Fables of Failure Read online

  FABLES OF FAILURE

  By Gregory R. Marshall

  Copyright © 2021 by Gregory R. Marshall

  Part 1: Hate and Lies in Provisia

  “But the moment you pick up the clay, electronic or otherwise, you become a demiurge, and he who embarks on the creation of worlds is already tainted with corruption and evil.”

  —Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p.57

  “There is no such thing as Paranoia…Even your Worst fears will come true if you chase them long enough. Beware, son. There is Trouble lurking out there in that darkness, sure as hell. Wild beasts and cruel people, and some of them will pounce on your neck and try to tear your head off, if you’re not careful.”

  --Hunter S. Thompson, recalling advice given to him by his father, Kingdom of Fear p.30

  “ANYONE CAN BE COMMANDER CHOKE”

  (The following is the second-to-last article ever published by Forrest G. Cromwell.)

  1

  There are a bunch of things I should tell you about the process of writing this article, but honestly I’d rather kill myself. Writing is an ugly process, done by and large by ugly people. It’s not uncommon for an Outlaw-Journalist to be mistaken for a mutant, especially if he has bark and leaves, like I do. A rickshaw driver once told me to go whittle myself when I asked for a ride. I simply put my hand on his shoulder and said “Transdermal Toxicosis. It’s catching.” Well, you can bet that son-of-a-bitch was out of there in a hurry.

  Of course, the truth of the matter is that I don’t have a disease. It’s a sexually transmitted enchantment I picked up from a hooker in the red-light district. Lauren Deadwood: the bitch better hope I never find her. But if I were a gambling man (I am: I gambled away my entire advance at Plutocrat’s Palace) I would bet that I’ll never cross paths with her again. In any case, I’m not contagious. Not without sexual contact.

  You’ll have to forgive me if this doesn’t make too much sense. I’ve locked myself in a tiny room in the basement of an inn. The room is about the size of a large closet. I’ve given the inn keeper strict orders not to let me out until I slide the completed article out to him under the locked door, and he has managed to assemble the whole damn thing page by page. There’s really only enough room in here for me and my desk; the supplies take up all the extra space. I’ve got three jugs of good Rumble Rum and a crate packed with baggies of premium Pixie Grind for when I get tired. I have some sort of indecipherable religious text in one of the drawers, a revolver in another, and a bedpan beneath a trapdoor under the desk. Most of these preparations are just to keep me focused, but it’s probably not safe to leave until the article’s done anyway. Trips and Trolls Magazine has been known to send bounty hunters to bring back the corpses of authors who have reneged on a deal.

  I guess the main question I imagine you would be wondering about right now is why I chose to be a writer in the first place. “Here he sits, locked up in some corner of the cellar in an inn, being hunted by agents of a disreputable magazine, picking leaves off himself as they sprout, all alone, and just as likely to overdose as he is to starve to death or shoot himself. What fun is that?”

  I’m not sure. But the truth is, I really do get a bang out of it.

  2

  I woke up in a ditch cursing my every ancestor down to the self-replicating crystals that inadvertently evolved some primitive amoeba in the primordial oozes countless eons ago. My head felt like a mega church packed with retarded televangelists. I had sprouted fresh twigs that were tearing holes in my shirt.

  “Up you go, Forrest.” I said, as I pulled myself up, the mud squelching a I staggered out of a ditch infested with lice and filch parasites. I was in some shitty feudal town. Peasants kept bowing to me when I walked by, evidently some idiotic local tradition. I made elaborate and impolite hand gestures at them. I realized they couldn’t see me because they had lowered their eyes, so I did the noble thing and told them to fuck themselves verbally. I tried to pick up the pieces of what had happened. I thought back to the previous night.

  A roulette wheel spun crazily behind each of my eyeballs. Roulette…

  I snapped the twigs off myself absently as I thought. Pounding music. Poker chips. The most exquisite go-go dancers. Various hallucinogens. I remembered betting everything on the number 5 right after all the people started looking like fascist ogres. It seemed like the patriotic thing to do to bankrupt these totalitarian lackeys, even at great personal risk to myself. The memory got pretty dicey after that point, though admittedly I don’t recall any dice being involved. They dragged me as I screamed “I’m Peyton Painbringer! None dare oppose me with their iniquity!” And then they hurled me out, and it seemed that I was in the air for a long time, ballerina-like. I woke up here in this wonderfully quaint feudal town.

  It took me a minute to even remember how I got my hands on the money to gamble in the first place. It came back to me slowly. I had pitched an article to those dumb bastards at Trips and Trolls Magazine. The idea was even more obscene and commercial than my work on the Goblin Games for Vicarious Living. I promised to investigate the phenomenon of so-called ‘Adventurer-Heroes,’ saying I’d get the scoop on the do-gooders by traveling with them, probably getting out of my face on drugs while they busted up Leveller encampments and slayed mountain dragons.

  A quick check of my belongings revealed that I had no money, food, or supplies. Sensible thinking told me that the only viable option was to find some particularly feeble-minded peasant who I could hoodwink out of enough material goods to keep this wretched assignment on track, before the publishers got wise to the fact that I had blown my entire advance.

  It was like searching for a strand of golden hay in a stack of needles dipped in a deadly poison. Everywhere I looked, I found feeble-minded peasants. On one corner I saw a pig farmer who appeared to be giving a speech to his pigs to raise their morale. Down the street there was a woman who was rubbing every oil lamp in a small shop, apparently to see if one of the lamps contained a genie. Naturally, this would influence her decision of which lamp she ought to purchase. She kept rubbing a lamp, waiting for a few seconds, and saying “Oh, nuggets!” in frustration. The shop keeper was tolerant of this practice. I’ve never known a shop keeper who objected to using free moron labor to get his goods cleaned.

  I continued to look. There is a subtle art to peasant hoodwinking. You have to find a peasant who is stupid enough to be hoodwinked yet fortunate enough to have wealth worth exploiting. The clever con man will approach the mark from an angle, perhaps engaging a friend of the fortunate, soon-to-be-hapless individual.

  I crossed the street and found a young peasant crying in a cart full of hay. His manner of dress denoted peasantry without poverty. Clearly this young fellow was the indentured man for some moneyed governess who liked her servants to look sharp.

  “What’s wrong? What are you carrying on about?”

  The indentured boy sniffled and wiped at his nose. “Nothing.” He looked at me more closely. “Why do you look like a tree?”

  “Never mind that. What’s your name?”

  “Mickey.” Mickey. A name fit for a muskrat instead of a man.

  “Look, Mickey.” I said, “I pulled my roots out of the ground to shamble over here and ask you what’s wrong. Now, damn it, you will tell me what is wrong. Or else.”

  There was a brief awkward moment as Mickey calculated that it would be less painful for him to explain the source of his troubles than to continue to be badgered by a talking tree.

  “I’m not a man.” He explained.

  “Ridiculous. How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “You’re a man, alright. Why do you say that you aren’t a man?”

  “No one is a man until
they have consumed an entire Heep embryo.”

  “Heep Embryo?”

  The peasant sighed miserably and pointed at a broken-down stable. A few creatures were pecking at the ground. They were like chickens, except that they were covered in a heavy coat of wool. I did the peasant math. Hen + Sheep = Heep. The monarchist genetics labs were always cranking out new species of misbegotten and pitiable hybrids.

  “You’re telling me that all you have to do to feel like a man is eat a bunch of egg yolk?”

  “No.” He sobbed. “Not the yolk, the embryo.”

  “Well, for the Gods’ sakes, man. There’s eggs right there. Get going.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, mister. You have to have witnesses. You have to go to the Heep embryo shop and get it notarized.”

  “Well then, let’s get a move on. This is no way to carry on. I cannot abide this racket. You’re scaring away the birds that eat the parasitic bugs that nest in my bark.” (For some reason I was enjoying the deception; I wanted him to think I was an animate tree. Though for the record, I do get bark parasites, and I hate the evil bastards.) “How far is the nearest Heep embryo notary?”

  The boy sniffled again. “About five miles. But mister, I’m supposed to work today. My governess said…”

  “Your own self-loathing is a more potent punishment than anything any governess in the world could dish out. Let’s get moving. I’ll be your witness.”

  “I don’t think a tree is allowed to be…”

  “Be quiet and get moving.” I said. Things were starting to look up. I knew that if I could get this sap into my debt, I could put the project back on track. I was pretty sure I could fuck shit up enough to draw out an Adventurer-Hero, but I would need to borrow some funds from Mickey’s governess first.

  We walked for several miles, and we saw many strange an asinine things during our journey. I saw tumbleweeds that were adorned with little bells so that they rang when the wind blew. Mickey called them ‘jingleweeds.’ I am morally opposed to any sort of weed that cannot be smoked. There was a donkey that kept drinking from a mud puddle, apparently so he could sneeze the mud at a rooster, who squawked angrily but did not take any action against the donkey. A group of raggedy farmers was playing a game similar to horseshoes, except they were obviously metal shoes fitted for the hooves of some bizarre animal that was not a horse. The shoes were badly rusted and shaped like the tops of four-leaf clovers. They bounced off the pole they were trying to encircle every time.

  I squeezed my eyelids shut. I felt certain that my mind would rot if I remained here too long. At last we reached a well-kept hut that Mickey identified as the Heep embryo notary. Mickey stopped short. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  “Pal, I didn’t walk through that five-mile phantasm of idiocy so that we could turn back. You’re going in there. I’m going to witness you eating that embryo. Then we’re going out. You dig?”

  He dug. This fellow had about as much backbone as a turncoat myriapod. We entered the hut. A sinewy old man with a beard like a polar tornado stood behind a counter. “This fellow wants to eat a Heep Embryo and become a man. He’s not allowed to leave until he does it. How much will that cost?”

  The old man smiled a sparse grin. “Six nobles.”

  “Well?” I demanded. “Shell out, Mickey.”

  “But…but…all the money I have was given to me by my governess to…”

  “I don’t care. Let’s see the coin.”

  Mickey put the coins on the counter. The old man disappeared with a bending groan and reemerged with an enormous egg in a tiny dish. He tapped the egg experimentally with a silver spoon, and then broke the egg by whipping at it ferociously. He then began to draw up a form on some parchment, so that I could sign off that Mickey had indeed managed to consume a Heep embryo. Apparently, the county logged the amount of Heep embryos that each of their men folk managed to consume. It was a mark of honor and masculinity to consume a large number of Heep embryos. Mickey gazed miserably at the slimy unborn creature that sat before him in the dish. It had the beginning vestiges of wool, and the subtle rudiments of a beak.

  “Chow down, Mickey. I haven’t got all day.”

  “Wonderful things, Heep embryos!” The old man was telling me. “They’re great for you! Packed with testosterone.”

  “Wolf it down, Mickey!” I said, “You’re never going to finish it by swishing it around your dish like that!”

  “In fact, it’s illegal for women to eat Heep embryos in these parts. They’re said to engender masculine traits in the women-folk, and--”

  “SHUT THE HELL UP!” I screamed. The old man blinked but continued smiling. It was as if some neural messenger had suffered an aneurism and failed to report to his brain that I had screamed at him.

  “I…I can’t…” Mickey babbled.

  “You can and will! Do it, or I will populate your lymph nodes with my spores and you will never know another moment without pain!”

  Mickey bought this empty bluff and grabbed the entire embryo out of its dish. He shoved it whole in his mouth. I watched patiently as it slid down his throat. This was followed by a full four minutes of dry-heaving. I signed the paper.

  “You owe me, kid.” I said.

  3

  I could tell you the next part of our story straight, but I don’t feel like it. Instead, I’m going to talk about two types of animals they had in the town where I grew up: flaffs and tweeps.

  Flaffs are nature’s Outlaw-Journalists. They are born dirty and they get dirtier each moment until they die. Unsurprisingly, they die by transforming into dirt. They have fluffy coats that are always caked with grime, and huge tusks that scrape the ground if they don’t hop just right. Their tails are like poorly made rope. Tweeps are small and rodential, named after the sound that they make early in the morning when everyone still desperately wants to be asleep. They stand about 4 inches tall and walk on their hind legs.

  These two species have the most bizarre and unproductive symbiotic relationship that I am aware of. Colonies of flaffs and tweeps always live side by side. The flaffs build hideous mounds of dirt and debris that are so poorly made that it’s never been clear to me whether the flaffs intended to make them at all. A flaff mound might be one shape in the morning and another shape in the afternoon—it changes shape depending on the form of rambunctious idiocy the residing flaffs are engaged in. Flaffs don’t do anything productive, ever. They don’t do the minimum amount of work that would be expected of an animal to survive. They fuck and sleep. All their sustenance is provided by the tweeps, who do all the foraging and shelter maintenance for the dubious privilege of being allowed to live among the flaffs.

  The flaffs, predictably, are not grateful at all to the tweeps. For example, tweeps are attracted to shiny objects, and flaffs have nothing but contempt for anything that cannot be eaten or fucked. If a tweep brings a shiny, inedible object to a flaff, the flaff will throw it at the tweep and knock it over. It is common practice for a flaff to defecate on a tweep right after the same tweep has brought it food.

  I know all this because I wrote a report on these creatures when I was a kid. It returns to my memory now, because it occurs to me that Mickey is very much like a tweep and I am very much like a flaff. The only substantive difference is that when Mickey brought me shiny objects, in the form of silver stolen from his governess, I did not throw them back at him. On the contrary, I sent him back to steal more.

  I had convinced the young man that he was forever in my debt for helping him overcome his insecurities.

  4

  We found ourselves in a ghost town. The streets were empty and the dust was hateful and sharp, the kind of dust that doesn’t content itself until it’s really worked its way deep into your pores. My bark doesn’t have pores, but you get the idea.

  “This is the most useless ghost town I’ve ever been in.” I declared. “Everything’s locked up.” Mickey said nothing. We had spent all the silver he had stolen on a cart, a mule, and some f
ood. I had driven the poor mule so relentlessly for such a long time while being so stingy with the food that the animal dropped dead in mid-gallop, leaving us among the desolate stores and homes.

  The signs hanging from the shops advertised goods that would have been maddeningly useful if we could get at any of them. But the doors were locked tight and the windows were reinforced with no-nonsense lattices of iron grating. Mickey and I heard a faint slobbering chewing in the distance.

  “Stay back. I’ll protect you.” I said. I picked up a large brick from the ground and started creeping towards the noise. Turning a corner, we spotted a hunched figure chewing on a Provisian flag, drool dripping over the hallowed stripes and pentagrams. It was a zombie if I ever saw one.

  I lowered the brick. I thought back to the campfire stories that had been making their way along the grapevine. I had heard that an unknown virus had produced a race of ultra-nationalistic zombies. People called them “Flagsuckers,” though I had never imagined that the zombies actually did this.

  “What is it?” Mickey asked.

  “Flagsucker.” I told him. “Jingo-style zombie. Very dangerous. Don’t make any noise.” I cocked my arm back and brained the zombie with the brick. Violence is a reflex for me; the sickening sound of a brick dislodging a rotting brain becomes the language of love. I watched as the zombie’s jaw went slack and its legs buckled. It fell to the ground with cinematic slowness, the Provisian flag fluttering into the dust just beyond it.

  The locks slammed open almost in unison. The t-shirts the creatures wore struck me as more garish and horrible than their undead faces.

  “PROVISIA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.”

  “PROVISIA IS NUMBER 1: THANK THE GODS AND PRESIDENT GILD.”

  “PROVISIAN LEGION.”

  “IF YOU MUST BURN THE PROVISIAN FLAG, WRAP YOUR CHILDREN IN IT FIRST.”

  The eyes of the zombies moved with a dreadful predictability. They first saw their countryman, who I had recently promoted from “undead” to “dead.” They saw their cherished Provisian flag sitting disgraced in the dust. They saw Mickey and they saw me.