THE CAVE IS packed with Rosenbergen and Trunks and confusing words and bad ideas and negative reviews and broken psyches and Slammy’s burgers and darkness. Everything multiplies, replicates, spills over like a grotesquely mutating organism. There are patterns and echoes and repeating decimals and clones and idées fixes and “hi, how are you”s and entrenched masturbation fantasies and lies and violent overthrows. All of it always present, space and time jammed seemingly to capacity. But capacity is illusory. There’s always room for one more, as the old Scottish ballad teaches us:
A tinker came first, then a tailor,
And a sailor with line and lead;
A gallowglass and a fishing lass,
With a creel o’ fish on her head;
A merry auld wife full o’ banter,
Four peat-cutters up from the bog,
Piping Rury the Ranter,
And a shepherd laddie
Down from the brae,
With his canny wee shepherd dog.
He hailed them all as he stood at the door.
Said Lachie MacLachlan, “There’s room galore.
Och, come awa’ in! There’s room for one more,
Always room for one more!”
Of course, the buried lesson in this diddy (is it diddy or ditty?) is that there is not always room for one more. For Lachie MacLachlan’s house exploded from too many guests singing and dancing. That they all went about building a larger house does not change the likelihood that the bigger house would explode from too many people at some point in the future. I am still trying to understand. I am trying to understand Ingo’s movie, how it seems to never end, how every time I think about it, I remember something else, something new, something contradictory, how my experience of it is in constant need of reassessment. The movie grows and grows as if planted in the dirt of my brain. A beanstalk. A fungus. A colony of quaking aspen. Will my own head explode only to be rebuilt bigger and better by those responsible for the explosion? By Ingo? By the innumerable puppets in the movie? Has that already happened? Has my head been rebuilt again and again until it is as big as the solar system?
THE TRUNK CABINET, composed entirely of Trunks, convenes an emergency televised meeting. The president speaks.
“OK, let’s go around the room, each of you sing a few words of praise of me and whatnot. Secretary of Defense Trunk? You start.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. It’s an honor to serve such a courageous and forward-thinking president such as yourself. My song will be sung to the tune of The Flintstones theme song:
“It’s an honor to serve you
We really don’t deserve you
And therefore we’re so grateful
For your attacks on all the hateful
Few who want to destroy our great cave
Through Fake News and depraved
Homosexual acts
We’ll have a gay old time!”
“Thank you, Secretary Trunk. Secretary of Education Trunk?”
There is an explosion, sirens blare, and in an instant, all the Trunks rise from their seats, transforming into machines of war as an electric wall rolls down, much like a car window, through which the assembled Trunks fly out into the night-like cave, joining all other flying Trunks now hell-bent on raining destruction on the crowd below.
I CAN’T SAY I know anymore where I end and thoughts from outside my head begin. Some of my memories seem questionable, as if they originated elsewhere. Many contradict other memories. It is likely impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were, and I suspect perhaps acceptance of this new me is the only way to proceed, the only way to maintain my sanity. I do love all the executives at Slammy’s, for example. More than I can say. I love them. They have been just terrific and nothing but supportive of my filmmaking career and my new and sudden and overwhelming interest in becoming a war correspondent. Yet in the dark recesses of my mind, I must acknowledge harboring fantasies of sexual congress with one or several of the Trunks, not all of them at once, for I am not a pervert, but any of them and even several of them at once. I am, of course, repulsed and embarrassed by these fantasies at the same time as I harbor them. And the truth is, I can’t tell which, if either, of these feelings—the fantasies or the repulsion—is true to me. They coexist. Maybe neither is authentic. Although, I must say I see this possibility as unlikely, so powerful is my desire to take a Trunk penis into my— Oh, here comes one now, clear as day: Secretary of War Trunk (Trunk No. 35,711) appears before me in only a jockstrap. I’ve always loved me some chunky old man (I have?) and I feel myself getting hard at the imagery. He beckons me by pursing those amazing lips of his tiny luscious mouth on that huge face, delectably mottled like a prime slab of marbled beef. And, my will seemingly not my own in this fantasy, I am sashaying toward him when my head suddenly explodes in a burst of pain, and I understand this is the signal that I am needed on the battlefield. I reach into my pocket, take out the PULL urinal button, pin it to my fedora, and head to war.
I cannot make sense of any of this. There is a battle, but it is unclear who is fighting, who the enemies are, who the allies are, what the goal is. There are no uniforms, or rather, everyone seems to have designed his (her, thon’s) own uniform. Some wear pickelhauben, their giant spikes modified to resemble Star Wars lightsabers; others wear outsized bicorns or bright yellow tricorns with black plumes. There are helmets of all varieties, of all periods, from the world of fiction and from the world of not. There are steampunkers and superheroes, soldiers with body armor and others almost naked and in warpaint. It is, in many ways, like a cosplay convention, except the killing is real, or so it seems. How would I know for certain, special effects today being what they are? In my PULL button and my flak jacket, with my camera around my neck, I consider myself a war correspondent, neutral even though I have a partisan interest in the side of decency and truth, which in this fractured world is, for better or worse, Slammy’s. But a Trunk dances in my head, winks, seductively calls me Fake News, beckons me. I am conflicted.
Of course I carry a gun now—the PF-9—but it is only for self-defense; I am a noncombatant. How have we come to this place? My musings are interrupted, as right in front of me a man dressed as some sort of Visigoth-Mongol hybrid slaughters a Tatar wearing pale white vampire makeup. I snap a photo. It’s a good one. I predict a Pulitzer. The Pulitzer committee in my fantasy is made up of naked Trunks in jockstraps, urging me up onstage to receive the award. Robot Trunks with head propellers dive-bomb from above, shooting eye lasers indiscriminately into the crowds here on the cave floor, while at the same time, many other Trunks, standing on makeshift plywood stages scattered around this mammoth field of battle, deny such actions are taking place.
“Slammy’s is fascist, they tell me, a fascist un-American corporation. They shoot into crowds, I’ve been told. Children, mothers, farmers. Good hardworking American farmers. Coalers. All we want is to make America great again, for everybody, even for those lying Slammy’s folks, and this is, believe me, what real Americans want, too. We love peace. Right? Of course we do. We love peace. We are a peace-loving people. Everybody knows that. And my administration, that’s what we love most. Peace.”
A Slammy’s ice cream truck fights its way through the chaos, playing its tinkly electronic jingle. Young children—dressed as different young children: child soldiers of Africa, Stephen of Cloyes, Joan of Arc, the Tabura Zaroken Sehit Agit of Kurdistan, drummer boys (girls, thons), Astro Boy, et chetera—run to the ice cream truck, waving Slammy’s Bucks, and are immediately shot dead by unseen snipers hidden among the stalagmites. I snap photos of this, too. Pulitzer likes this kind of thing. Now Pollux Collins, being driven in a bulletproof “popemobile” with dark tinted windows, pontificates to the crowd through a megaphone attached to the roof.
“My people, you can hear me but not see me, as I can hear you but not see you. Well, I can’t hear you, either, through this soundproof bulletproof glass, but I’m told you have lovely voices and that you are chanting my name. This is good. Very good. Now is a time of tumultuous change. We must weather this storm to arrive at a time of peace and prosperity for all. As the great teacher—that’s right, teacher, not son of God—Jesus H. Christ once said, ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’ He meant there is no need to look outward for peace, for it is in your heart. In fact, he might have gone on to say that looking outward is probably a distraction. For as Matthew 18:9 tells us, If thy right eye offends thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. He might very well have gone on to say, pluck them both out, then there’s no chance of offense at all and you can focus on the kingdom of God within your heart and not look at porno or whatever it is you look at that distracts you from looking inside yourself at the kingdom of God therein. For hasn’t my blindness given me insight? Yes, my friends, it is no accident that the word is insight. In sight. Get it? In sight. I invite you to join me in denouncing the external. For is not this cave itself, our protection we have found from the harsh elements outside, a kind of blindness? Let me ask you, what happens to the cave fish? Over generations, its eyes go away. Now some say this is simple evolution, but I say it is God thonself rewarding this creature for its faith, for swimming faithfully into the darkness. Have faith, my friends. Join me in this beautiful garden of the nonvisual and pluck them out.”
“Pluck them out! Pluck them out!” chant Pollux’s followers.
“Ecstatic new followers of Pollux,” continues Pollux, “join the already initiated, my Acolyti Edepol, in this act of defiance against the lies of the visual world and remove the eyes that do offend me, I mean, thee.”
And those still-sighted who have been moved by this astounding sermon pull out their very eyeballs, which then fall to the floor of the dim cave and roll around. It turns out it is not at all funny in real life, but rather horrifying, tragic, and disgusting. I snap some harrowing photos that, sadly, these Acolyti Edepol will never get to see. This is as they want it, apparently. Still, there is a sadness, at least for me as a neutral photojournalist, for my photos are spectacular, truth be told, capturing the brutality of war, its emotional toll, as well as hundreds of black, eyeless sockets, which parallel, metaphorically, the very inside of the cave in which we all currently find ourselves. I’m thinking Pulitzer for these, too, if it still exists. It suddenly crosses my mind that it may not. And how sad would that be, that this award, created by Joseph Pulitzer, the inventor of dyn-o-mite, who on his deathbed wanted to do one good thing to make up for this invention, would see his award disappear from the face of the Earth, if he were alive today to see it. As it is, he will surely roll over in his grave. In any event, I am certain Slammy’s has a photo competition of some sort, a prize, maybe a Slammy’s Bucks cash prize, which would be nice, as there’s a used Sega Pocket Gear that a seller called Grabyounow514 on Slambay is selling that I have my eye on. Although, let’s face it, just the recognition would be a tremendous boon, really. Just a trophy to put on my mantel. Well, I don’t have a mantel. Just a trophy to carry around with me. It’d be a great boon if it’s not too big. Maybe a plaque. A wallet-size plaque.
Watching the other photojournalists running around shooting guns, I have to question their neutrality. The horror of war is horror for all; it knows no national borders or allegiance, so I try not to judge them. One of them shoots at me, and I duck through a hole. Him, I judge.