TWENTY-THREE

The Ultraworld!

[1994] (Hollywood, CA)

OFFICER FRIENDLY, with a stick, a gun, a fresh cup of coffee, and a radio strapped to his belt (telling him things of the immediate world and what might be required – by it, of him) sat humming to himself in the bright room of glass and steel and formed orange plastic that he’d known formerly and knew now also as Dirty D’s Donut Hole, glass box in the desert, best in the basin, the best at any rate known to him, with air conditioning so advanced it was likely back-engineered from recovered alien technology, and though he had no fresh doughnuts to match the coffee (granted, how many doughnuts could a man eat, in any case?) he did have the sudden and disarming sense – no, don’t call it sense, because it was more than that, it was a knowing – that he was new, here now, brand bang happy squealing new. This. Him. He was not and never would be the same. Not again, not after what? Nope, nope. The same as? Well, the same as before, the same as he was once. Never. The same as just a moment ago. That was all gone, all over and done, and he, he, OFFICER FRIENDLY, was a new man. Here now, what do you know.

“Explain,” came a tinny voice from out of his radio.

He, the man, OFFICER FRIENDLY, drear-faced and lonely, sad as the song, patrolman beached off the Hollywood beat like a dried-up, limp kelp, long lost in the sun, formerly dead and gone, he, he sat crackling in the controlled climate of a fishbowl while outside Santa Monica Blvd shimmered, blah-blah, a four-lane car park producing smoke and smog, terrestrial trip-wire, highway to and from the stars and sun, and the beach, the beloved, if existentially bereft, of so much seaweed, of light and the shore, a favorite among the faceless of all the inland empire, now drift and shit-dappled, whatever his accoutrements, and so young! He was like a light, if a light now dim, all but burnt, maybe broken (yes, definitely broken) – a railyard, a stagecoach, grave cast in granite, all the rage, given to the like-mindedness of the man with the hole in the head. That was where he’d put one bullet, that one that he remembered. Bang, straight in the face! The face had crumpled and collapsed like so much paper. But he was still here, still a cop, even if just a corpse with a pulse. So-called corpse, so-called pulse.

But now he was new! New life! A new body heat. Braced in the square-back of the molded seat, legs and feet beneath the table. But he could not would not say (if he should) who he was. Because he’d been someone different, if an empty man, only a moment before.

“Explain,” squawked his radio, “explain…”

Well, yes. In the moment after the going-over the turning man circled here and he called, “Willy,” he said, “Willy,” and “Willy, look. Do you know who I am? Do you recognize me?”

The turning man, sticklike, scarecrow, flop-hat, more dried-up than he, turned, turned and circled, said nothing, looked straight ahead. And once, for a moment, their eyes met brief, met briefly, but there was no recognition from his side. Or so OFFICER FRIENDLY would’ve said. But there was.

“Willy, do you know me? My name is, was once… no, wait – it never was…”

Proteus.

END