Fantastic Metropolis

REALITY CODE — INDEX 10A MS LIBCON-DOMITIAN-3576-F. 10 (recto) CLAUSE MAJEUR (In verbo populorum: The Bob Dole Law):

ALL COMMERCIALS ON ANY CHANNEL OF THE WORLD NETWORK AT ANY TIME MUST INCLUDE NO MATERIAL OTHER THAN THE TESTIMONIAL OF A WILLING AND AMATEUR VOLUNTEER EXPRESSING HIS OR HER TRUE THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS ABOUT THE FEATURED PRODUCT.

R.CODE SPECIFICATION I — TO INDEX 10A (April 1, Year 132):

THE AMATEUR VOLUNTEER MAY, HOWEVER, RECEIVE COMPENSATION.

I

I used to teach owls to sing for the Department of Parklands. It was time consuming and required a solid background in music theory as well as a good bit of owlishness. The key was getting them in the mood.

There were better jobs, and I knew it. My friend Bengt was a professional amateur, for instance, and he’s the reason I’m no longer with the owls.

Bengt is an insufferable showoff, always has been. He stands tall, topped with black hair that looks painted on to his cannonball head. His pearlies are whiter than the glint on the hood of a new car. While I did the owls he was number two on the international network. He radiated untrained charm in all genres—teary testimonials for self-help programs, “high concept category” spots for meat or plastic, sodapop comedies, law firm epics and toothpaste pastorals.

But he really made it with a luxury commercial. The big one. The biggest.

We were at the Cafe Mirabell at the top of the Nokia building, having the angel hair with veal. Bengt had his fork in one hand and his palmer in the other, ready for action and as gauche as a left-handed left hand. I didn’t care. The food was brill and I was delighted to be out—and he was paying, anyway. Soft candlelight glinted off of the mirrors as white-robed waiters made their rounds like clockwork sufis whirling.

Then Ella entered. Impossibly fresh skin, breasts that could be compared to all manner of dirigibles and aquatic structures. Her lower back, exposed, straight as the side of a skyscraper. White daub made her lips a fleshy extension of her teeth. Kanis-Qanis lipsmudge, season five in perfect ivory. That was in. She had made Kanis-Qanis the “it” thing with a shocking series of ad spots the winter before. It was said that she could make men ejaculate with her voice alone.

“Ella,” Bengt smiled. “Number one.”

“Oh, really,” I said. “She’s shorter than she looks on tv.”

“I’m amazed she doesn’t have a bodyguard.”

On the stage, the Nickrenz Quartet was performing Hansell’s Dahmer Sonata and their violinist was absolutely glisten. She cried as she dug into the rain of staccato sharps at the end of the first movement. It was a storm of feelings and it rang true through the perfect acoustic space of the Cafe, hovering above the clink of plate and fork as a banner might fly above an army.

“That violinist is blind brilliant,” I said to Bengt and no sooner had the words gone into the air than a paparazzo approached brandishing dealcard and camera. I waved the bastard off.

“You never do commercials, Arny—It makes me sad,” Bengt said to me in that perfectly modulated, perfectly chill voice of his. When he was young his voice had been scratchy and low like a frog’s. He had an alley doctor put a fly in his throat to make it sound better. The fly stuck to the vocal cords or something, buzzing at just the right frequency. He had to take it out before he went to sleep. To feed it. Major reality crime. We learned in school that the code says that the body is what defines reality and to modify it is a sin, but Bengt never really cared for school.

“I don’t like ads,” I said. “If I enjoy something, I’d rather keep it to myself. I don’t want the Nickrenz Quartet to get thick famous. Then I might have to pay extra to see them.”

“It’s your civic duty, mon ami. Share know-how with others and make some money while you’re at it. That was a high-culture pap you waved off. A classical commercial could make you lots—specialized audience. Baby says: artistocracy. If you did a spot like that once a month you could quit it with the owls. Look at me, look at the way I glow—do you think I’d glow like this back at the Department of Wax? I’ve made my appreciation work for me. I have a joie de vivre and I’m never going to lose it…I feel as terrific as this wine tastes…”

His Palmer went off. He read it and gave a high-five to a paparazzo who had silently approached with a dealcard. The shutterbug was wearing a vintner’s tunic. He smiled and his camera buzzed.

“...because this lovely York Chardonnay,” Bengt swirled the glass in the candlelight and beamed with a winning smile, “is the essence of refreshing. The quintessence of the new cool. I’d recommend it to anyone; Bengt Marc drinks it, shouldn’t you?”

The pap left and Bengt returned to his chair and his veal. I had to give it to him: he could go in and out of commercials like tapping a switch. We got to talking about a boy we had known growing up together who got killed in a thresher accident. I had discovered it first, found his tennis shoe in my family’s hydroponics. We conversed solemnly and as I twirled the last vermicelli on my fork I looked up at the monitors—Bengt’s wine endorsement was already running. A ruddy man with a bushy moustache stood up immediately at the other end of the restaurant and waved his hand for attention: “Garçon! York Chardonnay for this table!”

Bengt’s palmer went off again. He looked at it and gagged on his recently endorsed wine. I got up to help him but he pushed me away, wheezing. He turned to make sure he wouldn’t be seen, and retched the chardonnay on the floor. Then he got up, strangled his nerves into submission, rubbed his throat to comfort the fly and ran a hand over the top of his head to make sure that his hair was right.

“Sorry,” he said. “Olympic sized thrill. It’s a collaborative.”

On the other side of the Cafe, Ella had lit a Wu-Krazer Diamondback light tobacco-free cigarette. She was savoring the smooth burn and nicotine-less buzz while lying back in her seat with her thighs provocatively parted at forty-five degrees.

The Nickrenz Quartet’s palmers beeped and the four women nodded to each other. They began the stately strathspey that is the Wu-Krazer theme—a song that, for the last few years, had also been associated with New Year’s celebrations there in Stockholm. The cello pumped like a procession as the higher strings crossed over it again and again, lacing up the major-key glory.

Everyone noticed Ella in the warm yellow spotlight. Everyone noticed Bengt Marc crossing the room towards her. Hands lifted from the crowd to touch him as he passed. He ignored them, let them rest on his belt loop for a second or brush the side of his leg as he walked towards his lady.

“Is that a Wu-Krazer Diamondback you’re smoking?” he asked.

“Why yes it is, baby,” she said, with that voice.

“Then I think I love you.”

The W-K theme crescendoed into curling notes as they kissed. Glisten, that violinist was.

II

Ella and Bengt’s spot was everywhere, on every channel of the network. There was something about it that made everyone crazy for it. It became more important than Sonny Langland’s testimonial for lung-cleaning. More famous than Our Lady Spears’s dancing spot in the foot-bowl before the Great War. More moving, to many, than Saint Aloysius of Cleveland’s endorsement for the Universal PseudoAgnostic Church, an ad that had featured blood tears without the reality crime of special effects.

The magic was that Ella and Bengt had, during the course of the commercial, fallen deeply in love.

They played the couple angle, only doing collaboratives. They put out a rumor through the usual channels that dealcards below a certain amount would be waved off, that low offers might just provoke them to do spots for competing products.

Bengt became unreachable. His palmer was thick all the time with every pap in Europa buzzing him. I tried his phone sometimes but I didn’t even get the machine and when I decided to go by his old apartment I found five Koreans there from the Department of Fasteners who had no idea what had become of the former tenant. Baby says: gone.

Which is why I was floored when he called me on my birthday the next year. I was rather somber, having just broken up with an airline girl, and although it was a sunny day and the owls were very enthusiastic I just scowled and kept running them through the most difficult scale exercises I could find. As if to spite me, the egg-shaped birds remained cheerful and self satisfied, hooting every note.

“Arny,” he said and for a second I didn’t recognize his voice. “It’s been forever and another, but I haven’t forgotten you, old friend. Come to my place tonight.” And he gave me an address in Gamla Stan.

I dressed to the nines with my old tailcoat in shiny sharkskin and when I looked at myself in the mirror I felt like Mozart off to find rich patrons. Perhaps I could sell Bengt on the piece I was writing. Perhaps we could get the Nickrenz Quartet to do it whenever Bengt and Ella did their next spot. I shoved the score into my breast pocket just in case and I felt better about myself knowing it was there. Then I popped a confidence tablet.

Off of the train, my shoes made pickaxe noises on the cobblestone streets as the confidence climbed politely up my spine like a neutered kundalini. There was a group of Americans power puking in an alley, dressed identically in wolf-skin jackets—corporate teambuilding. I walked faster past them but calmed when I saw that everything else was lurid but normal—just artistocrats strolling on chopines in good-girl makeup and a few well-lit whores doing their stretches.

I was nearing the right part of town when a bony finger hit me twice in the shoulder. I stopped to see a coat. Actually, it was a coat and a hat and some shoes, all supported by some kind of small, hunched man standing in the shadow of a dumpster. If you make yourself feel small enough you can disappear and he was well on his way to mastering the skill.

“Hey buddy,” he said. “We know that you’re going to Bengt and Ella’s place. All I’m telling you is that if you have anything—and I mean anything—on them then you just tell me. Dial P-L-O-T on your palmer and get me. Anytime. I’m Mr. Plot, Department of Reality.”

In Bengt’s ballroom there was a party for me. I had never had a party with an ice sculpture before—a glisten crystal jellyfish with Perrier-Turbine bottles wrapped chill in its tentacles. The beautiful people slunk around in up-to-the-minute clothing.

“You know,” I was yaddy-hooing to Bengt over the roar of all the voices bouncing from amethyst floor to rose marble ceiling. “I’ve got a piece I was working on that maybe you’d be interested in. Maybe you could get the Nickrenz Quartet to…”

“Speaking of which,” he said and took my arm and pulled me across the ballroom floor. In the corner, a group of thin women perched like crows, and as we approached them three scattered and one stood.

Her hair was a curly brown hexagon. Sky-blue powder dusted around her soft green eyes and her lips were a crimson flower. It was the violinist.

“I heard you play,” I said. “I was there at the Wu-Krazer commercial. That night. I saw the original. You were amazing.”

“My name is Octavia. Bengt tells me that you compose?”

III

We all moved to London because everyone said it was the place to be and we lived off of the docklands, Ella and Bengt and Octavia and me. We bought a perfect island that we had made for us special and we christened it Diamondback Island because W-K had started it all. It was great for the spots and the manor house we built was designed with shooting angles in place. We put the house near a rock where sea lions would come and roll around and roar, because Ella loved sea lions.

I was living my dream. I would wake up with notes in my head, put them down (on paper, in a spirit of defiant anachronism) and then spend the rest of the day turning them in to music with my beautiful Octavia, who used her bow like a rapier. Octavia sola: there had been contractual problems and Erictho Nickrenz had left with her two sisters after a day on the island.

“Eri was just trop jalouse, Arnaud,” Octavia told me a thousand-thousand times, stroking my arm gently with her knuckles as we settled into the moonlit sheets at night. “The real quartet is us. The actor, the actress, the composer and the player.”

My music was heading out in all kinds of directions anyway, so we hired studio players and brought them out to the island on our new, cherry-red hydrofoil. We had a drummer, a bible-thumping Tourette’s victim from the Alabama Free State who hit crazy beats. We had a blind flautist called Zohar who charmed snakes on the streets of Soho. We had a chorus of staid accountants from the Department of Attention who could sing like seraphim. I recorded it all and played the better things as background for commercials with Bengt and Ella. A cantata of mine was performed in Poland and artistocrats from San Dimas to Siberia were eating up my songfiles.

So everything was brill for Octie and me. The problem came from the other side of the perfect manor house.

You see, Bengt was driven—driven by his fame. Ella had been much bigger than him before they met, so she was used to it. But Bengt still drew adrenaline thick from when people on the street asked him if he would penetrate them repeatedly behind dumpsters or falafel stands. He put himself in the situation often enough, taking the hydrofoil to the city and getting lost in the miniskirted throngs of Covent Garden. Eventually, the right kind of redhead approached him and he succumbed.

Ella smelled her on his breath that evening. She did not ask Bengt about it, she merely refused him intercourse and pondered her revenge.

Well pondered, revenge came only the next day in the form of a steamy commercial for Wagging-Tail Tights. Ella, her eyes smudged with kohl, slinkingly donned Wagging-Tail thigh-high-risers in the candle-lit depths of a Piccadilly bath-house. Her award winning breasts were more exposed than they had ever been. She approached a muscle-bound British pit-fighter of minor renown and circled him with her legs. Posed at the pap’s camera, in full close up she circled white lips with red tongue, jingling, “Wagging-Tails, they’re so hot—make me want twice what Bengt Marc’s got.”

“Bengt ill-equipped to handle Ella,” ran the hearsay rags the next hour. After the usual reality disclaimers, they opined that Ella was quite likely dissatisfied with Bengt’s prowess at intercourse. The journalists had taken things too literally, as they usually did, but they did point to the fact that something was wrong.

All of this did not quiet Bengt’s desire to penetrate fans behind video stores and power stations.

Uneasiness crescendoed. The auspices were terrible. Bengt and Ella did a spot where they were supposed to eat Stipe-Schneider peaches and then kiss, but Ella slapped him instead. Right at that moment Octie broke a string and it twanged into her eye. Right into the white. Burst like pudding. Ella drove the hydrofoil to the mainland while I held Octie’s hands and told her that in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed are the best violinists. Meanwhile, Bengt stalked up and down the beach. His pride stung. The spot was successful, but, like so many others, it was just a big joke on the once-mighty Bengt Marc engineered by the crafty Ella. Joyous love had been their trademark, now it was all bitter irony.

After their third commercial for a divorce lawyer, Bengt decided on his move.

IV

Meanwhile, I had a confidence problem. With Octie hurt and no more parties at the manor house, my muse had gone away. The blank staves looked like barbed-wire fences and all the melodies flushed out of my head. I tried giving up paper and using touchscreens and that didn’t work either. Confidence helped a little. I’d pop a tablet, or three, and for an hour music bled out of me, then stopped. More tablets, more music, but in decreasing proportions.

One terrible night I was lying awake, shaking from a confidence overdose. My heart felt like a threshing machine and the ideas of all the horribly wonderful things that I could be doing refused to leave my racing brain. Octie slept soundly next to me in a red velvet eyepatch.

Above the clatter of my thoughts, I heard a faint rotoring sound. The sea lions bayed. Something scared me and I got up and put on my tunic and slippers. I heard the front door open, then close, and I went upstairs.

Bengt’s hat was gone from the rack by the door. Our dumb waiter approached to ask if I needed anything but I waved it off. Then, on second thought, I called it back and asked it if anyone had left the house.

“Master Bengt did, Master Arnaud.”

Was he holding anything?

“A sample bottle.”

Diamondback island, being perfect, was circumnavigable on foot in forty-five minutes. Small enough for all areas to be accessible but large enough to afford a sense of privacy and partition.

I made it around in fifteen. Nothing at the telescope hill, the lemon orchard or the bathing grotto. I found Bengt on the black sand beach. He was a black shape against a night sky yellow with the lights of London. There was another, shorter black shape near Bengt, one who heard my footfalls on the sand. A rotorcar was parked where the waves broke on the shore.

“Ah, you again. You should’ve talked to me earlier. Could’ve saved yourself a lot of disappointment,” a gruff voice said.

It was Mr. Plot. He tipped his hat to me, put his hand on Bengt’s shoulder, and then climbed into his rotorcar. It rose almost soundlessly, a testament to modern engineering, and glided off towards the Tower.

I dashed at Bengt. He’s taller than me, but with him unprepared and my running start I managed to slam him to the ground and get my hands around his neck. He didn’t struggle, just cried quietly and I felt the anger go out of me and get replaced with something else.

“Baby says: over. Oh, Arny, it’s all gone. Ella will be gone. And that means me, too. And your music and this island. All gone. I’m free. Finally free.”

“What did you do?” I asked “What did you do?”

It turns out that Ella’s phenomenal breasts were not, in fact, real. The certification from a council of thirteen respected Finnish physicians had, for a long time, been definitive proof of mammary authenticity. But Bengt had just told Plot the truth: the physicians had been bribed, tempted by Ella’s willingness to participate in activities whose deviance exceeded the imagination of even the most inventive hearsayer. As confirmation, Bengt had given Plot a core sample, procured that very night from an intoxicated Ella with a bioscope that Plot had given him in secret a few days before.

I went back to my room and took off my slippers and gently kissed my Octavia. Then I lay awake for the rest of the night and listened to the sea lions.

The next day I was pouring orange juice when the praetorians from the Department of Reality arrived. Ruddy men, mostly Americans, with high, crested helmets. They poured through the door after I complacently opened it, all of them breathing heavily and smelling of french-fry grease. Last of all came Plot, in his shabby little get-up. He sneered at me and tipped his hat.

The praetorians brought Ella out, one holding each of her arms. She walked dignified, wearing a miniature black fedora on the side of her head. News paps swarmed, strobing the room with their flashbulbs. Bengt followed, smiling.

“I’m finally free of you,” he said. “Of your thick gloating and your god damned selfishness.”

“My darling,” she said. “Why didn’t you just talk it out with me?”

They stared deeply into each other’s eyes. Bengt gulped, as if he had made a terrible mistake. He craned his neck towards her. The praetorians didn’t pull her back as she stretched towards him. The duo kissed, gently at first—then passionately, clicking into the deep tongue-soul interface they had achieved in the Wu-Krazer spot.

In the middle of the kiss, she grabbed his neck and jerked his Adam’s apple up and down. The guards tried to stop her but she elbowed them backwards with twelve gym-full years of strength. Hands free, she took Bengt’s neck in one hand and, with the other, hit his back.

He coughed with a sound like a zipper unzipping and she let him go. On the floor, shining in its blue carapace, was the throat fly.

“Take him, too,” she screamed. “He’s had it is whole career. He never told me but a faker knows a faker.”

They put Bengt in restraints. He said nothing. I wondered if he could still talk when the fly was out.

As the reality people were getting ready to leave, the chief praetorian asked Plot. “Should we check out the composer?”

“No,” said Plot, looking at me. “His music’s real. It’s not good enough to be fake.”

---

Octavia and I sold the island. No one in the music world would talk to us. Even blind Zohar left without leaving a palmer number. I called an old friend at the Department of Parklands and he said that all government jobs were off limits for me. So Octie and I lived off of our savings in a small apartment two hundred floors above St. Paul’s ancient dome. She made sculptures out of broken instruments and I took too much confidence and tried to have intercourse with society girls. The trial lasted for years and we testified several times.

My final day at trial was the last time I saw Bengt. He was on the stand, smiling martyr for the new anti-reality movement, kowtowing with his glance to the few fans left in the courtroom stands, and after I spilled the beans on him he turned towards me and looked me in the eyes.

“Hoot!” He shouted, and laughed like it was funny. “Hoot! Hoot!”

---

Brantley L. Bryant is a graduate student and freelance writer living in New York. He is currently working on an annotated version of James Branch Cabell’s novel Jurgen.