Gigantic
Strange aircraft arrived with the sky that morning, moving blood-slow. And Professor Skychum was forced from the limelight at the very instant his ranted warnings became most poignant. ‘They’re already here!’
Skychum had once been so straight you could use him to aim down, an astrophysicist to the heart. No interest in politics—to him Marx and Rand were the same because he went by pant size. Then one afternoon he had a vision which he would not shut up about.
The millennium was the dull rage that year and nutters were in demand to punctuate the mock-emotional retrospectives filling the countdown weeks. The media considered that Skychum fit the bill—in fact they wanted him to wear one.
And the stuff he talked about. There were weaknesses in his presentation, as he insisted that the whole idea occurred to him upon seeing Scrappy Doo’s head for the first time. ‘That dog is a mutant!’ he gasped, leaning forward in such a way, and with so precise an appalled squint to the eyes, that he inadvertently pierced the constrictive walls of localised spacetime. A flare of interface static and he was seeing the whole deal like a lava-streamed landscape. He realised he was looking at the psychic holoshape of recent history, sickly and corrosive. Creeping green flows fed through darkness. These volatile glow trails hurt with incompletion. They converged upon a cess pit, a supersick build-up of denied guilt. This dumping ground was of such toxicity it had begun to implode, turning void-black at its core.
Like a fractal, detail reflected the whole. Skychum saw at once the entire design and the subatomic data. Zooming in, he found that a poison line leading from two locations nevertheless flowed from a single event—Pearl Harbour. One source was the Japanese government, the other was Roosevelt’s order to ignore all warnings of the attack. The sick stream was made up of 4,575 minced human bodies. In a fast zoom-out, this strand of history disappeared into the density of surrounding detail, which in turn resolved into a minor nerve in a spiral lost on the surface of a larger flow of glowing psychic pollution. A billion such trickles crept in every tendril of the hyperdense sludge migration, all rumbling toward this multidimensional landfill of dismissed abomination. And how he wished that were all.
Future attempts to reproduce his accidental etheric manoeuvre resulted in the spectacle of this old codger rocking back and forth with a look of appalled astonishment on his face, an idiosyncratic and media-friendly image which spliced easily into MTV along with those colourised clips of the goofing Einstein. And he had the kind of head propeller hats were invented for.
Skychum went wherever he’d be heard. No reputable journal would publish his paper On Your Own Doorstep: Hyperdimensional Placement of Denied Responsibility. One editor stated simply: ‘Anyone who talks about herding behaviour’s a no-no.’ Another stopped him in the street and sneered a series of instructions which were inaudible above the midtown traffic, then spat a foaming full-stop at the sidewalk. Chat shows, on the other hand, would play a spooky theramin fugue when he was introduced. First time was an eye-opener. ‘Fruitcake corner—this guy’s got the Seventh Seal gaffa-taped to his ass and claims he’ll scare up an apocalypse out of a clear blue sky. Come all the way here from New York City—Dr Theo Skychum, welcome.’ Polite applause and already some sniggers. The host was on garrulous overload, headed for his end like a belly-laughing Wall of Death rider. How he’d got here was anybody’s guess. ‘Doctor Skychum, you assert that come the millennium, extraterrestrials will monopolise the colonic irrigation industry—how do you support that?’
Amid audience hilarity Skychum stammered that that wasn’t his theory atall. The gravity of his demeanour made it all the more of a crack-up. Then the host erupted into a bongo frenzy, hammering away at two toy flying saucers. Skychum was baffled.
He found that some guests were regulars who rolled off the charmed banter with ease.
‘Well see here Ray, this life story of yours appears to have been carved from a potato.’
‘I know, Bill, but that’s the way I like it.’
‘You said you had a little exclusive for us tonight, what’s that about?’
‘Credit it or not, Bill, I’m an otter.’
‘Thought so Ray.’
It blew by on an ill, hysterical wind and Skychum couldn’t get with the programme. He’d start in with some lighthearted quip about bug-eyed men and end up bellowing ‘Idiots! Discarding your own foundation! Oppression evolves like everything else!’
Even on serious shows he was systematically misunderstood. The current affairs show The Unpalatable Truth were expressing hour-long surprise at the existence of anti-government survivalists. This was the eighty-seventh time they’d done this and Skychum’s exasperated and finally sobbing repetition of the phrase ‘even a child knows’ was interpreted as an attempt to steal everyone’s faint thunder. And when his tear-rashed face filled the screen, blurring in and out as he asked ‘Does the obvious have a reachable bottom?’, he was condemned for making a mockery of media debate. A televangelist accused him of ‘godless snoopery of the upper grief ’ and, when Skychum told him to simmer down, cursed him with some vague future aggravation. The whole thing was a dismal mess, smeared beyond salvation. Skychum’s vision receded as though abashed.
