Buck Alice and the Actor-Robot

Buck Alice and the Actor-Robot

Walter Koenig

Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.

Copyright 2011 Walter Koenig

www.PermutedPress.com

To . . .

Joe Dimaggio, Max Zaslofsky,

Wally Hergeshimer and

Bill Swiaki—my childhood.

I wish to thank . . .

My wife, Judy, whose unfailing support has made this book a reality;

George Clayton Johnson and Shimon Wincelberg for being its early champions;

Travis Adkins and Nicholas Grabowsky for remembering my work favorably;

Jacob Kier and A.P. Fuchs for having the faith and conviction to republish it.

And Leonard Nimoy who always comes through.

PREFACE

I wrote this story at a time when events seemed to be conspiring against me and I found myself teetering on the brink. However, when circumstances changed for the better and the crisis did not, I began to understand that teetering was less a consequence of a single traumatic episode and more a constant in my nature. With the realization that I was permanently thus impaired, the inevitability of it all took hold and I began to relax. Since relaxation is the key to balance, I was able to make an accommodation with my instability.

Therefore, if the characters in this story appear to be a trifle out of kilter, it is because my brain has long been postured at an angle with the medulla oblongata flailing precariously in very thin air and the cerebral cortex perilously close to scraping the cement.

Or is it the other way around?

CHAPTER ONE

-

The Book of Joshua

Wayfarer of the White Wasteland

If only I were to keep my eyes open and not turn away. No one in his right mind could expect a blind man to save the world. I could stumble around for a while and then, like frightened old men who drool down their nightshirts, cry out for mama . . .

Mama, mama, Joshua said, pinching the skin above his Adam’s apple and shaking it vigorously. ‘‘Mama, mama,’’ he rattled again, testing the effect achieved when his other hand shut off the air from his nostrils.

He continued aloud to himself, After a while I could lie down somewhere and then, weak from hunger, fall into a deep sleep from which I would pass into my untimely death. THE UNTIMELY DEATH OF JOSHUA CHAPLIN. Lawsuits would be filed over the rights to the title. The world’s greatest authors would be reduced to squabbling boys . . .

At that moment, Joshua’s eyelids lowered and the searing rays of the sun were replaced by purple dots, vermilion explosions, violet rods, and Milliginian silhouettes. At this point the idea of quitting had not yet strongly taken hold.

Joshua’s body turned and, on their own, his feet began to move. He watched the activity below him with the happy innocence of a backwoods farmer suddenly astraddle a fiery pink carousel charger.

Lookee! Lookee, dag burn it! Hog-tied and feathered, that thar machine sure are a wonder! Whoopie! he yipped as his feet began to move faster. Ride ‘em cowboy! through clenched teeth, as the carousel spun faster and he met the challenge of his galloping doggies. High in the saddle, he rode a hundred yards before the music stopped and the bumpkins clambered off and he fell to his knees in exhaustion. Plumb tuckered ain’t you, stout fellers, gallant lads? And, had it been there, stuffed deep in the side pocket of his jeans, just as sure as shootin’ he would have plunged in his hand and brought forth the biggest lump of sugar his feet could eat.

Joshua wiggled his toes. The four smaller ones had really very little to say. To be sure, there was a symmetry in the arc they formed that was rendered with subtlety and taste, like a quartet of doughty pillars steeped and graded for harmony of thought and action. Reassuring in its way but at a sacrifice, a sense of restraint; the subjugation of the individual for the common good: conformity. All in all, good architecture but not great art.

On the other hand, there was the big toe.

THE BIG TOE.

No humble petitioner, a craggy tower—intense, feverish, excessive. Not only above but beyond the crowd. Proud, insolent, a testimony to personal commitment. The nail-jagged, splintered, uncompromising—a pioneer. A tuft of hair-like fire in the desert-stark, defiant, liberated. The superstructure itself, a thousand planes and textures, the face of the people, and yet free-forming, spontaneous. Beauty through truth. The soul of the artist bared.

Joshua cursed his single-jointedness. His lips could reach no farther than the cap of his knee.

He felt the earth moving from beneath the sun’s eye. The sweat drying in his scalp turned his hair sticky and clumpish and the heat in his brain leveled out at luke warm.

Early afternoon. What a homey expression. Soft bellies easing over beltless slacks on tip-backed chairs on small town porches, overlooking cut green lawns from behind splashes of light and shadow.

Joshua stood up. Now, let’s take a long hard look. Maybe there’s something I missed. To my left I see . . . white, yep, it’s white all right. Everything within ninety degrees to my left is pure white. Now to my right . . . white again—wait, is that . . . nope, white again. Thought I saw a fleck of cream there for a moment. Now, behind me. . .

But his heart had gone out of the game.

"‘Tepid tissue equals joyless reality.’ Get it framed, Mrs. Cummings, and hang it up behind my desk." Joshua started walking again and the white dust—which was all there was to mark the end of civilization and which altogether was all there was—smoked around his feet but left no impression that he had come or that he had been.

* * * * *

Before the invasion he had been a thirty-four year old JEWISH INSURANCE SALESMAN. It had been his custom, ad nauseum, to dismiss, with elaborate indifference, all cocktail party questions regarding line of work with a perfunctory Jewish Insurance Salesman. Behind the studied nonchalance, however, was the mischievous little boy who announces to his harried household that the neighbor’s Great Dane, trained since birth to open oven doors, had just slipped in through the kitchen window and stolen the family’s holiday dinner.

Those who were not Jewish inevitably challenged the demand for Jewish Insurance, exclaiming in the same breath that anti-Semitism had all but disappeared. Those who were Jewish, of course, raised their eyebrows knowingly, inhaled deeply through shuddering flames and nodded their heads sympathetically. To both reactions Joshua enjoyed an inward chuckle. The meaning of the gag, obscure to all but himself (which in turn gave him a feeling of superiority,) was that being Jewish and selling insurance was a contradiction in terms. Insurance gamesters the world over were named Berkley, Thomas, and Fellows. They all had mean blue eyes tucked deep into pink faces, handshakes patterned after the Quakers and three Manny jokes in their repertoire. Joshua interpreted his survival in this world not as a compromise but as a victory for his people, through infiltration in the secret war. Telling himself that at least gave his rather dull existence a little more meaning.

Besides, Joshua loved to daydream.

Joshua at thirty-four lived comfortably but not in comfort. His life resembled the cardiograph of someone recently expired: a straight line continually repeating itself, traveling predictably from left to right, without interruption. His success at the office resembled the fabled tortoise only at the starting gun. The rest of his life, as if to preclude any mistake in his aptitude test, crawled along at a dead even pace.

Joshua liked bachelorhood . . . sort of. The prospect of having a family did from time to time warm the cockles of his heart, but the addendum thought that a haranguing wife and bleating children might change warm cockles into self-immolation did much to extinguish the flame. So Joshua liked bachelorhood . . . sort of.

Unfortunately, everything he experienced had the ring of sort of:

. . . sort of good, sort of interesting, even sort of okay.

The overall effect was to leave him sort of empty.

Much of the problem could be attributed to his lack of drive. Anything beyond the cleft of his chin was beyond his reach. He aspired only towards goals discernible to the naked eye, leaving for others the ones requiring vision.

* * * * *

He did daydream a lot, though.

We will serve you, said the six monsters.

For dinner? flashed the answering thought.

No, said the six monsters who could read Joshua’s mind. As your slaves.

They were, of course, hairy and hideously yellowish maroon. They had, as well, the mandatory number of fangs and claws, but what really made them monsters was the mellifluously rendered, soul-rending sincerity in their voices. It was like a tulip in a tar pit, he decided. How much uglier the tar pit for the beauty of the tulip.

Joshua instinctively backed off. Quickly, however, he regained his composure and with one deft thrust brushed away both the fear and the compassion that surfaced in the tear that hung from his eyelash.

Now then, he said in a steady voice, what’s this all about?

The monsters waddled closer. Together, they chorused, we can defeat the Milliginians. And with a great display of strength they reduced to rubble the complex of skyscrapers immediately to the northeast.

No, no, that won’t work, Joshua mused. There aren’t any skyscrapers anymore. Perhaps they could build skyscrapers from the dust, but then again that smacks of urban renewal.

Joshua looked up. It was the dusk of another day. He thanked the monsters and filed them away for another time when the consuming loneliness of his existence might start again to eat from his brain pan.

* * * * *

Joshua was on a journey. It started on Dykman Street in the Inwood section of Manhattan, in the city of New York, and had carried him several hundred miles in the direction of the Everglades, in the state of Florida.

* * * * *

Misteh, misteh, my baby brodder fell down the sewer, the child had said, pointing to the opening in the gutter beneath the sidewalk.

Without so much as a backward glance, Joshua had ripped off a nearby manhole cover, pulled his tie from his collar and, otherwise fully clothed, climbed down twenty feet beneath the street into the dank underworld of alligators and prophylactics. He had heard one burst of maniacal laughter before the light disappeared and the manhole cover was pushed back into place. Beside the squish of his own damp shoes, the only other sound he heard that day was the thud of something heavy, very heavy, shoved across the skylight of his subterranean Bastille. Worse still, there was no sign of the baby brodder.

Periodically, Joshua heaved upwards against the manhole cover from the top rung of the sewer ladder, but weighed down as it was, it never even vibrated. In a wink he lost all sense of time and space and with a hand to his nose was one last effort away from leaping off the brink of insanity right into the teeming labyrinth.

The manhole cover did not move. It shattered. It had the consistency of wood shavings. As his hands went through it, the lack of resistance caused him to lose his balance and, accompanied by the raining powder, fall backwards and down. He remained in the sewer two days more. His back was badly wrenched and the slightest movement was agony, but now at least a shaft of daylight penetrated the abyss and his sanity teetered to a precarious balance.

Alone and in pain, Joshua Chaplin had no way of knowing that at that very moment he was one of only one one-thousandth of one percent of Earth’s human population still alive and the only one of the species in the entire city of New York.

If such a thing could be considered a stroke of good fortune, then his descent into the depths, and the subsequent injury to his back, was indeed a lucky break: the malevolent laughter, the last human sound to penetrate his asylum, was also the fun city’s valedictory. No sooner had the gurgle died in the wretched child’s throat then he and the rest of the city’s eight million inhabitants turned to crumbly powder and died where they stood. The life span of the lethal radiation that accompanied the attack was four days, a period that was exactly five hours short of Joshua’s first above-the-surface breath.

Joshua looked about him and decided he was frightened. Where is everybody and where did all the white dust come from?

Where he stood it was ankle-high but he could see in the distance that he would soon have to trudge knee-deep in it. With an eye toward investigation, he freed his foot and sent a spray a football yard. Nothing happened; it gently settled back to earth. Joshua, his prospects as insubstantial as the surface he trod, reluctantly started walking. Had he known, he might have garnered some little comfort from his punter’s toe. Inadvertently he had fulfilled the five-day-old promise of retribution on the architect of his predicament.

* * * * *

Joshua’s fingers tingled as he remembered.

He had been wandering about for some days looking for something to eat and had come across a forest replete with trees and green leaves and furry little animals. It was a heavily wooded area somewhere in Connecticut and, like the rest of the non-man-made world, had been left unviolated. Oh sure, here and there was a desecrating heap of white, but basically the verdant landscape remained verdant and its furry inhabitants, had they been so charged, would have rejoined Milliginian who? in testimony relating to the invasion.

Joshua’s fingers tingled as he remembered.

He had made the forest his home. He began by eating roots and berries. A JEWISH INSURANCE SALESMAN does not eat roots, he told himself one day after throwing up, and with his hunter’s cunning, took to pursuing little furry animals.

For a long time after that, he ate a lot of berries.

Then one day he strangled a fourteen-year-old rabbit who, grateful to be put out of its misery, thanked him with a parting flap of one ear, the tip of which struck him in the eye and caused a bothersome sty that lasted for weeks. Having tasted blood, however, there was now no stopping Joshua. Out of the wilderness he forged a bow and arrows and through sheer craft hacked out a spear. Then he waited. When hunger at last reappeared, all was in readiness. Snap-buckle went the tools of destruction as he shouldered them into place and, with body slung low, ear to the ground, nose to the wind he went, as all hunters have before him, in search of game.

For a long time after the rabbit-murder, Joshua ate a lot of berries.

Joshua’s fingers tingled as he remembered.

He had lived this way a long time. Two months, maybe three.

Then came the moose.

Joshua discovered it defiling a small water hole with the indigestible refuse from its breakfast. Enraged beyond reason, (he had used this very pool for his bath,) he surprised the animal before it could extricate itself from the mud and beat it mercilessly about the antlers with the handle end of his spear. The animal in turn lowered its head for a charge but in so doing dipped it beneath the surface, panicked, inhaled three times, and drowned.

Joshua dragged the beast from its watery grave and feasted royally.

At a time when despair had succeeded depression and a reason to continue living grew more remote, the image of himself as JOSHUA, KILLER OF MOOSE became a valuable cudgel in his arsenal of maintenance weapons. It can be a good thing sometimes to be a city boy and not know moose from deer.

Joshua’s fingers tingled as he remembered the exact moment he saw her . . . or rather, felt her . . .

He was sitting Indian-style before the fire, daydreaming of enchanted berries which turned into medium-rare steaks directly after (1) the underside of the middle leaf is rubbed, and (2) pure thoughts are thought . . .

. . . when he received a wet, fishy slap across the back of his head.

His heart missed cadence and was one dropped beat from a total halt when, through dimming vision, he perceived a little old lady with sprung Jack-in-the-Box eyes and a mouth frozen wide in a silent scream.

Fortunately, she immediately fainted. During her unconsciousness, Joshua recovered and in the process discovered that the little old lady was, in reality, a teenager upon whom events had taken a severe toll.

Joshua’s fingers tingled as he remembered how he had gathered her in his arms and had begged the rocks and the fire and the branches of the trees to not let her die. Joshua’s fingers tingled as he remembered just how her eyes had fluttered and how she had rested contently in his arms and told him about the invasion . . . about the colony of humans in the Everglades, how and why she, Catheleen, had run from them.

Joshua’s fingers tingled as he remembered the long silences during which they looked into each other’s eyes with love and gratitude for each other’s presence. Joshua’s fingers tingled as he recalled the absurdly concerted effort required to pry his fingers from the knuckle-bleached, death-grip of her hand.

And so Joshua decided to go South.

CHAPTER TWO

-

New Hope

~ Pathfinders ~ Isobel ~ Just-Call-Me Robbie ~ Buck Alice

~ Claude Aefitte ~ Major Hank Hank ~ Titheria ~ Gardner

Isobel was ten years old. She had a forehead and ears and eyes and a nose. She also had a figure that looked like a loaf of mud, removed from the mold of its Jack-and-Jill pail and turned upside down to dry brick-hard in the sun. She also had a pair of pancake-shaped jowls, children’s plate-sized, that hung from her cheeks and eternally shaded the upper half of her stubby neck. Lining the inside of the jowls were secret pockets in which was stored all the terrible malignity of her nature. Isobel had only to puff up her cheeks and the ground, for miles around, would tremble with the quaking of knees.

By any rule of thumb, Isobel was no good. Nevertheless, she was also the singularly most revered object in the settlement called New Hope now that Catheleen had disappeared.

The main body of New Hope was formed from an organization called the Pathfinders, a group of sixty husband and wife teams who believed in the frontier spirit and were out finding paths in the Florida Everglades when news of the invasion came over their transistors and interrupted the ball scores. However, it was not until the dying broadcaster announced that until further notice all American sports events are from this moment suspended, did the Pathfinders abandon the hope that the radio bulletins were the doctored joke of warped intellectuals.

Nevertheless, once recovered from the shock of a world purged of non-Pathfinders, a prickly sensation traveled the skin of all the corps and left in its wake an overwhelming feeling of pride. "If the rest of the world had been where it belonged, out finding paths, they reasoned, it wouldn’t be in the spot it was now." Awe succeeded pride and with it, a sense of mission to reconstruct the world in an image closer to God’s pioneering spirit. In no time at all, a plan was devised to build a settlement—and since the invaders were still hanging around Earth—to begin life anew in the jungle.

It had been the busy season in the swamp when the attack on Earth occurred and the Pathfinders soon learned they were not the Everglades’ only vacationers. Before long, Just Call Me Robbie—And His Mincing Ways minced into camp. He, in turn, was followed by Claude Aefitte, the Parisian tart peddler (the kind of tarts with cherries in them); Buck Alice, the science fiction epistler; Eric and Catheleen, the young lovers; and the mother of the child as well as the child herself, the dreaded Isobel.

* * * * *

It was exactly three o’clock in the afternoon in the fifth month in the life of New Hope Settlement. Punctual as the attack on Hiroshima, Isobel stuffed her hair into her mouth and screamed loudly. She did this every afternoon at three o’clock. It made her feel good. It also scared the hell out of everybody in the camp, which made her feel better. Predictable as land devastation after the flood, Isobel, in a torrent of tears, came splashing out