. Frugg delicately moves the structure until it sits adjacent to one of
the room’s four pink walls. The walls are not actually pure pink—not as far as
Frugg can tell—but are instead suffused with a pink aura, which gives the room
a depth, that makes one feel almost as if one could venture right out into this
diffuse pinkness and enter an entirely different spatial dimension. Of course,
Frugg knows that this is merely an illusion, created by the way in which the
wallpaper is designed—he is, after all, a real Cartesian. His housemates,
however, are not always quite so sharp in their perceptions; and, on many
occasions, he has watched, bemusedly, as Yolinda and Beetle have periodically,
and at different times—walked right into a solid bulkhead, like confused birds
who can’t fathom how a clear surface of glass could impede their aerial itineraries.
Jan, however, is more intelligent, and tends to move slowly
and with caution. When he enters the room and sees Frugg’s strange invention,
he wants to know if its purpose is aesthetic or practical. “Both,” answers
Frugg, who is proud of his inventiveness, and knows that the others will not
understand exactly how the device is supposed to work, but will appreciate it,
all the more, because it will work so efficiently.
“Well, what does it do?” asks Jan.
“It’s an Early Departure Machine,” answers Frugg, with
unconcealed pride.
This pride is infectious, and Jan is soon huddling with
Frugg in the corner of the room, and listening to all of the complex details
regarding the workings of the strange little object. Frugg, then turns a small
switch on a converted TV-remote, and the machine begins emanating a warm energy
that Jan envisions as choral-reef blue—a light color suffused with an
enveloping momentum that Jan can actually feel as if it is making its way down
his throat and into his digestive apparatus, like a well cooked egg that he has
just swallowed whole. Strangely, however, the machine, itself, appears
inert—like it is little more than a series of arbitrarily connected pins in no
particular order and of no consequence in any functional way. Jan inquires
about this apparent paradox; but Frugg insists that there is no paradox at
all—that this is merely the earliest part of the machine’s transformative
process, and that within a short time, Jan and the others will both feel and
see the effects of the device.
The machine begins emitting sound, which resolves into an
uncanny children’s rhyme:
Horsey heads,
horsey heads
sleep in
little hayloft beds.
Horsey heads,
horsey heads
their riders
gone, and now he’s dead.
Horsey heads,
horsey heads
dissolve when
they don’t take their meds.
Frugg snorts facetiously. “The machine really works!”
“But don’t we have to wait for the tickets?” asks Jan.
“This little modular gizmo takes care of
everything—processing, boarding and arrival.”
“Where does all of this take place?”
“Right here; the departure area is right here in the Pink
Room.”
“I think I’m missing something in your explanation,”
interjects Jan. “How can we leave for Early Departure if we don’t even leave
Cavalcade House?”
“The Spectacle doesn’t require that you actually move in the
physical sense in order to go from one place to another.” says Frugg with an
air of mystery, his Horsey Head nodding in annoyance.
“I thought you were the Cartesian, the Rationalist, does
this sound rational to you?”
“You have to think of it in terms of modern physics, the
machine plays with space-time, and, through quantum fluctuation, it allows us
to navigate efficiently through various portals.”
“If I was prone to believe that sort of explanation, I would
go ask Beetle or Yolinda—this is the kind of nonsense that they like to
espouse!” asserts Jan.
“The difference is that they don’t know what they’re talking
about, whereas I do—this machine is science not magic,” replies Frugg, his
nostrils flaring and exuding green smoke.
“If that’s true, I’m not sure that I really know the
difference between the two,” answers Jan, a bit sullenly.
“You’ll see,” responds Frugg with confidence.
Jan sits in the kitchen thinking. His glazzy hurts, and he
can’t get the strange radio noises out of his mind. “’Sleep in hayloft beds?’
what does that mean?” Beetle walks in suddenly, interrupting Jan’s thought
stream, murmuring excitedly about Frugg’s Early Departure Machine. “My dreams
are going to be made into movies,” he whinnies. “I think you’ve got its actual
function confused with your current fantasy,” snorts Jan, his Horsey Head
releasing tiny puffs of spinach colored steam. “How do you know?” asks Beetle.
“I don’t think any machine exists that can record and then playback one’s
dreams,” answers Jan, with a superior smirk. “If there’s a machine that can
create Early Departure from the Pink Room, why can’t there be one that records
dreams so that you can watch them later?” counters Beetle. “Because this isn’t
a ‘Dream Recording Machine, bellows Jan, it’s an Early Departure
Machine—different machines perform different functions.” “And how do you know
this?” queries Beetle. “You know what? I really don’t know for sure,” answers
Jan, who realizes that Beetle may actually have a point.
Meanwhile, Frugg is up in the Pink Room twiddling the remote
and pressing various combinations of buttons to see what each sequence actually
does. One particular progression projects images of famous movie actors on the
wall, while another makes Frugg feel drunk; still another creates a strange
music that sounds like honeybees scraping pollen from their hind legs. There is
even a series that makes Frugg ravenous for a delicious piece of fruit—in this
instance, however, the fruit he desires is formed from small bits of clay,
rather than something growing from a tree. “This is a strange device,” he
thinks, automatically attributing all of the parts he has trouble understanding
to ‘quantum physics.’ His difficulties in understanding the strange effects of
the device are compounded when he inadvertently presses the channel-changer
three times in succession and suddenly finds himself, encased in a neoprene and
fiberglass space-suit, in orbit several hundred miles above the surface of the
earth, and trailing a tuna-sandwich wrapped in heavy-duty plastic. “Where am I
now?” he asks of no one in particular, before pushing the buttons again in
reverse order and finding himself back in the Pink Room.
Frugg is now quite sure that he cannot really explain
exactly what it is that is allowing the machine to induce such effects, but he
knows it must be some sort of ‘science,’ as he refuses to believe in a concept
as mystifying as ‘magic.’ Calling it ‘magic’ would be like attributing anything
unusual happening in Cavalcade House, to something as abstract as ‘God.’ In fact, to many people, magic is inextricably
linked to God, whose name is mistakenly invoked as shorthand for any
labyrinthine causality. Frugg believes that people do this when they are
pressed for an explanation, rather than out of any sincere conviction.
Strangely, however, given his professed Cartesian Rationalism, Frugg believes
strongly in God, only in his belief God is a distant figure, largely content to
let natural processes take an unfettered course. This is because God is not a
control freak, as many religions have often portrayed him. Frugg is not even
sure that God has a specific gender, since God would precede such definitions,
in the same way that God precedes other human categories and judgments. One of
these being the tendency for people to invent inescapably convoluted labyrinths
of their own.
As the appointed hour creeps slowly into range, the others
make their way back to the Pink Room. Jan is first, and he is travelling light,
having packed only a small suitcase full of toiletries and several books. Jan’s
glass eye is protruding more than usual, a sign that he is slightly worried
about the outcome of the upcoming journey. Frugg, reading Jan’s expression
accurately, tells him not to worry, as “quantum physics will set everything
right.” “That’s what worries me most,” says Jan, “quantum physics is your new
way of making it sound like you’re saying more than we need to know, when in fact
you’re not saying anything at all. What exactly is this ‘quantum physics’
anyway?” Frugg ignores the question, and instead asks Beetle, who is just now
walking in—and sauntering the way he does after a nice infusion of
Levo-Dromorphan—if he has seen Yolinda about the house. “No,” answers Beetle,
who doesn’t offer any elaboration on his answer. “Well, we need Yolinda in
order to facilitate Early Departure, otherwise we will be stuck here
indefinitely. “Here as opposed to where?” inquires Jan, whose Horsey Head is
now rising along with his nose hackles. “Our destination,” answers Frugg,
without offering any more details. “It sounds like your saying nothing again,”
comments Jan.
The growing tension is temporarily dispelled by Yolinda, who
steps into the room the way a jockey opens a stable-gate—treading softly so as
not to draw any attention to herself. “All here—good, we can get started, says
Frugg. “Started on what exactly?” questions Jan, this time doing it in such a
way as to caution Frugg against merely repeating the day’s well-worn tautology.
“The machine is going to induce a space-time shift that will
propel us forward into the next level.”
“Level of what—do you actually have any idea what you’re
talking about?”
“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”
“That doesn’t tell the rest of us anything, except that you
are brazenly over-confidant.”
“I’ve done this before.”
“When?”
“When we took our last Early Departure.”
“There was no last Early Departure.”
“Of course there was, don’t you remember?”
“No, I don’t remember anything of the kind—and how the fuck
do you remember?”
“Now, now, be a good Horsey—
“Don’t fucking patronize me,” snorts Jan, “just tell me what
you’re talking about.”
“Okay—I’ll tell all of you,” answers Frugg, in a revelatory
tone. “Before we came to be in Cavalcade House, we were in another place on the
Spectacle continuum—I know it’s complicated, so just bear with me. We were in
Luxor-Towers, and we were a little different…” Frugg pauses. Everyone is
staring silently, in a mixture of disbelief and almost palpable curiosity. “We
didn’t have Horsey Heads then. “What did we have?” interjects Jan. “Man-Heads,”
answers Frugg. “What is a Man-Head”, queries Beetle nervously. “The head of a
man,” answers Frugg, whose own head is starting to become unmistakably
toad-like, without its equine dimensions being affected in the least.
Nobody says a word—everyone just looks at the machine, which
is now bleeping, and steaming like an abstract sculptural rendering of a
toy-locomotive engine. “Well, does that mean that we can get Fishy-Whale Heads,
the next time around?” asks Beetle excitedly. “I don’t know”, responds Frugg
quite seriously. “The Spectacle Continuum is a strange process, and one can’t
predict its workings with any precise amount of accuracy.” “Does that mean that
we’re all going to end up in stasis? asks, Yolinda, who has been silently
taking it all in up until now. “I don’t think so, but I can’t be completely
sure,” responds Frugg. “That doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence,” replies
Jan.
“Look,” argues Frugg, “we’ve made it before, and we’ll make
it this time—I’m completely positive of that. I just don’t know if we will
retain our Horsey Heads or if we’ll end up partially altered as some other form
of…” “Of what?” asks Jan. “Of something” retorts Frugg. I can’t even try to
predict it—just as I couldn’t have predicted this. That’s what that song was
about—once we go into the continuum induced by the device, our ‘rider’ is gone,
and we ‘disappear,’ in a sense, before appearing somewhere else—as something
different, with different qualities.”
“You make it sound like a type of reincarnation,” says Jan.
“Well, maybe it is, in a way,” answers Frugg.
The group sits motionless, listening to the crackling static
and sporadic beeping of the machine, as it warms up. It begins to emit a
translucent green mist. This soon, becomes a heavy fog and quickly envelops the
room. Jan feels funny. He is the first and last to speak, from within this
miasma. “I don’t know, but I feel like my body is moving without actually going
anywhere—does anyone else—“
JZRothstein 12/19/2013
