Nefarious Muse

“I was born, I went to Kindergarten, I fucked some crazy slut on the back of my father’s corpse. I can’t remember her name, but her blood was composed of a chemical I can’t pronounce. I was young, and foolish, and in need of character development, so I fucked her without a condom on and that’s how I got my super powers.”

A voice whispers deep in the string-theory wet dreams of my skull, lost amid the squalls of narrative: a summary of a life story that structurally replicates itself across reams of word and picture.

The omissions are always the same: there’s always something between the lines, cut from the story.

Me, I’m going to tell you the unabridged version of my life story:

I was born at the age of five.

It was, it is a time of change, and I was one of the first born to be part of that change.

In place of my guts was a self-renewing bioengine.

I dropped unceremoniously into the vat from between Mother’s legs. Mom twitched, and then her body took on the temperature of the room, her precious fluids stretched too far and too thin to keep her tiny heart shuffling.

I aged several years crossing the room and shed an entire mouth’s worth of teeth, spitting them like popcorn kernels as I went.

Dad followed and threw streamers at the appropriate moments.

Dad wore a trench coat, and looked at the world from behind mirrorshades. He puffed a battered pipe, ran a nervous hand through his stubble and produced the birthday present he hadn’t the time to give me during the short trek from the vat.

I tore the wrapping from the gleaming marvel and gaped in Dad’s direction.

“It’s a Fun Machine, son, only one of its kind. Just like you, as far as I know. They say your kind will be like humans, but more. Maybe. Your mother and I filled this machine with everything we knew. Perhaps it will help you understand the way people were before you…” Dad rattled off the machine’s specs. I wasn’t listening, I wanted to get behind the handlebars and make race car noises. (At this point, of course, I couldn’t know what race car noises were, but every young boy seems to be coded with this important knowledge.)

The machine looked like someone had spliced together a big-wheel replica of the Avro Arrow. I enfolded it between my thighs and pedalled. I hummed high-pitched race car noises as I went.

With each revolution of the wheels, worlds opened up inside my head. My parents’ voices issued streams of narrative, the choice of stories followed no discernable logic, ran scattershot across genres.

Deep in my guts, the engine that kept me upright flared with the effort of absorbing a whole culture. My brain, it was the open archetypal mouth of a young bird hungry for its parents’ bile.

The sound of countless stories being told whirred across my spine until eventually the Machine shifted gear and everything became a welter of picture and sound.

In minutes, I had the cold architecture of both my parents’ stories arrayed in my skull and their physical presence was superfluous. I waggled my hand at the outmoded flesh-father as his lungs pumped his pipe, mouthpiece clicking on dentures as he disappeared behind me.

Adult teeth peeked from the folds of my gums.

Twenty minutes later I was sixteen and my legs faltered under the weight of information. All the stories they collected had pulped together, bleeding back and forth.

I looked over my shoulder.

It was all there in rank and file, seen through the shimmer of hot asphalt: every TV show, comic book, video game, novel, novella, poem, story, song and painting Mom & Dad had encountered were shoehorned into a narrow city block. Morals from stories for young children clashed and contradicted, entire space dynasties swallowed one another whole. Identities, tropes and foils combined and created living literary monstrosities.

The myriad retellings of stock characters superimposed and superimposed and superimposed on themselves until they became multi-limbed Lovecraftian beasts, flitting in and out of existence. At this realization, the Cthulhu mythos threw itself over everything and the whole scene deliquesced accordingly.

I pumped along the road, swivelling my eyes backward as I rewrote, re-imagined, the Little Mermaid. There was no flash, no bang. A nubile Ariel separated from the supraliterary monolith of tooth, flesh and paper, her body an open mouth.

(Alas. We were all once raging hormones.)

I cupped my hand across Ariel’s midriff as I thought back on the events of the past hour. I looked into Ariel’s lustful face and told her my story.

The scene shifted and I recognized myself in the crowd, replicating wildly as my clones told & retold my story. The chain reaction started feedback loop as their thoughts were picked up and amplified by the Fun Machine.

Then the Machine took a shit and died.

The scene became assiduously warped: Ariel leered at me as she inhaled crystal meth from a broken light bulb I’d seen appear in countless cartoon epiphanies. A multi-armed, quivering werewolf that might have originally been Wagner or maybe Gabriel-Ernest (or both at once) had ensconced itself in a lazy boy, bulbous beergut(s) lolling above decayed boxer shorts. The changes affected the crowd of creations, each monstrosity struggling with multiple versions of itself falling into disrepair. The crowd thinned as they lumbered off to decrepit, condemned homes full of torn furniture and flickering fluorescent lights for a sloppy masturbation session, a glass of gin and that night’s episode of the Gilmore Girls.

I stood alone with my clones, our collective mass cracking the concrete. There was a soft wheeze as our bioengines ticked out the seconds as they cooled.