I feel so perverted, but I can’t stop feeling it. I wish the tables were turned and Nan was the horny one, molesting me while I was paralyzed, with the insane screamers stampering around us.
I bend down to pick her up, podding my arms around her hips. I lift a little with my weak muscles and take her shoulders off the ground, but then my penis stabs her in the side with a shock, and I drop her. Her head claps against the street. My erection doesn’t leave her side, though, it presses further instead. I must be insane, truly insane. I feel my way up her stomach to the unexposed breast and pull the bra down. Smoothing my palm into it. I can’t stop myself now. My penis has taken full control over my body. Screaming-commotion all around this performance, people being eaten alive, beating each other to escape, and my other hand decides to go between Nan’s legs, feeling the outsides.
Then, before my hand goes any further, I stop. The hard-on is gone, the penis has shriveled… I pull both of my hands away from her skin, lean in to her ear and whisper, “I’m sorry, Nan. I’m going crazy.” Then I plunge my head into her bloody stomach, but I don’t cry. My mind doesn’t care enough to feel the disgust I should be feeling now.
“Leaf!” I hear from the distance.
Mort limps toward us, smiling at his act of survival.
“What happened?” I ask Mortician when he arrives to us.
“I almost got it back there,” he says. “I tripped on some bastard and fucked up my leg. I’m surprised those things didn’t get me. Especially with my slow ass.”
Mort pauses. He looks down at Nan.
“Did they get her?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“She’s fucked.”
“I couldn’t pick her up.”
“We’re going to have to leave her.”
For a second, I feel relieved, because I won’t have to face her after she wakes up from paralysis. But I know that would be very wrong.
“We can’t just leave her. She’s our friend, and she’s the last human female left.”
“Well, my leg is crippled and you’re weak, plus you have your fucked eyes. How are we supposed to get her out of here?”
“We’ll have to both carry her,” I tell him. “I know she hates me, but I can’t leave her here.”
“Fine,” Mort says. “But if you get stung, I’m leaving you both here.”
As we leave, I see a human clown with its arms missing. They look like they’ve only recently been severed. The clown is wandering incoherently toward the scorpion flies. Blood drip-drips onto his side. He doesn’t seem to notice that his arms are missing, and it’s almost funny. Richard Stein said that clowns are goofy people that know how to be funny. I think he’s right, because even though this clown is in a terrible state — losing his arms in a violent sort of way and all — I still cant help but laugh.
Richard Stein also said that there are only two sorts of people that would laugh at someone so pitiful as a clown with its arms cut off. Those people are the mean sort of people and the sort that have maggots in the brain. I wonder which sort I am.
But Richard Stein said that there are very few people in the world that don’t laugh at the pitiful and the misfortunate, which means that most human beings are generally mean and/or have maggots in the brain. But mean people and maggot-brained people can be pitiful themselves, so there was a lot of confusion among humans before their souls were lost.
Scene 24
Ocean Man
The drizzle-rain dies as we arrive at Punk Land — not the punk version of heaven, but the place where punks acted punk before the walm took it over.
We’re not strong enough to pick Nan up off the ground and her knees are raw-bloody from scraping against the asphalt. She has yet to become un-limp, but I’m not impatient for what she will do to me when her strength returns. I cringe at the thought.
I left Gin’s demon body parts where they were. Besides Breakfast, that is, who refused to be left behind. He followed for almost a hundred feet, crawling on fingers, before I noticed him. Then I stuffed him down Nan’s shorts, hoping she wouldn’t mind. She’ll probably kill me for that too. Waking from paralysis to find out she’s been pervert-handled by both myself and her dead boyfriend’s demon hand will probably be damaging to her mental health in some way. I hope I can make it up to her in the future, after we start a colony in a different dimension.
The scorpion flies are behind us, feeding probably, but we can’t be too sure we’re safe from them. And there are other creatures to worry about as well. Like the dark ones and the prowler beasts and the krellians. And the Movac, who knows everything, who is awaiting us at the walm.
Richard Stein said that it would be a terrible thing to know everything about everything. I bet he would’ve agreed with Lenny’s statement that nothing should know everything, and whoever does know everything should be killed. Richard Stein also said that all human beings are born with the wish to know all there is to know, even if it is such a terrible thing.
The park, which used to be punk-filled, is now flooded with a miniature ocean — one that must’ve been brought from a miniature world. At first I see it as a giant puddle, through gyration eyes, but once I scoop a handful of the water I can see closer-closer. Turns out there are tiny whales and sharks and sailboats inside. So small that a sandwich bug can eat them in a gulp. I drop the chunk of ocean back into place, probably drowning the sailboats that I had. The ocean seems to go for half a mile, all the way through Punk Land.
Richard Stein said that the ocean, not old age, is where all the world’s wisdom comes from. He believed that oceans produce an aura that seeps into the souls of anyone around it, so people that live in or around the ocean are generally the most enlightened people alive. Mr. Richard Stein never knew this for fact, though, because he didn’t know any wise people that lived near the ocean. He just assumed he knew what he was talking about after he visited the Atlantic one summer. He said, “The vast emotion was overpowering and my thoughts were never so clear.” But he never went inside of the water, since Richard Stein couldn’t swim. One of his legs didn’t work correctly.
Water-wisdom is what he called it. He said that it’s much more powerful than old age wisdom or educated wisdom or the common wisdom you’re born with. In fact, he mentioned that if there was someone who knew everything about everything, that person would’ve gotten his/her knowledge from water-wisdom. If this were true then more schools should’ve been built on beaches or near lakes, because wisdom is more important than school-learning — which is intelligence. The thing about intelligence is that it revolves around memory. Those with good memories will learn more. Those that forget easily will not be intelligent. And those with photographic memories will be considered geniuses. I don’t like to hear that someone with such good memory can be called such a name, a genius is one who has both intelligence and wisdom.
The man who knows everything is an exception, however, because he was probably born with the knowledge to know everything — at least in my opinion. So memory would not be an important commodity for him, since there is nothing he can learn that he will need to remember.
By the way, I have been addressing the man who knows everything as a he, but I perfectly well know that it could be a she — the woman who knows everything. I will have to start calling it the Movac, so that I do not ruin its gender.